“Cities as the Heavens of This Earth”
from Hustling Is Not Stealing
Introduction: 45-62
. . . The evidence of culture is
everywhere within this book. Culture has its issues and its
problems that affect the decisions and inform the discussions of the
many people who play their parts in this book's dramas, but it cannot
be easily seen. Like the unconscious mind that is the source of
personal motives, culture appears in unconventional ways, as if by
choosing absurd crises it could elude detection and continue its
work. When I was in graduate school, one of my professors who had
held a post at a Nigerian university during the first days of that
country's independence told me a funny anecdote. I did not ask
about a way to check the sources, but the anecdote concerned a series
of letters to the editor in a local newspaper. Someone wrote a
letter to the effect that now we Nigerians are independent and we have
to make sure that our children are well educated. In order to
help them in their studies, we should all pitch in and see to it that
the children get a lot of sleep so that they will be alert in school,
and therefore, we should not allow people to make noise late at night
by playing drums or talking loudly or blowing horns. The response
was a barrage of irate letters that maintained that the children also
have to know that they are Africans and know that Africa is their
homeland, and the place wouldn't be Africa if it wasn't noisy.
Cities as the Heavens of This Earth
I must have become an African when I was
there. The place I lived was just up the street from an outdoor
nightclub where live bands played till the wee hours, and I was always
able to sleep all right. I moved back and forth from the serious
traditionalists who set the rhythms of my research to the cacophony of
Accra without missing a beat. As much as I had managed to adapt
my being to the spirit of an ancient culture, I never felt out of place
in towns like Accra or Lagos. I enjoyed those towns as I have
never been able to enjoy American and European ones. The
difference is the kaleidoscopic assortment of people who mingle there,
as varied a group as one could imagine for any cosmopolitan place, but
who seem to mix together more than in our type of atomized social
world. I would meet more new people in a few days in Accra than I
might meet in a year in the States, and then I would always be running
into them because all of us were out of our dingy rooms and spending
our waking hours in public places. Some people were going with
the flow for fun and experience, and some were making contacts for
survival. I met them easily because both conditions fostered a
type of ambience that focused on sociability to an amazing
extent. In a small bar, for example, someone entering will go
around the tables and greet everybody else, "Good evening." This
attitude comes straight from traditional lifestyles; in any village,
one says good morning, good afternoon, or good evening to everyone one
passes. In the cities, if you are walking down the street
casually looking at someone, when you get to the point where normally
you might avert your eyes, you'll see the person looking back at you,
smiling, and nodding a greeting when he or she passes. People
shake hands when they meet and hold hands when they walk
together. They gravitate toward other people, and I remember
being fascinated by that aspect of city life. I sometimes tested
it in crowded places by staring at someone far across a room, and sure
enough, that person would look up from the conversation and return my
gaze. It was as if a physical network of tendrils connected the
people who gathered anywhere.
Many of the people I knew were young like me.
During my first year in Ghana, I was a graduate student who thought he
had read enough books already and decided to drop out of the grind
while he was there. At that time and place in my life, everything
was data. Most of my friends in Accra were just trying to make do
in the urban environment, usually because they either could not or
would not fit into the more traditional lifestyles of their parents in
the villages. They mixed peacefully despite their
differences. They came from different ethnic groups and had grown
up speaking different languages. They were of different ages and
had different levels of education. The types of work they were
able to do, if anything, were different and changing. Some were
born in the city, but others had left their villages and provincial
towns where the yoke of tradition was too heavy. They were
struggling and suffering but I could understand their choice.
They were people who refused to be peasant farmers or somebody's third
wife. The attractions of a city can never be minimized when one
considers the alternatives. If I knew I was probably going to be
broke all my life, I'd rather live my life somewhere closer to the
center of the action. Accra was their New World, their Yukon,
their California. Like our ancestors leaving their original
homelands for America or, once here, leaving for the frontier, many
were misfits, many were seekers, many were free spirits. Most of
the young people I knew were without jobs and without education or any
means of self-advancement, but they felt little bitterness. They
were open toward each other, perhaps because they had to be, as a
cynical observer might say, but probably because they enjoyed being
that way — always ready to get together and get something going.
Their motto, painted in two parts on the front and back of busses and
taxis, was "Observers are Worried; Believers are Enjoying." They
were ready to believe in anything that would connect them with each
other and with life on the rest of the planet, interested in anything
new, anything "pop," anything "free," anything they called "Afro,"
which was their way of talking about the unique style they brought to
the experience of it all. The main thing they had in common was
their ability to get with what was happening at the moment and see
themselves inside it, and that ability was enough to hold them
together, at least until tomorrow, and they had a motto for that,
too: "Who Knows Tomorrow?" The ambience of Accra and the
West African towns and cities I know was well summed up in the words of
an African American friend: "Lotta freaks, lotta fun."
In previous writings, I have described West African
towns a number of times and a number of ways. One idea that
always seems to help people recognize the kind of places these towns
are is the observation that Charles Dickens would have felt at home in
a place like Accra or Lagos. People create their own
opportunities, like a jack-of-all-trades who can fix anything.
