TRAVELLING IN SILENCE…

I never had anyone advising me on the sensitive subject of marriage as a young boy growing up. All I knew were from my intuition, what I had read from books, and friends. This sort of preparation was hardly adequate for the rough life of adult relationships, not to talk of marriage. I had lived an orderly and regimented life all my life but here I was, with everything upended. I had been brought up to follow rules, and although I had been slightly rebellious in secondary school boarding house, I believed in the rules and regimented lifestyle. I had had a plan, a script I had planned to follow scrupulously from my teenage years: high school, university, girlfriend, job, marriage, mortgage, and children. It was all stupid if I look back now.

A light misting rain had been sifting down most of the day and here it was still, prickling at me. The air was crisp and clean. My whiskey was getting warm, the pork cold. At the moment, the music paused. I felt deeply disoriented. I sat in the car in front of the house staring at the screen of the cell phone as I typed a text. My nostrils flared.

The sun continued its ascent and the light grew a little brighter. The air was damp and intense, chilly and slow. It was the kind of air that kept football players on the pitch all day. The kind of air that holds in suspension all that floats in its orbit. What was it with pubs in Ghana? They all seemed to be in the habit of playing loud music on giant speakers that are clearly hazardous to the ears. Was that part of the culture?

A few weeks ago I found myself in a conversation with a complete stranger at the bus terminal of the public transport company, STC, in Kumasi. Whilst waiting for the bus at the terminal, this stranger had invited me to share a glass of whiskey with him. He was holding a part-used bottle of Chivas Regal whiskey. I wasn’t really keen but I figured the drink could help me sleep during the journey. And I knew I needed a friend to talk to at that moment so this stranger was almost a heaven-sent angel to me right then. He put the two chipped glasses and the whiskey on a table at the far left corner of the cafeteria. I pulled the chair from underneath the table and sat across him, watching where our bus will be parked before loading for the journey. He pulled the cork from the bottle and poured two generous measures – the first one was for me and the other was for himself. I admired his dexterity with the cork. He was focused and precise. We both took a sip, placing the glasses back on the table. I longed for ice but it was a hopeless longing because there was no way we could get ice at that time at the cafeteria. It was 4a.m. The curious eyes of the other passengers were focused on us. I perversely enjoyed and wondered what they might have been thinking.

The cafeteria was poorly lit. There was no waitress around except for the lone lanky man behind the bar that sold only non-alcoholic beverages – apparently that was a ‘management’ decision. There was no music and the room was unusually silent. Most of the passengers were dozing off, waiting for the bus. It was my interlocutor who first spoke after our initial sips. ‘Are you okay?’, he asked. How was I supposed to answer that to a stranger whose name I didn’t even yet know. No, I wasn’t okay but why did he care? It was later I was to learn Tony was a clinical psychologist. Apparently, there had been something about my gait whilst moving to the ticket booth which had convinced him that I was in pain and needed a friend at that moment. Why would a clinical psychologist have a bottle of Chivas in his luggage at the wee-hours of a Sunday dawn? I am yet to ask Tony that question.

I evaded his question and instead spoke to him about a playlist I had been compiling on my laptop earlier in the night. Tony was big on music just as me and his knowledge of the world of music greatly impressed me.

There was still mist in the air. I was talking about the history of inter-modal shipping containers. Tony seemed interested and listened attentively. I was explaining the concept of twenty-foot-equivalents units or TEUs as used in shipping to him. If he was impressed, he kept it to himself. Then he uttered his words; ‘you look stressed. I think you are suffering from depression.’ I laughed a mirthless laughter at that. I countered; ‘how can you simply tell if a person is depressed just by observing his gait? Isn’t that too simplistic?’ He did not answer. I found Tony very shrewd and deeply philosophical. He had a keen sense of humour which bothered on the malicious.

Tony is a huge fan of the Seattle-based artist Gold Brother. We talked about Gold Brother’s 2017 record, Lose My Faith. We reflected on the melancholic theme of the song. Tony took me through a nuanced discussion of music, emotions, and mood. Contrary to what I had been told, I was pleasantly surprised when Tony pointed out to me new research which suggested that listening to sad music could positively impact a person’s mood based on the sense of connectedness it provided. Such a revelation! I knew then that I had met a kindred spirit.

