Beekeeping Development in West Africa — Ghana 2023 Part 1
Sometimes, when you embark upon a great and ambitious project, you can feel like you’re holding a proverbial crocodile by the tail. Sometimes, you find yourself in Northern Ghana literally holding a crocodile by the tail.
It’s heavy and feels a bit rubbery, but is infinitely preferable to the open jaws on the other side which you hope will remain on the other side.
But first, we have to get there.
Getting into Ghana at all would require facing a hurdle I had been anxious about ever since leaving Australia two weeks earlier. When I was just too far along towards the airport to turn back in time, an hour after leaving the house, I realized with dread that the yellow fever vaccination certificate that should be in my passport was not there. I’d presumably taken it out to scan the certificate for some visa. This certificate is often required for entry into countries in Africa. Finding myself without it was, short of the passport itself, possibly the worst-case scenario of things I could have forgotten.
Desperately thinking through what possible options I could use to remedy this I remembered that I did in fact have the scan of the certificate. It’s highly plausible the passport control officials would deem a scanned image insufficient but it was my only hope, so I transferred it from the google cloud to my phone and pinned my hopes there.
Entering Guinea, as luck would have it, they didn’t even ask for it. But now it was time to try my luck with Ghana.
To get to the gate in Guinea one has to go past no less than seven security checkpoints. In previous years half of these blatantly tried to solicit a bribe from me, but it seems that’s been stamped out as not one did this time.
My Cote D’Ivoire Airlines flight took me north to Guinea-Bissau, where some passengers disembarked and others got on, like a great big flying bus; and then we continued on to Abidjan, Cote D’Ivoire, where we all disembarked. On a previous year I was then stranded in Cote D’Ivoire for several days, as a consequence I’m always leery of getting stuck there, but other than a big traffic jam to get through the security x-rays (it’s bad every year, they don’t seem to have enough x-ray machines for the passenger through-put they have) I was happily on my way again two hours later.
Entering the airport in Accra, Ghana, the first kiosk we lined up at to show some papers, to my horror I realized was asking for the yellow fever certificates! My blood went cold and I felt a weight in the pit of my stomach. I got the picture open on my phone and then it was my turn to approach the desk.
“Yellow fever certificate please?” the young man asked mechanically, putting out a hand.
I plonked the phone down on the desk assertively, saying with a confidence I didn’t feel “here is my yellow fever certificate.”
He looked up at me with surprise, looked at the image on the phone, looked at me again like he was about to object, seemed to consider the amount of trouble it would cause, and said “okay,” briefly glancing at it and then waving me through. Whew!
Another immediate problem was booking my flight from Accra to Tamale in the north — the airline’s website wasn’t letting me enter my credit card and they weren’t answering their phone. So I resolved to do something I’ve actually never done before — go to the actual airline office in the airport to book a ticket.
The hotel receptionist called me an Uber for which I paid 14 cedis. Easily bought the ticket for the next day at the airport, hailed a taxi from there, which charged me 70 cedis to go back to my hotel, which left me cursing that my phone wasn’t working or I’d have called an uber myself.
An interesting observation about Accra, perhaps, is that it doesn’t seem very walkable, at least the parts I’ve seen between the airport and my hotel. It’s more like an American city than a European or even most African cities — businesses in big buildings that one takes an automobile between, if one were to walk one would be walking long distances on a narrow sidewalk between a busy street and a wall. I’m sure other parts of town are more pedestrian-centric but not this area.
Next day short flight up to Tamale, during which one could see the many angular bays of the immense Lake Volta down below. Met at that airport by a colleague from last year with car and driver, two hours drive north through the shea tree savanna to the town of Walewale.
Here we booked in to the same guest-house we had used last year, and I was pleased to learn that they had constructed a really nice conference room there since last year so we could to the indoors parts of the training right there.
Training this year will be young adults and youth, one week per group of them. The first week’s group consisted of 42 students (35 male, 7 female), of which the youngest was a girl of 15 but mostly I think they were around 20 years old. Most didn’t have any prior beekeeping experience though a few had (or their families had) a few traditional beehives — which they hang in trees and just destroy to rob of honey once a year.
Rather to my surprise the group seemed more attentive and well behaved than the group of adults we had here last year. Maybe because they’re accustomed to going to school while the adults have been out long enough its hard to get them back into studious mode? Last year I found I could hardly take questions from the audience without things devolving out of control, while with this group I had the opposite problem of it feeling hard at times to get them to raise their hands and ask questions much less have a discussion.
One impediment to that I think is that we didn’t manage to actually do beekeeping until the penultimate day, it kept getting cancelled or postponed due to the hives being unsuitable or some other reason. I find getting chased around by bees is a great icebreaker and team building exercise! I say that jocularly but I’m also serious, the group always really comes together after we’ve been in the field together.
