Ghana 10: Holiday

Despite two negative test results and a course of drugs I still suspect that I might have malaria. That or this train carriage is very, very hot. The woman sitting next to me looks flushed and is buying a bottle of water from the trolley drone, so it’s possible that the air conditioning is broken. However, she’s of an age when she could just be having a hot flush, so I’m not convinced that her heating problems offer me any reassurance.

Technically I am on holiday. After almost a year in Ghana, Louisa and I have flown back to the UK for three weeks to remind our respective parents what we looks like. When you’re earning a Ghanaian salary, being written out of wills is something to be guarded against at all costs. With my darling sister currently performing her one-woman show at the Edinburgh Fringe, now is the perfect time to pass off living in West Africa as a comparatively sensible career move.

With similar concerns in mind, Louisa pointedly asked me on the return flight not to use my usual description of Accra being ‘like Swindon but with a few more open drains’. This apparently doesn’t help bolster our reputation as fearless filmmakers surviving in the Heart of Darkness. Watching from West Africa over the past few weeks while the UK set itself on fire, I suspect that Swindon may represent more of Conrad’s nightmare than the noisy stability of modern Ghana. While glued to CNN at work, a shot of an armed rebel watching a flat-screen TV had me scurrying to Immigration to seek political asylum before a colleague pointed out that we were watching Tripoli and not Tottenham.

With police complicity in the News of the World phone-hacking scandal and now the riots making international news, it’s been an embarrassing few weeks to be a Brit abroad. Ghanaian colleagues have been asking with genuine concern whether it’s safe for me to return home, and then more thornily, why the riots are occurring in the first place. For really acute middle class liberal guilt, try explaining to someone who earns the equivalent of £120 a month why their former colonial masters are clubbing each other in the street over looted trainers.

Although Ghana gained independence in 1957 it still has strong ties to the UK and, on the quiet, looks up to Britain. To see its master-turned-mentor tearing itself apart while Ghana pulls itself up by its economic bootstraps is frankly unsettling. It’s like coming home from your paper-round to find an authoritarian parent drunk and weeping in front of Trisha.

Before we left Ghana our Canadian friends and seasoned ex-pats Joe and Janine warned us of the dangers of trying to do too much during brief visits home. Cancelling our planned visit to JD Sports we took heed of their advice, but possibly not enough. We were too busy drawing up daily schedules of where we were going to be and booking our next lunch dates.

Arriving home in August should have buffered us against the shock of the change in climate. Of course since 2001 British summer now occurs during the last week of April, so we arrived back instead to what has felt like a Siberian winter. Louisa immediately went down with a shocking cold while I began to do the Malarial Sweats, a routine that has you alternately flushing hot and cold while humming Mad Dogs and Englishmen through clenched teeth.

I’m currently rattling north on a train Halifax to see my 94-year-old grandfather. Despite me frequently telling him that I’m working for a TV station, his concept of our life in Ghana is firmly based on him having seen Zulu when it first came out in 1964. During a previous phone conversation I detailed some of the hardships of our life here (no Strictly Come Dancing; over-priced cheese). His advice was for us to fall back to the hospital buildings and make a last stand there - sage advice if we were fighting off thousands of armed natives, but less useful if you’re just trying to get Skype to connect.

That said, as another wave of heat engulfs me and sweat begins to trickle down my spine, retreating to a hospital building doesn’t seem like a bad idea. I’m beginning to wonder whether North Yorkshire has any provision for treating tropical diseases when the ticket inspector bustles into my train carriage, apologising. “Sorry for the heat in here. The air-con’s broken. Someone’s coming on board at the next station to have a look at it.” As he pushes on down the aisle the woman next to me rolls her eyes and fans her face with her hand. “It’s like bloody Africa in here” she says. “Yeah” I mutter. So much for being on holiday. At least I might not have malaria.  

Ghana 9. All Protocol Observed

I’m in the News Editor’s office, discussing how to fund three days of live coverage from Ghana’s presidential ‘primaries’. As usual at The Network we have a starting budget of zero. There’s a sudden silence as the senior news team pauses to digest what I’ve just said. Maybe I’ve overstepped cultural boundaries this time.

