Easter Day in the City of Accra

You’ll find no people in the neighbourhoods; they have all thronged the chubby churches. Even the irreverently rackety dogs seem to respect the moment of the occasion. By midday, when I’m rolling on a holiday ride, the streets are blanched with women, children, men, and more women who have quickly colonised the great outdoors with their over-obvious piety. I turn down the devilish dancehall playing on the car stereo, for I fear I will not relish the poison darts the onlookers will strafe this way.

Random Questions

Will Obama dare tighten immigration rules?
Is our president afraid of the ex ex?
How often does police surveillance go wrong?
Will Liverpool and Bayern now switch to cricket?

Sex, Size and Payment in the City of Accra

Venue: Soldier Bar, somewhere at Kwame Nkrumah Circle, Accra.
Time: 11 pm.
Day: Any day.

Man Pervert (MP): How much?

Underage Girl (UG): You have to drop your pants first.

MP: Why would I want to do that?

UG: I need to see whatchu got. Price is per hour, according to size!

HMMM!

M. K. Ghandi is someone I admire

M. K. Ghandi
Because he was the most human of us all

Steve Biko
Because he would have been the legitimate forerunner of the anti-apartheid movement

Yitzhak Rabin
Because he would have managed to bring peace to the Middle East

Barack Obama
Because you just came back from sequestration on Mars if you do not know why

Kaka
Because he combines supreme talent with the fear of God and modesty - a rare thing in the 2000s

Corazon Aquino
For such grace, dignity and bravery

Aung San Suu Kyi
Because she has more balls than the military in Burma

Tony Blair
Because he has the gift of gab

William Jefferson Clinton
One politician I could trust that he really believed in what he was saying (bar Lewinsky), plus he has no prejudice or bigotry in him

Nelson Mandela
For how he kept a volatile country together in the 90s

Living in the Osu Cemetery

Squatting serenely in the sparkling sunlight, somewhat betwixt the sprawling sports stadium and the skeletal State House, in Osu, is the Osu Cemetery. As darkness descends on the city of Accra, it becomes a horror-home to homeless hordes and residential rejects. They perch, repose, cha cha cha and steeplechase on the gravestone, as if they’re devil-daring the sleeping bones below to rise up and fight their effrontery. It’s scary to drive near this necropolis at night because, every now and then, a humanesque figure would clamber over the wall, streak through your headlight beam, and disintegrate into the nothingness – they never use the gates. If a manic necrophiliac is playing Rumpelstiltskin on the tombstones, and they’re still alive, it’s because they haven’t yet pissed on my blessed Grandpa’s grave.

The Ocean

When you put a calm mind to it
There are not many things
Before the timeless ocean
The blueness of intensity
The green eyes of jealousy
The white surf of purity
Rolling waves and lolling lave
Salty taste and lulling hum
Grades of sand as true as gold
The intimate bathe in tenderness
The gulls, the weeds, the sun and the shells
All seen and loved by generations gone
And it’s bigger that everything else
It owns the shoreline
And the sky
And the topsy-turvy brine
Even the far-off horizon line
The power to give unending pleasure
Choose the size of shore next year
Now pent-up rage bursts out at the moon
Holds the world in a low vile growl
And plays mirages of spirit lights
A slow recline in the afterglow
The ocean sleeps in silent sate.

Silence

It is the music of the trees
In the drone of the balmy breeze
It is the stretching of the hills
And the tears the sky sadly spills

Thunderclap in breaking hearts
The unseen tail of poison darts
It is the picture of the sea
The still before the storm we see

It is the depth of the deep black hole
The massive ice caps in each Pole
It is the cosmic dance of stars
And the sounds of life on Mars

The great allure of muted minds
The need to see behind the blinds
The presence of stark loneliness
The blank before each ‘I confess’.