“I thought you weren’t talking.” He glared at me.
“These and many more,” I added. “These are just two examples.”
Torgbe held the batteries and pondered the problem for about two and a half seconds. “It can be done,” he ruled. “The spirit can help you.”
“Oh, thank you, sir,” I said respectfully, bowing my head. “What must we do?”
“It will require alcohol,” he replied.
“Ah, so we should go buy alcohol and return?” I asked, mentally kicking myself for not having thought of that. Of course it would require alcohol.
“No,” said the apprentice. “We will take care of it. Give us two cedis and we will bring the alcohol for the spirit.” I unfolded two cedi notes from my pocket and handed them over, relieved that the price of entry was so reasonable. “Please follow me,” said the apprentice as Torgbe disappeared into another room.
We stepped back into the sun and crossed the dirt yard to the first of the two temple rooms. “Remove your shirts and shoes,” he said at the entrance. Whit and I glanced at each other. The apprentice was now holding a knife very similar to those in the paintings. We disrobed and entered the temple.
The windowless room was dark and stuffy. The only light came from a candle burning in a large metal bowl on the tile floor, which was mostly covered by animal hides. From the glow of the candle we could see more wall paintings. One showed a bearded Old Testament priest with his hand on the forehead of a prone man who was obviously sick. Next to that was another buxom mermaid, this one I think modeled after Charo. On the next wall was a bearded man sitting under a tree with a snake in the branches. Over to one side, the room opened into a small alcove, which was hidden from view by a gauzy curtain. Next to this alcove was a carved wooden bust of a woman almost completely covered in hardened drips of candle wax—the fetish.
We sat in plastic chairs next to the man with the knife, sweat pouring down our exposed chests. Soon Torgbe entered. He was now shirtless himself, with a muslin wrap around his waist. He sat in front of the gauze curtain. He had a bottle of schnapps. “The spirit has requested three hundred to be summoned,” he said.
“Three hundred cedis?” I asked, fairly choking.
“I think he means three hundred thousand old cedis,” said Whit.* This confusion, combined with the fact that English-language numbers could be difficult for uneducated Ghanaians to master, often complicated financial negotiations. “Is that right?”
“Yes,” said Torgbe.
“So you mean thirty new Ghana cedis?” I said.
He thought for a minute, doing the mental math. “Yes.”
“Wow,” I said, peeling off three ten-cedi notes, about twenty dollars, from my bankroll. I handed them to the assistant, who passed them along to Torgbe, who stuffed them into a small woven basket. Then he draped the curtain over his head, rattled a shekere (a percussion instrument made from a gourd covered with cowry shells), and began chanting what sounded like gibberish in a strange tongue. He poured a shot of the schnapps into a small plastic cup, recited some invocation, and poured the liquor over the wax-covered fetish. This was presumably the offering to the spirit. He poured another shot and downed it himself. His apprentice took the bottle, poured a generous shot on his own account, and then poured one for Whit and finally me. The liquid was strong and coarse, and I had to choke it down. I felt bad for Whit, who had been suffering an all-too-common bout of intestinal dysfunction; the last thing I’m sure he needed was a long slake of moonshine. But it seemed clear that to refuse the alcohol would anger the spirit. Plus we had paid for it.
The libation completed, Torgbe was ready to engage the spirit. His face was still concealed behind the curtain. There was more shekere rattling, lots of strange yelling, and suddenly a cloud of “smoke” that smelled remarkably like talcum powder filled the air around the curtain. I was beginning to feel like Dorothy meeting the Wizard of Oz. And then the spirit spoke.
Or I should say, squeaked. The all-powerful spirit, it turns out, had a voice closely related to one of those plastic dog chew toys that squeaks when you squeeze it. And the spirit apparently had a lot on his mind, because the squeaking went on for some time. I looked at Whit. His eyebrows were approximately on the ceiling, and his jaw was stretched tighter than a drumhead. He was trying his best not to roll over laughing.
“The spirit says you are welcome,” said Torgbe, emerging briefly from behind the curtain.
“Please tell him thank you for us,” I replied.
Torgbe drew the curtain closed again and chanted some more, which was followed by more spiritual squeaking.