“Okay…” Ida, one of the producers, breaks the silence. “Okay, so your point is that if we accept the NDC’s offer to fund half of the broadcast, it might cause problems if we then say anything critical of them.” Heads begin to nod in considered acceptance of this.

I say something about journalistic credibility and then hit them with my Defiant Bill Nighy Stare. Hilda the news editor concedes. Sort of. “I suppose we’ll still have the free accommodation that they’re offering all journalists.” One step at a time. I decide to keep my mouth shut for the time being and we move on.

The news team are not stupid. This is just the way things are done in Ghana, where the much-maligned creep of party politics into every aspect of daily life is quickly forgotten about when it offers to buy you lunch on route.

With a general election looming next year, Ghana’s political parties are in the throws of nominating their presidential candidates. All eyes are currently on the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC), which is rocking the establishment with a family feud of the highest order.

Ghana’s current president John Atta Mills is being challenged as the NDC’s presidential candidate by Nana Konadu Agyeman-Rawlings, Ghana’s former first lady. Weighing in from the sidelines is Nana Konadu’s husband, Jerry Rawlings. Like an over-zealous parent at sports day, Ghana’s former military-dictator-cum-first-elected-president is vocally backing his wife against the man who once served as his vice president.

Political dynasties abound the world over, and the Rawlings clan is just another to add to the list. Ghana is well aware of this and public debate rages as to whether the electorate should extend their rule.

Beyond NDC infighting, scratch the surface of party politics in Ghana and what bleeds from underneath is centuries of tribalism. The NDC has traditionally drawn its support from the Ewe people and from tribes in the less developed Northern regions. In contrast the NPP is broadly aligned with the Akan people and the traditionally powerful Ashanti.

There are also religious divides to take into consideration, with Northern Ghana predominately Muslim and the South predominantly Christian. In urban areas both religions co-exist remarkably peacefully, but belief is still another line along which political fissures can emerge.

To top it all off, Ghana’s countless indigenous social divisions have spent the best part of a century being shoe-horned into the bureaucratic pigeonholes of the British Empire. Like a fat man forced into a leotard, the resulting spectacle is unpleasant to look at and as inflexible as a dead dog.

Nowhere is Britain’s bureaucratic legacy more evident in Ghana than at public events. Custom dictates that everyone tabled to speak (and you can guarantee there will be at least fifteen of them) is required to begin by addressing every notable individual in the room. Thus begins the familiar litany of “ladies and gentlemen, honourable guests, members of the press…”

The most expensive coffee beans in the world are produced in Indonesia, where they are collected, partially digested, from the droppings of a native wild cat, the Asian palm civet. In a similar vein, the abundance of Ghanaian bureaucratic excrement has given birth to a linguistic crap-cutter of rare beauty – the phrase “...and all protocol observed.”

So long as this catch-all nicety is the last line of your introduction, you could confidently greet an audience by pulling out your pockets and asking who wants to see your elephant impression. You have all bases covered.

As an obruni – a foreigner - no matter how long you are here (almost 10 months for us now) some Ghanaian social rituals never quite become normal, no matter how often you experience them. One is saying goodbye to friends. The other is being called fat.

The past few weeks have seen a number of our very close friends leave Ghana, returning to their home countries to begin academic courses, new jobs and generally resume normal lives. The absence of Mel, Kat, Anna, Heather and shortly Maurice will render Accra a quieter, more sober and significantly more dull place.

Ghana has a different model of female beauty to that in the West, and while we idolize anorexics, Ghana prefers its women curvaceous. Accordingly, it’s not uncommon for Ghanaian women to be greeted with complimentary observations such as “oh, you’ve put on weight!” For obruni women raised on a Western maxim of “get thin or die trying”, this can be a little hard to take, particularly as these comments aren’t always made in ignorance of how non-Ghanaians may receive them.

