From Road to Infrastructure

What a difference a couple of years can make. When I first came to Accra in 2010, I regularly travelled through a highway construction zone. It was a fascinating mess. Huge piles of red dirt, scaffolding made from wood, construction workers wandering up and down without safety harnesses, the only concession to the dangers of such work being the occasional hard hat. This was a highway to nowhere that abruptly stopped.

But there was, towering over the construction site, an enormous billboard acknowledging the wonderful US Millennium Challenge Fund that was helping to pay for the highway construction. Last year, I passed through the same intersection, with the construction finished and the highway filled with hurtling traffic and honking horns. Still towering over was the Millennium Challenge sign.

Today, on the way to work, crossing that very intersection, lo and behold, there was the sign, this time just a hulking empty skeleton of a billboard, providing the ghost of a memory of previous gratitude, while oblivious drivers speed off in all directions. But…  maybe memory and gratitude are more enduring and just a little twisted. Suddenly, I noticed another sign, small, at the side of the highway, informing me that this is now the George Walker Bush Motorway. 

So, from the highway to nowhere in 2010, the Millennium debt is now paid in perpetuity. George Walker Bush Motorway.

Random Accra

My new roommate. I’ll say no more.

Don’t let them get wind of this in Canada

Ladies Kitchen Insurance. That’s right. Apparently there are a host of special hazards and accidents in Ghanaian kitchens but no fear. Ladies Kitchen Insurance can be bundled with home and auto. It is so indicative of the gendered nature of household labour here.

Except at Suma Court where we have a new chef. An excellent man from Burkina Faso who only speaks French. I knew all that time pouring over the menus and snooty French restaurants would come in handy. I am hoping for crème caramel again! An unexpected treat!

Sartorial Hawker

Seen on the road, and me without my camera …. An elegant young man, sunglasses, gleaming white shirt, pinstriped pants and natty, astonishingly bright chartreuse bowtie. What was he selling? He was holding three or four pairs of polished and gleaming men’s dress shoes. More remarkable is that fact that his own dress shoes were also gleaming in defiance of Accra’s ubiquitous red dust.

This young hawker stands in contrast to another, a middle aged woman walking with a red plastic laundry basket on her head. The basket was over flowing with brassieres, hanging from the sides, threatening to tumble from the basket: red lace, utilitarian white, sexy black, purple with astonishing padding, bras of all shapes and sizes…. But how you get a good fit at the intersection is beyond me….. and the driver won’t engage in conversation so it must be a little risqué.

Signs of the times

They ride ponies, too! As an addendum to Animals of Accra, another creature to add to the list, although not personally sighted, must be the polo pony

…. unless I am misled by the sign for the Accra Polo Club. Incidentally, this has surpassed the “Golfers Crossing” sign in Achimota Forest as the most incongruous site in Accra in my estimation.

And then try this do not trespass … a little different from our

Canadian custom of closing the campus roads one day a year!

Finally, there is the sign that captures the historian’s eye. The intersection of three eras captured on one traffic sign: colonial; traditional and generic modern.

This little piggie goes to market

So immediately upon lamenting the absence of a pig sighting, what is ahead of us in the traffic but a pickup truck (they ride lower that ours and are not nearly as intrusive on the road as a result) stuffed full of half a dozen pigs clearly on their last journey. These were not happy pigs. There was one teenage boy in the back with trying to keep them all lying down but really, six swine against one boy… you know the rest.

The pigs weren’t tied down or on leashes or in cages or anything like that. He just had to keep grabbing whichever one was trying to make a run for it and stuff it back into the truck. It was like a life size game of wack-a-mole with a lot more wriggling and a lot more screaming and better odds for the wackees. I do mean screaming:  not the boy but the pigs. I had never heard a sound like really unhappy pigs being led to slaughter. 

Animals of Accra

Animals are found everywhere in the heart of this busy city; packed in side by side with shelters of varying sturdiness, commercial stalls, chop bars selling meals, often cooked over a wood fire by the side of the road, there are animals. On my way to work there are two places where enormous majestic cattle forage by the side of the road or wander along in search of better (I cannot say greener in this red landscape) pastures. These aren’t nice little Jersey dairy cows but rather big African cattle with long horns, wandering at will, with no apparent keepers. They just know where they are going and how to get there.

Goats roam at will as well, nibbling grass by the roadsides or running into the fields and woods that crop up now and then. They travel in small little groups of three or four nannies, occasionally with a little kid.

The billie goats are in evidence nowhere. Clearly, they are deemed too cantankerous to roam through the markets and along the sidewalks without supervision.

Chickens are definitely free range and literally everywhere: mother hens with broods of chicks scratching around for bits and pieces of grain by the chop bars. Sometimes there are two or three hens, scrawny and scraggy, keeping each other company as they dart back and forth through the traffic, proving Darwinianism is at work in Accra. Most chickens and roosters are thin, with saggy feathers, clearly not the best of foragers. Some, however, like the ones that live across the street, are lush with shiny plummage. The rooster has a grand cockscomb and tail feathers and chases the girls all over like a randy bachelor. Meanwhile, the girls seek refuge in our compound, coming across the street to forage in peace. Occasionally, however, they are too bold and self-assured and they round the corner into the territory of the dogs that bark and chase, and sometimes catch one of them. But the survivors keep coming back utterly unperturbed.

Unlike the animals that run free, I saw bunnies in corrals, clearly well cared for because they ran straight to

the fence expecting a treat or a meal. They, alas, like all animals here, are not family pets but rather will eventually end up as rabbit stew.

No sightings of pigs, although I’m told that people do raise them in the city. We drove past a sign for a pig farm one day on the way to work but there was no evidence of swine of any age, shape or size.

This little lizard, well, not actually so little, lives in the courtyard among the plants and trees that provide a little shade. It is curious and comes remarkable close if one is quiet and still. 

There are other little lizards scampering here and there – the size of domestic chameleons. Sometimes I see them in my room but they scurry off. I don’t mind too much because they catch mosquitos, which I don’t find much of a problem, perhaps because of these little reptilian friends.

Dogs are everywhere in evidence though none will make it into the Westminster Dog Show. They tend to wander at will like all the other animals of Accra, which is curious because there are always one or two street hawkers with arms full of leashes and dog collars. Once there was a man walking what looked to be a pit bull on a leash along the road. And there are frequently cages of puppies for sale along the cool shady section of the road that goes through Achimota Forest, the largest greenspace in Accra. We have two dogs at Suma Court: Jeep and Spike.

Jeep

Spike

They are not pets but guard dogs. They mostly live around the other side of the building but occasionally saunter through the front yard amongst the parked cars and generator and random people coming and going. They stop in their tracks at the entrance, never putting so much as a whisker across the threshold but their big brown eyes yearn for a little pat. One night, I happened to look through the front doors and there was Spike, notoriously lazy, sleeping on the little table near the door, with Jeep lolling on the porch. They scarcely raised an eyelid when I took their pictures.

I am assured that despite their laid back ways, one wouldn’t want to wander in uninvited and unannounced in the middle of the night. They are, after all “Friendly Guard Dogs.”

The only creature that I might have expected to see and have not are cats. They are nowhere to be found. I’ve asked about cats to no avail. One person just doesn’t like them. Another murmurs ominous things about the dietary preferences of a particular Ghanaian tribe. 

It’s all troubling and traumatic as I think of little Jerome and Ambrose tucked safely in Guelph, with the heads on my pillow, napping without a feline care in the world. That is a good thing.

Ambrose    

Jerome