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AFRICA-
A WORLD IN PROGRESS

This book is a gift to the library by
Dr.Pasupuleti Gopala Krishnayya,

President, Krishnayya's News
Service and Publications, New York

City, as part of a collection of
American books given in memory of

His Beloved Twin Brothers

Rama (Med.Stu.) & Bala Krishnayya

(Eng.)

I

An American Family in West Africa

VIRGINIA CONE

Illustrated

An Exposition-Banner Book

EXPOSITION PRESS

NEW YORK

EXPOSITION PRESS INC., 386 Park Avenue South, New York 16, N.Y.

FIRST EDITION

1960 by Virginia Cone. All rights reserved, including the right of
reproduction in whole or in part in any form, except for brief quota-
tions in critical essays and reviews. Manufactured in the United
States of America.

To

MA is IE and WALTEB
who made Ghana a reality

This book is a gift to the library by
Dr.Pasupuleti Gopala Krishnayya,

President, Krishnayya's News
Service and Publications, New York

City, as part of a collection of
American books given in memory of

His Beloved Twin Brothers

Rama (Med.Stu.) & Bala Krishnayya

(Eng.)

Preface

THE SEEDS from which this book sprung were planted when my
husband came home from World War II. I have always been
fascinated by his stories of his two and one-half years in Africa.
I was envious when he went alone to Ghana's independence
celebrations in 1957. When the opportunity came in 1958 for
all the family to go to the new University College of Ghana
on the west coast of Africa for one year, there was no hesitation.

It was not always an easy year but it was always an interest-
ing one. West Africa is an exciting place, ever changing, devel-
oping, experimenting and full of eager people who are "going
places."

Friends who had lived in Ghana for several years told me
early that if I didn't write down my impressions in the begin-
ning, I could never do it. Dr. William Hudson, president of
Blackburn College, my alma mater, was most persuasive. So
I wrote them first for my family at home and then decided to
share them with others who are interested in the new Africa.
I hope people who read this will be challenged to say, "Why
can't we do something like this?"

Here are the problems, adjustments, and frustrations that
face an American family living 7500 miles away from home
in unaccustomed tropical heat. Here are also the new experi-
ences, joys, and real fun that one faces in day-to-day living in
a different kind of world.

Mary Kingsley, the famous missionary, wrote that after a
tour of West Africa one always wants to return. She is so right,
for we are now planning our next trip to Nigeria.

v. c.

Contents

GOOD-BYE TO INDIANA IS

HOME ON THE HILL 20

DOWNTOWN TO ACCRA 32

CHOP EVERY DAY 43

THE LITTLE JOYS OF LIFE 51

CLASSES FOR THE PEOPLE 57

CHRISTMAS IN THE TROPICS 66

ON TREK 70

BICYCLES AND LAGOS 79

SPECIAL OCCASIONS 84

GOING HOME 93

CHAPTER I

Good-bye to Indiana

IT WAS OUR LAST DAY at home. Our bags were packed, our car
had been delivered to its new owner, and the house keys were
on the table ready to be handed over to the teachers who would
live in our house. Very close behind us were all the minor
tremors and stresses preliminary to preparing for our journey
to West Africa. We had received the numerous shots and done
the thousand little things that precede the final exhausted
"good-bye."

Shopping and packing for ourselves and three children had
been hectic enough, but our twenty-one-year-old daughter,
Leslie, had decided to get married at the end of her summer
camp job. So we had had to give a large church wedding just
two days before we took off. That whole final week I felt as
though life were a jumbled jigsaw puzzle. There were farewell
parties, the wedding with packages and guests arriving, clothes
to be bought for the wedding, clothes to be bought for London
and for Africa, the house to prepare for rental for the year, last
minute bills our life was a scramble of "last minutes" and in
the back of my mind I kept hoping that all the pieces would fall
into place by Tuesday, August 26, 1958.