Back on the bus, I put on my headphones, reclined the seat, and drifted away to sleep, listening to my melancholic playlist. In my dreams, I wondered to what extent one could be comfortable discussing his mental health with a complete stranger with whom he had just shared in the disappointment of a public service rendered ineffectively.

Often I’d sit in pubs, bus terminals and other public places; watching strangers, observing them and wondering what their lives may be. I’m drifting off to the tune of Zevia’s 2021 pop record, ‘If depression gets the best of me’. I hope it doesn’t.

The next day, I met Tony for the short trip to Mamfe, in the Akuapim North district. I join Tony in his exquisite blue Honda sedan. The interior showed a car belonging to a person who dedicated his time to ensuring the well-being of the car. I was intrigued. Why spend so much time caring for an inanimate object like a car? Wasn’t that too much work?

I am reading Chinua Achebe’s ‘The Education of a British-Protected Child’ to a background music of SZA; ‘Nobody Gets Me’.

I’m fascinated by two of Achebe’s essays; ‘Traveling White’ and ‘My Daughters’. I’d come back to these two later in this essay.

I had mentioned in my conversation with Tony the day before about my fascination with the Akuapim range and the Akuapim town of Mamfe. Tony had offered to drive me to Mamfe on the Tuesday. I don’t know where my mystical fascination with Mamfe had started from but I had always held the town in such magnificent awe and wanted to explore it further. Mostly, I tended to reduce my deep fascination with ancient towns like Mamfe to bland curiosity which passed with time. Not so with this ancient town and its role in Akuapim civilisation and evolution. We were going to see a historian who Tony was sure could help me with my understanding of the town.

It was 10a.m. in the forenoon but the sun wasn’t fully out, leaving the weather cloudy, which was awkward. Our historian was going to travel to Koforidua at 1p.m. We had probably just one hour to speak to him. That was all.

The road ahead was narrow, straight and empty. No oncoming traffic, which was a disappointment to me because I loved observing cars whenever I was in the countryside. We were heading from Mamfe to another one of those Akuapim towns to see another old man. I am thinking about the wars of conquest and expansion in pre-colonial Ghana and how that shaped our present ethnography. If colonialism had not truncated the process of state formation in pre-colonial Africa, what would have Africa in the twenty-first century had looked like?  These are musings to which there would never be a definitive intellectual consensus.

We ended up spending far more time than envisaged with the two old men. The sun was long set by the time we set off back to Accra. There was a glow in the air, far ahead! Neon, red and blue, possibly. Tony slowed as we approached the glow. Far up the road in the distance were a pair of red tail lights, a cargo truck, perhaps. Very faint and far away. Tony braked. The bar was in view now. Just a simple metallic container with fifteen square feet open arena littered with plastic tables and chairs donned in the colours of the Guinness and Club beer brands. There were a few parked vehicles. Black Sherif’s ‘Konongo Zongo’ poured from the stereo, the bass thumping so loud, it then faded back to make way for Mr.Drew’s ‘Pains’.

We walked to the metallic container’s sliding door. We entered.The air conditioner was incessant and merciless. It was a fairly small room, with chairs and tables on the left and the bar on the right. There were three customers in the room, all men. About twenty more customers outside, mostly men. The barman was serving a customer, lining up the next, glanced over at us and beckoned one of his two waitress to attend to us. Tony ignored the waitress, threading the narrow alley of tables to the bar. I am rooted to my spot, apologising profusely to the waitress that I was with the man and she can come back later when we had settled down. She smiled and walked away. I felt everyone was watching us. We looked foreign and tired. Tony came back, holding two glasses and a bottle of Jack Daniels whiskey. Tony’s fascination with whiskey was yet another thing of mystery to me. He loved his whiskey and won’t settle for anything else. We settled on one of the tables outside.

