Ghana at 50
Rob Taylor
On March 6, 2007, Ghana will be turning the big five-oh. If Canada’s national media does its job, you’ll hear a little about Ghana’s 50th. This is because Ghana’s anniversary is also Africa’s, as Ghana was the first African country to overthrow its colonial occupier post-WWII. With such historical weight behind it, this positive story out of Africa just might land a 30-second blurb at the end of a newscast. The image will probably be one of celebration: crowds gathering in the streets of Ghana’s capital, Accra, waving flags and cheering, as they did at independence in 1957. For many, this coverage will come as a needed respite from the flies-in-the-eyes reports on wars, plagues, and famines that usually dominate global reporting on Africa.
What you most likely won’t see in the news report is the space between those two contrasting images of Ghana — the place between jubilation and desolation where most Ghanaians live. More specifically, you won’t get a sense of the strange mixture of pride and shame that resides in the citizens of Accra during the lead-up to the Golden Jubilee celebrations.
Accra is ‘cleaning’ itself up, with the Accra Metropolitan Association (AMA) leading the charge. Taxi drivers, who often barely scrape together a living wage, are being ordered to wear uniforms. Traffic conductors in starched white hats are popping up all around the city, and police officers rove the streets demanding pedestrians walk only on the overcrowded sidewalks, not the street, and that they cross at designated crosswalks. Theirs is an impossible task, but they do it with determination, often sending people back across the street and ordering them to cross again, this time via the ‘proper’ route.
These changes are frivolous at worst. The real assaults, though, are being directed against those working in the “informal sector,” those whose jobs fall outside the realm of worker’s rights, minimum wages, and any sort of state-defended standard of living. Most notably, street vendors, who over the years have set up wooden-plank stalls from which they sell everything from vegetables to car batteries to running shoes, are being served eviction notices. Many areas of Accra have already been cleared of vendors, revealing the most criminal aspect of this practice: where their stalls once stood you can now make out the white lines the city once painted to designate the area as being authorised for street vending. In other words, people who built their stalls with the city’s blessing are now finding them torn down because the political tides (and some of the world’s television cameras) have, at least temporarily, shifted.
Hundreds of stalls have been shut down and thousands of people have lost what limited employment they formerly had. To make matters worse, unexplained fires have ravaged a number of Accra’s largest slums over the past few months. What caused the fires, and why they weren’t responded to quickly enough to save most of the buildings, are questions that are open for debate. There is no doubt, however, that the AMA’s refusal to let anyone rebuild in the slums in the name of ‘public safety’ is a direct assault on the city’s poorest.
And in the midst of this, average citizens find themselves more than a little torn between the wish to portray themselves and their city in the best possible light and the harsh actions that appear necessary to do so.
This temporary under-the-rug-sweeping of poverty, of course, is not unique to Ghana, or Africa, or the ‘Majority World’ in general. It is a pattern that repeats itself over and over again in some of the richest cities of the world — hopefully it is a pattern Vancouver will avoid in the lead up to the 2010 Olympics, though that seems doubtful.
Western ‘empire’
Where, then, should the blame lie for these aggressive actions against Accra’s poor? Granted, the federal government and the AMA should shoulder a good deal of it, as must the global trading systems that ensure that the city, country, and continent remain in a state of poverty. But even with the regularly sighted ‘villains’ of Africa — corruption, bad-governance, and trade abuse — hauled out for their usual tongue-lashing, a piece of the explanation for what is happening on the streets of Accra is still missing. After all, the richest cities in the world, with less poverty and (theoretically) better, more accountable governments, do virtually the same things whenever the world’s attention is drawn to them.
To me, then, there is something bigger at play here: our constant striving for something that I will refer to here as ‘empire.’ What I’m referring to is our constant individual and collective desire to fulfill a limitless potential, to ‘be all we can be.’ This concept isn’t monopolised by any one part of the political or social spectrum, but is held by everyone: as corporations seek forever-rising profits, so too homelessness advocates will settle for nothing short of the ‘eradication’ of poverty. It lies at the heart of Western capitalism, and the societies that embrace it. In these societies, the word enough all but disappears from the national vocabulary, with debates between those holding opposing views becoming endless tug-of-wars, full of violence and rhetoric, in which the notion of compromise appears laughable, at best.
Indeed, Canada and the rest of the West are so overcome with this notion of ‘empire’ that many living in the West, including, until recently, myself, have never known of an alternate mindset. When I moved to Accra in September 2006, though, I sensed something different rumbling under the surface here.
