"Ghanaian Culture 101"

Over the past two weeks since returning from my holiday travels, I have been settling in to Kumasi on a more permanent basis and establishing a daily routine for myself here. There is much to tell, so without further delay:

Coming back from vacation and getting back to work was a bit of a readjustment, but I was relatively productive. I officially registered for French classes at Alliance Frances, which are anticipated to begin this coming weekend. While I was filling out the registration paperwork, the receptionist asked me if I was Chinese. I told him that I was American and he seemed a bit surprised. I laughed and asked him, “Why, don’t I look American?” and he replied no, you have small eyes like the Chinese. That was a new one for me; I’ve been asked if I was British, German, French and other variations of European descent, but never Chinese. Guess there’s a first time for everything.

More housing issues arose on Tuesday. While I was eating breakfast, my host mom came into my room and says, “Afia (my Ghanaian name), I would like to collect the rent the first week of every month so I have come to collect what you owe for December.” I told her that was no problem and asked how much I owed her. She replied, “Well, what did I tell you in November when you were here?” I replied that she hadn’t given me a set price; that she told me that she wouldn’t have me pay for the room, just electricity and water only. She countered with, “Is that so?” followed by, “Well what did I tell you to pay for electricity and water?” When I was here in November discussing the possibilities of me staying where I am at present, the conversation went as follows:

Essentially, Louisa (my host mom) told me that if I wanted to stay here, I could have the room for free, adding, “you are my daughter; how could I charge you?” I was very thankful for her offer and asked what then I would pay. She told me I would have to pay for electricity and water, but that she couldn’t tell me a price for that yet because the tariffs for both utilities keep rising (which they do); since she wasn’t sure how much the new tariffs would add to her existing bill, she said that we would just have to wait and discuss what I would pay at the end of January. I told her that was fine and tried to ask her how we would determine the amount of water and electricity I used since she gets one bill for the entire household, but that was a flop. I left the conversation a little skeptical, but willing to try it out and see what happened. Okay, now that you’re caught up, flash forward to the second week of this month.

As I was saying, Louisa asked the price she had quoted me for electricity and water, to which I recalled our earlier discussions from November. After taking a long pause, she said, “Okay, is 200 GHC okay for you?” I asked her if that was the price I would be paying every month and she told me she wasn’t sure. Needing to think about how best to handle the situation, I asked if we could discuss it when I came home from KNUST that afternoon and I would pay her the following day, with which she didn’t have a problem.

At Tech, I met up with my friend Mubarak and later my friend Eugene. I conferred with them about the situation and they both said the same thing: she was taking advantaged of me, which I already knew because when I originally came to Kumasi to search for housing, all of my friends and everyone I spoke with who knows the area well said that I should expect to pay 100 GHC, but could pay between 50 GHC- 150 GHC depending on the room. Where I am living now is roughly a half-hour to hour commute (depending on traffic) from the university, so the price should be lower. For me, it’s not that I can’t afford 200 GHC; it’s the fact that (1) 200 GHC isn’t a fixed price: Louisa told me that she didn’t know what it would be from month to month, which is a bad position to put myself in because it leaves me vulnerable to her adjusting the price as she sees fit, and (2) I don’t find it fair to charge me more just because I am a foreigner and it is perceived that I have a lot of money since I am able to travel from my home country to here. Plus, technically I didn’t owe Louisa any money for December; before Brent came, I spent the first two weeks of December in Kumasi, for which I had already paid her.

