My Eyes Were Opened - Culture, Poverty & Abundance in West Africa
I have recently shared an article about the emotional opportunities and trials of traveling with my mother for a month in Ghana. Now, I’d like to share some of my experiences of traveling in West Africa. As I said previously, I had never had a compelling desire to visit Ghana, but I went to accompany my mother who had long admired the Kente textiles. And while there were some stunningly beautiful aspects to the trip, there were many more that were startling and eye opening.
Mole National Park
After the first three days of arriving and driving in Ghana, which were of themselves very harrowing, we arrived in Mole National Park in the northern reaches of Ghana. Established in the 1950’s, Mole spans almost 2,000 square miles, is the largest national land reserve in Ghana, and is one of the very few places in Africa to offer walking safaris (rather than just driving safaris).
In Mole and elsewhere in Ghana, we experienced an interesting phenomenon. The country is either completely ill-prepared to handle visitors, or it is set up as a tourist trap destination, often not quite reaching what tourists are there to experience in the first place. Mole National Park, though stunning, fits squarely into this second category, as both a prime tourist location (probably a top 3 reason that people visit Ghana from abroad) and also not quite catering to the wildlife enthusiasts that the park has the potential to reach.
The park offers walking and driving tours which are two hours in length, and the typical trajectory for tourists is to do one or two of the tours each day of their visit. Unfortunately, you cannot explore the reserve alone or so much as walk 100 yards from the hotels unless you are on one of these guided tours, making the experience of visiting gorgeous but confined.
We chose to stay at the Zaina Lodge within Mole National Park, which offered incredible vistas over a wide swath of the park, an infinity pool, and much more. I will never forget my mom’s first experience in such a pool and her sheer delight in swimming while overlooking the forest.
While at Zaina, we were treated almost like royalty, with an extraordinarily large staff looking after our every need and sometimes trying to predict our desires and requests in humorous ways, like anthropologists trying to understand a foreign culture. Granted, I’m a little bit odd to begin with, but no one there could ever figure out what to make of my tendency to do handstands on the deck overlooking the forest for an hour or more each day.
Far and away, the most spectacular sights at Mole occurred during our walking and driving safaris, where we had the pleasure to walk right by several African elephants, baboons, warthogs, and a wide variety of other animals and wildlife. It was incredible to see, but we learned later that several of the water holes around which these animals gathered, were constructed specifically so that we could view the gathered wildlife.
The Weaving Villages
A primary reason for the trip to Ghana was so that my mother could see some of the Kente villages where the traditional cloth of Ghana has long been made. These are the Bonwire and Adanwomase Kente villages, as well as the Keptoe fabric stamping village, in the Ashanti region in Ghana. On our way back down the country after Mole, we spent several days living in the outskirts of Kumasi, which is the second largest city in Ghana, and visiting these textile villages.
Throughout our travels in Ghana, we saw no tourists, except at our hotels each night. It was then especially startling, that upon entering the Bonwire village, a pack of salesmen descended, and we were treated to an extremely aggressive sales pitch for the entirety of our visit. Caucasian tourists stand out and are seen as an opportunity for easy money, which also speaks to the poverty of much of the country.
That said, visiting these villages was perhaps the highlight of the entire trip. My mother was given a detailed tutorial on the use of the looms, which have been used for centuries to make Kente cloth, and then very much in Morrocan fashion, we were treated to a drawn-out conversation and bargaining about which cloth we might like to purchase.
Unexpectedly, we also ended up in the Keptoe village which is where woven fabrics are then stamped. This dense black “ink” is made in small batches by stripping the bark off of a specific tree, grinding it to a paste, and then boiling the paste for upwards of 48 hours. My mother, a lifelong printmaker, enjoyed using their hand-carved stamps to create her own hand-printed fabric.
The Impact of Charcoal Production
One of the most startling realizations I had while traveling throughout Ghana was the extent to which charcoal production and consumption is a way of life. As we traveled out of the major cities, we would notice overloaded trucks full of bags of charcoal, and we learned that a majority of the population (upwards of 70% of families in the outlying villages) earned their livelihood producing charcoal.
Charcoal production involves cutting down trees, slow cooking them over an open fire, bagging the resulting charcoal, and long-hauling it to more heavily populated areas. This results in deforestation, enormous air pollution, and lung damage to those responsible for manufacturing.
