The simple answer for us was: read everything you can get your hands on. Of course reading about palaver sauce and yams will not prepare you to truly know the taste explosion; skimming a paragraph about the spectacle of the ever-present tro-tro (mass transit buses that are a cross between city buses, taxis, and cattle cars!) in the chaos of traffic will not paint enough of a picture to call it your own; and looking at a picture of endless, soft sands and menacing waves of an Ghanaian beach is a poor substitute for the heat on your face and the sand beneath your feet--but the word and the image--moving or still, written or spoken--are all you have from the great, safe, and terrible distance of Canada.
Our reading recommendations would have to include the Bradt guide to Ghana (written by Briggs, a resident of South Africa), which has a somewhat British, orientalist sensibility about it (the cover says it all...as opposed to the more American, where-is-the-nearest-buffet approach to travel) and it can boast the perks of being accurate, reliable, respectful and culturally informed. However, I would have loved to have found a travel book about Ghana (there are few, though it gets good play in guides to West Africa), written by a Ghanaian. Reading about Africa through the colonial lens feels dangerously close to reading about nearly every invaded and/or colonized country and culture of the past five hundred years or so.
Web sites and blogs that were of specific use were those maintained by real people--usually women and usually part of the international community (referred to as the "ex-pat" community but I resent this because I am not an ex-patriot of Canada!) in Ghana. The best of such sources that we came across was by far "No Worries! -- The Indispensable Insider's Guide to Living in Ghana!" (http://www.noworriesghana.com/nw_home/). The site is written by North American women living and working in Ghana and it is a practical and invaluable resource that has proven useful on a daily basis. It has been very good for helping us to ask the right questions of the right people, and to find our way towards answers from one minute to the next. It is mainly because of this site that we knew to bring bug spray, sun lotion, hand sanitizer, school supplies, books, personal care items, a well-stocked first aid kit, electrical adapters, toilet paper (!!!) and specific items of clothing from home. We also knew which schools were good, which supermarket we were likely to shop at, what would be easy to find, what would be hard, how market negotiating worked, where to swim (including the serious dangers) and what it was like to be a white person, or "abruni," in Ghana. All this before we ever stepped foot into Africa.
In addition to these two key resources, we talked with those who had been to Ghana (a couple of Ghanaians and a couple of people who had done mission or other international work) and we watched dozens of videos on You Tube, all with varying degrees of usefulness, though I'm sure each one has resonated in one way or another. In essence, we tried to listen to as many voices as possible, packing our minds and our bags with as much useful material as we could, leaving behind that which was unnecessary or trivial. As a result, we have often said: "Thank goodness we brought that!," rather than: "Why on earth did we bring that?" having said this, we have enough sun lotion and bug spray to coat ourselves (and quite possibly the Ghanaian National Army) for a bush safari each and every day over the next year!!
For a broader sense of Africa, we turned to fiction and to a couple of independent films. The movie Tsotsi is hard to watch, but worth the effort. I just re-read Things Fall Apart by Achebe and it resonated with me in the same way Canadian novels about early contact (from the point-of-view of the "invaded") have. I am currently reading a slim book called Beasts of No Nation by Iweala which is set in an unnamed West African country, and is the first-person story of a child soldier. Before I left, I read Half of a Yellow Sun, a recent and epic novel by Adichie, that captures the varying perspectives on both sides of the Biafran conflict of the late sixties in Nigeria ( a nearby and still unsettled country). As I was packing my hundreds of books for the thrift store (did you just hear the sob all the way in Canada?), I remembered that Margaret Laurence spent time in Africa and wrote extensively about it. Being something of a fan--I have dared to teach The Stoned Angle...er, I mean The Stone Angel a few times and I have read the corny, naughty bits in The Diviners--you can imagine my surprise and delight to discover that she was in Ghana! I will tackle her writings next.
I suppose I should draw this entry to a close before it threatens to become a novel of its own (heaven forbid!). My next entry will likely cover some of the sights of Accra, as we have now explored some of this bustling and remarkable city of more than two million people.
Akwaaba!
Ryan
