Northern Ghana was not developed when slave traders entered
the country two centuries ago. By dint of their being on the coast, Accra,
Tacoradi, and Cape Coast were points where Europe, and later America, came to
build and fill ships with human cargo. According to “History of Africa”, the
north was purposefully not developed by the British in order to ensure a
constant stream of cheap labor when the farmers of the north suffered their dry
season and moved south for work.
It has been over fifty years since Ghana gained her
independence. It experienced the typical African growing pains; a harsh
dictator, the bloody overthrowing, an economic descent into poverty, and has
emerged into the twenty first century as a country that has experienced three
elections without upset. The former Gold Coast has become the Gold Standard by
which other African countries are weighed; a peaceful, development minded
country whose south boasts hotels comfortable by western standards, a Shop Rite
shopping center, and that bastion of development; obesity.
Once you pass through Kumasi, known through the country as
being a site of robbery and the very worst in third world transportation, the
country is unrecognizable. The north that the British are charged with never
developing (but which most people have chosen to overlook) has one major paved
road that bisects the regional capital, Tamale. The extreme poverty of the
north is unique mostly for how widespread it is. It is not a few people in the
north who are poor; it is a few people in the north who are not.
Because of this, many people in the north follow their need
for income to the south. During dry season, the typical northern village loses
a large chunk of their young women to work in the south, and you can hear the
regional dialect Dagbani spoken frequently in Accra and Kumasi.
The disparity of wealth coupled with the fluctuations in the
value of the cedi note combine to mean that goods are being sold for very low
prices, and the relative wealth of the south remains contained. The young
porters need housing, and many find it in refuse walled huts in what is known
as “Soddom and Gamorah” in Accra. Those who cannot afford those prices can
sleep on the street, and those who rightly fear for their safety on the street
can find an older man, one with a home nearby, and accept his offer of a room
in return for compliant sex. There is no shortage of these individuals.
Young women stencil their names on their arms with staining
black ink so that, if they die in the south, their bodies will be returned to
their families. Those that survive wear these marks into their adulthood with
something like pride. Those that survive
frequently come home with new babies, with HIV or AIDS, with loss from malaria.
This is important because Ghana also leads the developing
world in their low rate of HIV/AIDS, a trend that will not persist should the
trend termed Kayayo (a Niger word meaning head porter) persist. What impacts
one person has the power to impact us all. The success of Ghana gives hope to
many African nations still in the adolescent process of Becoming, and its
challenges reach farther than its own borders.
No comments:
Post a Comment