So here we are in Zebilla...

Where to start?  One of the bits of introductory information we were given describes Zebilla as a town of some 23,000 people.  I don’t think that can be right, but it prompts some thoughts about population distribution in Ghana.

Ghana is home to about 25 million people.  There’s no doubt a smattering of foreigners but the vast majority are “native Ghanaians”.  That risks a digression about the ethnicity of Ghana, but I’ll resist the urge for today…  The alert among you will remember that I’ve told you that some 5 million of those are reckoned to be slum-dwellers in Accra and Kumasi (Kumasi is Ghana’s second biggest city and capital of the Ashanti (or Asante) kingdom - part of the digression you’re waiting for).

The three northern “regions” of Ghana (there are 10 “regions”) account for a bit less than half of the country – I’ll estimate 45% - and you’ll recall that Ghana is approximately the same size as the UK.  In these three regions the total population is about 4 million – so less than 20%.  Of that, about 1.2 million lives in the Upper East Region, whose capital is Bolgatanga (the place Jane and I have to go to get a halfway decent internet connection and to get the laptops repaired…).  I think Jane is about to post about the joys of the 30 mile journey from Zebilla to Bolga, so I’ll try not to steal her thunder.   Bolga is quite big (it has more than one tarmac road and it qualifies for a map in the (excellent) Bradt guide) - I could imagine it being 4 times the size of Zebilla, and Bradt (2010 version) has its population at 70,000.  The only other big place in the Upper East Region is Bawku (pronounced “beaucoup”), which Bradt describes as “large and busy”, but there’s no number and no map.  We haven’t been to Bawku yet but we will at some point, and I’ll probably blog about it when I do ethnicity (because (I think) it’s the only place in Ghana where there is enough ethnic/local political tension to cost lives – and we have heard that two more lives were lost in the past week, so maybe we won’t hurry to visit).  We’re told that Bawku used to be as big as Bolga but the latter has overtaken it in the past decade because of the troubles in Bawku.

The point of all this was, if Bolga, Bawku and Zebilla between them account for 150,000 people, I really have no idea where the other million plus are.  The Upper East Region is geographically the smallest of the northern regions so it’s actually probably more densely populated than the Upper West and Northern Regions (the latter, quaintly, lying to the south of the two “upper”regions).  But my overriding feeling here is that it’s empty of people.  So whilst 23,000 feels much too high a population figure for Zebilla, I'm really struggling to understand where all the people can be who apparently live in the Upper East Region.  Maybe we'll come across them as we explore the territory a bit more? 

Zebilla lies on the road between Bolga and Bawku.  This is a big road and it’s probably been there a long time – there's a turn-off in Zebilla which will take you to Burkina Faso, but if you're going that way the main road is a right turn at Bolga.  The road runs through Bawku and out of Ghana into Togo and beyond, and it takes lorries as big as anything you'll see on the M6.  They trundle through at fairly low speed (I’ve hinted at how good the road is) – maybe a hundred a day.  Zebilla sprawls quite a way both along the road and to either side, but the centre of the town comprises a small market square and a criss-cross of narrow, unpaved and uneven streets onto which the market spills out every third day.  I don’t think there is any proper sanitation in this part of the town, but I’m also not convinced that many people actually live there – it seems to consist more of small shops and business premises. 

This whole area can’t be much more than 400 metres square, and is surrounded by probably twice that area which is a fairly dense residential area.  Quite quickly it becomes quite a bit less dense and there start to be small parcels of land between the dwellings.  At this time of year, these are planted with maize and millet, and something else whose name we don’t know but we understand that it’s used for brewing the local tipple (“pito”).  We haven’t plucked up the courage to sample pito yet – you only seem to be able to buy it in local dives, where they drink it out of “calabashes” (drinking bowls which seem to be made of half a water-melon).  Judging by the state of the people lounging about outside the dives, it’s pretty potent stuff; but I don’t have a good feeling about its effect on the sensitive digestive tracts of two people who are still filtering and boiling their water.  So I think the blog about local alcohol comes near the end of our stay…

Whilst I might describe Zebilla as a sprawl, and not desperately tightly packed, it would be wrong to give the impression of a quiet place with few people visible.  It’s quite the opposite – dwellings here are not big and a lot of life here goes on out of doors, and the place is home to a lot of farmyard livestock in addition to people, so on the rare occasions when you can’t see another person you’ll be being eyed up by goats, sheep, pigs, chickens, guinea fowl and possibly cows, not to mention the biggest population of lizards of all sizes and, in the air, either circling vultures and kites (they have black kites here which look very like our red kites but the tail isn’t quite so deeply forked) or, at dusk, large bats.

