What happens in Africa

The cleaner, the cakes and the poor black foal

2010-03-12T20:40:00.009Z

“You train horses, don’t you?” asks Daniel the cleaner as he sashays around, well dressed, with a feather duster. I don’t, I say, but I ride a lot, and if I had my life again I’d be preparing for the Olympics.

He’s talks quickly, so I only get about 10% of the conversation, but he’s charismatically animated. Roughly translated, he says: “My cousin has a horse, you must come and see him. He keeps it near the race track and we go there often. In fact every Saturday. There is also a black horse there and it is…woah! (sucks teeth in delight) it is woah! You must see it. It is a big one. Woah! It is a stallion and so big and when it comes out to race, woah!” At this point words are not enough and Daniel starts to canter camply round the kitchen, dropping his duster and being a racehorse.

We agree that we’ll go and see his cousin’s horse on Saturday and call to see his baby and his mother too, and cross an important boundary on our otherwise non-existent relationship. I panic bake for his family, sifting out weevils from the ingredients as I’ve been taught by caretaker Jonas.

Saturday comes and I show Daniel the cakes I’ve made for his family. They are burnt and the cherries on top have soddenly leaked green onto the icing. He looks at them sadly, then at me, and thinks “she doesn’t train horses, she can’t bake and she clearly can’t clean or I wouldn’t be here.”

We go off in my car to Labadi, a township near the beach hard at work earning a meagre living but living a good life. We go first to visit his aunt, a big woman sitting alone in a small dark room watching a programme about science and algebra on TV. She scrutinises me, asks Daniel why I’m there, then cracks a wide smile and goes back to her programme. Daniel picks up his daughter, Daniella, and we leave the gloomy room and move back into the searing sun.

As we walk around the small courtyard to see the rest of the family, we see kittens, litter after litter, small and thin with big furry paws catching shadows and flies. I turn to Daniel saying: “The guard tells me people in Labadi eat cats,” expecting him to roll eyes and say it’s a myth made for the white man. “We wait ‘til they’re bigger, then we make soup. One of our favourite things. Do you want some to take home?” I dash a glance at Magnus who's thankfully distracted by a football, and say we've enough kittens at home.

Daniel’s mother emerges, tall and toothless, wrapped in mismatching batiks but glamorous and effortless and clearly the matriarch. She comes with a luxuriantly pregnant young woman, smiling and content. We talk over the yapping of a terrier bitch, all teets and complaining face, and her two ugly puppies in a cage. I don’t ask Daniel, but I think dogs fare better than cats in Labadi. I hand over my cakes in an old cereal box with gaffer tape round the sides.

His cousin’s place is a similar set up to his mother’s, but close enough to the beach that you can taste the saltwater spray and watch sparkling sea from the waste-strewn dirt road beside it. Between the small rooms housing adults and countless children are stables and stalls for the horses and ponies they keep.

Daniel’s cousin has saddled up the largest, and wants me to take her for a ride. She’s a former polo pony, seven years old, whose career at the polo club a few miles away ended when she injured her legs. Her refined polo pony head remains, but she is thin now, with swollen forelegs that look like they’d impede anything faster than a slow walk. I decline the ride but say Magnus can get on because he’s less of a burden and I fear she’s about to crumble and break.

We take her down the road for a while, she walks slowly and breaks into a surprising trot now and then, and Magnus asks to take her to the beach and she stumbles across the rocks but plods on. It’s midday and white with heat, and the horse is pulling Magnus who’s had enough. The cousin motions to me. “Take her for a gallop now” he says. “She likes it.” I hide disbelief and wonder if her life giving pony rides on the beach are the cause of the sad face, so decide to give her a go.

She is wearing a plastic saddle and string reins. We clatter over rocks on the beach and I nudge her on, expecting nothing. She collects her hindlegs and starts a slow canter. The ears are happy, so I ask for little bit more and suddenly she’s back on the polo field, Seabiscuit, breaking into a fast gallop that’s hard to contain with the string reins that now burn painfully through my fingers. We run out of beach and are up a bank onto the flat old salt pond they call the racetrack, twice round at top speed then finish. She’s not even out of breath and I am delighted.

The cousin runs up the beach dragging Magnus. “Excellent!” he says. “I want you to train her son.” I ask about him, learning that he is young and unbroken. We walk back to the compound to meet him. The cousin takes me to his small, bare stall between bedrooms. I stare in disbelief.

“He’s a foal,” I say, looking at a black colt barely six months old. “No, he’s two, I ride him,” he says. “He’s for sale.” I decline the offer and tell Daniel we’re going home, dashing the cousin 10 Ghana cedis ($7.50) and wondering how long the baby colt foal will survive.

As we drive home I’m suddenly aware that I’ve given Daniel nothing for his trouble. We pay him over the odds, but he still only earns from us in a month what we would pay a London cleaner in a week. It’s a tough subject to address, but I ask him. “Don’t give me anything” he says. I reflect, thinking he is a decent man. Everyone is friendly, but everyone’s a secret entrepreneur, and few favours are for free, especially for a white person.

I am thinking about this a few days later when Daniel comes to clean. He’s a rare find and I am happy to employ him. He hasn’t been unkind to us, he’s pulled himself together quickly on the occasions he’s cried, and he hasn’t eaten the cats on the compound (while the gardener of the previous tenant did). He’s not on the make, he’s earning his money honestly with a mop and feather duster, and he’ll be promoted soon to market the cleaning business for which he works.

With that, he comes to me, doe eyed, and says he’s sad we’re leaving. I wonder if he’ll cry, because sometimes he does, but he steels himself, looks me straight in the eye and surprises me. “I was thinking” he says, “I want to email you when you go. Best that you leave me your laptops.”

My slightly-less-successful-than-the-last-fishing-trip fishing trip

2010-01-30T12:42:00.025Z

I gaze at the calendar my mother has given me for Christmas. It has pictures of British beaches, and I know she intends for it to speed my return home from Ghana.

I count the weeks we have left.

"Eight weeks" I tell the others. "We'd better go away for the weekend, to make the most of it." Really it's because I've ridden the local horses to exhaustion, and now I want to go fishing.

