I’m not even sure I can be writing this, but it is after all my thoughts. So a little disclaimer before I begin: I may be homesick, or slightly ‘culture-shocked’, definitely I’m not in the best mood, and its been a long day. This is no way a slight or even a widespread representation of Ghanaian men, or their relationships with western women; just my interesting experiences so far, and the ideological perspectives behind them. Furthermore to YOU the reader – this is a slightly scary but very real idea of how far the image that western culture/globalization presents can reach, and how distorted that image can be. Who says that our actions, our culture, our opinions, and definitely how we present ourselves when we travel don’t have far reaching impact?
I’ve had 5 marriage proposals today, 3 people imploring me to take their children to Canada, and for the first day since I’ve got here, I want to scream everytime somebody tells me “Obruni (foreigner/white person), I want to be your friend so you can take me with you.”
Let me explain further – here a foreigner is a ticket out. If you ask further questions when people propose to you/ask you to be their girlfriend, you get very insightful and telling answers:
1) “I want a white/Indian/foreign girlfriend!”
This one is easier to explain. [Note: usually when I get marriage proposals, they are only semi-serious and I joke them off. “Yes, I’ll marry you, you can be my fifth husband!” or “Yes, but my asking price is 900 cows!” or “My father may beat you! Aren’t you afraid?” Hahahaha!] The idea behind this (after further questions – “Why don’t you want a Ghanaian girlfriend?”) is that foreign women are mythologized; no, foreign people in general. Apparently we are all very very very nice. We won’t ‘bicker’ like our African sisters, we are okay with them having other girlfriends at the same time (apparently we are also promiscuous – thank you western music videos – so yeah, my foreign-ness makes me an easy lay.).
Some of this is based on the entertainment export culture. The only music videos that make it to Ghana more often than not are rap or reggae videos, with hundreds of scantily clad, well oiled (no, literally) women sidling up to one man – the artist. The movies they see, to a lesser extent, the magazines they read (old copies of Cosmo are sometimes found in the lending libraries). These are the cultural icons that make it here. How bad am I allowed to feel with this misrepresentation and gross generalization of western culture? Interesting question, but if you flip it, “What do westerners think of Africans? In fact, how many know that Africa is not a country?” and you will get interesting answers as well.
Some of it is rooted in colonialism and post-colonialist culture; how ‘whites’ or foreigners are mythologized in general. “Very, very nice” often also means, “gives us things”. The expression ‘HiPC’ pronounced ‘hippuck’ means “Highly Indebted Poor Country”, and is in COMMON use here – many people here are well aware of things such as aid issues, trade issues, rice subsidies, the International Monetary Fund. And what do many aid workers/NGO workers/”development tourists” do but (in a Ghanaian perspective) emphasize that age old dependance relationship? ‘You, black man, take this from me, the benevolent foreigner’. When well meaning backpackers and students bring scores of pencils and candies and old clothes and ‘I love USA’ badges and throw them out to throngs of children, what are we doing again? We are, ahem, being Very, Very Nice. Yassum.
Of course there is good old foreign mystique. That one isn’t really a culturally specific factor – even Canadians do it all the time. “Ooh, she’s dating a guy from France, how romantic.” Can’t blame them here, although I will be perfectly honest that when I’m covered head to toe in red dust, sweaty, with pieces of hair stuck to my forehead, and small boys chasing me saying “Fulani! Fulani! Where are your cows?” I’m pretty sure my ‘foreign mystique’ no longer comes into play. At all.
2) “I want you to take me to Canada!”
Not so easy to explain. But I shall attempt… “Why do you want to go to Canada? Ghana is so nice!” and the answer is usually, “Ghana no good. Ghana has no money! Ghanaian economy is bad!”.
That may be true, in fact, being no economist/expert myself, I can still notice that there is a vast disconnect here between people who need jobs, and jobs available. Even government jobs are not really sufficient to feed a family/satisfy the cultural requirements of supporting extended family. Subsistence poverty is widespread in the northern regions, in the farming areas, but the ‘middle-class poverty’, where even educated Ghanaians can’t make ends meet, is commoner still. But…
Why is Canada the answer? Because we are rich. Let me first speak for myself; I personally, vastly misrepresent by saying I’m a ‘first-generation Canadian, daughter of immigrants’. While this is in fact the truth, and my parents do work very, very hard, we did not struggle to eat while my mother cleaned office buildings by night and my father worked on the pulp-mill floors. My father is a professor, and my mother is a teacher. We are not the typical story of what happens when people dreaming of a better life arrive ‘in the west’. We are however, the story that Ghanaians hear. Every Ghanaian I met in Winnipeg before I left was “doing well, quite well”. I met lawyers, professors, doctors, engineers, teachers, scientists; I met people who don’t make “good wages”, they make comparatively “great” wages. They are highly academically educated, and come from privileged backgrounds even in Ghana.