Everyone has to find a way to survive, and the disorder of development
provides the openings. A blacksmith can fashion bicycle peddles
from recycled scrap or build hunting rifles from tubing, and a village
hunter I knew used match scrapings to fire his gun. A motorcycle
mechanic doesn't have a diaphragm for a carburetor: "No problem,"
he says, "it doesn't need it. The bike will run all right.
They just put this thing inside so it will spoil and you will buy a new
one." Need some cheap sandals? In the market, you can
get sandals made from tire treads cut to shape, with rubber
cross-straps fixed in place with bent nails. Ghanaians call them
"Afro-Moses": the "Afro" refers to the locally gerrymandered
solution and makes a joke on the poverty behind it; the allusion to
Moses means that the sandals are guaranteed for forty years in the
urban wilderness or forty thousand miles, whichever comes first.
People need the guarantee: the Pidgin English expression
"wakawaka" is used even in French countries to refer to the walking
people do when going about dealing with their business. For the
multitudes who do not see the benefits of the one-time investment in a
pair of Afro-Moses and who prefer cheap disposables, there are people
who actually make a living charging a few pennies for repairing rubber
flip-flops. Africa: land of somehow. On a major road
leading from downtown Accra to the suburbs, a young man is filling the
potholes with gravel and sand; standing beside him is a sign that
reads, "One-man contractor; donations accepted." Near the town
center are letter writers with their old typewriters. Tailors and
seamstresses who cannot afford their own kiosk carry their sewing
machines on their heads giving door-to-door service. Runaway
children push hand trucks at the stations. Even outside the
markets, everywhere there are people who have something to sell,
sometimes only one obscure thing, which they hold in their hands or
place on a small table. Those not so fortunate hang around busy
places, some waiting for an opportunity to carry something or clean
something, others waiting for someone to beg.
It's urban poverty in action. Some readers may
find that the stories in this book make them sad because of the way
poverty messes up peoples' lives. On the other hand, some readers
might be oddly disturbed by the way people in this book spend
money. You may not get a feeling of poverty from these people,
and in many ways they do not seem to be poor or obsessed with
poverty. Yet you see their poverty from time to time, as when
Hawa does not have forty cents for medicine, or when buying a bucket
and a few pots is something to be shared among friends. Have you
ever had to pack up your house recently? What the young people in this
book own can usually fit into a large suitcase. It is important
to understand that poverty is a factor somewhere behind everything that
happens in this book, influencing the smallest details as well as the
whole, but it is also important not to allow the effects of poverty to
overwhelm your perception of where the people are coming from.
You should understand their poverty as they do. They know they're
poor: to them poverty is something like a sickness that imposes
troubles and pressures. It is difficult for poor people to make
long-range plans, and they take their problems and their pleasures from
day to day, and in that regard they resemble old people as well as sick
people. Because of their poverty, too, they have to do all kinds
of extra things and take many extra steps to achieve a goal. Even
your best Marxists sometimes have no patience to appreciate how much
poor people have to do to get something together.
Poverty is about what is not there, and poor people
are aware of what they do not have; when they walk into someone's room,
they notice what is inside. They are aware of what they need to
make their lives easier: anything cool. Poverty is hot like
a fever, and everybody would like to be cool, that is, moving
comfortably and without worries. In the West African idiom, when
someone is "hot," it doesn't refer to being popular or on a roll; it
can refer to being annoyed or serious or worried, but also when someone
says, "I'm hot," he means he's broke. Yet if poverty is like a
sickness, poverty is something that people deal with in different
ways. Some people dwell on it and think only about it; some
people ignore it and act as if they don't know they're poor; some
people suffer quietly and take its problems unto themselves; some
people react against it and try to collect damages from anyone and
everyone. If you're a stranger among them, when they see you
walking down the street, some of them are hoping that you're having a
good time and will speak well of their scene, and some are watching
your movements and wondering whether you need help. Although some
are seeing you and thinking about food, most poor people in Africa
harbor not ill will and jealousy but rather appreciation of your good
fortune. A few may try to get their share by hook or by crook,
though without being especially malicious. True bitterness and
hostility reside within the ideological preserve of some of their
educated or indoctrinated compatriots. In this book, the
characters deal with their poverty on a case-by-case basis. It's
always there and it's always bad by definition, and it makes them do
some things that might upset some readers, but it doesn't always have
the same meaning to the different people in the stories. It's a
given, just a fact of life.
In the 1960s, the anthropologist Oscar Lewis wrote
about what he called "the culture of poverty" as a common element of
peasant and working-class life in much of the world. [endnote] He
was trying to make the point that poverty affects people's lives so
much that it overwhelms the cultural resources of a place; it
determines so much of people's lives that it exhibits many of the
characteristics of culture, even to the point that it instills lifeways
and values that keep its victims and their children inside it in a
vicious cycle. The notion of a culture of poverty was much
debated and criticized, but a more interesting thing happened to
Lewis's work. Lewis illustrated his ideas in the form of detailed
life histories that depicted a number of Mexican and Puerto Rican poor
people, and although the significance of poverty was evident throughout
their stories, the magnificent spirit of these people showed through
and caught the imagination of a large readership. The people in
this book might not strike the same chords, but like the people in
Lewis's books, they cannot be understood primarily in terms of their
poverty.
