Waiting for Godot (Khayelitsha)

The two men sit outside a container waiting there in the middle of the field. There is an ease about them. We've caught them at a comfortable lull in the conversation or perhaps they are pondering a fond memory or the whereabouts of so-and-so. Their posture is relaxed, their clasped hands are mirrored. They've shared many stories, they'll share many more.

The one, perched on a couple of cement blocks, sports a plaid cap, a light pink polo shirt and slightly loose black trousers. Second hand. The other's multi-coloured off-brand Kangol bucket hat underlines the point. They are not rich obviously, for it goes without saying that the rich do not sit waiting outside containers in the middle of fields.

The power lines loom overhead, the hum of Tesla's crucifixes perhaps crackling occasionally to punctuate the high voltage cancerous flow. A basin sits to their right and there are a couple of piles behind them, clothes, it appears, that they are in no hurry to wash. The puddles of (dirty) water we assume do not disturb them now if they ever did. They are at ease in their patch of the the world. If it weren't for their skin tone, one would be tempted to call them Vladimir and Estragon, for indeed they do appear to be Waiting for Godot.

The earlier photo, taken at a further remove, is more classical. With its wider angle it captures more of the bluer sky, and places the men in their proper scale and perspective: insignificant like the discarded beer bottle at the curb, twenty meters away from the faded green container. Although it was winter in South Africa and it had snowed in Johannesburg for the first time in years, the environs of Cape Town could count on the milder weather that the men are enjoying. I understand why the photographer zoomed in, however. It's those details: that package at their feet, that blue plastic bag stuck under the locked container, the expressions on their faces, it's not so much resignation and despair as wist. Rather than the theater of the absurd, call the scene a mere portrait of modernity. I welcome other readings.

...

The Khayelitsha township near Cape Town, South Africa remains a foreboding place: poor, underdeveloped and a visible reminder of the lasting legacy of apartheid.

Still, even among the informal slum surroundings that might depress the most hardy,

there is a dynamism among the people that live here that belies the script that many have written for them.

Amidst the tin shacks (these days without the asbestos roofing of yore)

and the containers

those improvised, repurposed and ubiquitous containers

and under the shadow of the electrical pylons and power plants,

you'll find shops,

churches of sorts

and, more importantly, the people with more ideas than you can absorb.

There's no time to dwell on any notion of nostalgia or the tragicomedy of poverty. This is the terrain of the hustle.

I trust the future is being written in Khayelitsha.

Soundtrack for this note

As is my custom, a playlist to augment this thoughts.

• Omar - I Don't Mind The Waiting
  The album is titled There's Nothing Like This. I still can't believe it never received a US release.
• Dave Barker & The Upsetters - Sitting And Waiting
  Lee "Scratch" Perry was on a roll
• The O'Jays - What Am I Waiting for?
  Survival is the name of the game.
• Courtney Pine - I'm still waiting
  There's a sweetness and sense of ease that runs through the Closer to Home album.

Obligatory disclaimer: I skipped the obvious songs about waiting since I was aiming for optimism rather than the blues (Prince's Still Waiting, Bob Marley's Waiting in Vain or say George Michael and Aretha Franklin's I knew you were waiting for me etc.) Also: these photos were taken by The Wife during a research trip in July 2007. I still haven't geared up to write up my own observations from my time in South Africa.

File under: South Africa, slums, photography, culture, Africa, life, poverty, containers, observation, perception, travel, Khayelitsha,Observers are worried, toli

The Books of Nima

A note I've been meaning to write for perhaps 6 months to "Sir Sky", the author of The Sea and the Bells; a conversation about Nima, a neighbourhood of the mind.

Part 9 of the Things Fall Apart series, this time an entry under the banner of Social Living...

I was looking over your shoulder during your year in Ghana, perusing your travelogue that I came across in a case of web serendipity (the Ghana tag at Technorati, in case you're wondering). When I first read you, and learned that you were going to be staying in Nima, I was apprehensive. Yours would not be the typical volunteer or expat experience; you weren't destined to have the servants, the driver and car, or the air-conditioned office. I don't know if you knew what you were getting yourself into, that you'd be going local and doing the slum housing thing and worse. As an Accra boy, albeit transplanted to Cambridge, I know all about the school of hard knocks called Nima. It looms large in the Ghanaian consciousness, even if there are many worse places these days as you know. It's very far from ideal as an introduction to a visitor.