“The spirit says he can give the batteries much power,” confirmed Torgbe, again pulling aside the curtain. “But there must be a sacrifice.”
“Of course,” I replied.
“We must kill a cow,” he said, and at that moment his apprentice demonstrated by drawing the knife close to his own throat. “From the blood will come the power. Also three bottles of alcohol and fifty million cedis.”
“Fifty million cedis?” I asked. “So that’s, let me see … five thousand new Ghana cedis?”
“Yes.”
“Five hundred, right?” suggested Whit hopefully. “You mean five hundred new cedis.”
Torgbe, whose English was rudimentary, seemed confused. (We learned later that he was in fact Togolese, although his French was also weak.) He reached behind the altar and withdrew a ruled student notepad and a ballpoint pen. On the pad he wrote the numeral five, followed by four zeros—no commas or decimal points. “That is how much,” he said. So did he mean fifty thousand? In old or new currency? Now it was our turn to be confused.
“Can I see the pad?” asked Whit. He took the pen and started writing. “So ten thousand old cedis equal one new cedi, right?” He wrote down the equation. “And one hundred thousand old cedis equals ten new cedis, okay?” He wrote the numbers below the first set.
“Right,” said Torgbe, looking on closely.
“Okay. So one million old cedis equals one hundred new cedis, yes?”
“Yes.” Whit wrote down the numbers.
“Now. That means five million old cedis is the same as five hundred new.” He wrote it down.
I was getting slightly embarrassed for the spirit, who was waiting patiently behind the curtain while this currency conversion played out. “So the spirit is asking for five hundred new Ghana cedis, right?”
“No,” said Torgbe firmly. “Fifty million old, five thousand new.”
“Really?” said Whit.
“And a cow.”
“Oh, the cow is not included in the price? How much is a cow?”
“Maybe three hundred cedis,” said Torgbe.
“Old cedis?”
“New cedis.”
“Wow,” I said. “I don’t have that much, and I’m not sure I can get it.”
“When can you come back?”
“Well, I can come back any day, but I don’t think I can get that kind of money.”
“You will check and come back tomorrow,” Torgbe commanded. I was starting to see what Kevin had meant when he said it’s hard to extricate yourself from these guys. “Now, we will pray for you. Come.”
Torgbe and his man Friday led us out of the hut, back into the glinting sun, next door into the other windowless temple room. We stepped into the dim light and almost fell over from the stench of rotting flesh. After our eyes adjusted to the dark, we saw, in the center of the floor, a large pile of cow horns and jawbones, still slippery with dark, coagulating blood. In a far corner I made out nine African peg drums of different sizes, stacked up. On the other side was a high altar topped by several wood sculptures of African priestesses and other traditional figures. In the center of the altar, piled almost to the ceiling, was another gruesome tableau of rotting animal bones—at least I hoped they were animal bones.
“You must kneel,” said Torgbe, pointing to a goat hide in front of the altar. I got down on my knees over the blood-m
atted fur, trying to breathe through my mouth so as not to vomit from the vile odor of the room. “The spirit needs twenty cedis.”
“I have only ten,” I said.
“Okay.” Clearly the spirit, as channeled through Torgbe, was negotiable.
I fished out the note. Torgbe set the crumpled bill on top of the cow bones. He chanted for several minutes. “You may go now,” he said.
“Can we have our batteries back?”
We took our batteries and left, but not before Torgbe’s apprentice got my cell phone number. We drove out, past the bamboo fence, past the sign with the mermaids and the knives, and we did not stop until we got home to Koforidua.
“You asshole!” said Whit, speeding into town.
“What?”
“What?” he repeated in a mocking falsetto. “This guy’s on our route, and if we blow him off he’ll be pissed, and he’ll totally fuck my business—not with his lame Donald Duck spirit but in real ways, like telling people not to buy the batteries. You asshole! This is all your fault. You need to talk to him and figure out how to get out of this gracefully. Maybe the spirit will need five hundred cedis, I don’t know, but you need to figure it out before you slink out of here, asshole.”
“I’ll talk to the man tomorrow.”
That night, the power went out. Torgbe called me twice over the next few days. I told him both times that I didn’t have the money. I never went back.
