Unbalanced Impressions

A number of hustlers, hawkers, hasslers, and touts exist in Ghana.  I seem to attract many of these people for a variety of reasons: I live in Accra, the biggest city; I am a white foreigner, which seems to stand out more than a non-white foreigner; I am young, which seems to make me more approachable or likely to be befriended than someone older; and I am a male, which seems to be less intimidating to the younger men (though not the older ones).  The worst place for touts in Accra is a strip nicknamed, ‘Oxford Street’.  Oxford Street is the most tourist-focused area in the city with a high density of popular hotels, restaurants, and bars.  The problem with touts on Oxford Street, as opposed to the myriad of other souvenir sellers in Ghana, is that they do not take rejection well.  I’ve been called a ‘white pig’ and ‘slave master’ on a few occasions, I was once grabbed violently by the arm and threatened on another, and countless times I’ve been sworn at, either for rejecting someone’s offer to buy something, or ignoring the Obruni (white) cat-calls that emanate from so many streets stalls.  When I walk down Oxford Street I begin to hate Ghana, and worse, I find my generalizing about Ghanaians.  These recent incidents have had me thinking about the unfortunate and disproportionate power of bad encounters.

I use the example of walking through a door.  How many times a day do you hold the door for someone else, or perhaps lean back with your arm to make sure it stays open while the other person walks through?  How many times a day does a person do it for you?  It becomes reflexive after a while, holding the door for someone, or smiling and thanking them for doing the same for you.  Now imagine how you feel the odd time that someone lets the door slam in your face.  Imagine how you feel when someone makes no effort or doesn’t even look back as the door imprints itself on your nose.  This doesn’t happen often.  However, when it does happen, I personally find myself forgetting the history of all the previous ins and outs where someone had politely held the door for me.  Suddenly all I can think about is that time, and the lingering impression of that rude and thoughtless person overpowers the rest.   

            I use this example in reference to Ghana because I think it’s really just an extension of the same situation.  The majority of people that I’ve met in Ghana have been very friendly.  Not only that, but I can assume that the overwhelming majority of people that I have not met are also friendly.  It’s safe to assume that I pass by great people every day who say nothing, just like in any other country in the world, but it’s the lousy people who are disproportionately more likely to approach me.   So despite all of the terrific people I meet every day, and the assumption that I’m also not meeting equally lovely people, I often find myself consumed with the unbalanced impression that the touts leave.

             Some of it has to do with the kind of comments that are made.  I’ve been insulted in Canada before, but being called a ‘racist’ and ‘slave master’ for ignoring the hawkers on Oxford Street is at times a little more than I can bear.  Initially I took the strategy of trying to rationalize with the touts.  I thought about what societal factors had perhaps led to who they are, and if in any way, it not justified, but made more understandable their actions.  Then I began thinking that it is entirely useless to rationalize with them, and that I should accept that some people in this world are simply irrational; moreover, some people are just plain lousy.

While I don’t think that it excuses those most abrasive and violent of people, any understanding of this seems incomplete without taking into account environmental factors.  Ghana is a poor but stable country, and thus has become an popular destination for many first timers to Africa, voluntourism companies, development workers, and exchange students alike.  This influx of foreigners, particularly in Accra, has created a showcase for the inequality between the local population and the far wealthier outsiders.  As meager as my monthly VSO allowance is, it is still far more than the average Ghanaian will earn over the same period.  It's the same for almost all foreigners, and where there is this wealth, there is an opportunity for local people to capitalize on it.  So the poorest of the poor beg, and many others sell souvenirs and trinkets, and most interact with foreigners very politely, accepting a person’s decision not to buy or not to give with typical understanding.  But on Oxford Street, many of the sellers take someone’s decision not to buy from them personally, and with much anger and resentment. 