The fact that you were willing to give of yourself to us was very generous, and I don't know if Ghana fully reciprocated the generosity... The years from 1982 to 1988 broke the back of the Ghanaian people, and ever since, we've been struggling to recover from scarcity and arbitrariness. Thus we demand a lot of outsiders and of anyone who's been abroad. This is changing, and our current quiet stability is restoring our confidence in parts; still, not everyone has read that script, and the neediness can wear you down. For what it's worth, you're not the only one labelled oburoni; my mid-Atlantic self gets that designation every now and then when I'm home.

I was tempted at many stages to jump in: to suggest creature comforts or avenues that would have made things less wrenching for you. But as is the norm on this web, I remained dark matter, absorbing your energy. Still in mitigation of the head nods I omitted to send your way, I think your experience is all the more richer for being yours alone. Like your country's peacekeepers, you are one of Canada's great exports, and after your experience in Ghana, you'll breeze through anything back home.

You lived through countless lights out and experienced the wasted time spent dealing with simple things like water, food and transportation. And of course, there were those untrustworthy and maddeningly inconsistent people... It's the simple fruits of poverty; we lack infrastructure, physical and otherwise.

You had the daily struggle in that library without resources, where you taught the adult literary classes and wrangled to teach those neighbourhood children. The ironies and absurdities about that task are worthy of a novel and hopefully you'll write one.

Osu library was the scene of some of my fondest memories of my childhood. It was well stocked and the librarians cared and worried about you. No one could ever tear me away from it, even at closing time. It was where I learned that books and ideas are important, where the parental challenges were investigated and puzzled over. Those books were a long winding road, to be read with care as their nuggets would reveal themselves, or the inconsistencies of an argument would appear in relief in the reading light. My greatest heartache about Ghana today is that very few children are getting the same opportunity. True, our lingua franca these days might be radio, television or this internet thing, but really, how many Ghanaians are participating in this conversational web? If only I could hear those missing voices... The notion that so few in my country can bury their heads in books on weekday afternoons or on a lazy Saturday morning at the library is cause for much distress. And don't get me started about what's happened to the Legon university bookstore. Must everything be utilitarian? Is a country without whimsy worth worrying about?

I think the emotional violence could have been avoided, and, certainly the physical violence should have been avoided. My heart leaped at such times, but still I kept silent and read on. Nima is such an insular place, it is very wary of outsiders as you probably found. In the past it was where rural migrants came to partake of the Accra dream in the Gold Coast. Thus it has always been messy, and developed in fits and starts as befits the residence of those who live on the fringe.

Even today, two shacks away from the homes of proud middle-class schoolteachers you'll find the "Nima boys", selling 'wee', guns or worse, right under the Kanda highway and close to the police station. The boys can always be counted on to roust any political opposition come election time, and their hard knocks usually come for cheap. True, the stereotypes of Nima boys as uncouth, brash, vicious, and ill-educated are extreme, but they carry a kernel of truth about a small minority that lingers even in the relative prosperity of the moment. Across is a chop bar serving the best banku and fetri in town; Auntie Maggie's spot is packed during the day and there's nice fresh tilapia at night, shantytown chic as it were. Just around the corner is a drinking spot with people playing oware or dominoes and downing bottles of Star beer and Guinness in the early evening. Nowadays there are the occasional interruptions when they'll whip out the latest mobile phone ostentatiously: "talking loud and saying nothing".

But you saw all that and more, you saw how people "disciplined children" and how they meddled in each other's business — or not. As you found out, that "it takes a village to raise a child" business isn't happening much in the slums of Nima; too often it is the garden-variety anomie and indifference of urban life, something that wouldn't be out of place in any big city. I saw the same mix in Soweto a decade ago, although that was more upscale at the time, and well, Inman Square is what it is. It is true that given a few decades of development, Nima could become the Catford of Accra, and, believe it or not, it is much better today than it was in the sixties and seventies, but perhaps that progress is cold comfort for the struggles you faced.

I dug your observations on the press and on street life of Accra. Your look at the street cleaning exercises that took place earlier in the year was priceless. In the year 2006, they're finally worried about rubbish and overflowing gutters! And only for two weekends. Ah yes, that culture of maintenance that was so evident in your encounters with us. Perhaps you too have the journalistic impulse. And that water shortage in certain parts of town, Accra is straining at the seams; I was in Ghana at the time and noted as much, although we had water in our neighbourhood. You picked up on our tro-tro wisdom, our folktales, and the languid way in which we view the world. You even taught me that proverb from Northern Ghana:

"Trust God implicitly but always tie your camel up at night."

