After the pitch came questions and demonstrations. Then Whit would say, “So who wants to be the first person to start getting batteries for half the money?” Someone would step forward with a few wadded up cedi notes in his hand, and we would lead the crowd in applause.
Or not. Sometimes no one came forward. Sometimes no one showed up at all. One Friday in late August we arrived at two different gong-gongs in far-flung villages that somehow never got organized. This happened a lot, sometimes after driving for an hour down a road that was little more than a footpath. Sometimes the road itself ruined the gong-gong. One day, Jan and Rose were driving on a back road in the Kia when an exposed tree root punctured the sidewall of a tire. They jacked up the car and put on the spare—which was flat. They walked over a mile in the punishing sun to a village, where a man with a bicycle pump accompanied them on foot back to the car. They got home late, well after dark, hungry and tired. This sort of thing happened on an almost weekly basis.
Occasionally the gong-gong no-shows were understandable: someone had died in the village, and funeral arrangements had to be made quickly, out of respect and, in places with no refrigeration, sanitation. But sometimes the excuses boggled us: “It is cloudy, so the people lost track of the time.” Never mind that virtually every adult in the realm had a cell phone with a clock. Time is simply not tracked precisely by people who live by the sun and the planting seasons. When rural Ghanaians do think about specific times, it is usually in the past tense—as in the time of the ancestors. Time as a future concept is rarely considered. Meetings will happen when they happen; what is the point of worrying about it? Likewise it is nearly impossible to get a Ghanaian to give you a realistic distance between villages. The next village is as far away as it always has been, and you will get there when you get there.
This Zen-like concept of time and distance, while charming and possibly even wise, made it difficult to do business in the conventional sense. Often the closest we could get to pinning down a gong-gong was for “Friday” or “Tuesday.” We considered ourselves lucky if we could at least specify morning or afternoon.
You might think that the Ghanaians’ laid-back approach to time would make them readily available to start a meeting as soon as we arrived, but no. Often we sat around an hour or more, watching goats have sex, waiting for things to get going. We occupied ourselves playing our usual games with the children. We started responding to their calls of “Obruni!” by pointing at them and saying “O bebeni!” (Oh, black man!), which made them laugh. I learned how to say “I am not a white man; I am a black man” in Twi (“Menye obruni; meye bebeni”), which got them thinking. Whit and I decided to teach them some American rap lingo, so we invented a greeting, recited with the appropriate hip-hop arm gestures:
“Yobruni!”
“ ’Sup, bebeni?” And so on.
In one village, out of boredom, Whit caught a striking red-speckled grasshopper. Knowing the African child’s pastime of putting insects on “leashes” made of strings, Whit gave the bug to a small boy. He dropped it and stomped on it.
Often there would be something culturally edifying to watch, like the Krobo bead makers in Bomase. In the village of Twum, a man named Foster Appia made sturdy rattan market baskets while listening to his Burro-powered radio. One time I saw two men by the side of the road flip a live sheep onto its back, tie its legs together, load it into the trunk of a taxicab, and drive off. I thought that was pretty impressive, but the next day I saw a taxi with two sheep in the trunk. At one gong-gong, the chief, who had been drinking apio, was having trouble getting a sound out of the shell horn he used to start the meeting. Jan offered to try, and the villagers laughed. But Jan had played saxophone in school and was the bugler at her summer camp. They cheered when she belted out a perfect note.
One day Kevin asked if I could go with him to a gong-gong. “I promised this village an obruni,” he said, which always seemed to help drive interest in the batteries. “If you can’t, no problem; I can tell them my white man has traveled.”
“It’s fine, I can be your white man,” I said. But we got there and everyone was too busy: a government-sponsored malaria control program had villagers clearing brush from around their huts.
At a gong-gong in a school in Behanase, a man in an Obama T-shirt who had lost his right leg at the knee in a car accident was complaining to his neighbors that someone was stealing from his farm. “If I catch them I will cut off an arm,” he said. “If a cripple like me can farm, then able-bodied people should be able to do their own farming.”
Another time, Rose and I had a meeting with a chief in a small village called Meawm’ani. A gray-haired man in his sixties who wore a traditional African tunic, the chief seemed like a wise and thoughtful leader. But after examining a battery and listening to Rose’s introduction, he demanded twenty cedis for organizing a gong-gong, a request that bordered on extortion. If he thought Rose would be a pushover, he was very mistaken.
“Twenty cedis!” said Rose. “I have never paid more than five cedis for a gong-gong.”
“Okay, five,” he said, “but you must pay me now.”
“No,” she replied. “I will give you two now, and three later if you make it happen.”
“I want five now,” he insisted, “and I will give you back three if it doesn’t work out.”
Rose shook her head. “You know, where we live there is electricity. We can go home tonight and turn on lights. So we are just trying to help you and your people in this village. Yes, we want to make some money, but we are not making that much.” None at all so far, she might have added. The chief finally agreed.
The process of training agents was arguably even more important than the gong-gongs, because the agents would be on the front line of battery sign-ups every day. The gong-gongs were a key driver of initial interest in the program, but if the agents didn’t get it—and feel inspired to promote it—the whole thing would collapse.
