EPISODE SIX – MARCH 29th

Getting back to East Africa, I understand how the infernal heat of Ghana punished me. But I left Navrongo before the heat increased even more: a week later, it was 40° to 42°. Even as they cut the trees, people tell me how much hotter it is getting. Is there hope? Probably not.

Then a kindergarten ‘world leader’ who believes climate change is fake news, launches a war on enemies he just doesn’t understand, calling them, in his best diplomatic language, ‘demented scumbags’ (takes one to know one). I remember with great admiration my travels amongst the cultural treasures of Iran – now being bombed to rubble by a man who gets his cultural understanding from Hollywood action films.

I’m so glad I saw so much of the world when it seemed so much bigger – and before America started attacking it.

****

I never thought I’d see Nairobi as a clean city. Kenya was one of the countries to lead the way in banning plastic bags – even if every loaf of bread and most foodstuffs are still packaged in plastic. Without the billowing plastic water bags, like those infecting Ghana, the country seems clean. I’d dismissed the ban as a frail effort, but perhaps the publicity about plastic bags has had a psychological effect? At least people understand that plastic is a pollutant.

Pity Kenya doesn’t now concentrate on eradicating single-use plastic bottles, but perhaps even a sovereign African state doesn’t have the money to take on Greed Corp USA, (AKA Coca Cola), that produces the lion’s share of them…

****

Slowly recovering from the excesses of Ghana, it’s time to ride back to Uganda.

At the border, before the great white elephant of a vast immigration hall – nothing more than Chinese bribes and Ugandan hubris – I fall into conversation with Nancy. I must stop and chat; there’s still that cordiality here: a stranger about whom to be curious; welcomes to express. It’s delightful and restores some of the sense of ‘Africa’ that I lost as a largely anonymous outsider in Ghana. Petite, smiling Nancy is in her mid 40s. To my comment on the waste of this vast new border post: “How many teachers could this pay for?” she shrugs with a smile. She inured to the folly of those running her country. She’ll never express an outright opinion: that’s been removed from Ugandans by years of bad dictatorship.

The ride round the mountain is SO familiar now, still a pleasure. The weather’s changing. I’m caught at Bukwo by a torrential shower. The clouds are hovering just above the road as I climb the steep hills, red water coursing down the roadside channels. When it rains here…

Just in time, I pull on waterproofs (which aren’t, of course) so end up with not much more than a wet bum. Then, I’m out into expansive broiling skies.

The next minutes, as the clouds rise again, are magical as I coil through Tulel. Clouds dance and clamber into the deep blue sky. Those below are of many shades, some still filled with rain, others drifting languidly higher, relieved of their weight. It’s beautiful. Magnificent. The roads are steaming ethereally, as if on fire. I’m sweeping and curving along, parting the wisps and wraiths of mist. The views are sparkling after the rain, the banana leaves jewelled in diamonds. Children play in the brown puddles. I’m in Uganda again, and my smile is now instinctive. People wave, children are excited at the roadside; they’ve not yet lost that welcome, the novelty and curiosity about strangers. It’s gone in Ghana, where there’s little thrill at the unusual: they’ve seen it all – on their phones at least.

****

I’ve come to meet Debra from Australia. Three years ago, she visited and became part of the family, like me. She’s a traveller by heart: been everywhere and done everything; taken risks for her life’s story.

Debra and I have advised and helped Alex. We’re delighted with his success. His guesthouse is the most popular in Sipi. Full to bursting yet again, the best marketing – which his competitors don’t understand, is referral by other guests.

Unfortunately, we’ve little time to converse. Debra flew in on Qatar Airways and she has to cut short her trip and hassle to escape, now that bellicose Israel and the demented scumbag have targeted the oil of the Middle East. She gets out on one of the last flights through Doha.

****

A gathering of Alex’s Kapsomin clan was called in March, with members coming from all over eastern Uganda. Alex was asked to address the meeting and spoke passionately about his progressive beliefs: education, especially of girls; lowering the birth rate; abandoning bad cultural practices; respecting one another; working harder; moral behaviour and corruption – all subjects close to his heart.

He was met by a barrage of applause! There and then, it was unanimously decided to sack the current clan chairman, a traditionalist of the old school, and make Alex, just 38, chairman of the clan – a position with moral and judicious responsibility, making judgements on social issues and the first steps in any judicial action.