To be fair we haven't been roughing it, a solid stream of guests since November requiring trips ranging from super-luxury to gap year in Cape Coast, Akosombo, Big Milly's Backyard, Elmina.

But the renewed pressure of a deadline to leave Ghana brings a fresh excuse, and we decide on a little trip to Ada Foah.

It’s no small undertaking. We know of only one hotel, we've stayed there, and I wrote so many pages in the guest book (a menu that bore no relation to the reality of supplies; two-pin sockets for three-pin appliances; and universally depressed staff) there was a queue of guests lining up behind me to read it.

"How will we explain our return?" I say.

My husband rifles for the tourist book. "There must be somewhere we overlooked".

There is. Tsarley Korpey, a two-storey house with inestimable stone cladding that would leave my (Welsh) compatriots gasping for air.

“Aren’t we lucky?” I say to Magnus as we survey the River Volta while waiting from 12.30 to 2pm GMT (Ghana Maybe Time) for three salads in a national characteristic that makes my husband ~~intolerable~~ very hungry. Magnus eyes a jetski and looks gleeful. “Don’t get too comfortable, all over soon,” I say. He suddenly hates me, but it is early January and I tell him he’s missing the snow and he gets sad.

Our lunch wait time is being underused, so I call a man I've met before to bring his boat at 2pm so we can catch a barracuda, then take Magnus to a jetty to fish.

”You go first” I say, handing him the rod in the hope that he’ll catch something and start liking it. He feigns interest, plops a worm into the drink and hands it over.

But there’s nothing here, it’s like Cowes Week gone south, a persistent hum of speedboats that has sent the fish to the shady banks of the island over the way. I reel in, get stuck on a rock, and am forced to cut the line and lose a South African spinner I’d bought just the day before. As I pull in the rest of the line something hits the water. Plouf. The arm of my finest reel has worked loose and is sinking away from me, through dark water and down into sinking sand, and there are crocodiles, and I'm not going in after it.

"I must have the highest ratio of lost equipment to caught fish in the world," I say to Magnus. "You should give up," he says.

The barracuda boat comes with its owner, whose number's stored on speed dial as Moussa Fish, though only one of those is his real name.

I feel my luck's in. But I’m on form, the parody of a fisherman, losing another reel, another set of tackle, some pride, an afternoon, and several fish. Magnus sleeps through the whole round-trip.

“We’ll try the island tomorrow” says Moussa Fish, apologetically. He has caught nothing either, though unlike me his rod and his pride appears intact. “I’ll pick you up at 8”.

Eight comes and I'm lifeless, pinned to the bed by an interminable pain, a dagger welded in my middle so sharp it’s like Olivia's been with the cowry. “I’ll be fine,” I say. “I’ll cancel the boat” says my husband, and they disappear to breakfast, then return to say goodbye because they are going on a jetski. I drift away, clasped ‘twixt Morpheus and Nauseous, but overhear Magnus from over a mile away screaming delight across the estuary.

When they return, it’s time to go. I uncrumple myself, and my husband shows me to the receptionist. “The latest strain of malaria starts just like this,” she says (not food poisoning from our hotel! Good God no! Malaria, for sure, typhoid maybe. Bilharzia. Bubonic plague but most emphatically not food poisoning, no siree!)

We rush back to Accra for a malaria test at the hospital and by the time we arrive I’m bent double in pain. “I feel very sick" I say "like I have food poisoning, and I need a malaria test."

The receptionist takes down the information, asks if we’re paying cash, then says "you're an emergency, go straight in."

The doctor looks at me gravely and directs me to his ultrasound machine. Strange, I think, I assumed a malaria test would require some blood.

“I feel sick, in my stomach, and I ache, like the ‘flu” I say, “what is it you’re ultrascanning?”

He doesn't answer.

“Almost definitely malaria” he says. He looks at me, concerned, like he’s about to break bad news. “Are you paying cash?” he asks. Yes. “Better stay in.”

I'm drugged, dripped and left. Then there follows an incredible crescendo of antipathy. Drips fail to drip, and two big nurses come to tell me off; they storm in at 4am and turn lights full-on, then ask why I'm not resting. They try to take a blood sample and say my veins are wrong, and they tell me off. And so on.

My son meanwhile is delighted because it occasions a meeting with Dr Boy, who saw him when he was admitted with (vile) dysentery, and who said to him "My name is Dr Boy. I am not a girl, I am a boy". My son repeats it regularly as part of his "I'm a Ghanaian" line up that also includes, in strong local accent, "Your buttoss is itchy!" (you've ants in your pants) and "Jolloff rice is tooooo nice!" (but your buttoss will get fat).

I hold Doctor Boy in slightly lower esteem. He comes into my room, spies my son, whom he talks to adoringly, then my husband, to whom he is reverent (Ah! The BBC man! Great to have you here. How was Kenya? East coast suit you well? Been travelling much? You look on fine form!) and leaves. He has ignored me, on the bed, drips not dripping and wrong veins. He pops back in, as if he's forgotten himself, gives me a cursory "you OK?" and leaves before I answer.

Twenty-four hours, five non-dripping drips and nurses who sing sweet church songs while violently flushing a vein later I am allowed to go. We go to pay the bill. It's almost one thousand dollars, with a premium on everything because the man with the ultrasound machine was the country's top gynaecologist. We didn't know.

"We thought he was the doctor on duty, we told you I wanted a malaria test" we say.

The woman, who's behind a thick pane of glass and talking deliberately quietly, says "You saw the gynaecologist, do you know how good he is? So you have to pay what it says on the bill."

The credit controller comes, and we explain. She sucks her teeth and says "pay it". There follows a loud row. Not between her and me, because I'm being puny and still ill, but between her and my husband, who has become excellently terrifying.

The medical director spies that we're being manhandled by the credit controller, a woman who raises aggressive a few notches and turns it into fanged loonyism. She ushers us into her office, apologises, and we emerge triumphant, sensing the credit controller will be the next person in.

We pay the right amount and walk out past an audience we've entertained for the past half hour.

As we reach the door my husband, a reasonable, cerebral, (usually) conflict-averse man, turns on his heels. "I'm going back to the credit controller," he says, "to tell her she's toast."