I had little time to think about the familiar conveniences
that were a part of our lifenewspapers, daily mail and milk
deliveries to our door, telephone shopping, street lights, bus
service, a drugstore on the corner things we'd sharply miss.
Perhaps it is just as well to be frantically busy and have no time
for doubts or questions. The wheels were in motion. There was
no going back, doubts notwithstanding. Fall was already in

14 AFRICA A WORLD IN PROGRESS

the air that August day and although Africa's brilliant sun and
palm-tree coast were familiar to us through pictures, it was
quite impossible to realize we would soon be a part of that
exotic scene. That day it just seemed a world away from Purdue
and Indiana. We finally fell into bed the last night at 2 A.M. and
at 3 A.M. we were up again with six-year-old George who had
a temperature of 103 and a nasty sore throat. I immediately
unpacked one of my precious bottles of acromycin and started
giving him regular doses. Sleep was quite out of the question
and the only thing that kept going through my mind was that
the plane left O'Hare International Airport at 9:30 A.M. and
that we all must be on it. We were, which still seems a minor
miracle.

Those last-minute catastrophes are amusing now but they
definitely weren't then. Ten miles from home, George discovered
that he had left his pillow behind and began crying that he
had to have it. Fortunately our friend Michell Hirst, who was
driving us to the airport, has steady nerves and unending
patience so he turned around quickly amid the moans and
protestations and drove back to get it. Then we had to drive
madly through the rush-hour traffic to get to the airport on time.
It seemed we'd only gotten through die door with our eleven
pieces of luggage when we heard our names over the loud-
speaker asking us to please board. The friends who had come
to see us off all ran down the wrong stairs with us (and of
course had to run right back up) trying to help us carry
cameras, typewriter, brief case, dolls, duffel bag, pillow, and
small bags. Michell insists that in the shuffle and melee he
kissed our very dignified minister, Reverend P. Ammerman, a
fond good-bye instead of me.

We pushed through the gate to board, and there was our
Stratocruiser in the bright sunshine, long and powerful and
ready to go. We wistfully looked back at the airport and at our
friends behind the barriers and then climbed the steps quickly
and entered the plane. Our seats were well forward, my
husband and I on one side of the plane with nineteen-year-old

GOOD-BYE TO INDIANA 15

Jan sitting between small Henrietta and George on the other
side. In a few minutes the door was closed. The engines started
up one by one with a deafening roar and revved up to take-off
speed; and then very gently the great plane wheeled around and
began to taxi across the air field. It turned, stopped, and we
could see the long runway stretching straight in front of the
plane. The plane trembled and suddenly, with barely a jolt,
it began to rise. The people on the ground looked small and
far away, the houses seemed like doll houses set in a row, the
roads from Q'Hare field dwindled to strips of ribbon, and the
Chicago suburb became a story-book Lilliput. We were off to
adventure! London tomorrow morning the first leg of our jour-
ney to West Africa.

For the first time in months, I had time to think. For it was
just three months since we definitely decided to go to Ghana,
on the west coast of Africa, for a year. Three months was a
very short time to tear up our house, beg for leaves of absence
from Purdue University where we both taught, get all our
shots, passports, visas, air reservations, sell the car, and marry
off our daughter. We also had made reservations and planned
a five-weeks' tour of England and the Continent on our way out
to Africa. I felt like the soldier who waits tensely for the big
battle-day and when it begins, says with relief, "No matter what
happens, thank God, at last I am on the way."

This was the children's and my first trip to Africa, but it
was my husband's third trip. Win had been in the Nineteenth
Weather Squadron attached to the Air Transport Command
during World War II and had been stationed in several parts
of Africa, including Ghana, for two and one-half years. He
had also spent a year and a half in the Midddle East. After
the war, he kept on studying, doing research, and writing on
Africa. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago,
and now was Associate Professor in the History Department
at Purdue University. In 1957, he took a sabbatical and spent
a month in Ghana at the time that that country received its
independence from Great Britain. It was the first black country

16 AFRICA A WORLD IN PROGRESS

tp get dominion status within the British Commonwealth. Win
has several friends in Ghana and had taken excellent colored
slides of the University College of Ghana, Accra, and surround-
ing countryside. It was not a completely strange place to which
we were going or so I told myself.