The other day we met with one of our departing friends to wave her off to the airport. As we waited for her ride she recounted with a dry chuckle that while walking home across Accra for the last time that afternoon a Ghanaian man walking in the opposite direction had smiled at her and brightly announced “you’re fat-o!”

The friend in question has just completed an internship working for an organisation promoting women’s rights. After several months of receiving similar ‘compliments’ with a fixed grin she seized on a final opportunity to foster some cross-cultural understanding at a grass-roots level. Stepping into his path she planted a hand on his chest, fixed him with a look that could circumcise and politely told him to go fuck himself. All protocol observed.

Ghana 8. Football Vest

You know something, somewhere, has gone horribly wrong when you start wearing vests again. As a child, the coming of winter was marked by my mother sowing me into my underwear until spring came around. I thought I had left those thermal-clad days behind until I found myself needing to look smart in a tropical climate.

Out here men wear vests not to stay warm but to soak up sweat. There’s no point in leaving for work in your best threads if by the time you reach the office you’re damper than a paedophile in a nursery. Thus now each morning I don my singlet, my slacks and my best nylon shirt before shuffling out into the blazing heat to join the Ghanaian rat race.

This will be my fifth week as head of production for The Network, one of the big three terrestrial TV stations here in Ghana. Back in the mists of the New Year while Louisa was doing battle with Malaria, I met a South African man who works for the channel. With freelance work thin on the ground, when he mentioned that they were looking for a new head of production I jumped at the opportunity.

I then sat around waiting for over a month while the senior management procrastinated, postponed and put off giving me a contract in accordance with the Ghanaian management maxim “why do today what you can put off until tomorrow?” Just when I had decided that this job was never going to happen, I was told to start on Monday.

My wardrobe since arriving in Ghana has consisted mainly of a handful of limp t-shirts and several pairs of shorts that would look dirty even on location with Time Team. I was suddenly faced with the need to smarten up for work in a way I’ve never needed to even in the UK. Thankfully Ghana is the Mecca of the second-hand clothing world. Every year thousands of tonnes of used clothes make their way from the West to the shores of Africa where they are re-tailored by armies of seamstresses into new garments.

Cantamento Market in central Accra is a rabbit warren of second-hand clothing stalls that stretches for miles. Six shirts, two pairs of trousers and some creaky black leather shoes later and I was set to become Mr. Middle Management.

In the UK the head of production is usually a benevolent god-like figure who drifts around the channel giving his blessing to new productions and gently intervening where a programme is going belly-up. Here in Ghana, Head of Production might be more accurately entitled Head Master, as overseeing productions here is equivalent to corralling twelve-year-olds during a field-trip to a sugar factory.

On Friday I returned to the office from a meeting to find crew wandering aimlessly around the main entrance when they should have left for a shoot in town an hour previously. Despite them knowing exactly when and where they were supposed to be filming, no one had issued an order to depart, so there they stayed. The week before last the entire news department managed to lock themselves out of the news studio thirty minutes before the lunchtime bulletin because someone lost the studio key.

It’s not all Carry-On Camera; the news department have won several awards for one of their current affairs programmes, and we are the only station in West Africa providing live sports coverage to Super Sport and, on occasion, even the BBC.

Perhaps the biggest irony in this whole affair is the fact that I’m in charge of Ghana’s premier sports channel when I don’t know the offside rule from my elbow. If you thought Britain was football obsessed, you should come to Ghana, where even the most cholera-infested slum* will have signboards advertising the next Chelsea-Arsenal fixture. And in the midst of this here am I, with a greater interest in Belgian tax law than in the Great Game.

That said, the process of providing live coverage of anything here makes for an interesting challenge, regardless of what’s going on in front of the lens. Other than the state broadcaster we are the only network here to have an outside broadcast van, which coughs and splutters its way between the nation’s sporting arenas. With Ghana’s road network bumpier than the Middle East peace process it’s a miracle that it makes it to most locations without the satellite dish falling off the roof.

