Saturday, March 30, 2013
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Water water everywhere – but sometimes nought to drink?
I don’t think it has rained more than three
times since October when we got back to Accra from France. The UK may be
suffering the coldest Easter on record with temperatures of minus ten degrees (I
remember swimming in the North Sea at Easter up near Newcastle, at much this
time of year and, though cold, my genitalia didn’t completely retract) but
Ghana is drought-like. Temperatures stay up around 33 degrees and the humidity
is around 80. Even Ghanaians are suffering heat rashes. The consequence is
water shortages. And water wars.
The latter are fought between the well-to-do
in the much sought after areas of the city. Here, half acre plots boast large
houses and tropical gardens. Every house has a decent-sized water tank to see
it through the days when the mains water does not run. This was fine until someone
realized that if you add a pump to the tank you could exert extra suck on the
mains and fill up even when water pressure is low. Soon, the inevitable, either
you get a pump or you have no water.
Where we live (a mix of large houses and
shanty squats) there is less water acquisitiveness but it does not mean we are
out of the loop of steadily escalating self-interest. We had a full tank the other
day, enough for two weeks, normally. Two days later it was nearly all gone.
Why? We have theories. Leaks? Not likely as there are no damp signs on the
soil. Neighbours burrowing under the wall and putting a T joint on our house
supply? Again, no signs. The gardener selling water to locals (a common reason
for sackings at the big houses). No – he’s a good feller and I am in the house,
writing, when he is around. The neighbours joining the water pump army and
sucking water from our tank? Possible. Anyway, our plumber is coming to fortify
these precious resources. Also we will soon have the bore hole fully operational
and be able to draw water when and how we like. In this latter respect we are,
to use the North Korean metaphor, going nuclear.
All this does not disguise the potentially frightening
issue of water becoming more precious than any other resource, even in Ghana. The
country has the financial wherewithal and the climate to provide water for everyone
all of the time. It is now oil-rich. But a governmental ideal that everyone,
from the poor upwards, should be cared for, is sadly lacking. Thus the rich secure
water by whatever means and what is left is spread thinly among the rest of the
population.
Labels: #Ghana. Water. Africa.
Thursday, March 21, 2013
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Of flying horses and thwarted lions
Encouraged by my interest in his
forefathers, the gardener tells me another tale. It is magic realism at its
best. I’ve repeated it to one or two people and they don’t get it. To them it’s
mad, bonkers and childish. It doesn’t feel like that when you listen to it.
Something about the eyes of the teller, the excited expression, the relief that
someone is listening without criticism. Anyway, it goes like this:
“My
grandfather’s brother built a house which stretched from here to the junction
(he is indicating about a half mile). This house was so big a stranger would
never find his way out again. My grandfather’s brother had thirty wives. Every
wife had many chickens. His brothers had wives but only six or eight each. There
were thirty thousand chickens around the place. When strangers came to the
gates, my grandfather’s brother had to greet them himself. Then he would find out
their business and arrange for them to be taken into the house.
One
day he had to travel to Burkina Faso. There were no roads and there was jungle
everywhere. He went on horseback. His steed had been prepared like the dogs in
the previous blog. Four lions stalked him, wanting to eat the horse. They came
at him from all sides. My grandfather’s brother made his horse rise into the
sky, just above the mouths of the biting beasts. Here they stayed until the
lions became tired and left them alone. He continued his journey in peace.”
I believe he believed it. I believe that
such stories have some intrinsic symbolism that I can’t fathom and that my
friend, the gardener, has sad eyes because he has lost the understanding as
well. He knows that these stories will end with his generation. Those that
have come afterwards are full of Christian or Muslim mythology and symbolism, grafted on over the last
decades.
www.chronometerpublications.me
www.azimuthtrilogy.com
Tuesday, March 19, 2013
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Giving
dogs super powers
Our part time gardener is of an
indeterminate age. He does his job on a timescale known only to him. He moves
around the compound cutting grass and shrubs and attending to the dogs in a
slow, inexorable pattern. Sometimes he sits in the shade for a hour or two and
sleeps. Remember that temperatures in Accra hover always above 30 degrees with
high humidity. The sun is like paint stripper on the skin. We have anecdotal
conversations once in a while. Because I research local medicinal plants and we
grow them, I pass on what I glean. Locals here have forgotten the efficacy of
what burgeons around them. For example, a shrub called bitter leaf prevents
malaria. Chewing the leaves kills parasites in the blood.
