Max Alexander

by No City: An African Adventure Bright Lights

  What he learned is that the hub is the rub. To hear Whit describe it, Tripoli International Airport is a nexus of such uncompromising sadism as to warrant revisions to The 120 Days of Sodom. Upon debarking into Tripoli’s transit “lounge” (dominated by a monumental portrait of Qaddafi ) after an overnight flight across the Sahara, Whit and the other passengers were frog-marched through a reception line of redundant document and baggage checks performed by shouting, mustachioed security operatives resembling those weasely bad guys in spy movies who are always lurking around foreign airports, just before James Bond gets klonked over the head and shoved into a waiting Deux Chevaux. Copious signage, with lots of bold passages and exclamation points, covered the walls, but only in Arabic. Having survived the pat-downs and random confiscations (Libyan authorities took all eight of Whit’s Burro batteries, plus a plastic D adapter, on the grounds of “travel security”), the weary nomads at last encountered an oasis: a pleasant little café bar, around which perhaps a dozen or so urban Bedouins sipped aromatic espressos and enjoyed fresh local pastries. Alas, this “Traveler’s Café & Restaurant” did not accept credit cards or any foreign currency, despite the fact that by definition all travelers in the transit lounge were changing planes to and from other foreign countries and thus were highly unlikely to possess even a single Libyan dinar. There was, needless to say, no currency exchange office in the transit lounge; a decrepit looking ATM was out of order.

  Well, coffee and breakfast would have to wait until Rome. But given Whit’s condition, what definitely couldn’t wait was the restroom. Here the term restroom must be stretched even beyond its usual euphemistic sense, although the British moniker water closet turned out to be pointedly apt. In this cruel dungeon, above a floor covered with an inch of gray fluid vaguely resembling clam liquor, the culture gap widened into a chasm. As in many Islamic countries, Libyan toilets are set up to accommodate the religious hygienic rules known as Qadaa al-Haajah. These rules, established by Muhammad himself, require “purification” with water after defecating. In modern Islamic toilets, the ritualistic ablution is accomplished with a flexible rubber or metal hose having a manually controlled spigot and an ergonomic tip. While the rules do not prohibit the additional use of toilet paper (Muhammad recommended using smooth stones), in practice many Muslims just rely on water. Nevertheless, in a public restroom in an airport transit lounge frequented by non-Muslims, one might expect to find a roll of tissue in the stall. But a country that requires all visitors to have an Arabic translation of their passport is not about to compromise on the weighty issue of Islamic ass wiping. There was not a scrap of paper to be found. Everyone, regardless of religion or background, was required to spray down with the hose. (Fellow passengers confirmed to Whit that the ladies’ room was no different.)

  Intending to be better prepared for Tripoli Airport on his return flight, Whit secured toilet paper in Italy and scoured the country for Libyan dinars but could find none at any exchange bureau. Miraculously, on his return the sad little Libyan ATM was working, which allowed him to buy coffee and, in the souvenir shop, a new English translation of Qaddafi’s 1975 Green Book, in which the dictator shares his wisdom on the tyranny of representative democracy and Western capitalism. It’s a slim tome. Perhaps it was meant to be used as toilet paper.

  3. Have You Ever Worked with Money?

  Whit’s Koforidua estate was much quieter in the fall. The courtyard was empty, the door to the hut shuttered and locked. “Where’s Akosia?” I asked.

  “Gone. Victor threw her out.”

  “What?”

  Apparently Whit had followed through on his promise to Akosia, telling her husband he could no longer bring other women to the house. Victor retaliated by throwing Akosia into the street—pregnant, along with their young son. She disappeared, presumably to her mother’s place up on the Akwapim Ridge. When Whit found out, he evicted Victor. Now the place lay empty.