And also of course there’s just the fact that beekeeping is more fun than sitting in a lecture hall. I prefer if we can break up every day between some lecture and some hands on training, so the days-on-end of lecture was a bit of a marathon for them and for me, but by and by we made it to the end and they seemed to enjoy it and learn the material.
By and by it was the weekend! We had passed a sign on the road to Walewale for the “Saakpuli Slave Site.” No one I asked about it in Walewale seemed to know anything about it but googling it it seems to be habitually visited by school groups from St Olaf’s College in the US, who must get extra credit for blogging about it (only one blog post comes up presently but last year I swear a whole bunch did). In the afternoon we drove down there which was about half an hour south on the main road.
Turning off the main road we continued another fifteen minutes on a very well maintained dirt road before coming to a village of thatched huts. I was wondering if we should have made an appointment but by just arriving and asking people at the crossroads who we should talk to we soon found ourselves talking the the resident teacher / tour guide.
While we waited for him to find the chief my colleagues, native Ghanaians mind you, commented to each other their frank surprise that “this village is surrounded by large well-tended fields, and look at all the cattle they have in those pens, and yet they choose to live in huts? Why?” Normally it’s very rare to find a village that even has a significant number of huts much less only huts, and this one seemed more prosperous than most if you looked at their surrounding agriculture. My colleagues attributed it to a “backwards” (their words) mentality.
I’m perhaps a bit more cynical than them. What puts this village on the map, that differentiates it from all others? That foreign visitors routinely come here is no doubt one of only a few stops on a quick tour of Ghana. It is in the village’s interest to encourage this by continuing to look picturesquely “authentic.”
First we had to greet the chief. Traditionally we should have brought him a bowl of kola nuts but a small monetary donation sufficed in its place. He made some of his favorite jokes I recognized from the St Olaf blogs (“You are now my best friend, you’ll take me to America?”) but he seemed a decent chap.
Then we went to see the slave tree. There’s not really much to see here, just a big old baobab tree (with about a dozen bee colonies in it!). We were told they used to chain the slaves to the tree. Buyers would come to buy them with cowry shells and take them on down towards the coast. Our guide said they were captured from the immediate area.
The next day we (myself, my colleague Williams and our friend Cecilia) hired a car and driver (for 800 cedis / $71.47) to take us 2.5 hours north to the border of Burkina Faso where there are these famous crocodile ponds.
We arrived to find a smallish pond (maybe an acre in area?) surrounded by commons with goats grazing on it. After we’d met the guides (who just kind of materialized to greet us) and paid the fees (all up 260 cedis / $23), one of the guides casually walked to the water’s edge and shook a young guinea fowl he was holding right by the edge of the water and then stepped back as a crocodile just came plodding right up out of the water like a trained dog and came to a stop once fully out and a few feet from the water, right where he needed to be for people to pose with him.
The guide, giving the crocodile’s head a wide berth, stepped around behind it and gave it some affectionate thumps on the back like a car salesman slapping the roof of the car. Lifted its tail as well to demonstrate that this was safe and then directed me to come around behind as well, indicating the wide circle I should make around its head, which I didn’t need any encouragement to do.
After me, my friends all had their turns posing with the obliging crocodile. I’ve heard of the abuse suffered by the sedated tigers tourists like to get their photos taken with, in Southeast Asia and I was keeping an eye out for any such signs of abuse here. As far as I can tell, these crocodiles truly live freely and unbothered in the pond and just over countless generations have been habituated to not only peacefully coexist with people but to permit them to monkey around them in exchange for feeding them a tasty snack. After we were done the guinea fowl was tossed into its eagerly awaiting jaws.
After that we went to another historic slave camp that was nearby. This one was better developed and had more to see (marks on rocks where the slaves had been made to carve their own bowls out of the rocks, etc). Particularly poignant was an area where we were told they used to bury any slaves who died in a mass grave, now marked with grave markers and with evidence that flowers and wreaths had been placed there within the past few weeks.
One thing I thought was interesting was that while at Saakpuli they said basically “if our ancestors needed money they would go to neighboring communities and capture people as slaves,” here at this one they were emphatic that it was three guys from somewhere else who had founded and ran the slave camp. From here as with the other one, people would buy slaves and then march them to the coast.
While it feels a bit morbid to visit former slave markets “as a tourist,” I think it’s important to keep these memorials of a dark past, much like Auschwitz; and also I’d imagine for persons whose ancestors were trafficked in the slave trade being able to visit one of these very specific focal points where their ancestor might have been held would probably be very meaningful.
And then we returned to Walewale. Tune in next week for the next update, in which I stumble upon traditional drumming and dancing at night just by following the sound.