I think this post has broken the rules about brevity so I hope at least some of you are still with me – I’ll stop now and my aspiration for next time is to try to give a sense of how society functions here.  Because, however basic the lifestyle, infrastructure and technology might be, make no mistake, there is a functioning society here which is every bit as rich, complex and multi-faceted as Didcot and Harwell village.  

The road to Zebilla

11 October 2013

The Road to Zebilla

First, a word of apology.  Readers will have been on the edge of their seats waiting for the next instalment of my blog, and are due a word of explanation for the delay.  Put simply, the internet connection here is a bit of a challenge, and unfortunately the blog has lost out to email and facebook.  Jane has managed to post a couple of times, and these will give you a sense of how we are faring.  See [link]

Looking on the positive side, the delay does mean that some of these thoughts are a bit more mature than they would have been three weeks ago.

We spent our first week in Ghana’s capital, Accra (pronounced a bit like “bazaar”).  It’s a friendly and vigorous place but it’s a pretty charmless, sprawling city, probably typical of its type.  There is almost nothing of historical interest (unlike, for example, Marrakech).  It is low-rise; if there is an architectural style (but I suspect there isn’t) it’s “functional”; it has a couple of busy ring-roads and a lot of traffic; there aren’t many big shops (though we were told that Africa’s biggest “shopping mall” is in Accra and it was pointed out as we were driven from the airport to the hotel); and there is lots of evidence of building work – much of it in the form of partially completed structures where work might well be waiting until the developer can afford the next load of concrete blocks.  There isn’t much by way of public buildings, the notable exception being rather grand the tomb of Kwame Nkrumah, who led Ghana’s campaign for independence and was its first leader.  A couple of banks have big buildings which look as if they contain a European-style office environment, but the buildings we went into (VSO’s own offices, and a doctor’s clinic) are considerably more basic (and wouldn’t be deemed adequate by most Europeans).  Health and Safety professionals probably risk their sanity if they visit…

Intermingled with this, many parts of the city have almost totally un-made streets; the street drainage takes the form of open gullies rather than buried sewers (which you could easily fall into when walking at night); and somewhere – we didn’t see where – Accra houses its share of an estimated 5 million slum-dwellers (that’s about 20% of the population). 

The population seems quite comfortably to inhabit the city world and its rural antecedent simultaneously – people pedal their wares on foot at busy roundabouts and road intersections, goats and sheep, chickens and guinea fowl can be seen roaming apparently free, and people fry food by the side of the road and sell it (and seem to do a roaring trade) just as they do in more rural communities. Don’t get me wrong – I reckon you could get to like Accra, and it certainly isn’t the worst place I’ve ever stayed.

We left Accra by bus after a week in a comfortable, air-conditioned hotel.  Departure was 16.00, for an overnight trip arriving in Bolgatanga (capital of the Upper East Region) at about 7 the following morning.  It was a good quality bus, competently driven, and full.  It took the best part of 2 hours to get out of greater Accra, and as it is dark by 7pm we didn’t see all that much of the countryside.

We arrived in Bolga in one piece, both having slept (but me more than Jane I suspect).  I’ll describe the road at a later date – suffice to state at this point that my suspicions about the continuity of the tarmac were totally vindicated in the first 40 miles (rather sooner than I’d expected!).  From Bolga, we were collected by the Ghana Education Service’s car and taken the last hour to Zebilla in the comfort of a 4WD truck, with our mouths hanging open at the state of the road and the skill of the drivers.