I suppose it’s a way to vent their frustration for their situation, and I could never understand what it must be like to be as desperate and poor as so many here are.  However, the unfortunate part of the hawkers’ actions is that it not only hurts their business (beyond off-the-boat-tourists I know few people that would buy from them), but also the businesses of those kind and genuine people who work day and night on Oxford Street hoping for the odd sale.  But what it should not hurt, and what I had let it hurt for a few weeks in April, was my impression of the Ghanaian people.  A handful of abrasive and racist men on Oxford Street do not speak for Ghana anymore than drunken nationalists in a New Jersey hockey rink speak for the United States.  I think I had forgotten this for a few weeks.  Bad encounters may have a disproportionate ability to cloud an otherwise pleasant day, but they are certainly not representative of the Ghanaian experience. 

Travels in Sierra Leone.

Two Fridays ago I flew a few hours along the Northwest Coast of Africa to Freetown, Sierra Leone.  Freetown is a paradoxical city.  On the West side of the peninsula lie the tourist areas of Aberdeen and Lumley, saturated with chique hotels and expensive restaurants.  From there begins a beautiful stretch of coastline that can boast some of West Africa’s best, and still relatively clean and quiet, beaches.  Freetown is located on a peninsula and the only reliable option from getting from the airport to the city late at night, which was when my delayed flight arrived, is by hovercraft ferry.  The terminal for the hovercraft is in Aberdeen, thus it was this area that was my first impression of Sierra Leone.  After disembarking from the ferry, passengers are greeted (read: accosted) by dozens of touts and hawkers offering to find you a hotel (where they would get a commission) or take you by taxi to your hotel (where they charge you triple the price).  I met a man from Chicago on the ferry and we agreed to share a taxi and find a cheap hotel.  Quite the guy, for him the number 100 is significant for two reasons: he claims to have set foot in 100 countries, and claims to have slept with about 100 prostitutes.  After considerable confusion and hassle, and a screaming match with our taxi driver who tried to cheat us, we found a hotel and I was able to sleep for a few hours. 

            As mentioned, Freetown is a paradoxical city.  Only a few minutes drive away from the tourist-focused West, the city centre and particularly the Eastern part of Freetown stand as an encapsulation of Sierra Leone’s condition, in all its stereotypical African destitution.  In the morning I hopped on the back of a bike and asked the driver to take me up the snaking mountain road to one of Sub-Saharan Africa’s oldest universities.  From the top, Freetown appeared like a city bursting at its seams.  Hundreds of thousands of people fled to Freetown from the provinces during the country’s 11-year civil war; many of them never left once peace returned.  Countless shanty-towns are characterized by tin roofing held down by rocks, unfinished buildings with jagged metal protruding from its walls, and electrical wiring tangled in fire-hazardous clumps. The smell of petrol, the lovely smell of beans-oil stew, the ghastly smell of open sewers that waft particularly when it rains, and the smell of burning trash fill the street air.  Yet Freetown is quite a picturesque city, set against an ocean backdrop on hilly streets, shaded by massive cotton trees that erupt in the most arbitrary of locations. 

             After touring Freetown for a day I decided to travel to the largest national park in the country, located in the Northwest corner of Sierra Leone, near the Guinean border.  To reach Outamba-Kilimi National Park required that I first take a four-hour poda-poda (far more banged-up version of a Ghanaian tro-tro) to a city called Makeni.  From Makeni it was another four-hour poda-poda to a small town called Kamakwie.  The road from Makeni to Kamakwie was one of the worst I’ve ever been on in Africa.  The ‘road’, more like a horizontal slalom course, characterized by gaping potholes the size of refrigerators, was traversed in a poda-poda that should have been retired decades ago.  Unlike in Ghana, where there is at least some road-regulation, in Sierra Leone every car is packed to almost double its capacity.  Thus, in a mini-bus with about 18 seats there were close to thirty people, stacked, crammed, people on the roof- and for the first time since rural Tanzania I spent about four hours sitting beside a live, and very talkative, rooster. 