I had done some studying and reading on Ghana and West
Africa and I did not take lightly the tales of the sinister deadli-
ness of the West Coast climate. For years this part of Africa
has been known as the white man's grave. Graham Greene
wrote, "The phrase 'the white man's grave' has become a music-
hall clich^ to those who have never seen the little crumbling
cemeteries of the West Coast." It has also been said that no one
ever worries about the terms of his pension if he's assigned to
the West Coast, for he never lives long enough to retire. We
knew life had improved there due to mosquito control, modern
medicine, and better diet. We also knew that the family who
had lived in the house that we were to have in the coming year
at the University College had lost their small child just before
Christmas last year with typhoid fever. We didn't share our
families' and friends' view that we were completely mad to
take three children and rush off to Africa of all places! They
plainly said that if we were sane we would have gone to some
nice civilized place like England or Switzerland.

But we wanted to go to Ghana to teach in the new Uni-
versity College for a year. We wanted to meet the students
and people firsthand and see how they lived and what they
were thinking. We both felt strongly that Africa will play an
increasingly decisive role in the world in the next decade and
that Ghana would be a good place to observe. We would be
the first Americans to teach throughout Ghana in the Extra-
Mural Studies program. When Ghana was an English colony,
still called the Gold Coast, it drew few Americans. We were
looking forward to it enthusiastically. In the age of atoms and
jets, West Africa has lost much of its harsh, exciting exclusive-
ness. It is no longer the end of the line or only for those bent on
power or self-sacrifice or solitude.

GOOD-BYE TO INDIANA 17

Our children, like children everywhere, didn't want to pull
up roots and leave their friends and school and home. In the
summer we heard our little boy telling a neighbor, Mrs. Free-
man, that he would be glad to go to Africa so he could hurry
up and get it over with and come back home. But by the time
we had toured England for three weeks, visited the World's
Fair in Brussels, climbed the Eiffel Tower in Paris, and shivered
at the top of Mt. Blanc, they were ready and anxious to go on
to Rome. They knew that that was the last stop before Africa
and our new home. Any kind of a house would do fine after
living out of suitcases and in hotels for five weeks. Now they
could not wait and counted the days until we would be there.
We took all of our fall clothes down to the American Express
in Rome and had them shipped home.

At last we left Rome for Accra. Planes usually fly over the
Sahara at night, as it is less bumpy due to cooler air currents.
The plane was crowded, as it had come from London and was
full of families returning from annual leave for another year. It
was hot, and thick with cigarette smoke, and it was difficult
to sleep or settle down with children going up and down the
aisle for water every five minutes. Babies cried, and my tweed
skirt felt hot and itchy. I could imagine I was already in the
tropics. It was a beautiful, clear night with a full moon. As I
finally settled myself, my thoughts were 20,000 feet below, and
I seemed to hear the camel trains padding slowly on their long
journey to the far-famed Bight of Benin a thousand years ago.

Suddenly it was six o'clock, and we were setting down for
breakfast in Kano in northern Nigeria. Kanoour first look at
Africa! As we stepped stiffly from the plane, a strange scent
made up of flowers, of hot earth, and of blistering asphalt met
us. Kano is a few miles south of the dry, burning heat of the
Sahara desert. We could feel the very breath of Africa as we
had lukewarm coffee under the swinging fans in the airport
lounge. Kano is one of the busiest and most important airports
in Africa. British, Dutch, French, Belgian, American, and other
lines use it as an essential stop on their route across the conti-

18 AFRICAA WOULD IN PROGRESS

nent. It handles 1,000 plane movements a month and 150,000
passengers a year. Sitting in that modern airport, it was hard
to realize that around this ancient and fantastic city 130,000
people live. The airplane is probably the most beautiful and
exhilarating tool of travel we are ever likely to invent. But it
has a disadvantage in that it gives the traveller no time to pre-
pare for the new. Each journey is an assault on the senses and
imagination. You spend the first hour after you land trying to
catch up with your body. That was my reaction to Kano; I
couldn't quite believe I was in Africa. It was as unreal as the
the vultures sitting confidently on top of the buildings and
peering down at us.

