This post is overdue. I didn't get a chance to post it before today, but it comprised my thoughts on the city of Kumasi, Ghana, where I lived for two weeks. Currently, I'm living in Naama, a village in the Ashanti Region. I've used pictures to establish paragraph breaks, but because I took only a few pictures in Kumasi, I've added some pictures from this village. Perhaps more importantly, but probably not, I was diagnosed with malaria and typhoid. This resulted in a light headache, some back pain, a couple days of an on-and-off stomach ache, and fever dreams about Oregon Trail where, fording the river, I lost ALL my oxen. Only kidding about the fever, the dreams, and the oxen. Not kidding about the bravely surviving deadly diseases, or the stomach ache, which, to be fair, was a little frustrating.
The question about photography I had struggled with in this blog’s last post was always pointing, I think, toward a question of the image and its relationship with Africa in particular. In the last century, an immense accumulation of images of human suffering has subjected Africa to the one-two punch of its mighty power of knowledge-bearing and its inauguration of certain changes to our real engagement with places. I feel a duty to Africa, then, to represent her ethically. What does ethical mean here? The question, for me, is how best to construct this next representation with the sad knowledge that, inevitably, I must lay it gingerly atop the already enormous pile of images that sits, rotting and patiently burning, like one of the massive garbage-heaps on the side of the road here in Kumasi.
We ride tro-tros and taxis. Taxis are tattered hunks of metal adorned with tattered cushions and seem, sometimes, to puff their knotty, pitch-black exhaust as if the entire vehicle was suffereing, perpetually tempting death, from a terrible coughing fit complete (like any good coughing fit) with empty wheezing, dry heaving, and short erratic bursts, tiny thunderclaps of black smoke. They bump along impatiently on the least hospitable terrain and honk with careless freedom in some awful Morse code. Tro-tros are simply taxis, as described, made large and crammed haphazardly with fifteen to twenty passengers.
I am on a tro-tro and realize that the young boy of about ten beside me is the car’s mate. With an ease rendering his age all the more confusing and, perhaps, both saddening and inspiring to middle-class American sensitivities, he stands in the main doorframe to hang an arm and a leg outside: left hand clutching inside lip of roof, left foot planted on the metal step passengers use climbing aboard. He’s shouting, “Aboabo Station!” and swinging lithely back inside to collect cash and, again deftly, deal change. I think he’s the driver’s son by the familiarity in their conversations.
Another boy, about the mate’s age, joins the car, squeezing into spot between the mate and me, and when they start talking I decide to listen vaguely to what must be, for the boys, a fortuitous meeting of equals on a car packed, otherwise, only with adults. The new boy wears a boxy teal backpack and the austere government-school uniform of brown and orange. Imagining that, for the mate, the new character might serve as a kind of serious relief, I observe a basic sense of familiarity and perhaps a double-sense of both understanding and being understood conveyed in the mate’s tone. Of course, ignorant of their language, I know nothing they’re saying; but I am quietly enlightened as the mate reminds the boy plainly of the fare price and, collecting accordingly, springs nimbly back into position, hanging out the van door and calling shrilly over the wind as we speed frantically down the road.
To me the air in Kumasi was always inflected with a harsh smoggy scent, or one of many knock-out-punch stenches which radiate from sewage and litter. Only recently did I grow accustomed to the smells of garbage and of garbage burning. Walking to school I once saw across the street plumes of black smoke gushing forth toward the sky from a huge pile of garbage. The black snaking cloud rolled across a billboard selling toothpaste promising 12-hr protection against a background of classic squeaky-clean toothpaste teal.
