Features
The creation of an African ‘bloodstream’: Malaria control during the Hitler War, 1942–1945 (Part 6)
KORLE AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR
But the major reason that the antimalarial campaign of the Second World War was forgettable is because it was never completed. By 1945, just as Lt. Ribbands and Major Macdonald declared victory over the mosquito, the Allies had opened up the Mediterranean, and transshipment across the Sahara was no longer necessary. The number of troops stationed in Accra dwindled, and the Americans hastily terminated their involvement in the antimalaria campaign. From 1942–45, the Gold Coast government had been responsible for funding only eight per cent of the work done by the Malaria Control Group, while the rest had been covered through the Lend Lease programme (65 per cent) and by the British armed forces (25 per cent). In 1945, the Allied forces left the Gold Coast Public Works Department with the entire cost of maintaining the massive drainage works built on the Korle watershed as well as the responsibility of spraying DDT around the city. A year later, it was evident that the Gold Coast government would never muster enough funding to keep a perpetual campaign against malaria going—the Public Works Department did not even have a budget to screen the windows of bungalows in the city, let alone reinforce miles of concrete embankments along the Odaw River. Major Macdonald’s attempt to squeeze infrastructure funding out of the Americans had worked temporarily, but the war was simply too short to complete the project.
In 1946, crew working for the Gold Coast Public Works Department were further disheartened when aerial photos revealed dozens of quarries, salt pans, and borrow pits around Accra, too numerous to monitor and too expansive to spray regularly. The effects of human habitation had created a niche for mosquitoes to flourish, and any dream of eradication was untenable. The British returned to a policy of malaria management—by relying on quinine prophylaxis and the occasional spraying of waterways to prevent mosquito infestations. In the short term, the effects of DDT made the city notably healthier, and use of the chemical became commonplace. For the price of only four pence a tin, DDT even found its way into homes, where people used it to control lice and bedbugs. Kingsway, the largest department store in Accra, dispensed the drug at their chemist department and advertised it as a product created for the “eternal benefit of mankind.” Unfortunately, the mosquitos in the area quickly developed a resistance to the chemical, as they did in many other parts of the world. By the 1950s, the Korle Lagoon and its tributaries became mired in silt, and malaria was once again endemic in Accra.
When the soldiers were demobilised and the spraying crew departed, the identity of the lagoon as a goddess among the Ga was easily revitalised. In 1946, after several years of bitter disputes over the stool, Nummo Ayiteh Cobblah II was installed as the priest of Korle. Cobblah became a prominent religious leader in Accra, as a moderate during anticolonial riots in 1948 and as a friend to Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah. When Cobblah was enstooled, he resuscitated the rituals of the annual harvest festival of Homowo, establishing his rights to communicate with the spiritual forces that inhabit the lagoon. As she had for centuries, Naa Korle asserted herself as a moral force within Ga culture, a goddess with the ability to define states of collective well-being in the city.
INTERLUDE: HEALING THE SICKNESS OF COLONIALISM
In the early 1950s, when the colony of the Gold Coast was on the verge of independence, a unique type of healing culture developed among a group of Zarma-speaking migrants from western Niger, known in Accra as the Zabarima. At the time, the Zabarima were the fastest-growing segment of the Muslim population in Accra, reaching 4,000 by 1954. Working in the most menial of jobs, such as carrying loads around the market, recycling used flour bags, or scavenging for used tins and bottles, the Zabarima survived on the margins, and their religious and healing practices reflected their social station. The Zabarima had immigrated from a part of Africa that had been Islamised for hundreds of years, but many of them were also worshippers of a pantheon of deities known as the Hauka (a Hausa word meaning “crazy”). Jean Rouch, a French filmmaker who followed the activities of migrants around West Africa, claimed that at the peak of the Hauka movement, there were approximately 100 Hauka gods in West Africa and that approximately 30 per cent of Zabarima migrants to the Gold Coast were possessed. Unlike Ga priests and spirit mediums, who worshipped and practised in public, the followers of the Hauka operated in secret. Indeed, their ceremonies would have remained largely unknown if not captured on film by Rouch, who was invited to one of their gatherings in a village suburb of Accra.
