Heel The World

Two young men still smouldering out of school. They snip and suture soft Italian leather from scratch (after they have gauged your feet with true callipers). They call the magnificent shoes 'Heel the World'. They give a percentage back through a charity. It's not confusing. It's inspiring and quite clever. They're making things happen in the city of Accra. It's pure art!

Oh Look at That Happy Face!!!

This is my friend (for five minutes) Yaw. I saw him in front of my parents' house at Achimota while visiting. I saw this amazing shine in Yaw's face and politely asked him if I could take his pic. He jumped at it.

He was eating cooked beans in a polythene bag...with so much ecstasy on his face. I asked him to show me how he ate it and he sucked it lovingly out of the bag.

When I thought I had taken the second (and final) picture, he demanded that I take another.This (above) is his own chosen pose.

He chose this one too. Oh 'mehhhhn' the happiness on his face! Sadly, when Yaw was gone, I was told that he had a 'mental condition' but was going/growing untreated.

I thought of how many of us 'ghost' around our worlds unhappy with all the blessings that we have. In five minutes, Yaw showed me how much he already had of the commodity so many chase without success.

The Vitriol of a Foreigner

Two kinds of people go to ‘foreign’ countries – visitors and bigots. For far too long, the creative aspects of the life of Africans (and Asians and Native Americans and Native Australians, etc) has only been studied as Anthropology, while the Euro-American way has been studied as Art.

I have always wanted to meet blogger Holli, but she’s frankly not worth a second of my time. To be very honest, I wish the people over at ‘Immigration’ would keep a strict eye on her status and see her off as soon as it is time.

Why am I saying this? There was a street festival last weekend at Jamestown (an old settlement of Accra). It is not the most densely populated part of Accra (contrary to Holli’s lies). I will leave it at that and ask you to make the time to compare different accounts of the festival for yourself.

First, puke on BIGOT Holli’s vitriol here.

Then, luxuriate in GHANAIAN Nana Kofi’s pictures here.

Finally, ruminate on 'EXPAT' Graham's riposte here. (I know him and he's a GENUINE 'visitor')

Do Holli, Nana Kofi and Graham describe the same event? Yes. But one’s description is sick, bigoted, hateful and dishonest. How I now value the saying about a picture being worth a thousand words (and also an attempt at 1000 fair and honest words - Graham)

The Services Make the City

The streets are choked; won't let the traffic flow freely. The pipes are parched; no water rushes through at all. The cables are confused; the current streaks one way and then the opposite. Is this only a city because it's crawling with millions of pacific people?

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Silly, Self-Love Friday: The Hunk in the Mirror

Swaggering down the office corridor towards the dividing glass door, I saw this swanky-dandy, dressed-on-point, God-I-hate-that-dude kind of guy strutting towards me. In a panic of pride, I picked my phone to call my girl to make sure she was far from him. To my bright-eyed surprise, he picked up his phone too to call his girl to make sure she was far from me. Then it hit me in my slender body. The God-I’m-so-envious-of-him guy was my own reflection.

Hunger Strike, Dumber Strike

Ah! Some grieving group of teachers strafed their stomachs with a hunger strike in protest against the belly-full leaders of yet another teachers’ association. Such benighted belittling of that wonderful political tool! I have scarcely heard of a dumber strike. (Be sure to listen to the ridiculous audio here).

No sooner had their sham stomach shutdown started than they quelled it questionably by crouching behind a court order (obtained by the police) restraining them from the hunger strike. Confused? So am I. They’re simply saying in order to be law-abiding citizens, they’ll go back to eating. That’s male-cattle excrement.

Lake Bosumtwi

Refreshing, sun-blocked, some-earth-some-grass glade. Running round a terra cotta, waking lake. Far flung from where most of you (ad)venture. Swimmers tumble rough in the eddy, while dancers bop and bump around the plank-wood stage. The bush-meat pepper-soup bubbles in a cauldron under a mahogany tree, not five feet from the palm-wine ‘pulpit’. Huddled close are fish and rice and loads of fantasy foods. Holidaying here is far lovelier than Accra.

Dark Dens in the City of Accra

To my nought surprise, there are holes and hideouts for the hoi polloi in the city of Accra where the herds and humans bleat and feed, mate and litter, and even die together among scrap-made shacks without electricity.

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Working Out in the City of Accra

On every rough-hewn (rasta) park, I see a rag-tag team a-play. My slightly richer, 'trendier' peeps say the gyms are hot agog too. It seems Accra has finally caught on that a little pay or pain ahead is cheaper than later bills from 18th-Century med centres.

