The Shit Storm

We all get the tummy trots from bad food, sweets, spices or fear. The other day I compared notes with friends and colleagues on the cold sweat, malaise and black eye of the rapid runs. We shared startling similarities.

For most people the shit storm makes landfall (or shall we say intestine fall) after midnight.

Most people can hold in the runs while on the move (in the city) but when they get home and near the toilet, the muscles relax and any obstacles or delays and, pffffff, it trickles down the legs.

The runs are sometimes held back by a solid pellet which when ejected with a mistimed foolish fart turns on the taps of Montezuma’s Revenge.

The trots dislike sudden moves; for when the first drop dribbles out, the funnel flares and the faucets overflow.

Breaking* in the Name of Love

Accra is pocket-size - everybody knows almost everybody else.

Imagine a fringe friend who’s secretly married warming up to your sibling or close friend. Do you tell on them ‘already’? Would you shut your bill (you parrot!) and mind your own ‘beeswax’ and let people deal with their issues (or tissues, since this will end in tears)? Or will you tell Angelic Acquaintance to fly away quietly forever and nothing more said?

*Breaking – a Ghanaian English word meaning to tell on someone in order to upset their plans.

Hiplife Video Vixens in the City of Accra

As far as Hiplife goes, I shine up to the songs that I do before I see the videos. It is not a statement on quality, though I don’t think mighty much of them. It’s about the video vixens. They seem to need to wear minimal clothes to bump, grind and gyrate their boiling bodies. Is there only one way of dancing to Hiplife? Is it not an art form that must develop, innovate and reinvent itself all the time? And Hiplife naturally thrives on immediacy and present-pulse. It reflects what is happening today, right now, at this very moment! Then it fast fizzles out and returns revealed in different sizzling styles. That’s the thrill of our Hiplife. So if Hiplife means all that’s cool, en vogue, stylish and ‘now’, you really have no effing excuse wearing out-of-vogue-and-never-returning, ugly-in-itself-God-what-was-the-tailor-thinking fashion simply because it helps us to delicious 'dishings' of your delightful desserts.

Un-I-Doing in the City of Accra

They grumble that divorce is competing healthily-unhealthily on the sombre-statistics table in the nuptial city of Accra. Some propose that today’s talented women are anti-BS and will make you gorge yourself on some. I have double doubts about that. Other people whine that young people are getting hitched for wretched reasons. I’m open to looking into that. Is love the only right reason? What about respect? Convenience? Empathy? Need?

The Commodity of Children

They sell fish and nets and kids at roughly the same price. And the kids are human kids, not goats, but their parents are marketing them. They litter in tens and twelves: 3 may not survive ill-health, 5 to do the menial jobs, 4 for sale if the fish fetches low prices. Arrests hardly happen. Prosecutions never nail them. It may be Vigilante-Time.

New Rule: One-Month Seizure

A driver sees the red lights come up. He’d rather not stop because (unlike the other people in the gridlock) he has somewhere to go...urgently.

Another driver swerves out of the traffic line and cuts a through-course across the hard shoulder. Street vendors just manage to sprint out of harm’s way.

A traffic cop halts both cars. He takes down the particulars of the cars and of the drivers. He calmly motions the passengers to come down. He takes the keys away from the drivers. The cop has no choice but to be firm. A camera blinks at him from a nearby pole or fence.

In 20 minutes, tow trucks arrive. The now-repentant cars are ‘craned’ up and whisked off to the government ‘Hold’ an hour’s drive outside Accra. They will hibernate there for 1 month.

1 month cannot run quickly enough. If the driver wants his car back, he must visit the ‘Hold’ outside Accra, and fork out the ‘fine’. The fine has a built-in rental for the space and care of the car.

A document is signed. It shows the fine has been paid. It is also a bond that on the third seizure, your licence will go, and on the fifth seizure, your car would go.

If I had the power to make a rule about life in Accra, this is what I think I’d do. Reader, what would you do with that power? What would you change?

Smallpox in Court in 2010!

Shame on the liked lawyer who ‘couriered’ his unwilling understudy last week to announce that he had the chicken pox, and could not continue his case. Today, he returned, hardly pockmarked, I must say. He announced that he’d contracted malaria and ... wait for this ... smallpox! Gosh, smallpox was ‘dinosaured’ in the 1970s. He was lying about the illness, no?