Georgina Pipson with three boys and two girls

2010-01-17T15:59:00.006Z

In the past weeks as Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab's fortnight in Ghana gave its place in the news to Togo under siege in Cabinda, another story was quietly playing out in the local press. It divided people sharply, turning its culprit into a victim while speaking volumes about a society out of touch with its own reality.

The story broke on January 5, with the discovery of five dead children, aged 11, 9, 6, 4 and 1, lined up like dolls on a bed in order of age.

Their mother, Georgina Pipson, (pictured, holding the youngest, Esi) is thought to have poisoned their food, then called her ex-husband, told him he should get the children, and fled.

Initially she was labelled a monster. But days later she was found lying semi-conscious in a vehicle in Accra. She was admitted to hospital and died the following day. Nobody spoke of the cause.

When she was found, she was carrying a purse containing a small diary in which she had chronicled her life.

“I was born in December 1977...I am alone in this world, God why, God why..Georgina with three boys and two girls...I don’t have a mother or father, who am I? My People deserted me...God give me hope...forgive me and my children, Nana, Kwaku, Angel, Kofi, Esi...What a painful world; God have mercy on me and my children...Why, Kojo my husband? Kojo, I do love you and will never forget you."

While reports suggest that Georgina was mentally ill, her former husband had said that this wasn't the case. “Georgina was not mad. She was quite normal but occasionally at some point, she starts behaving abnormal. She would go out and sit somewhere and cry.”

She'd been visited by a domestic violence unit of the police after reporting her husband for abuse, but there the help stopped.

In this newspaper column written "just to interrogate the system", Vicky Wirecko suggests that Ghana has yet to get to grips with the disintegration of communal living, which was equipped to support single mothers. Its place has not been filled by adequate state support, leaving single mothers, dirt-poor, struggling to bring up big broods they can't afford. The mental wounds (one study found 50% of women surveyed in a marketplace showed signs of mental degradation) can obviously be devastating.

Wirecko says the family’s tragedy "speaks loads about our failed society, our dysfunctional child welfare and protection institutions, and a pathetic diagnosis of the social welfare and medical support systems that exist in our country today."

Georgina still lies in the mortuary with the youngest of her children. The four others were buried last week by their father, absent for the latter part of their lives but keen last week to talk to the newspapers to present a picture of the wronged father burying his children in the copper soil.

The remaining child, one year old Esi, remains unclaimed. She cannot be laid to rest with her siblings because the father says she's not biologically his.

He also can't bury Georgina, so she will not share her children's grave. He says his culture can't allow him to bury the family together without the consent of Georgina's family, but they have not kept contact, save for the presentation of a bottle of Schnapps when they heard the news that the children had died.

Who is Blaise Campaoré?

2009-12-31T21:11:00.007Z

In the early days of his role as West Africa correspondent, when Conakry’s streets were a killing field, my husband looked up from his screen and said: “How do you write a snappy intro about two countries no one’s ever heard of?”

We laughed, knowing that was a pitfall of covering 15 West African countries, many of which receive scant attention by western media.

Bloodshed at a demonstration in Conakry, Guinea aimed at stalling plans by the military leader Captain Moussa Dadis Camara to run in upcoming presidential elections meant that country was climbing the mainstream media’s agenda.

Harder to explain was Burkina Faso, a large but largely unknown country, whose president, Blaise Campaoré (pictured above with Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi), had been appointed by the Economic Community of West African States to broker a peace deal with Dadis Camara.

Over the past four years, Campaoré has become mediator du jour, negotiating in three African disputes: Côte d’Ivoire, Togo and now Guinea.

In July 2006, he was named mediator of the Inter-Togolese Dialogue, a series of measures aimed at pulling this small West African country out of the disastrous effects of a decade of prolonged political, economic and financial governance crisis.

In 2007, he was back in the spotlight as mediator in Côte d’Ivoire, a cornerstone of the region’s economy that from 2002 was torn apart by a civil war that had turned its tropical landscape into a troubled heap of African corpses.

Campaoré brokered the peace agreement that was signed by Ivorian President Laurent Gbagbo and the then-rebel Forces Nouvelles leader Guillaume Soro after a month of negotiations in Ouagadougou on March 4, 2007.

At last February’s Ecowas business forum, Campaoré spoke of the urgency of implementing the Millennium Development Goals, the role of the private sector in developing world wealth creation, peace and security, good governance, the fight against poverty, and ensuring the harmonious integration of West Africa into the global economy.

So what better candidate for Nigeria (as current chair of Ecowas) to choose than Campaoré for the job of fixing Guinea?

Not sure. Have a look at his record.

He entered the political scene in 1987 in a bloody coup that murdered his erstwhile brother in arms, Thomas Sankara, who despite having taken power in a coup four years earlier was regarded by many as a genuine idealist.Campaoré’s stewardship later saw the elimination of Henri Zongo and Jean-Baptiste Boukary Lingani, accused of plotting against his regime.

Four years later he was elected unopposed when just 25% of the electorate turned out to vote. He was re-elected in 1998 and 2005, breaking a constitutional amendment that allows a president two terms of five years each in power. Campaoré, who by then had been in the president’s seat for 18 years, said the amendment could not be applied retroactively and he took power once again.

Burkina Faso has faced domestic and external concern over the state of its economy and human rights, and allegations that it was involved in the smuggling of diamonds by rebels in Sierra Leone. It has substantial gold reserves, yet its main export is cotton, which leaves it vulnerable to market fluctuations. The United Nations ranks the country as the third poorest in the world.

In 1998, Norbert Zongo, the publisher and editor of the Burkina Faso newspaper l'Indépendant, was murdered while his newspaper was investigating the murder of a driver who had worked for the Campaoré’s brother. An Independent Commission of Inquiry concluded that Zongo was killed for purely political reasons, but no one has been charged for his murder.

When a decision was taken to drop the case, Reporters Without Borders said: "After eight years of campaigning, this decision makes the reign of impunity in Burkina Faso official… The president has got what he always wanted - injustice”. On the upside, at least there was an independent inquiry that was able to pass a judgment unfavorable to the government.