I don't know if that's where Ronald Reagan got his "trust but verify" shtick, but it's close. Still, Kweku Ananse's cunning and laziness can be a curse; living by your wits, hustling in short, is no substitute for the prosaic work of development, although it can be quite enjoyable.

I suspect that a lot of Ghana has rubbed off on you; we can be quite infectious (and not just in matters of public health). Do be careful that you don't break out into pidgin when you're back home interviewing for a job; our deconstruction of the English language has its own musical logic, and not everyone is ready for it.

Take care-oh.

And you saw the other side too, the havens of those expats who saw Ghana as a holiday, who kept to themselves and didn't engage with the country and its people. Hell they might as well have been living in Eden; your garden was good old Nima. Well at least you got to know us intimately; that has to count for something. We claim you as our soul sister, and will keep your heart hostage in our town.

You even reported on the beginnings of the cholera outbreak that I encountered last Christmas. When my father began to warn me about taking precautions if I decided to eat out in town, I nodded my head knowingly; for a time you were my favourite Ghanaian newspaper.

And of course there were those malarial episodes, the fevers, the Larium dreams and those hallucinations. How much energy was dissipated in those sweaty nights and days? Those mosquitos, and their cargo of plasmodium falciparum; they are a poverty tax. We may throw our herbal medicine and "bitters" at them, but that is after the fact, to deal with the symptoms. The full panoply of mosquito nets, sprays and lotions counts for nought if you don't deal with sewers and the ever-present pools of stagnant water, or if parents will use their children's nets. And we all know about drug resistance: Darwin's evolution is intelligent design. Still, as they say, mosquitos don't discriminate. Not in Ghana, not on the island of Reunion, and certainly not in Cambridge. We're all singing the West Nile Blues these days. Some call it globalization; I know it as the Mosquito Principle.

You may only have lived in Nima for a while but you got the full Ghanaian experience, unvarnished and cacophonous; three centuries taking place simultaneously in those twisted back alleys. I'll admit to a sense of wistfulness in seeing my country anew through your eyes, and I want to hear more of your thoughts going forward as you carry Ghana in you. I hope we don't weigh too heavily on you. I wish I had been there on the ground; it's hard to be living vicariously through a Canadian woman.

As you'd expect, it's very painful for me as a proud Ghanaian that, almost 50 years after independence, we are still relying, nay depending on you, to teach us how to read, or even to school us about the importance of a book. To read, for God's sake. Hundreds of years after our chiefs started sending their children to Europe to learn these things and we haven't internalized the lessons... But then it works in the other direction, the West relies on people like me to make sense of its world - the technology world in my case. And your southern neighbour, that United States of Anomie, can be a similar school of hard knocks, and not just for lowly immigrants; you don't need to visit New Orleans to get the daily evidence. Still, I wish the cultural interplay was more balanced, that we could each walk tall, rather than smile sheepishly as we do and say, "Only in Ghana" or "That's how it is in Ghana". As if we can't do anything about it. As if it doesn't have to be this way.

You quoted Anthony Hopkins playing C.S. Lewis in Shadowlands:

"Experience is a brutal teacher. But you learn. My God, you learn."

I'll suggest in response, our poet Kwesi Brew's book, African Panorama, and I'll quote one of his elegiac poems. You should recognize the subject matter.

The Slums of Nima

Three neighbours met,
And after a hurried, "I give you rest"
The two young men stood aside for the old man
to pass and then picked their way
in the opposite direction towards the alley on the left.
They were thieves who robbed with violence
But still they stood aside for the old man
And he thanked them.

In a bereaved world questions and comments
Fall on unhearing ears.
Only silence, understanding and
Belonging can put
A blind man's stick in the hands
Of a searcher in that night.

The crumbling walls have leaned
On their chests for decades!
The toll of breathing has shredded
Their lungs, and their eyes are sore
With the smoke of the wicker lamps.
And now we all stand at the edge
Of an abyss
Afraid to plunge headlong, or
Return to the dark of the night with them!