I’m so proud of Alex! His slow approach, rigorously keeping his integrity intact, brings MUCH more respect and influence than most Ugandans’ rush for instant financial gratification by corrupt means.

****

When it rains in Sipi I want to be somewhere else. It is utterly disgusting: the soil turning in moments to thick, cloying mud.

It came towards the end of an afternoon at Chelel, the clouds rolling in like a blanket, pouring over the mountain slopes and falling into the great yawning valley, soon obscuring the views in chilly fog. Then came a shower for twenty minutes – and a heavy-footed plod home in sticky red mire.

With local boys, we’ve planted another 400 coffee seedlings – (altogether about 1000) – on the lovely lower plot that I bought this year. Next month they’ll plant onions between the young bushes, which help fertilise the young coffee.

The first time I saw growing coffee was in Costa Rica in January 1974. Who’d’ve thought I’d be a coffee plantation owner 52 years later? Well, of course, I’m a coffee planter by proxy, having bought the land for Alex. In the future for which he unusually plans, he has the potential to be a wealthy man who can use that money imaginatively to advance people around him. It’s already bringing work for the young men of Chelel and a market for their manure, seedlings and goods.

I’m relieved to see the investment in farming going so fast. The situation of the hospitality trade in this potentially unstable country is a concern – increasingly so, with unhinged demagogs in charge of the western world, to whom any ‘shithole country’ (his words, not mine) with some oil seems a prize worth attacking. Rumour here has it that he’s threatened the corrupt Ugandan leadership that he ‘will come for them’. Uganda has some untapped oil reserves – and is now drilling in their most famous national park. You wouldn’t believe these people if it wasn’t true…

Land and food will always be needed, especially with the ballooning population of this mad land.

****

Life here can be medieval. The jealousy that is generated when people see one of their own getting ahead is shameful. It’s the result of lousy education and consequent lack of imagination. If you are constantly taught that creativity and imagination are worthless, it withers on the vine. Lack of imagination causes so many here to live in the moment, never to plan, and makes life so cheap that all risks are thoughtlessly taken.

A neighbour comes ranting and shouting in pure envy that Alex has stolen his land. It’s undignified to witness this corrosive jealousy. This anger is caused by the usual family-breaking fact of a man who married several women. Polygamy is still common. The old man who legally sold the land to Alex didn’t consult the other children of the same grandfather – but different grandmothers! If that’s not medieval..?

****

As the rainy season starts, temperatures drop and the sun is less forceful, I begin to get a bit of ennui. I can get weather like this in Devon. Mind you, it may be wet, but it’s still 24° or 25°…

Everyone gets busy, hoeing, planting and sowing. We are no exception: past days have been involved with farming coffee, beans, potatoes and onions – and gardening. The seeds that I brought from Harberton have all germinated: hollyhocks from the Square, marigolds from seeds pinched around the village, sweet Williams and statice from cheap packets and everlasting sweet peas from my own garden.

The guesthouse compound is a terrific sight. Plant a stick here and it grows. Roses, hibiscus, angels’ trumpets, giant geraniums big as bushes, nasturtiums, coffee, camellias, passion fruits, palms, bananas, tropical trees and plants I can’t identify – and the two big Chelum lilies we scavenged from a field on a hike, are both coming into magnificent flower for the first time.

****

I’m proud I can still keep up with someone half my age for 18 miles at about 6000’ altitude! For that’s what Alex and I do between building and farming: keep hiking. I’ll steam along back on Dartmoor at only a few hundred feet above sea level!

We hike across country and on the red dust country roads, through rural communities and small farms.

It’s a fine walk today; we’re off the beaten track and a mzungu is a rare feature here. I’m such a celebrity! I must humour hundreds of small children, racing to the roadside to greet me. Others scatter in fear or hide behind mothers’ skirts, wailing. A group of children gather to interview me: intelligent questions about my white skin, where I’m from, why I’m walking, are there hills and cows where I come from, why are my arms hairy? It’s a delight.

We stop for chai, chapati and beans in a scruffy makeshift cafe and request water here and there, and a couple of disgusting sodas for sugar. We walk happily, free from the strains of home. Alex enjoys this. As an ex runner, he’s happy to keep the pace going and I try to keep up, begging a minute or two under a shady tree now and then.

We walk for seven hours on a warm day – about 33°. The scenery’s fine, the big plains far below. People are happy to see us: many joke and comment, on this lazy Sunday. Today, we walk through a large area that is populated by Alex’s clan – of which he is now chairman! We make regal progress!

