Vicki: While John visited the slave dungeons on the coast, I went into Accra with Aidan, Maeve, and our friends Josiah and his mom Elizabeth. We visited the National Museum, which has artifacts and displays providing a window in the long history of human life in this part of Africa. We saw prehistoric stone tools, tribal carvings both ancient and recent, and displays about encounters with the Europeans. Portuguese sailors first landed here in 1471. They brought home reports about the apparent abundance of gold possessed by the elites of the coastal kingdoms, prompting Portugal to establish a trading operation intended to put gold into their cash-strapped coffers. One of my favorite displays was of the bronze weights used in Ashanti territory to measure gold and gold dust. They were crafted into whimsical shapes – laughing people, animals, warriors, and dancers. I wish I had taken a picture, but chasing Maeve kept me busy. She thought of the space less as a museum than as a race track.
As John’s post on the slave dungeons shows, however, this early trade paved the way for one of history’s greatest catastrophes, the slave trade. When the gold ran thin on the coast, Europeans starting purchasing slaves to use as forced labor in the New World. Enslaved people brought to the Americas had an average life-span of less than 7 years, if they made it there at all after their dangerous trek to the coast, brutal imprisonment while waiting for the slave ships, and the trip across the Atlantic in conditions that can only be described as murderous. The European demand for slaves turned slave-raiding, which had been a historically brutal but also occasional practice connected to war, into a regular business serving a seemingly bottomless demand for slaves. People from the inland areas were captured in mind-boggling numbers – 12 million or more. At the museum, we saw displays about the slave trade, including the irons used to confine small children and the documents passed among Europeans showing their means of accounting. The museum had a model of the Cape Coast slave castle that John and later I visited, but miniaturizing the slave castle had had the clear disadvantage of making it look very cute and fun to play with. The kids loved it.
After the museum, our gang went to a store called Global Mamas that sells goods made by local women according to fair trade principles. Ghana is a cash-strapped nation were people work very hard but on average earn less than $2.00 a day. As a friend on the ship who taught a unit about fair trade in Ghana explained to me, many of the women of Ghana are skilled seamstresses without a market for their goods. They make for themselves the beautiful clothes crafted from gorgeous textiles that we could see everywhere we went. But since so many women can sew and so very few people have enough money to buy ready-made goods, there’s not much of a local market for their skills. Global Mamas employs them at a decent wage to make clothes for the western market. The organization provides the dress patterns suited to western. The women decorate and dye the fabric and sew it into dresses, shirts, backpacks, all kinds of bags, table linens, and more things than I can name. The women also make beads from clay, glass, and stone, which they string into jewelry. Women working for Global Mamas can make as much as 1000% of their usual salary, which sounds like a lot until you realize that it amounts to about $60 a week and that they use the money to support their extended families. The operation does, though, help lift people out of poverty. I purchased largely, even though I can’t pretend that doing so gives any evidence of my virtue any more than it does of my pleasure in buying pretty things.
Global Mamas is a pretty cushy shopping experience for Ghana – it’s enclosed, air-conditioned, and the fixed prices relieved us of the (for us) burden of extended bargaining that typically characterizes commercial exchanges here. By contrast, great deal of shopping in Ghana occurs alongside and even on the roads, which are lined with stores from one end of Accra to the other. A colleague on the ship, who’s spent a good deal of time in Ghana, told us beforehand that you can buy anything you want from your car in Ghana, and she wasn’t exaggerating. The stop-and-go traffic is threaded with merchants selling their goods from car to car, always from containers balanced on their heads, according the local custom. You can reach out from your window and buy not only the water and snacks intended for hungry commuters, but also jumper cables, fan belts, sunglasses, underwear, kitchen goods, and cell-phone cases. Most of the stores along the road are housed in decaying cement buildings and shacks that were probably constructed by their operators. For a westerner, it’s odd to see refrigerators, couches, office chairs, and glass coffee tables sold by the road, block after block and mile after mile. I found the mismatch between many of the goods and the spaces in which they’re sold jarring: flat-screened televisions, for instance, are stacked up in a dusty, ramshackle stands without electricity or running water. I took pictures, often at random, from the bus, but none of them captures the impression made by miles and miles of stores.
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