7 Votes

My totally loud, know-it-all roommate goes to bed at 6 p.m. It is 2001. My roomie has just stood for election as Hall President at Legon Hall in the University of Ghana. I know he is infamous, derided, mocked. He thinks he is popular, famous, loved. He wins! Not the elections. He wins 7 votes out of over 5000. Take away 4 (the number of his roommates). Take away 1 (his own vote). He just had to sleep early, right?

Bringing in the Girls

At college, people know full well what they are down for. Boys will not sprout wings and be humbugged with a halo just because girls are around. So if the whip-cracking Czars of the University of Ghana hallucinate that inserting girls into an all-male residence will lasso and tame the boys, then they should have rightly gone with the dinosaur, the dodo, the caveman and other creature-fossils.

A Very Adult Question

I have a callow college friend – 19 is she! We have only makeshift-met two times or three. We work the cellies when the weeks between become many. Her call comes through one rainy night – I recall how pinching the air was. She says she doesn’t know where I live and thinks it overly odd. I don’t know what to say, so I limn it to her (she has imagination!). She says she’d like to see it, and school is not far from where I live. I parry it with I can only make it on weeknights. She says that’s ok. So, I raise the white flag and say “soon”.

Am I the only one with questions? Is there a lot of trust? Or am I caught in her youthful crosshairs?

Mine is Bigger than Yours

I was lapping up this delicious little book on how to be “seriously good” in court. It had only three hundred pages. At an office, I met an older lawyer who looked inches impressed. He said he had a book of his own to show me ... and onlookers. He lumbered off and returned in a minute with a one-foot-thick titanic tome on the same topic! At that moment, I wanted to drop my trousers to see what he’d do next.

Tyre-Mending in Accra

On a rainy evening on a public holiday, I was just zooming off from work to wolf a pizza. It was already ordered. Ah-woooo! Phhst, a tack retired one of my tyres! I’d fixed that same one the week before. The rubbish tyre men had looked thick and bungling. But it was in the middle of the Devil’s ass – I couldn’t pick and choose. They’d applied super glue instead of rubber glue and a little common sense. So I stood glued in 'Mud Acre' while proper tyre hands did over the punctured pneumatic. It’s just like that, no? So many Accraians only pretend competence.

The Melting Streets of Accra

The fiery sun is barbecuing up the sweltering streets of Accra in their own bitumen. I wonder, if a similar sizzle is not sautéing the (delicious?) delicate sauce around the human brain. Might that be why some street Accraians behave like little devils dancing on a bed of flaring coal? We have scythed down all the trees for urban (under)development!

Cascading Buildings in the City of Accra

A college girl dies. Her friend is between a rock and a hard place. They were only leaving a hostel as students do. A canopied walkway avalanches on them. The building was erected decades ago. Money is not for maintenance in Ghana. It is for creating, and then creating some more. Already existing infrastructure can take care of itself.

Her parents were expecting a smarter girl back. They are getting a corpse. It happened in school; on school property. Somebody has to pay. Her parents are grieving, I know. But, they should PLEASE not simply leave it to God. Sue somebody. Sue everybody who should have cared. It won't bring Eva back, but do it anyway. Start with university authorities!

God, I did not know her – why am I so upset?