The Fluid Traffic Lights in the City of Accra

I've heard it said about prisons, mental-health institutions and toilets. Now I add traffic lights. You can tell how civilised a country is by how its drivers mind the traffic lights (and traffic circles).

Five or six years ago, a friend and I saw a Nigerian businessman do a jaw-drop when visiting Accra for the first time. "They actually obey the lights?" He asked. He said the lights were useless décor back in his country. We had a sneaky suspicion that he was self-deprecating too hard.

That kind Nigerian gentleman; he visited five years too soon. Every morning at the Regimanuel traffic lights on the Spintex Road, I barely hang on to dear life after three 'Hail Marys' and four near misses.

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Racing with Cyclists in the City of Accra

My heart turns cartwheels every time I see a cyclist’s thirty-second madness. Pumping pedals to race your car, they’re in the lead for twenty seconds. Then you’re level...edge past... whiz ahead. Ten seconds scrape by; they surrender; admission of no catch-up chance. It’s the human spirit in the race of life.

The Age of Innocence

The Age of Innocence is gone. We buy late-night Kelewele at 5pm, and do dawn-jogging at 7am. Twenty of us at a pub are no match for 4 gunmen. Saturday night-crawling is a far-off, silver-screen fantasy. Security is merely a word we teach four-year-olds.

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2016

Four years from today, you'll leave home on Monday and get to Accra City Centre on Wednesday. If you don't take too long about your business, you may make it back home by Saturday. But we'll still vote for leaders.

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A Robbery Victim's View of Mob Justice

Days after my rebuke of the Nigerian mob murder, a robber's pistol poked my chest. And a friend's question probed my beliefs: do you still condemn mob justice? I thought about the shiny, black, cold metal and the nine years' worth of data lost. Then, my answer run out boldly: Yes. Mob justice is wrong and the lynching murder.

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Hideous Humanoids, Barbaric Beings

Four boys are lacerated, eviscerated, excoriated and incinerated by a mob of maybe ten. Thousands, literally, feast on the cruel skill of their local ‘gladiators’. A few officers of the law cower among the rabble in this arena of the gory and the gruesome. They do nothing to stop the baying wolves. If they try to stop the lunacy, their reward would be a flaming pneumatic garland.

This happened in Nigeria recently. It could have been Ghana or Kenya or South Africa or anywhere in Africa. (WARNING!!! IT'S REALLY, REALLY GORY!!!)

In my knowledge of African history, criminals and suspects may have been punished by flogging, burial-while-alive, banishment, capital punishment. BUT it happened after a trial; a trial by the elders or, indeed, a trial by ordeal before the gods and their priests. The punishment was cruel sometimes and the trials not credible in today’s conventional wisdom.

BUT THERE WERE TRIALS BEFORE PUNISHMENT!

We were cheated into colonialism, yes. We inherited some great legal norms, though, to add to valid virtues of our own. Joy!

So when (and why) did we learn to seize suspects, untried, to bludgeon-n-burn to death? Why are we more barbaric today than 500 years ago?

Bon Apetit

I should have bulls-eyed on my food at Golden Tulip Kumasi City Hotel. Or I should have focused on the horror movie of the distinguished-looking old man to my right, gouging himself with wine and enough rich food to feed a dozen pigs.

The swimming pool is just outside the restaurant. It has a terrace on which diners can eat open-air. So in they walked when I was just about to throw up for the gourmand sat to my right.

A boobs-a-spill girl likely sixteen; a fully-clothed lass maybe fourteen; then a grand papa, couldn’t have been below fifty-five. He’d brought them dining. That they wouldn’t walk together, and her curious get-up got me thinking that the sixteen year-old and the almost-geriatric were in a relationship. Well, an arrangement.

I looked around to assure myself that nobody had seen my curiosity. I was wrong. Everybody in the room must have been thinking the same scadalous thoughts, including the gentlehomme with the piggish appetite. When our eyes met, he was choking down the laughter. The moment seemed to call for words, so I said, “Bon apetit”.

I was really referring to his wolfish traits, but he burst out laughing and sprayed strawberry gateau over his table-for-one. Then, it hit me. He though my “Bon apetit” was meant for the grand papa, his below-legal liaisons and whatever pleasant pastime we thought they were headed for.