Fishy trip to the coast

Lots of flags and colorful boats

You smell Elmina before you see it. This little town on the coast of Ghana is teeming with fish – and people catching, hauling, smoking fish, fish, fish. Drive into town, as we did last weekend, and the smell gets stronger the closer you get to the huge fish market and fishing boat harbor.

At the edge of the market, women walk by, effortlessly balancing huge tubs of fish on their heads - sometimes long fish droop over the edge of the overfilled tubs, bodies swaying like shiny snakes. Wagons of many, many tubs of fish are pulled by one man, then pushed from the back by a couple of others – or boys pretending to be pushing when dad isn’t looking. Racks full of small fish rest on top of smoking clay ovens, tended by women in bright head-wraps and aprons.

Hauling tubs of fish, mainly herring. Taxis just have to wait

And the market itself! It’s so full of people doing everything related to fish that there’s no visible path in.

Elmina is divided by a small yellow bridge over the entrance to the lagoon that is the fishing boat harbor, and it’s possible – as we did – to spend a chunk of time in the morning just watching the action from the height of the bridge deck. The fishing boats each fly a flag from some other country – it doesn’t really matter which one, a man explained to us. It’s just to identify when “your” boat is coming in from the night’s work, presumably so the women can get the big tubs – the size of those old-fashioned washtubs – ready. The flags provide part of the color of the harbor – the boats the other, since most are painted with symbols and proverbs. There are dug-out canoes jockeying for space with bigger boats with actual outboard engines (sort of!), and even bigger boats with the laundry of the crew hanging off the crosspieces that are wired with little lights. You can watch them come and go under the bridge, everyone yelling at everyone else, occasional boats drifting in the way of others as someone attempts to fix a motor. 

And so many boats! Bill counted 70 one morning from the beach in the front of our hotel on the ocean a little ways from the town itself – and that was before he gave up counting. We treated ourselves to a nice stay at Elmina Bay Resort, worth every penny. Our first night there we walked west down the beach to another little fishing town, Ankwanda. Kids ran after us in clumps asking for cedis, a dreadlocked man asked if we wanted to buy some waterfront (sure!), and one man stopped to just chat. He had, he said, just come back from working in a gold mine and was in the village because there was a festival starting next week. He answered all our many questions, and then we wandered back the way we’d come, still trailing kids and stares from the fisherman mending nets and working on the boats.  (The kids don’t care when you say no to their cedi requests, it’s all part of the game.) 

After herbs, you can see what happened to us. Bill on left, Theresa on right.

 The next morning we walked into Elmina, this time straight through a “smoking village,” with stacks of smoking racks and ovens. I’m pretty sure no white-haired obrunis had ever appeared in this village before – people looked at us with shocked faces. The village seems to have been built in an old graveyard – crumbling gravestones jam up against chop bars (fast food) or little kiosks or mud houses with thatched roofs. It’s odd to see a stone cross emerging from a clump of goats grazing under someone’s laundry. 

The castle looks nice, but hides a horrible history

Besides gawking at the fishing spectacle, we visited the historic Elmina Castle, one of several gold trading castles turned slave dungeons on the Cape Coast. We knew it would be sobering, and it was. The guide occasionally closes the barred doors on guests, just to demonstrate how horrible it would be to be jammed into a tiny, dark room with over 100 people before descending through the “door of no return” to the waiting ships. No one comes across very well here: not the Portuguese, nor the Dutch, nor the British – all of whom occupied this castle at one time or another - nor the Ghanaians who sold their own people into slavery. And certainly not the Americas, where the demand for slaves came from. We left the castle wondering at man’s inhumanity to man. As Bill said, “It’s a reminder of what is inside of us all.”

(Oddly enough, on the way home our driver was telling us about the drug trade through Ghana. Apparently there is a new demand from the Americas to be met …)

More photos of our Elmina trip on Picasa - link on right.

If it’s Friday, you must be Kofi!

                When I did my initial round of introductory one-on-ones with the students  in my Print Journalism class, I said something to one of the young women about her long string of names, and she quickly replied – “But you should call me Baaba. In our language, that means I was born on a Thursday.”

                Later, when we mentioned this to one of our drivers who has become a friend, he nodded. “That’s right – I was born on Saturday, that’s why I’m called Kwame.”

                Turns out that each gender has not only a name, but several similar names to choose from, based on the weekday of their birth. In addition to Baaba, I have an Aba in my class – another Thursday woman. Kofi Annan, the former Secretary-General of the United Nations (and now the Chancellor of the university here), was born on a Friday. Esi, a woman who was just hired to the faculty in my school, was born on a Sunday, which means she could alternatively have been named Akosua.  Abena, another lecturer, was born on Tuesday. And so forth.

                This tradition, according to an article in Wikipedia, is also still practiced in Jamaica – with which we are continually seeing tight Ghanaian connections. And here in West Africa, people’s names get even more specific. The Wikipedia article lays out some of the other naming protocols: Kofi Annan also has “Atta” in his name, for example, meaning he was born as one of twins.

                So it seems that the answer to Shakespeare’s question, “What’s in a name?” is, “A lot of information, that’s what” – at least in Ghana.

Kofi Annan, Friday’s child, being installed as Chancellor of the University of Ghana in 2008