That night when I returned home, I went to talk to Louisa about setting a price that both of us felt fair. The first thing Louisa said when I entered her room and sat down on her bed was, “Afia, I don’t want you to feel like I am cheating you or being unfair, so you just tell me a price that is okay for you.” I then told her that I was just confused about the price because one, I had already paid her for my stay in December, so I didn’t owe her for last month, which was the rent she sought that morning, and two, because when we had originally discussed the arrangements for my staying there in November, she told me I would pay for electricity and water only, which I knew I had not used 200 GHC worth of. [I know this because one of my friends in the Peace Corps living in Kumasi told me that her average water bill is 12 GHC/month and 20 GHC/month at most, and her electricity bill is roughly 40 GHC/month. We have similar consumptive behaviors and even if I allow for some leeway, 200 GHC is steep.] I then told her that I don’t have a problem pitching in extra for water and determining a price for that with her, but that I think it would be best to install a separate electricity meter to measure my use in my room so that I would pay for the electricity I use. She wasn’t up for this idea, and told me, “Afia, you know, I am a single mother and things are difficult. So any amount you can give to help out is okay with me.” I just sat quietly, thinking, and told her I would give her an amount the following day. To say the least, I felt a range of conflicting emotions.

When I woke up in the morning, I assumed my usual routine: walk to the kitchen to boil water to make coffee. Louisa was in the kitchen when I entered and as I walked toward the stove to put the pot of water on fire, she said, “Afia, the second tank for the gas has finished and I need to go and get it filled today. Give me something small so that I can go and fill.” She then showed me the empty tank sitting outside of the kitchen door to ensure that I understood what she was saying. This made me a little peeved in all honesty because the only, literally the only, thing I ever use the stove for is to boil water in the morning. It is the family that uses the stove the majority of the time to cook. I am perfectly fine with pitching in money for gas, which I did, but I just couldn’t understand why it seemed she had only asked me for money, rather than asking me in addition to, for instance, the grandmother who uses the stove in abundance. The situation just reiterated that I should probably look for other housing arrangements because while her being flexible about the amount I pay is great, her not setting a fixed price, which I could then say, “Okay, that’s within my budget,” or “Okay, thank you, but that’s not going to work for me,” leaves me vulnerable to being asked for money for other things. After that, I was pretty resolute that I should move and all of my friends here confirmed that I should, telling me that I am not in a good situation: that if I ask her to lower the price and tell her a price that I feel is fair, she could agree to it, but be upset about it and treat me different and even if I don’t try to lower the price from 200 GHC, she isn’t going to stop asking me for money. I have prospects for a place through a friend that is guaranteeing me a fair price, which I will go and see this week. But, in all honesty, it is not that simple. I feel very torn and conflicted about moving. To begin, Louisa and her family are like a family to me. They are the ones who opened their homes to me the first time I ever came to Kumasi when I was studying here in 2012 and they have been gracious to open their home to me again this time around. I have known them for over a year now; I enjoy their company and have a genuine interest in their well-being, which is why I think it is so hard for me to even consider that my host mom is trying to take advantage of me. It is difficult for me to get super pissed at the situation and be hell-bent on moving because everyone here, including my host mom, is so great to me. I can pay the 200 GHC and would love to help out my host mom, especially if the money will help her to better provide for the family and because she has been so gracious to me, but feel incredibly torn as to whether it is a good idea. For one, I am living in a compound, of which she is the landlord from my understanding (it’s either that or a family member owns the compound, so let’s her and her family stay in their rooms for free). Every other tenant renting a room has a fixed price and isn’t expected to pay more in order to help the family. From the standpoint of professionalism, asking me to help out extra isn’t appropriate. But, I don’t think I am an average tenant. I am foreign to this country and when I was new here and knew nothing of Kumasi, Louisa gave me somewhere to call home and helped me with things that to me now are so simple- like knowing how to get a tro-tro to where I need to go or knowing where to buy food. That is something I believe one can never fully appreciate until they are on their own as stranger in a country so different than the place they call home; in those situations, being comfortable makes all the difference in making an experience enjoyable and I am incredibly indebted to my host family for making me feel like I have a home in Kumasi. So you can see why I feel so torn about the situation.

