There's a big wide world out there: 2 - Africa

Another blog about my travels... but first a quick update.

I finished my last lot of chemo at the end of January. The side effects took a while to clear but I am pretty much back to normal now. The skin on my hands, which was very thick and dry, is definitely better. It took a while for my sense of taste to come back but it has. And my hair is gradually thickening up again which is good.

On the minus side, the pain is definitely beginning to tick up again and I've had to increase the amount of morphine I'm taking. But still a relatively low dose. 

I'm due a scan at the end of the month and then I'll need to decide whether (and when) to have more chemo. It's a bit of a balancing act - when I'm having treatment, I can't wait for it to stop. When it stops, I start worrying about when I can start again.

Emotionally, it's been a bit up and down. We had a lovely few days in Pembrokeshire during half term - staying in a cottage we've visited many many times before. I did some good walks and gathered some good memories - walking along Newgale beach on my own with the sun starting to set across the water, the wind blowing and the dog running around on the sand...

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...which is as good a link as I can manage to another beach memory - of eating fresh fish, fried over charcoal on a beach in The Gambia one evening about twenty-five years ago.

I travelled to different countries in West Africa - Ghana, The Gambia, Guinea and Cameroon - several times in the 1990's through my work for an Anglican church-linked charity USPG. Looking back now, some of the memories are a little surreal - staying with priests and bishops, attending synods, being driven to visit parishes and schools, and some very long church services... (At the enthronement of the new Archbishop of West Africa, the service lasted at least four hours, but all the VIP guests, me included, were ushered out half way through for cold drinks...)

I've decided to share two memories in a bit more detail, both from my very first visit to Ghana.

In my first week in Africa, I was taken to visit the slave castles at Cape Coast and Elmina. These were both originally European trading posts on the coast which gradually became centres for the organised trade in enslaved people. They are disturbing places. I remember at Cape Coast there was a young African American man who shouted at us Europeans, and how our Ghanaian hosts hurried us away, almost embarrassed by his anger. But it seemed to me that anger - and grief - were probably the only appropriate reactions to the situation.

As an aside, the very first black Anglican priest, a man called Philip Quaque, ministered at Cape Coast in the second half of the eighteenth century, at the height of the slave trade. I've always wondered how he lived with that.

The other memory is from later in the same trip.

I'd travelled to the city of Tamale in northern Ghana on the bus. As we got into the city it was clear that things were not right. There were police road blocks and people started talking about a curfew. At the bus station I managed to find a young man with a very run down taxi. Looking back, I perhaps shouldn't have put him in a situation where he was breaking the curfew, but I think he was pretty desperate for the fare, and I was desperate to get to where I was staying.

We set off, dodging police checkpoints by driving down back alleys. By now I'd found out the reason for the curfew. The day before there had been a dispute between two men over the price of a guinea fowl, which had spilled into violence between two ethnic groups. It's now known as the Guinea Fowl war.

What happened when is a bit of a blur in my memory now, but I think the first thing was that we ran into a group of young men, marching along the street brandishing machetes and guns. The man in the lead was in tribal dress, dancing with his machete striking sparks off the ground. 

My taxi driver backed up - and immediately stalled the taxi, which had run out of petrol. This wasn't unusual, and the driver had a milk bottle which he grabbed and headed off to refill it. I was left in the taxi. I remember hearing gun shots, and thinking that perhaps I should get my head down. Probably they were just shooting in the air but it's the only time I've heard gunshots that close up and it was quite frightening.

I was just beginning to wonder if I should take my chance and set off on foot - and realising that the driver had locked my bag in the boot to prevent me from doing just that - when the driver returned. With a milk bottle-full of petrol in the tank, we were able to get going again. Until we ran into a police patrol.

They demanded papers - and the driver got out to talk to them while I found my passport. There was talking, and then shouting. I'd been waiting in the car, but when I got out I realised that they were threatening the taxi driver. He turned to me and said that they were going to beat him up for breaking the curfew. I believed him.

I asked to speak to the officer in charge. I put on my best polite-but-firm English lady act and explained that I was a visitor from England and that the taxi driver had come to my aid in the middle of the curfew. I told them that I had heard about the excellent reputation of the Ghanaian police (OK, that one was a bit of a porky pie) and didn't want to have to return to England with a different view. 

It worked. They agreed that the driver could take me provided I didn't pay him. We sped away.