The scale of the matches we cover varies massively. One of the first FA Cup fixtures I tagged along for had goats grazing on the side of the pitch. In contrast, a couple of weeks ago we had to resort to sign language in order to communicate amidst the din at Accra’s Ohene Djan stadium when two of the biggest Premier League teams were playing a grudge match.

By far the biggest sporting event of the last few weeks was the England-Ghana friendly played in the UK at Wembley Stadium. For a country enviously obsessed with its old colonial master’s Premier League, after Britain’s appalling World Cup performance this was seen as an opportunity for David to give Goliath a really good kicking.

The Network was picking up a live feed from the UK by satellite, and after our own pre-match studio debate here we switched to the live coverage. The studio team immediately downed tools and fought for space in front of various TV monitors to watch the kick-off. We were twenty minutes into the first half when suddenly all the lights went out and everything in the main control room of the nation’s third biggest TV network switched itself off.

Power cuts here are common enough that anyone who can afford it has a generator. While various back-up battery systems kicked in I dashed outside in the dark to our generator to see why it wasn’t yet belching into life. Illuminated by a couple of mobile phones, several technicians were kissing their teeth in frustration as a stack of car batteries failed to produce enough charge to jump-start the engine. Eventually another battery with some charge left in it was found under a bush by the front gate, and the oily monster was shocked into action.

Back in the control room everyone had crowded around the few consoles still being powered by the back-up batteries. The main concern was not that we had briefly ceased broadcasting, but that we might have missed a goal. As the rest of the equipment flickered back into life the general mood of mild anxiety caused by this technical hiccup dissipated. The volume level rose accordingly as Ghanaian discussion of live football settled in at a cruising level of 120 decibels. Relieved, I looked down at the rings of sweat emanating from my armpits, alone on my otherwise dry torso, and once again marvelled at the absorbent power of my vest.

*This is not an exaggeration. We currently have an outbreak of cholera in Accra. Which is nice.

Ghana 7. Mormons & Malaria

The sign on the door of Louisa’s hospital ward read:

To minimise the inconvenience of noise making to others, praying with patients on the ward should be done silently

This doesn’t fill you with confidence in Ghana’s medical system when your nearest and dearest is lying half comatose in a hospital bed, hooked up to a quinine drip fighting severe malaria.

In Ghana every headache or fever is assumed to be malaria until proven otherwise, which is a pretty sensible position to take in a tropical country filled with mosquitoes. I had two blood smears over Christmas and New Year that both came back negative while I spent several days in bed fighting off some virus or other.

The severity of malaria cases is ranked 1 (weak) to 4 (dead in a week). Louisa’s not only came back positive but a 3+ at that. Thus began the unpleasant business of finding a hospital to check her in to (a taxi ride away with a stop for her to vomit on route) and starting the bureaucratic wheels turning with our insurance company back in the UK.

The whole experience was made a lot easier by the reassuring presence of our flatmate Dr. Ben, an American hospital doctor doing part of his rotation in Ghana. While I did battle with the insurance company (thank god for cheap calls to the UK) Ben diplomatically gave the medical staff a pop quiz with questions such as “should her eyeballs be rolling back in her skull like that?” and so forth.

In all fairness, Nyaho Medical Centre – the hospital where we ended up – turned out to be one of the better ones in Accra. The place was comparable to many British NHS hospitals (make of that what you will), and once they moved the infant with suspected typhoid down the ward Louisa had a room all to herself. I set up camp next to her and no one took issue with me sleeping in one of the spare beds.

So there we stayed for four days with Louisa being pumped full of quinine and fluids via an IV, getting up to wee every half hour and then collapsing back into bed. Unfortunately the side effects of the quinine are as unpleasant as the malaria itself; amongst other things Louisa developed acute tinnitus rendering her deaf as a post, unable to hear anything that the doctors or nurses were saying to her, let alone talk to her worried parents on the phone.

Having recovered sufficiently but still weak as a kitten, Louisa was discharged with a bag of quinine tablets and instructions to return for further blood tests later in the week. Unfortunately, only days after her return home, I had to leave her in the care of friends to go off on a sound recording job for a week.