One thing that can be said about poor people in
general is that they do not like to have someone's idea of poverty
interfere with their idea of themselves as human beings. They
know what's not there but they also deal with what's there. If
you find yourself focusing too much on what's not there, remember that
electricity and flushing toilets and supermarkets are recent inventions
that even the rich and royal people of old did without, and no one
makes much of that or calls them poor. What poor people in Africa
don't want is a person who feels that he or she is better than others,
who tries to show himself to be above them or who separates himself
from them or who presses down on them. Most do not mind seeing a
rich or powerful person if they have even a slight hope that they might
have access to consumables or resources. Therefore, to be fair,
we should consider the proposition that people who do not pity
themselves for their poverty should also be exempt from our pity.
What they have to do or think they have to do to survive is often
lamentable, but to them, many of the consequences of their poverty are
not sad but funny. Given the amount of attention they have to
give their poverty, they have quite a few ways of dealing with it, and
one of the more successful strategies in their repertoire of responses
is to become very adept at laughing it off. They're not about to
let their poverty spoil their life completely. Poverty, like any
kind of problem, brings out the best and the worst in people.
Poor people can be selfish, petty, and jealous about their lack of
means, but poor people are often the world's most generous, and many of
them don't mind spending their last penny to help a friend or to
enhance a moment.
While I was with them, I was a believer and not an
observer. I went along with the positive view, and I enjoyed the
benefits of being positive. During my first year in Ghana,
1970–71, before I moved into town, I lived at the University of Ghana,
seven miles outside Accra. I felt I had read enough of the books
that were on the curriculum, and when I was not away in other towns and
villages doing research into "culture," Accra was a place to have
fun. My routine was to hang around the Institute of African
Studies in the mornings, talking to colleagues and friends, or to relax
in my dormitory room reading or writing, then hitchhike to town in the
early afternoon. Unless I had to buy something, I needed only
about two or three dollars for the day, one dollar of which was
reserved for a taxi back to campus in the small hours. Once in
town, I had a general walking route that would take me through several
areas, and I would visit friends and let the day develop any way it
wanted. In the quick tropical transition from harsh daylight to
evening, the images of dilapidation, repair, and construction softened
and faded, but the pace of life abated only a few steps. In the
evenings, the streets were full of traffic. The petty traders
were everywhere, many selling food or tea. People were on their
way to visit each other. People were sitting outside and playing
draughts or conversing or watching the passing scene. Actually, I
went to Ghana partly because of a conversation I had had with a
Ghanaian who was living in the States. He described Accra
evenings by saying that many people go out "to refresh their
minds." The phrase intrigued me for a few weeks while I was
deciding to go there and see how my mind might be refreshed by the
scene.
After my daily strolls through the town, in the
evening I usually ended up at one of the bars or nightclubs with
resonant names like Lido or Tiptoe or Metropole or Apollo. These
nightclubs were outdoors, with metal tables and chairs partially under
a roofed area and arranged around an open cement dance floor. I
had early on befriended the people who watched the gate at these
places, and I entered free, though I often had to wait outside for the
right time to enter. No problem. Outside the nightclubs was
another convivial scene. There were a lot of people hanging
around enjoying the outside view while listening to the sounds from
inside. People with small tables sold everything from kebabs to
cigarettes to aspirin, and people with kiosks sold locally distilled
spirits. At that time, a full shot glass — a "tot" — cost about a
nickel. Two tots in a tumbler was a normal quaff, taken at a
gulp. I would be hanging, perhaps chatting with one of the petty
traders or taxi drivers or barhoppers or friends. The invitation
to a drink was, "Shall we cut something small?" For ten or twenty
cents, we sported each other to the stuff. I still can't believe
how much I was able to drink in those days. Inside the club,
excellent beer was about fifty-five cents for a 66 cl bottle, but
people from inside also came out to buy the cheaper "hot" drinks or, if
they preferred something "cool," to go around the corner to a darker
spot in order to smoke marijuana, which they called "groove." On
their return, people would tease them, "How you doing?" "Groovy,"
or "Coo-o-l," they giggled. Around the clubs in Nigeria, where
capitalism was more advanced, the marijuana was sold already rolled; in
Ghana the marijuana was folded and tied inside cut-up pieces of airmail
paper suitable for rolling one cigarette. One "wrap" cost a
shilling, just under a dime, and many groovers would nurse a drink
inside the club and then step outside and rely on the marijuana to add
a buzz to the evening. In Ghana, the marijuana sellers were not
usually around the club; at a cost of about fifty cents, a taxi driver
could be sent on a quick drive to get five wraps for several groovers
and receive a commission for himself of one wrap from the seller and
one from the buyers.
