In the Village

On Friday we left early because Isaac had invited me to spend the weekend with his family in the village he grew up, and a new chief was going to be installed. It was in the Central Region and would take over two hours to get there. We waited for Keziah, a girl from the office, as she was coming with us. However, after not answering her phone and not showing, Isaac said, “I think Keziah has disappointed us”. We picked up Isaac’s brother on our way out of the city. Keziah’s absence lowered my mood because I didn’t want to be the only guest and I had been looking forward to spending time with one of my female colleagues outside of work.

We pulled up at the petrol station and Isaac told me to hand over 80 cedis, which seemed like an incredible sum compared to other things here, and I started to feel a bit like I was funding their trip home. I experienced a lift when we past palm trees and the sea, giant coconut trees and small jungles of banana leaves. Excitement was hampered because I still felt drained of energy after being ill, and thought that I ought to be resting. I really wasn’t looking forward to being the honorary obruni in the village.

Greetings began as I’d expected- a number of people spying my arrival, some grinning with friends or shouting, “Obruni, hi”, a number of grubby handshakes as people were interrupted grounding cassava or in some other kind of manual labour. The village consisted of simple crumbling earthy houses surrounded by vegetation and dusty outdoor spaces with chickens pecking and small goats grazing on debris. There was the old church with children sitting on the wall outside, watching shyly. I was ushered in to various buildings to meet Isaac’s relatives. It was difficult to tell which of Isaac’s sisters were really sisters, and which were aunts and great aunts or cousins.

Isaac said it would be better if I went to meet the chiefs now, because at the ceremony the next day they would be too engaged in other activities. It was growing dark as we headed over to the ‘palace’, which turned out to be a slightly nicer crumbling old building, with a Romanesque feel as windows of the rooms around the square faced into the courtyard in the middle. There stood a simple throne on the far side of the square courtyard, made of animal skins and red leather. We were invited into one of the rooms on the right, and I was seated in between two gentlemen positioned opposite the door. The room swelled in the evening heat and the air was muggy. I tried to not let it overwhelm me that I was placed in a small stuffy room in a ring of men with an African chief sitting on the bed.

We returned to the house where Isaac grew up. In the dark and dirty yard with a cracked concrete floor, where there were moth-eaten kittens and lines of hand-washed laundry, I was given a chair, which was wiped down, and told we were having ‘rice’. I knew by now that this could mean I was having just about anything as an accompaniment to the rice. I felt agitated, if we were all going to sit around a communal bowl and eat together I would need to wash my hands. I was quite surprised after some time to be handed a very white and clean plate with a metal spoon with fluffy white rice and a simple salty onion omelette.

After saying my temporary adieus we left. On the drive to the guesthouse, it was very dark outside the car and definitely time for bed, but when I saw the clock on Isaac’s dashboard it said 7:30. After Isaac’s car headlamps had disappeared, in my room in the Guesthouse, I suddenly felt very alone. The bathroom seemed to look like the one in scene from ‘Psycho’ and there wasn’t a top sheet on the bed but a kind of itchy blanket. I turned on the TV, which the night guard had informed me only had one channel, and if I wanted to change it, I would have to ask at reception. An advert conveyed that at 8:00pm the following evening, ‘Nigeria’s Got Talent’ would be on. Then there was some incredibly cheesy Latin American series showing that I couldn’t work out which country it was from, but it would never be aired in England because our stomachs couldn’t take it.

Saturday

Isaac arrived at 8:00 to pick me up. I felt exhausted and thought I might rather stay in bed and read my book for the morning. But instead, I got in the car and was taken to his sister’s place. On the way, he informed me that Keziah had been admitted to hospital with stomach pains. It turned out she has a low blood count and would need to have tests.

The house was a few doors down from where we’d eaten the previous night. The walls were lined with posters of African women modelling different Ghanaian popular dresses. These are generally rather more flamboyant cousins of the Western dress, with extra frills, layers and locally patterned cotton. In the corner was an old-fashioned pedal sewing machine with a beautiful wooden base and black and gold metal body. I was introduced to two sisters. There was a young boy who gaped at me until his aunts made fun of him, and then someone handed me a toddler with cute hair bobbles on her head, pierced ears and a giggly grin. I sat her on my lap while everyone chatted. She ate from a bowl that had the word “かわいい” (“kawaii”) written on it in Japanese, which means cute and small. When eventually she clambered down, there was a little damp patch on my dress. I held the fabric up to my nose and confirmed that it was indeed urine. Isaac’s sister patted the toddler’s wet bottom, “Oh well,” she and Isaac said, “it will soon dry”.