Jean Rouch’s footage of a Hauka spirit possession ceremony is striking. It includes several men and one woman gathered around a Hauka shrine in a courtyard decorated with fluttering Union Jacks. Rouch, the narrator, tells the viewer that those gathered are suffering from illnesses caused by sorcery and witchcraft and that they have come to seek the help of the Hauka deities. On the cue of a single note from a violin, the participants are slowly filled with spirits representing different colonial characters, perambulating chaotically before the camera, making grotesque faces, and foaming at the mouth. The most powerful god was Gomno, the “governor,” a deity represented by a colourful mound with a pith helmet—an image that Rouch paralleled by interposing a scene of the Gold Coast governor Arden-Clarke wearing full regalia at an official ceremony in Accra. Other prominent characters represented the network of colonial officials, including the train engineer (who marches relentlessly back and forth), the sergeant at arms (who berates the participants), and a doctor’s wife (who mediates disputes). The film climaxes with a series of heated arguments among the spirits, and a frenzied meal of dog-meat soup. After they eat, the spirits slowly leave the bodies of the possessed, and the exhausted migrant workers load themselves onto a truck, bound for their regular lives in Accra.
When Rouch screened the film in Paris in 1954, it created a scandal. Some critics thought the film, entitled Les Maitres Fous (The mad masters), was a fake made with paid actors. Others thought it was a racist portrayal of colonial subjects as ethnographic specimens. Anthropologist Marcel Griaule called the film a “travesty” because it stereotyped Africans as savages; he urged Rouch to destroy it. More recently, Les Maitres Fous has been celebrated because it depicts a form of mimicry that expresses the colonial mentalities of African subjects. As Rouch had always argued, the Hauka cult made a bold statement about the psychological effects of colonialism, representing a kind of social healing that allowed immigrants to cope with their subordinate status under White colonial rule. The “mad masters,” he maintained, were not Africans but the colonial ruling classes, who, within the context of the cult, represented the authoritarian structure of colonialism. The antithesis of benevolent colonialism, these spirits revealed a menacing crowd of military and technocratic elites fumbling about, fighting, arguing, and screaming. Even the character of the doctor’s wife, who plays the role of the mediator among the gods, becomes complicit in Hauka imaginings of colonialism, adding strength to the argument that the colonial subjects of the Gold Coast always regarded medical workers as agents of colonial power.
[This piece is culled from a book authored by Jonathan Roberts, titled: Sharing the burden of sickness: A history of healing and medicine in Accra]
Features
Cocaine and human anatomy
The Journey to London is not an easy one when you’re carrying a pot-belly.
And, if the pot-belly is a fake one, then the carrier must face indictment and explain why his protruding belly must not be properly examined to determine the degree of genuine cargo in it.
As it were, some pot-bellies have been carefully cultivated through regular beer quaffing, reinforced by the evil of indulging in khebab chomping. When you drink beer every day for five years, you are bound to lose your soul, and in its place will be a brewery installed in your belly. It is, however, an honour to have a brewery as a body-part.
And when you are going to London, the immigration officer can readily recognise your belly as one that has either a bubra-background, a star-origin or a club-destination. Immigration officers are now trained to prophesy.
The immigration man is generally interested in bellies, not for the sake of it, but because stomachs have become multi-functional these days.
Yes, the immigration officer is often curious why a belly well examined does not bear the tell-tale marks of beer addiction and yet, the belly carrier also doesn’t sound a likely host to refugee worms. So what is in the belly? Five months pregnancy?
SUSPICION
Normally, a suspicious immigration officer must be careful how he handles the belly of travelling men. With some men, their pot-bellies are their only treasure. So they tell you to handle with care!
