Potholes: Past and Present
The road trip from Accra to Kumasi was not for the faint of heart. The entire journey was 170 miles but it took us 6 hours to navigate across this deathtrap to visit the historic core of the Asante nation. Stories about highway mortality here are legendary; some pedestrians have been left for dead on the side of the potholed road, having been run over multiple times. The intermittent but heavy tropical rain didn’t deter our driver from putting pedal to the metal despite major flooding this week. As a coping strategy my colleagues fell asleep while I took photographs out the back window.
In Asante we toured the Manhyia Palace Museum, former residence of two Kings of the Asante Nation, Prempeh I and Prempeh II, and frankly, a bit of a disappointment compared to our afternoon tour of the Central Market, controlled exclusively by Ghanaian women in a country where paradoxically, domestic rights are far from settled or equal. I took no images inside Africa’s second largest open air market (photo: outside market), largely because the walk-through experience was fast, close, personal, like swimming naked downstream in a tiny tributary with thousands of your closest friends, joining confluence after confluence of primary-colored waterways. Color and smell are all around. Women and their children stood, sat, all smiles when they saw the pale-faced, floppy hat wearing Obrunis; each of them peddled wooden plates of goat meat, chicken, or guarded tables full of spices, plantains, umbrellas, bric-a-brac, mirrors and combs. Hello, how are you? they’d ask, reaching out to touch our sweaty, sun-screened hands. It was amazing. I received more high-fives in that market than I have in a lifetime.
Later, kids outside the ticket booths at the Manhyia Palace were trying to peddle tri-colored Ghanaian bracelets and inadvertently (really, it wasn’t all their fault) knocked my camera to the ground, rendering the new lens useless. Casey would later joke that we “just can’t have nice things”. Thank goodness for the backup HP camera!
The Palace Museum – in contrast to the rawness of the Central Market - featured life sized and freakishly realistic plastic effigies of former Kings and the present Monarch; but all the talk of gold and Kingship left me jumpy and queasy in a country where sanitation and water are needed more than pricey remembrances. I’d also just learned that the cost of the new Presidential Palace in Accra set Ghana back 45 million USD, 30 million of which came on loan from India. As Obama makes his way to Accra on July 10, it’ll be a proud moment for Ghana, but let’s hope the government doesn’t blow a wad of cash on glitzy jubilees and instead allows the President to see Ghana’s many faces. With its car-choked cities and plastic water bottles, Ghana plunges forward clumsily toward the Great Modernity, but the past (and its potholes) are still worth a visit. Photos 3 and 4: Cape Coast Slave Castles (Ben and myself).
The road trip from Accra to Kumasi was not for the faint of heart. The entire journey was 170 miles but it took us 6 hours to navigate across this deathtrap to visit the historic core of the Asante nation. Stories about highway mortality here are legendary; some pedestrians have been left for dead on the side of the potholed road, having been run over multiple times. The intermittent but heavy tropical rain didn’t deter our driver from putting pedal to the metal despite major flooding this week. As a coping strategy my colleagues fell asleep while I took photographs out the back window.
In Asante we toured the Manhyia Palace Museum, former residence of two Kings of the Asante Nation, Prempeh I and Prempeh II, and frankly, a bit of a disappointment compared to our afternoon tour of the Central Market, controlled exclusively by Ghanaian women in a country where paradoxically, domestic rights are far from settled or equal. I took no images inside Africa’s second largest open air market (photo: outside market), largely because the walk-through experience was fast, close, personal, like swimming naked downstream in a tiny tributary with thousands of your closest friends, joining confluence after confluence of primary-colored waterways. Color and smell are all around. Women and their children stood, sat, all smiles when they saw the pale-faced, floppy hat wearing Obrunis; each of them peddled wooden plates of goat meat, chicken, or guarded tables full of spices, plantains, umbrellas, bric-a-brac, mirrors and combs. Hello, how are you? they’d ask, reaching out to touch our sweaty, sun-screened hands. It was amazing. I received more high-fives in that market than I have in a lifetime.
Later, kids outside the ticket booths at the Manhyia Palace were trying to peddle tri-colored Ghanaian bracelets and inadvertently (really, it wasn’t all their fault) knocked my camera to the ground, rendering the new lens useless. Casey would later joke that we “just can’t have nice things”. Thank goodness for the backup HP camera!
The Palace Museum – in contrast to the rawness of the Central Market - featured life sized and freakishly realistic plastic effigies of former Kings and the present Monarch; but all the talk of gold and Kingship left me jumpy and queasy in a country where sanitation and water are needed more than pricey remembrances. I’d also just learned that the cost of the new Presidential Palace in Accra set Ghana back 45 million USD, 30 million of which came on loan from India. As Obama makes his way to Accra on July 10, it’ll be a proud moment for Ghana, but let’s hope the government doesn’t blow a wad of cash on glitzy jubilees and instead allows the President to see Ghana’s many faces. With its car-choked cities and plastic water bottles, Ghana plunges forward clumsily toward the Great Modernity, but the past (and its potholes) are still worth a visit. Photos 3 and 4: Cape Coast Slave Castles (Ben and myself).
2 comments:
A couple of things I noticed. First, quite a few stickers on vehichles appeared. I bet that they have a highly regulated beaura system. Secondly, the "houses" in the background of your outside-of-the-market shot render us enough imagination of the shopping abmiance there.
WuChun,
Good observations. I wish I'd taken more everyday life pictures, but sometimes it's so much harder to do when my favorite subject, Casey, is back at home.
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