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The Streets of the Two Accras

In clustered Central Accra, they pave the streets in praise-pursuit; china-smooth like heaven's highway. But the suburban straits are genocide (or is there a more sombre word?); raw, rugged, lumpy-bumpy thoroughfares cruelly calculated to cripple your chassis.

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Drivers & Angels in the City of Accra

You again! Or are you her sultry sister? Or her sister's sister? You're all divinely descended from one prepossessing Mitochondrial Eve. Was it the blue-black jeans sculpting your sensual, s-shaped sinews or the tantalising-in-tone torso? Or perhaps the devastating dimple (I saw just one)? Your eyes 'diamanted' towards me, my right foot zombied onto the brake, my left hand zigzagged towards the kerb. Danger-dealing demoiselle, please don't beam bright beside the road. You're too stunning to behold.

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Corrective Rape

Corrective rapes
Collective rapes
Sour grapes
Stone-age apes

Rough Riders In The City Of Accra

No bulging bags after six pm. Really wretched riders will ooze out of the lessening light with scimitars and lurch for your wrist or jugular. Delayed submission leads to loathsome laceration. Best give up the sac and ask if they don't require the padded wallet and matching shoes as well.

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When The Power Gets Cut (As Usual)

It's amazing how everything (but my bodily functions) ceased when the electricity company cut the power during a poco-powerful storm. It's been off for 7 hours now.

I was lucky that my handheld held all day (after the laptop had died in a fight scene of a psycho-thriller) even though I Whatsapped, BBM'd, Gtalked and tweeted all day.

In a blast from the past, I scoured every column and feature in the Graphic and Mirror by torchlight. Nostalgia - I don't read the papers anymore. I get all my news from the digital media.

So, the electricity company goons may outdo even their own assinine record. I'll turn the vacuum into a positive experience.

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Holiday Hangouts in the City of Accra

Not surprising. The traffic circle near the Accra Mall was jammed. Packed thick with cars. 4 lanes of cars in a two-lane way. All were going into the Mall. Most did not make it. The Mall was already full of herds. On a public holiday, there is nowhere to go. They all throng the beaches or the Mall. Oh, the Mall was a pen or sty.

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Hitting on the Home-Route Girl

Silly, old man. Leaning over the till in the convenience shop at a service station. He miscalculated he could use the sales girl for his convenience. When I walked in, he was in the middle of crooning the history of bank notes to her. He stopped when my shadow darkened the note. He said she could pocket the 'clinky' change of two coins. She said a rapid half-thanks and dumped them noisily in the cash register. He could not have missed her sublime slight.

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The Case for the Demolition of Drums

Must State and corporate official events always be laced with trombo-trumpet tooting and brain-busting drumming even during office hours? Is it cultural to fritter away your waking hours with frivolous fun and to dim-wit distract others who want to do something else?

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When A Car ‘Bumps You’ in the City of Accra

You have cleverly got around the insane traffic by pushing out at a thin hour. You are steering through a dark, ‘un-peopled’ spot when a car ghosts into your rear view. It catches up with you, and you slow down, but it does not overhaul. A small jolt and a jangling sound tell you the car behind has eaten your ‘ass’. You screech to a halt to inspect the damage and maybe replicate it on the other driver’s face. He also slips out (with his previously hidden mates) and holds a piece to your gonads. They zoom off with your valuables (and maybe your car). If you are still wrapping your mind around what is happening, you have just been robbed!

Weekday Hour # 1

The hour after work (6 to 7 pm, as the day kisses the night) is definitely my most enjoyable weekday hour.

The air con is off; team mates have faded away; work files banked in paper and mind folders; and still too early to tussle with the traffic.

I hook up with my friends online, catch up on news of this sinful world, tweet and blog: a little spot of heaven.

What's yours? The most enjoyable hour of your typical weekday?

Tangled Toes in The City of Accra

I shoe ten tangled toes (as do most of the 'kids' I grew up with) from playing barmy, barefoot football. Thus (these days) I shirk slippers outside home.

In those indigent, illiquid economic days in Ghana, we would have suffered parental thrashing if we had dared parade our shoes on the dump (football) field.

We had no sports shoes. Our (not so) patent leather shoes were hardly appropriate, anyway, and were bought on a strict one-child-one-pair policy. Wo de k)b) ball na )kyena w'ahye deEn ak) school?

So, the rugged rocks and rough roots, stone chippings and shards of glass, gnarled nails and snail shells sliced, stabbed, lacerated and etched their gory graffiti into our tarsals and metatarsals.

It is a ten-toe 'mazement that behind those gruesome-gladsome years, we could yet count two full feet of ten (tangled, traumatised) toes.

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