They return to Ghana, to their hometowns, perhaps to their grand-parents’ villages, and people see them: Ghanaians from Canada. And how grand they are; how rich and vast and wonderful a land Canada is! Eh-hein!
How do I explain to them, that if they haven’t finished their SS (Secondary School – ie High School), and they somehow arrive in Canada, they will be living in a similar state of deprivation to their current clime? What’s worse, the incredible sense of community that is the norm here, is completely gone. If you are hungry here and you tap on your neighbour’s door one evening, they will feed you. If you are hungry in a dingy, cockroach infested apartment on Jane Street in Toronto, and you knock on your neighbour’s door, they may be crack dealers, and definitely may not feed you. The support system that both plagues and is a gift to this country is all but gone in Canada. Not to mention the fact that you will not have weeks of reading and training on ‘culture shock’. You will be thrown into a vat of complete foreignness, with the highest, and most unrealistic expectations possible, and you will be fighting hard to stay afloat.
That is the truth. Does it upset me perhaps that poor Ghanaians in Salaga aren’t aware of the realities of the immigrant experience in Toronto? Perhaps, yes, I am upset about that. But in the name of being brutally honest, I will tell you what perturbs me more – my guilt.
I wonder, why do I have to justify my lifestyle when I am working here for free, trying to relieve these people from poverty? (I am not defending my mindset, by the way, just shamefully illustrating it). Why am I responsible for undoing every stupid act any foreigner ever committed in Salaga and East Gonja? Furthermore, my age old personal ‘romantic’ image of the poor being hardworking and never asking for things is tarnished constantly when people are not only expecting things, but indignant when they realize I didn’t bring any. The worst is what happens when I realize that even with our lack of community and social capital and perhaps true joy and connectedness to our lives, even with our pollution and lack of action on the world stage, and a completely muddled sense of national identity – Canada is a pretty damn awesome place to live in. And when I realize that, I realize that its because I live in Canada, because I am, let’s face it, rich that I have had many of the opportunities I desired to achieve my dreams. I want to travel, I want to write, I want to do work for free – I can only do this because of the opportunities I have had.
So what if I DO want to take them with me? Every smiling child, every eager adolescent, every hardworking auntie? I can’t! Its that frustration, it’s the permanently emphasized difference between my chances, and their chances; my ability to choose regarding my life, and their inability, that just makes me cry with anger and frustration sometimes. I won the lottery, I randomly happened to be born to my parents, where they are, and not to Mr. Abudu Seidu, hardworking farmer of Mekongo, striving to make ends meet, his children proud farmers, even though one (shyly admitted) wanted to be a nurse. Or even to Madame Mercy, the Best Yam Farmer in Ghana (!!), of Kpandai town, who is slogging day and night to pay her children’s school fees.
I’m writing this, and I’m sharing this with you because I feel compelled to do this; it burns in my throat, that choked uncontrollable sorrow and childlike complete mistrust of the world and its ways, that feeling of utter betrayal by fate and morality and human accomplishment, that Mr. Abudu, and Madame Mercy, can dream the same dreams for their children as my parents dreamed for me, and it is conceivable – nay, its is very likely, that their children will never, ever achieve them. Not because they aren’t capable, but because of the inequality in the way the things we age-old described as wealth and power were distributed.
So now, after months of explaining to my family and friends and strangers, why I am here, and what I am doing, I have fully grasped and comprehended the purpose of my stay in Ghana. Beyond building capacity at the MoFA office, beyond training the agricultural extension workers in better teaching techniques, beyond organizing a district food security network; I am here because the ideologies, the big words and poverty-reduction strategy papers, and UN Conferences and have all become redundant (in a way) and reduced to the singular pressing need to do something regarding the inequality in the world. The inability for people to make choices regarding their lives. I am here because the people who have become my people, my family, my neighbours, my friends, these people are struggling and I need to take that message home.
Because poverty exists during Mother’s Day, and poverty exists during the cottages opening on May long weekend, and during the annual Winnipeg marathon, and during Folk festival and when you are drinking coffee and eating a donut in Tim Hortons, and even, even when you pad down the stairs in your pajamas and see the perfection of a late August sunrise and think ‘oh, how beautiful’ – because precisely at that moment of small, and secret joy, someone somewhere in the world, someone who I love, someone who has become my family or my friends, will look at a similar sunrise, thinking only of how to feed their children, how to get by. And their heart will be beating the same as yours, their blood, mostly plasma some erythrocytes, like yours, but that joy? That hope, that dream, that ability to see in the sunrise a latent potential for adventure and daybreak and possibility? I can only hope that you will take action so that that can be the same as well.
Keep Well.
Apoorva
