I was at a glam wedding in Accra this weekend, a tapestry of beautiful people enjoying themselves. There were several events, culminating in a dance on the final night of the two days of eating and drinking. I don’t propose to talk about the clergyman and his self-indulgent sermonising both in the wedding service and at the reception, save to say that sometimes His loyal servants give Him a bad name – even among agnostics like myself. What was both magnificent and very sad related to a contingent of young Ghanaian professionals come over from the UK. Indeed, bride and groom are living there and many of their friends were doubling up holidays with a few days in Accra for the marriage.
What was sad? Well, they were fine looking, articulate, fun-loving, hard-working and successful middle class people who play by the rules and are on top career trajectories in law, medicine, management and the City. In the UK. Not in Ghana.
I remember several occasions when I lived in the UK when there was an outcry about the ‘brain drain’ from the UK to the US. Thousands going west for better prospects. Here, it is pernicious. The continuing diaspora of young, ambitious Ghanaians to UK and US educational institutions and who then ‘stay on’ leaves the country with a deficit in the intellectual elite who can challenge the establishment and the archaic and sometimes corrupt practices of Government bodies. Every country needs youth to lock horns with the previous generation, forcing change, improving the lot of people with altruism and rationalism before they, themselves, become corrupted or de-clawed by osmosis among the insidious ruling (largely male) political, social and business elite. But I don’t sense much of that idealism exists. Perhaps the lure of middle class England is greater than the challenges and vicissitudes of middle class Ghana? Perhaps, in mythological terms, they don’t, symbolically, want to kill the Father and prefer these fleeting visits to keep in touch with the old country but not to get involved in intractable problems of its society.
I met a Japanese girl who is currently working in East Africa for Medecin Sans Frontieres. Now there is a charity worth supporting! She is an idealist, giving some of her life for the benefit of others. Ghana needs its own young people to be filled with the same idealism. It should not be a breeding ground for western-bound intellect and skills or it will, forever, be ruled by dynasties appealing to the largely poor and ill-educated populace with reductionist slogans and offering them little likelihood of meaningful change in their lifetimes.
Surviving the worst
Hardiness is a much valued human characteristic. It often underpins bravery. We love hearing about how miners survive underground explosions, children are pulled from rubble, pensioners take on and defeat robbers or cats who travel a thousand miles back to their original homes, after their human families moved to another part of the country. On the one hand they are examples of role models. We identify with them. We like to think that in the same situation we would emulate them, even the cat. Therein lies a mistaken feature of our perceptions of the world. Most of us would never be the hero nor the obdurate survivor. We are social animals who prefer to keep our heads down and live quietly alongside our neighbours. Indeed there have been many studies that show that most of us will take orders, despite our role being to inflict apparent pain on others. Most of us defer to authority, no matter how unacceptable and inconsiderate that authority’s demands upon us. So, as far as following role models in the real world goes, it occurs mostly in our fantasies.
On the other hand, much is made of these incidents by God-fearing folk. “Miraculous!” they say. It was used many times about survivors of the Twin Towers attack.
What is the opposite of miraculous? Natural? Normal? Prosaic? In fact there probably is no antonym for the term, even among atheists. This may be because we prefer evidence of there being some supernatural order to existence that can bend forward and intervene, even when all seems doomed. One last chance, a gift from God. The randomly rare nature of these interventions undermines the existence of deities for unbelievers but, paradoxically, prove how difficult He is to please for believers, since, more often than not, the dead outnumber survivors in catastrophes. Isn't that the definition of them?
It may be better to take on personal responsibility to do as well as we can and not speculate on, or ask for, God’s or Satan’s interventions. Try to be hardy. Try to be heroes within reason. Question more.
Scientists recently took some rock from Beer, a place on the south coast of England. They attached it for more than a year to the outside of the space station. When they got it back it was to discover that bacteria within it were still alive. Is this a miracle? Are these microbes heroes? They are certainly hardy.
Labels: Microbes. Beer. Miracles.
I’m on a train travelling at high speed towards Paris. Suddenly it is cooler. The heat of the south is giving way to weather much like one might expect in East Anglia in the UK. People in the carriage are donning extra clothes. A woman in the seat in front has screwed down a tight leather jacket with a ribbed back, much like those beloved by French film directors. I think she is a shoe designer because I half overheard her talking about footwear and she was pointing out a pair of blood red boots to her companion, not in that ‘wouldn’t these be nice to own’ kind of way but with a proprietorial, ‘these are my children’ lyricism. Women’s magazines are also stuffed in a rack beside me. My companion designs clothes.
When I look through them, there are all the expected images of women, emphasising, shot by shot, different parts of their topographies, as though, in essence, there is actually only one woman and she has been dissected and then rendered in cameo sections to the reader, as a benign gift of attainability. But this composite woman cannot be emulated by her readers. She is a phantasm, populating their dreams but never their realities.
Look, she has all the bits that men crave for and in such perfect order. See the breasts in particular. Aren’t they just sugar coated seduction?