Part II: Insights into Ghanaian Culture with Kwame

This following week, one of the other Fulbrighters. Alex, came to visit Kumasi with his friend Kwame, who is Ghanaian. Alex and Kwame are based in Koforidua, the capital of the Eastern Region, roughly one-hour north of Accra. They work at a government-funded company that produces all natural herbal medicine. Alex is setting up an electronic records database system for the organization to help them with more efficient record keeping, discovering trends in the impact of the herbal remedies they produce on health, and the likes. It sounds like an amazing project.

Alex and Kwame came to Kumasi for the weekend to see a project that a US organization called Plumpy Peanut is working on in Kumasi. Plumpy Peanut has brought in two American guys, Dietrich and Luke (who I also had the pleasure of meeting; they are great) to build a factory that will produce a groundnut paste that has extra vitamins and nutrients designed to help fight malnutrition amidst children. The goal is that eventually the factory will serve as a distribution center not only for Ghana, but also for the whole region of West Africa. I’m interested to see what the demand for the product is in Ghana and in West Africa as a whole and how the project turns out once the factory is up and running.

Alex also needed to buy some paintings, purses and other knick-knacks to send back to the US for a charity auction. His alma matter, the University of Michigan, hosts a charity auction every year that sells crafts from Ghana; the proceeds from the auction are then sent back to hospitals in Ghana to help fund a program that the university runs here to improve patient care. Pretty awesome. So I took Alex and Kwame into the heart of Kumasi to the cultural center and other shops where Alex could purchase what he needed. After our shopping spree, we took a tour through the Armed Forces Museum, which was not on my bucket list of things to do here, but I am really glad I did. The museum is situated in the Kumasi Fort, which is historically known for its use during the Ashanti Rebellion in the early 1900s. The British who sought to take the Golden Stool of the Ashanti kingdom instigated the Ashanti Rebellion. The Golden Stool is like the Holy Grail of Ashanti culture. According to local tradition and belief, the Golden Stool descended from the heavens in the early 16^th century. As the leader of the Ashanti people, the Asantehene (king) possesses and guards the stool. In the late 1800s/early 1900s, the British decided that they wanted to steal the Golden Stool from the Asantehene. Why? Well really there is no good explanation for this because it was just such an unnecessary, below-the-belt move, but my speculation is that the British tried to steal the Golden Stool as a way to demean the Ashanti people, insult their culture, and aim to further assert their dominance as colonial administrators in the country. Really, an asshole move no matter how you look at it. However, as a people proud of their culture, the Ashantis were not going to take such an insult lying down. The Queen Mother of Ejisu, Ohemaa Yaa Asantewaa, led her people to revolt against the British and protect the Stool. The Rebellion caused deaths on both sides and in the end the Ashanti’s were successful in protecting the stool.  During the rebellion, Yaa Asantewaa was captured and detained by the British at the fort before she was exiled to the Seychelles Islands. The tour included being led through the various rooms where we also learned about Ghana’s and Africa’s involvement in the first and second World Wars. It is amazing to me how important of a role Africa played in both of these wars, yet how little history classes talk about this; it’s quite depressing in many ways to realize how skewed of a historical perspective the average American student is getting, particularly when one considers that since Africa was colonized during this time, Africans didn’t have a choice: their colonial administrators forced them into the war. Many of these men were without, what I would call the most simple of provisions that every soldier should have to assist them in their fighting: shoes. I believe the tour guide told us that it wasn’t until the Second World War that Africans were given shoes when going to war. It’s always amazing to me how humans can be so cruel to one another sometimes.

