Day 32--In port, Tema, Ghana

24 September. In port at Tema, Ghana.

When I think of West Africa in the future, I’ll think “red dust.” It’s everywhere: on the roads, surrounding the shops, on the floors of homes, in the gardens, on the front “lawns.” The red clay that must underlie this entire part of the continent becomes a rock-like foundation covered by a thin layer of fine sand-like dust during the dry season. And everything that moves—cars, cycles, women carrying huge baskets on their heads, small children playing around their tiny homes—everything raises a red cloud that eventually descends, falling on furniture, fruit stands, cars, busses, even the women and children. Because paved roads are so few and sidewalks are nonexistent, the clay and dust are everywhere.

Ghana certainly seems to have a little less red clay than the other two countries—Togo and Benin—I visited. But that’s only because Ghana’s relative affluence has allowed it to plant more trees and shrubs than its neighbors. On Tuesday morning after the ship cleared customs, I joined a small group of our voyagers on a visit to the African University College of Communication. The college dean, an American named Reggie Jackson (not the same) now living and teaching in Accra, invited us to a reception at the college, and Bob Chapel accepted the invitation. The college sent a bus to carry 30 of us to their campus in the center of the city.

The college, which was started only 4 years ago, is housed in what looks like an old Holiday Inn: a plain, cement, 3-story, rectangular gray building surrounded by a red clay courtyard. As we pulled into the courtyard, a troupe of dancers and drummers, dressed in bright-yellow-and-red costumes, hustled into position and began serenading us with Ghanaian music and dance as we stepped off the bus and were escorted to three rows of chairs assembled under an entryway.

We sat there tapping our feet, clapping our hands, and, for the next ten minutes, being thoroughly enchanted by the wonderful entertainment. The lecture on Ghanaian music Scott DeVeaux had given on Sunday night gave us a grounding in what we were hearing: opposing 4-beat and 3-beat rhythms, the two layered on top of each other, accented by bells and rattles. Meanwhile the dancers—4 women and three men—danced around frenetically to the complex beats and sounds. We couldn’t have ordered a more perfect introduction to Ghana.

The rest of the visit to the college was equally delightful. The school treated us to a delicious meal of Ghanaian food—red and white rice, fish, chicken, and very tasty, very hot sauces—then we were enlightened by the college’s vice president for institutional advancement talking about Ghanaian culture, including traditional proverbs. The one that hit me as particularly appropriate was the following: “Until you leave your own home, don’t praise your mother’s cooking.” We’re seeing and sampling the world’s kitchen firsthand.

Yesterday, Wednesday, we boarded a bus for what turned out to be an odyssey across West Africa, beginning in Tema, Ghana, crossing east through Togo and Benin to the city of Cotonu. The drive covered several hundred miles, crossed two international borders, and passed along a moving diorama of sights that, like Marrakech, were out of a Discovery Channel documentary. It’s hard to know where to begin in describing the people, villages, people, farms, people, cities . . . did I mention people? . . . we passed. Most of the people are moving, going from somewhere to somewhere on foot along the roads, almost all dressed in traditional multi-colored sarong-like dresses for the women and equally bright pajama-top shirts on the men. And all but a few women were carrying goods on their heads: coconuts, loaves of bread, the day’s wash, a tower of baskets, live chickens cinched for market, a tray of candy for sale to stopped cars and tour busses.

As the women came toward us, often we could see the bottom of a tiny foot splayed under each arm. Then, as she passed, usually turning her head under the basket to talk to a neighbor or look at us as we drove past, from a multi-colored sling on her back emerged a tiny black head and two bright eyes, turning left and right to take in the passing sights and sounds.

Those who weren’t walking sat in roadside stalls selling everything from fruits and vegetables to televisions and refrigerators. When I saw the first of these stalls, some built of stone and brick but most cobbled together from palm fronds, pieces of old wooden signs, branches of trees cut down as support posts, woven straw, and corrugated metal sheets, I thought we were seeing the kind of temporary stands we see along the roads in US farm states during harvest. But as the string of stands continued mile after mile, becoming dense in the larger towns and cities, I realized that these were the permanent storefronts of the Ghanaian, Togoese, and Beninoise merchants. More than storefronts, most also serve as homes for the merchant and family. Where, in the US and most other developed countries, we may shop in brick-and-mortar stores and strip malls, The West African strip mall is a string of roadside stands, with all merchandise displayed outside, some, but not all, under a metal or palm awning.

The heaviest concentration of the shops was at the two border crossings: from Ghana into Togo and Togo into Benin. The travel service that set up our local tours assured SAS—and us—that they would be able to expedite the border crossings. Not the case. Crossing out of Ghana was delayed because several travelers had mistakenly requested single-entry visas, which would have prevented them from returning to the ship after our 2-day drive. That issue took about an hour to settle. Then, at the border crossing into Togo, the customs agents insisted on having customs forms for each of us, again something the tour company said was unexpected.

At this second crossing, we waited 90 minutes for the tour operator to complete the necessary forms. While we sat, we watched the stream of cars, trucks, and pedestrians, encumbered with their head-borne cargos, pour across the borders in both directions. We also saw bribes change hands—frequently—done in an almost ritualistic way, neither giver nor receiver looking at the grease. But after the transfer, the gates opened and the traveler passed as if he or she had simply slowed momentarily at a yield sign.

The signal for “give me something” is putting the thumb, fore- and middle fingers together as if they’re holding a tiny piece of chocolate and moving the hand to the mouth repeatedly. It’s like saying “feed me,” except it says, instead, “feed my pocket.” We saw the gesture often during the 2-day trip. But at the borders, the sign is unnecessary; the frequent travelers clearly know the rules.

