How’s the Weather?
on Anthony Lovat in Bolgatanga (Ghana), 15/Oct/2010 12:27, 34 days ago
Ghanaians must be the only people in the world who enjoy talking about the weather as much as the English. Greeting someone you haven’t seen for some time inevitably is followed up with an exchange on how hot or cold; dry or wet it has been. This seems incredible to me because the weather is so unfailingly predictable.“It’s hot today,” a science teacher called Blaze told me yesterday with genuine interest and surprise.The difference between English and Ghanaian weather conversations is that the English often compliment the weather. Saying a day is“lovely” is as likely as “miserable”. In Ghana, by contrast, talking about the weather, like money, always involves some complaining.“Is the rainy season finished?” Blaze continued, mopping his brow and squinting into the sky. “I cannot stand this heat.”Such observations are often followed up with queries as to how cold it really is in England. I’ve been told by several people how cold Ghanaian football fans found the weather in South Africa for the World Cup. Many fans could not stand the conditions and so flew home early. When I tell them about ice, snow, sleet and frozen earth, they just shake their heads in disbelief.“I would die if I went to England,” Blaze smiled. “When it goes below twenty degrees I feel the cold.”When I first arrived in Ghana and complained about the weather, volunteers who had been here for some time would smile knowingly and tell me that if I think it’s bad now, I should wait until some other time of year when the weather would be far more hot or dry. Having been here for just over a year, I have now experienced the full range of northern Ghanaian weather so I find myself in the position of smiling smugly at any new European arrivals, tellingthem how they should wait until...The weather is hot but surprisingly difficult to know how hot. There are no weather forecasters, no thermometers and no measurements that I know of. There was a debate amongst Blaze and the other teachers I was sat with as to how hot the weather can get. One reckoned 42 or 43oC, another suggested 39oC and another confidently stated 48oC– all wildly differing estimates. For people who discuss the weather so frequently, it seems strange that no one seems to know the numbers. Laura and I have a thermometer in the house that we occasionally look at – I’ve not seen it go higher than 39oC in the shade. Humidity is, of course, a big factor in determining how uncomfortable the weather can feel. Having recently visited the south of Ghana for the Teachers’ Day award ceremony, I spoke with dozens of Ghanaian teachers who have never been to the north of the country. When I tell them where I live they look at me in amazement –isn’t it very hot up in Bolga, they all ask. I actually find the dry savannah habitat of the north more comfortable than the humid forest habitat of the southern regions where the sticky humid air stifles your movements and leaves you blinking through your own perspiration. This should not be so surprising – savannah is, after all, a human being’s natural habitat.The fact is that, for all the moaning and complaining I hear from both Europeans and Ghanaians, the weather here is lovely. Human beings evolved on the African savannah grasslands and there is a theory that suggests we all have an instinctive‘memory’ for this environment. Since leaving Africa we, as a species, have adapted the environments we found elsewhere in the world to make it more like our ancestral home. Britain was covered in thick forest before human beings opened up the landscape to grassland. ‘Capability Brown’ stately home landscape gardens and golf courses are designed as open grasslands interspersed with occasional trees, exactly the conditions found naturally in the African savannah. This desire to make the whole world like African savannah led to the decline of macro-fauna elsewhere in the world. Giant elk,mammoths, huge marsupial wombats and kangaroos, giant ground sloths and sabre-toothed tigers all were driven to extinction due, at least in part, to an African mammal, the human being, leaving its ancestral home and altering the environment to make it more similar to African savannah. It is, therefore, only the African macro-fauna that share the same natural environment as human beings and have been able to live in some sort of equilibrium with us – the elephants, hippos, rhinos, lions and giraffes.The Chinese have lifted more people out of poverty in the past twenty years than the rest of the world combined. It was therefore interesting to listen to the Chinese ambassador to Ghana in a radio interview giving his reasons as to why sub-Saharan Africa remains so poor. Life, he explained, is easy in Africa. In the temperate north, people have to work hard just to survive. To keep a family sheltered, warm and fed is not easy in northern climes. In China, he explained, people die of cold and the growing season is short. It has imbued the people with a work ethic– not dissimilar I assume, to the ‘protestant’ work ethic of northern Europe, a similarly harsh climate.No one dies of the cold in northern Ghana. People choose to sleep outside even if they have perfectly good houses. You can grow food at any time of year. You can pluck fruit from wild trees and cast a net into any river. You could, if you were so inclined, frolic outside wearing nothing but your own skin and be as comfortable as the proverbial Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Whereas northern Chinese and European houses are designed to snuggle the inhabitants inside against the ravages of the weather, Ghanaian houses are open and spilling outside into the environment. Kitchens, always a focal point of any household, are tiny in Ghanaian houses– even posh expensive ones. Everyone prefers to cook and, by association, live their lives outside. As human beings living in the African savannah, we are in our natural habitat.In fact, the climate in Eden is suited precisely to not doing any work. The daytime heat saps your energy and drains you of any inclination to work or even think. You just want to lie under a tree, possibly with a calabash of pito, and sweat through the warmth of the day, bathing your body like a lizard in relaxing comfort.It’s an unfamiliar idea, especially for Ghanaians, that life might actually be easier in northern Ghana than in northern Europe but, the more time I spend here, the more I think there may be some truth in this. I have had people tell me, without any irony, that have worked hard when they have just spent the day writing a letter or putting up some shelves – things that British people do to relax. When a Ghanaian says he has relaxed, he has literally not used his body or his brain for a period of time but just closed his eyes and meditated motionlessly in the heat – something that British people virtually never do and have possibly even forgotten how to do. To say that work is not part of the culture here is a mistake – this is, after all, our natural habitat and we belong here. The need to work is such a part of our culture that we are blinded when we look at how people live here. The climate, at least according to the Chinese ambassador, is responsible for our blindness, our addiction to work, our inability to relax.I was talking yesterday with a British man who had previously volunteered in southern Ethiopia, the savannah birthplace of homo sapiens. He remarked on how hard it was to adapt to life back in the UK after living for two years in Ethiopia, a land synonymous in British eyes with famine and starvation. Everyone seemed so miserable, he told me. Walking around London, he couldn’t believe how fed-up, depressed and unhappy everyone appeared.I walked the dog around the block this morning and decided, just as an experiment, to take note of people’s facial expressions. I saw women sat outside their house washing clothes and laughing together. I saw a group of children happily kicking a stone around. I saw a group of smart men shaking hands with one another and sharing a joke. I saw a couple of men sat under a tree doing nothing. A few people were casually walking alone without any expression on their faces but, as soon as they made eye contact, their faces split into almighty grins. No one was rushing. In the bright morning sunshine, I did not see one person looking unhappy or discontent. It is a condition that is infective. Try doing the same exercise at 7am on a typical morning in late October in England.Seasonally Affected Depression (SAD) is now a diagnosable condition treatable, apparently, by exposure to a bright light mimicking sunlight every morning and evening. Finland has a famously high suicide rate. Suicide rates across northern Europe are highest in winter. To complain about how the weather affects the culture, specifically the work culture, of northern Ghana is to fundamentally miss the point. How does our weather affect our culture? Are we, with our heating, our lighting, our landscape gardening, our depression, our desperately trying to adapt our foreign climates to suit our African bodies, in any position to criticise the Ghanaian attitude to work?Human beings didn’t evolve to live on our miserable rainy island, that’s why we have to work so hard to survive. It is far more comfortable back in our ancestral home, our Eden – the African savannah.