Tangled Toes in The City of Accra

I shoe ten tangled toes (as do most of the 'kids' I grew up with) from playing barmy, barefoot football. Thus (these days) I shirk slippers outside home.

In those indigent, illiquid economic days in Ghana, we would have suffered parental thrashing if we had dared parade our shoes on the dump (football) field.

We had no sports shoes. Our (not so) patent leather shoes were hardly appropriate, anyway, and were bought on a strict one-child-one-pair policy. Wo de k)b) ball na )kyena w'ahye deEn ak) school?

So, the rugged rocks and rough roots, stone chippings and shards of glass, gnarled nails and snail shells sliced, stabbed, lacerated and etched their gory graffiti into our tarsals and metatarsals.

It is a ten-toe 'mazement that behind those gruesome-gladsome years, we could yet count two full feet of ten (tangled, traumatised) toes.

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