After refueling, we took off for Accra, some 750 miles further
southwest. At first the ground was sandy with scrub bushes and
scattered rows of crops. The scene changed and there were slug-
gish, red rivers, curving their way to the sea; spreading between
them was the jungle, deep and wild. Then it thinned again,
and there were more rivers and lagoons and red salt marsh
and then, suddenly, the seaa sea of deepest violet, moved by
huge rolling breakers and ringed with palm trees, brilliantly
green on a line of silver sand. The tiny footpaths and villages
grew larger and clearer as the plane approached Accra. We
fled over the University College. It stood on an emerald hill,
in the brilliant sunshine, gleaming white with bright-red tile
roofs. We fastened our seat belts. After a jolt and a few bumps,
we settled down. The long journey was over. Indiana was
7,500 miles away.

A breath of sweet, warm air from the sun-and-rain-soaked
airport came in when a brisk-looking official entered the plane
and thoroughly sprayed plane and passengers with D.D.T. This
is routine in tropical countries because of mosquitos and insects
which may be transported from one country to another. As we
walked down the steps of the plane, the intense heat rose
towards us from the baking asphalt. Even the cool, white
buildings of the air terminal shimmered in the heat. The tweed
coat over my arm seemed unbearably heavy. Inside the customs

GOOD-BYE TO INDIANA 19

room it was not quite so blindingly bright, but just as hot. We
filled out immigration forms, health forms, and a customs decla-
ration. We were treated with great courtesy by efficient African
clerks and hostesses in neat uniforms. Finally, we claimed our
luggage in a large room filled with chaos, Europeans and Nige-
rian traders and staggered out with dry throats and Africa-
dazzled eyes into the bright afternoon. This was to be home for
the next year.

CHAPTER II

Home on the Hill

GHANA HAS A POPULATION of close to 6,000,000 of which about
16,000 are non-African, a ratio of one to three hundred. The
country is over 99 per cent Negro. It covers some 92,000 square
miles, roughly the size of Indiana and Illinois combined, and
comprises a coast line, forest belt, and grassland. Illiteracy is
calculated at over 70 per cent of the population although it is
improving rapidly with 680,000 children now in primary schools.

Ghana is divided into three separate sections: southern
Ghana which includes the Accra plain, a semidesert strip along
the coast; the Ashanti Kingdom in the rain-forest belt in the
middle; and the Northern Territory in the dry savannah land
in the north. Ghana was called the Gold Coast State until it
was renamed in 1957 at the time it received its independence.
While most historians agree that the present peoples of Ghana
came as conquerors of aboriginal tribes who used stone im-
plements and made elaborately decorated pottery, their origins
have been the subject of several theories.

Of these, the prevailing theory links the Akan people of
modern Ghana by direct descent with the people of the great
empire of Ghana, which flourished in the western French Sudan
(what now comprises the Mali Federation) more than a thou-
sand years ago. This empire had reached a high degree of
civilization when it was overthrown by the Moslems in 1076.
Many of its people fled southwards, eventually, it is believed,
as far as Ashanti and the coastal plains.

The British established a foothold in the sixteenth century.
Although they came with the Portuguese, the Dutch, the Danes,

HOME ON THE HILL 21

the Swedes, and the Prussians, they alone became dominant.
It was not easy. There were eight different Ashanti wars, and
the British intervened to help the more civilized Fanti tribes
along the coast resist aggression by the warlike Ashanti. These
wars caused so much trouble that British public opinion called
for the English to pull out of the Gold Coast altogether. As
Joyce Gary wrote, "We didn't want the damned place/' But
in 1874 the British consolidated the various coastal settlements
into the Gold Coast Colony and it became part of the empire.
The British marched against Kumasi, the Ashanti capital, and
burned it to the ground in 1874. There followed a truce until
1895 when the British demanded that King Prempeh accept a
protectorate. When he refused, he was conquered. Ashanti was
added to the British Crown in 1901.