Two sips in and Tony is back to his subject of mental health. “The very essence of human nature is this desperate desire for an eternal quest”, he said. It was a beautiful statement but I knew he had made it philosophically. I looked at him quizzically but kept my silence in order not to wreak his philosophical point.�

Half an hour later, we are back on the road, driving towards Accra. Tony was convinced I needed to stop taking the sleeping tablets. I knew the tablets were helping me to sleep. The sleeplessness was constantly giving me migraine and I wanted an escape from that. We rode in silence, Tony’s words churning in my mind: “you’ve got to stop taking the pills, man.” I tried to picture what my life had been before all this happened. The clock on the dashboard read 11p.m. when I got to the Tema end of the motorway but I knew I couldn’t sleep if I went home and I wasn’t going to take the pills so I found myself driving around the city aimlessly.

In the essay, ‘My Daughters’, Chinua Achebe writes about an interesting phenomenon. He writes about his experience of raising his first daughter, Chinelo, with his wife. Achebe recounted a story when Chinelo was about fours years-old and one day had declared to them – the parents – that; “I am not black; I am brown.” Chinelo’s declaration at the age of four had alarmed her parents, which prompted them to start asking questions of her education at school. Achebe’s inquiry to the source of Chinelo’s perception of the colour (or should I say race?) question had led to the representation of images in the “expensive and colorful children’s books imported from Europe and displayed so seductively in the better supermarkets of Lagos.” (Achebe’s words).

Chinelo Achebe was born in July 1962, so the incident her father recounted in his essay might have happened in 1966 thereabouts.

In my travels around the country, one of the curious phenomena I came to observe were the images displayed on the billboards of hairdressing salons and barbering shops. I wondered what the idea of beauty in twenty-first century Ghana was – Caucasian?

In a recent conversation, I told a friend I hardly attended any of the baby’s christening ceremonies I am invited to because almost all the images on the invitation cards were those of Caucasian babies when the parents of such babies were as black as the charcoal being hauled off a truck at Agbogbloshie market.

In my last write-up on my travels this year, I wrote about the socialite Aba Dope and what I considered to be her sad and dangerous views on skin belching. Perhaps, the root cause may be in the images of what we portray as beauty to our kids. Images are not everything but perception are powerful instruments of reality. How do we represent power to our children?

The night was dark and still. The sound faded as we drove away from the roadside parking lot of the pub. Silence clamped down, absolute silence, and the temperature seemed to drop as usual, since we were still in the vicinity of the Adaklu mountains. The road was pitch dark and I struggled to see the road beyond the range of a few yards out. I thought of the world of the blind. Not easy, obviously. To hear the sounds of a beautiful world but not see it.

I had no idea the world I was moving into had its own expectations of me, expectations which I was to accomplish but had no idea on the how. A little after noon on that Saturday, I heard the fire engines wail to life and careen away, toward the old town. I imagined the sort of fire they were going to encounter. I had always wondered how house fires started and its destructive nature. I had always wondered the memories house fires carried with them in the wake of their destruction. Those fire officers were indeed brave in meeting head-on, something that the natural human instinct was to escape from.

I was drawn to the itinerant, artistic lifestyle of the two Jamaicans we had met on the journey. I wondered about my life if it lacked the spontaneity and practicality of the Jamaicans. I longed for their existence.�

In my daydreams of the esoteric, nomadic lifestyle of the Jamaicans, I knew I would question for life the decision I had made the year earlier. Their roving lifestyle – nomadic, isolated, lonely -both unsettled and fascinated me. �

In the essay, ‘Traveling White’, Chinua Achebe recounts the story of racism he encountered at a hotel in Rhodesia in October 1960 when he visited on a Rockefeller Fellowship. Achebe had checked into the hotel with two young white academics and a black postgraduate student from the University of Rhodesia. After checking into the hotel, Achebe had offered to buy a bottle of beer for his three escorts. Achebe wrote; “It was the longest order I had or have ever made. The waiter kept going and then returning with an empty tray and more questions, the long and short of which was that the two bwanas could have their beer and so could I because I was staying in the hotel but the other black fellow could only have coffee.”

The Jameson Hotel simply refused to serve a man a bottle of beer because of his skin colour in a hotel that was built on African soil. Achebe was to witness even more befuddling instances of racism the next day when he had decided to board a bus to the Victory Falls. Unknown to him, a black man could not sit in the front seat on the bus, indeed, there were separate entrances for boarding the bus for white and black passengers. Achebe speak of “a monumental sadness [that] descended on him” at the end of the journey when the black travelers at the back of the bus applauded and formed a guard of honour for him for standing up to racism. Achebe wondered who the real heroes were – those helpless victims of an apartheid regime who had taken the risk to celebrate his defiance or him, a Nigerian writer who could not be a victim of the apartheid regime in Rhodesia?