At that time and up to now, in French-speaking
countries like Togo, Burkina Faso, or Côte d'Ivoire, the nightclub
scene was annoyingly neocolonial. Instead of large open-air
nightclubs that attracted a diversity of people, major towns in the
Francophone countries had small European-style discos, indoors and
air-conditioned. There was no cover, but inside, a 33 cl bottle
of beer could cost as much as six hundred to twelve hundred to fifteen
hundred or even two thousand CFA francs, about three to six to nine
dollars depending on the exchange rate. Needless to say, the
patrons were primarily European and Asian expatriates and members of
the African elite. The whole scene stunk of class and threw
patterns of sociability and conviviality totally out of kilter.
The discos were often nearly deserted, though at several of them,
drinks were cheaper by half and more people were present.
Although there were some open-air nightclubs that functioned on
occasional weekends with local bands, the main drinking holes for the
general population were small bars with tables extending to where a
sidewalk might someday be placed. You could go from bar to bar,
corner to corner, to change views. In those bars, the large-size
bottle of beer was about seventy-five cents, and of course, many people
who attended a nearby disco but were serious about drinking would nurse
a single small bottle inside the disco and then come outside to satisfy
their thirst before going back inside to dance.
The drinking routine was for different people to buy
rounds of several large bottles that were shared into the company's
glasses; as soon as your beer was even slightly below the rim of the
glass, someone would serve you and top it up. If you thought that
you were already too loaded and wanted to stop drinking, you would
leave your glass full, because if you drank even a last polite sip,
someone would fill it up again. The cafelike atmosphere of the
street bars was generally made even more typical by the presence of
huge speakers that would blast popular African music onto the
street. The sound systems were not up to the standard of those in
the discos, and the records were sometimes scratchy, but at least the
street bars had the advantage of never playing French popular
music. For me, sticking my head into a couple of the dark discos
and hearing Johnny Hallyday was about as far as I went into that
particular scene.
I was into traditional African music, and my first
requirement for urban nightlife was hearing the modern music that came
from traditional beats and developed to suit the styles of the changing
times. Inside the Ghanaian nightclubs, live bands provided the
beat for the cross-section of urban life that congregated there.
The first people I befriended were the musicians and the music lovers
who were friends of musicians. From them, I met more people at
the tables where we sat and talked. The ambience was clubby with
the twist that all strangers were included. If I was sitting
alone, it was commonplace for someone I didn't know to approach me and
invite me to sit in company with him and his friends. I had
traveled a bit before I went to Ghana, and I knew that going out alone
is the best way to meet people; I always had the patience to sit by
myself and wait for something to happen, and something always
did. Somehow or other, I picked up the nickname "Psychedelic,"
and within a few weeks after my arrival, there was almost no place in
central Accra where I could go and not hear a friendly voice calling
me, "Hey! Johnny!" or "Hey! Psychedelic!" In addition to the
sociability, the main difference between these nightclubs and the bars
I knew at home was that the people were of all ages and social
backgrounds. There were shortages of old people of course, and
married couples were vastly outnumbered, but the young and middle-aged
mixed together, and it was not uncommon to find a table with people in
their twenties, thirties, forties, and fifties.
For the most part, I was with the younger set, and I
was a "guy," a word that in the local idiom can refer to either a man
or a woman, someone who is a friend to all, someone who is
straightforward, someone who does not bluff, someone who can joke and
hang with people. A guy is a believer, someone who believes in
himself or herself and believes in others, someone who is prepared to
get with what's happening. A guy has what they call an "easy" or
a "simple" understanding, meaning that it is an easy matter for a guy
to understand and agree with what someone was saying, at least for the
moment. We guys shared a sense of togetherness as young people;
we were in our teens and twenties and thirties but we called ourselves
boys and girls, terms that in the context distinguished us from married
people. My interest in the nightclub scene naturally extended
from the music to the whole social atmosphere the music fit into and
enhanced. I remembered teenage dances in the States where there
were always people looking for a fight, bars in the States where I
would have gut reactions to the ambient hostility, public places where
people had to be sensitive to the space around certain
characters. There was none of it in those African clubs, and yet
the people there were so different from one another.
One thing that fostered the togetherness was the way
that people just put aside many of the labels that we might ordinarily
think would define their identity. For example, ethnic
consciousness — what used to be called "tribalism" — is an obvious
case: it was there; it was definitely a factor in the networking
of the workaday world; it was often a factor in self-help associations
in the neighborhoods. At the clubs, people from the same family
or original hometown might sit together and converse in their
vernacular. It was occasionally a factor in the many personal
dramas that preoccupied people, and it was possible to find people who
would talk about it privately. But I hardly ever heard people
openly abusing each other about their ethnicity or publicly talking
about "these" people or "those" people. There are over seventy
linguistic groups in Ghana, more than two hundred in Nigeria. An
African city like Accra is so pluralistic that people cannot be sure
about other people's backgrounds and cannot allow their ethnic
sentiments to prejudge a person who might become a friend. One
evening I was in the company of an American radical and a group of
Accra guys, and the American was talking against colonialism; he was
evidently thinking to ingratiate himself and develop international
solidarity while he delivered a speech about how much he liked the
Ashantis because they had fought the British. I cringed because
the group included not only Ashanti guys but also some Ga and Ewe guys
whose ancestors had also fought the Ashantis. The potential
discord was quickly glossed over, as usual, but whenever anybody at the
university asked me what "tribe" I hung out with in town, I used to
answer, "Apaches."
