Anger Waiting for a Cause in the City of Accra

Two young men snatched a phone in broad daylight and bolted. One slipped away; the other was bagged by oh ten thousand ‘petulants’. They hurt and hammered the hangdog with sticks and stones and switches until their gall seemed to peter out. Then, a jobless Beelzebub fetched a grubby jerrycan of grimy engine oil. They soused him slick with the stuff, and made him glug a gallon or two.

Smiling Monsters after Dark in the City of Accra

Man Mountain, hanging like a treacherous cliff over a forlorn length of the shadowy Spintex Road in the mini-principled city of Accra, why are you counting on a lift from strangers with that tarzan torso just because you can smile?

The Village Fool Lives Long

Years ago, while crawling back to this smothering city from a country cruise, my team mates and I gained on a hamlet as the day lit out. The family was back from breaking rocks, bones, pods, grounds or whatever hard work they did. The evening feast had been finger-licked. Father and mothers, siblings, dogs, cats and birds huddled together in a close circle to ululate an uncouth song. The father fooled, frolicked and tripped the light fantastic in the middle. The women and children egged him on. Stress almost kayoed me today at work, and I remembered that simple, solid scene.

African Marriage Doesn’t Need the Church

Imagine my holy hang-up when a parish prescribes principles for neo-nubian nuptials: dwindled dowries, laundered lists, ‘liposucked’ linguists and alcohol alternatives. Church, stay out of African marriages. You have your own mysterious matrimony. We can pray without the Paternoster.

Songs That Seduce

Scores of songs have seduced us silly by stirring us from soothing slumber, and sucking sweetly at the heartstrings in the ensuing twilight-zone spell. 

The Papaya Fruit Girl

In the sea of sellers of anything, she flared her loveliness in my view. Too pretty, too dee-lee-cious, to stride the sour streets. Too sweet in eyes and nose and oh her lips to schlep diced papaya; swaying on her head, swaying to the beat of her body-full of  ‘S’ shapes in its strut-n-swirl. The flask woman behind her – bland, sun-blistered battleaxe – she didn’t stir a single whisker of my heart. Silly, sad me: pouring pity on the flower, sweeping scorn atop the bug. But beauty is such a disabler! Oh that stimulating papaya fruit girl on the sunny streets of Accra. Will I see her tomorrow too?

The Sentry and the Squatter in the City of Accra

In the city of Accra, at genteel Ridge, at 9 am, a man in hermetic jeans was looking to leak his liquid privy into a drain. I shuddered to see him crook his legs to enable him to sag the seat of the asphyxiating denim for release.

Not quite ten metres away, another man in a white caftan was squatted over the same poor drain, doing similar business. I thought I caught him cast a disgusted glance the way of the standing man as if to ask which lowlife would hang his dispenser out on broad-daylight display.

I was desperate to stop and correct the squatter’s delusion that he was the better man, but I had to hurry to the office to go spend a penny.