“Don’t mess up with my belly, men!” a traveller would say. “Do you know how many goddamn years it took me to build this?”
Apart from belly size, immigration capos also use a bit of psychology. When a man comes by unduly agitated and wants to hurry small through, he is a likely candidate for close examination. His huge belly has no guilder antecedents! What he has inside is dangerous cargo- cocaine or heroin carefully packaged and swallowed.
If the plane doesn’t land quickly at Heathrow for the carrier to discharge, then an obituary becomes inevitable. The digestive juices in the belly and ensymes might be strong enough to digest the covering and leak out cocaine. Death is assured!
So the agitated traveller is chaperoned into a little side room and questioned. The officer would like to know whether there is any drug in his alimentary system.
“Nonsense!” the traveller would cry out. “I am a final year doctorate student in Law. To suggest that I’m a cocaine smuggler is an affront to my noble academic pursuits. It is blasphemous to the God I worship. I am going to see my lawyer to deal with you…”
LABOUR
When the man mellows down, he is given something small to drink to cool his heart. Sooner than expected he begins behaving like a woman in labour, He dis-charges pellets of cocaine, 60 or more.
So suddenly, a man studying for his doctorate in Jurisprudence at Oxford suddenly admits that he is a cocaine courier extraordinaire.
Sometime past, drug smuggling was at its real peak and cocaine seized on couriers suddenly turned into sugar when it came back from forensic examination. So you would wonder why any person in his right senses would either be stuffing his rectum with sugar packages or swallowing pellets of sugar.
Many drug barons were released because cocaine suddenly became granulated sugar, heroin became cocoa powder and various drugs miraculously assumed harm-less chemical formulae. Today, I do not think such miracles are still happening.
However, there are miracles as far as drug smuggling is concerned. First, the baby nappy method of the early 1980s is still in operation. A baby is carried with a wet napkin that immigration officers would not suspect contains coke. Sometimes it is not only wet, but the baby’s pooh-pooh also shows.
Now, the new trick is with snails, a delicacy that people need in Britain. They are stuffed with coke and exported. The yam formula has outlived its usefulness. So people have gone back to the late 1970 crude method of stuffing female genitals and taflatse rectums with coke.
This has necessitated the forcible examination of the orifices of the human anatomy in any event of suspicion.
Now if the stuff is not detected at Kotoka International Airport that might not be the end of the story. When the courier gets to Britain and he is or she starts dancing without being asked to, the immigration guys know that there’s “something in the soup.”
Fact is, every item or substance introduced into the human body must evict after some hours. That is why human waste doesn’t stay in there forever. It must exit compulsorily.
After flying for six hours the swallowed cargo in the belly starts to exit and it must be pushed back, a task that is well-nigh impossible under immigration scrutiny. So the courier becomes overly agitated and starts hissing like a snake. Soon he (or she) must start dancing, hoping that it would prevent the capsules from dropping out.
TRUTH
The African belly dancer is politely invited to enter into small room to free himself from further alimentary torment. That is the moment of truth.
There is no easy way to making money. With drugs, you could earn 30-years in jail. Saudi Arabia, you’ll be beheaded. In Singapore, you’ll be in for life just like in Thailand where Ghanaians are languishing today. Beware of drugs!
This article was first published
on Saturday August 6, 2005
Features
The Prophet (part 11)
Priscilla had gone away. She needed to pay an old debt, and the creditor had promised to visit violence on her whole family if she didn’t pay the GH¢700 by 8pm. Another woman was waiting in the other bedroom. He was about to join her when the voices started.
“You are here already?” Antubam said. “You deserted me completely as I went through the ordeal this morning.”
“Your own stubbornness got you into that situation. You must never approach those book people again. Do not get into any argument with them. Enjoy the money, the power and the women we have given you. You can never win.”
“And what about the man, Gidigidi.”
“The stick will give you all the protection you need. He talks a lot, and he likes fighting. But as you told him, he has no brains.”