I was not being clever. Actually, during the
period of time when I was in Ghana, a considerable number of young
people in Accra called themselves Apaches. They evidently took
the name from some movie in which the U.S. cavalry comes upon the
smoldering remains of a wagon train, and the scout picks up an arrow,
exchanges glances with the lieutenant, shakes his head, and mutters,
"Apaches." The Apaches, as understood by uncertified Accra
anthropologists based on the ethnographic accounts of Hollywood
screenwriters, are generally quiet and understanding; they can sit and
watch something for hours, blending into the scenery; they are
individualists with a strong sense of interpersonal loyalty; they are
true to themselves and they are prepared to die at any time; they mind
their own business, and they don't like people who come around and make
a mess. The urban scene is one in which people have to hang
together and take care of each other to survive; they don't have time
for "tribalism" unless it's going to help them or hurt them at a given
moment. They try to avoid it in general, even to the extent of
calling for themselves a celebrated heritage from thousands of miles
away.
I fit into that spirit, happy that my own tribe was
not much of a factor. As an American, I had to learn my share of
tricks to avoid being typified by people who didn't know me, but by and
large, I was just another one of the young boys who were there with no
specific purpose apart from hanging. I was relatively passive in
that regard, mainly because I was interested in the nightclub scene and
thinking about it as an entry point for focusing on the music and the
lifestyle of the urban setting. Thus, I did not choose some
people over others; I decided to be friends with all of them, and I
guess I became well liked because of that. During my first
months, I had my share of guides who were masters of that particular
social territory. I maintained my laid-back demeanor because many
people opened up to me, and as I got to know more of them I learned a
lot about where they were coming from in the scene. After a
while, when I entered a nightclub after hanging outside for a while, I
might already have greeted many of the people who were there. If
the place was uncomfortably crowded, I might join a table; otherwise I
circulated.
The main activities, as one might expect, were
drinking, talking, and dancing, and it was through dancing that I came
to know many of the girls. The bands played their music in
nonstop sets; when one song ended, the drummer would add a coda that
led into the next number. On crowded occasions, people would
leave their seats for the dance floor en masse; as if being pulled by a
magnet, they leaned out of their seats and were dancing by the time
they stood up. To get a partner for a dance was simple: one
could approach a table, salute the people with a greeting, and ask
anyone who was not otherwise preoccupied. But since I was often
hanging around just talking, girls who knew me felt free to ask me to
dance if they had no partner. I figured they liked my style of
dancing since I had been trained by a very cool guy from Newark whose
revised moves had not previously made it back to the motherland.
But probably what the girls knew about me was that I hung with the
musicians and I was not a boyfriend of anyone in particular and I was
not going to spoil anyone's game because I was one of the guys.
Those girls who were regulars at a club would often sit together, and
sometimes I sat with them instead of with other friends. If I had
brought an extra dollar or two to town, I would buy a couple of bottles
for the table; if not, one or another of the girls was buying. I
suppose I had a somewhat privileged position because once I became
known, it was general knowledge that I was not going to hassle
anyone. The girls kept me dancing, which was good, and I enjoyed
their conversation. The benefits of their friendship eventually
extended to the point where I would often visit their houses during my
daytime movements through the town. They also visited each other
to cook and eat together in the afternoons, and I would sit outside
with them while they cooked and we talked, maybe played a game of Ludo,
and then ate.
I first met Hawa in 1971 when her boyfriend was a
good friend of mine. Her place was also a popular gathering place
that was close to the center of town. It was just up the street
from an automotive shop owned by a Lebanese friend who had offered to
fix up an old BSA motorcycle for me. We never got the bike on the
road, but for a while I used to pass by there almost every day to check
on whether or not he had found this or that spare part, and from there
I used to go to Hawa's house, where there was often a group of friends
cooking or hanging around. Urban housing for most people is
typically a room or two in what is called a compound house. The
house itself is basically a series of rooms off a yard, or
compound. The kitchen is outdoors, generally in a shaded area of
the compound, and the cooking is done on an open fire fueled by
charcoal. One sits on wooden benches or stools or relaxes on a
woven mat that is spread on the ground. People cook and eat
together first of all because everyone knows that eating alone is a
miserable experience. Second, the local food is usually a stew or
soup that should be made in quantity, or at least in more than a single
portion, and eaten fresh. Third, in Ghana cooking is hard work
that is best shared: the stew or soup is usually served on a
heavy paste made from some type of boiled flour or else on a starchy
dough called fufu that is
made by pounding cooked cassava, plantain, or yam in various
combinations. Fufu is pounded in a large wooden mortar with a
long wooden pestle, and although most women can do it by themselves, it
is much easier if one woman turns the fufu while another pounds it.