Then came the hassle over the Golden Stool. This throne,
sacred to the Ashanti kings, is much more than a mere symbol.
It was supposed to have been handed down from heaven in a
black cloud, and it is considered literally to be the soul of the
Ashanti people. The British governor of the Gold Coast ill-
advisedly demanded that the Ashanti surrender their revered
and holy stool for him to sit on and to send to Queen Victoria.
They refused, provoking the eighth and last Ashanti war. The
British won the war but they didn't get the stool, as patriotic
Ashantis hid it. It was not found until 1921. The Ashanti served
notice that if the British took the stool they would go to war
again. This time the British knew better and permitted it to
remain in Ashanti possession. King Prempeh returned from exile.
In 1935, the British recognized the Golden Stool as the sacred
symbol of the Ashanti nation, and relations have been smooth
since then.

The coastal strip and the Gold Coast Colony proper have
had more experience in democratic procedures than any other
region in British Africa except that of South Africa. In 1844,
Fanti chiefs united themselves into a ''bond" under British law
and in 1850 they created a "Legislative Assembly of Native
Chiefs Upon the Gold Coast." In 1868, they made the first

22 AFRICA A WORLD IN PROGRESS

attempt to establish independent government. Later they formed
the first real political party ever known to Black Africa, the
"Gold Coast Aborigines Rights Protection Society." The Gold
Coast's first constitution, the Guggisberg Constitution, came
in 1925. They received another constitution in 1946 under the
governorship of Sir Alan Burns. The Legislative Council chosen
under this constitution had a Negro majority, the first in the
history of British Africa.

Then came Kwame Nkrumah, and eventual independence
in 1957, Kwame Nkrumah, Prime Minister of Ghana, has said,
"It is far better to be free to govern or misgovern yourself than
to be governed by anybody else." His one aim from the time of
his college days was independence for his country. He says he
studied Gandhi's political philosophy of nonviolence with great
interest He was bora to illiterate parents in Nkroful in the
Western Province of the Gold Coast in 1909. Nkroful is a typical
West African village composed of mud and wattle houses and
bamboo compounds. He lived there with his mother until he
was nearly three years old. They then joined his father who was
a goldsmith in Half Assini some fifty miles away.

Kwame Nkrumah has come a long way from his origin. It
was his mother who talked his father into paying his school
fees and starting him in the local Catholic school. He liked
school. He was afraid that his father wouldn't have the money
to continue his fees, so he started raising chickens at seven
cents each to help with the school fees and to buy books. After
eight years at the elementary school, he started teaching school.
Eventually, due to the encouragement of a visiting principal,
he enrolled at the Teacher Training College in Accra. It became
part of the new Prince of Wales College at Achimota outside
Accra in 1928, and Nkrumah was in the first group of students
to be trained at Achimota as teachers. He writes that he felt
very fortunate to live side by side with the secondary-school
students and was able to exchange ideas and learn from them.

It was here that he came under the influence of Dr. Kwegyir
Aggrey, Assistant Vice-Principal and the first African member

HOME ON THE HILL 23

of the staff. He was profoundly impressed by Dr. Aggrey's
philosophy that the black and white races should work together.
Aggrey was opposed to any racial segregation and was proud of
his color. His favorite saying was, "You can play a tune of sorts
on the white keys, and you can play a tune of sorts on the black
keys, but for harmony you must use both the white and the
black." Aggrey had spent twenty years in the United States,
and he spoke of it with enthusiasm and affection. It was because
of Nkrumah's great admiration for Aggrey both as a man and
scholar that he decided to further his studies in the United
States. It took eight more years of teaching and saving money,
plus financial help from relatives, before he arrived in America
and enrolled at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. He received
his degree in economics there in 1939 and a Master's degree in
philosophy from University of Pennsylvania in 1943.

He was in the United States ten years. He says that these
were years of sorrow, loneliness, poverty, and hard work. He
was always in need of money and worked at any job from dish-
washing to preaching in Negro churches on Sunday to earn
enough money to eat.

