Whit turned to Kevin, who was driving. “He was kidding, right?”
“Oh no,” said Kevin. “The Ewe, they eat cats.”
“Oh come on,” said Whit. “You’re not serious!”
“Yes, they do. They call it Joseph.”
“Joseph? You mean, like pig is pork, cow is beef, cat is Joseph?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t believe you. I’m calling Charlie.”
“He will confirm it.”
Whit picked up his phone. “Good afternoon, Charlie. I’m calling you with a quick question. Kevin says that the Ewe eat cats, and they call it Joseph. Is it true?”
There was a brief pause.
“Really! Do you eat it yourself? Okay, thanks, Charlie.”
He hung up. “Charlie says it’s true. He said, ‘Don’t ever leave your cat with an Ewe.’”
“I told you it was so,” says Kevin.
Back in the office, I decided to confirm this revelation with a second Ewe source. “Adam, do you eat cat?”
The young accountant looked up from his laptop. “Yes.”
“Joseph, right?”
“Yes. It’s very nice.”
“Nice? Yes, most people would agree that cats are nice. Why is it called Joseph?”
“I don’t know why,” he replied, pondering the question as if for the first time.
“How do you prepare it?”
“Oh, in a stew,” he said with a tone of surprise at the inanity of the query. Everything in Ghana is prepared in a stew.
“What does it taste like?”
He thought for a minute. “I don’t know how to describe it.”
“Like chicken?”
“No, it doesn’t taste like chicken. More like rabbit. Do you eat rabbit?”
“Indeed,” I replied, which made me wonder why we find it so repulsive to eat certain pets (assuming one eats any kind of meat at all). The Ewe also keep cats as pets, but they are somehow able to compartmentalize Tabby while dining on Joseph. But they regard the consumption of dog as absolutely barbaric. I posted the whole Ewe cat food thing on Facebook and got a lot of responses. My friend Steve Vickery suggested serving cat topped with dried cat food, “for extra crunch.” Don Rainville wondered why we abhor eating pets since we have no problem eating vegetables, even though we keep house plants. It’s a good question, but I decided I would politely turn down offerings of Joseph, unless doing so would cause grave offense to a village chief.
5. Do More
The first counterfeit coupons showed up on 9/11. To a casual observer they were not obviously fake, but Jan was no casual observer. It was Friday, the end of a hectic week and her last day in the office before a three-month trip home. Over the summer, while Jan worked in Ghana, she and her partner Leslie had bought a house in Medford, Oregon—four hundred miles from her previous home in Seattle—where Leslie had taken a job as pharmacy manager for a local hospital. Between packing for her trip and looking forward to seeing her new home, Jan could easily have been distracted enough to miss the eight fake coupons in the cash box from that day’s route. But she thought they looked funny, so she looked again. They were the right size—one and a half by two and three quarter inches—with the right words (“ONE BURRO EXCHANGE, FRESH BATTERIES ANYTIME”), but the font looked just a little too small. And the image of the Burro battery with the donkey logo was grainy. What’s more, the fakes had a dotted-line border around the edge, like a cutting guide, which the real coupons did not. Also there was no staple mark; these coupons had never been part of a booklet. Obviously someone had made a copy of an original coupon, then copied it several times more, compromising the resolution just enough to be noticeable if you took the time to compare. “Hey, Whit, look at this,” Jan said.
“Holy shit,” he replied, staring at the bogus slips, holding them up to the light. “Wow. That didn’t take long.”
“Definitely from Bomase,” said Jan. “It’s the only place we collected at least eight tickets today. And they came from either Seth or Dorothy,” two Burro agents there who had redeemed a bunch of coupons. Seth was a smooth-talking farmer with a cool straw hat whom we had met on that very first day in Bomase; Dorothy was the wife of a former assemblyman and the town’s youth leader. Both were high-performing agents and among the first under the new system.
“Do you think Seth or Dorothy know?” I asked.
“I don’t know, but I doubt it,” said Whit. “Most likely one of their clients, without their knowledge.”
