Yesterday we traveled from Busua Beach back to our place in Kumasi. Total transit time was about 9 hours, and clvrmnky was sickening the whole way. Today he is not well at all and has started a course of antibiotics.

Over the past week I’ve been thinking about the ways that we see things when they are new to us. For instance, it is easy to fall into imagining that the towns along the coast are very similar to the old colonial towns, to imagine that the paths between harbours and such are “just like” they were when the Europeans arrived. The coastal towns have more colonial architechture (it seems, anyway) than inland towns (or Accra, whose phenomenal growth in the last twenty years means most of it is new). Rural Ghana doesn’t look anything like rural North America. It is covered in scrubby-looking bushes and palm trees, plants intermingled, red dirt paths and small shack-like houses. It takes a conscious effort, if one has not been to Ghana before, to realize that these are heavily developed agricultural fields, which have almost completely replaced the forests that covered the country 400 years ago, when Europeans first arrived (and which were still dense as recently as 30 years ago). The slave-trading forts that seem to connect us so vicerally to a terrible past stand in a landscape that bears very little connection to the landscapes in which they were erected.

It is impossible to study Africa with any seriousness and believe the myth that it represents some kind of “past” way of life. But I got to thinking while looking at the landscape about what terms like “developing,” “underdeveloped,” and “Third World” do to our ability to see what is really here. I’m reminded of something the economist Polly Hill wrote in the 40s or 50s, questioning her disciplines willingness to believe that Ghanaians somehow managed to create the world’s largest commercial cocoa industry “by accident”. By suggesting that Ghanaians didn’t have any native form or understanding of capitalism, this is just what economists implied. Likewise, it seems that terms like “underdeveloped” make it difficult to see the ways in which Ghana is very much a part of the modern world, with all it’s capitalist “development”.

Filed under: Ghana