Besides the shops and endless string of pedestrians, the ride to and from Cotonu was a drive along a palm-lined coast, beautiful enough to make a resort developer sweat with excitement—except, that is, for the piles of litter and debris heaped close to the more populated areas and along the beaches. Apparently public trash pickup is rare or expensive in these countries because, once the litter reaches some commonly understood height, it’s incinerated . . . on the spot. So, besides litter, the drive was lined with frequent burn spots, some still smoldering. Between the diesel trucks spouting fumes, the motorscooters burning cheap (and illegal) Nigerian gasoline sold in liter bottles in roadside stands, and the smoldering piles of incinerated litter, the air of West Africa is certainly among the world’s most polluted.

After the border delays, a stop for lunch and the necessarily creeping speed required by numerous potholes, speedbumps, and red-clay detours, the drive that on a US interstate highway would have taken no more than 3 hours saw us crawling into Quadah, Benin, 8 hours after we left the port of Tema.

Quadah’s notoriety comes from its role as Portugal’s link to the slave trade from the 16th to the 19th centuries. The old Portuguese fort still stands in Quadah, though we couldn’t get in because the guide for the fort had already left for the day. Still, our guide on the bus, Remi, narrated a trip around Quadah, covering the Python Temple (an old ring of stucco buildings serving as a home for a dozen or so pythons, revered in the Voodoo religion, the most prominent religion in Benin) and the Sacred Forest, home to the spirit of an early chief who, according to legend, turned into a tree upon his death. Details on the statue erected to the chief would imply that he must also have left an extensive family. “Erected to the chief” is the appropriate phrase; it caused some flushed faces among the girls and triggered the guys’ cameras.

By far the most moving part of the day was driving down the path taken by captured Africans being led to the slave ships that, for 400 years, loaded their cargo off the Benin beaches. At the beach, UNESCO has built a memorial stone gate, called “The gate of No Return.” On the shore side is a fresco atop the monument showing long lines of Africans parading away in chains toward the beach; and on the beach side, the fresco shows their faces looking out at the waiting ships. The horror and inhumanity of that “peculiar institution” is truly a dark stain on our history. We all felt it on that Benin beach.

After the visit to the gate, we got back onboard the waiting bus for the remaining one-hour ride to the Hotel du Lac in Cotonu. The drive took us onto unlit streets packed with people, motorbikes, cars, and trucks—some with headlights, some without—milling home at the end of the work day. I’ve never seen such congestion and seeming chaos. Yet the Beninoise seem to know the unwritten rules of when and how to pass, of whom does and doesn’t have the right of way, and of how to make it through seemingly impossibly narrow passages.

Thursday morning, we reboarded the bus and rode for about 90 minutes to a lakeside dock, where, surrounded again by vendors and little children either trying to sell something or simply extorting a handout, we boarded narrow, unstable boats for the ride out to the village on stilts: Ganvie.

Ganvie was founded 350 years ago by natives fleeing the slave trade. To avoid capture, they went out into the middle of a shallow lake north of what is now Cotonu and built a village—homes, stores, today even bars and restaurants—on wooden platforms supported by cut tree branches anchored into the lake bottom. Today, 35,000 people live in Ganvie, a population larger than Libertyville’s. They go about their daily business—traveling to market, selling, buying, attending school—in small dugout canoes, the Ganvie version of a gondola.

As we floated through the village, small children came out from their thatch-roofed shacks and danced, waving at us, on their porches. As I watched them on the very edges of the entryways, I wondered how many infants must crawl onto those porches each year and disappear into the brown, silty, polluted waters of the lake. Of course, people adapt to their environments—as we’ve seen on dramatic display throughout West Africa—so perhaps the overall mortality in Ganvie is no worse than it is among the rest of the population. I didn’t ask.

Words can’t do justice to the sights of a place like Ganvie, so I’ll leave most of the telling to the many pictures and videos I took. Suffice to say that the visit to Ganvie, the earlier stop at the Port of No Return, and the visual documentary that we passed enroute to and from the stops made the 23-plus hours spent on a bus worthwhile. But the next time, I’d fly.

The drive back to Tema and the ship was slower and longer than the drive out. We made it through the Benin-Togo border in relatively speedy order—30 minutes—but waited, parked, at the Togo-Ghana border for more than 90 minutes because of the same visa snafu that had delayed us on Wednesday. This time, though, it was clear that the customs agents wanted payment. And our tour agent, the owner of Land Tours, refused to pay because, of course, a bribe to get 45 Americans across the border would amount to a large dent in her revenue stream. Finally, a series of phone calls from the agent to her husband, a successful businessman in Ghana, to the Ghanaian minister of Education, to the director of customs and immigration broke the logjam, and much to the chagrin of the border agents, who saw a princely sum slip through their palms, we went on our way at about 5:30pm.

Four-and-a-half hours later, after a ride on a road that would make some of the mountain roads in Colorado look like interstate highways, our bus, covered with red dust and carrying 45 very weary students, teachers, and seniors, pulled up to the MV Explorer. Home had never looked so good. Bob Chapel, who was duty dean, greeted us at the gangway, and the students hi-tailed it to the 5th deck, where the crew had set up a late-night buffet. I, instead, went to the faculty lounge, where the world’s best bartender, Mandy, made me a Tanqueray & tonic and poured out a dish full of nuts. After telling the tales to Mandy’s customers, I finally went to my cabin and into bed. We had started the day with our 7am departure from Cotonu. I went to sleep by 11pm. Fourteen of the intervening 16 hours I had spent sitting on a West African bus. It’s all part of the adventure.