We stop to visit a great aunt of Alex’s – a charming, happy old woman, coated now in flour as she grinds maize. There’s a big dob on her nose that matches her curly white hair. She’s so pleased to see Alex and his visitor. When we leave she insists Alex takes some small money because her ‘eggs are finished’ and she must give her visitors a gift.

“Buy some eggs!” she tells Alex. Usually, we dash a few small notes to old ladies, but no, says Alex, this time we are her visitors and custom demands she must present a mark of respect. It used to be just this way in Navrongo. I wonder how much longer it will last here? Longer perhaps, with this dire lack of education and less exposure to the evils of antisocial media…

The next four miles are all uphill. Hard at first, then slowing to a slope that goes on and on.

The first hill is so steep it’s been roughly tarred. A motorbike taxi struggles with two passengers. It stops and the woman on the back, with baby tied behind, gets down to lighten the load. A middle-aged man stays aboard…

We catch them up at the top of the hill. “Huh!” I exclaim derisively to the man sitting complacently on the boda with the driver, “Always the woman who must get down and walk!” The man looks at me as if I’m demented.

“It’s good exercise for her,” he dismisses me.

“Yes, for you too!” I comment with a shake of my head. Does he listen? Do I change anything? No, this is Africa. A poor woman, in middle age, with a grandchild on her back, must plod up the 1:4 hill while the man remains seated, superior in station and ‘Tradition’: the excuse for exploitation largely invented – and maintained – by African men…

****

Hiring a local driver, Alex and I go to Mbale, the ‘big city’, 30 miles below Sipi, to visit the children at school. We miss them. I’m greeted with big excited hugs from Keilah and Jonathan.

We drive to a smart hotel – the Wash and Wills, that sounds more like a laundry – and buy them chicken and chips and pop. Two big bags of treats from the supermarket and the inevitable new shoes for JB, who gets through them at great speed. Fortunately, they love school, yet it is a Spartan life.

I’m amused to see that Keilah has adopted the name Joy on her schoolbooks! How does she know the name of my late mother, I wonder? With JB’s school fleece embroidered: ‘Cheptai J Bean’, I’m having quite an effect in this family.

I’m content to be able to pay back some of the generosity I’ve received around the world, frequently from those who could least afford it.

THIS IS EPISODE FIVE – MARCH 6th

NB. This episode FIVE will appear on your device ABOVE number FOUR. Scroll down to read chronologically

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I don’t look back as I walk away from my little ruined Navrongo house, in which I slept for the first time in 1998 with such thrill and expectation. A £2 coin, newly minted then, set in the doorstep, reminds me of the date. Crunching over used nappies and plastic, I walk away, largely ignored by so many strangers, between the ugly dross of half finished, unimaginative, stained block bungalows. The story fades.

But I need to be a bit more upbeat and find the positive… I must try to relax a bit. I’ve always said a traveller must leave his values at home. And now I’m doing the opposite!

****

I’m heartened to find just a bit of old Navrongo left, even if it only confirms that it existed in the first place. I have to visit a man in his late 90s to find that vestige of old courtesy, respect for community life and mutual support.

Mr Atiim, is Perry’s father in law. He learned a bit of quaint antique colonial English when he worked down south in the 50s. He’s been a cattle farmer most of his life and has the formality and deep politeness of the old generation I met when I first came to Navrongo.

He’s very happy to see us, presenting us on parting with a cockerel, a mark of respect for a male visitor; the only one of this visit – where I used to get so many.

He has a spot-on memory for the old stories of past times and traditions: tales of beating down the mud to make a road for the first car; pesoas paid for labour; how far people travelled on foot before our modern times when no one walks any more, and digressions into the behaviour and habits of the old town, back before and after independence. Atiim is the last remnant of that generation; the oldest person for many villages around. His memory of ‘being quite grown’ by 1946 may mean he really is close to 100 as he claims.

He lives a couple of miles south, a walk we’ve taken several times over the years. But now there are no fields, no woodland and few trees. It’s hot as hell and twice as ugly. The place holds little attraction. A 100 foot communications mast towers over his house.

****

At Nyangua village I am still remembered: the white man who came and built their school.

The school now has 220 primary pupils and nearby is a JSS, almost certainly the result of the bargaining power enhanced by building their own simple school buildings for themselves with the help of private donors (Bedford Park Rotary Club and me). I’m proud of this basic project. It’s educated 33 years’ of Nyangua children.