One day we trained three new agents in Amonfro, a village on a main road out of Koforidua, toward the Akwapim Ridge. One of the agents, Enoch, owned a small chemist shop in town; the other two, George and Monica, were shopkeepers in nearby, smaller villages. Whit began the training session by outlining the company’s values:
“The first is respect—for you the agents, and the clients. We follow the Golden Rule of do unto others as you would want them to do unto you. We will always respect you and be honest with you, and we need you agents to show respect for the clients. And we hope you will have respect for us and the company and what we are trying to do.
“Number two is innovate. We are still learning. We are always looking for better ways to do things. We are a team, and we can go farther if we share ideas. So please do not hesitate to tell us when you have an idea for a way we can serve our customers better and help them do more.
“The final value is empower. Burro is about helping people do more. So talk to your customers about doing more. Our offering is very simple: better battery for the half the price. You need to spread the word that people can do more with our batteries.
“We will come to visit you two times a week to change batteries and collect names of new clients and money. Your commission is twenty percent on batteries, ten percent on merchandise like the phone charger. You can take your commission then, or if you like, we can hold it for safekeeping until you want it.* Are there any questions so far?”
“How do we sell the batteries?” asked George, a handsome, thoughtful man whose nearly identical (but not twin) brother was also an agent.
“That’s a very good question,” said Whit. “Let’s talk about selling. When someone comes the first time to get batteries, you need to take a deposit of one cedi for each battery. This is very important because the battery is very expensive. You need to tell the client two very important things. The first thing is that the battery is not for sale. They are borrowing it. The second thing is that they can get back their deposit any time they want if they bring the battery back an
d do not take fresh.
“Now, the client has to join the program the first time. That’s how you sell batteries. So the first time only, they must fill out the form.”
Whit pulled out a printed form the size of a filing card. “You have on this card client one, client two, and client three. First you get their surname—the name they gave at school. Then you write down any other names, their phone number—”
“Not all have phones,” said Monica, a quiet young woman.
“That’s okay,” said Whit, “but please ask. It will help us to market to them, which will mean more sales for you.” (Cell phone penetration in Ghana reached 75 percent by the end of 2010.)
He went on: “Then you get their birth date or age—if they don’t know how old they are, just make a guess. Check whether they are male or female, on grid or off grid; that means if they have light. You mark the date they started, how many batteries, and if they took them alone or with an adapter. That’s it. You only need to do this the first time they sign up. Any questions?”
George again: “What about the coupons?”
“Another very good question. When they use the batteries and come back for fresh, they have three choices. If they want to pay half the price of Tiger Head, they must buy a coupon book for two cedis.” He held up the book. “With this they get sixteen batteries, or eight pair. And now, for a short-time promotion, they get four extra. So twenty batteries for two cedis.
“They can also buy one battery at a time, for twenty pesewa each. We call this pay as you go. It’s still less than Tiger Head, but not as great a savings.
“Finally, if they can’t afford two cedis but want a better deal than pay as you go, they can buy a one-cedi book, which gives you seven batteries.
“One more thing on the commission: with the coupons, you get ten percent when you sell it and ten percent when the coupon is redeemed. So you should always redeem coupons, even from clients who did not buy them from you. If anyone has a coupon and a fallen battery, they are entitled to get a fresh battery—even if you don’t know them—and you will get ten percent commission on their coupon.
“Now, we would like to set you up with fifty batteries and twenty adapters. You put the fallen batteries in the red tub; we will pick those up and give you fresh. Keep the fresh in the green tub. Please do not mix them up! Are there any more questions?”
None.
“Okay, thank you,” said Whit. “If in four weeks you are still selling any Tiger Heads from your shops, you are doing something wrong.”
He was kidding, because he knew Tiger Heads had one clear advantage. One day we watched a man listen carefully to the Burro pitch in front of a shop, then plunk down one cedi for four Tiger Heads. Whit shrugged. “We are definitely not the cheapest battery today. You can get Tiger Heads cheaper the first time.”
Kevin said, “That man stood there for a long time listening. He wished he could get the Burros, but he needed four and did not have the money for the deposit.”
2. Smoking Wheels
Batteries were not the only unpredictable technology in the business. Burro’s “Avon lady” model depended on vehicles to deliver fresh batteries to villages along routes that Whit, Jan, and the employees had designed. When the business was new and concentrated along just a few main roads leading out of town, route management was relatively simple. But as business expanded in several directions and Burro started racking up dozens of agents in an ever-widening circle around Koforidua, scheduling the cars became a math puzzle. In particular the route teams competed briskly for use of the Tata, which had four-wheel drive and high clearance and could go where the tiny Kia could not. There was little room for error in the schedule; if someone came back late from a gong-gong or a meeting with a new agent, events for the rest of the day tumbled off the calendar, like a blizzard at O’Hare rippling into flight delays across the country. Complicating matters were Ghana’s punishing roads, which sent both cars into the shop constantly. Flat tires were relatively easy to fix; a major breakdown was inevitable.