As they cooked, the girls joked and talked about
whatever — the events of the previous day, their plans for later, the
films they had seen, their other friends, their boyfriends, their
problems. Often they told extended anecdotes about themselves or
things they had seen. The range of experience and people they
described was very wide, reflecting the cosmopolitan scene as well as
the fact that they were single. After all, one of the attractions
of being single anywhere, for men and women, is being able to move with
different people; a married person, as everyone knows, has settled down
and sees less of life's diversity. When I met Hawa and began
visiting her house on occasional afternoons, one of the first things I
noticed was that she was very, very popular among her friends because
of her storytelling. To me, her popularity suggested the notion
that she spoke for her friends as well as for herself, that she was
telling them the truth about themselves and the type of society they
lived in. They gathered at her place and shared their stories,
but she was the best raconteur among them. She could tell a story
for an hour or more, holding them spellbound or making them laugh till
they rolled on the ground.
When I returned to the States between 1972 and 1974,
I thought about those happy afternoon conversations many times. I
decided that when I went back to Ghana, in addition to continuing my
studies in music, I would try to collect some stories from people in
order to convey something about modern African youth and the type of
lifestyle they have. I thought their voices would help me
communicate some matters that were difficult to describe about the
spirit that had attracted me to the nightclubs and other places where
people relaxed and did their own thing. I thought to choose two
young people from the people I knew, Hawa and an equally articulate and
charismatic male counterpart, hoping to use them as a point of entry to
discuss the pluralistic openness of the modern cultural milieu.
When I did return to Ghana, however, I fell straight into my work on
music. I continued working with contemporary and traditional
artists, and I could never seem to get around to sitting down with Hawa
or my other friend to tape-record their stories. The situation
was complicated by the fact that Hawa had moved from Accra to Lomé, in
the neighboring country of Togo. One of the traditional areas
where I was working was just by the border, and I saw Hawa often during
frequent visits to Togo because where she lived then was near a friend
of mine. I often joined her and her friends to eat, and we all
often met in the evening at roadside bars. I first suggested this
project to her in 1975. I was more interested in her stories as
vivid and intimate descriptions of the way people interacted than in
her own personal story as such, though a life history seemed a
convenient format. I told her simply that I believed many people
in America would be interested in knowing how a young African woman
felt about her life, and I expressed my conviction that she would be
able to communicate effectively. She was sympathetic to the
project, but a number of problems were occupying her attention, and she
could not spend enough time with me for us to do any recording.
For a while she was absent from Lomé and no one knew her whereabouts,
though she was rumored to have stumbled into some kind of serious
trouble.
Meanwhile, my plans further unraveled regarding the
man I had had in mind to complement Hawa. He remained a tight
friend and was very close to me in Accra, but he changed the way he
talked. It was not that he lost the ability to talk but that his
manner of talking became so complex and full of artifice that it could
no longer be comprehensible to a Western reader. His verbal
agility was too great to be used for an uninitiated audience, too thick
to be presented without an overwhelming number of explanatory
footnotes. What happened was that he and some of his friends
became enamored of Nigerian Pidgin English and began spending most of
their free time in bull sessions that were oriented toward developing
an argot of puns, multilingual phrases, fractured syntax, and
deliberate mistakes that satirized semieducated usage of English.
To them, Nigerian Pidgin was a model language because it raised
linguistic ironies to new heights. He and his friends themselves
had only primary or middle-school education, but they were incredibly
alert to the ways in which concepts become twisted in translation and
classes of words change from one language to another. In their
pluralistic world, people are always learning other languages and
making hilarious mistakes, particularly when they try to puff
themselves up by using the language of the elite, English. In the
way my friends used English, there was probably an element of parodied
class-consciousness that poked fun at the elite and the bureaucratic
pomposity of their speech, but the allure of Pidgin, with its odd
personifications and strange metaphors, goes far beyond such
inspiration. Nigerian Pidgin is particularly funny.
Nigerian newspapers have humor columnists who write witty pieces
glorifying Pidgin's descriptive power and flexibility; I remember one
column I read in which the main character was explaining to a potential
girlfriend that he didn't have a car, "I no be car-owner; I be
leg-owner."
The Accra guys sat around and passed their leisure
time sharing the latest samplings of such usage that their ears had
collected and also making up their own examples. Their evening
conversations were thickly laced with gradually built-up combinations
of dislocated Akan Twi and Ga and Ewe as well. For example, my
friend Santana, whom I will describe in the next few paragraphs, once
saw someone wearing a shirt with the name of the Miami Dolphins
football team. Such used clothing sent from overseas,
particularly jeans and modern fashions, sells well. The local
name for it is buroni-wawu, from the Twi Oburoni w'awu,
in which one addresses the former owner by addressing the worn article
of clothing, "Oh! White man, you died." Santana turned "Miami
Dolphins" into Mia-mia-odo-phians. The Twi word mia means to squeeze and also to hug, and miamia me means "squeeze me tight," or "give me a big hug" or, in some contexts, "screw me." Ɔdɔ is the Twi word for "love," and ɔdɔfo
is "lover." The suffix "-fo" indicates "a person who," and
Santana also associated that syllable with the English suffix "-ians,"
or "relating or belonging to a group," to mean "the people of," as in
"Philadelphians." The result, Miamia-odophians,
meant people who really like to screw, and when we would go a nightclub
and Santana would see a lot of girls hanging around the bar, he would
say, "Yes. Those are the Miamia-odophians."
