The Longest Independence Day

The next day, I had been told to meet Senam (who you may remember from a couple posts ago) at the main gate of campus to go into Accra to celebrate Ghana's Independence Day on March 6 and then continue on to a small village Senam had taught English in for 10 years. I am a little jaded on Independence Days because in the US they generally mean barbecues, beaches and fireworks, all of which I like but none of which are actually connected to the idea of independence. I had hoped that celebrating such a day in a country to which Independence was hard fought, well deserved, and relatively recent that my feelings would change. They partly did and partly didn't.

We rode the tro tro in and walked towards Independence Square, which looks like this from a distance

This is a group photo of the early risers. From left to right: Natalie, Alicia, Elaine, Senam, Katie. You will notice the guards behind them. Any other day of the year, it is illegal to take a picture of a person in uniform, so I took advantage. More later
This is what the Square looked like at the beginning of the celebration. It's a wide area of empty space, but the seats are all painted red, yellow black, and green, the national colors of Ghana.
We grabbed some breakfast (bread and Laughing Cow cheese spread and some snacks as the day went on like peanut brittle that almost resulted in a trip to the dentist for Katie who was knawing desperately on a corner before it budged). We then took our seats and watched the uniformed men, women and children march out:
The white is the marching band, the blue are the police, the red are the army, the light blue are the navy, the yellow are the prison guards, and the green are the immigration officers. In addition to government workers, children in school uniforms marched out and held banners. They walked around a lot and ended up standing for a long time in the sunshine. Every so often one of the students would just fall over and two men on the side would run into the middle of the crowd with a stretcher. Nobody batted an eyelash at it. Senam said he remembered passing out as a student in the march. It's just not seen as at all alarming.
The presence of snipers on the marker for Independence indicated the arrival of the President. The monument has the date of Independence (March 6, 1957) and the slogan "Freedom and Justice"
Kufuor arrived too far away to see to much applause from the crowd. He staked out his area in the Presidential stand, and the moved off to examine the troops and school kids:

There are guards running on either side of the car because Kufuor was recently involved in a side-collison. He was just fine, but many believe it was an assassination attempt. The whole story blew over really quickly.Kufuor's car weaved through the troops and made its way to the base of a statue of "The Unknown Soldier" commemorating the nameless soldiers who died for Ghana's independence. He lit the "Perpetual Flame" at the base of the soldier before driving back to the elaborate podium to deliver his speech. The speakers had some timing issues so there was about a 1 second delay between his speech booming from the speakers at the front and our small speaker in our section. That combined with his accent meant sadly that I could not understand a single word he said.

The speech was followed by a procession of the large armed vehicles. This tank was my favorite reading "Ghana Armed Forces: Partners for Development". It also included several missile launchers, a helicopter and an airplane. Also, horses:
Shortly after that we decided to leave. We made a stop at the Art and Cultural Center (where vendors love seeing white tourists- we were surrounded within moments looking at all sorts of crafts, but moved on rather quickly). We walked up to Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park (Senam was upset that we had never seen it). Kwame Nkrumah was the first president of the First Republic of Ghana (there have been Four Republics because of three intervening military coups). Some people want to erase Nkrumah's face from the memory of the country because he designed a one-party system and did not tolerate political opposition fearing (rightly) that he would be overthrown. It's always interesting to talk to people about it. But nonetheless, he is buried in this mausoleum at a park in Accra:

On the way to the park, we passed a group of Ghanaians rollerblading and skateboarding. I realized that I had not seen these activities since leaving the Bay Area, and was happy to be reminded of them.