Among the more high profile allegations against him are those that have emerged during the trial first in Sierra Leone and then in The Hague of Charles Taylor, former Liberian leader, for crimes against humanity and war crimes in Sierra Leone, where one of the bloodiest and most chilling wars in West Africa raged for 11 years. Linked investigations found documents showing arms shipments from Ukraine to Burkina Faso.

They have also collected statements from witnesses describing how these arms were transported to Taylor’s militias and to Foday Sankoh’s Revolutionary United Front in Sierra Leone, plus other military and commercial links between Compaoré, Sankoh and Taylor. These are allegations of course, but they keep cropping up.

A leader in the Sierra Herald, a Sierra Leonean newspaper and website, asks why Campaoré has been drafted in to help Guinea when he is “the chief gun-runner and rabble-rouser of the sub-region, with paws in the three rather fragile states of Liberia, Côte d’Ivoire and Sierra Leone.”

Perhaps here is the very reason he’s been chosen.

His role in Côte d’Ivoire offers clues. His appointment there is understood to have happened due to his support for the Forces Nouvelles, the breakaway militia in the north of the country who had mutinied with success in 2002. Involving him as mediator was viewed as the only way to exercise power over the rebels and broker a peace agreement using what Africa Confidential calls his “diplomatic cunning” aimed at transforming himself “from rebel sponsor to regional peacemaker”.

Two years on, and in spite of that agreement, the country remains split across the middle, tens of thousands of weapons continue to circulate and elections aimed at restoring democracy have been postponed five times.

In Guinea, he is believed to have been the backer of a plot against the previous regime under Lieutenant General Lansana Conté. Following Conté’s death, many of his senior officers switched allegiance and now serve in Dadis Camara’s regime. Ecowas could be hoping this would give Campaoré enough leverage to build a rapport with Dadis Camara, says Africa Confidential.

The early signs have not been encouraging, but then the two sides in Guinea’s conflict have irreconcilable positions. Dadis Camara, meanwhile, lies in hospital in Morocco after being shot by one of his top aides earlier this month. The official media in Guinea has reported that the junta leader is recovering and will return to the country as soon as possible, but unofficial reports suggest he is incapacitated and unaware of his surroundings.

Whether or not Dadis Camara returns to Guinea and to power, Campaoré will still be talking to military men in his efforts to diffuse the situation. He may have the knack for talking to soldiers, but the civilians on whom Guinea’s future depends may have more difficulty in talking to the grand daddy of West African coup leaders.

For a glittering glimpse of tough-dug gold, there will be blood

2009-12-03T18:21:00.015Z

My parents arrive, Deet-drenched and eager, on fire with expectations but justifiably half-broken by their first taste of African heat.

I want them to feel safe. But in a misjudged moment of truth, I reveal that a woman I know in Accra has day guards, night guards, armed guards, panic buttons, guard dogs and sensors set off by a cotton moth’s gossamer wings.

They look around for our security staff, spotting caretaker Jonas, ex-pro footballer but lately all bulging hernia and crooked leg. He’s wearing cracked spectacles he’s too proud to have us replace. “We’re fine with him, he says nothing happens round here,” I say.

Jonas flops the papers onto the breakfast table. “Bloody Weekend: Boy Beheaded, Woman Killed & Four Armed Robbers Gunned Down” reads the splash.

My timing for the safety chat seems wide of the mark. I make a hurried concession, announcing plans to buy a dog, and we look at the photos in the paper.

Here is a handcuffed man, in whose lap is cradled a dead 6-year-old boy. The child is his nephew, whose eye and ear he pierced before beheading him.

Next to it Rita Baah, 30, raped by her priest when she went to receive “spiritual soap to make her make her more beautiful and extraordinarily attractive to men”. He finished her off with a mauling hammer, then draped her body across his tiny moped to dump it.

Under these, four dead men, faces uncovered, shot by police following an armed robbery in the Ashante region in central Ghana.

“I thought Ghana was a happy place” says my mother. By the end of her stay, she’ll be in no doubt that it is, but for now, she’s focussed on the papers.

I try to think of a time in the past two weeks that The Daily Graphic has arrived without pictures of the dead, but it’s a struggle.

Days earlier, the paper was the first to publish a photo of 14 women and children from Dompoase in western Ghana, laid out still-clothed in a mortuary when an illegal mine where they worked collapsed as they clawed into the hillside for gold.

Ghana police called it the country’s biggest mining tragedy, but the data doesn't seem to verify that. In 2007, 18 miners were killed while 30 others went missing when an illegal gold mine caved in west of Accra. In total 15 bodies were found at the latest accident at Dompoase, but the police said more would be recovered.

Everyone’s heard of Ghana’s gold (it accounts for more than 90% of the country's total mineral exports with revenues last year reaching $2.2bn), but less known is the human cost as small scale, artisanal miners known as Galamsey tear at the gold beneath their feet to recover small portions of the riches exiting the country in multinational hands.

For while the ground is rich, just 3% of the profits it generates are thought to come back into Ghanaian hands.

Many of the Galamsey were once farmers, working fertile land that could support harvests of tomatoes, plantain and cocoa for generations. When Ghanaian officials sold the rights to the gold to multinational companies, the farmers were evicted for the price of a single harvest.

Now they claw back what they can in rivers and makeshift mines owned by small local operators, some licensed, some not. The mine at Dompoase was illegal, but the owner died with the others so no questions could be asked.

Much of it happens in the river basins, rich with alluvial gold, using mercury which seeps through food and water causing mutations and afflictions so scarcely understood its witnesses claim evidence of witchcraft, its victims ostracised or killed.

In the mines, people work, eat and sleep in stifling conditions, in humidity and darkness with temperatures hovering around 38°C and brutality from mine owners rampant.

There was shock in Ghana was it emerged that almost all who died at Dompoase were women, but in the 45 African nations where this activity happens, up to 50% of the miners are thought to be female, according to Community and Small Scale Mining, a networking group chaired by the UK’s Department for International Development.

In some places, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo, CASM says the participation of women is much higher. There, it’s illegal for children to work in the mines, but one million of them do, their mothers subjected to some of the worst rape and sexual abuse in the world by security forces and militia that control the extraction activities.

