The Papaya Fruit Girl

In the sea of sellers of anything, she flared her loveliness in my view. Too pretty, too dee-lee-cious, to stride the sour streets. Too sweet in eyes and nose and oh her lips to schlep diced papaya; swaying on her head, swaying to the beat of her body-full of  ‘S’ shapes in its strut-n-swirl. The flask woman behind her – bland, sun-blistered battleaxe – she didn’t stir a single whisker of my heart. Silly, sad me: pouring pity on the flower, sweeping scorn atop the bug. But beauty is such a disabler! Oh that stimulating papaya fruit girl on the sunny streets of Accra. Will I see her tomorrow too?

The Sentry and the Squatter in the City of Accra

In the city of Accra, at genteel Ridge, at 9 am, a man in hermetic jeans was looking to leak his liquid privy into a drain. I shuddered to see him crook his legs to enable him to sag the seat of the asphyxiating denim for release.

Not quite ten metres away, another man in a white caftan was squatted over the same poor drain, doing similar business. I thought I caught him cast a disgusted glance the way of the standing man as if to ask which lowlife would hang his dispenser out on broad-daylight display.

I was desperate to stop and correct the squatter’s delusion that he was the better man, but I had to hurry to the office to go spend a penny.

All About the Head

His head was save-me-Lord uncomely - hardly humanoid, neither miles near any familiar fine-formed fruit. So, in a football match Ghana was bossing, why did he have to diss a Tswana boy's head in public?

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Senegal – No Football Lions

Twisted, rangy sinews, a sixty-minute engine and sharp snipers will maul a second-rate skirmish, but not a six-match contest. Your problem is seeking to admit yourself into the Pride when you’ve only roared once.

If I Don’t Speak Up Because It Didn’t Happen to Me

Any State that treats the fourth estate with the third degree because it sees them as the fifth column is crude. It’s that simple. In truly democratic countries, the ‘security’ job is carried out like infra-red light. Not in Ghana! We run it like fireworks on New Year’s Eve.

Because of our hairy history of railroading our impotent institutions of democracy, any bloke in boots, a beret, a big belt and a badge – never mind whether they’re even private security – demands deity-deference because they can slap-slap you to Paga, Pluto and then Purgatory.

Paradoxically, the most disciplined and brightest security outfit by far in our democratic sparks has always been the military.

So when Ghana’s national security enforcers advertise their brawn like a neon billboard right outside a court of law, you’d expect their civilian masters to pull the leash and put them in the doghouse.

Why should our shadowy moles unleash their cloak-and-dagger 'yawa' on the streets and sow insecurity in the deepest hearts of the lamb they’re sworn (?) to protect. This week, they pummelled a girl journo and rent her clothes to dishonour her. If she was taking shots of an unfolding public scene which they resented, why not simply arrest the offending camera. And even that...

Selective Memory

"My educational colours didn't fly in Ghana because too much rotates round raw rote memory." Daily discourse I hear which dampens my day. I often roundhouse-kick the brainless regurgitation in our schools on this blog, but it is dishonesty when you vomit verses from King James Version to varnish every vowel.

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Shoes from the Loo

The droplets on your shoe

Say you’re just from the loo

Hands unwashed, knowing you!

Even if you didn’t poo

Your hand’s a microbe zoo

And I won’t shake it too

New Year Resolutions

New year; he launches out to sea

No last look at the fungous wreck

Which cast him here many monsoons ago

In no time, Big Wave sweeps him ashore

He’s read the flotsam books back-to-back

The seasons, the reasons, the nano and the bio

Conquest and empire – he knows it all

But he does not know where he is

The little legs pattering near his hut

The warm smiles where his food is fired

Even the blithely breathing body in his bed

He does not recognise them any

Next year he will try again

And push out to find his hidden Home

But Big Wave will fling him back

Won’t build a house or town or school

He won’t colonise this place

He’ll try to leave again and again.

A Despicable Thing At Opeibea House

An urchin scampered from car to car at the Opeibea House intersection. That is where an ex-president's car turned cartwheels when it was crossed by a 'drunken' man. The boy would touch his nostrils to each car window and mist it up as if to disgust the driver to give him coinage quickly and make him evaporate. A driver of a tiny box-car swept him away by throwing the door open. Three times he did this. Each time, the lad pushed it back shut. If you insult him by treating him like dirt, don't be surprised at what he will grow into.

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Tomato Movie Awards

The makers-happen in our ‘measled’ movie market amaze me mindless. You roll and eddy over one another like confused crosscurrents with your myriad flimsy film awards. If you don’t close them to a classy one or two, you’ll continue to clutch at celebrity straws.

Assad, Gingrich and Other Random Questions

Has the EU ever needed Britain?
Should Iran give back the border-breaching drone?
Shouldn't we put an assassin on Assad?
Why did they allow Gingrich to rise again?