He tried to learn techniques of organizations. He says he
knew that when he returned to the Gold Coast he would be
faced with this problem, for he knew that whatever the program
for the solution of the colonial question would be, success would
depend upon the organization adopted. He acquainted himself
with the Republicans, Democrats, Communists, Trotskyites,
N.A.A.C.P. and he even became a Freemason of the thirty-
second degree. Always he dreamed of returning to the Gold
Coast and leading the fight for independence. While in America,
he wrote a pamphlet on this called "Towards Colonial Freedom."

In 1945, he went to Britain for further study at the London
School of Economics, quickly became involved in West African
politics, and returned to the Gold Coast in 1947 as General
Secretary of the United Gold Coast Convention. Two years
later, he broke away to form the revolutionary Conventions

24 AFRICA A WORLD IN PROGRESS

People's Party of which he is still leader and life Chairman. Im-
prisoned for political agitation in 1950 by the British, he was
released (because of popular support in the 1951 election) to
form a government as Leader of Government Business and later
as first Prime Minister of the Gold Coast. In 1954 and 1956, his
party was overwhelmingly returned to power on its firm policy
of "self government now." On his forty-seventh birthday, Sep-
tember 17, 1956, he declared, amid scenes of wild jubilation,
the date for his country's independence March 6, 1957.

Ghana is a rich country. It is the largest producer of cocoa
in the world, supplying more than one-third of the total world
crop. Every cocoa farm is African-owned. The Ghana Cocoa
Marketing Board, a semistate organization, supervises the indus-
try on a broad basis, buys and sells the crops, accumulating
funds for lean years, and contributes heavily to the Ghana
economy. Cocoa is the symbol of social advance and progress
in Ghana. It provided most of the funds for the new University
College of Ghana located on Legon Hill.

The University College was founded in 1948 on recommen-
dation of the Asquith Commission on Higher Education in the
Colonies. As a temporary measure, the buildings of the Teacher
Training College at Achimota were handed over to house the
teaching departments, but in 1948 the government presented to
the college more than five square miles of land surrounding
Legon Hill, a five-hundred-foot hill rising from the Accra Plains,
eight miles north of Accra. On the slopes of this hill and on the
plain reaching down to the Dodowah road, the Halls of Resi-
dence, the teaching buildings, a library to hold 250,000 books,
and many houses for the academic staff have been built. The
top of the hill itself is crowned by the immense block of the
Convocation Hall and the administrative buildings, from the
middle of which rises a 120-foot tower built with a special
grant from the government to celebrate Ghana's independence.

Achimota (four miles from Legon, out of which the Uni-
versity College sprang), as a secondary school and Teacher
Training College, was one of the best-known educational institu-

HOME ON THE HILL 25

tions in British West Africa. Its influence has been profound.
Prime Minister Nkrumah, the former Ambassador to the United
States, Mr. Chapman, Finance Minister Gbedemah, Cabinet
Minister Botsio, and many of the contemporary generation
of Ghana's leaders attended the college. Achimota means "Speak
no name*' and its origin goes far back. Slaves trying to escape
would steal away from the coastal stockades five miles away
and, if lucky, get as far as Achimota for their first stop. Friendly
Africans would hide them even as American slaves were hidden
by the underground railway in the United States. Naturally it
was too dangerous to mention the names of the escapees or the
ones who helped them.

The University College at Legon has established academic
standards as high as those of more venerable universities in the
Western world. It has avoided the temptation to compromise its
standards in order to quickly produce larger numbers of trained
men and women a feat of some magnitude in a country where
high nationalistic feeling makes tremendous demands for quali-
fied people.

The college is under the aegis of the Inter-University Council
for Higher Education Overseas. This organization, with head-
quarters in London, deals mainly with the recruiting of staff and
promotions. In addition to the College at Legon, the council
also supervises the Universities at Idadan (Nigeria), Uganda,
Southern Rhodesia, the West Indies, Khartoum, Malta, and
Hong Kong,

The principal of the University College of Legon, and 90
per cent of the faculty are English; the rest are African. As
more teachers qualify, the percentage of Africans on the staff
increases. A special program with the University of London safe-
guards the maintenance of the highest academic standards.