“Just one?” I said. “Don’t kid yourself. Those Krobos have been copying Venetian glass beads since the fifteenth century. Even the Arab traders couldn’t tell them apart. Have you ever looked at some of the patterns on those things? Faking up some Burro coupons would be child’s play to them. You’re in deep shit. And did I mention they also grow dope?”
“This is nuts,” Whit said. “As if this business weren’t hard enough.” He slumped in a chair and opened a beer. “Today I drove for ten hours, covered a hundred and eighty kilometers, and came home with forty cedis and some counterfeit coupons. Totally nuts. We need a lot more volume.”
We were all feeling a bit violated by this breach of faith. Charlie always said, “You try to help poor people in this country, they just take advantage of you.” Whit and I had always hoped he was just being overly fatalistic, but maybe he was right. Maybe you couldn’t help poor people. Obviously bad guys were out there watching us, looking for ways to game us. Fix this leak and they’ll spring another one, somewhere else in the system. Do More, indeed. They were mocking us!
“What are you gonna do?” I asked Whit.
“Nothing yet. Wait and see. Let’s monitor the situation, see who’s turning them in. I don’t even want to tell the agents yet. When we find out who it is, maybe we pay them a visit with the assemblyman and the police. We may need to do a currency call-in—you know, exchange your old coupons for new ones, and after thirty days we won’t honor any coupons without the new stamp. Shit, I don’t know. This business is hard.”
1. Feeding Time
The rain dampened the dust and cleared the view from our second-floor terrace of the twin fifteen-hundred-foot hills that rose, like the humps of a Bactrian camel, a mile southeast of downtown Koforidua. They are known as the Obuotabiri Mountains, and tradition says they are the home of the local gods as well as mysterious dwarves. That legend is somewhat trivialized by the mountains’ current status as a broadcasting relay station—eight blinking antennae sprout from the highest peak. But just as modern African village chiefs enjoy listening to soccer on the radio, so perhaps do the gods of this noisy merchant town find it expedient to keep abreast of the mortals through the evening news.
Thanks to the broadcast towers, a rutted dirt track to the summit is sporadically maintained and negotiable by truck seasonally and by foot always, affording a fine view of town and a refreshing breeze. Yet despite this relatively reliable access to a pleasant vantage and clime, human habitation ends about a third of the way up; from there, houses give way to slopes dense with tall grass and banana palms, above which tower eighty-foot-tall silk cotton trees with wide, smooth gray trunks and umbrella tops. Below this verdant crown the dirt brown city, much of which we could take in from our terrace, sprawls chaotically, and watching the passage of humanity through this maze was an endless source of entertainment. On any given day there were parades of youth groups running through the streets carrying school banners and led by frantic drummers; groaning livery trucks unloading dozens of market-bound farmers from the outlands, who hefted coffin-sized sacks of cassava root; rattletrap tro-tros bound for the town of Suhum and heralded by the throaty “Su-Su-Su!” call of the driver’s mate; and men and women carrying loads on their heads that defied physics. I distinctly recall one man, who in America could find good work in the rings of Barnum & Bailey, balancing a full sheet of plywood on his head while riding a bicycle.
Yet as far as some of the locals were concerned, the real show was up on the
veranda where the obrunis lived. We were out there all the time—it functioned as our living room—and since no other white people lived in the city center, our highly public existence was, for them, a spectacle worthy of footlights. From morning until late at night we endured the interminable cries of “white man!” and “obruni!” from strangers who mostly just wanted us to wave. Nothing wrong with that, of course—except that by the tenth or eleventh wave it got a little old, and it was still morning. By the end of the day, it could actually be anxiety-inducing. I realized with discomfort what it must be like to be a celebrity, and I suddenly felt sympathy as I never had before with the plight of the famous, who so defensively guard their privacy.
We weren’t famous, of course, just very different from most humans in their orbit, which I suppose made us rather nonhuman in their eyes. I don’t recall exactly when I began to feel like an animal on display, but I do recall a torpid night, just before dinner, when I turned to the assembled onlookers, some of them particularly strident in their catcalls, and yelled, “The zoo is closed, it’s feeding time,” before disappearing through the screen door.