Last month, the Minister for Women and Children's Affairs in Ghana, Akua Sena Dansu, called for a clampdown on women’s participation in Galamsey. In a statement to parliament, she touched on the NGO’s findings, putting it bluntly saying the “major contributing factor to the involvement of women in illegal mining activities, is the irresponsible nature of some men”.

The women mine in backbreaking, filthy conditions, frequently with the twin load of young baby and unborn child in the cycle of relentless pregnancy that dominates poor communities.

To supplement the family income, they take second jobs. CASM found that in one mining community in Kenya, 70% of the women have sexually transmitted diseases from sex work to boost earnings because their husbands spend the money elsewhere.

That inescapable sex inequality’s rampant throughout Accra. We watch it as we take a cab that afternoon to visit an American who’s selling Alsatians.

Amid our congealing trail of traffic, women street vendors come with heavy burdens of necessities. They're carried on heads in baskets and buckets that load multi-kilo force on bodies already bearing infants on front or back.

The men carry light loads of commercial long shots: chest expanders, Barbies and Santas wrapped in warm red coats for the 34 degree heat. I can’t recall seeing one with a heavy headbasket of anything.

Interviewed by the BBC, the women who sell in these conditions said they felt lucky they were not forced to work in the mine at Dompoase, but standing amid lines of crumbling tro-tros in thick-baked air, their lots don’t look much more fortunate.

Turning his gaze from this economic adversity, my father says: “Do you think the oil will be any different from the gold?”

He’s been an oilman all his life, and is in no doubt that the wranglings between China the UK and America for control of the Ghanaian oil discovered by an Irish company that promises years of work for riggers from the Middle East and India looks set to repeat the curse of the extractive industry that’s characterised the gold rush for years.

“Depends whether Ghana gets involved” I say, explaining the Ghana National Petroleum Company’s plans to scramble finance to keep the others out of the way.

A few yards on we buy three apples from a (male) street vendor, paying a heavily-inflated white man’s price and reducing his load by a third. As we sit in the snarl-up, we watch him return to a woman with a bulging bucket of apples on her head, twenty times his own load, to replenish his stock before moving back into the superheated, stinking, movable junkyard to sell them.

Huckleberry Finn should never go to reggae night

2009-11-09T10:00:00.024Z

"You need to lighten up," says my husband.

“What?” I say defensively. I’m a Capricorn. The words don’t compute.

“No one wants to read about doom and gloom. There’s so much that…well it’s not all like that is it?” he says.

“I have a sense of foreboding that if I write about the nice stuff…” He cuts me off: “You have a sense of foreboding about everything.”

I know this is nothing to do with tending towards the real. It’s because he wants me to write about The Fishing Trip. But that would involve a loss of face, and I won’t be drawn.

“Write about the fishing trip,” he says, eventually, then picks up a kit bag and heads off. He’s going for a week to East Africa to chase the story of Somalian Pirates’ wavering demands for a couple of captured Brits.

Odd trip for a West Africa correspondent, I say. Why’s he off there? “British lives in danger,” he says. It calls for hands on deck from all corners of troubled, starving, war-torn, famine-ridden (not everywhere, remember?) Africa.

He’s going to miss the beach in this heat, I think, mucking about in temperate water, playing cricket with Magnus, finding a rare breeze that wafts smells of fish cooking on the grill.

Fish I didn’t catch.

Let me explain first that I have never thought myself an expert.

I spent a childhood in Wales persuading my father to spend rain-soaked evenings in ugly estuaries so we could catch flounder and plaice, and he would stand patiently with me in gales while we hooked tiny crab and threw them back.

In three years of this we caught one edible fish which my mother cooked and shared four ways. It didn’t matter that we caught little; I went to escape a wasteland that was children's TV.

That was a long time ago. Now I was ready to fish the great shoals of rare and beautiful fish that I would girlishly wrestle from the sea and bring home and serve to my own family. They would marvel at my skill, and I would feel like a huntress.

I knew there were tilapia in Ghanian water, a strong-spined fish you cook with cocoyam leaves, or with okra in a hot stew that’s slippery, like an overbloomed swamp whose crocs have long gone in shame, but which tastes like chilli velvet.

And much else besides: yellowfin and big-eye tuna, mackerel, sardines, sea bream, blue marlin and further afield barracuda.

But all this needs practice, requiring a trip to the beach for some concentrated learning. The boys come along for moral support, but it isn’t the peaceful mission I desire.

“Welcome to reggae night!” shouts a boy from a bar. He pulls up three plastic chairs for us to start drinking beer. One of us is 6, but that’s the least of my new problems.

I’m here to dip my hook quietly into teeming sea, but there’s a cacophonous crowd fired up for a big night and we’re suddenly centre-stage.

The fishing rod is an immediate source of entertainment. Fishing here is a job done with boats and nets, not a hobby. They want to help. Someone wants to buy the rod from me. He’s persuasive but I can’t, it’s the closest I get to adrenalin sport since a ski accident that broke my leg for a year.

They want to know everything.

“What’s on the line?” I show them hooks and beads and weights. I demonstrate how to put the rod together and how to use the reel, and I show them where in the water I want it.

“What are you trying to get? You want tortoise?” I assume they mean turtle. Magnus would cry forever.

The bit I am dreading is the inevitable next question.

In anticipation, I pick up the tackle box and pretend it’s time to move to a better part of the water, but they’re pretty jazzed up, they really want to know what this is all about.

And then it comes: “What food are you using to catch the fish?”

This is the bit my husband loves.

I’d prefer to produce a baby’s leg than show them what I’ve got. I had no time to stop for bait on the way; there was a risk of missing the last of the light.

So I took what I could from the fridge. Something that might sashay in the sea and fox the fish into thinking it was food. But it’s not really going to work, and it’s not going to pass muster with my new fishing friends.

They see I’m hesitant, and while two of them keep me protracting another looks in my fishing box and pulls out the “bait”.

I wish away my audience but it doesn’t work. They have found my oyster mushrooms, and I shudder.

So there we are, Huckleberry Finn and the Strange Bag of Fungi. The reggae boys are politely perplexed. I’m crestfallen. I reach for a magic goat horn but there isn’t one there.