1. Burn Rate
In September Burro had its first birthday and was still not breaking even; far from it. In fact, the trailing thirty-day revenue of about two hundred cedis was roughly one tenth of what Whit called his “burn rate” of two thousand cedis a month—another way of saying negative cash flow.* On the bright side, growth was phenomenal: revenue was doubling every two weeks. The new offering was catching on, so it appeared to be a question of conscripting enough agents, getting them trained, and getting the word out. Whit and Jan crunched the numbers and figured break-even (and possibly modest profit) would happen when the branch had roughly one hundred agents renting one hundred batteries each, so “100/100” became the rallying cry. Almost all of Burro’s “corporate” energy in late summer was focused on signing new agents. Every morning the staff split into teams and fanned out across the region. One day it might be Jan and Rose in the truck, heading up north toward Bomase, while Adam and Whit took the Kia Pride (another used car Whit had bought, known in the United States as a Ford Festiva) south, through towns along the road to Mamfe, a busy junction town on the Akwapim Ridge just before the road descends into the dust and chaos of Accra. Kevin, meanwhile, spent a lot of time managing the twenty-six agents still working under the old, monthly rental system, a job that included preparing them (and their clients) for conversion to the pay-go plan in early September. On some days Adam would stay in the office and work on the books while Kevin and Whit, or Whit and Rose, or Jan and Kevin went off on the routes. It was a rotating chain of teams, everyone vying for time in the two vehicles because the alternative was taking tro-tros. Sometimes we would get stranded in a remote village with no tro-tros or taxis, and then we would walk, down dusty roads that traversed cocoa farms, thick bamboo stands, and high, grassy plateaus.
Sometimes we saw snakes, mostly small neon green varieties—almost Burro green—that probably weren’t poisonous, but we didn’t know, so we kept our distance. Once a python—a small one but a python just the same—slithered lazily across the trail in front of us. Had a local farmer been with us, he would have surely hacked it apart with his machete. Visitors often find this brutal, but snakes in Ghana kill people in very ugly ways. The Armed Forces Pest Management Board of the U.S. Department of Defense lists twenty-four venomous snakes in Ghana, including, besides pythons, many varieties of cobra, viper, adder, and mamba. Some carry venom that is hemotoxic—causing internal bleeding and death—but most are neurotoxic, shutting down brain functions like breathing and heartbeat. Death in either case is agonizing, and not fast enough. Some venomous snakes won’t actually kill you; they just cause “tissue necrosis” (in the words of the Defense Department), requiring amputations. These are not anomalies. I couldn’t find numbers for Ghana, but it’s estimated that perhaps a thousand people every year die of snakebites across Africa, and many more thousands are wounded and maimed. Potentially deadly encounters with snakes are quite common in Ghana, and there is no 911, no ambulance to rush you to the ER for some antivenom. If you are in the bush in Ghana and you are bitten by an Egyptian cobra, you will die of respiratory failure within five hours.
Watching carefully for snakes, I tagged along with one or another of these groups (including the tro-tro excursions) on most days. We would pull up in a new town, survey the market and the shops, unload our plastic tubs full of batteries and flashlights, draw a crowd (not hard for a white person in these outposts) and start walking and talking—looking for the important people, the opinion leaders, maybe even the chief or at least a shopkeeper with a good reputation. Kevin and Adam and Rose would talk in Twi or Ewe or Ga; Whit and Jan and I would embellish in English (and sometimes French if the people were from Togo or Benin). Whit and I would make funny faces at the children who crept up to stare at us; they would run away squealing in laughter as we bared our teeth and shook our arms and pretended to be monsters. Then we would open our plastic bins and pull out our wares and demonstrate our batteries. Villagers would leave and return with radios and flashlights, and we would take them apart and pull out leaky Tiger Heads, sanding down rusty terminals (with scraps of sandpaper kept in our road kits) and inserting new Burro batteries. “Ahaahh!” they would say in appreciation as we turned on the radio and blasted them with their favorite station—hiplife or reggae or news or talk or soccer, whatever. “Ahaahh!” they would say again. And we would smile and say to the growing crowd, “Who would like to start saving money on batteries today?”