At the newer JSS, with 74 pupils – girls slightly outnumbering boys – we meet Vida, the headmistress, as the pupils break for the weekend. In the dust of the schoolyard, she tells them how a mysterious white man caused their school to exist, and here he is come to visit: excitement, applause and exclamations.

Then Clement, one of the three JSS teachers shakes my hand. Clement was one of those boys, then in P4, who sat at the broken desks of that original ruined mud classroom I visited in the early 1990s! He’s now 42, teaching another generation of Nyangua children. It’s a moving moment.

I’m happy today. We WALK the eight miles or so home in the 38° heat and increasing dust.

****

The Harmattan winds that cool Navrongo should happen in November/ December but now, mid-February, we are in the throes of these dust-laden northeasterly winds from the Sahara. What’s happening? You witness Climate Change so closely in Africa.

Few here comprehend the seriousness. They cut trees, build empty houses, waste water, overuse their soil, increase the population limitlessly, ride every inch they used to walk. Here, you witness this slow destruction incrementally. It’s unstoppable. It was always hot, but this is Climate Change in action. Everyone claims that the heat is increasing…

****

It’s market day every third day. I used to enjoy them so much, but with the narrow spaces now filled with the mopeds of women doing their shopping it feels like Morrisons filled with demanding, smelly mopeds in the aisles. It’s good to see so many women riding – something I’ve never seen in East Africa, but I find myself hot, fractious and short tempered. It’s not fair on Wechiga. I’m trying my best now not to see the filth and the unmaintained scruffy houses. Trouble is, it’s every man for himself now. Pretty much like the rest of the world, I suppose, but I witnessed what came before this casual self interest, when people cared for one another, shoulder to shoulder in the face of a much bigger challenge than new material possessions.

Happily, Wechiga stays pretty much his old self, my brother, despite our very different intellectual approaches to life. He’s endlessly sociable to the world. He knows all the familial relationships of who’s who in Navrongo, but he has little pretence, does Wechiga. He is what he is, with simple ambitions, not a lot of education, patient – somehow, poor fellow – with my moodiness; endlessly friendly to all, upholding the values of his parents’ traditions and honest to a fault.

****

Neighbour Itiel comes as power cuts drench us in darkness – rather delightful, but only to me. The boy I knew and liked so much as a 12 year old is now 21 and has grown into a muscular, athletic man perhaps an inch taller than me; a decent, thoughtfully quiet young man studying nursing at the Navrongo School of Nursing. He still plays trumpet in the police band. It makes me smile, having given him his first trumpet! So many memories still…

****

I can’t help pondering the thousands of work hours lost to funerals. Men (mostly men; the women are busy cooking inside the yards) sit about eating and drinking and conversing. They are teachers, civil servants, workers; but funerals of distant relatives take immediate precedence over duty and work. Days of work sacrificed, lessons cancelled, meetings delayed, business rescheduled. And someone’s always at a funeral. Death is a constant companion here. I always found it difficult to accept THIS cultural formality in which people live in squalor and die in splendour, beggaring their families in the process. It’s nothing I’ll change though, so on this one I just keep quiet and nod.

The final straw is that even keli-weli is a poor imitation now; the WONDERFUL Ghana-defining smell that I remember so vividly, as plantain chips fried with pepper and spices in aromatic coconut oil in big pans by the roadside, is now fried in ‘Frytol’, processed vegetable oil. It used to be served in a screw of cement bag paper with a cocktail stick. Now it comes in three plastic bags, and a styrofoam box, with a plastic fork.

Wechiga is taking me to another funeral. There are so many! Our ‘team’ gathers with drummers a mile away, drums and dances at the first house and then we all drive three miles south into a rural area off the road. Too hot to walk, Wechiga has borrowed a derelict motorbike. I’m taking him. The bike has no brakes, no mirrors, no lights and none of the instruments work. The front brake has been removed; looking around, I find this is a very common adaptation on Navrongo motorbikes. (and on return to Kenya, I begin to spot many boda-bodas without even front brake cables) “Oh, we don’t use it! It makes us fall off; we use the downer one!” they tell me. The ‘downer one’ is the inefficient rear brake. (For non-bikers: good practice is 75% front brake, which is more efficient, and 25% rear brake to control any skidding). Few bikes have mirrors; they are commonly removed by the dealer on request. I’m not surprised the hospitals and graveyards are so full…

The ceremony is diverting. Full of rituals and comings and goings between the ‘teams’. The dancing is great but raises dust in our eyes. The drumming and whistling contains elements that for a while say, ‘Africa’, although it’s captioned tee shirts rather than goat skins on the entertainment troupe. The boys dancing are young and muscular, black skin shining. They wear baggy smock trousers, and fling their arms about as they jump in the frenetic spasms of the local dance. Bystanders – all smocked for the occasion – stick dirty banknotes to the sweat of their brows. It’s fun to watch, and it IS a shred of old culture, even if half the audience clutch and scroll their phones.