He was saying yesterday that his
forefathers knew such things. He was busy coating the Doberman with shea butter
and spraying both it and the bitch, a blonde Alsatian, with a spray I concocted
from soursop leaves. This is a summary of what he said.
“My grandfather had six dogs. To protect them he went into the bush
and collected plant leaves, bark from trees and roots. These he boiled and then
bathed the dogs in the juice for a week. This made the dogs strong. In those
days there were lions and animals with long back legs and short front ones.
They could open doors and kill your creatures (chickens, cattle) but once the
dogs were ready nothing could harm your beasts. If a lion tried to bite a dog
it would jump back as if it had touched an electric fish. The dogs could not be
cut by anything. Anyone coming to the village with a gun could not shoot the
dogs. The bullets would never hit them. This knowledge has died with the
forefathers.”
Our gardener became a Muslim in 1977, the
only one of his generation. He is sad that the old ways and the old knowledge
are not being maintained and that he, himself, does not carry them inside him. He knows
that they are at odds with modern religions which stamp out ancient lore in the interests of a single god..
Labels: Making dogs invulnerable. Accra #Ghana. The old ways.
Sunday, March 10, 2013
New
Gods for old
Further conversation with a young Ghanaian
male about his unshakeable belief in Christianity provides insights into
cultural dissonance. That is, between him and me and between him and his
traditions. There is little doubt in my mind that one of the reasons why
Africans take to Christianity with a fundamentalist zeal is that its rituals
are sacrificial and mysterious. His blood. His flesh. There is also the Old
Testament with its patriarchal, forbidding and vengeful God. Since the white
man brought ‘the book’, the new religion had the effect of breaking down social
infrastructures within tribes. Where once women ran commerce and saw to the
delicate business of maintaining the balance between labour and survival, the
imperialist empire builders, brandishing their words from God, would only deal
with males. Rupture followed. We see the consequences today, everywhere. And
now the men have guns and women and children become ever more vulnerable.
Fortunately, for the time being, Ghana is
peaceful and there are strong remnants of the old world co-existing with the
new. Women choose tribal chiefs. Land is still passed down the female line. But
the traditions are being eroded by land registry and other western business
practices which tend to discriminate against women.
Back to my young Ghanaian friend, the one
who laughs hysterically at the notion that I might not believe in ANY god! In
northern Ghana, he tells me, The crocodile Chief in the river has a ‘red cap’.
He will not kill humans. You can sit on him. He is a kind of godly
manifestation in the water. But kill any of his tribe and humans will die as a
consequence. He tells me another story. The tribal custom is to bury the umbilical
cord of every human birth in a particular spot. The Chief travelled to the US
and married a white woman whom he brought back. She set about, in a western
health and safety kind of way, clearing up this site of decomposition. Once
cleared the Chief’s body underwent encroaching paralysis; hands, arms, legs…. A
further myth or traditional reality is that before you die you must be
‘instructed’. If this happens then you can communicate with the living and vice
versa.
He tells me these stories with a curious
reticence which gives way to enthusiasm as I don’t deride them like the
Christian priests do. Pagan black magic. It reminds me of the extraordinary
nature of churches all over the UK. The believers stand, sit, kneel and pay
their respects to the One God and all around them are symbols of
pre-Christianity. The Green Man. Fornication. Images of Lilith who preceded
Eve. Bestiality. Christianity was the progenitor of imperialist (and
capitalist) subjugation of the old traditions. And it is still doing it
consummately well, here in Ghana.
www.chronometerpublications.me
Labels: The repression of tradition and the imperialism of religion.
