SEEING PLACES FROM A DISTANCE
It was just after 2a.m. on a Wednesday dawn in April and I was driving from Tema to the Amansie West district in the Ashanti region to see someone very important to me. It was just after eight in the morning when I arrived. As I drove into the little village decimated by the scourge of ‘galamsey’, my mind went to my college days when I had led a solitude, lonely life to avert the snub of my school mates in that bastion of middle class snobbery of a university. I wondered how a region that was home to a science and technology university could be devastated environmentally on such a scale. Did the folks not know the effects of their destruction on the future of their communities? I wondered…
I sat in the corner of the bar, drinking water and watching the front door. It was almost midday when I finally got the chance to meet her. The conversation was strained. There was a distance between us, a distance that could be felt but not spoken of. I wondered how you could have been with a person for years and yet not know her at all.
It was no stress finding a lodging in that part of town since most of the galamsey operatives were itinerant and reliant on temporary accommodation. I found my way to room 12, which was located in the two-storey building opposite the reception area. I was met by a cold, evil smell. It was obviously a room that had been witness to all manner of crimes. It was a very small room and poorly-lit. There was no furniture and the bed was placed at the left-hand corner of the room against the wall. There was no photograph or drawings and the washroom was surprisingly, immaculately clean. There was no television and this situated me perfectly.
The bedsheet was not only dirty but also had a musty scent. As the night wore on, you could hear the sounds of cars maneuvering their way into the small yard in front of the reception area that was meant to serve as a car park. I knew someone was going to park behind my vehicle and it was going to be my unfortunate task of locating who this fellow was when I was leaving at dawn.
I had intended to stay for days but after my two hours conversation with her earlier in the day, I knew it was no more desirable and she didn’t want that. She made it clear to me that she didn’t even desire to spend the night there with me. This too had come as a great shock to me. How fickle the human emotion could be!
In that foreboding atmosphere, it occurred to me what had happened a decade earlier. It was also sometime in April. I thought I was prepared now but I wasn’t. I was as helpless, and anxious as I had been that Sunday evening in Kumasi on the first day of April in the year, 2012. Today was the twenty-sixth day of April in the year, 2023. What was it with Aprils? Was it not in April of 2013 too when I nearly lost my life in that fatal accident when two of my fellow travelers died? I had no capacity for spiritual thought at that moment so I penned it down to coincidence.
I knew I was going to travel again in that sub-world which I had traversed a decade earlier. But as scared as I was I knew what to expect this time. But that terrible knowledge was no consolation. The weather was growing colder and I could barely sleep that day. What I did not know then was the subsequent bouts of insomnia and sleeplessness that was to afflict me in the months ahead. If I had known, I would have savoured my last proper sleep that night of April 15th.
I was in a strange state, and it was far easier for me to indulge my interest in the gold business of the towns I was traveling through than face my reality. I was afraid at once though I knew that fear was not going to do anything to harm me. The night was growing a bit warmer as it transitioned into the dawn hours. The weather was clearer. It was a queer, lonely time of the night.
The antiquated atmosphere of the towns was reflective in their architecture. Most of the buildings were pre-colonial. The roads leading to the towns were barely motorable.
She demanded to leave at 4a.m., despite her residence being a mere five minutes drive away and not needing to report to duty until four hours later. In my mortified state, I knew what it meant. I had no will to argue further for I had spent the previous day, vainly it seemed, pleading my case. Sometimes you ought to buy peace with silence. In silence, we dressed up and I gave her what I thought was going to be our last hug. She quietly untangled herself from my embrace and walked out of the room with her furtive attempt at concealing the tears that were forcing to break forth.
I was intent on starting this day drowning out my thoughts, which were threatening to overcome me. I was profoundly sad. I found myself playing Ray LaMontagne’s “We’ll Make It Through“. Her mind was far away and I wondered if the appropriate pronoun then was ‘we’ instead of ‘I’, for I was the one in crisis.
It was a Thursday and I wanted to get back to the city as early as possible. However my plans were scuppered when five minutes into the journey I realised I had a flat tyre. A flat tyre at 4:10a.m. in a town that was dead asleep. My only hope was waiting it out for a vulcaniser to open the shop, which I was to learn would be in three hours. I was damned.
Reflectively, I wondered about the terrain of the roads, on two of my three visits there, I have encountered two incidents of flat tyres. Could that also be coincidental? To believe in the coincidence would have required an act of faith on my part, I had no such faith.
I always wondered why I could never get round to the task of changing a flat tyre, despite countless hours of watching videos of changing a car tyre on YouTube and physically observing others do it at least a dozen times. I never got around to trying it myself.