One day out on the veranda, I was reading Ryszard Kapuscinski’s 2001 book The Shadow of the Sun, and I think I found my muse. Not the author—the late Polish journalist and New Yorker contributor who filed thoughtful, funny, and harrowing dispatches from Africa starting in 1958 (his first stop was newly independent Ghana)—but rather one of his subjects in the book, another journalist, named Felix Naggar.
In the early 1960s, Naggar was the Hemingway-esque East African bureau chief for Agence France Presse. He lived in a sumptuous villa in Nairobi’s exclusive Ridgeways neighborhood, which he apparently rarely left—gathering news over the phone and dictating stories to his staff of Indian copyboys, who sat at teleprinters and transmitted his reports to Paris. To hear Kapuscinski tell it, Naggar was a Mozart of the news dispatch: perfectly composed stories flowed effortlessly from his mouth, ready for the printed page. With no need to labor over his copy, he had plenty of time on his hands for a trifecta of more edifying pursuits, namely cigars, cuisine, and crime novels. “He was either supervising his cooks—he had the best kitchen in all of Africa,” writes Kapuscinski, “or sitting in front of the fireplace reading crime novels. In his mouth he held a cigar. He never removed it—unless it was just for a moment, in order to swallow a bite of baked lobster or taste a spoonful of pistachio sorbet.” The phone would ring, a source would reveal a tidbit of breaking news, and Naggar would dictate the breathless dispatch to his aides. At that point, says Kapuscinski, Naggar would “then return either to the kitchen, where he would stir something in the pots, or before the fireplace, to continue reading.”
This was a job I was cut out for. I was already the de facto chef at Burro world headquarters, where among my duties I had taken on the task of daily market shopping and dinner prep. (The alternative was eating in one of the town’s handful of vile restaurants, as Jan rarely had time to cook and Whit seemed incapable of making steam from boiling water.) I have enjoyed cooking since childhood, as much for the process as the food itself. I began, like so many cooks, at my mother’s side but soon moved on to cookbooks. As an adult, and after years cooking in restaurants, I graduated beyond the need for cookbooks except as they provided broad outlines for unfamiliar dishes or critical measurements for more technical creations. Over the years, in Europe, New York, and Los Angeles, I found myself drawn to the public green markets and food stalls, and I gained confidence in heading out to shop with no particular menu or ingredient list in mind but rather determined, like a Neanderthal to the hunt, to see what I could find and cook whatever followed.
I didn’t think about any of this before coming to Ghana, but soon after I arrived it became clear that my hunter-gatherer abilities were about to take on new significance. With nothing even remotely resembling a Western grocery store in Koforidua, food shopping was a daily scavenger hunt, and improvisation a survival skill. Most of our shopping was done in the town’s sprawling and odiferous public market, a maze of wooden stalls wedged into narrow walkways bisected by open drain channels clogged with vegetable trimmings in various states of compost. Here, every day of the week, anyone with a few cedi notes in his pocket could choose from hundreds of neatly constructed pyramids of tomatoes, peppers, onions, garlic, ginger, cabbage, cucumbers, avocados (charmingly known as “butter pears”), limes, lettuce (“salad leaves”), mangoes, papayas, pineapples, plantains, bananas, coconuts, rice, peanuts, eggs with anemic pale yellow yolks (precisely why I don’t know), green beans, dried beans, yams, eggplants (“garden eggs”), dried and smoked fish and shellfish of every size, and (in the rainy season) wild mushrooms and live snails as large as a baseball. In other sections of the market you could find bolts of fabric, handmade leather shoes, hair weaves, charcoal, cookware, and stiff switches with which to beat your child.
Considering that many African countries regularly contend with drought and famine (as did Ghana in 1982), the availability of so much cheap food was an unqualified blessing. And yet (to qualify anyway) this relative cornucopia was aggravated by two factors. The first was a numbing lack of diversity within each category (except when it came to dried fish); every stall with tomatoes, for example, proffered the exact same type of tomato, at the same price. While arguably fresh, sun-ripened, and juicy, they were all the same, everywhere and every day. It was as if every farmer in the country had sworn allegiance to the One Tomato; likewise every other species of vegetable and fruit. At first this lack of innovation puzzled me; why wouldn’t an enterprising farmer grow something different—an exotic tomato, a striped eggplant, a wax bean—and corner the market? Instead, with no distinguishing product, sellers resorted to a curious form of competitive begging:
“White man! Please buy from me!”
