Confusion Twice Confounded in the City of Accra

They stand like sentinels at the skirts of the streets burgeoning higgledy-piggledy from shrimp size to big-as-a-house. They stunt, check and colour out the red, white and blue regular road signs. You’d be pardoned for confounding that the City of Accra had dada place names like ‘Dressed Chicken for Sale’, ‘Local Brown Rice’, ‘Moringa Sold Here’ and ‘Great Provider Furniture Works’,

Don’t get me wrong – the signs are helpful if your car would crab-crawl at that awkward spot, or if you were taking the air on foot. But, at 60 kph, when the boards flash just a quick blip in your sight, the advertising principle is crowded out. Besides, if you aren’t lost, or are simply sight-seeing, the pesky collection simply gangrenes the scene.

No-Jabber Day

What mithers the Nokia N Series that terrifies so many of them to just freeze? My four-month old suddenly iced over at a morning meeting, while we were exploring information technology! Usually, you can eject the dry cell, leave it an orphan for a minute, and the phone is fired when you re-insert. Tricks tried, experience employed but, still, phone paralysed!

So, today, I’ve strived and stayed alive sans a running phone, and it is oh sooooo sweet! Nobody has called, or succeeded anyway. I have now up-ended my punishing policy of keeping my phone on at all times. The peace was pampering, and I will be sure to repeat it as often as I safely can. Noticed served!

An Inconvenient Itch

Of luckless late, I’ve lost my second sight, and I’ve been itching cacti for some wicked, unrestrained inspiration to zap me back on track. You know, it’s not an undemanding engagement of throwing your eyes wide to catch the telling detail. When true second sight strikes, the inspiration or the scene will seize you!

I went out and bought myself a little present today – a writer’s notebook. It is my first purpose-book for creative non-poetry. That should do the trick, no? Nature wound some of her mystery too, and granted me an extravaganza in Dzorwulu, in the City of Accra. With war-front features in a pair of tight, oily-fabric, white trousers, she needed only a few drive-by seconds to shock my hair to barbs and bristles!

She was walking fine one moment; dithering in the next; splaying her legs out till her fat thighs no longer kissed. She pigeon-toed her feet and hoicked up her pinpoint posterior at a gross gradient. Something was missing from the scene – her right hand! It crawled out of its burial ground, inch-deep in her rump! Before fifty pairs of affronted eyes, at a swarming intersection, she’d just liberated herself from an inconvenient itch!

The Ill-Favoured Furniture in the City of Accra

The wooden train courses round the sketchy streets in supplementary neighbourhoods where most of the buildings are still young and growing. The carpenters’ strokes are sure and steady. They tell of long hours lent to learning the patience of whittling and splicing. The finishing may sometimes even be fairly flawless. But the material models arrive too ginormous and in droll patterns – equine, leonine or Dalmatian coats or some un-tellable, textural, textile torture. It is an open orchestra without a master conductor; cunning craft craving art.

The Twice Married in the City of Accra

Many people living in this unconscious, self-conscious city are twice married to little purpose, and do not even know it. They credit the first in time as the primitive prelude to the higher other, but the law secures both on the same pedestal. It is a cheerless throwback to time no-more, when kids were named and then christened or baptised with a ‘Christian name’. Then they’d injuriously insist at home on being called ‘Kwabena Paul’ or uncultured crass like that. We denigrate the African marriage as the engagement, and elevate the European marriage (also called ‘Civil’) as the real thing. And yet, you can call yourself Mrs. Something-Something after the ‘Engagement’. So, is there a difference? A certain kind of man chooses only to get ‘engaged’ so that he’s not limited to only one lawful wife. Get it?

The Prado Wins the Girl

H, the office manager, traipsed tardily into my office on his daily morning constitutional. He sauntered towards my bird’s-eye window to manage the ante meridian view below. All of a sudden, he called out to me to come and take a quick street scan.

A girl! Slender, tall; still magnificently delicious womanhood! She was tucking in her shirt, which the tight pants on her canyon curves were constantly casting off. Shirt in straight, and she started cheesecaking away from under my look-out.

He wondered if he should call her. Cheerleader-I said yes! As H managed the window into an open-slide position, a parked white Toyota Land Cruiser Prado backed up into the street, and pulled up beside our girl. Quick words were swapped as H’s hellos were deafly disregarded. She half-glided-half-galloped into the SUV, and they were gone in a wisp.

Were we livid? No! Were we sad? Not at all! Were we beaten? Twice soundly, thrice roundly! And it was not even the real Land Cruiser, but its less charming cousin!

Saturday-Night Showdown

Three Levantine leches leaked into Sankofa Night Club, in Akosombo, looking limpid to whisk women away (they were not merely there to whirl and twirl - they were drawing the women, in turns, to shadowy corners, through a jersey-clad cowboy pimp, for smutty brokering). For a short spell, they didn’t come near us, but after selecting and deselecting their wholly willing quarry, the leader of the raiders posted one of his lackeys to call our B.

I leapt over a low table and belted him on the arm, screaming all the while at him to “leave our girl alone”. El jefe employed bravado, but when I was icily intrepid, he backed down dispirited. K (B'S man)was watching unruffled as a tempest threatened, secure in the knowledge that B required no help to sweep off the effluence (but K knows I menaced for a different reason). They ended up sneaking away with three victim vixens (of whom one was just a cub).