“You won’t catch,” says one. “I’m getting you a fish.” He disappears into a bar and returns with a sardine’s tail, cuts it up and puts it on the hook. Then he asks me for more money than I would’ve paid for the entire fish at the market.

I disappear into the sea, a leg-wounded Fisher King, and pray to the god of Ghana and all his ancestors that I don’t fall over in the waves.

I try to fish, but I entered the realm of slapstick some minutes ago and now find it hard to stay serious. My sardine tail catches two plastic bags, one white, one black. I achieve racial harmony at least.

I look over at Magnus who’s been drawing animal pictures in the sand during the whole episode but has seen that the boys have found the mushrooms. He looks back, apologetically, fondly, thinking: “I love her but I don’t think I am hers.”

Why Olivia and the goat horn are making headlines near you

2009-10-29T17:51:00.016Z

“I placed a goat’s horn into the stomach of my sister to prevent her from having children,” says Olivia, 19.

It’s not my usual morning reading, but it’s compelling.

It’s a news story about a girl who’s been a witch since she was 5, and is now being exorcised in a church whose congregation are “stunned”.

She continues: “They gave my mother’s heart to me to eat and our queen witch feasted on my mother’s head, as my culture demands.”

Hell that’s bad, though maybe Mama had it coming, having ignored Olivia’s wishes to be exorcised for 10 years, by which time it was too late.

“When I was 15 my mother took me to a Man of God in Ivory Coast…but a strong burst of smoke came out of my nose and mouth as the pastor faced me…he was not strong spiritually to face the witchcraft spirit in me, so we left.”

Olivia’s troubled, for sure, and she’s been on the rampage against her family.

Among ills inflicted are abject poverty (she has stored their savings in her cauldron), a lifetime of pain for her grandma, in whose stomach she has placed a shell, and the headless, heartless mother, eaten.

And the goat sister. For she has spent “the last ten years…going to all lengths to find a solution to her barrenness, wasting a lot of time and money in the process.”

I lack grasp of matters cloven-hoofed, but shouldn’t belly-full-of-goat-girl have mentioned it to her physician?

Luckily it doesn’t matter. A preacher, Prophet Michael Osei, can save her. He can make her vomit the womb-held horn (figure out the exit route for yourself, I am foxed), exorcising Olivia and stunning his (rural) congregation in one sweep. Thank God for men of God, for they can save the world, the witches and hell fire! even the football.

And their PR machine’s not bad either.

The story’s amusing, but I bristle, because I think it’s also pernicious. It’s running on at least two popular news outlets in Ghana and there is no indication that a journalist has done anything to question the legitimacy.

I check the reader feedback. It’s a mix of fear of “witches and wizards”, calls for “a proper journalist to investigate” (at last!) “who this queen witch is” (oh), and something sensible from Naa Shomey: “This is the kind of thing that makes such false prophets perpetuate such nonsense. Why is it that most accused witches are women and young children?”

Thanks to Naa. I think she has hit the nail on the head.

The likely origin of the story is a revivalist church, which confirm or "discover" signs of witchcraft, operate on a profit-making basis and most that practise exorcism will put on a performance like Olivia’s for the purposes of financial gain.

Promise double digit dollars to a teenager with her heart set on some slingbacks and a night out, coach her and poof! she’ll ham it up about the goat and the smoke and the bloke who couldn’t fix her. The crooked bombast of a preacherman gets a quick return on investment, winning the support of troubled families who have no access to basic social services, and use the church as their moral reference point. Pass the collection plate!

The knock-on effects are felt as far apart as Tanzania and Tottenham, Angola and Hackney, Congo , Tower Bridge and Harlesden. You name it.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo alone, Unicef estimates that there are 25,000 abandoned children in Kinshasa and more than 40,000 country-wide. More than 70% have been accused of witchcraft.

One of those children is Cedric, who was 8 when he watched his village, just outside Kinshasa, turn against him after his father was killed in an accident. He and his brother, denounced as sourcerers, were beaten with stones and chased away. “I knew I was not a witch. They only did that because they did not want to look after us,” Cedric said. They sought refuge in an aunt, who gave them to a pastor to be exorcised. Together, the aunt and the pastor beat the children until they ran away. Cedric lost his brother along the way, joined a gang and slept in “stinking alleys, oozing untreated waste”.

Pastor Michel Kabi, who runs an organisation set up to counter witchcraft, says accusing children of sorcery is an easy way out: “People are too poor and desperate themselves and are frightened of having to look after children too.”

Children who are uncomfortably close to your doorstep.

They include Victoria Climbiè, an Ivorian girl who was tortured and killed in Tottenham due to witchcraft accusations. Boy Adam, whose mutilated torso was discovered floating in the River Thames, and Child B, an 8-year-old child brought to the UK from Angola, who was beaten, cut and had chilli rubbed in her eyes after her aunt and two others believed she was a witch.

All of these cases had their origins in Africa.

I called one of the media outlets to ask about their editorial policy. Is it appropriate to publish a story with no reference to the possibility that the facts might not stand up? And that ultimately mask a practice that in many other cultures would be called child abuse?

“Our editorial policy is our own business and is not for public knowledge,” says someone there. He’s a journalist. I ask what he thinks of it, personally. “It’s not right,” he concedes.

Western media stands rightfully accused of using large-scale suffering and backwardness as a means of reporting Africa (I feel dangerously close to falling into that camp, too).

But here are popular, urban Ghanaian media outlets giving credence to practices that demoralise Africa and give the rest of the world the idea that for this continent, there still is no hope.

Quite sticks a goat horn in my Hallowe’en spirit.

Ghanaian rain the least of the pain for Vodafone’s African adventure

2009-10-22T18:10:00.002Z

“It’s raining!” shouts Magnus as he flings himself onto my bed at 5am while looking for things to do following the household ban on TV.

He opens the curtains and I open an eye. Rain of tropical proportions.

“Thank you London!” he says, and skips off.

I’m not sure why he’s so pleased. But I am delighted, because today caretaker Jonas can divert the gallons he soaks onto sun-baked earth to our reserve tank instead, so when water looters steal from the mains so they can survive, so can we.