By this time, we were actually only a couple of blocks away from the Cathedral, my destination. I paid the driver a good deal more than we'd originally agreed and wished him luck. I never knew if he managed to get home to his family without being arrested.

I later discovered that one of the priests had hidden a family from a nearby village at the back of the Cathedral. Their home had been burned to the ground because they were the 'wrong' ethnic group. That was real bravery.

Later on, I saw a very short article in the Guardian about the riots, but by then I was safely back home in Surrey. I showed my mother, and gave her a slightly toned down version of events. Sometimes it was good not having 24 hour news and the internet!

I think that was the most eventful of my visits to west Africa. I have far more memories of the warmth and hospitality of people, of vibrant colours, hot sticky heat and the beat of the music. Fried plantains, fiery jollof rice, sticky fufu, wonderful fresh fish - and not having the courage to try African land snails. 

With young people after a service in Ghana.

And of faith - which in west Africa is so much more part of everyday life than it is here. Church services lasting two or three hours. Prayers at the start of every meeting, every journey. A Muslim driver stopping the vehicle so that he could pray by the side of the road.

More recently I had the chance to visit two other African countries - Zambia and Kenya. In Zambia, I was in the Copper Belt which is still dominated by copper mining and smelting. I was meeting people who are living in the shadow of a massive copper smelting plant which for years has blasted out sulpher dioxide, poisoning plants, animals and people. 

In Kenya, I met some amazing farmers in the shadow of Mount Kenya, and then had the chance to do a weekend trip to the Maasai Mara to see some wildlife. Here's a lion, just because...

Travelling is a privilege and it's also a challenge. When I travelled in West Africa with USPG, I was almost always treated with far more respect than I deserved. If there was a chair, I'd be the one sitting in it. If there was food, I would get the first and best portion. If there was a top table, I'd be sitting there with all the men (and the other women would be cooking and serving...). 

I hated it. It made (and still makes) me feel profoundly uncomfortable. I know it was a gesture of respect for the organisation I worked for, but I hated that my whiteness brought me nothing but esteem, whereas a black person visiting the UK would not necessarily have had the same experience.

There is history and there are power relations between the UK and Africa. Power relations that still exist, and in some ways are perpetuated through the 'international development' sector where I have spent most of my working life.

It's not just down to aid agencies, but they certainly haven't helped by feeding the stereotype of Africa as a 'global basket case' filled with starving people who are too helpless (or hopeless?) to feed themselves, or a 'war zone' populated by child soldiers and war lords... 

While the wildlife documentaries I love to watch have helped us imagine Africa as rolling savannah with lions and elephants, and local people playing bit parts as either stalwart rangers or evil poachers.

Of course Africa is none of these things. It's a vast continent, bigger than Europe, with huge regional differences. There is poverty, but most people who live in poverty are highly skilled and resourceful - they have to be. There are wars, and conflict as I experienced in Ghana, but apart from a few countries they are the exception not the rule. And of course there is wildlife, but sadly mostly confined to game reserves.

And there are cities, and small towns, and motorways, and swimming pools and supermarkets and universities and most of all Africa is home to more than a billion people, the vast majority of them young, ambitious and energetic.

On the plane on my way home from one of these trips, I overheard a young English woman explaining what she had been doing in Africa. She had gone out for three weeks as a volunteer to work with a group helping a particular community learn how to farm properly. She explained at some length about how their techniques were all wrong and this was why they were still living in poverty. She was full of enthusiasm and clearly glad to be 'helping'.

OK, she was young and naive. But where had she picked up the idea that she had anything to teach the people she had visited?

The reason that there is still poverty in Africa has far more to do with the drain of resources, both natural and human, inflicted on Africa by Europeans from the slave trade, through colonial times, to the big corporate-owned mineral businesses of today. Africa has been pillaged. And now we have the cheek to send our young people to Africa to tell them they don't know how to farm. Please, let's stop sending young people to Africa with the idea that they can do much to help. If they go, they should go to learn.

Well this blog is longer than it should be and I've ended up getting up on a soap box which wasn't really my intention when I started it (about a month ago!). And I've realised there might need to be a part 3 to this series...

If you are interested in the relationship between the 'West' (in this case America) and Africa, I'd strongly recommend Barbara Kingsolver's novel 'The Poisonwood Bible'.

This blog is dedicated to all the people who have looked after me in Ghana, the Gambia, Guinea, Cameroon, Mali, Zambia and Kenya. Thank you for your hospitality and your graciousness.