But it was the story of Wolfgang Zeidler that intrigued me mostly in the essay. Zeidler was a distinguished judge who had just accepted an offer to become a constitutional consultant to the Namibian regime at the time. A friend asked the judge to read Achebe’s book, ‘Things Fall Apart’. Zeidler dramatically changed his mind about moving to Namibia after reading the novel.

Achebe wondered why a man as accomplished as Zeidler needed to read a novel in order to open his eyes to the reality of Africa. Achebe concluded by asserting rather forcefully that literature could be used as a tool to alter the social and political condition of Africa. As I read Achebe’s words, I wondered how many of our young activists even in our universities had grappled with Achebe’s writings yet?

The weekend after the trip to Mamfe, I was due to attend a friend’s birthday party in the Volta Region.

Against the background music of Dave’s ‘Environment’, I drove silently to the unassuming, beige, beautiful riverfront home of my friend in Sogakope with its high walls, impeccably well-kept lawn in front,and, a rather large parking lot for a three-bedroom residential apartment.

As I stood at the balcony overlooking the river, my mind went back to basic school when the teacher had asked us to write about our future careers. I was so focused on my nostalgic meditation such that I didn’t notice when the lady in the silk blouse started staring at me. I was not used to others staring at me and it made me greatly uncomfortable. It was a mid-afternoon so I blamed the hot sun for my profuse sweating but I knew it was because of the focus of the lady on me. I had learnt to ignore such premonitions but this lady, I couldn’t ignore nor read. Why was she staring at me? Her stare was a strange mix of recognition and nostalgia and this deeply unsettled me.�

I had taken the sleeping pills in the last two nights to calm my nerves. I had reacted badly to it and my face was full of stress. When I was in basic school and we had that lesson of what our future careers were going to be, I had said surgeon. My dad had mentioned the word and explained what they did to me. I found it exotic and exciting so I decided I was going to be a surgeon. Then after a visit to a hospital in Takoradi, I completely changed my mind about being a surgeon or ever working in a hospital environment. My new fascination was with aeroplanes and I was going to be a pilot. Standing at the balcony now, I wondered why I made those choices when even at that young age, I knew I enjoyed reading George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’ as a thirteen year-old than the soviet scientific papers I had read off my dad’s book shelves. I knew I enjoyed reading Chinua Achebe’s ‘Things Fall Apart’ than the Mathematics I was studying in class.

Then the time came to pick a course for my senior secondary school education and I was convinced to pick General Science course though I knew my passion was really in the humanities. I was told the best careers were in the sciences. I have often wondered how I was expected as a fourteen-year old to make such a career-defining decision at that point.

Why had I chosen to pursue a course in science instead of the arts when my true intellectual curiosity were in the areas of history, literature, philosophy and politics? And so I ended up at the department of Mathematics in the university instead of pursuing a course in creative writing, which really was one of the things I desperately wanted to do. I knew I had a knack for passing examinations, even when I couldn’t make head or tail of a subject, so I knew I was going to graduate with a degree in Mathematics after four years but I wondered what I was going to do with the degree afterwards and if it was going to give me any fulfillment.

The lady had been skittish about her stare when she walked up to me. She asked why I wasn’t inside, dancing to the loud music as the others were doing? I smiled and told her I was the world’s worst dancer and wasn’t in any case attracted to danceable music. I found them irritating and noisy. After the brief, stunned silence; she asked how is it that I could not dance at all? Wasn’t dancing supposed to be an African thing? I shrugged! It wasn’t just my thing. She asked; “what is your thing, then?”

I have been thinking about it for weeks now; what really is my thing? Or who am I?

Part of me wanted to cry, I had been crying a lot lately – Though I never used to cry, hadn’t cried in years. I found myself lying in the centre of my bed crying and wondering if I was ever going to be okay again.

In the tears were a mixture of grief and rage – grief for the pain I was going to cause a lot of people and rage at myself for getting yet another monumental decision in my life spectacularly wrong. I wondered if life itself was worth it…