Old Dirty White American Woman
on Anthony Lovat in Bolgatanga (Ghana), 26/Jan/2011 16:22, 34 days ago
Travel south from Bolga on the main Tamale road and you will soon reach the busy and rapidly sprawling town of Wale Wale. Despite only being forty minutes from Bolga, Wale Wale has a distinctly different flavour– predominantly Muslim with colourful flowing head coverings and imposing new mosques. As well as being the capital of West Mamprusi district, it is the junction town to turn off the main road towards Gambaga and Nakpanduri. This rough unsealed road goes through the heart of the ancient Mamprusi kingdom. Founded in the fourteenth century, it is supposed to be the oldest extant political institution in Ghana – one that gave rise to the later Dagomba and Mossi kingdoms. Geography has helped the Mamprusi kingdom last for seven centuries. The road passes up the Gambaga escarpment, a modestly beautiful line of uplands that rise suddenly and unexpectedly from the perfectly flat floodplains of the Volta Rivers.The last main town on the Gambaga escarpment before the Togo border is Nakpanduri and so we stopped to stay the night in the government rest-house perched on the cliff top. The stunning view looks north across the virtually uninhabited savannah woodland. The rest-house is set in a green forest glade where a number of different trees have been planted and cared for around several circular thatched donkey huts. As we were bringing our bags in from the car, we noticed an old white woman feeding the chickens.“That woman lives near here,” Joseph the rest-house manager told us. “She is from Holland or somewhere like that. She used to live in the rest-house but now she stays over there.” He waved his arm in a random direction. We went over to greet her.The woman was not Dutch but was an American. She drawled a welcome in her nasal mid-western accent, so different from the precise Ghanaian syllables. She was short, skinny, wore thick wonky glasses and was incredibly dirty. The grime covering her arms, legs, clothes and face was thick in a manner that suggested she hadn’t washed in days, possibly weeks. Her grey hair was dry, visibly grubby and unkempt. She told her story in a manner that suggested she had repeated it to so many people so many times. She sounded tired.“I’ve been living here since 79. I was a Peace Corps volunteer and decided to stay on. I moved into the rest-house in 83. It was quite basic back then – no running water or electricity or such luxuries. Then in 95 Rawlings visited and I had to move across the hill. They didn’t want the whiteperson around although they let me keep my trees here. The trees don’t bother the visitors.” She looked at the trees through her goggle glasses and suddenly laughed like they were old friends sharing a joke. “I keep a tree nursery here.” She pointed to rows of saplings growing in polythenebags. “That is the project I am here for. We supply schools with trees. Each school gets twenty trees each year. Some schools plant them and are now surrounded by lots of really good, established and mature trees. It depends on the teachers – most teachers don’t bother but some really get intoit. The good thing is that teachers are regularly transferred so if you have a bad teacher in a school they’ll be quickly moved to another – hopefully a better one will be transferred in.” She laughed suddenly again and then, blinking at us through her buggy glasses, abruptly stopped as if she’d just remembered we were there. “The trees can be used by the communities for firewood, building or shade.” She talked passionately now, emphasising with waves of her filthy arms, her eyes widening to reveal the small intense fires burning behind them. “This area used to be covered in forest. I remember in 83 some British birdwatchers came and walked down to the seasonal waterfall we have here. They saw thirty species within an hour. Now they are all hunted out. There used to be monkeys, antelopes, baboons and all sorts of other mammals but they’ve all gone too. Hunting is illegalin the forest reserve but they hunt. Farming is illegal but they plant patches of corn and millet. They burn the bush. They burn the trees. They destroy everything. There have been five fires through this area already this season. Five! One went through here last Sunday.” She pointed at the ground we stood on. She looked like she was about to cry. The surrounding bush was unmistakably blackened. The tree trunks were charred. “I called so many people to help me fight the fire but it was a Sunday. Everyone told me they were coming to help but no one actually turned up. You know – it was aSunday. I managed to save most of the saplings but I couldn’t do much by myself.” I looked at the old dirty white woman, dressed like a peasant, and imagined her calling the local people scrubbed and dressed in their smart, shiny and meticulously clean Sunday best clothes. “This area used tobe so beautiful,” she sighed.We left the American woman to climb to a stunning viewpoint. The sun was quickly dropping from the sky bathing the landscape in a soft gentle light. The world lay out before us. I tried to look at the landscape through her eyes, imagining how it was thirty years ago. The potholed road weaving its way up the steep pass into Nakpanduri, perhaps, wasn’t there. Perhaps it was little more than a track. I watched the lights of a distant lorry creep towards us, the roar of the engine faintly carried up on the gentle breeze. Perhaps the patchy forest was a thick carpet of woodland stretching to the horizon.Perhaps environmental degradation is an inevitable consequence of‘development’. The global industrial and technological revolution has led to massive deforestation, overfishing and exploitation of non-renewable shared resources. Environmental destruction is now recognised as the biggest threat to global security. As the Mamprusi people of the Gambaga escarpment have grown richer and have had more access to the ‘developed world’ over the past thirty years, they too have exploited their environment – taking more firewood than can be replaced, burning more bush than can regenerate and hunting more animals to local extinction. Expecting man and natureto live in harmony seems impossible. It’s the tragedy of the commons. The American woman was not able to escape this. By running to rural Africa and living the ‘simple life’ she has found herself fighting a losing battle. There aren’t many people who choose poverty over riches, buckets overshowers, boreholes over pipes, boiled rice over Big Macs, Ghana over America. There aren’t many people who willingly deny themselves a better life in the service of nature.The American woman was both inspiring and depressing. I admire her idealism and her fortitude. I also know that I am perhaps a little too much like the Ghanaians dressed up in their Sunday best, aware that their environment is being destroyed but too busy to stop partying and help.