  Nkansah had also disappeared. Over the summer things came to a head about his use of Burro’s fifteen-hundred-cedi loan, which was supposed to cover an apartment lease but which Nkansah said he had used to buy a motorcycle so he could continue to live with his parents out of town and commute to Koforidua. After Whit and Rose pressed Nkansah repeatedly to come up with the bike, he admitted he had used the money to invest in a taxicab, which another man was driving for him. (A man whom Burro had hired to drive Nkansah until he got his license; Nkansah stole the driver too.) It was just another of his many business ventures. Enraged that Nkansah had essentially gamed Burro’s generosity and then lied about it, Whit put him on leave and ordered him to return the money, even if it meant selling the taxi. But Nkansah simply vanished after sending Whit a string of barely comprehensible text messages lamenting what he perceived to be unfairly harsh treatment—never accepting any responsibility in the matter, calling Rose “Juda,” and assiduously avoiding any discussion of a repayment plan.

  The whole experience left everyone dispirited, in part because Nkansah had shown so much promise. On the other hand, as Whit pointed out, his sales skills were not matched by even the remotest flair for management or any capacity for details. It was probably just as well.

  At any rate, in Whit’s absence, Jan and Rose had hired an even more promising manager—a twenty-three-year-old Ashesi grad named Nii Tettey. While he lacked the protean carnival-barker sales skills of Nkansah, Nii was considerably more polished. A member of the Ga tribe of Accra, he had grown up in an elite family. His father, who died when Nii was seven, was a Ghanaian diplomat and former undersecretary of the United Nations; his mother was a retired accountant. Nii was born in Italy and attended Achimota, the renowned secondary school in Accra mentioned earlier (as the alma mater of Whit’s partner Charlie) that has groomed African business and political leaders (including Zimbabwe’s despotic Robert Mugabe) since the colonial era.

  Perhaps reflecting his privileged background, Nii favored an archaic manner of speaking that seemed professorial even by Ghana’s formal standards of English. Instead of “yes” he would often say “exactly.” Offer him any small favor—a cookie, a sachet of water—and he invariably replied, “That would be nice.” One day in a village we encountered an unusual curly-haired dog of the type more likely to be seen on the Faubourg Saint-Honoré, and Nii remarked that lately he had been observing a profusion of “randomly exotic dogs in villages.” Rose teased him about his baroque syntax, but he was self-assured and paid no mind. “I should like to write a book,” he told me. “A book about cultural and social changes in Ghana.”

  I told him I felt he was in a good position to do so. We had just left the Burro office, Nii and I, driving out of town toward the northwest, scouting off-grid villages for new Burro agents. This was uncharted territory, so to speak—places and people as yet unaware of Burro and its offerings. Nii was a good and experienced driver—the first employee besides James, the route driver, whom Whit and Jan did not have to train in this skill—but like most Ghanaians he grew a lead foot behind the wheel. This compunction for haste had very nearly proven tragic two weeks earlier, when Nii and the newest intern, a nineteen-year-old college sophomore from the Bay Area named Alec Scott, rolled the Kia onto its side after losing control when a wheel broke off the axle. This was the same car in which Whit and I had burned up a wheel bearing more than a year before, but this latest malfunction was considerably more serious.

  The accident happened on a weekend; they were headed down the coast to Busua Beach, an idyllic tourist spot popular with adventurous surfers. Somewhere along the way, the car began swaying ominously, but they pressed on—the pair had what pilots call “get-there-itis.” They did not get there. When the wheel fell off, the car pitched, rolled, and landed on the passenger side, skidding along the roadway. Photos taken later by Rose showed the entire right side creased and crumpled from stem to stern, the windshield smashed. Nii was driving; had he not been wearing his seat belt (a Burro rule), he would have landed on top of Alec, who was riding shotgun. Lucki
ly, both ended up only briefly in the hospital, with minor injuries. (It would take several weeks to fix the Kia.) “For the rest of my life I will always wear this seat belt,” Nii said to me as he drove.

  When Whit, still in Italy, heard about the accident, he was aghast. Alec’s parents were old friends; they had worked together decades ago in Niger. “Imagine if something had happened to Alec,” said Whit, shaking his head. “I mean, yeah, it wouldn’t have been my fault—both of those guys should have known better and stopped before the fucking wheel fell off—but still. I would feel totally responsible.” The accident caused Whit to rethink letting employees or interns borrow cars for personal trips. Besides the risk of injury, Burro was growing fast and simply couldn’t afford to lose vehicles.

