Plantains in Space
August 20th, 2011 § 2 Comments
I ate a space plantain the other day. It had the NASA logo on it:
(Ignore our messy kitchen in the background!)
This is roughly where the plantain was when I encountered it:
(Yes, this is corn. The shot turned out better than did my photo of the roasting plantains.)
Starchy foods like plantains, corn and yams make up a popular category of Ghanaian street food. They’re roasted over makeshift braziers like the one above, then wrapped in newspaper and sold for perhaps 50 pesewa, or US$0.35. The newspaper is usually not, as one might expect, the Chronicle or the Graphic, but rather tends to be a European or North American paper published some months ago. (My space plantain came wrapped in a Canadian paper dated from last March.)
The curious afterlife of Western newspapers isn’t just limited to wrapping up street food, as I discovered when I stopped at the bathroom at the Kintampo bus station and was handed some crumpled Dutch news from last September in lieu of toilet paper. Google hasn’t turned up any useful results about the frequency of old papers (printing overages? copies with serious errors in them? victims of the decline of physical publication?) being sold to traders in developing countries, and I am left to wonder who figured out that there was a market for cheap newsprint in Africa. I spotted some boys pulling a cart stacked with old newspapers at the downtown market the other morning, so I plan to return at the same time next week in hope of encountering them again and asking about their source.
IPA-Tamale in Hipstamatic
August 20th, 2011 § 2 Comments
This week’s session of “Ghana in Hipstamatic” turned into “spot the IPA logo”:
On curtains
On shirts
Under the office monkey (long story)
Witchcraft on the Small Screen
August 15th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
The STC bus that I caught from Accra to Tamale yesterday was equipped with a DVD player, and we were treated to four Nollywood productions, all of which were centrally concerned with witchcraft. I didn’t catch the title of the first one, but highlights included a man getting up in the midst of the night to swat at a moth in his room, only to have the insect turn first into a bird and then into his wife. Egg of Life portrayed a campfire story told by an older man to a group of children, about a chief’s son who was poisoned by the witches he had inadvisedly consorted with in his youth, and the group of female warriors who were sent to find the restorative Egg of Life. (The traditional costumes were quite lovely.) Brotherhood of Vipers was really beautifully lit, with deeply saturated colors lending interest to this story of business rivals using witchcraft to get ahead, whilst Super Warriors was a cheesy romp about a magician who cast down his enemies by shooting lightning from the Star of David painted on his forehead.
This put me in mind of an article I recently read by Stephen Ellis and Gerrie Ter Haar. In “Religion and Politics: Taking African Epistemologies Seriously,” they argue that many African approaches to religion* treat the material and the spirit worlds as constituting a single spectrum of reality. They note as well that this historical mode of thought may go some way towards explaining the warm reception of charismatic Christian churches in Africa, whose messages of spiritual healing (and the prosperity gospel) have proven increasingly popular over the last decades. In Ghana, charismatic churches such as the Lighthouse Chapel International have been growing at the expense of the mainline Protestant and Catholic churches at least since the 1970s.
Paul Gifford touches on these issues in his recent study of Ghana’s charismatic movement, which offers up some telling observations of pastors calling upon the holy spirit to counteract juju worked upon members of the congregation. Traditional typologies of spiritual forces may thus co-exist with biblical descriptors of the same phenomena, such as demons. It’s fascinating to see the ways in which a set of cultural practices and beliefs that were at the first utterly un-African (i.e. Christianity) have slowly adapted themselves to their local setting.
*This isn’t intended to over-generalize, however; there’s obviously a huge diversity of religous practice and belief (or unbelief, for that matter) within the continent!
Ghanaian Advertising in Hipstamatic
August 14th, 2011 § Leave a Comment
Round two of Ghana in Hipstamatic:
Doesn’t the baby look like he’s saying “ouch!”?
IPA-Accra
All your legal documents in one place
Ghanaian Nationalism in Hipstamatic
August 12th, 2011 § 3 Comments
Foreign Policy’s recent photo essay on the Afghanistan war in Hipstamatic inspired me to an experiment of my own: Ghana in Hipstamatic. Today’s photos capture some of Ghana’s national symbols in downtown Accra.
Independence Arch
Old stadium at Independence Square
Chair with Ghana’s national symbol (I seem to have a thing for nationalistic chairs…)
Six months
December 29th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
I left Ghana six months ago today, and I must admit that it still feels odd to be back. As Glenna Gordon aptly wrote about her return to New York a few months ago,
That time I was standing on a table in the middle of a tshirt factory when the owner walked in, I didn’t think, how did I get here? Or stranded on the side of the road somewhere between Sierra Leone and Liberia when the bush taxi broke down and we all sat on logs waiting for another car to come by and shepherd us to the next town, I didn’t think, how did I get here? … I know how I got to those places. The question is just how I got back.
Waking up in my own apartment, with running water and central air and electricity to keep the fridge going, still feels stranger to me than piling into a matatu in Kigali with twenty other people and a few chickens. Stranger than walking back to Walewale after a day surveying in rural villages, using the Tigo cell tower next to my office to navigate my way through dusty fields. Not quite as strange as the double economy in Kinshasa, where one could pay US$8 for mangoes imported from Belgium at City Market or 20 cents for local mangoes at the bus stop – but still. The thought of six months passing since last I stood in Ghana is unreal.