“White man! I have what you need!”
“White man! Come and see!”
I tried to spread the wealth and buy from different sellers every day, a strategy, I began to learn, that makes friends of no one. Bargaining was fruitless, as it were, although I never ceased enjoying the effort. Whit and I had developed a sort of vaudeville routine that shamelessly milked humor from the recent currency devaluation, in which one new cedi replaced ten thousand old cedis. I would give a mock shudder at the stated price, then say, “Old cedis, right?”
Usually that drew a laugh. “Oh no! New Ghana cedis!”
“Wow! Is that obruni price?”
“Not obruni price! Everybody price!” I rated the whole routine mildly amusing, but Ghanaians regularly doubled over in laughter at the exchange.
“Okay, but I want a gift.” A “gift” was the traditional extra tomato or two thrown in, as gratitude for your business. Most sellers kept a special pile of less-than-perfect or overly ripe produce just for these gifts. Otherwise, it was exactly the same as the regular produce.
Everywhere I went in Ghana, I kept an eye out for that unusual tomato or strange eggplant, but it didn’t exist. Over time and through our own business dealings, I began to understand how poverty depresses innovation and entrepreneurship, even on the level of the produce market. Although times are relatively good right now, Ghanaian farmers live constantly on the edge of disaster. A crop destroyed by pests, or one that simply doesn’t sell, can ruin lives. There is no margin for error. Risk is simply too risky.
So the proven tomato, the one that does well in the local soil and sells well in the local market, is the one whose seeds get saved and replanted. In the long term, of course, that practice promotes a dangerous lack of biodiversity; sooner or later a new pest will come along that positively adores the Ghanaian tomato, and then there will be none. This is what happened in Ireland during the potato famine of the nineteenth century. But then as now, a farmer living on a pittance will always focus on his family’s needs today, not a theoretical caterpillar of tomorrow.
(This hand-to-mouth lifestyle had clear implications for Burro. In the first battery offering, the monthly subscripti
on price was too much money for most customers, even though it saved money in the long run. And for a lot of customers under the new, pay-as-you-go system, the one-cedi deposit was a big hurdle, again despite the savings.)
The second problem with food shopping in Koforidua was the long list of staples that were completely unavailable—like coffee, except for instant Nescafé, which is synonymous with “coffee” in Ghana. Or dairy. The country simply has no dairy culture, and gold bullion could not buy you a drop of fresh milk or cream in Koforidua, although a couple of stores sold boxed milk. Butter could be found at great expense (imported from France and quite good; how it found its way to our Anglophone banlieue I have no clue), but cheese might as well have been moon rocks. Nor was there yogurt, except in presweetened and artificially flavored children’s drinks. Olive oil was considered medicine, like castor oil, and had to be bought from the pharmacist. All of these exotic alimentations could be bought, expensively, at the Western-style supermarket in Accra, but that was a full day or overnight trip.
The daily scavenger hunt for groceries really became an adventure when it came to buying meat. Poultry was relatively simple: both chickens and turkeys could be bought live in the market (you could always find someone to butcher them) or dressed and frozen rock hard from one of several “cold stores”—modest but busy shops with a few chest freezers and a scale. Cold stores also sold frozen fresh fish, as opposed to the dried fish in the market, and, oddly enough, factory-made hot dogs, rather optimistically labeled “sausages.” Red meat beyond processed frankfurters, however, necessitated a visit to the abattoir, a windowless octagonal house of horrors within the public market. Under this squalid dome lay a tableau that might have been shot by Brady at Antietam. Counters lined in bloodstained vinyl sagged under the hacked carcasses of large mammals, hooves akimbo, skulls cleaved and bellies ripped open. Shirtless butchers in stained aprons wielded machetes over these dishonored corpses, sending bits of bone and flesh flying.
Max Alexander Page 20