Ghana’s ‘empire’
The pace of life and work in Ghana is notably slower than in the Western world. Foreign governments and aid agencies regularly voice frustration with their difficulty in getting anything done within a meaningful timeframe. As work days move slowly, so does corporate initiative. Dan, a Ghanaian friend of mine (who works for a government agency and sells satellite dishes on the side), once told me a story about a Chinese businessman he met who said that if all his global competitors were Ghanaian, the competition would be so limited that “he would never have to work another day in his life.” This does not mean that the people are lazy, or that an enterprising spirit does not exist in Ghana; I have never seen a country with more small-scale and family-owned businesses. Instead, it means that that enterprising spirit is tempered. Once people reach a certain level of material comfort and security, they seem satisfied, preferring to devote further energies to their family and community rather than to ever-increasing profits.
Obviously, this is a gross overstatement. Many Ghanaians, including my satellite-dish-selling friend, have caught the ‘empire’ bug as much as anyone in the West. And who can blame them, when such striving yields new televisions, cars, and sprawling mansions, such as those that can be seen dotting the hills on the outskirts of Accra. Accra is filled with educated, eager young professionals, and also highly motivated, if under-educated, young people working in the informal sector as vendors, day labourers, et cetera, who are always looking for that next leg up. These people stand as Ghana’s future.
Here and now, however, these ‘empire’-minded individuals, though they dominate the political and economic spheres, do not completely control society (as they do in the West), allowing for the light of an alternative lifestyle, and an alternative state of mind, to slip through the cracks. And in that alternative, I find a great deal of hope. Western crisis
We all know that Western societies are in trouble. I could repeat all the stats about North American crime and incarceration rates, depression levels, suicides, et cetera. We’ve had it explained to us a million times over. The conclusion is that Western, capitalist societies are good for the wallet, but bad for the soul.
The material gains we have garnered through our ‘empire building’ should not be taken for granted, but should equally not lead us into complacency. Life in the West is good on many fronts, but it is achingly obvious that it can be much better if we learn lessons from those outside our societies who still understand the meaning of enough. More urgently, perhaps, it doesn’t seem a stretch to suggest that the ultimate solution for our unsustainable consumption, and the resulting rampant pollution and environmental damage, must come in the form of our embracing some concept of social and economic ‘contentment.’ The problem is we don’t have much time.
Ghana’s crisis
The local government’s campaign to clean up Accra, and its subsequent attack on the city’s poor, is a strong sign that Ghana is going the way of the West. The plan here is not to honestly celebrate both the city’s flaws and its virtues, but to apply a thick layer of concealer over its perceived blemishes. It is a quick, substantively meaningless, and costly performance motivated by that strange brew of pride and shame that lies at the core of insecurities held by all ‘empire’-minded people: pride in the successes and vibrancies of the city, but shame in all those places where the city still does not measure up to its peers.
That this is happening in Accra reveals not only that Western, ‘empire’-based ideas are dominating the city’s political discourse, but also that the conquest of an ‘empire’-based state of mind over a state of mind based on contentment is not simply being played out in the hearts and minds of the city’s inhabitants, but is physically being forced upon them in the streets. What can be the result of this, other than the further invasion of a sense of inadequacy and shame? Gha na’s street-clearing campaign should be viewed, therefore, as one small step in the long march towards the Westernisation of both the country and the spirit of its people.
A celebration
A vital caveat should be made here: the point of this report has not been to argue that any of this should not be happening. While I do oppose the street-clearing in Accra, I cannot argue against the larger process at play: the adoption of a Western ‘empire’-based economy and state of mind. I do not feel it is my place or my right to tell anyone they should not strive for, or be granted, any of the luxuries of the West. To ask another society to remain content living in a state of relative poverty, while next door they see people living in affluence, is as absurd as it is outrageous. In coming years, with its young professionals leading the way, Ghana will become as ‘empire’-minded as the rest of us, and in response only irresponsible global citizens will complain.
My only point, then, is that on that day when the last vestiges of a ‘content’ Ghana disappear, it will be a significant loss for the planet. We ‘empire builders,’ who are missing a large portion of what it means to be healthy, happy humans, will have driven to extinction the key to a potential solution. For now, however, 50 years in, there still exists in Ghana a potent alternative to our current social and economic state of mind. We have time, however fleeting, to learn from it, and in so doing so, find a middle ground between pride and shame, between skyscrapers and slums, where we can live together, sustainably. That, before anything else, seems like something worth celebrating.