Twenty-one teaching departments in the university are
grouped into five faculties: Arts, Social Studies, Physical
Sciences, Biological Sciences, and Agriculture. In 1958 there
were 550 students and 140 faculty a ratio of four students to
every teacher. We recalled the huge classes in the States. By

28 AFRICA A WORLD IN PROGRESS

now it is a clich6 to moan about overcrowded classrooms, at
any level of education. Still, one thinks wistfully of the possi-
bilities of such a ratio. In the next few years, the university
expects to double its enrollment. The government already has
spent thirty million dollars for the new buildings. The university
is one of the show places in Ghana. The people, of course, are
tremendously proud of it. It symbolizes growth, freedom, and
light hope for a better life, a richer, more significant life.

We were met at the airport by a university car from the
Extra-Mural Department for which Win would teach. The
driver was smiling broadly, happy to greet Master and Madame,
and drove us to the university, through its impressive gateway,
down the long shady avenue lined with brilliant flowering
trees through to the college compound to our own furnished
bungalow.

Here we found the luxuries of the West: electricity, modern
plumbing, telephone, refrigerator and electric stove. Too, we
had access to the college buttery. Accra was only eight miles
away with modern department stores and the cinema. All staff
houses on the college compound were concrete, painted white,
and with red tile roofs. Furniture in all the houses was the same,
though this removed the need to keep up with the Joneses, it
lacked spice and variety.

The interior decoration revealed a sensible tropical influence.
Everything was open to get all the available breeze. The long
living-dining room had four sets of doors on each side. It was
not screened, for the belief was that screens cut down the
breeze. It was fine, we discovered, until you had an invasion
of insects. The entire bedroom-bath area was screened. We
breathed a sigh of relief since we had supposed we would have
to sleep under mosquito nets.

There were no curtains, shades, nor Venetian blindsjust
shutters that could be closed if necessary. The walls were solid
white, which gave an illusion of coolness. The floors and ceilings
were of fine Ghanaian mahogany. In each of the three bedrooms

HOME ON THE HILL 27

there were twin beds, a dresser, bedside table, and a chair. I
remarked to my husband that twin beds pushed together did
not make a double bed and wasn't this apt to put a strain on
marriages out here? He explained that due to the tropical heat,
a double bed would create a greater strain. There is the true
story of the senior officer in the university who sent back to
England for a real double bed and innerspring mattress. In due
time the bed arrived. The first of the month came and he
received no salary check. On inquiry, the bursar told him the
double bed and freight charges had used up his salary for that
month. This is the only record we have of the customary double
bed being brought to the university compound.

The living room had six easy chairs and six small tables, a
desk and bookcases in one end, a buffet and dining table in
the other end. This was quite adequate. The kitchen with its
stainless steel sink, hot water heater, big, rough tables, small
electric cooker, as they call the stove, and refrigerator was so
much more than I had hoped for that I never gave a thought
to my jade green electric kitchen back home. It also had a small
screened safe, which held flour, sugar, tea, etc., with four legs
set in cans of kerosened water which supposedly discouraged
ants. But our ants were hard to discourage, and I became used
to shaking them out of the sugar bowl, flour and cookie tins.
Next to the kitchen were the "stores," or pantry with lock and
key. I confess I never locked any food away. If our steward
occasionally helped himself, that seemed less trouble than car-
rying the key around with me and expecting "things to happen,"

From our back veranda we looked across nearly an acre of
short mowed grass dotted with flowering shrubs and two trees
which the children soon learned to climb like monkeys. Here
we could sit in the late afternoon and see the ever-changing,
troubled sky. Later, the harmattan sun hung in the sky like a
round copper ball and always at dusk we could see the big
planes from New York, London, and Johannesburg set down at
the airport just a few miles from us. The airport was just
enough higher than we that we could actually see them land.

28 AFRICA A WORLD IN PROGRESS

We could also see the rooftops of two little African villages and
in the distance on a clear day we could get a glimpse of the
sea. It was a scene of which we never tired.