One Tuesday morning in August, Whit, Adam, and I were driving the Kia to Mamfe to train two new shopkeepers as Burro agents. It was a key expansion, the closest we had come yet to Accra: one shop was in the busy tro-tro station and another on the town’s main roundabout. Both had the potential to move tons of batteries, but we had almost no experience in urban, electrified markets, where customers would almost certainly be more transient and anonymous. Would they return the batteries?
Suddenly, rounding a tight curve at about fifty miles an hour, the Kia shuddered violently and swerved right. “Hold on, kids,” said Whit as he gripped the wheel and pulled hard left, trying to stay on the road.
“Whoa, that doesn’t feel like a flat,” I said.
“I think it’s a wheel bearing,” said Whit. He drifted to the side of the road and limped another hundred feet to get past the blind curve. Fortunately there was no open gutter along this stretch, but the shoulder was still nonexistent. Overloaded trucks, hauling tomatoes and bananas to Accra, were bearing down on us at high speed, horns blaring and stones flying. We pressed open the doors a crack and escaped into the tall elephant grass along the side of the road. The right front wheel was smoking from the hub. It was starting to rain.
“This business is hard,” said Whit in a mock whine. The metaphor nobody mentioned was obvious: were the wheels also falling off the business? “It was so much easier to sell board games,” he added.
“And as I recall you took the bus to work.”
“I did.”
Whit got Kevin on the phone. “We’re past Adenya junction, near Kwamoso. I’m wondering if we should call a mechanic in Kof-town or get Samuel up from Accra.” (There is virtually no concept of tow trucks in Ghana; most mechanics, few of whom have their own cars, travel with their tools by taxi or tro-tro and make repairs at breakdown sites, working in traffic. Often they have to travel twice—once to assess the nature of the repair, then back to get parts. If you can be sure of the problem in advance, your mechanic can arrive with the right parts the first time.)
Kevin advised calling Samuel, Charlie’s mechanic in Accra, who had in fact checked out this car and recommended it for Burro—not least for the very good reason that it is a common car in Ghana with readily available parts. Whit reached Samuel, explained the situation, and hung up. “He can’t leave Accra until noon, so he’d get up here on the tro-tro around two.” It was now nine-fifteen.
Whit called Kevin again and asked him to contact the Koforidua mechanic we’d used in the past. “Maybe he can get here sooner than this afternoon,” said Whit. We sent Adam back to the office in a tro-tro; no sense in three of us eating dust all morning when Adam could be working on the books. Whit and I walked ahead another hundred yards to a small turnoff—nothing more than a path to a small settlement in the forest—where a woman and her two young children were selling bags of gari under a bamboo shelter. “If we can get the car here, we can pull it off the road and jack it up,” said Whit.
“Well, the bearing’s obviously fried so I don’t think we can hurt it any more,” I said, conveniently ignoring the unpleasant possibility of toasting the entire hub with more driving. “Just take it slow.” We nursed the Kia up to the clearing, backed into a spot next to the gari stand, and hauled out the jack as the gari lady and her children looked on curiously. Kevin called back with news that he could come down in the Tata with the mechanic in an hour or so. “We got the tire off,” said Whit, “and it’s definitely the bearing, maybe also the hub. But I doubt he can pull the bearing without a press, so he should probably bring a whole hub. I’ll leave it up to him, but don’t let him come down here without parts.”
Whit and I hailed a taxi and sped up the ridge to Mamfe for our training session with the two shopkeepers. Obviously, we were late. Fortunately, shopkeepers are usually around their shops. We sat in the usual plastic patio chairs, but this time we weren’t under a mango tree in a village with a gong-gong man. This time we
gathered under the awning of the Redeemer shop at the noisy tro-tro station. In case anyone might miss it, the store said REDEEMER REDEEMER REDEEMER across the cornice. Redeemer sold the usual mix of everything, Africa’s version of a New England general store—from aluminum bowls to spaghetti to matches to cans of Malta and penny candy in jars. And batteries—both Tiger Head Ds and Sun Watt AAs.
The owner, Emmanuel, was a gray-haired man in a bright red traditional African robe with fancy black piping that is typically worn for funerals. He greeted us with the usual Ghanaian smile and warmth—“You are welcome,” he said—and went off to get his wife, Janet Twumasi.
It soon transpired that Janet was the real boss, for as soon as we sat down she announced she was no longer interested in selling our batteries. “It’s too complicated,” she said. This was not a total surprise, as she had relayed as much to Kevin a few days earlier. He had talked her back into the program, and as far as we knew she was on board. But now she was waffling again. Whit whipped out his phone and dialed Kevin, then put her on. Several minutes of Twi later, she was back in the program, but I didn’t sense much enthusiasm. It seemed clear that the conventional Burro training process—starting with the inspiring rundown of the company’s values and commitments to empowering Africans—would fall flat here.
“You better cut to the chase,” I murmured to Whit.
“No kidding.”
We were joined by Christy, the daughter of the shopkeeper a hundred yards away in the roundabout. Christy seemed more plugged in to the concept. “If someone comes in to buy Tiger Head, I will tell them that Burro is a better deal,” she said.
Max Alexander Page 18