For another example, someone would take a Twi word like ntɛm,
which means "prompt, hurried, early, quick," and add an "s" for the
English plural and the suffix "-ment" to make an English noun.
Then, when talking about a situation when he was extremely hurried, he
would say, "The ntɛmsments
were too much." Such mixed-language words followed each other so
rapidly that even the people who could follow the allusions were always
catching up with what had just been said and trying to slow the speaker
down with interjected laughs, "Ha-ha! Yeah! The ntɛmsments!"
They used English itself at one moment like James Joyce and in the next
like an illiterate who had misheard what he was trying to say. A
breeze would blow, and one person would take a deep breath and say,
"Aha! Airfreshments!" Then another would say, "Ah-h-h! French
air!" And everybody would fall out laughing. It was great
stuff, but it was dense, and it lacked the extended dramatic thrust
with which my friend had formerly imbued his stories about
himself. While I joined in the laughter, I cursed myself for not
having acted to record his stories previously when they would have been
more presentable to people who are total strangers to the scene.
Since I had originally intended this book to be
about both a young man and a young woman, I might as well tell
something about the man who was intended as Hawa's counterpart, just to
balance the view because there is no one quite like him in Hawa's
stories. Santana was my friend's nickname. The nickname
itself was a corruption of "Sartana," the main character of a popular
spaghetti western entitled Sartana the Angel of Death,
one of the many spinoffs of Clint Eastwood's and Sergio Leone's
Man-with-No-Name films from the 1960s. The replacement name
"Santana" pushed the name "Sartana" from popular consciousness in 1971
when the American musical group of that name played a well-hyped
concert in Accra. For youthful Ghanaians of the moment, the name
"Santana" was synonymous with a totally modern, do-your-own-thing
attitude and style. "Santana" fit my friend well enough, and the
switch became permanent. The film was popular enough in its time
that a person could have the nickname Sartana the Angel of Death, and
many people would understand the allusion. When the name Sartana
changed to Santana, though, my friend also retained the epithet Angel
of Death.
Santana truly deserved that nickname. He
divided his time between Accra and a farm about thirty miles outside
the city. Fed up with mooching relatives, he had built a rustic
compound deep in the bush, where he worked sizable plots entirely on
his own, living what he called a "heavy hippie life in the
jungle." At night, he hunted with devastating
effectiveness. He also caught live snakes barehanded, including
cobras, for the zoology department at the University of Ghana. I
met him during my first year in Accra, and he stayed with me in a house
I was sitting for a generous professor who had traveled for the summer
vacation. When I returned to Accra in 1974, Santana joined me in
a small apartment I had rented in town. He would spend three or
four days a week fooling around in Accra with me, arriving with bush
meat from his hunting and sacks of food from his farm. He was
still catching snakes for the zoologists, who paid him the paltry sum
of two dollars each, but he stopped after I nearly opened a pillowcase
he had deposited in the kitchen as if it held some limes or cocoyams
when actually there was a deadly carpet viper inside it. After
that he only brought the skins of dead snakes, which he sold to Hausa
traders for making leather goods. Each skin, whether of a
ten-foot cobra or a twelve-foot python, was accompanied by a fantastic
story of The Big Fight between Santana and the snake. Santana
normally did not kill snakes for fun, but when a snake moved into the
compound and began eating Santana's chickens, it was war. Telling
every detail of how he stalked and found and then chased the snake
through the thatched roof of his house until the story culminated with
the final blows of a machete, Santana would say, "Yeah, that snake had
a very strong spirit!" Apart from his hunting, Santana also
derived his epithet from his powerful hands, which were calloused from
his furious machete farming into something like huge blocks of
wood. On the very few occasions when Santana would get into a
fight, the fight was over with one blow. I have never seen
anything like Santana's hands. Everybody who shook his hand would
jump back and exclaim, "Wow!" Then Santana would laugh and say,
"Yes. I am the Angel of Death."
Santana did whatever he wanted, and he was such a
funny and uninhibited guy that people knew him wherever he went.
Everybody liked him. We were inseparable, but if we had not been
around a particular area for even a couple of weeks, if I went there
alone, the first thing many people would ask me, even before they asked
how I myself was doing, was "Where's Santana?" He was a believer
whose expressed motto was, "Do your own thing; no copyright."
Fela Anikulapo Kuti, who sang mainly in Pidgin, had a song called
"Gentleman" that went, "I no be gentleman at all; I be Africa man,
original," and Santana boisterously upheld the message. One time
when we were boarding a bus, Santana farted loudly, and an elderly man
looked sharply at him. Santana said, "Yeah, na so we dey do for
my country"; the old man said, "Oh? Where from you?" Santana
laughed about the incident for days. A self-styled "original
African man," he would fart and say, "Yeah! I dey!" meaning, "I'm
here," an amendment of Descartes's philosophy into Santana's original
African principle Flato ergo sum.
