Ghana Time

We’re just about to leave. I’ve just accrued “dock time”—the detention given to anyone who misses the official “on ship” time by more than a second. I was late about five minutes, which earns me three hours I have to stay on board in the next port. But I feel I have the ideal excuse: I was on Ghana Time.
Which means that I was inhabiting Kudzo Dunyo’s world. Kudzo is constantly in motion. His car has 260,000 kilometers on it—some of it from making the trip between Tema and his home village, Dagbamete, but most of it simply spent cruising the streets of Tema. Kudzo’s work involves electrical generators: he supplies and maintains them for numerous businesses. But he is also involved in a garage in town, and does many other things as well. Every time I meet with him, we take off for another endless round of errands.
Take Wednesday, for example. I had thought we were going to spend the day trying to deal with the crisis of dressmaking (too many girls buying fabric and none of them having time to meet with the dressmaker). But we ended up at the garage instead. He said, suddenly, that Kwasi’s “senior brother,” Hunua, was there: he knew because he saw his car. He took me into a side room, where an elderly man sat, clothed in traditional African finery: cloth, cap, and fancy sandals. He looked lost and vaguely bewildered. Kudzo talked to him in Ewe, and finally introduced me. Hunua’s stony face broke into a smile, as he announced that it was his pleasure to meet me. According to Kudzo, Hunua was not only an important elder, but also a national figure: the president of the Ghana association of traditional healers. We talked for a short time before going outside. It was only then that Kudzo explained why Hunua was there: his car (a fancy van parked outside) had failed because of a faulty fuel pump. In short, this small room was a kind of temporary waiting room for his distinguished visitor. Having diagnosed the problem, Kudzo sent someone into town to fetch a replacement. An hour later, the pump arrived and numerous mechanics stood over the engine (in the floor of the cab) until it was installed. All this took precedence over anything else Kudzo may have planned.
We then had to wrestle with Ghanaian bureaucracy. Kudzo is buying an apartment. He’s been living there for several months—long enough to convert one room into an elegant office with a computer. He was near the end of the process by which this sale could be made official. We picked up a small photo: it was the man selling the apartment. Apparently, these photographs were necessary to set up a meeting between the two people (seller and buyer), who would then be interviewed before the sale would be approved. The old man was sick, though; Kudzo went to pick up his wife, but she didn’t want to come today. Kudzo agreed to the next morning—until I reminded him that we had our FDP (Faculty Directed Practice—our ship-approved field trip) that day. So we went to the Tema Development Board, where Kudzo explained his situation to several people. Having the woman come wouldn’t have done any good, as it turned out: she was not the official owner, but simply his wife. To make things work, he would have to give her Power of Attorney. Fine. We had that point settled. But our time was not yet complete. Kudzo has been in Tema all his life, and knows people everywhere. We went around the building saying hello to several of them. One was a senior official on the top floor, in a fancy office (two windows! A refrigerator!). Everywhere we went, I was introduced as a “professor” of music from the University of Virginia, traveling by cruise ship. They nodded their heads, grinned widely, and bid me welcome, asking me again and again how I liked Ghana. All very pleasant, if time-consuming; but this kind of culture requires a great deal of time.

Today we had yet more errands to run—except that I didn’t go out until 4:30, just an hour and a half before on-ship time. I didn’t expect to leave the port gate. I had dropped off fabric with Kudzo that morning and planned only to pick up the shirts and pay the tailor. But back into the car we went. There were more errands: a second-hand refrigerator that Kudzo had to inspect, a shop (the one where we met Hunua) to be closed. I grew nervous. We finally made our way back to Sakura’s shop, where a woman was still working on one of Nancy’s shirts. It took time before I paid him for his work (5 shirts—2 for me, 3 for Nancy), and it took even longer before we had gathered the shirts into a plastic bag. We sped mightily to the gate. No shuttle: so Kudzo found a man driving a car with the proper port permit. This man was wearing a Jerome Bettis jersey—the second bit of Steelers gear I had seen in the past hour, which I took as a good omen. I got to the ship—but five minutes late.

The piece de resistance of Ghana was Thursday, when we took our busload of students out to Dagbamete. The trip didn’t start out smoothly: we were supposed to start at eight, but getting Nancy and the girls in the bus held us up twenty minutes (nothing like the bus leader screwing things up!). Then we had to find Kudzo, who was going to lead the bus there. He wasn’t at the port gate, but was stuck in traffic (probably taking care of a few errands before leaving town). We didn’t really get going until forty-five minutes had passed. The bus went slowly. It was an aging industrial hulk with big noisy gears, drowning out the inadequate, intermittent sound system the tour guide was trying to use. The road was a motorway—a pleasant change from the usual pothole scarred streets of Tema and Accra—but every town we went through had large speed bumps, which had to be spotted and carefully negotiated. As we neared our destination, the roads deteriorated further, to graded unpaved roads to bumpy trails to tiny village streets, barely wide enough for the bus.
By the time we finally pulled into Dagbamete, I was not in a good mood.
But nothing like being in a real village to put a smile on your face. I had been told we would be greeted by a procession—slow Atsiagbekor (the Ewe war dance) to the dance place. And by God, there they were, dressed in purple finery, carrying drums on their heads. Because we had arrived late, the village people decided we would eat first. Our lunch was held in the Kathy Armstrong Lodge—a sizeable building (built by Kwasi and dedicated to his favorite Canadian drummer) that dominated the town square. Inside were pictures of Kwasi in African garb. Seeing his gold-flecked fabric and elaborate caps, my students had assumed he was a prince—not a former food processing factory employee! They enjoyed their lunch, but turned up their noses at my additional course of akple and palm-oil sauce (“too fishy,” said one woman).
The performance was excellent—a young and energetic troupe of drummers and dancers from a nearby village (four miles away, they told me). They performed Adzogbo, a time-honored traditional piece I remembered from my Berkeley years; and Fume-fume, a hand-drum-based piece apparently aimed more at youthful entertainment. Because of my relatively high status, I was pulled away at different times. Kwasi’s wife wanted to show me “my room” (where Nancy and I would stay if we spent the night—obviously, our scheduled departure in the late afternoon did not sit well with many). Later I was told that the elders wanted to “have a word” with me. I didn’t know what they were after, but found out, after some nudging and coughing, that these men were the elected officials of the small district Dagbamete was in, and that they were making a pitch for economic development. I sat while they touted their excellent clay deposits, the superiority of their pineapples and mangoes, and their central location. I finally earned my escape when I noted that I was, alas, not a businessman, but a professor of music who doesn’t know bleep about how to ship mangoes, but that I’d do what I can.
We closed with a drumming and dancing workshop. At my request, they taught my students the basics of Gahu, beginning with the drum parts (twenty students in a circle, each with their own drum. Not much you can do in half an hour, to tell the truth. Those who got the rhythm still struggled over stick technique. The dancing was more successful. They learned how to match certain steps with drum patterns, and began to distinguish the signal from the bewildering variety of sounds the lead drum can make. But after just a few minutes, I had to call a halt. We were already late, and we still had two-and-a-half hours of driving ahead of us. (We didn’t in fact get back for dinner until 8:30.) Next time, we need to spend the night. This group was ready.

Ghana was exhausting, but splendid. All my students—indeed, just about anyone I’ve met—loved the place and want to come back. I do, too.