Friday, April 29, 2011
Royalty - the soap
Well it’s not exactly a day for republicans in the UK. Gimlet eyed I turned on the TV to watch the world news and avoid any reference to the wedding, thinking that Al Jazeera would be the one to eschew the saccharine pomp and ceremony at Westminster Abbey. What was their main news story? The same as everywhere else. Not Syria or Libya. One becomes a sexist monster muttering expletives at the female kind as you watch hitherto calm and even intrepid reporters going girlie, ogling, eyelash fluttering and sugar voicing their way through the ‘making of history’. David Cameron who just the other day told a female MP to ‘calm down dear’ several times, also warbled like a reed bunting about a thousand years of royalty and what it has done for Britain. No killing of wives, imprisonment and executions of competitors or German take-overs there then!
A while back I did some work in St Petersburg and was fortunate enough to visit the Tikhvin, a small cemetery which contained the graves of many Russian composers, artists and poets. I sat on a stone and wondered whether their still decaying bodies were throwing molecules into the air that I was breathing. Maybe I was imbibing the spirit of creativity? And I have gone on to write a three volume fictional piece which I begin to edit today! Who knows? As an atheist of a kind I am not averse to believing in some things and the way we pass on memories through our genes and atoms is one of them. Anyway, in the Abbey is Poet’s Corner, a bit like that Russian quarter acre. So the bride and groom will walk through the lush grass of approbation from the great and the good and ‘some ordinary people’ -Al Jazeera, and imbibe the molecules tossed into the air by poets turning in their graves. Well, some of them:
"The communication of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living" - Epitaph on the memorial to T.S.Eliot.
The monarchy seems to me to be a palliative, a bit like football. For so many people it arrests their development into critical members of society by filling their heads with dreams of princes and princesses, glass slippers, thousand piece tea sets and maybe a bit of acceptable bodice ripping, sexy phone tapped calls, murky deaths, disagreeable humour, racist attitudes and heavily regulated liaisons.
Labels: Westminster wedding. The royal family. Republicanism.
Sunday, April 24, 2011
Of dogs and men
Away from the dogs of war in Libya, Cote d”Ivoire, Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq - I suppose the list would comprise a whole, dispiriting blog without any further content but this is holiday time as those atheists and agnostics among us piggyback on the Christian calendar. There are a number of churches within earshot of our half acre compound and Easter Sunday sees them in full flood, vaguely Anglican hymns melding with ululations that sound as if they came off that Paul Simon African-inspired album. In case you think that that must be wonderfully exotic, it is not. It is loud and intrusive. There have been a number of cases of complaint around Accra at the pain caused to neighbours by these open air concrete hangars (not agnostic or atheist neighbours but Christians of a quieter, indoors, enclosed hue.) Complainants have then been threatened and victimised by the proponents of the ecclesiastical loud speaker systems. Recently I have come across a new dialogue here. There are (admittedly academic) those who see the evangelical mission in Africa as a form of imperialism. Since Ghana had an all-seeing, non-gendered, abstract notion of God before the missionaries arrived to infuse souls into pagan black bodies and promulgate Jesus-worship with its own pagan communion rituals, there is a harking back to what this colonialism has meant for indigenous culture. What is being lost? Whose god is it anyway?
Anyway, Easter Sunday is no different from any other day in the compound. The three dogs play out their strange relationships and are an unceasing source of wonder and debate. If you remember there is the old dog, a bit like Tommy, deaf, and blind but loudly not dumb and once about to die. His two mutt friends for ten years or more both gave up on life, not raging into the night but happily sleeping under the bougainvillea and so we bought two pups, a Caruso bass Doberman called Sirius and a female, eye-lash flickering Alsatian called Andromeda, the daughter of Ghana’s leading drug-sniffer dog. Andromeda goes in the pool every half an hour for a swim, a half-length at a time. She is also likely to swim out to you as you do your lengths in meditative silence and try to get on board, nearly drowning you. The Doberman is very big and excels in ball chasing, fending off the other two. Heracles, the old boy is now frisky and excitable, enjoying his two young companions who seem to treat him with respect and can’t sleep unless he is nearby to reassure them. Each wants to be the favourite of their human owners. They bat each other away, Andromeda hangs on to Sirius’ collar and tries to drag him to the ground and Heracles cunningly waits and eases in for a stroke while the other two squabble. They play tag with a tennis ball, the rule being that the one who has it wanders around, nonchalantly, chest puffed out and the others run in circles and wait for it to drop. Sometimes they can be seen careering up and down the half acre, making up new rules for the contest.
If, as many have pointed out, dog is god spelled backwards, then our three anagrammatic deities have shown that differences can be assimilated in fun and peace for the pleasure of all.
Labels: Accra. Gods. Dogs.
Friday, April 15, 2011
I know it's only rock and roll...
I walked into a supermarket in Accra today and asked who was in charge of the poultry section. A nice feller came up to me and said “I am the Eggman”. I wondered whether he had heard of the Beatles and he looked pinched before nodding dubiously. No Ghanaian wants to say no to anything. We shop in supermarkets because there is more chance of hygiene being applied to food preparation and storage, though sometimes, when there is a gap between electricity supply going off and generator coming on, there is a smell that drives you to the food that is not raw. We tend to buy in bulkwhen desired offerings appear on the shelves because there is no guarantee you will see them again for weeks. Hence, the fruit and vegetables we juice every morning are at the centre of the shopping quest. It is not unusual to see us making off with several kilo bags of carrots, beetroot, green beans, cabbages, ginger and the fruity rest. There are scares about buying on the markets because sometimes root crops are grown in effluent.