This road took us through dozens of tiny villages where I saw first-hand why Sierra Leone is regarded as the second most impoverished country in the world.  Little boys and little girls with bloated bellies suffering from malnourishment were absolutely everywhere.  Yet in the beautiful way that children live in the moment they all seemed quite content.  Climbing up and down mango trees, teasing goats with sticks, and running past the village women who’s exposed breasts sagged to their navels, the kids seemed happy as any you’d find anywhere.  But these isolated villages, surviving almost entirely on subsistence farming, are symptomatic of Sierra Leone’s bigger problems.  Sierra Leone cannot feed itself.  There is plenty of arable land, but a lack of machinery, lack of start-up money or training, and terrible roads that make trade very difficult, have essentially removed any incentives to farm.  A few people mentioned to me that the new government in Sierra Leone is now forcing people to farm, but until the time comes when faming is a viable economic vocation, Sierra Leone will continue to be dependent on imports- and thus be at the mercy of volatile global food prices.   

            From Kamakwie, I again had to hire a motorbike driver to take me by an even worse ‘road’ toward Outamba-Kilimi National Park.  I slept in a beautiful reed hut right on the riverbank for $3/night; and at dawn woke up and paddled an hour down the river to where 8 hippos were moving lazily in the water. Tiny little ears, beetie eyes, but an enormous jaw and body, make hippos just the most absurd looking animal.  It was so peaceful though, on the river, the kind of moment where I suddenly forgot everything but the present, sitting in a canoe in the Northwest corner of Sierra Leone, a matter of feet away from hippopotamuses.  Because of the effort and time to reach the park I had been the first tourist in months.  My guide was thus very willing to endure a barrage of questions that I had for him; and as things invariably do in Sierra Leone, the conversation turned towards the war.

The War

  The absolute stupidity and injustice of the war is what seems most frustrating to the people.  But I suppose that is typically the case in most wars: initiated and perpetrated by a few but affecting countless.  Lonely Planet West Africa writes that during the 11-year war approximately 90% of the county’s diamond wealth was stolen by rebel forces or outside governments.  Where would Sierra Leone be if they could have harnessed that wealth?  Where would they be if they could have utilized even just 50% of it for the good of its people?  The legacy of the war in Sierra Leone, which ended around 2002, is found throughout the country.  It’s found in the infrastructure.  It’s found in what’s there: crumbling buildings and unfinished construction projects.  It’s found in what’s not there: reliable electricity and water.  From 6am to 6pm the only places with electricity were those with a generator.  It’s found in the literally thousands of four-by-four cars that roam around towns bearing the emblem of some NGO.  The UN has a huge compound on the edge of the Freetown and its jeeps, helicopters, planes, and staff are found everywhere.  But mostly the war legacy is found in the people.  I walked around Freetown’s centre and must have seen hundreds of amputees in town.  Reminiscent of Phnom Penh, Cambodia, war victims are pushed around in wheelchairs outside of the city’s banks, nicer restaurants, and bus stations, begging for change.  

Everybody I met in Sierra Leone had a story about how the war had affected them.  Many became refugees in Guinea or Liberia, some fled to Freetown, and many people hid.  My guide in Outamba-Kilimi National Park told me a story about how he and his family were forced to hide in the park for three months as the Revolutionary United Front (RUF) burned their village to the ground.  They ate only what they could find in the forest, and when they returned to their homes after the RUF left, there was nothing to return to.  Some refused to go anywhere- as if refusing to let the war affect them.  I met a man in Freetown who had previously worked with WaterAid who proudly proclaimed, ‘I was here when the first shots were fired in 1991 and I did not move until peace was declared in 2002’.  For a people already brutally impoverished, the war in Sierra Leone set the country back more than a decade.

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After leaving the national park I spent the next few days exploring the other larger cities in the country and the little towns along the way.  It’s certainly the most difficult traveling that I’ve ever done.  Ass bruising seats combined with terrible roads and overfilled poda-podas made it feel more like a test of endurance than anything.  After a few days I reached a city called Kenema.  I had plans to visit a second national park to track elephants, but upon reaching the park headquarters I was told that due to the roads it would take me about 3 days to reach the wildlife- 3 days to travel about 80 km!!!  I could walk faster.  Thus, I resolved myself to exploring what Kenema had to offer: diamonds.  Diamond merchants are absolutely everywhere.  As the only foreigner around I seemed to arouse quite a bit of suspicion from people as to what my intentions were snooping around diamond stalls.  Perhaps thankfully, I don’t know a thing about diamonds, so once I opened my mouth the merchants quickly realized that I was just a silly backpacker and not some smuggler. 