After a while Isaac said he was leaving as he had some village matters to attend to. I should stay there and rest as the ceremony wouldn’t be until 2:00 in the afternoon. I was really quite relieved as I wasn’t in the mood to go anywhere, and they put down a slim mattress on the floor for me to lie on in the living room. The TV was on and we lay silently watching a Ghanaian soap opera on the old box TV. The actors were speaking in English. A man with a sex addiction enjoyed making women pregnant and had seemingly impregnated most of the women in the village. Then he started doing it while they were sleeping and helped out infertile husbands. Then he had to admit to all the women what he’d done and explain himself to the village priest. Another guy confessed to his wife he was gay. By the end the protagonist wished she could “turn back the hand of time”, but concluded, “it’s all wishes now”. Despite all the drama on screen, I was relatively relaxed, though I didn’t sleep. Then we watched an Indian movie about a high-profile Brahmin girl who falls in love with her bodyguard until it was time to walk over to the procession.

The ceremony wavered between being extremely interesting- with the display of traditional outfits and shaking hands with the chiefs as they paraded around the square- to tedious, as ceremonies often are drawn out, and I couldn’t understand any of the Twi coming through the microphone. I noted that the programme read ‘chief enstoolment’, which didn’t conjure nice connotations.

Children dancing with beads around their ankles and under the knees wearing orange and brown dress came to lay handkerchiefs on the knees of people in the crowd. Drums with metal edges instructed their movements like the Pied piper. If you wanted to dance with the children you get up with the handkerchief and mirror their movements. If you don’t feel up to it, you have to lay out some money for them to take. I got up to dance and was led into the middle of the square trying to imitate the dancers in time to the music. I felt conscious that there were a lot of eyes on me, but I decided it was best to not make eye contact with anyone and thus I was impenetrable to their gazes. The floor beneath my feet was of reddish beige sandy earth, with ageing huts made of crumbly clay bricks all around. Everyone got their camera phones out.

Isaac’s brother, Sammy, revealed that Isaac had once been invited to be a village chief- appointment was down to hereditary matters and election based on personal merit. But he’d felt he was too young to take up the responsibility at the time and it may be a possibility later. One of the chiefs came over to shake my hand, and then he asked me if I’d like to share his hut that night instead of staying in the guesthouse. I leaned in towards Sammy and asked,
“Is he serious?”
“Yes, he’s serious”.
I thanked the chief for his kind offer and said that I was quite settled into my room in the guest house, but how about next time. Now I just had to make sure I never came back, or at least that my next visit outlived him.

The light was fading as the chiefs retreated to the palace and the crowds dispersed, leaving only empty water sachets as evidence of the festivity. The moon was set at half mast, which indicated I’d been in Ghana for about five weeks.

The moon takes on a more powerful presence in the sky here than at home, which is probably down to the lack of street likes, making it brighter and more luminous. It’s also a different shape, which makes it more noticeable and shifts shape from bottom to top rather than right to left. Leonard says in German when the moon waxes and wanes they say it is losing or gaining weight. Being in Africa somehow makes you more aware of your mortality, which is reflected in the moonlight and you gain a sense of the vitality of being a part of the Earth.

“Tomorrow we will buy a goat and slaughter it, and you will see how it’s done”, Isaac announced in the car on the way to the lodge.
“Umm, OK”.

Sunday

Isaac and Sammy came for me at six o’clock. Although with the firm belief that if you’re going to eat meat, it’s better not to be hypocritical about the death of an animal, now on the other side of twenty five, the fervour of convictions in youth is already waning in favour of comfort, and I thought it might rather be preferable to stay in my room and read my book.

I was holding a baby when they brought the goat out. We were standing in the courtyard at Isaac’s family home. It was a small bush goat, and I thought it was probably best not to go over and pet it. I hoped the scene wouldn’t be too shocking and I drop the baby. With a huge blackened knife, Isaac’s nephew slit its throat and blood ran out. Then he started hacking its throat and I realised I was patting the baby in rhythm to the hacking, more for my own comfort than for the baby. The deed was done; the goat was now dead and the baby had soiled itself. The smell of goat blood and baby poo expanded and enriched the air.