  A lot of that growth was in the new territory that Nii was opening up. He and Alec had been using Google Earth satellite imagery and local topographical maps to zero in on population centers, which were not always visible from the road; thousands of people might be living down a narrow trail, out of sight. Although the Google maps were useless in much of Burro’s territory due to out-of-date and low-resolution satellite imagery, it so happened that relatively new and more detailed imagery had been added to Google Earth for this particular test area. The topographical maps were thirty years old and unreliable for population data (some villages had sprawled and grown over three decades, others had withered), but they typically contained a more comprehensive set of place names, sometimes for even the remotest settlements, as well as elevation contours. By cross-referencing Google Earth and the local topo maps, Nii and Alec were able to discern in advance the latitude and longitude of locations with greater potential. Those coordinates could then be entered into a handheld GPS for field location. They had begun to articulate what was becoming an increasingly sophisticated and efficient way for Burro to identify potential sales areas.*

  So armed, Nii and I were striking out to find new customers—or more accurately, new agents (make that resellers) who could serve customers in new villages. Building on the fieldwork done by the BYU interns last spring, Burro had refined and codified the process of reseller selection, and I wanted to see how that was working. Now reseller candidates were nominated in an open-forum village meeting (often with special input by village elders), then interviewed and scored by a Burro manager—Nii or Rose, whoever was running the new territory in question. The “winner” was then announced with fanfare, a process that not only helped ensure the best reseller but also reinforced the idea that the job was important.

  Nii dodged potholes at high speed along a theoretically paved main road on which I had never traveled, not that the landscape offered any novelty; stretches of plantain groves, teak plots, half-built concrete churches, and roadside vendors with their gallon jugs of crimson palm oil under raffia pergolas could have been just about anywhere in Eastern Region. As usual, three-phase electrical lines ran on high poles along the road—in fact they appeared to be getting upgraded, as large wooden spools of bright chrome wire had been dropped every few miles—but no power went back into the villages.

  Nii turned onto a muddy tire track that ran alongside a teak farm and drove about fifty yards until the road turned into a footpath. The map data had suggested there was a substantial village down this path, a place called Nkrankrom Dadasu.

  We got out of the truck and looked around. A shirtless man was hacking at the trunk of a teak tree with a machete, work that I imagined to be exceedingly difficult in the midday heat; I have fashioned teak accessories on my boat and respect it as a wood with the approximate density of alabaster. He stopped and greeted us, sweat glinting off his bare chest. Nii and the man spoke in halting Twi, which was not Nii’s first language or, I gathered, the stranger’s. “He says he will take us to the village,” said Nii. Ghana was like that. Everywhere you went, someone in the middle of some important exertion would cheerfully drop everything and help you. Then again, any excuse to stop chopping down a teak tree in ninety-degree heat might be welcome.

  It had rained buckets the day before, and at some point the trail actually went underwater. Villagers had fashioned makeshift bridges with logs, but the logs themselves were now floating, so there was no way to cross without getting wet. I had on Crocs, which were fine except for being dangerously slippery, but Nii was wearing leather street shoes and socks. It may have been the last time he sported formal footwear on a recon mission. After about half a mile we reached the village and met the chief, a small man about my own age. Nii introduced us and the chief gathered several of his elders.

  We sat under a tangerine tree, the tiny fruit still green, as Nii explained Burro to the assembled dignitaries. It turned out that the villagers were Ewe, from Togo. Nii spoke no Ewe; my French was rudimentary but serviceable, although not as good as Nii’s Twi, which was better than their Twi or English. Between this Babel of languages we managed a crude but effective communication. Our cold call was warming up.

  Nii explained the battery program and passed around some samples. “You must always keep using them,” he said. “They are like a footballer who must always stay excited to perform well.”