The Art of Public Peeing

Yes, I understand that art must mimic real life. It matters nothing if ‘real life’ is a national dishonour for us. But the movies strike me dumb! Why must the movie-makers stream sick scenes of men dog-peeing in the open where civilised people live?

Faux-Fang Vampire

Twelve or thirteen year-old spectre haunting the Mahogany avenue at 37 beneath where the bats hang upside down. He has his hand to his mouth. He stirs the cars to motion and makes me wonder why. Then he ghosts up to my window and drops his hand. Geez, he has two-inch fangs for canines, and he tries to shock you to give him money. I thought him unfortunate but a friend thinks they were faux fangs.

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Give the Bone a Dog

Yes, I wrote and meant that. Give the bone a dog. Imagine my voluptuous stimulation on hearing that profligate, plundering Portugal, who formerly came to explore, and then exploit, Angola is now imploring Her to save Him from imploding. Asking Her to buy fat stakes in His ex-economy. Oh, give the bone a dog!

Wanting

I have not felt the want of anything so badly in such a long time. I espied a loafing, adorable urchin on my street this morning, while everybody was at church. He was gazing over a dwarf fence into a neighbour’s compound. Even from far, I could tell his naughty contemplation. As I got closer, I saw his bait: a chandelier of low-hanging green mangoes. He panned from the fruit to my face, and then back. His honest hankering made me almost stop to aid the trespass. Such simple hunger! It is a feeling I have not had about anything in yonks. And the mangoes were not even ripe!

Pre-Mall Accra

I only do blue-moon drop-ins at the Accra Mall. The cars and crowds are too “clustered thick as seeds”. I nurse a middling memory of pre-mall Accra. There was the government’s GNTC. It lay down and died when I was still an embryo. Chandirams went out like a candle. Kingsway kicked the bazaar bucket. Glamour walked the plank, and UTC bit the dust. Melcom survived (sometimes on a respirator, I think). A&C came and found a niche and reposed in it. There weren’t too many cars, then; Kingsway’s palm-size car park worked just fine. There was no colourful range of glittering goods to spike your Saturday surprise. Now, as then, some stay at home. Then, there was too little (to choose from). Now, there are too many (people to shove out of the way).

The Unlawful Business of Serving Food in a Whites-Only Club in Accra

An Italian uomo hissed at a black Afri-lady that she could not gain membership of his degustation restaurant in Accra because she was “not white”. He laughed while hissing. She was outraged, and waged war through social media. The unsavoury jibe jarred on the public psyche-palate. The government boys ‘came to town’ and closed down the ‘club’.

I believe the Italian man. I believe that he was just joking. The Afri-lady was with a Spaniard and a Japanese national when the pellets smacked the ceiling. I understand that the Japanese was a member of the club. I have doubts that the Italian uomo would have thought the Japanese white. Plus, if there was real racism going on, why would they not simply make it a private, members-only gig? Why would they allow non-whites to walk in and eat, and only withhold membership with its (usually) dubious benefits?

That said, I believe it was a very lame defence for the Italian man to say the fact that he was married to a black woman was proof that he was not racist. Very lame!

So, I believe that it was a mere jackass joke, and not true jaundice.

But the joke exposed him. He was operating a legit, front-room, raw seafood shop and an unlawful, backroom, seafood eatery. He evaded certain taxes by giving worthless scribbles on paper as receipts. He was cheating the nation.

So, a cruel, ill-thought, stupid, unnecessary joke exposed the poor man to odium, opprobrium and ‘government matter’. Hopefully, he thinks before he speaks next time, but I don't think he is racist. Enough of this row now.

The Hair

Exquisite, Elysian locks in angelic interlace crown her pretty head, and cascade in delightful, comely tresses to settle on her shoulders. The ribbed ‘rawness’ at the top and the subtle smoothness sailing softly below then frame her fine-featured face in fifty flawless fancies.

Water Everywhere in the City of Accra

Monstrous incompetence sluiced through the City of Accra on Tuesday night. It turned God’s bounty into a Greek gift; destroying lives and houses, cars and mattresses. It is among us the depravity resides. The wealthy wise-ass who chiselled and cast his brick-and-mortar in a water way because there was space; because he could; because nobody stopped him; because be bought off whoever tried to stop him. His workmen bought food in plastic bags and created compost blocks in gutters. Between the government goon and the conniving contractor who constructed a ten-millimetre gutter, if any at all, don’t you deserve to go Gaddafi!

Feckless Form Filling

Excited employee is completing a 6-page loan form. I ask him why he won’t scribble with a pencil first. He can always etch in ink when he gets all the details right. His long look tells me I’m a bloody busybody. He used a pencil already, he says. But I can’t see the lead strokes any. He gloats, “I deleted them all before restarting with a pen”. Three hours later, he’s still ‘donkeying’ down the document.