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.
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