As I set out on the long night bus back to Freetown a storm hit.  West African storms don’t flirt, they don’t pretend.  They arrive!  Bang, Kapow!!!  Powerful, deliberate, impatient, and then they’re gone; they don’t linger either.  Amidst the rain and sloppy streets, the bus reached Freetown early the next morning and I spent my remaining day touring around town and perusing some of the nearby beaches.  

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            Sierra Leone is a very difficult country to travel in.  It’s difficult not only because of the roads and mode of transportation, but because of the images that you see outside of your window.  I’m completely unable to understand what is must be like to live this kind of poverty.  A man I met on the bus from Kenema back to Freetown put it perfectly, ‘you could never understand what it’s like not to know how to get your next meal’.  I don’t.  What I saw on the bus between Makeni and Kamakwie seemed totally surreal.  It was as if I had suddenly been transplanted back to a couch in Canada watching a CBC news report of hunger in Africa.  But in Sierra Leone, a country essentially without a middle class, these images are all too real- brutally so.  So many idle men, so few idle children- as they’re busy selling every good imaginable- these images are everywhere.  Yet despite all of this hardship, the constant travails, what’s remarkable is that Sierra Leoneans appear optimistic about the future.  I suppose anything is better than the 11 years of conflict that they endured.  There is an incredible resilience to people, a perseverance built perhaps out of necessity, which I could never begin to understand, but that is so extraordinary.  Yet there is also a sense of urgency to people, not that the peace is fragile, but that this newfound peace presents an opportunity.  If ever there was a country that deserved an opportunity, if ever there was a country that deserved to have this hope realized, it is Sierra Leone.  

To Sierra Leone...

As my time in West Africa is quickly progressing, I have decided to take a short trip outside of Ghana.  West of Ghana, past the troubled countries of Cote D’Ivoire and Liberia, lies the tiny country of Sierra Leone.  When one thinks of Sierra Leone, the typical points come to mind: diamonds, the catch phrase ‘conflict diamonds’, the film ‘Blood Diamond’, and perhaps to a lesser extent child soldiers.  Not the most warm, cuddly, and inspiring thoughts.  Yet, it’s perfectly understandable why these are the ideas that come to mind.  Sierra Leone, ravaged by war throughout the 1990’s, regularly pinpointed as the prototype of what a failed state looks like, has hardly made headlines for anything but its problems.  In this sense, Sierra Leone reminds me a lot of Rwanda.  Just as conversations about Sierra Leone invariably revolve around the issue of diamonds, so are discussions of Rwanda habitually shadowed by the word genocide.  Such is the thing about history, it is impossible to change, and very difficult to escape the lingering impressions that it creates.

 A few years ago I crossed the Tanzania-Rwanda border on foot and spent about a week touring Kigali’s genocide museum and a few of the memorials that dot the countryside.  As I was squeezing anecdotes from anybody willing to talk, I was surprised at just how quickly Rwandans had rebuilt their country, as well as the bonds of trust between the people.  It seems that as many of us outsiders were busy bemoaning the history of this troubled country, Rwandans had taken it upon themselves to try to create a better future.  And so I hope is the case with Sierra Leone.  Yet, while there have been significant improvements in the political and security situations over the past few years, Sierra Leone is currently ranked by UNDP as the second poorest country in the world (Niger is the poorest).  And so, at least for the present, it seems impossible to discuss contemporary Sierra Leone without discussing the details of its very problematic past.  However, it is my sincere hope that, like Rwanda, after meeting some of its people and traveling through some its countryside, I’ll be able to leave Sierra Leone with impressions other than those of its infamous past.