We’re beneath a twisted baobab and the African sun is sliding down the sky. As it gets a few inches from the horizon I tell Wechiga that not only can I not see in the dark, but we have no headlight anyway! We beg to leave; I can see things will go on another hour, although everyone assures me it’ll be over in fifteen minutes. We ride home unsafely.

****

Another day, another funeral… The ‘tradition’ of this second one is a rather watered down version of war dancing. Based on the old dances, with customary mad costumes, it all feels a bit tongue in cheek, without the serious import it would’ve had a few decades ago. These men have inherited the old bangles, slave bracelets, dead tortoises, oddly shaped branches, even perhaps the woven costumes – but what they haven’t inherited is the depth of meaning all theses things once had. They are going through the motions, laughter barely suppressed, their smiles spoiling the gravity of the occasion. These young men are carpenters, clerks, junior government workers, teachers; they have phones in their pockets as they dance and go to church on Sundays. And put commercial plastic wreaths on the Catholic burial mound…

And it’s not even a real burial, as the body was buried earlier in the Catholic cemetery. “The Catholics have won! The white man brought his tradition and killed ours!” exclaims Wechiga. Goats are ‘sacrificed’, blood flows into calabashes, a clay pot is broken and a fake body in a reed mat carried about. Here, in the family compound are buried only some clothes. I’m glad that Akay, Adamba and Grace are buried at home. Go and bury some clothes for them in the Catholic graveyard if you want!

****

I never imagined I’d be glad to leave Navrongo. The compromises I must make are just too uncomfortable. I used to make these adaptations easily, but not so much now. The squalor of life upsets me; perhaps I just don’t rise to the challenge any more? I mean, I know I CAN adapt, but I don’t want to now! Perhaps I’d forgotten how much adaptation I need to make?

At home life is basic, a bit above subsistence, but only just. There’s no time – or imagination – for beautifying and personalising the home. It’s all bare concrete and twisted tin, mess and scurrying scraggy chickens. It’s simple and crude, this life. And HOT!

****

Wechiga agrees to travel south with me. We’re going by ‘public transport’, taking five days. It’s about 16 hours of extreme discomfort in old minibuses. We stop to see Gladys again: his sister still her effusive, laughing, generous self and I’m happy at least that these two old comrades come through my disappointments unscathed.

****

But finally, I’ve decided there IS something for which I’m too old: travelling by African people’s transport. Time WAS, the cattle truck travel was part of the story; proving I could do it – was as tough and accepting as an African. Maybe that was a fable for myself. 2026 Navrongo has challenged me. My fastidious nature objects to the number of compromises I must make to survive here: the basic squalor of this life, and the effort it takes, the HEAT. Time IS, I can’t stand it, get irritable and grumpy and most likely embarrass poor Wechiga.

****

The final straw is that even keli-weli is a poor imitation now: the wonderful Ghana-defining smell that I remember so vividly, as plantain chips fried with pepper and spices in aromatic coconut oil in big pans by the roadside, is now fried in ‘Frytol’, processed vegetable oil. It used to be served in a screw of cement bag paper with a cocktail stick. Now it comes in three plastic bags and a styrofoam box, with a plastic fork.

We stop the penultimate night 100 yards from the Atlantic beaches. Winneba is a bit down and scruffy; the traffic is a minor irritation and the breeze a delight. The town is not touristic; a low rise place with some old decaying colonial buildings and no attractions except a rather nice (cleaned) beach to the west backed by palms. It’s still 34° and horribly sticky, but the ocean breeze tempers it. I can walk the small town with a smile on my face. Popular on Saturday, it’s fun to drink beer and watch the enjoyment of so many young folks frolicking in rollers of the bath water warm ocean.