Ghanaians are natural storytellers. We are cultural interpreters and urban griots; not for us Anglo-Saxon brevity. Even as we consider Kwesi Brew's abyss, or that heart of darkness, you'll hear the musical laughs and see our urge to understand. We want to change the perspective and open things up through observation and humour. As he wrote in another poem, and I won't give the punchline away, things must be sweet for Ghanaians:

How else could they laugh
Like they do when they should weep;
Remembering the voiceless days of the past.

It is quite poetic that you arranged for your class to travel outside Accra - to the beach no less, and even managed to get them that helicopter ride over the city. We are all so caught up in our black boxes, strangers in our own country. It is eye-opening to glimpse those different perspectives, and you too were being a cultural interpreter, making people see themselves anew. It was a small victory in your ongoing journey.

I really hope you don't take your journal down as you threatened recently. The pearls of experience therein are too rich to be simply discarded in the dustbin of the lost web. Allow Google to stumble over your throwaway experiments - they provide comfort even for an audience of one. I dug a lot of the writing (without a doubt, you're on the road to many books). The sound of a voice trying to make sense of an unfamiliar, frustrating yet endearing environment, the large and the small observations, all these things make for a historical document done in best tradition of the web style. The Sea and the Bells, at least that year's version, is a great snapshot of Ghana in the years 2005-2006, a personal introduction to be sure, but it constitutes a compendium of small things to be duly celebrated.

As you might guess, my preferred response to Things Fall Apart is small things: short cuts and bite-sized conversations that engage in the marketplace of ideas. I know you only as "Sir Sky" and the conversation has been one-sided until now. Consider this my opening gambit, my "so what's your name?" approach. I hope you like my brand of small talk; it's known as toli.

Dig: I'm sending some books to the Osu library. I hope it's still there and that someone will receive them. I can only hope that people are still reading. I've been carrying them all these years but never did anything about them; they make a glorious floorscraper. They'll be delivered in your name, and inscribed with the word Nima.

A belated head nod to you.

Next: Dilemmas.

See also: Poetry as Cultural Memory

File under: Ghana, Nima, Accra, Africa, life, experience, urban, slums, conversation, literature, poetry, Kwesi Brew, web, serendipity, observation, culture, interpretation, development, infrastructure, glue, perception, history, Canada, globalization, essay, wist, Social Living, Things Fall Apart, toli

On an Ambiguous Adventure

A short note to Kenya Hudson who unilaterally declared an end to her blog experiment the aptly-named Ambiguous Adventure...

A couple of comments/observations:

Those who research the blogging phenomenom have noted that:

• The vast majority of blogs are abandonned after 90 days.
• Most bloggers experience an existential crisis at some point. Usually this comes down to the blog not living up to their expectations. There have been numeous high-profile instances of this.

I've noticed, in the past few months, that life has intruded more than a little on your ambitious adventure causing a little matter of ambiguity to come into the picture.

I believe that you're in good company and 10+ months of blogging would be well beyond the call of duty as those statistics would attest. We all blog for different reasons and get pulled in different directions. For my part, my crisis came after 6 months when various insanities at work and other life issues raised their head - some of which continue to this day.

My blogging hiatus and its consequent resolution came from a curious direction and I was surprised that my voice returned, refreshed by a 96 year old woman who calls me Frank and who caused the discovery of a community I didn't know I had.

But to engage you a little, Kenya, I'll simply suggest this: there's a paucity of voices such as yours on the web.

I am hoping that you'll rather consider this period a time out rather than an end. Unilateral acts are a little much in this day and age. Just ask the Croats about declaring independence in the past decade knowing that opportunist Milosevic types were itching to take you on and the costs they have suffered. Or take these recent ones for example which led to this: Zimbabwe Slum Dwellers Are Left With Only Dust. Metaphorically, and with some tongue in cheek, you're leaving your slum readers in the dust a la Robert Mugabe and lobbing some tear gas surreptitiously supplied via Malawi to boot.

Thus I'll also suggest a different track. I have long seen this web thing as a conversation engine and even though some conversations fizzle out, many will pick up the strands and you've started quite a number that we, your readers, are all trying to digest and weave together.

And will you resist the opening about Mugabe's continuing misdeeds (and the sanctions-breaking Malawi connection) that begs for your kind of dissection? If I wasn't spread so thin I'd be weighing in myself on the idea of a government preparing for over a year for the propitious moment to raze the accomodation of and destroy the livelihoods of 300,000+ of its citizens without notice and moving them into camps under the guise of "driving out the rubbish" (and political opposition) - something that reminds me of what happened repeatedly in Nigeria under military rule in the slums of Lagos and other towns; a government so far removed from the everyday concerns of those it is supposed to serve. I've touched on slums and squalor in the past, I wonder what you thought about that piece or my other ramblings.