It is in memory of this that I’ve been flipping through all of my Africa photos again, and thought I’d post a few favorites from countries beyond the usual suspects:
A tree grows in Kampala
Mosaic from a monument at Place de la Revolution, Bujumbura
Drinking local in Addis
Contextualized illustration
May 3rd, 2010 § 1 Comment
IPA-Tamale recently moved to a new office, and in the course of packing up the Examining Underinvestment in Agriculture storeroom I found a flipbook used by the Ministry of Food & Agriculture to educate farmers about the benefits of using fertilizer on their maize fields. MOFA has its share of politicized decision-making and elite capture, especially with regards to fertilizer distribution, but interestingly enough it still commissioned illustrations that were thoroughly representative of the lives of the average smallholder farmer.
Cover. As you’ll see, the intended audience is one of male farmers, who grow maize as an accepted male crop – but their wives still play a significant if unacknowledged role.
Skipping to the middle of the book for a second, this illustration of the farmer in his field captures a lot about the intended audience. Note the straw hat, simple sandals, manual distribution of fertilizer, and use of a repurposed condensed milk can to hold it.
Contrast this to the implicitly better-off fertilizer salesman, who shows up to deliver fertilizer in a baseball cap and closed-toe shoes. (Jan Chipchase has a good post mentioning footwear as status markers.) There’s not much romanticization of the economic prospects of smallholder farming here.
There’s some great detail as well in the section on how to avoid storing fertilizer improperly. The protagonist obviously isn’t doing too badly, because he has a metal roof, but leaks are a persistent problem. His young daughter, here seen splashing in the spilled fertilizer, is wearing appropriate earrings and waist beads. (And yes, it’s quite normal that she’s wearing nothing else.)
What does it mean for farmers to recognize themselves in this officially sanctioned view of how to farm?
Tamale Photos
March 28th, 2010 § Leave a Comment
Some photos from around Tamale:
What it says on the tin
Travel agency in the downtown Choggu neighborhood catering to the majority Muslim population
Vodafone has taken Tamale by storm
The best of field research
March 20th, 2010 § 2 Comments
That said, my last post doesn’t particularly convey the sense that I like my job, which I very much do. There are all these small human moments that account for that, that liking, such as the following.
- Perhaps the most wondrous thing about field research is people’s grace in allowing strangers into their homes, their lives, to pose a series of questions whose purpose must surely seem cryptic to them. (The surveyors do introduce themselves, and the purpose of the research, of course. But I think it’s a far cry from those introductions to understanding the worlds of academic publishing, or [in the case of this study] insurance product design, that are the prime movers behind these surveys.) And yet they do let them in. They even let me in, when I am monitoring surveyors in the field, and I have been profoundly grateful for these chances to sit under respondents’ carefully thatched roofs and listen to snatches of their lives in my mediocre Dagbani.
- It has been a blast getting to know our surveyors. The team leaders are just great – thoughtful, organized, and intelligent – and I’ve slowly moved past my initial monolithic impression of the larger survey team as “that group of 20 men (and one woman) who do a lightning strike on the office for their netbooks each morning” to individual interactions, individual personalities. There’s L., who willingly took on additional work when his team leader fell ill, and D., who is perpetually flashing the friendliest smile at everyone, and J., who elevated himself considerably in my opinion when he finally stopped flirting in French and began speaking to me politely, and many others. They have been a fantastic group of people to work with.
- And honestly, much of what’s enjoyable is a succession of small daily things. The reckless glee of being on the back of a surveyor’s motorcycle, on our way to find a respondent, speeding between houses so closely spaced our legs brushed the mud walls on either side. The temporary cooling of buying cold Pure Water sachets on the way to the office and drinking them as quickly as possible. Chasing chickens and small beautiful children out of the open door of the Walewale office, somewhat halfheartedly, because they think it’s a game to come into the office and get chased, and I enjoy the break. An unexpected frog hopping out of a backpack containing soil samples and into my hands, to be set free outside. All of these, perfect pleasant diversions from a job that is at times overwhelmingly busy, but always worthwhile.
Where I’ve been
March 20th, 2010 § 1 Comment
A random sample of a different sort
There is a very strong correlation between my returning to Africa and my completely neglecting this blog – which says less about African internet than about how busy I always find myself when I’m here! I came into my current position with IPA at the beginning of a two-month household survey examining underinvestment in agriculture in northern Ghana, and since then our whole team has been working non-stop. Our surveyors leave for the field between 7 and 8 am every day, so I’m usually at the office by 6.30 to make sure that everything’s prepared. Then it’s a long day of tracking survey documents, sorting soil samples, assigning survey teams to new communities, preparing per diem payments, troubleshooting the netbooks & survey software used in the field, selecting respondents for field audits, taking calls from surveyors, and making frequent three-hour round trips up to our satellite office in Walewale, among any number of other things. An early day might end at 7 pm, and a late one at 10 pm. The sheer amount of work has forced me to grow more as a manager than I have in any other position I’ve yet had, which has been fantastic. It simply doesn’t leave much space at the edges of my days for anything else.