Then I remember Vodafone.

The downpour that’s keeping us in rainforest garden is drowning cables elsewhere in town. There’s no way our broadband will be working.

I call the Vodafone man. “There are major problems,” he says. I ask if it’s the rain, he says no, of course not, then relents when pushed and says the problems could last the day. I hang up and wonder if the call will be used for quality and training purposes.

I switch to the MTN line and watch it whip through credits at unimaginable speed.

Vodafone must be finding it tricky in Ghana. The rain is one problem, but small in comparison to this: a report emerged last week calling its acquisition last year of Ghana Telecom, the state provider, “unconstitutional” and “illegal” and calling for the entire deal to be renegotiated.

It’s a slap in the face to a world class network that has entered a lucrative market with an extravagant promo promising a $1m grand prize which includes a luxury villa in Accra’s exclusive Trasacco Valley, a chauffeur-driven 4X4, motorbikes and scholarships in a draw that will be aired on national TV. Its presence here is inescapable.

On paper, Vodafone bought a 70% stake in Ghana Telecom for $900m in a deal that completed in August 2008.

But the report, commissioned by the incoming National Democratic Congress government led by John Atta Mills, said that "through a complicated series of financial arrangements" the actual price it paid was less than $450m - far less than the annual earnings potential of Ghana Telecom. Analysts say the figure in reality could be as low as $267m.

I call Vodafone HQ to ask about revenues from Ghana. They don’t break them out. So I ask my neighbours how much they spend on their mobile telephones. They estimate $120 a year. Add to that some broadband customers ($500 a year), some mobile broadband (costlier), heavy use by companies and NGOs, and the fact that the Ghana Telecom deal added 1.6 million customers to the Vodafone network, and the revenues start to stack up. It doesn’t take long to make the deal pay for itself.

In all of this it would be unfair not to mention what Vodafone brings to Ghana. It's made the country a key cog in its corporate and social responsibility programme, stepped up health and safety, changed electrical equipment to cut fire risk, and taught safer standards of driving. A spokesman in the UK tells me the company has yet to receive a copy of the report, and that it will decide how to react when the Ghanaian government makes an official statement.

The report, which is certainly available in Ghana, goes on to question why Vodafone's bid was approved when other firms, such as Telkom South Africa were offering higher bids for a lesser stake.

It adds that “although strong allegations were made about bribery and corruption, the committee did not have the powers and resources to investigate these claims”.

Ah! Right on cue, a chance for Atta Mills to act, to right possible wrongs of the former (opposition) government and come up smelling of roses.

Right? Wrong.

Contacted when the report emerged, communications minister Haruna Iddrisu told Ghana’s Joy FM radio station that the ""Government is of the opinion that the Committee overstepped its remit in expressing an opinion on the constitutionality or otherwise of the transaction."

So why such reluctance to act?

The report into Vodafone’s purchase of Ghana Telecom comes at a time when the NDC government is squirming from the fallout of the Mabey and Johnson bribery case. Mabey and Johnson is a British company that specialises in building bridges and it recently was found guilty of trying to bribe officials in a number of countries to secure contracts.

One of those countries was Ghana when the NDC was last in power in the 1990s. Two ministers serving in the current NDC administration have resigned pending an investigation into their alleged role in the bribe-taking scandal. So flinging mud too enthusiastically at the former New Patriotic Party government for its handling of the Ghana Telecom sale risks some of the mud coming back.

And it risks the country's own attractiveness as a place to do business.

Ghana has done well in recent years to market itself as the good news story of Africa.

Compared with its neighbours – Cote D’Ivoire, Sierra Leone and Liberia, that’s not particularly hard, and while Nigeria remains a smog-choked punishment of a place to do business, Ghana is a safe and stable Anglophone alternative just three countries to the left.

Amid the billions set to flow in thanks to oil exploration that’s revealed one of the richest African prospects in years, is $500m or so lost on a telco deal really worth the quibble?

Niger, the unreported Guinea of West Africa

2009-10-18T21:12:00.002Z

On Tuesday October 20, Niger, a vast uranium-rich state in West Africa, will see the final swing of President Mamadou Tandja's constitutional wrecking-ball.

Tandja changed his country's constitution so that he could hold a referendum which, naturally enough, gave him an overwhelming mandate to serve another three years in office on top of the normal two-term limit. Niger's supreme court ruled that Tandja's referendum was unconstitutional, so he shut it down. And to make sure nothing else got in the way, he dissolved the national assembly in case it tried to forestall his patriotic destiny.

The umbrella opposition group, Coordination of Democratic Forces of the Republic, is boycotting the election, saying it's not only illegal but will be rigged so that President Tandja can pack it with cronies. And what might a national assembly packed with Tandja's supporters do? Approving unlimited terms for their man would be a good one to start with.

Does the the rest of the world care enough to impose sanctions? Not really, and this is the menace.

Africa's wealth of natural resources leads to an inevitable hypocrisy among countries with the wealth to tap them.

Take Guinea, for example. Here is a bauxite-rich country in West Africa where soldiers of the military government led by Captain Moussa Dadis Camara killed more than 150 opposition demonstrators on September 28.

Last week Ecowas, the sometimes ineffectual Economic Community of West African States, met in Nigerian capital Abuja and imposed an arms embargo on Guinea as a result of the killings.

The problem is that Guinea already has plenty of weapons. When your enemy is unarmed civilians, you don't need sophisticated military hardware. AK-47s and men willing to use them is enough. And does anyone really think Guinea buys weapons from West Africa? Go north a bit and think Ukraine.

And to prove that Guinea is in good shape, the China International Fund, a private vehicle, is planning an eye-watering $7bn investment - almost the country's entire GDP - for infrastructure, mining and oil.

A leader in The Observer today asks whether China will earn more respect in Africa than the west did during centuries of trade, subjugation and exploitation. (What it doesn't touch on is why Africa is unable to capitalise on its own natural resources. That is a big subject, requiring courage to write, and is for another day.)

The Economist says the Chinese investment "mocks human rights in Africa".