This is a statue of Nkrumah taking the first step forward to Independence, and below is his grave inside the mausoleum


We toured the small Nkrumah museum, hit the bathroom and then walked toward Accra main station. As we walked into the station a Legon bound trotro passed us, and Natalie, Katie and Alicia hopped on. That left Senam, Elaine and myself catching a trotro toward the town of Nungua, east of Accra, and the town of Senam's birth. Although he was three when he moved, he knew people all over the place. Elaine and I blindly followed and met gaggles of kids and a few adults. Senam then took us to see his mom, Agnes, called Auntie Aggie, and her daughters. Let me interrupt by saying that any person your age who you know at all is referred to as your brother or sister, anybody who is older than you is an aunt or uncle or grandparent. The definition of family is a lot looser here, so Elaine and I gave up quickly on trying to establish Senam's biological family as distinguished from the people he loves and grew up with. There doesn't seem to be that big a difference. We saw his hometown, had a drink with him and Auntie Didi (wearing all black because her husband died 5 months ago. She was really sweet to us and welcomed us repeatedly). Then we got back to the trotros and continued on toward Tema. When we go tthere we took a taxi right to Senam's sisters' house. We met George, Mary's husband outside listening to the radio. He welcomed us and we walked in to a courtyard full of women joking and playing around as they cooked and made clothes. Mary is the eldest sister and clearly the one in charge. She was so kind. She gave us big hugs, took our bags, and set us down on a bench in the shade. In the US, it would be nice to get up and try to help, but in Ghana it is considered insulting (like saying 'You are not cleaning well enough, so I have to show you how to do it'). We sat nect to Monica, Senam's little sister. She works at a computer store in town, and presented me with my first marriage proposal. I politely declined, but she was fun to talk to anyway. Second oldest was Aba, who was the most feisty and Matilda was making a dress on the side to wear to a funeral that weekend. Aba and Mary were making us banku in okra stew with lobsters (they were small and you're meant to put the whole thing in your mouth and chew and swallow the meat and the shell), tilapia (full of bones but good), wele (cow skin), and vegetables, especially peppers. Elaine and I do not have enough stomach capacity to eat three huge meals because we're both snackers, but we got teased becasue it took us so long to eat and we didn't finish our portions of banku. It was fun to hang around with those girls, they were really a trip. We looked at old pictures of Senam's father and extended family and played with Mary and Aba's daughters. After a while though, we returned to the tro tro station and rode for two hours as the sunset to a town of Sege. From there it was a shared taxi ride to get to another town and when we got out it was pouring rain and lightning was crashing every two seconds to big rumbles

of thunder. We took shelter in a little shack of a bar until the rain stopped and then walked a ways down the road under the lightning bursts. All three of us had woken up early (around 4am for me and Elaine) so we were exhausted by this point. We just stared at the lighting as Senam got on his phone talking to some people from the village. When we got to the end of the road, we stared at the Volta River stretching before us. It was calm considering it had just rained and the tropical trees on the side were occasionally lit up in the huge branching strikes of lightning that were now so far away we could only hear the faintest thunder. Because it's savannah out there though, it still illuminated everything. It was beautiful. Senam's friend Zach soon arrived in a canoe from the other side of the river and we cautiously hopped in, holding our bags on our laps. Zach single-handedly paddled us up the eastern shore and then accross the river. We talked a little but mostly started at the lightning.

It was so quiet and peaceful. Nothing was moving and we could just stare at the black and purple sky. By the time we had arrived on the other side, the lightning had stopped and we were in the dark. We followed Zach and Senam overland between mud huts with thatched roofs, until we arrived at a concrete house painted yellow with a lantern on the porch. Behind the lantern was an old woman whose name, as far as we were ever told, was Madame, the matriarch of the village of about 200 people. She is the mother of Theophilus, who we met at the university in Winneba. She smiled and invited us to eat, but we politely declined because we were still full from Mary's banku. She showed us two rooms that used to belong to Theophilus and his brother and sent somebody to bring us sodas despite our protests. We drank them at a small table but shortly thereafter Elaine left for her room and Senam and I hopped into the bed in the front room and I slept my first night in the small village of Adidopke ("Ah-deed-oh-pweh")