Not a moment too soon...

“You’re lucky you’re leaving now,” a fellow professor in my department said to me the other day. The reason? I had asked her a question about the murkiness of the air outside.

                This is, I guess, sort of a follow-up to the previous blog post, which mentioned the bright red sunsets, and the pink dust that was swirled up into the air by passing vehicles.

                In the few days since I wrote that, things have visibly changed, and yesterday, it finally clicked with me: the air looked different. When I tried to imagine how to describe it, the best I could come up with was what it’s like when the very first wisps of fog start blowing in: you can’t actually see anything there, as you can later when you see the water particles and the dense mass of the fog; instead, you just have the impression of murkiness – you know, sort of like what some of us have when we realize that it’s time to put on the reading glasses.

                The air was just starting to look thick. Things 40 or 50 feet away were perfectly clear. A couple hundred feet away, there was this indistinct thickness. And in the distance – a thick haze like the pollution over Athens on a hot day.

                “Ah,” I said to myself. “The harmattan has definitely arrived.”

                This is a seasonal phenomenon in Ghana that nobody seems to like, natives and short-timers alike. It’s the name of a wind – a wind like the mistral, or the Chinook. This one originates in the Sahara, and blows south until it reaches, well, our flat, and then blows out to sea. It carries the finest possible dust with it; it picks up more dust from the dry earth everywhere; and it reverses the normal northerly wind direction that typically brings moist air in from the ocean. The result is hazy air, painfully chapped lips, hotter days. Not a lot to recommend it!   

                It is, they tell us, far more pronounced in northern Ghana, where the dust is thicker and the winds get stronger. Here, at least so far, the wind hasn’t been all that strong, although I have noticed more leaves blowing off trees and being tossed around.

                “As early as 1671 English adventurers spoke of it,” writes Allan A. Metcalf in a book I found on Google, “one of the few words of Twi [one of the local languages of the south of Ghana] that have entered the English vocabulary…. In 1845 the naturalist Charles Darwin saw the harmattan ‘raise clouds of dust high into the atmosphere.’"

                It will continue for who knows how long – probably until we return here in late January, maybe longer; with climate change seemingly affecting Africa particularly strongly, nobody really seems to know how these phenomena will act these days.

                So this is why my friend said I was lucky to be leaving. We just hope the dust hasn’t infiltrated EVERY corner of our flat by the time we return!