After the tour, we went out for dinner. Kwame, Alex and I got into a great discussion on Ghanaian culture that helped me to understand so much of my experience here in general and Louisa’s action in particular. Here’s a short recap of some of what we discussed:

RE: Louisa and the rent

Kwame told me that in Ghana, because society is so communal, there is a strong culture of reciprocity. That helps to partly explain why I get asked by random people to buy them things or give them money and it also explains Louisa telling me she would give the room to me for free. Louisa didn’t give me the room for free necessarily because I am her ‘daughter,’ but because in Ghanaian culture the underlying rule is if ‘I do you a favor, then later when I need help with something, you will repay that favor.’ As a custom, this makes a lot of sense to me. We definitely have a variation of this system in the US and in all honesty, I think the rule of reciprocity is a pretty universal concept. Personal relationships are built, not wholly but definitely to a strong extent, in my opinion, on reciprocity. Gift giving aside, think of your best friend: you support him/her in multiple ways with the underlying, unspoken expectation that when you need that same support in return, he/she will give it to you because you did the same for them when they were in need. In the case of Louisa, it seems she wanted to give me the room for free and in hopes that in return, I would help her and the family by pitching in extra for the bill. Looking at it from that perspective made me a lot less irritated about the situation, but not any less conflicted about what to do.

RE: Marriage proposals

Kwame asked me how my experience had been so far as a woman in Ghana. I told him that overall I hadn’t had too many negative experiences and that at times I felt like my presence as a white woman has definitely helped me out. The one thing that I know is different for me than for the average Ghanaian woman is the amount of marriage proposals that I seem to get at any point in time. But I told Kwame that this didn’t really bother me; that typically I just laugh it off because I realize people aren’t actually serious- they just want to go to America, so they see marrying me as their ticket to Obama-land, as it is often called here. Kwame told me that for some people that is true, but for most of the guys, they propose because they just want to have sex with me. *Vomit* Kwame explained to me that Ghana is not like the US when it comes to sex. In the US, one-night stands and non-committal sex are not unheard of. In Ghana, a very religious society, the whole culture of ‘hit it and quit it’ is widely looked down upon; that’s not to say it doesn’t happen, but it’s not seen in a positive light and generally speaking, people are less apt to reserve judgment than I feel we are in the US. If you are married to someone, then this isn’t an issue, so, alas, marriage proposals are more about lust than a ticket to America. This is one thing I wish I hadn’t learned about Ghanaian culture because now every time I get a marriage proposal from a 60 year old man or any aged man for that matter, I feel really uncomfortable, grossed out and borderline pissed off because I am being seen as an object to be desired, not as a person with thoughts and emotions.  I also learned more about gender relations here, but some of it is pretty explicit, so I’ll just say that paternalistic attitudes about women’s roles in society are very much prevalent and while Ghana has made more strides in the terms of gender equality than some other African countries, it still has a long way to go.

Getting so much insight from Kwame was very useful. It never ceases to amaze me how different my experience coming to Ghana completely on my own on the Fulbright has been from my experience studying here with a large group of Americans; it hasn’t been in a bad way; each experience has had its positives and negatives, as any and every experience does, but I find myself picking up on more minute aspects of culture that I didn’t notice before because there were times throughout the study abroad program when we were definitely isolated from the culture.