“I need people to help me. The two girls were reliable, but they are gone. All the others are thieves.”
“They are thieves? And what are you? Remember that in the business you have chosen, there are many risks and dangers. We will try to help you. But you are very greedy’.
“The girl, Betty, told me that I will receive punishment sooner or later for deceiving people and for using the name of God. Is it true? Can you help me avoid this punishment?”
“Don’t worry about any punishment. Leave everything to us. We will give you all the protection you need. And by the way, the fetish priestess has made a request to Nana Kofi Broni to release you to her one day every month to keep her company.”
“That must be a very big joke. I will never, never again sleep with that old drunkard with rotten teeth. Never.’’
“She has already presented drinks at the shrine. If you don’t go, we are under instructions to fly you there by five o’clock and take you back home by six o’clock. If you don’t obey, your manhood will vanish and never return’.
“Have you people come to help me or torment me? Why can’t you find someone else to satisfy the old witch’s desires?”
“Next time you say such a thing again you will receive more lashes than you did last time. Start preparing for Sunday’s service. You are about to become the most popular prophet in Ghana.” The voices seized, and a strange silence seized the atmosphere.
Antubam was perplexed. What, he wondered, had he gotten himself into? He only wanted to grab that beautiful girl, Betty, marry her and have five or six beautiful children with her. But his desire for that girl seemed to have released a chain of confusing events.
Apart from the fiasco at the shrine for which he had to go and perform pacification rites at the shrine, he was compelled to have sex with that stinking old priestess. Her mirrors couldn’t bring up the image of Betty, yet she blackmailed him into having sex with her. And now the dwarfs want him to make that repulsive act a monthly ritual.
How annoying. But could he afford to lose his manhood? What would he do with the regular supply of two women a day? And how could he give birth to children? And what was he going to do with the threat from that fool of a competitor, Gidigidi? The stick provided by the Okomfo saved him on that occasion, but what would happen when he was eating, having a shower, or sleeping?
And now the dwarfs claim he was about to become one of the most popular prophets in Ghana. He was thrilled at the prospect. It meant more money, more power and control over people’s lives, and of course, more women. But at what cost? At the back of his mind, he felt an urge to go to Betty, confess everything to her, and ask her to help him start all over.
It was clear, Antubam thought, that a power far greater than Nana Kofi Broni was behind Betty. From their own mouths, the Okomfo, the stinking priestess and even the dwarfs had all indicated that Betty and her ‘book’ were too much for them.
But did it make sense to go to a girl you badly want to subdue and, having failed to achieve your aim, now go to her for help? How could a proud man like Kofi Antubam go through that? No, the cost of going to Betty was too high. He would continue to enjoy being a false prophet for now. Perhaps, if he got into trouble sometime in the future, he would go to her for help. But as for now, the show must go on.
Betty and Mary started work with Morrison Construction, and established a relationship that continued for many years. Completely satisfied with their honesty and hard work, Mr Morrison entrusted the acquisition and supply of materials in the Eastern Region to them, and concentrated on the other aspects of his work.
He paid for their admission to the University of Technology to undertake a sandwich programme in building construction, which they did online and on some weekends. They forgot about Antubam completely.
Kofi Antubam continued in the church business for many years. He became very popular for his miracles, and for several other things. On a few occasions police were called to the church premises to control his assistants who often exchanged blows over the sharing of money.
Quite a number of husbands confronted him for destroying their marriages, and he became known for raining insults on radio callers who asked him ‘stupid questions’. But he faced his main problem at home.
At first, he was only dealing with dwarfs who only spoke in shrill voices. But over time, all manner of creatures appeared before him, physically and during his sleep. On several occasions he tried to call or go to Betty, but the dwarfs restrained him. He sought solace in whisky and gin, and quietly hoped that Betty, or Mary, or Suzzie, would find a way to save him.
“That must be a very big joke. I will never, never again sleep with that old drunkard with rotten teeth. Never.’’
By Ekow de Heer
