Last day in Accra

February 17

John: We made one last sortie into Accra, braving the hour-and-a-half bus trip into the city with the goal of seeing the Makola Market, the central shopping place for the citizens of Accra. Unlike the Arts Center, which caters to tourists, the Makola Market is where the locals shop for everything from groceries to appliances. It's an enormous, sprawling place, and it really resists description. We only saw part of it--it would be impossible to see it all in a single day. Streets lead into labyrinthine alleyways, goods spill out in every direction, stalls selling pots and pans juxtapose with stalls selling cloth, food, toys, oh and over there is a guy butchering a cow's leg with a machete. It's completely disorienting--within 50 paces you have no idea where you are, and how to get out--you just have to keep going. We clutched Maeve tight and waded in.

The biggest surprise was the kind of reaction that Aidan got. The day before, I had bought him a Ghana soccer team jersey from one of the fairly ubiquitous stalls, and people all around as we walked through the market called out to him "Ghana boy!" "Ayew" (the name of the Ghanaian soccer player on the back of the jersey--he's apparently the team's star) which we initially took for "hey, you!" Soccer is big here, and the Ghanaian team a source of pride, since they've played above their heads lately in international competition.  Most of all, it seemed that people were genuinely pleased and charmed that a little boy obviously from outside the country was expressing affinity for their team--everyone was very nice about it all.  We were glad to go to a non-touristy place--we were the only outsiders around, clearly.

After that, we stopped at Nkrumah Park, the memorial to Kwame Nkrumah, the founder of modern Ghana--there's a memorial park with fountains and a statue, his mausoleum, and a small museum. The park is lovely, the mausoleum more or less what you might expect (OK, maybe more modernist than you might have expected--it's nice), but we found the museum to be a little sad and run-down. It's a block building, with a main interior space not much bigger than a classroom, with pictures on the wall in mismatched and beaten-up frames documenting Nkrumah's career.  About which I knew pretty much nothing before we arrived, and it was a good, quick lesson, one clearly biased but not hagiographic--his flaws were in sight as well as his strengths. Nkrumah was clearly brilliant at the task of unifying what was then the Gold Coast in the 1950s so that it could put itself into a position to gain its independence from Britain--Ghana is still proud, clearly, that it was the first sub-Saharan African state to put the post in post-colonial, gaining its independence in 1957 and its full sovereignty in 1960. But Nkrumah was also clearly deeply flawed at actually running a new state, and he was deposed in a coup in 1966 and spent the last six years of his life before he died in 1972 in exile (one interesting exhibit outside the museum is a statue of him with his head cut off, a relic of the day of the coup, when the statue was vandalized). The story that the pictures told, though, was on the whole an exciting one--there is Nkrumah with the founders of the party organizing for a free nation!  there he is declaring the state independent! there he is with Kennedy! with Kruschev! with Nasser! with Mao! It gave the picture of an exhilarating, if very brief moment, when people here could feel that history was on their side, that they were doing something memorable and important that they could be proud of. It all seems a lot more interesting than today's mission of pleasing the IMF and the World Bank. 

We'll be processing our trip to Ghana for a while--it was kind of overwhelming. The country has enormous challenges; there are elections scheduled for this year, and while Ghana is a success in that it has had peaceful transitions of power for years, it's still clear from reading the paper that the country is deeply divided by partisan lines that surely cut across regional and ethnic divides as well. We are very glad that we were able to spend some time here with Semester at Sea--it's hard to imagine that we could come here any other way--and we'll be rooting for Ghana in soccer and everything else from now on.