Another billboard stood at the same distance on the other side of the street; and to my left, that special picturesque meeting of murky green tributaries of water which, flowing through too much garbage, had become sewage. Set above such bittersweet convergence was a benevolent morning sun by whose scattered and zigzagging reflections the toxic river achieved an unnerving swampy glamour. To my right the road. Never not honking; and speeding cars; and on my left homeless women and men sit cross-legged behind small calabashes collecting coins. Behind one calabash a mother breastfeeds her baby. A tro-tro mate jumps out at a traffic light to exchange a one cedi bill for one man’s calabash coins (to provide customers their change). Tall buildings casting shadows on feral brown grass, telephone poles and lots of noise and advertisements spotlessly clean and brightly colored and always selling with a smile against this unfinished dusty city full of rusting metal and damaged wood shacks selling what? I ran recently across the idea that consciousness is the human’s barrier against overwhelming amounts and intensities of experience. That daily modern experience presents itself to us as an unending, totally enveloping stream of shocks. Kumasi is a city of gruesome sensory conditions and contradictions rendering real experience, in maybe some deep felt way, somehow unintelligible due its sensory excess and the excesses of symbolism—and, one might pretentiously add, in its epistemological pluralism. There is an excess of meaning on every street, an ultimately indecipherable because irreducibly varied overload of symbols, signs, lifestyles, worlds, classes, class-interests and competing terrains. Confronted with such totalizing contradiction, perhaps the only derivable unity, epistemologically, lies in God; and God, it is true, pulses fast through this city and this country. Press your ear to any surface and you will hear the heartbeat, Nyame, Nyame, Nyame.
Koonimo’s house, where I study the talking drums with a master drummer, is a beautiful unified work of dramatic structural simplicity. His main room is a large space housing, in one corner, thirty drums of wild shapes, sizes and colors; strewn around the drums are rattles, bells, male and female banana bells, male and female don-dons, and sticks cut and carved from trees; and against another wall stand formidable lines of ancient xylophones and marimbas with tones dry and eerie like gently clicking skeleton bones.
The ceiling is, as Ko himself described, unresolved: angled upwards, four planes resist convergence to form a stunning open square happily welcoming the sun, the fresh air, and, perhaps most elegantly, the rain, which, streaming down, paints a perfect square on the concrete floor. Ko is something of an international celebrity, having established himself as a Ghanaian guitar legend, a poet, and a serious philosopher, befriending over his more than seventy years the great Joe Pass, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Max Roach, Thelonious Monk, and others. His house is filled proudly with books and instruments. When he first greeted me from behind is patio desk, he was surrounded majestically by plantain trees behind him and books in front: notable among them were Aristotle’s Politics; John Blacking’s How Musical Is Man?; Bertrand Russell’s Has Man a Future?; and a book about the African philosophical tradition. I’ll be living with him in April, practicing, reading, asking him questions, and hopefully playing music with him. His voice is a rich baritone, and his beard is silver.
So, after a lesson at Ko’s, I ride a tro-tro to Tech Junction where, under steady drizzle, the persistent night heat, and the thorough darkness achieved by the week’s second power outage, taxis make imponderable twenty-point turns amid swarming masses of sweating bodies and huge sputtering vehicles. Waiting, submissively, in a taxi queue; imagining boarding a tro-tro and slipping into the corner spot where, poking my head out the window, I can admire, in the expansive blue-black African sky, Orion straight upward; and finally now, hurling myself into a taxi, I am sandwiched between several strangers: one, a man, and the other, a mother with two small children, one of which is a baby wrapped securely to her back and ogling me. Feeling, in the whole non-functioning, chaotic mess a kind of mighty irony, or cosmic amusement, giving way only to that familiar warm, enveloping sense of deep affection—the kind of affection that itself gives way to clenched fists and teeth and wrinkled noses and that slight, short intake of breath whereby, all of a sudden, you feel distinctly that your heart rests delicately on an upturned palm which has lifted it gently, barely, just an inch.
All of this is, perhaps, to say that people develop a relationship with a place, no matter where…and that relationship, if it is real, is necessarily complex, and painful, and full of endearment, familiarity, surprise, and perhaps, if we are lucky, even love. And that real people live here—real people live in all sorts of places around this complicated, awful, occasionally lovable piece of shit we all call home in different tongues. And that every place is as valid, important, and epistemologically legitimate as every other. And that we should always aspire, when encountering difference, to incorporate it into our worldviews, not exclude it. And that to exclude it is, probably, wildly unethical. And it is also to say, I think, that I am starting to like this place for what it is, and for what it isn’t…