We had been contacted several weeks previously by an American producer-director who phoned us from an Angolan oilrig saying that he was coming to Ghana to shoot Mormons and could we sound record for him? Louisa was lined up to do this, but with her convalescing at home I had to go in her place.

The American turned out to be an interesting mixture of LA-based Hollywood TV type and down-to-earth devout Mormon, which were most definitely the ying and yang of his personality and no mistake. He’s in the midst of making a promotional DVD for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints (or COJCOLDS for short, an acronym they seem curiously unwilling to adopt), depicting Mormon congregations around the world and explaining some of their theological beliefs.

Now, all I knew about Mormonism at the beginning of the week was that Mormons tend to dress like IT technicians, and that at some point previously they practised polygamy (probably as recompense for the terrible uniforms). Hoping to bear witness to at least one polyester-clad group sex ritual during the week, I was disappointed to find that the multiple wives thing went out over a century ago (although it still plays havoc with their image) and that they’re really no more devoutly nuts than the next Christian faction claiming to preach the One True Faith.

Moreover, other than several spotty American missionaries doing their religious equivalent of a gap year, all the Mormons we met were Ghanaian – a determinant of character that outweighs religious influence like a transvestite in a knitting circle. For the fact that everyone in Ghana believes in god in some shape or form (“Washed in the Blood of Christ Hair Salon” anyone?), Ghana’s Mormons just read a slightly different religious text to the rest and then get on with the usual pan-Ghanaian concerns of being loud, gregarious and a bit disorganised.

Okay, so there are a few aspects of their beliefs that put Mormons at loggerheads with other branches of Christianity. For instance, they believe that their founder, a 19^th century American called Joseph Smith, was visited by God and by Jesus who instilled in him the divine right to preach their gospel, lost since the death of Jesus’ original apostles in Biblical times.

In contrast, the Catholic Church lays claim to unbroken papal lineage from St. Peter, who was appointed divine leader of the church by Jesus himself. For Joseph Smith, trumpeting an alternative claim to having divine right to preach the gospel was like telling the biggest bully in the playground that he smells of poo. Accordingly, Mormons have historically been shaken down for their lunch money on a regular basis.

Ghana is pretty easy come, easy go where religion is concerned. Everyone professes to be devoutly something – usually Christian or Muslim – but finds room in their beliefs for a bit of traditional African spiritualism at the same time. It’s a bit like enthusing about Bjork’s latest album at parties, then going home and listening to the Best of the Carpenters – you’ve had it a lot longer and the words are easier to remember.

We spent much of the week filming at the Yamoranza church in Cape Coast. One member of the congregation, Ebenezer - a middle aged pharmacist with a gammy leg – talked in detail about how the church was built. A neighbouring family had to be persuaded with a cow and sum of money to move their sacred altar rock as it was right where the new driveway was going to be.

Nothing unusual there; however, he went on to say that the family’s god Akatakyiwa (pronounced “Akatichiwa”) takes the form of a dog and thus no dogs have been permitted in the village for generations. One night many years ago he woke up needing a leak. As he relieved himself into the gutter outside his shop, across the road in the darkness he saw the biggest dog he’s ever set eyes on. He stared at it and it stared back at him before melting into the darkness.

On a muggy Sunday morning, standing on the steps outside the Mormon Church he attends at least once a week, Ebenezer maintained with blithe sincerity that the dog he had encountered had been none other than Akatakyiwa. He pointed out the small shack next to the church where the family’s altar rock now resides. Then, with a “God bless” by way of farewell, he ambled awkwardly off, dragging his bad leg behind him.

Louisa was only prayed over once while in hospital (by another patient’s visitor who thoughtfully included her in her very vocal prayers, sign or no sign), but God nonetheless came to her though an IV drip and a secondary course of tablets. This morning, a further blood smear declared her finally free of the malaria parasite and once again fit for human consumption. It’s a weight off both of our shoulders; this evening we will offer up a coconut to our sacred chicken before putting a few coins in the local church collection box - just to keep everyone happy.