Kumasi Ghana

We kept driving South into Ghana. We started to find real road not long after we entered the country after leaving the game park in the Northern corner of the country. Ghana was different than Upper Volta, Mali and Senegal were. The people seemed to be more happy in their daily lives and they all seemed to have a purpose or a job to do all the time. They were very busy all the time. The housing also changed into more of a Western style of building except made out of adobe with thatched roofs and more and more tin roofs were starting to show up also. We found plenty of fuel stations and food stops along the way. We spent the night sleeping under the stars along the side of the road when it got dark. I loved watching all the people carrying things on their heads. There were frequently women and girls walking along the road with large urns of water on their heads or large stacks of firewood and things. The clothing was also much more colorful here with lots of bold prints. Once we left the far north everyone was fully dressed all the time. The population quickly increased as we went South and the rainfall increased. Large fields of crops appeared and once in a while we saw a modern tractor in a field or on the road.

We finally arrived at Kumasi, a large densely populated city with good infrastructure. We headed straight to the University and my driver visited his fellow professors there. We had a great meal and sat around drinking until late in the night before we were put up in a nice modern apartment right on campus.

I was talking to the professors all night about the philosophy of education and what the goals of a country's education should be. Should it supply theoretically trained workers or people ready to step right into a specific job category? We discussed the merits of both styles. Ghana was in the middle of an internal revolt over this topic. The early English school masters had been telling the students to come to school to get a good education so that they did not have to struggle on subsistence farms for their entire lives. Families had worked hard to put their kids through school instead of teaching them how to survive on a subsistence farm. The dream of getting a well paying job at the end of the struggle is what drove them to sacrifice so much to get the education. The problem now was that thousands of students were graduating from the educational system and expecting to walk into the high paying careers that they had gone to school so long for but there was one big flaw in the dream--There were no high paying jobs available to the vast majority of these students. They had been taught that farming was a low esteem living so they did not want to go back and work on the family farm. They ended up in the overcrowded cities with nothing to do but turn to crime for a living. So now large gangs of men in their twenties were roaming the streets with guns and sometimes rioting for jobs. It was a very sad situation. The professors asked me to teach at the University. I had practical experience as an electronic technician and they wanted me to teach a course at the University using a hands on approach instead of the purely theoretical approach they currently used. They offered me a very good deal with cash deposited directly into a foreign bank account and a full room and board with a living allowance for my time in Ghana. I thought long and hard but did not take the job. I did spend a few days talking to large groups of students during assembly at the University. I spoke about the same things I had spoken about in all the other schools, music, Western culture, Western politics, racism and all the violence going on in the U.S. at the time over the Viet Nam war and race. I enjoyed the sessions. They went for most of the day for a few days in a row. I ended up staying at the University for a couple of weeks working during the day and drinking at night with the students and professors. It was very satisfying.

I had to take the job or leave and I left. I hitch hiked South to Accra the capital. There was a lot of violence going on in the streets and I did not like the vibe so I got out of there quickly. Accra was a large city trying to become Westernized but having lots of troubles doing it. While I was there young men with machine guns went on a rampage because they had no jobs or means of support. There was talk of a civil war brewing. I did not want to be caught up in a civil war.

I met some travelers and we hitched West along the coast and found a large abandoned Portuguese fort right on the beach. We explored it and found shackles about a foot of the ground and also about five or six feet of the ground on the walls of lots of small dark dank rooms. This was an old slaving center and slaves and prisoners were shackled up to these. It was an strange feeling seeing them abandoned like this and imagining when this was an active fort a few hundred years earlier. We ended up moving into the fort and living in it for quite a long time.

The fort was right on the beach. We set up a camp inside where I put up my tent and lived in it. There were almost twenty of us living there at one point. We swam during the day and hung out on the beach. We played cards. We had little orgies in the prison cells. We watched the fishermen coming and going working on the beach. They sold us fresh fish everyday that we cooked over an open fire. We supplemented that with lots of fresh fruit like papayas, mangoes, bananas and pineapple. There were lots of other fruits that I did not even know the names of. We had a good life going. At night we had a fire and some of the guys played guitar and sang. We had some weed to smoke here and there but mostly we just drank a lot of beer. I was having a great time. Then it all fell apart.

An English guy caught Malaria and decided that the drugs for Malaria were a corporate fraud and that he could beat the disease just like all the local people here had for centuries with no drugs. Well his speech sounded good but it was based on flawed assumptions on his part. First of all the local people did suffer and die by the millions without drugs. Sure some survived but that was due to a genetic modification called sickle cell anemia. The reality was that people died every day because of Malaria here in Ghana and around the world in the Malaria belt. This guy went on a pineapple diet to beat the Malaria. He quickly developed a very high fever and got delusional from the fever, shivers, diarrhea and dehydration from his stupid attempt to beat the system. He ended up dying. We tried to take him in for medical help but he refused to go and then he died quickly during the night. His death created a stir in the community. We got word that the police were going to round us up and arrest us for contributing to his death. I took the rumor seriously and I split right away. I quickly hitched a ride to the Ivory Coast just a few miles West.

I only stayed in Ivory Coast for a few days. I did not like it much. There was too much crime around me and the people were even closer to a revolution than the people in Ghana. I turned around and started to head East. I did stop off near the fort on the way past it and I found out that the police had indeed raided our encampment and retaken the fort themselves. I never found out what happened to my friends and I was afraid to ask for fear that I would go to jail. I never mentioned that I had anything to do with it and instead I just kept right on going East through Accra and on to the next country, Togo.