Which reminds me of shopping in Tashkent, Uzbekistan a few years after the demise of the USSR. There, the supermarket had what it had. There was no rhyme nor reason for what was on the shelves. I remember seeing a brass telescope next to umbrellas and tinned goods. Then, next to them I became excited because there were piles of vinyl, albums by British and American artists, copied in the old USSR, despite their degeneracy. I got everything that fulfilled my love of the riffs of progressive rock music or which, like The Eagles or The Band melded rock with country.
So once again in 2011 I was shopping in that same opportunistic way, sticking my hand in the bran tub of surprise and pulling out a plum; Jack Horner rather than Jack Sanger. I thought to myself, placing a half dozen big white eggs in my basket, that I was never the Egg Man, more Jumping Jack Flash which then reminded me to look for Brown Sugar.
Labels: Accra. Shopping. Rock and roll.
Tuesday, April 12, 2011
Dear Brother Leader and Sister Burqa
Some news items are difficult to write about. and some not. Libyan citizens (apart from Gaddafi’s own tribe) have generally been oppressed for forty years with secret police instigated disappearances, torture and an absence of the freedoms they would like to take for granted. The African emissaries did themselves much harm in toadying up to the dictator and offering a ceasefire that would consolidate his military hold on Libya. To insinuate that he was in a club of like-minded African Heads of State did little to make the continent feel good about itself. But then it has been Gadaffi’s oil money that has underpinned many an African dictator’s hold on power. The Dear Brothers’ League of nations will continue to turn a blind eye to ordinary people’s suffering.
Some two thousand women in France consider themselves to be suffering. They must divest themselves of their facial encumbrances if they want to go shopping. They claim it is an attack on their civil rights. Probably. They claim it is an attack on Islam. Not. There is nothing in the Koran which preaches such extremes. The nearest the Prophet came to limiting a woman’s attire was when he asked that she retained a degree of modesty.
All religions appear to have a problem with sexuality - usually a woman’s. Since the Romans, according to Foucault, first began to institute laws to limit women’s freedoms in order to guarantee men’s progeny their right to property, women have been receiving a raw deal. Most religions limit their powers to lead in their organisations. Many still enshrine in ecclesiastical law, constraints on their sexual rights. The burqa is the symbol of a property being owned by a man. Imagine, in an Alice in Wonderland world if, in a religion, a wife must wear a burqa in the home but not in a public place. How long would the religion demanding it, last?
In Lysistrata the play, women stop war by withholding conjugal rights. Zuma and company should be brought to heel by their African women for their patriarchal despotism. Meanwhile, the French two thousand would do well to read the Quran and question what their husbands are demanding of them.
Labels: Burqa. Gadaffi. Zuma.
Sunday, April 10, 2011
Blind spots
I was reading a BBC website article on acronyms and the internet this morning and had one of those rude awakenings that my parents must have had after I first played a 78 of Bill Haley’s Rock Around the Clock as it ushered in teenspeak from the United States which was completely unintelligible to them. Grooving, cool cat, square, daddy-o, fast, free love and the like studded the language of teenagers, coined mostly by beatniks and black jazzers and the early mainstream drug pioneers.
My call to senses came when I read the following paragraph:
But many mistake "LOL" for "lots of love", leading to some unintended "LOLs", such as the infamous tale of the mother who wrote: "Your grandmother has just passed away. LOL."
Now like the author of the message above, I always thought LOL meant lots of love. After all, many of my female friends put it at the end of their missives to me. Yet all the while their communications may have been tongue in cheek, sardonic or, even worse, privately amused! Ah well, you are never too old for schadenfreude. It actually means Laughing Out Loud!!!
Here in Ghana there is much to learn in the mutation of the English language. I got a touch of conjunctivitis the other day and was instructed to go to the pharmacy and ask for drops for Apollo, the common name for it. Apparently a vast proportion of the population looked skywards imagining the moon landing and this coincided with a particularly virulent outbreak of the condition. One had obviously led to the other.
Labels: conjunctivitis. Ghana. LOL
Sunday, April 03, 2011
Upwardly and laterally mobile in Ghana
Maybe life is a struggle for everyone, rich or poor if you see it through the eyes of each individual but it doesn’t look like that from the outside. While students in developed countries fight to maintain their grants and fulfil the expectations of having universal education, albeit with varying degrees of fee-paying in the latter stages, what happens when you are born and brought up in a Ghanaian village where, if you are lucky, there is some rudimentary primary education and little else afterwards for the vast majority?
I will try not to be sentimental about what follows. A young man, in his early twenties came to the house as a gardener. Illiterate and not speaking English (the post-colonial language of Ghana) he worked very hard and with intelligence. He was moved to the factory which sells uniquely designed clothes directly to customers in the UK and elsewhere but not in Ghana. Here the staff at all levels are paid three or four times the national average for their levels of work in the fashion industry. Our young man became an ironer. A couple of years later he was literate and taking photographs of garments (having a very rare eye, even for so-called professional photographers). Now he is quality controller in the factory and patrols every phase of production with a forensic eye and a completely immovable force (resisting sixty staff’s desire to bend the rules has broken a few spirits!). He is earning money he could never have dreamed of. He still spends his Saturdays with us, cleaning. Much of his income goes back to send his sister through school and for other family needs.
Where does he live, here in the sprawling morass that is Accra? Every possibility exists, from under a tree to a sumptuous gated property with armed guards. But the majority live in kiosks and rough-made dwellings built from any available material, usually small, windowless and in acreages of the same or - and here we come back to the protagonist of this blog - on any available land that has not yet succumbed to the builders, both private and municipal. Just so with our man. Yesterday he could not come to clean because the Accra Metropolitan Authority was moving his kiosk on. At this moment his house will be on a trailer heading for a little plot he has had his eye on for some time. This is his third such move in three years. I expect he has found somewhere and I will hear about it tomorrow, at work in the factory.
Labels: Ghana. Living dreams. Mobility.