And what’s at the very centre of town? The prison! Backing onto Ghana’s huge free range toilet and refuse dump (ie. the beach). The sea is lined by ruins. Where in any other towns in the world would be the most expensive real estate, Ghana puts its slums and rubbish. Accra was always thus, a capital city on the coast, facing inland – pointing its backside at the ocean like so many of its inhabitants. So odd, that (many) white men look upon nature as an inspiring asset while so much of Africa looks upon nature as a nuisance and dumping place. You’ll never see flowers planted for beauty in Africa. If they have no edible value, they’ll certainly not be food for the soul.

****

We wander on Winneba beach in the morning. It’s still hot, but there’s a trifle of breeze as we watch local fishermen straining to haul in nets filled with plastic bottles and a few meek fish.

Then we are at the lorry park; a minibus is just loading the last passengers. We’ve timed it well. We crawl into the back seats.

What follows, the last journey in Ghana, is the worst – in a derelict van which should be scrap. It’s so hugely overloaded that soon we have a puncture as we bounce cross-country.

We wait half an hour. There’s not a tree left to give us shade. Another van is sent. It’s even older. The sliding door wobbles without catches and I must now hang onto a stanchion for my life. The front door only has one hinge and must be heaved into position and slammed energetically in the hope of finding purchase. Later, it won’t open. The screen’s crazed like a map of some mad city (it could be Accra, where we are going). There are no instruments left – they’ve just been ripped out leaving their arteries hanging. The steering wheel is a skeleton without a centre. I can hear the crankshaft crashing around and something clangs loudly underneath. And it’s three seats smaller. We are 26 people. This is an 18-seater. It takes ten shouting minutes to decide that we’ll now be squeezed five across on some rows and three people must crush in alongside the driver. I get a fairly short straw: the conductor’s seat by the flapping side door. Oddly, today, I’m quite amused by all this. Maybe the seaside relaxed me?

It’s a couple of excruciating hours to the outskirts of Accra. There’s a new highway being built, but there’s no planning as to how all the traffic will find its way through the large and extensive roadworks, so it’s just a free for all. Red dust billows.

Sometimes, I imagine what it’d be like to be condemned to live here. Then I count my blessings and appreciate Harberton with its petty concerns even more!

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THIS IS EPISODE FOUR – March 5th

I’m putting up TWO episodes today, as I’ve had no internet for month. They’ll appear with the fifth episode first, so SCROLL DOWN to episode FOUR first.

I’ve just returned to Kenya from a 23 day visit to Ghana, at the hottest possible time of year, leaving me exhausted.

****

My timing, arriving from East Africa was ill-judged. Firstly, this is the hottest time to visit this Ghana; up north the temperatures hover consistently around 37° to 39°, five degrees north of the Equator as the sun climbs to the equinox. The coolest temperature was 33°, and that was by the ocean, as humid as a sauna… The sun BURNS down 12 hours a day. It’s no joke taking ANY activity at ANY time, yet I walked miles.

But worse was to arrive and find my old friend Perry seriously ill in Accra. I met Perry when he joined my English family as a Christmas guest in 1987, a student alone in London seeking a ‘Typical British Christmas’. Of course, with a guest from a Ghanaian subsistence farming family – from a small town through which I had ridden on my first Sahara crossing on my motorbike in earlier in 1987 – it was anything but typical.

Poor Perry, try as he did to be host, was very unwell. If I’d been told, I probably wouldn’t have come. There seems to be a social taboo to talk of sickness, but arriving into family dramas of sudden hospital admissions is not easy for hosts or guest.

Thus it was that I travelled north quickly to Tamale, an hour’s flight into the brown dust and burning temperatures of the dry season north; and on three hours to Navrongo by racing-driver piloted minibus; his main proficiencies being with the horn, accelerator and texting on his smartphone on the deteriorating road. It’s a dismally dry landscape, grey soil, burned bush and scraggy shea nut trees. All the big Ghanaian trees have gone – to smart furniture in the West, construction and charcoal for cooking.

****

The town of Navrongo in the furnace of northern Ghana has been a major influence in my life, affecting my moral beliefs, ethical standards and how I look at life at home. It’s been in the background of my thoughts for 37 years, since I arrived on my motorbike two days before Christmas 1989, and met my brother Wechiga and became part of the Adamba family. As much as it’s possible for an outsider, I got inside another culture and saw life through their eyes; lived in their earth-built compound and came to know the old generation, last of the old order in Ghana. Although I didn’t know that then…

Now, in 2026, I’m back in this place I came to know so well on 21 previous visits – and I’m totally lost, physically and culturally – and emotionally.

