Happy Nkrumah Day!

What a week! It’s been so busy that I haven’t had time to think about much at all!

We drove to the Volta Region on Friday morning. It used to be part of Togo back in the day, but Ghana claimed it in the 1940s when German Togo was split up as part of Germany’s war retribution payments. Apparently there are a select few elderly people who still speak German, but they are very few and far between. We travelled in what we’ve termed the ‘Obrunimobile’, ‘obruni’ being the Twi word for ‘white person’. It’s quite entertaining to see people on the side of the road do a double take when they see a bus full of obrunis drive past. Our first stop was the Akosombo Dam, on the Volta River. It was built between 1960 and 1963 and used to provide all the power for the entire country. It also created the largest man-made lake in the world, Volta Lake. As a result, thousands and thousands of people were displaced and lost their livelihoods. It’s kind of a sad story, but the dam is so successful in bringing electricity to Ghana and even to surrounding countries that there was not really another option. Also, the government warned the residents that they would be creating a lake and then they built rehousing settlements for the people who would be displaced. However, very few people actually moved because they didn’t have another way of life in the new spot. It’s a bit of a tragic story.

Next, we arrived at a Kente weaving village. Kente cloth is a traditional woven cloth from Ghana. It is  woven exclusively by men, and it actually originated in the Ashanti region of Ghana. Volta Kente is slightly different than the traditional Kente because of the colours of the cloth, but it is still absolutely gorgeous! The patterns vary, and some are very complex! Kente is woven in long strips, sometimes up to 10 or 15 feet long, and then sewn together to create a piece of cloth. It tends to be very expensive. There was a piece of Kente cloth that was probably about 10 feet by 15 feet and it was three hundred cedis, or about $210US! Still it’s very beautiful stuff, and I definitely bought some to take home!

On Saturday, we went to Laa Falls. They were absolutely amazing! The hike there was a flat trail that took about 45 minutes, and then we came upon the falls. The water level was quite high, so the falls were very powerful. We went swimming in the pool under the falls, and the water was so powerful that we couldn’t even get very close. The water was blasting out from where the water hit the bottom. Swimming in waterfalls is so exhilarating! It was pouring rain at the same time, so the feeling was even more exciting You just can’t keep a grin off of your face!!

On Sunday, Logan was feeling sick, so we went to the Nyaho Clinic in the morning. It turns out that he has a throat/sinus/ear infection, so he was prescribed antibiotics and sent home. The whole excursion took over 5 hours from beginning to end. Then, I had a lot of homework and laundry to do, so my Sunday was over! Monday, we had classes, but yesterday was Kwame Nkrumah Day, a brand new national holiday for which classes are cancelled. Kwame Nkrumah was the first President of Ghana after independence, and he was a wonderful politician. He is featured on the back of all the bills, and everyone still loves him. One of his biggest ideals was to unite Africa, or at least end inter-tribal tension. He has been described as being years ahead of his time. He also believed in empowering women, among other things. I feel like I want to read more about him because he sounds so interesting. Anyway, all week long there are awesome events going on in celebration. Last night, we went to the first screening of a Bob Marley documentary, another much-loved figured in Ghana. It was all about Bob Marley and Rastafarianism, which was very interesting. I looked up Rastafarianism during my lunch break today, and it seems like a very strange...religion/sect/movement/whatever you want to call it. People compare Nkrumah to Bob Marley because of his vision of a united Africa, but he really was not Rastafarian at all. For the next four nights, there are various plays going on, which I am looking forward to, and then on Sunday night there is a highlife guitar concert and storytelling time on campus. It’s going to be so cool!

Our Peoples and Cultures lecture today was by Professor John Collins, a British man born in India who has grown up in Ghana. He talked to us all about highlife guitar, which was absolutely fascinating! During colonization, the colonial powers squashed out much of the traditional African music because they were scared that it would permit uprising among the people as it did in Haiti in 1803. Instead, they trained people to play brass instruments in European styles. In Ghana, during the Ashanti Wars of the late 19^th century, Britain brought in soldiers from the Caribbean to fight because they were mostly immune to malaria unlike the white soldiers. These soldiers brought with them calypso music, which had been adapted from African music in the first place. This inspired these brass bands to bring African beats back into their music playing. Eventually, this African influence transferred onto the guitar, which created the highlife music style. Highlife is basically an overarching term for any Ghanaian popular music, but it definitely connotes an African rhythmic undertone. It is a wonderful music style, and I am definitely going to bring some of it back!

I had a very short, but very interesting conversation with a Ghanaian student while waiting for my rice balls and groundnut soup the other day. He asked me what I was doing here at the University, and I told him that I was studying International Development. He asked me why, and the only reason I could really come up with was that I want to help fix the problems created by the West in the first place. He went on to say that Ghana and Africa in general don’t really need us to fix them. And he’s absolutely right! As I learned in Sierra Leone, the best way to help someone is not to enforce your own ideals upon them and control exactly what’s going on, but to walk beside them and do what they want to do. Work with the people towards their own goals, not to for their own good. Reading The White Man’s Burden by William Easterly really opened my eyes to the evil that foreign aid has done when we do it wrong. I feel like he didn’t offer enough positive examples in his writing, but it was a very disillusioning book. The idea that even if foreign aid doesn’t accomplish what we think it will that it is still better than nothing is a skewed idea. Foreign aid can contribute to corruption and dependence if we are not careful with it. There is a very fine line in foreign between help and harm, and it is difficult to discern that line and tread on the right side. As I predicted, my course on the Ethics of Foreign Aid is by far the most interesting class!

Keep commenting on my posts, and if you want to, send me an email or Facebook message. I am almost halfway done my trip! Can you believe it?