I was pleasantly surprised when the taxi driver offered to help me when he saw that I had a flat. He was efficient and was done in a few minutes. He refused my offer of a twenty cedis gift, insisting his gesture was a purely humanitarian act. I had long given up on the good of humanity in our fast changing society. Everything including routine kindness was transactional now.
I had already lost thirty minutes. She asked me to simply leave her there so she continues the rest of the journey on the commercial motorbike known as Okada, which were unsurprisingly rife there. It was a tensed compromise, for that sense of foreboding was lurking in my subconsciousness. She seemed distant in a faraway land in her mind to have inspired any form of affection. I did not want it to be a windy farewell. Her face was contemplative. It was a complex fate. The burden of confession had simply been too great. I knew it was simply a matter of fate. This was no way to live.
The journey back to the city along the N8 highway was a quiet affair this time around. I tried to listen to the BBC podcast, “Books and Authors“. It was a discussion between the Booker-prize winning Jamaican writer, Marlon James, and Elizabeth Day. I could hardly concentrate. I tried listening to Nina Simone rather but it was no better. I had no desire to listen to anything. Yet after the brief stop at Assin Praso, I realised I was in a bit of good spirits. The journey from there was not silent. I listened to Brian Fennell’s 2016 EP, “Hurt for Me“.
The motorway was uncrowded. The solitude suited me. Ordinarily, I disliked city traffic. It made driving such a torturous chore. It was almost drearily, impossible to take a long, peaceful drive at any hour of the day or night in this city. It was highly unusual that the drive to East Legon had been that swift and quiet. It was a Sunday morning in a slow October.
The old house of my host evoked memories of an affluence of a yesteryear which could not be maintained in the present age. Despite the bright Accra weather, the room was eerily dark, and the air stuffy. It was a decent neighbourhood. It was serene and quiet. But it contrasted sharply with the other communities I had visited in this city and across the country. The inequality was glaringly stark. It was astonishing how the two worlds could co-exist in the same space peacefully for different reasons despite their divergent fortunes.
The scale of the gentrification going on in the community was mind-boggling. I had followed keenly the parliamentary contest of this constituency three years earlier and as to why the issue of gentrification was never seriously considered by any of the two leading candidates spoke volumes about the level of ideation in our politics. If our fourth republican politics were producing any deep thinking patriots who were dedicated to pondering the existential questions facing the republic, even if fleetingly, then we would have had at least a modicum of hope for redemption. But our politics long ago swapped high-minded philosophical pondering for low-minded political practice.
I walked back to the church street with my friend. We did not speak. We walked in silence for the pleasure of the solitude the hour offered. We sat in a coffee shop just across the street and ordered for a cup of coffee. The Ghanaian anthem with its hopefulness was humming in my mind. I wondered if that hopefulness was giving way to a hollowness in my mind. In a clear matter-of-fact tone, my friend insisted that gentrification was not a serious political issue in Ghana and I shouldn’t expect any serious politician in the country to make it an issue. I was stunned. Our political class have become content seeking comfort in the warmth of numbers and statistics without undergoing the hard work of a nuanced examination of ideological positions.
I was drawn to the redemptive power in the lyrics of the Bob Marley record playing on the stereo at the coffee shop. The giant billboard advertising the sale of residential homes at the Montgomery residences piqued my interest. Prices for the homes were starting at a hundred and fifty thousand dollars. I wondered how many Ghanaians could afford that in a country where twenty percent of the population live in kiosks, shipping containers and wooden structures. Research conducted by the African Cities Research Consortium (ACRC) indicated that 16.9 percent of urban residents in Accra lived in non-conventional housing structures, such as metal containers, wooden and kiosk structures.
I was no political moralist. I couldn’t have been and was in no mood for moralising. But I knew for better or worse, something had to change. That was settled in my mind. Politics had long given us an excuse to avoid the necessary national introspection we needed but it is urgent that we start thinking about meaningful ways to invest in urban planning and social housing schemes. It would require a significant influx of money from the private sector with regulatory innovation from the public service to ensure the success of such a scheme.
In my car, I’m jostled awake for the first time in months by the incessant blasting of the air conditioner against my face. Getting back to Tema, I got pulled over by the police for something I wasn’t entirely sure of. In this day and age, I didn’t really see the essence of five police officers clustered at a spot on a stretch of a road hassling drivers. Is that the best use of police resources?
Ours is indeed a country of beautiful nonsense. Nothing is never what it seems…