I knew the old compound was gone – razed to the ground, to my unforgettable shock, between two of my visits after Akay died. Now, narrow footpaths are informal even dustier roads, abuzz with a thousand motorbikes and scooters, old cars and 4X4s. A fluorescent rainbow of Chinese-paint walls and ugly security railings surround hideous mouldering bungalows dotted with rusting satellite dishes; all set in a desert of blowing plastic refuse.

There’s no vernacular architecture, just hubristic designs on display to outdo the neighbours. Where there were fields of groundnuts and millet, grazing cows and earth-built compounds, there’s concrete and zinc, scruffy grey block bungalows and part-finished palaces, all unmaintained. This is considered development.

I’m not sentimental for the old days – when so many died in childbirth or in the first years of life; when hunger was endemic and ancient cruel practices masqueraded as culture. No, now people live longer – to kill themselves of drink, drugs, bad riding, envy, stress and junk food: exploited for the profit of the few.

Mutual support and strict social conventions ruled the the old life; there was a strict moral structure that controlled behaviour. There’s no SHAME any more, like the West. Now the relentless desire to accrue and display material wealth brings murder, jealousy, crime, disillusion, stress and lack of fulfilment. In copying the materialist Western life, the baby’s gone out with the bath water. Akay wouldn’t like this Navrongo. I don’t either.

Akay is still the most impressive person I’ve met in all my African travels; my African ‘mother’, mother to my brothers Perry and Wechiga and my ‘mad sister’, the irrepressible Gladys. It is Akay who directed this family into the 21st century, an illiterate woman with no status as wife of a junior brother, but of the finest natural wisdom. I couldn’t speak with her, but that never mattered: we recognised basic integrity and trust instinctively. She was the force of the family, relentlessly making her groundnut oil and kuli-kuli biscuit from the peanut waste to educate her three surviving children in Navrongo. In other circumstances – girls weren’t educated in her day – she’d have been a natural leader. As it was, people young and old listened to Akay’s advice.

Akay wouldn’t like the place Navrongo has become… She was the strongest proponent of the extended family, one of Africa’s greatest institutions. She forever respected hard work, community and mutual support; championed the belief that what she had, she must share. No beggar went empty away despite the hardships and poverty of her life.

The majority of the neighbours are now strangers in rental bungalows, the new income earner for the wealthier men of Navrongo, from lecturers and employees of the university faculties that were set up here 20 years ago and brought money to the town, but also brought a transient population – flitting by on motorbikes – that decimated the old traditions and values. Most of those who make the money from rents don’t live here any more: sons who live and work in the big cities or abroad but capitalised on the family lands in their poor origins. Many houses are empty, junior family members now mere caretakers.

Community, for so long the lifeblood of Africa, its way of overcoming hardships, is a washy version, everyone ‘too busy’ now, despite having more leisure time than any time in history. Time maybe to fritter away in endlessly scrolling screens and ‘liking’ new friends’ activities.

Akay’s Navrongo is gone.

****

I think back to that first time… It was two days before Christmas 1989, the end of my second Sahara crossing. I was met by Wechiga at the border of Ghana, just ten miles north of Navrongo, having ridden 13,000 miles from Yorkshire on my ‘Big White Moto’, as my BMW motorbike became known as we rode about the area: me suddenly a celebrity. I knew nothing of Wechiga’s culture: how to behave, what habits I must adapt to, what was expected of me. It was in those early days, while I depended on Wechiga’s wisdom inherited from his mother, that I came to respect him so much and built a firm brotherhood – for he knew nothing of my culture and habits either, but guided me instinctively through the minefields of social convention of that old Africa.

In 1989 I remember, many people came in the darkness of that first evening in the original compound in the dusty fields, where my motorbike stood beside the conical mud grain stores with the thatch hats. My big bike was a wonder, its technological presence alien to the earth-built, rounded organic structures around us, decorated in black and white patterns. All the local families came to greet their white guest. By lamplight I could only make out smiling teeth in black faces, but it was warmly sociable and communal and very exciting. Next day, we had to visit all the local houses to pay our respects. It was how life went round in the old Africa.

Now those houses are mostly filled with strangers.