But what will be said about Niger, where an absence of bloodspill has kept it largely off the western news agenda, but where opposition supporters started gathering today against Tandja's rule? Few reporters are based there and even western news rooms have trouble remembering whether it's part of Nigeria, the Niger Delta or somewhere else (it's somewhere else).

The Chinese know where it is.

In July, Reuters Africa reported that the country had struck a $5bn deal with Chinese state-owned oil company CNPC to produce oil and build a refinery. A planned multi-billion dollar pipeline across the Sahara is also due to pass through Niger.

So does France, which relies on Niger for energy security, and which could be a boost to Tandja's confidence. A meeting this summer between Nicolas Sarkozy and Tandja (pictured together above) resulted in French nuclear giant Areva building a $1.69bn uranium mine in northern Niger.

Alex Vines, head of the Africa programme at think-tank Chatham House told Reuters
in July that one-third of French nuclear power, which supplies nearly 90% of the country's electricity, comes from Niger's uranium. "(On) energy security, a different logic kicks in" he said.

For its part, France said in July that there was no mixed message, and that it was not satisfied with Tandja's referendum plans.

Despite last week throwing its weight behind Ecowas' arms sanctions in Guinea, France has remained silent so far on Niger.

And so has the western media. Maybe reporters are still consulting maps. Or maybe they are waiting for the "pavement jam", expat reporter speak for bloodshed.

Africa, Accra, Asbestos...Trafigura

2009-10-13T20:48:00.001Z

My husband calls just minutes after the Trafigura news reaches me from a colleague in London. "There is asbestos outside the school," he says. "I've spoken to them, they're having it disposed of. Can you check, later?"

Of course I agree. "It" is corrugated roofing material, white, old and toxic. I went to look. It is under a tree in the sun, flaking and broken and in the path of an easterly wind that blows towards our house.

"Having it disposed of" assumes there might be some municipal authority that will come in suits and masks to take it away. But asbestos worry hasn't reached these parts. I can make this statement with a small degree of authority because of a conversation with caretaker Jonas about the ironing board earlier this week.

"I can do the ironing" says Jonas, a muscular Ghanaian. "You can't", says my husband, a muscular Brit, "it has an asbestos hotplate". As much as I enjoy this homoerotic housewife chat, there is an important subtext. Jonas is a clever man but he has no idea about asbestosis. And nor do I, much, but that's because I've never had to deal with a potential cause. The locals don't because no one has told them, and they waft past the roofing in long skirts, sweeping up fibres into the sultry haze and moving about their business.

I check with the school later about the disposal. "It's all in hand" says the secretary, who dismisses me but shows no plans to follow it up. We walk home on the opposite side of the road, Magnus breathing through cupped hands.

An expert on the Trafigura tale says the level of toxic waste dumped in neighbouring Ivory Coast was enough to "bring a major city to its feet". A major city might have warned its people not to go outside and breathe the fumes that caused miscarriages and deaths, to work from home, to stop the transport system. I don't think that happened in Abidjan.

Do Africans care about rubbish dumps? I don't know. I queried Google. It said "Did you mean: do Americans care about rubbish dumps?"

On a day when Trafigura is top news, I didn't expect that. There's not much more I can say.

After one week, this much I know...

2009-10-10T21:26:00.001Z

Writing a blog about a subject as emotive as Africa is hard. At some point I shall write about turmoil or the lack thereof, music and dancing and joie de vivre, but I am underqualified to do it yet. I've been cosseted in a luxury hotel with wifi and three pools and now a beautiful house with a caretaker, aircon and the world's biggest bed (photo to come). I haven't been to Sodom and Gommorrah, the slums housing 55,000, which the authorities plan to destroy. I haven't seen the local effects of HIV or the sadness of poverty I haven't been to the part of the beach the locals use as a toilet, nor inside single rooms housing neighbours' entire families. When I do, I'll have a rounder picture.

Other visitors warn me not to go near the scruffy town beach, but I do. They say the hawkers make it unpleasant. I have found it to be anything but. They exist, but you can exhaust their persistance in seconds by talking of English football. I take Magnus (aged 6) for back-up. I know all of the clubs but none of the players. So Magnus, a gentleman, takes over converstion while I look at the sea and examine opportunities for fishing.

I am lost when local children who play in the garden (like Jacob, pictured) ask to come inside the house. Our (British) landlady says the tempation to steal is too great. We have reporting equipment here that could provide three years' wages a pop. We have bought a rope swing and paddling pool in the hope it will not be an issue, but I know in time they will come inside and watch TV, and I won't want to give them back.

The beautiful photographs that are an inevitable consequence of this stunning colourful land will be impossible to post to this blog as an inevitable consequence of the stunningly poor upload speeds. To maintain my marriage to the web, I have bought both a Vodafone broadband connection and mobile broadband from South Africa's MTN. I am single handedly propping up their share prices. The Vodafone service is unreliable, affected by something as basic as rain. My Blackberry is an expensive luxury I turn on only on work days.

The taxis are universally ancient, the doors falling off, suspension gone. When a driver left his seat to help me with bags, his car rolled off and he caught it through the window. Asking for seatbelts seems absurd, but we do it. The views are incredible.

I am scared to go fishing. It was one of the things I looked forward to most, but visiting the tackle section of the supermarket has dampened enthusiasm. Rod fishing hooks at home measure a couple of inches. None here measures fewer than 10. I can only imagine what they can catch.

Lifeguards are unqualified. Some parents even more so. At a local hotel, as staff packed up at 5pm, they found the body of a child at the bottom of the pool. It took them three hours to find the parents. I am taking my boy to the pool for eight solid hours at weekends to make him a stronger swimmer. I have taken him out too deep and watched him cry for help and never want to go there again.

Nights that start at 6 when the sun goes quickly still feel like winter. Even in the tropics with the aircon off. But you sleep soundly knowing the sun will stream through the shutters in the morning, and that the cockerel will bang on for six hours solid.

2009-09-07T13:54:00.000Z

Six months, five free days a week, three fishing rods, one broken knee, one six-year-old boy, twice London prices in Accra's overinflated rental market, pink chickens in the marketplace, gold in the ground, oil in the seabed, three generations of university education, an African democracy.