On the topic of insight, I had quite an informative lesson on corruption. About two weeks ago, I went to Obuasi to talk with some members of the Consumer Services Committee there. Mashoud, the director of the PURC (Public Utilities Regulatory Commission), arranged for Ben, his driver, to take me. Driving to Obuasi, a conversation on politics was sparked when upon coming to an unpaved portion of the road, Ben exclaimed, “Eh, Ghana! Corruption, corruption. These politicians just pocket the money. The mayors, they don’t help the people. Look at these roads! As if we are in a village- in the middle of the city! Eh!” I asked Ben what his opinion was of the current party in power. It should be noted that in Ghana, there are clear divisions of support for the two main parties: the NPP and the NDD. Political allegiance is important to many people, especially in Kumasi where tradition and culture and its preservation are deeply engrained, much more so than in Accra. Ben told me that the current party in power is very corrupt and that the NPP, the opposition, would have done a much better job had they been elected. When I asked him to elaborate on this, he said for one, secondary school would have been free for everyone in Ghana (which was the main platform upon which the NPP ran its campaign). I followed up with asking Ben how the NPP would have been able to ensure that every child in Ghana could go to school for free and he said by using the revenues from the country’s fledgling oil sector. According to Ben, the NPP is a party with a large backing and is already well endowed with money and resources they need to campaign; the candidate for president of the NPP, Nana Akumfuor, already had all of the money he needed and wanted to honestly give back and help his country develop. The NDC, however, does not have a lot of money, so they are taking money from development projects that will benefit the country and stashing it to make their ‘pockets swell.’ I then asked Ben his views on the fact that Ghana produces electricity and exports it to Togo while there are millions without access to electricity here within the country’s own borders and even those who do have access to electricity don’t have a consistent, reliable supply. He answered by saying that the practice traces back to a bilateral trade agreement that was established during colonial times and that it would be against international law to abrogate it (not sure I believe the whole against international law bit, but that’s definitely something worth looking into further). Ben said that each country needed one another: it is a source of revenue for Ghana and without the supply that Ghana provides to Togo, much of the country would be “living in the dark.” I then countered with, “well what about the people in Ghana living in the dark? What about the villages, especially in the North, who don’t have electricity at all? Don’t you think they deserve to have a connection to raise their standard of living?” Ben told me that villages don’t need electricity; that it would make farmers lazy and they wouldn’t farm. He expanded on his point of view by saying that villages were too scattered and spread too far apart from one another, so building power lines would be too costly, difficult, and time-consuming; he also said that those in villages wouldn’t pay their bills on time and wouldn’t pay until it became so severe that they were disconnected from the supply. In Ben’s words, “That’s how Ghanaians are.” I disagreed with Ben on many aspects of his argument, particularly the contention that villagers don’t need electricity and that having electricity would make farmers lazy and prevent them from going to the farm. I told Ben that having electricity is so important to creating other opportunities: for instance, if a household has electricity, then the children who go to school can have light to be able to study after the sun goes down (which is quite early, around 6:00 PM.) Assuming the child is able to complete his schooling, he then has more opportunities for jobs and getting out of the cycle of poverty. What about daily chores? My friend Brianan works as the Ghana Country Director for Community Water Solutions (CWS). Recently, CWS has expanded into piloting solar power projects in communities where they have already established working relationships with the people through the water treatment businesses. Bri and I were talking about this initiative and she brought up many good points about simple things, like not having to cook in the dark, that electricity makes easier that we who do not lack access to it often take for granted.

The longer I am here and the more the novelty of my experience wears off, the more I find myself seeing Ghana through a completely new lens; there are many instances where I feel as though I am here for the first time, noticing aspects of daily life and poverty here that I think just seemed so normal to me here, but now make me feel intrigued, empathetic, upset- a whole range of emotions that I can’t even begin to fully describe here. I find myself questioning, as every person interested in international development I think from time to time does, what the one ‘magic bullet’ is that would propel other aspects of development forward; I also wonder quite frequently why it is that development has happened the way it has across the world. Throughout my education at WVU, these very questions were posed through classes and many theories evolved regarding the inequality of power and voice in the global system and the distinct divide between the Global North and the Global South; about histories of places that have accelerated or hampered advancement, but the longer I am here, the more I question how these things could create such a distinct difference in quality of life between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots.’ It’s a perplexing question that I believe I will never know the answer to.

Every day, working in international development, specifically with regards to my interests in water and sanitation, takes on a new meaning to me. I am constantly challenged in so many ways, which is something I really enjoy because I thrive in environments where I am constantly learning, processing and trying to solve problems. I have unquestionably developed a different level of empathy than I have ever had in my life and have also come to the realization that it is okay to think critically, not cynically, but critically, about other cultures, not just one’s own. Overall, being in Ghana so far has been full of personal growth (and all of the other hippy emotions one references when talking about living abroad- please see the website ‘Shit White People Like’ for further information about what I mean) and I am interested to see how my views evolve over the coming months.