And since I know you don't confine yourself to Africa, how about this one: Bitter divide over plan to wall in Rio's slums. Should we be building walls around modern day ghettos (to prevent the collateral damage of stray bullets ) or deal with the social ills that give rise to the gangs, Bus 174 episodes and Cities of God?

I'll also ask you some of the questions that I've been asking the technical audiences I've been speaking to since the African toli has been scarce of late:

• How did you get on the web?
• What caused you to land your flag on this here internet?
• What caused you, your friends, or family to live, shop and commune on this here web?
• And what will it take to make you stay?

The internet is full of mysterious wonders. As an example, The Girlfriend and I were emailing links to her graduation pictures to friends and family and all of a sudden we saw some photos from the graduation at Tech, the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology at Kumasi A friend in Ghana, upon seeing her photos, signed up to Flickr and spent a few minutes uploading their graduation photos at some Internet cafe or other (or maybe it was a couple of hours, internet connections being what they are in Ghana). I can't tell you how wonderful it was to see the colourful glimpses of graduation done Ghana-style among the global graduation tag at Flickr even if only temporarily (the photos were since made private for some reason much like you're heading for the private sphere). And indeed we've already seen some great visions of the Ghana goes Flickr meme. Great sights and the sound of those voices again...

Lastly, a matter of serendipity:

Last summer, I lost my copies of the novel of your eponymous blog, Cheikh Hamidou Kane's L'aventure ambiguë both the original and the decent translation. Well I think I lent them to someone, I'm always giving out my best books and have for example, bought Camara Laye's L'enfant noir and Ken Saro-Wiwa's Sozaboy at least 5 times, not to mention Milan Kundera's Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Julian Barnes' A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters or Patrick Chamoiseau's Texaco which speaks cogently to the slum life that is the modern wold.

Rather than heading to Schoenhof's Foreign Books and bankrupting myself on books as I normally do since my wishlist is so huge and I too believe in compulsive book buying, I've been periodically checking Amazon and eBay for a used copy. Thus it was that last Thursday, some kind soul sent me a pristine copy of the book which arrived in a battered envelope (it had been advertised as being in acceptable condition). This internet thing is something: receive one of African literature's greatest works for $4.50 after just 2 clicks?

That I received the book on the same day that you apparently went all formal and declared a case of unsustainable blog development is a cause for some head-scratching on my part.

I'll be re-reading said ambiguous adventure in coming weeks, right after I'm done with Suzan Lori-Park's Getting Mother's Body which you should also read if you haven't already. A friend hipped me to it and its vibrant and cacophonous sound of the African-American experience is asserting itself in my ear whenever I can spare fifteen minutes - far more refreshing than the increasingly sclerotic Toni Morisson. And Lori-Parks has more groove than almost any living writer or playwright; I hope you managed to catch Topdog/Underdog if it passed your town (there's even a DVD about the struggle and creative process behind that great achievement. By the way, did you hear that Terry, and by transposition, Stella now has now lost her groove in a mix of sexual confusion, age and cultural misunderstanding. That could be the next entertainment in our silly season of discontent now that MJ has been released from a hysterical witchhunt.

I've been looking forward to engage you in the conversation about the ambiguous adventure, asking for example how the novel measured up with Mariama Ba's Une si longue lettre which I would have thought was more in your line (which again has a good translation). This short note is turning out to be a long letter... And for the record, what caused you to go with The Cheikh's words in your allusive blog title?

And what about Kwame Gyekye's Tradition and Modernity that I spotted on your reading list a few months back, I read it last year and have alluded to it in passing. We find ourselves mediating tradition and modernity daily and I wonder what the analogues of the blogging world were in the traditional past. Gyekye would have some provocative thought on the issue I'm sure. I also picked up a used copy of his African Cultural Values. All secondary school children should read it and not just Ghanaians or Nigerians, all American kids would do well to get some of his flavour and learn about cultures that have influenced the world but that aren't normally advocated. And why the hell is the book out of print in this country? Isn't he the greatest? A philosopher from the old school full of scholarship and learning and still vitally relevant today. I've been meaning to start that conversation on tradition and modernity for a while. But will I have a forum? And, if so, will you lead the way?