Sunday, March 03, 2013
Hypocritical
Oaths
Closed minds are like houses shut up for
the winter only to find that their owners are never returning. They become
dusty, dark, places of foreboding and creepy crawlies. You have to break in
from the outside to lever off hinges on doors or windows to let some light in. Well, it may
be an overplayed analogy but it represents my feelings of utter dismay when it
comes to discussing serious issues of life with Ghanaians brought up in
villages in an educational system that sometimes makes creationism look like a
liberal intellectual’s dream philosophy.
Coming out of DVLA in Accra the other day,
refusing to pay a bribe to go to the front of the queue, a young Muslim
accosted me.
“Is
that your wife?”
“Yes.”
“English?”
“No.
Fanti.” (A coastal tribe in Ghana.)
“She
is white.”
“Yes,
but her twin is black.”
“God
is wise and works miracles.”
“No.
It is called biology.”
“You
are a Christian?”
“No.
I do not believe in God.”
“You
have a long way to go.”
“I
have been further than you will ever travel. There is no God.”
“God
makes everything, sees everything, even the smallest thing.”
“You
pay bribes?”
“It
is how things are done.”
It comes to my mind that in this Ghanaian
world, where corruption is endemic, praying to God and giving your weekly
tithe, is just another form of bribery.
A young man, who has progressed from
illiteracy to being a photographer and user of Photoshop in five years tells me
that in Ghana you must be whipped if you are late or absent from school. He
was. (And left it, illiterate, as I said.) There is no other way. There is no
tie up to the Christian principles of love thy neighbour or parables about lost
sheep. Nor can their be any open discussion with the teacher or the priest
about the foundations of thought and belief.
Earlier blogs give accounts of mandatory prayers at medical conferences
introducing drug company reps with their latest spiel on the efficacy of
innovative compounds, at new bank launches or before politicians’ speeches at
the hustings. To deny God in Ghana is to invite anything from rib-tickled
disbelief to aggression. The notion of having a critical consciousness about
ALL things is not on the table. Churches rule daily social lives. The only
learning they vouchsafe comes from within the tight parameters of the bible.
The same young man, mentioned above, talks about “When the white man brought
the book ...” as the point of change for the better in Ghanaians lives, though
he has no idea what life was like before the missionaries. Looking at Ghana’s
remarkable, world-beating GNP, little of it is percolating down to the poor
from its religion-embracing Ministers of State. Meanwhile, the poor pray for
miracles to change their living conditions because it is in God’s hands. The
illusion of Heaven drives all religions alike. Everything will one day be
wonderful, you will find yourself at God’s feet, serving His will. Meanwhile, just
suffer with good grace.
The adherents of the world’s religions here
steal as much as they bribe. It is occupational. Gangs come and disconnect your
electricity at night and come to put it on again in the morning, at a price.
Kilometres of cabling are stolen regularly leading to blackouts. All the
country’s essential services are regularly ‘chopped’ by staff wanting backhanders to do normal
work, selling equipment taken illegally from central stores, demanding bribes
for releasing imported materials and so on. The same folks invariably go to
church on Sundays for their various forms of absolution, their prayers for
consumer items, their hopes for the future. They see little inconsistency in
week long criminality and Sunday holiness.
Before you think this is a rant from some
racist outsider, please take stock of other blogs I have written. I (as a long
time educationalist) see the blame
for Ghana’s troubles at least partially at the door of religions. They breed
closed minds with absurd certainties and they (as they have done through time
immemorial) keep the poor in its place. While religious institutions exhorted
their followers to enjoy a peaceful presidential election recently, one can’t
help thinking that their real concern was the status quo, their hold on the
purse strings of the poor.
For other writing:
Three FREE novellas at www.chronomterpublications.me
The Azimuth Trilogy www.azimuthtrilogy.com First TEN
chapters FREE.
Labels: #Ghana. Religion. Closed minds.