The towns had strange, exotic names like Huhunya, Agogo (as in “whiskey-a-go-go”), Tinkong, Nkurakan, Beware (Beh-WAH-ray), and Bosomtwi (Bo-SUM-chwee). But after a few weeks they could as well have been Moline, Youngstown, Danbury, or Duluth. After a couple of months they all started to blur together—an endless brown palette of mud huts, fire pits, flinching dogs, fly-covered goats, peanut stews, tattered and stained laundry draped limply over frayed nylon lines, and half-naked children with their ceaseless cries of “Obruni! Obruni!”
“That’s my name,” I’d say, “don’t wear it out.”
“Obruni!”
“Wo te brofo, anaa?” I would ask. Do you speak English?
“Yes,” they would say.
“My name is Max. What’s yours?”
“Obruni!”
The daily word games with children devolved into a certain sameness, but at least it was fun to make them laugh. Far more tedious was the sales pitch. There were days when I felt if I had to listen to the battery spiel one more time I would crawl out of my skin, slither under a rock, and renounce my citizenship in the human race. But if you’re going to be a good salesman, you have to get excited about your product every day, with every customer. It’s new to them, no matter how familiar it seems to you. Before coming to Africa, I joked about finding Willy Loman in the Casbah. Now I was becoming him.
Almost every week brought a gong-gong, crucial for building brand awareness and acceptability in villages where new products, or better ways of buying existing products, were virtually unknown. The format had not changed since the first gong-gong in January—a formal introduction to the chief and elders, sometimes followed by a Christian prayer in the local language, then our pitch.
Not that any two gong-gongs were quite alike. In Mangoase, a cocoa-growing center of three thousand voters, the gong-gong man insisted that everyone speak through his new, out-of-the-box megaphone. This seemed of dubious necessity given that only nineteen citizens showed up for the gong-gong at the town well, and we could hear one another just fine without amplification. Maybe he felt a jolt of technology would help revive his town,
which was long past its prime. Mangoase was once an important railway depot on the line between Accra and Kumasi, and its hilly streets were lined with stately colonial buildings. But the trains stopped running years ago—the tracks reverting to bush—and the only roads into town were washed-out dirt tracks. The colonial buildings were now faded and crumbling; despite an impressive public market basilica, Mangoase had the claustrophobic melancholy of a dying New England mill town.
Unfazed by his community’s wounded pride, the gong-gong man jumped energetically from speaker to speaker with his megaphone, as if working the audience of a TV game show. Most of us were largely unfamiliar with the operation of a megaphone, and its employment by untrained hands presented no small amount of danger. If the person next to you was speaking, you had to duck when he turned his head, to avoid getting whacked by the device or, worse, suffering permanent hearing damage from a point-blank acoustic blast of the speaker—powered, I might add, by Burro batteries.
The pitch for those batteries had evolved under the new pay-go system. No longer were batteries “fresh, anytime you want,” which reflected the monthly rental system of unlimited free recharges. Now our mantra was “better battery, half the price”—since a two-cedi Burro coupon book yielded sixteen individual refreshes, versus buying eight Tiger Heads for the same price. (To simplify the offer, the 1.50-cedi coupon booklet was changed to one cedi, which bought seven refreshes.) Whit and Jan perfected the pitch over several weeks, trying to boil it down to simple phrases, easily understood. They identified six reasons why Burro was a better battery:
1. Half the cost
2. More power
3. No-leak guarantee
4. Two in one (AA and D, using the adapter sleeve)
5. Cleaner and safer
6. First charge is free (you pay only deposit first time)
It seemed clear enough, but when Kevin, Rose, and Adam gave the pitch in one of the country’s native languages, we couldn’t understand what they were saying. And it often seemed like their spiel was taking a long time, even factoring in the consonant-laced African vocabularies. But over time we got better at recognizing their phrases, in part because many modern words have no local linguistic equivalent and are simply repeated in English—like battery, although in Twi the phrase we most heard was battery-nie, which means “these batteries.” And apparently there is no way in Twi to say “better for the environment,” because Kevin always said that in English.
Max Alexander Page 17