Do take your time before you resurface, I know it's difficult to regain balance. I fear there is much I don't do justice to myself. Still I firmly believe in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's maxim:

Any idea which couldn't stand a few decades of neglect isn't worth anything.

Thus a literal and figurative head nod in your direction Kenya.

I remain subscribed in Bloglines.

File under: Africa, Kenya Hudson, blogging, life, balance, conversation, communities, web, literature, politics, slums, letters, philosophy, ambiguity, adventure, Ghana, writing, toli

On slums, squalor and Sodom and Gomorrah

The LA Times continues its series on 'living with pennies'. this time focusing on the physical living conditions of a large portion of humanity.

Squalor everywhere, but still this is a neighborhood:

Plastic bags, knotted and sagging, soar across the slum late at night.

They bounce off tin roofs, splatter against mud walls patched with tin cans and tumble down the steep hillside, where they sprout every few feet like plastic weeds. In the morning, they are trampled into the ground.

After 33 years in this shantytown known as Deep Sea, Cecilia Wahu barely notices the bags anymore. They are called "flying toilets," and because no one here has a bathroom, everyone has thrown a few.

"My dream, before I die, is to live in a permanent house, not a shack," says Wahu, 66, who has rheumy eyes and is missing teeth. "It could be small, but it must have a nice kitchen, a real bed and its own toilet."

That is her dream. Her reality is an 8-by-8-foot mud hut.

Survival in Deep Sea is a matter of staying above an endless tide of mud and waste. All that separates Wahu from the filth is a dirt floor, thin plank doors and a stubborn sense that even this place is a neighborhood.

About 1,500 people are crammed into this treacherously steep four-acre warren. They live on less than a dollar a day, and this is the best shelter they can afford.

There is one water faucet, one toilet and no electricity. The homes are jumbles of tin, red-baked mud and sticks that barely keep from tumbling into the fetid Gitathuru River below.

Tropical rains eat away at the walls. Roving bands of thugs threaten to break down homes unless they are paid protection money. Wealthy neighbors across the river lobby the government to clear the hillside.

The future of Africa is bound up in such places.

The whole article is worth reading, it deals with Kenya but it pretty much captures the flavor of what I've seen in Ghana. I suppose slums are the same everywhere in the world whether it's Lagos, Mumbai, Port-au-Prince, Haiti or Rio. On the other hand, by concentrating on the physical squalor, one misses a little of the color and vitality of those places and the people who live there. The bustling nature, the loud sounds, laughter, crying. People living in objective squalor are sometimes the most house-proud whether as in the places in my own experience (Abutia, James Town and Aburi) or the houses I visited in Soweto in 1994. Simply concentrating on these places as an accumulation of tin shacks, or mud huts, as the case may be, that are festering with disease is not to tell the whole story. Human beings can, and do, adapt to anything; even in these conditions we are all jostling for a foothold and way out. Not to mention that we've all seen Beverly Hills and Manhattan, even if only on CNN or the movies.

Growing up in Ghana, one was always aware of the poor living conditions. The poverty in the villages was bad enough but the sheer physicality of city slums bring everything to the fore. Poverty often juxtaposed in startling proximity to great wealth and luxury. James Town, where the Ofosu-Amaah family home is, is right next to the Castle, the seat of the government, and is in many ways a very depressing place. But then things change. As a child, Nima occupied a place in my imagination as the worst slum in Accra, a rough and miserable place; the stereotypes of Nima boys was as uncouth, brash, vicious, ill-educated - your garden-variety slum boys. A decade or so on, many of those things are still true but things are changing and it's not just better education. Physically, the shacks are sturdier and perhaps more sanitary - maybe built with tin and the occasional bags of concrete, rather than the asbestos and mud of old. I guess the same is true these days in Soweto, the 'notorious' township of old is now marketed for tourism, rebranded the 'largest urban residential area'. It's a struggle but it is not a static state. Home improvement is not just popular in the US or UK.

