Entertainment in West Africa - March 2006

I have to begin this update with news on Courage, my cook’s son. He had his eye operation and it went well. He suffered no post-operative infections, and he can now see again from both eyes. He wears a pair of sunglasses now when he walks outside that make him look like Ray Charles. All that worrying for nothing.

I also want to apologize for the last dire update in general. When I don’t think too much about health issues, life here can be more entertaining than scary or depressing. Learning how to find humor in every day life has been an indispensable survival skill.

I was reflecting on this during one of my recent African dance classes. Yes, I am taking African dance. Before you laugh out loud, please know that when I go to the class, I don’t wear tie-dyed clothes, my hair is not yet in dreads and I still wear shoes. I can’t say that for everyone in my class though, one of the reasons I find it so entertaining. In fact, I think I’m one of the few who considers my participation as exercise rather than a cultural experience! I am armed with excuses for why I am involved in something so cliché: 1) the classes are conveniently located; 2) they work nicely with my schedule; 3) they are inexpensive; and 4) African dance is a great cardio workout. But mostly I think I like it because I get so much joy out of making a complete fool out of myself in public. I laugh out loud at least once a class when I stop and realize just what I must look like. I come home and demonstrate my newly learned moves for my husband and double over in laughter. He just shakes his head.

African dance is hard, and there is nothing intuitive about it. It doesn’t help if you are from Africa either; the Ghanaian women in the class are just as bad as the rest of us, and they laugh even more than I do in class. Nothing learned in past dance or exercise classes helps (not aerobics, ballet, step aerobics, yoga, nothing!) African dance mostly requires an amazing amount of stamina, constant bent knees, and lots of jiggling and butt shaking.

The instructors of African dance always seem to be men, and the students are almost exclusively women. I wondered the other day if any of the instructors could be gay. Being homosexual is pretty socially unacceptable in West Africa. There are no dedicated gay bars I am aware of in Accra (I heard there is a Thursday night place though) and I have only met one openly gay Ghanaian man, and he spends half the year in London.

Speaking of the unacceptability of being gay in West Africa, did anyone hear about the recent situation in Cameroon? A newspaper in Yaounde decided to accuse (or “out”, who knows) about fifty prominent, male businesspeople and politicians for being homosexual. In Cameroon homosexuality is a crime. The “outing” newspaper edition was so popular, it sold out and the paper resorted to photocopying the article. The accused are laying low, hoping the storm will blow over, but the country is seized with “gay fever”. The man on the street I heard interviewed on the BBC was ranting about, “How could we let these people run our country?!?” Then he quoted Sodom and Gomorrah. No wonder people aren’t “out” in West Africa. But now I’m getting depressed again, so let me switch gears.

Having a child here really does help me focus on the bright side of life. As far as my son is concerned, Ghana is the world. He doesn’t know there is more out there than what he sees every day, and he thinks life is pretty great. He has lots of people at home every day to play with him. He goes to play groups three times a week, he goes to the zoo, he goes on walks and he spends the rest of the day playing outside in our yard. He is not depressed, so why should I be? In fact, I’m sort of worried about how he is going to handle an upcoming vacation to Europe. He is not used to crowds of white people, big cities, subways, sidewalks, spending a lot of time in a stroller. It should be an interesting trip. I think I’ll appreciate the nanny much more when I get back!

I often spend time with my son on early weekend mornings outside our gate watching the traffic. He sits on my lap and says, “car”, and points at every vehicle that passes by. It is one of our favorite pastimes. He tops it off with ringing the doorbell 2,000 times. Anyway, one of our traffic-watching mornings, a commercial truck passed us and the driver looked right at us and waved, and he was wearing a pair of clown-sized, funny sunglasses that had lime green rims and purple lenses. I don’t think it was a joke though.

You probably get the idea from my traffic-watching story that there just is not a lot to do here! But it is not so bad—my husband and I manage to get out a few times a week as a couple. Our nanny loves to babysit (“Mommy! I need the money!”) so we take advantage of the opportunity to have an inexpensive, albeit limited, social life. Dinners out and going over to other people’s houses for parties, playmates and the odd poker game is about it. But I really like the fact we don’t have to plan our social life months in advance. It’s one of the nicest things about living overseas.

Anyway, when we do go out, we let our nanny watch videos after our son goes to sleep. She loves our dated video collection from our Bosnia days, and her reviews of the films are hilarious. Her favorite is the Indiana Jones series. When we arrived home the other night, I asked her how she liked the movie (Raiders of the Lost Ark) and she proclaimed, “Oh! Mommy! That man is a brave man! A very brave man!” After we ran out of Indiana Jones movies I had her watch Some Like it Hot. I asked her how she liked that one and she could barely talk when she responded she was laughing so hard. She kept saying, “Oh! Those ladies! They are so funny!” Then I asked her if she recognized the blonde woman in the film (Marilyn Monroe) and she squinted her eyes, shook her head, looked at me strangely and then asked, “You mean, Sugar?”

We recently had the opportunity to go out and see some live music in Accra, which, strangely enough, is not a very common occurrence here. We dragged our homebody friends to a hotel to see Orlando Julius, one of the original “High Life” stars of West Africa. The best description I can give of High Life music is that it is similar to old-school reggae. After our Stevie Wonder concert experience here (waiting four hours for him to show up) my husband and I knew we could arrive at least two hours late to this concert and still be early. And we were right. It was a beautiful night, about 80 degrees outside and a light breeze to keep the mosquitoes at bay. The concert was being held poolside at a hotel near my office. We showed up an hour and a half late and the artists’ new video (shot in Ghana incidentally) was playing over and over, with African dancers dancing along on stage (the best one hailing from New York City by the way). Right before Orlando Julius began his set, a representative of the Nigerian-American business association was introduced by the concert organizer and got up on stage. As it turns out, Orlando Julius is actually from Nigeria, so this “associate” was given the opportunity to tell us all about this fine musician, and the fact that he was able to smuggle ten copies of his soon-to-be internationally released CD into Ghana and, (lucky us) we were going to have the unique opportunity to be part of an auction of the Orlando Julius CDs that evening. He never told us who was going to benefit from the auction (did I mention he was Nigerian?) and then he proceeded to walk around to the foreign-looking members of the audience with a microphone and basically extort money from them in front of the entire crowd by saying things like, “Good evening sir! How much will you pay for this wonderful CD!” It was excruciating, and by far, one of the most outrageous experiences I have had here. You could hear the crickets chirping when he approached our group and asked one of our Embassy colleagues how much he wanted to pay for the CD. The silence was interminable, and then our friend leaned over to my husband and whispered, “THIS is why we don’t go out!”