Only a vestige of the old welcomes survives; there’s little of the social formality left. It’s a handshake in passing and “Welcome back. Long time!”, not the formal visitations, ‘sittings’ and extended greetings. It’s a wave from a moped and a shout of, “Eh! Navrossay, you are back!” Navrossay, ‘Navrongo accepts you’, my local name for these 37 years. There’s no time for those old fashioned formalities. We’re all too busy, despite the fact that no one goes laboriously to the well for water – they have big black plastic tanks above their bungalows pumping from boreholes to wash their motorbikes; no one walks to market – they ride; few hoe their compound fields – the only crop is bungalows.

Wechiga and I amble to visit neighbours; some around still know me, but none of them return the visits as formality demanded. There’s little excitement to see the white man; there’s a cheek to the children, a swagger from teenagers who know the worldly wisdom of their smartphones.

Many people I came to know, of all ages, have died anyway. Far more than die in my own circle. It’s a tough life; life expectancy here is lower and fewer people get medical help for ailments. Many die from problems of their own making too.

****

In the 1990s, I built my own block in the then family compound, a design that incorporated traditional with practical modern knowledge. It stood at the edge of the earth-built compound. I imagined it would be absorbed into the compound in time. But in the new nuclear family divisions of Navrongo life, that ‘old fashioned’ compound was razed to the ground in a frenzy of ‘modernisation’; replaced by a two storey block house surrounded by rental rooms, and several ugly rental bungalows. My idiosyncratically quaint round house with its black and white patterns ended up marooned in the remnants of the fields.

Jonathan’s House is now a ruin unworthy of repair; nothing is maintained here and I’ve been away for eight years. It’s stained and gloomy, an eyeless face. The roof is weak, the window frames rotted and eaten by termites. Children have chalked their alphabets where once I had traditional designs.

I made a little museum of traditional items: old pots, one or two unbroken ones rescued from a pit into which all Akay’s carefully safeguarded earthen pots were thrown during the clear out. I collected pots, calabashes, Uncle Gwea’s elephant-headed walking stick, the old men’s tobacco pipes. Very few survive, cracked and ignored in the ruin of Jonathan’s House. I could preserve them, I suppose – but mine’s another culture. Why bother?

No one here wants to remember that their parents and grandparents carried water from distant wells on their heads in fine earthen water pots with incised designs. It’s an embarrassment to preserve memories of their ‘backward ways’. Now, all have plastic containers and vacuum flasks from China, complete with ubiquitous peony decorations. I guess I’ll forget MY tradition and let the pots crumble with the house. No one here looks to the past, that’s a Western tradition… Perhaps my house should be best seen as a metaphor for the lost life of Navrongo. A decaying ruin covered in childish charcoal graffiti disintegrating into an ocean spume of plastic filth. I must ignore nostalgia; perhaps its value always rested in the story not the actuality..?

****

Navrongo has become one of the dirtiest towns I have seen in all Africa (and I’ve seen some FILTHY towns). The plastic problem is disheartening. To one who tuts censoriously at any piece of blowing litter in my home village, it’s distressing. Rotting plastic carpets the ground, flutters from every dead dry season plant and crunches underfoot. The biggest culprit is a piece of total commercial exploitation: half litre plastic bags of water. Sold as ‘pure and hygienic’, it’s almost certainly tap water made pure and hygienic with Ghana’s taxes. It’s the con of the century: tap water as luxury. It tastes of cheap plastic and the bag is discarded in a moment, to blow for evermore about the environment.

In places it’s ankle deep: single-use bottles; ubiquitous black plastic bags, the reflex reach of every trader; a million water bags; medicine containers, used ‘disposable’ nappies, sanitary towels; sachets from every sort of processed food, Chinese plastic shoes by the thousand – (‘buy Chinese, buy again next year’); sachets from killer alcoholic spirits; soap bags, cooking oil sacks, tattered remains of plastic mosquito nets, fertiliser bags, cement bags, margarine sachets (yuk!), carrier bags, styrofoam junk food containers; household utensils, ‘convenience’ food wrappers, bags, bags, bags, bags, bags, bags, bags. We don’t deserve this fragile planet – and in her wisdom I believe Akay would have sensed that.

****

Maybe I settled a bit once my initial disappointment was past? I tried not to see the filth and pollution, to be more philosophical about the fact that in 37 years almost all the world has gone the same ways. I think I knew, rather than suspected, that this visit would be a disillusioning visit.

Perhaps I just had to finish my Navrongo Story?

*****

I’ll post the conclusion of this Ghana story shortly, a little more upbeat I hope, before I return to Uganda and no internet at the weekend.