As it stands today, the production of charcoal accounts for the vast majority of air pollution in West Africa. All of this production is done by individuals and families, and these bags of charcoal are sold on the side of the street for an equivalent of USD $2 — $4 per 50 pound bag. These bags then retail for perhaps an equivalent of USD $20 in the capital of Accra. For a country that has abundant natural resources, including gold, oil, and a huge variety of wildlife, the fact that a majority of Ghanians earn their livelihood in this unsustainable way is heartbreaking.
World’s Most Impactful Animal? The Tsetse fly.
I discovered the tsetse fly by accident as we made our way into Mole National Park. There were some biting flies that ended up chasing our car, and once inside, they were extremely difficult to kill. Reading up on them later, I discovered that this fly is regarded as one of the major causes of poverty in West Africa!
The tsetse fly is responsible for African Sleeping Sickness, which affects humans, and Animal Trypanosomiasis, which affects both wild and domestic animals. Fortunately, African Sleeping Sickness is not a direct danger to humans in Ghana, but this fly has had a profound impact on all life in West Africa. Some people even theorize it might have the single biggest impact of any animal on the African continent!
The disease impacts wildlife but is particularly harmful to domesticated livestock. Cattle, once infected, struggle to reproduce, routinely miscarriage, and cows stop producing milk. Horses and pigs similarly die off. The result is an inability throughout much of Africa to maintain mixed livestock or farming. The trickle down impact of this is terrifying — without livestock to pull wagons, much of West Africa developed without the aid of transportation. And as other parts of the world developed from hunter gatherers to farming, this part of the world could not.
A History of Slavery
Growing up in the United States, I’ve always been thoughtful about the profound impact that slavery had on our nation. But it wasn’t until I was touring slave castles on the West African coast, that I truly came to understand that slavery in the United States was just a small part of the African Slave Trade.
If slavery in the United States lasted 250 years, slavery in Ghana lasted for more than 800 years! Part of this stems from the country having more than 42 distinct languages (not counting separate dialects) and the fact that internal warring factions took each other as slaves within the country of Ghana for centuries. This was then exacerbated by the Portuguese and other countries, taking an already pre-existing internal slave trade and bringing it to the outside world. If an estimated 2 million slaves made their way from West Africa to what is now the United States, something closer to 20 million were taken by boat to other countries from the West African slave castles.
It wasn’t until I visited these slave castles that the impact of this history really sunk in. We are struggling in the United States with the multi-generational impact of slavery, but for a country that consistently, for many centuries, has taken its own inhabitants as slaves and then sold them to other countries, it’s hard to fathom how this has impacted the mindset of generations of people and the entirety of the culture.
Poverty
Having learned about charcoal, the tsetse fly, and slavery, the poverty that I witnessed throughout Ghana makes a great deal more sense. Prior to this trip, I thought I was well traveled, having once lived in Latin America and traveled extensively throughout the Americas and Europe, but I have never witnessed a poverty like I did in Africa.
One day, making our way back to the hotel in a public taxi, we dropped off one of my fellow passengers. The neighborhood (somewhat of a shanty town) was bordered by an open sewer the length of a two lane road. This was about a 10 minute walk from my “nicer neighborhood” and about 15 minutes from the ocean in the capital of Ghana, Accra. The sewer was half full of liquid with floating debris and tires, along with a few ducks swimming around.
Similarly, the ocean near our hotel, where people fished daily and young girls collected wash water, were full of refuse. For a country that has so much potential, this stark reality was devastating.
Looking back some months after the trip, I’m grateful to have visited Ghana — and particularly to have taken the time with my mother. I’m grateful for the eye opening experiences that the country afforded us. Whether admiring the stunning beauty of the overlooks in Mole National Park, and then realizing that many of the water holes were constructed so that animals would gather for tourists to view them, or walking along the oceans rolling with waste, while small children played and locals welcomed us graciously to their country, Ghana was a confusing mix of graciousness and poverty, of hope and despair. Many people have said this to me since the trip, but it bears repeating: “Well, that’s why we travel, right? To open our eyes.” My eyes were certainly opened, and I’ll be looking more thoughtfully as I go forward.
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Robin Zander is the CEO of Zander Media, a media agency built for purpose-driven organizations, and the founder of Responsive Conference, which convenes annually around the “Future of Work.”
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