Hans’ Cottage is a hotel and restaurant with a difference – it has a boating lake. Full of crocodiles. Hiring a pedalo has never been more fraught with danger; we watched from the safety of the bank as a group of Ghanaians paddled gently around the oversized pond, several pairs of reptilian eyes following them from surface of the water.
Having just come from petting one of the larger specimens that was sunning itself on the bank, I felt no need to prove my bravery / stupidity further. The croc in question seemed oblivious to the crowd of nervous visitors who were taking it in turns to dart forward and have their photo taken while gingerly placing a hand on its tail.
Waiting my turn, I was equally frightened of the hatchet-faced matriarch who was policing the show, armed with a stick and a plate of meat scraps in case the main attraction should begin to show an unprofessional interest in the customers.
We had stopped at Hans Cottage on our way back from visiting Kakum National Park, an area of semi-rainforest sporting a network of treetop rope bridges that lays claim to being Ghana’s top tourist attraction. Ghana being, well…Ghana, this is equivalent to being crowned Miss Swindon. What little wildlife survives in the forest keeps well away from the aerial walkway, although the views out over the canopy are impressive.
This is a good thing, as the alternative is looking down. 40m above ground level is not the best place to realise that the narrow, swaying walkway on which you’re standing is constructed out of aluminium ladders with planks of wood bolted across the rungs. Our guide reassured us that they replace all the suspending ropes every six months. I didn’t feel like asking when maintenance was next due.
We were staying in Cape Coast, a small town about four hours West of Accra best known for its grisly monument to the slave trade. Like many of the old colonial forts dotted along Ghana’s coast, Cape Coast castle was a prison for thousands of Ghanaian slaves before they were herded from the underground dungeons through passages in the cliff face to the slave ships moored below.
We hurried uneasily after our Ghanaian guide as he explained that the floor of the still-fetid men’s dungeon through which we were walking remains an inch thick in compacted human excrement, the slaves having been forced to eat, sleep and shit where they stood, packed in their hundreds into the sweltering, cramped gloom. Suffice to say that many died there before ever reaching the ships.
While we felt sombre and guilty the Ghanaians in our group chatted and squealed with delighted horror at the near total darkness. “It’s the African-American visitors who are most visibly affected.” said our guide. “Most have come to Ghana for the first time to retrace their roots.” At the Door of No Return, beyond which the slave ships once waited, lay a pile of funeral wreaths, left by those whose ancestors had once passed through here and, unlike many, had survived the journey to the New World.
This grim colonial legacy means that Ghana is possibly the only place in the world where being wrongly identified as being American rather than British isn’t necessarily a bad thing. That said, 99.9% of the Ghanaians we’ve met don’t seem to bare anything close to a grudge about their colonial history. It seems to be a real effort for Ghanaians to stay sombre about anything for long.
As we took a taxi along the coast road to nearby Elmina we passed a convoy of cars travelling in the opposite direction; horns blared and people hung out of the windows. “Funeral” said our driver cheerfully, leaning on his horn and adding to the din.
Ghanaian funerals frequently outstrip weddings for the expense lavished upon them. Just as parents in the West will spend vast sums on their children’s weddings, so Ghanaian families will get themselves into considerable debt in order to lay on, for no better phrase, the funeral of a lifetime for their parents. Funerals will attract hundreds of people and often last several days, typically beginning on a Thursday with the lying-in-state. This is strategically planned to allow the vocal outpouring of grief to morph, over Friday and Saturday, into a massive party. Come Sunday everyone staggers to church rather the worse for wear.
I regret to say that all this is learned second-hand and that we are yet to be invited to a Ghanaian funeral. Just as we might tell a visitor to Britain that they simply must experience Soho on a Friday night, so Ghanaians often tell us, with a rare hedonistic glint in their eyes, that we have to go to a funeral while we’re here.
Statistically our chances are fairly good. Despite being highly developed for West Africa, average life expectancy in Ghana is still pretty low at 57 years. A high mortality rate combined with a culture of lavish funerals has generated a profitable funeral industry with some unusual entrepreneurial opportunities. The cost of a funeral can be significantly reduced by the financial contributions customarily made by guests. If however both you and your expected guests are poor, then you have a bit of a problem.
One solution is to employ a funeral-broker of a peculiarly Ghanaian type. Usually a well-connected man, the broker will use his social sway to turn an unremarkable passing into the social event of the month. Wealthy guests beget wealthy guests who not only up the ante of your funeral with their presence, but also help pay for something grander than you could have afforded by yourself through their generous donations. The broker takes a cut from the donations and everyone goes home happy. Except the deceased, who’s six feet under by this point.
Crocodile petting aside, our brushes with death in Ghana have thus far been limited to a few hair-raising tro-tro journeys conducted at break-neck speeds along rutted dirt roads. In a bid to live life more on the edge, last week I made that most ill fated of observations that “amazingly neither of us has really been ill since we’ve been here…” Cue a 3am bowl movement that measured on the Richter scale followed by all the other symptoms of malaria. We accordingly spent the morning at the local hospital, where I joined the ‘malaria-test-while-u-wait’ cue. Other than the used blood-test needles going into an open tissue box, the whole place was pretty sanitary and 45 minutes later (unbelievably fast for anything in Ghana) my thankfully negative test result was handed to me on a slip of paper.
Whatever flu-type bug or food poisoning I was having instead of malaria went as fast as it had come, which was good because we were being interviewed at dawn the following day for Ghanaian breakfast television. We had met Parlos the programme’s producer at a high-life concert he was covering several months before, and during a more recent chance encounter he said that he had a daily business slot to fill and would we like to take part?
After a 5am start and an hour-long tro-tro ride we arrived at Net2TV on the outskirts of town, where we were shepherded to the top floor of a large and seemingly empty office building. Here we were ushered through a door into the comparative clamour of the gallery, adjacent to the studio, from where the live broadcast was being stage-managed.
Just before 8am I was fitted with a radio mic and was led into the studio. Louisa had opted out of taking part on the grounds that my ego was enough for one sofa. The presenter was cued and as we beamed live into the homes and chop-bars of sleep-befuddled Ghanaians I launched into a witty and erudite account of our emigration to Ghana. Thirty seconds in, Parlos the producer walked on to the set in front of the camera, stopping me short.
“I’m afraid our transmitter’s just died and the whole station has gone off air. We’re not likely to get it fixed before the next programme’s due to start. Any chance you could come back and do this again at the same time next week?”
I should have known that I was in a more reliable situation when playing with that crocodile. “Of course” I said, wishing that I were still in bed. But then this is life on the edge, Ghana style. Time for another Lemsip.
PS: I was going to write about the weird world of Christmas in Ghana, but my train of thought got diverted. I’ll do it in the next instalment. In the mean time, the Ghanaian Signage of the Month Award for December 2010 goes to a car window sticker I saw the other day that read:
Caution! I drive like you do.