  The elders were duly impressed.

  “We are very community centered,” Nii continued. “We like to talk to people, find out what they need, and so we talk to our agents. If they tell us they need this thing in their neighborhood, we look for the best way to bring it at the best price. And we found out that a problem was charging your phones. For a place like this where there is no electricity, you have to take your phone far away to charge it.”

  The elders nodded. The chief explained that villagers pay fifty pesewa to send out their phones for charging, plus forty pesewa in taxi fare each way, for a total of 1.30 cedis.

  Nii continued: “So we said, ‘What can we do to solve this problem?’ And so let me show you the Burro phone charger.” He pulled the small green device out of a plastic bin.

  “This is what it looks like. It uses four of our batteries that I showed you.” He opened the charger to reveal the batteries.

  “I’ll show you how it works,” he said, pulling his own phone from a pocket.

  “Everybody gets their phone pin,” he said. “Everyone gets one free when you buy it. And so you put it like this”—he inserted a phone pin into the female receptacle on the charger wire—“and then you put it inside your phone, and you have your phone charging.”

  He held up his phone so the chief and elders could see the blinking battery symbol on the screen. “Look at it, you can see it charge.”

  They gathered around, amazed. “Charging!” confirmed one man.

  “Charging!” agreed another. They said the word in English but pronounced it almost like Chinese: CHAH-jing!

  “It’s as simple as this,” said Nii. “Now you can always have your phone with you; you don’t need to send it away, wasting time and money to charge it.”

  “How much for this?” asked another man.

  Nii replied that the four batteries cost a total of eighty pesewa and are good for at least two phone charges but often as many as four, depending on the phone. “So you would be paying twenty to forty pesewa to charge your phone,” he said. “That is on average a cedi less than what you currently pay. You must also pay five cedis for the charger, which is yours to keep. So after just five charges, the money you have saved will pay for the charger itself.”

  The men indicated they understood, and they did not seem fazed by the upfront cost of the charger.

  “But the main reason we have come is to talk to the chief,” said Nii, “so I can schedule a day that we will come to select a reseller. A reseller, also called an agent, is someone we need to see every week to give them more batteries and give them the things they would like to sell. So that is why we came.”

  The men conferred in Ewe, then spoke to us and agreed on a date the following week. “How many people are in this village?” Nii asked.

  “Oh, we have many,” said a man.

  �
��How many?”

  “Here we have thirty or thirty-five.”

  Nii’s face fell. That was not enough to justify an agent. “Okay, so I want to know how many in all the surrounding villages.”

  The men consulted again in Ewe. There was much shouting and gesticulation. “Perhaps a thousand,” said the spokesman.

  “Excellent,” said Nii. That was about what he had expected based on the map data. We shook hands all around, said good-bye, and trudged off down the slippery trail.

  On the appointed day we returned to select a reseller, this time wearing farm boots. But it had not rained in several days, and the trail was dry. We met again under the tangerine tree, now with a larger crowd of villagers that included four men selected by the elders as reseller candidates. Nii ran through the basic Burro spiel, pointing out what he called the three most important points about the batteries: stays strong, no leak, and costs less. Then we broke off for the job interviews, moving to a bench under a cocoa tree, next to an elaborate double still that bubbled under a thatched roof.

  The interview process had been codified into a series of questions designed to evaluate a candidate’s competence in seven critical areas:

  Literacy and Numeracy

  Honesty

  Reliability and Motivation

  Trainability

  Sales Experience

  Ability to Commit Time to Burro

  Personality and Character

  Service-oriented

  Each criterion was followed by several sample questions and a “scoring aid” to facilitate analysis of the answers. So a question under Service-oriented was “How would you deal with clients that came to you saying their batteries do not work in their flashlight?” The scoring aid noted, “Saying something like ‘I would tell the client to hold on while I report to the company,’ at this stage is a good enough answer to earn them a high score. Saying something like ‘I will collect it from them and tell them to stop spoiling my business’ or ‘I would tell them that they are lying’ would give a very low score on this.”