18 July 2007
Ghana: Week Two (May 20-May 27)
Posted by acardec under: Women Studies In Ghana .
A large white van with an 80’s teal stripe and the words “Graduate Studies” stenciled in white sits in traffic. The exhaust from the mountain of cars on the freeway makes everyone high. People do their daily shopping through car windows as women and young men “hawk” goods, carried in buckets and bundles on their heads, throughout the crowded streets. In the sea of black bodies covered in rich and vibrant colors, trotro’s filled with people going to and from work, the market, or school, and goats or chickens going about their business on sidewalks and red earth mounds, loud and distinct sounds can be heard coming from the teal and white bus.The people sing loudly, “Sail away with me to another world, and we’ll rely on each other, uhuh.”
Dolly Parton and Kenny Rogers have made their way to Accra. But, it was not the American students singing on the bus that made this picture so surreal. In fact, it was that the bus driver Daniel, a Ghanaian native, who had put the music on and caused all of the bus to begin rocking to the sound of country music. It is only the American students who wish to hear Ghanaian highlife. The scene on the bus is not unusual. In fact we have been dancing at a hotel and an outdoor beach club and both places have played music from the West. At the hotel it was only country.
In class we have been discussing colonization and strategies of resistance. The culture itself seems to be a mixture of the two, visually expressing its complicated history. One billboard on the side of the road celebrates Ghana’s 50th anniversary as an Independent nation and right next to it is a sign that adversities skin lightening cream. Yesterday, we went to the market where the mixture is also apparent. The market is a busy part of the city with outdoor vendors selling goods along one side and another. It is like winding your way through a dream. Going up the stone steps you almost trip and fall and you can never fully tell if it is the street itself that is slippery or that the aroma of baking corn, meat, and fruit forces you to spill over. Amid all of the chatting, car horns, and animal noises you loose yourself in another world. The streets are packed like sardines with fabric stores, t-shirts, to everything like soap and screw drivers. It is not like home, everything is about bargaining; it is truly an outdoor culture. But, even within in this tradition there is the impact of other
worlds. People wear western clothes, they speak English, and imitation Louis Vitton bags hang from shop street stalls. You are here and there, in both at once. And, it is this mixture of worlds that makes Ghana so unique.
It seems to me that Dolly’s song means something different in Ghana…that maybe sailing away to another world brings you to another place you could never have imagined, but in a different way than implied. Maybe that a different world is unimaginable because it is never really new. Sorry Dolly, but we never exist as islands in a stream, we are always connected through unseen ways, even if that connection is underwater.
- Meredith Tweed
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