Except when they have a baby attached to them. Then there is shock and rejection. Do not enter the fantasies of magazine readership with those sort of realities. One female writer sent an email to a news programme this week saying that breast feeding should be kept to the privacy of the toilet, not public spaces.
This places it nicely in the pages of life, doesn’t it?
We are still in France for one more week, the weather is as hot as Accra but the air is dry and, being up a mountain, there is a clean crispness that is very reviving. It is a perfect counterpoint to the humidity of equatorial Ghana and I am made to feel like a swallow by my excursions here and back. To labour my point about climate, the other evening we went to a village called Mosset, armed with a variety of warm clothes, dried fruit, blankets and thermos flasks, despite the day temperatures being in the upper twenties.
Mosset has a tradition of staging operas at this time of the year in its old castle – a sort of reinforced version of the original. It tries to integrate local people in a vast chorus with a few semi-pros or young singers, hopefully on the way up. Incomers (Dutch in this case) produce and direct the whole affair and tickets are hard to come by. It begins late, at about half nine, to ensure that darkness lends it a special atmosphere. And indeed it does. Well worth the visit. The crowd scenes are full of kaleidoscopic colour and pinball vitality, hugely ambitious and yet most of the time managing to avoid catastrophe or disbelief. Mercutio is particularly virile and believable among the leads and, if better choreography had engineered it, the exceptional masks and costumes and other elements of dark menace would have lifted some scenes even more.
It would be an injustice to call it amateur opera but it also falls a lot short of professional staging. As it happens I am not a great supporter or afficionado of singing theatre of any kind, finding the plots usually too ploddingly bathetic to carry the frequently haunting melodies. Usually, too, the acting lacks a call to passion. In the end I am happiest attending some highly stylised, minimal set and a form of gesturing that stay within the convention of semaphore rather than a plunge into hot breath and fleshy contact, thereby allowing my ears to dominate my other senses.
So, in the delightful Pyrenean village of Mosset, it happened that, when Romeo the plank tried to get it on with Juliet, the ice siren, there was a squirm or two on my plastic seat. The voices were ok, hers better than his, but I was left at the end wishing that the death-embracing philtre of poison, taken by Romeo, was Viagra.
That would have made for an erect, rather than recumbent and somewhat limp end to proceedings!
Vodafone: polluters of an African heritageHere I am in France, with space for reflection after a rather hectic time of it. I am at an age when, gradually, assumptions are made that with the passing years the vital edge of analytical thought decreases and the demand for my labour consequently diminishes. I finished my ten year stint with the British Board of Film Classification a week or so ago as a member of their children's advisory panel, though that was the end of a natural span of service but I also found that management consultancy in the public sector had been excised by the latest Tory edict. Before that sounds too crabby and personal, it suits me. I have to complete the final volume of a three stage fictional account of the beginning of agnostic thought among the demons and gods of a time pre-Buddha, a cross between Rider Haggard, A Thousand and One Nights and Samurai legends. In other words attending to a personal sense of legacy.
But the blogs will also continue because they are part of a discipline. They maintain the focus on everything from social change to agnosticism in the same way the vicar compiles his sermons for a Sunday. They also put out into the ether certain questions and challenges which others might take up. Tiny snowballs that accumulate into landslides, if the time is right.
Of course, snowballs are beyond most Ghanaians ken. In that tropical clime it is possible to witness hailstones from vast cumuli disturbances overhead, where rain drops are shuttled up and down in the deep miles of cloud, icing, dropping, rising and dropping so many times until, too heavy, they crash upon the world beneath. But snow, no.
What most Ghanaians seem oblivious of, also, is the insidious way that mobile phone companies are destroying any aesthetic that might exist within traditional communities. Few people have landlines. Vodafone have recently bought Ghana's main telephone system and are joining the forces of pollution that are turning some of the historical sites of Ghana into vast advertising hoardings. How it is done I have no idea. Equally, how it can be stopped is also beyond me. Whether money is exchanged for officials to turn a blind eye or whether the eyes are blind at the outset and do not see the increasing travesty, I don't know.
Just imagine this. You live in a pretty Cotswold town in the Uk or in the Lake District or any medieval town in Europe and along comes a telephone company and paints the main building on a confluence of roads at its very centre, red. Or yellow. Or purple. Then, to add the icing they put lots of Vodaphone, MTN, Zain or other branding insignias all over it. This is what is happening in Ghana.
I look out on my unspoilt village in France and reflect on Cape Coast along the sea road from Accra. To help you empathise with my troubled thoughts, you can see in the accompanying photograph the main bridge in its centre, now a crude yellow vehicle of advertising for MTN. Vodafone are rapidly catching up. They want to paint every town red. Ironically, the photograph was taken from the slave fort, built when the British, Dutch and Portuguese thought in equally demeaning terms about the Ghanaian people.
Could you argue that if the people don't object, then it can't be bad? Like Avon selling skin bleaches to African women. Or tobacco companies turning their financial strategies towards poor countries where peoples have to be conditioned into the consumption of cancer-inducing cigarettes?
Labels: Vodafone. Ghana. Pollution.