The skins were too thin to use as leather, someone informed me, but they’re sweet to eat. So the animal was carried over to a fire outside and rotated, singing the hair. The smell of burning fur reminded me of the goats at the family farms in childhood that would chew on the feed and gobble the paper bag. Now furless, the animal was given two baths until it looked like a piglet and then placed on a mat of banana leaves and dissected.

I tried to explain that I only eat the meat and fleshy bits, but this seemed to discard most of the animal and as such appeared rather wasteful. Neck, head, legs, intestines, liver, heart and lungs were laid out ready to be washed. We drank coffee and ate McVities Rich Tea biscuits imported from Manchester that Isaac had brought from the city, while one of the sisters set about cleaning the intestines. Isaac looked over and said that was his favourite part.

I went with Sammy to look at the community food garden. It was like a permaculture haven. I could see that okra grew from the nectar of a giant yellow flower, and that the difference between banana and plantain is that the banana trees are taller and the bunches have a purple dragon tails. There were garden eggs that I’d never seen before, and I tasted raw peanut for the first time. They are root-like and wet before they are dried, salted and toasted. There were huge racks of cocoa beans drying in the sun, and when you crack open one of the pieces it’s a deep shade of purple and smells like cooking chocolate. After collecting the plantain, we had to take it back to the house:

Then Sammy, Isaac and some others took me to see their cocoa farm. We walked through the jungle, and Isaac pointed out a tree which is indigenous only to Ghana and Israel and produces a kind of pod that smells spicy like cinnamon. I didn’t know I didn’t know what a pineapple plant looked like, but apparently I didn’t. Only one fruit grows on each plant and it takes about six months for it to grow. I gained a new appreciation for the amount of tender care nature takes in producing one of these delicacies for us to eat. I tried to recall some of the things I’d been taught in school, but the source of our food, and ultimately our survival, was not one of them. It was pleasing to see all of the cocoa trees lined up, each with about five or six orangey red pods. One of the men spotted a large crab disappearing under a log and fetched it out with a big knife. He weakened it, but kept it alive so it would stay fresh for longer.

As we arrived back at the courtyard, I saw the cat with a giant red and blue lizard in its mouth disappearing under one of the tables. Rather than putting me off eating the goat, the morning’s experience had been more affirming in assuring that all parts of the animal were essentially the same, and since I’d seen the intestines etc. being properly washed, I tried to think of them as no less edible. In the end I didn’t know what part of the goat I was eating when the soup was brought out, and we had it with fufu, which is pounded cassava. It didn’t seem to matter that much as it all tasted the same and it all tasted good in the subtly rich and spicy sauce. The crab was floating on top of the dish, and Isaac told me to eat its shell, legs and all because it contained a lot of calcium.

In the afternoon, two new women arrived; one was very old and frail with no teeth and her skin drooped. Isaac introduced her as his grandmother’s sister. He said that she had once been married to a white man who had come to Ghana to help build the road that went past their village and they had fallen in love. The man had since passed away. It was only later when Sammy mentioned the road had been built by Koreans that I realised the man had been from Korea. I suppose comparatively speaking, Koreans are still very white, and genetically are a lot more similar to Caucasians.

As we were leaving, I finally felt relaxed in the village. I then knew it had been heart-warming to have spent time with Isaac’s family. We went home via Khakoum, which is a forest reserve and you can walk on a rope platform above the trees. It was really cool to have a pie-eye view of the nature below and see great lengths of jungle spread into the horizon. I appreciated the drive past the beautiful coast as we headed back to Accra.

When I got home, the Senegalese guys were busy dissecting two sheep on the balcony. This now seemed completely normal. Troels, Ivan and Scottish Katie were there and had just come back from an adventure looking sun-crisp. They’d gone on Friday night to some town where the guesthouse was full and ended up sleeping on the floor of the house of one of the ladies in the market. The next day they’d taken a ferry at 6:00am for 12 hours up the river somewhere. They’d helped a fisherman catch his batch at some point and eaten fresh fish, and they’d spent a night in beach huts in a gorgeous location by the sea. By now the mutton was in the oven, with the meaty bits and the ribs on the top shelf and the organs were neatly laid out on a baking tray below, sizzling nicely.