Accra, It’s All Right to be Middle Class

When the stuffy colonialists guffawed their way out of here with their poniard noses in the hot air, they caved a vaginate vacuum behind. The locals clambered harum-scarum into the gaping hole, and strained their monkey best to mimic the egressing Europeans. And the clerical clique opened its eyes, delighted to find a little space in the formerly out-of-reach middle class.

Now, Accra is a city of the really ridiculously rich. Haute Couture clothes, dazzling jewellery, big, shiny cars and many-peopled malls are her defining character. A Little America is radiating out of the simian circus in sound and sight and wispy wishes. The seeming phiz has two low levels: an artificially oiled and funded upper class and a raw-nerved, resentful lower class. Old money and aristocratic name stand jaded and one-upped in the fringes jaundiced at anyone who (like them) dares to breathe or give a happy, life-savouring smile.

The numbers are staggering. The upper class is stiflingly stacked with true and pretend wealth. The modest middle class is shrivelled and shrunken to the sheer shower of cold, daily ridicule. “Why are you so old fashioned?” “Why are you so uncool?” “Why are you so quietly dressed?” “Why are you hiding so much skin?” “Haven’t you noticed that everybody goes to shop there?” “Why are you still driving that car?”

My favourite has got to be the well-designed website of a hugely popular radio station. They love to post pictures of the ‘happening’ places and events in the City of Accra. Every palsied pretender poses like a superstar. So, who’s signing autographs? Who is going where to see whose programme?

My dear Accra, it’s really all right to be middle class.

Life's Not Fair

Life’s not fair
And life is not so smooth
You will fall down again
You must rise up again
Sad to know someone suffers much more than you can bear
Love will creep up somewhere

Life’s not fair
Money can’t grow on trees
Honesty is not gold
Someone’s prettier than you
The one you’re sure is meant for you is in another’s arms
Someone you know just died

Life’s not fair
Hard work is second best
Feelings we must express
Some people we can’t stand
The children bombs will kill in the next senseless war
Your pay is not enough

Life’s not fair
And life is not so smooth
When your senses swim in joy
You make the most of it
See, you and I have come to know so well we can’t deny
That life’s not fair.

Life of Distress

A man with an ex
And a wife
And a mistress

Deserves only wrecks
And a life
Full of distress

IT Professionals

between booting early
and shutting down
at night,
they live the day in jargon:
interface, protocol,
defragmentation, zip,
compress, trojan.
the self-importance
of a growing group.
they think they are
Homo Sapiens 9.0

No Lending to a Fool

he had magazines –
sport, politics,
quick reads on investment,
cars, houses, fashion
and prayer books in one room;
a two-way mirror in another.

when he finally met them,
he always knew
who to lend to,
and who to turn away.

Edgar

Poor Edgar
Illegitimately sired
From
Illicit copulation
Incomplete fertilization
Inclement incubation
Invidious parturition
Ugly and mean
Incurable criminal.

Eating Supper at Eleven

It’s 10 O’clock in the night. The children went to bed at 8, tired, hungry, exhausted and unwashed. They just dropped, one after the other, to the crumpled sheets on the floor, like poisoned flies. They slept in their school clothes. There was nobody to care if they had clean clothes for school the next day. If there were no clean clothes, no decent clothes or no clothes at all, the ones they were sleeping in could have been washed and hung to dry on the balcony or in the room under the fan.

A car came creeping up the quiet, sleeping street towards the stately house a little past 11. As it turned onto the compact, clay driveway with the loose little stones on the surface, the man servant heard the wheeze of the old, little engine and the grating of the tyres, and rushed to check the rice on the fire. Perfect, just a little soft and mushy, the way the master liked it. The car came to a gentle stop at the carport. Charles, the man servant, walked briskly to the door, but its occupant was already out of the car. He held a black, cuboid briefcase which he swung slightly in the direction of Charles. Charles caught it with practiced ease and croaked, “Welcome, Sir”.

The master settled in his beer-and-TV chair, called for his beer and turned on the TV. In those days, there was just the national broadcaster, GBC-TV. The 10 O’clock news (which was never broadcast at 10 O’clock) had come and gone. On, was the programme, ‘Contemplations’. Why anybody would bother to feed philosophy to the hungriest inhabitants of the third world was a stroke of genius which the present writer’s obviously simple mind struggles to comprehend.

Not long after the beer came the food. It was 11.30. The master must have remembered, then, that he had children germinating somewhere in the big government house.

“Where are they?”

“They are all asleep, Sir. I’ll wake them up to come and eat.”

And, so it was everyday that the children would go to bed dirty, hungry and tired in their school clothes. Then they would be rudely woken up to straggle downstairs like zombies at about 11.30 to eat dinner, and go straight back to bed.