There's a slum in Accra called Sodom and Gomorrah (the link is to a photo essay on it which says it all). The reason it earned that biblical name is quite obvious; it is the worst of the worst - at least in Ghana circa 2001-present. (Nima boys might even fear to tread there). Governments have been trying to demolish it for the longest time. It is unsafe, insanitary, lawless and all the things one would expect. Here is a good piece about it:

End of the road for 'Sodom and Gomorrah' squatters

On arrival in Accra the first point of call is this 'no man's land', which is succour for the disadvantaged in Accra. Soon, and as is common with slums in some parts of the world, the place became a hideout for armed robbers, prostitutes, drug pushers and all kinds of criminals-hence the name 'Sodom and Gomorrah'. The people sleep, eat, and relieve themselves in the open, making it unfit for human habitation

In view of the disorderly nature of life in the area, successive governments have tried to give the lagoon and its surrounding some face-lift. In fact, plans to make the place a resort has been on the drawing board for a long time, but the political will to initiate the project has held it down this far. Doing that means dislodging the hundreds of thousands of squatters from a land that means everything to them and with that, jeopardising their survival

Early this year, the government obtained a Kuwaiti Fund loan to implement the "Korle Lagoon Ecological Restoration Project." Under the project, government is expected to dredge the lagoon and restore its surroundings to a green belt and recreational facility. This is because the Lagoon is near Ghana's premier hospital- the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital, which has been affected by the lagoon’s current deplorable state. To kick start the project, in April this year, the Accra Metropolitan Assembly (AMA), the authority running Accra's local government asked the squatters to pack and leave.

This case of has attracted the NGOs worrying about the human rights of the squattors, for example see this: Pending forced eviction of 30,000 dwellers at Agbogbloshie in Accra, Ghana

Over 30,000 squatters at a squatter camp at Agbogbloshie market-a suburb of Accra in Ghana referred to as Sodom and Gomorrah could suffer forced eviction shortly if a writ filed for an injunction to restrain the Accra Metropolitan Assembly (AMA) from carrying out its planned action is rejected by the High Court in Accra.

Knowing the particulars of the case of Sodom and Gomorrah, I'm actually glad that it will eventually be demolished. The current government in Ghana is all about due process, going by the book for 4 years with the squatters. This is unlike the famously arbitrary and often brutal practices of our Nigerian brothers that still seem to continue even under civilian rule (Obansanjo in civilian life still the unsentimental of the military general he was just decades ago).

Regardless, it is only a matter of degree between a squatter's camp and James Town. The point is to capture the totality of the experience.

One of my favourite novels is Texaco by Patrick Chamoiseau - the wonderful 'word scratcher' of Martinique. I'll review it later but here's a synopsis:

"Through his narrator, Marie-Sophie Laborieux, a daughter of slaves, he chronicles 150 years in the history of Martinique, starting with the birth of Marie-Sophie's beloved father, Esternome, on a sugar plantation sometime in the early 19th century. It ends with her founding Texaco, a teeming shanty town built on the grounds of an old oil refinery on the outskirts of Fort-de-France, poised on the edge of a city that constantly threatens to engulf it".

Chamoiseau begins in the present with the arrival of an urban planner, whom the residents of Texaco mistake for Christ. Marie-Sophie must now become Texaco's protectress, for only she can dissuade the urban planner from ordering her anarchic quarter razed to the ground. Like Schehezarade before her in Arabian Nights, she relies on storytelling - wonderful, wonderful stories about the history of Texaco and its denizens.

"The fellow that we would call the Christ appeared. He was hit by the stone... When they brought him to me, I told him of Texaco like I just told you, from my Esternome to my Irene. He was sitting before me, finishing my aged rum, closing his eyes sometimes over scraps of pain, opening them to look at me intensely. When I was quiet, his eye shone a wee bit. Now that he knew the bulk of the stories, I told him he could unleash his bulldozers and raze all, and destroy all, but that he should know that we will stand, up front, me first, as from time immemorial.

The slum of Texaco is itself a character in the novel but it is this fierce sentiment of the people therein that interests me. Dickens, writing about poorhouses in the 19th century, would have approved of the panache of Chamoiseau, but surely would be dismayed that the conditions he so richly detailed back then are still fodder for art and the lot of so many today, indeed "as from time immemorial".

See also: The Books of Nima

For some Ghanaian literature on slums try Bill Marshall's Bukom, Mohammed Naseehu Ali's more recent The Prophet of Zongo Street and Kwesi Brew's poetry especially The Slums of Nima discussed here.

File under: Africa, culture, observation, perception, poverty, toli, Ghana, slums, Kenya, Nigeria, South Africa, literature, Martinique, Caribbean, Chamoiseau, toli