He dressed in outrageous amalgams of styles, but his clothes were
always clean and pressed, uniquely sharp, and he walked with a spring
in his step. He wore wild hats because he neither cut nor combed
his hair, and though his hair did not grow into dreadlocks, he was a
Rastaman; as the song says, his vibrations were positive. His
laugh was loud, and he was friendly to people. The only people
who didn't like him were the occasional policemen or soldiers (whom he
referred to as "government dogs") who tried to prevent the Angel of
Death from doing his thing, but when we were together, we didn't get
into trouble. I guess I may have protected him from unnecessary
hassles from hustling authority figures, but all things considered,
when Santana came to Accra, he came mainly as another fun-lover in a
town of believers.
As I mentioned above, one of the delights of
Santana's company was his use of language. It was not only I but
everybody who enjoyed Santana's use of language. He liked to
parody proverbs, and with an air of wisdom would say incomprehensible
things like, "Yes, small boys are young because they are very
little." He had attended only middle school but had an
extraordinary vocabulary, and his interest in language extended to a
mastery of American slang to which I was only occasionally able to
contribute. He talked to anybody and everybody, from perfect
strangers to his language-busting friends, making weird sense with
references to things they could not possibly know about. For
example, he had a bad tooth that could not tolerate cold. We were
buying water at a busy kiosk that had some very frigid ice water, and
Santana took a swig and shrieked, "Ayi!
The thing is TOO HOT!!" As several dumbfounded onlookers stared,
Santana set the cup on the counter and said to them, "Yeah, make I put
'am down so he go cool small." Anywhere and everywhere, Santana
could always be counted on to enliven a scene by running his mouth and
turning expressions upside down and inside out. He was usually
equal to the challenge of explaining himself with further metaphoric
dislocation, until his interlocutor, with brow twisted quizzically,
would give up and laugh, saying, "Santana!" But Santana had more
than his match among the Accra guys for whom such joking was their
pastime. I enjoyed their use of language but I was not interested
in presenting Santana as an example of that: it was Santana's
personal stories that would have been worth sharing, for he had had
many fascinating experiences at the crossroads of culture, and his
positive attitude resembled and complemented Hawa's in many ways.
I just missed the boat. By the time I became serious about
recording his stories for this project, his language itself had become
an obstacle that would have bogged most readers down even though it
might have boggled their minds most pleasurably.
I decided to become serious about getting at least
Hawa's stories. The next time I saw Hawa was in late 1975.
She and some friends visited me in Accra when they were on their way to
Ouagadougou. Their plans were to return within a month and then
go to either Lagos or Abidjan. She failed to return as promised,
and there was no word of her in Lomé. Finally, I traveled to
Ouagadougou in mid-1977 to find her, a task that involved some tricky
detective work. She was going under a different name, and of
course, no one could be sure whether I might be someone whom she wished
to avoid. After several days of inquiry, I was able to trace her
and then contact her through an intermediary. She was happy to
see me, and when I reminded her of our conversations of years before
about recording her stories, she agreed to talk about herself on
tape. We then recorded many stories from her life, sitting for
hours at a time. The experiences she discussed covered the period
of her life from the time she was around eight or nine up to her late
twenties. The interviews were so extensive that I realized that I
could forget about recording a male counterpart and could just rely on
her stories alone. When we finished, I returned to northern Ghana
to pursue my other research. In 1979 I went back to Ouagadougou
again, and when I met her there, we recorded another series of tapes
that added further material and bought her stories more up-to-date.
As it turned out, this book does not directly
address my original interest in the public atmosphere of the African
urban scene, but it will rather take readers more deeply into the
private lives of the different types of people there. Perhaps it
answers my interest more adequately, if indirectly, in the way it
elevates the reality of their problems and the values by which they
live. In retrospect, Hawa gave me what is probably a better
solution to my original intention to describe the public places I
frequented. After all, the public places are only the setting of
the real drama, only the tables and chairs where the characters arrange
themselves. From ground level, the setting need only be sketched,
taken in with a glance before one starts dealing with the people.
This introduction serves that purpose in part. In the stories
that follow, you will hear next to nothing about modernization and
tradition, Westernization, feminism, bureaucracy or economics or
government, capitalism or Marxism; but you will meet urban youth and
villagers, expatriate Europeans, men and women, farmers and contractors
and civil servants and police, business folk and poor people. As
for the type of values that sustain the people, your awareness of that
will emerge gradually. There are no sermons, no psychologizing,
no treatise on ethics. What is bad is simple and clear:
abuse of position, lack of respect for a fellow human being, gossiping,
small-mindedness, greed, jealousy, the usual stuff. There are
some things people do in this book that are going to annoy a lot of
readers. Accept these actions for what they are, but do not judge
the people in Hawa's stories because of the failings on display.
As Durkheim might have said, it is the bad things in life that give us
the opportunity to know what is good and that give a storyteller the
opportunity to show it.
_________________________
Note: Oscar Lewis, The Children of Sanchez: An Autobiography of a Mexican
Family (New York: Random House, 1961), Pedro Martinez: A Mexican
Peasant and His Family (New York: Random House, 1964), La Vida: A
Puerto Rican Family in the Culture of Poverty — San Juan and New York
(New York: Random House, 1965)