The front of our house was clothed richly with vines and
blooming bushes. One bush had long, waxy, white flowers which
bloomed about every two weeks. The blossoms would open at
night. The entire house would be filled with this heavy exotic
scent which was quite overpowering. It would still be with us
at breakfast time. My husband always felt that such sensual
fragrance drifting over our breakfast table was quite wasted, as
we spent most of the time urging the two smaller children to
"eat your oatmeal," "drink your orange juice," and "stop quar-
reling with your sister."

I was grieved when the yard boys attacked all the profuse
greenery with machetes and clippers. For a few days things
would look shorn and disciplined, then almost overnight, fresh
shoots and new tendrils would be invading over and tinder and
through the windows. The speed of growth was fantastic. I
understood later why it had to be cut so ruthlessly.

Back of the house was really a tropical garden. We had
stalks of bananas, fresh pineapples, and pawpaws all year.
There were three mulberry trees with delicious berries, and
watermelon vines. I had my eye on one melon for days waiting
for just the right moment. But alas, so did some little African
boy, and he was quicker than I.

Morning comes early in Africa. One's daytime life is gov-
erned by the sun's authorityits ascent, blazing noon sway, and
late-day waning. At six o'clock in the morning the day looks
promising and beautiful; the sky is clear and pure blue. It is
cool then, and that is the best part of the day. Stewards, "small-
boys," cooks, gardeners, and mammies with boxes of food on
their heads are all going to work. The whole compound is astir
with laughter, talk, and movement. Everyone is filled with
energy. By midmorning the pace begins to slow, the sun's rays
grow fierce, tiles become hot under your feet, and metal is like
fire to the touch. By noon things come to a standstill. Offices and

HOME ON THE HILL 29

stores close until 2 or 2:30 P.M. School is over for the day. There
is not a breath of air, and your clothes stick moistly to you.
Everyone is content to lie motionless during early afternoon.
Then the sun begins to wane and at four o'clock tea revives you
and you venture forth again. Soon after six o'clock, darkness
falls swiftly. The sun seems to drop behind the darkening hori-
zon, and a breeze comes in from the sea.

As far as staff was concerned, we were most fortunate. We
were three adults and two small children, but our ideas of
service were modest. We hired a smallboy, Andrews, from
French Togoland who was supposed to clean the house, do
dishes and run errands. For this we paid him five pounds (four-
teen dollars) a month; we paid another smallboy three dollars
a month to wash the car once a week. The university furnished
gardeners, night watchmen, garbage collectors, and all repair
and maintenance. You were supposed to "dash" them (African
for gift) on special occasions or holidays. "Dash" is a word used
in many ways. It can be money or goods given for a special
favor or service; it can be used as a bribe to get special con-
sideration.

We bought a washing machine the second day we were in
Ghana. (I did the cooking, as the children were used to my
American style.) Andrews soon persuaded us to let the car boy
go and said he would wash the car and get breakfast if I'd raise
him to twenty dollars a month and call him "Steward." Being
used to American wage scales, I was easy and gave in without
even an argument. A bachelor friend of ours didn't fare so well.
He took a house in Accra and to his surprise found himself with
a staff of five people: a cook, steward, night watchman, laundry-
man, and car boy. He had spoken too loudly of his needs within
hearing of interested ears. That was the usual "help" situation
if you did not live on the college compound. It seemed that
everyone, but everyone, had nephews, brothers, cousins, and
friends who were experienced, able, and readily available.

It is hopeless to ask the African servant a direct question,
for they want to please and always answer, "Yes, please"

30 AFRICA A WORLD IN PROGRESS

whether it's "Can you make a cheese sottffteP* or "Do you under-
stand that you're to turn the oven off at eleven o'clock?" It does
not matter in the least that they do not understand a word you
say, they'll smile and say, "Yes, please." I tried to trap small-
boy Andrews by asking, "What time do you turn off the oven?'*
The reply was the same, "Yes, please."

Proper clothing is a "must" in the tropics. We had sent our
trunks months before we arrived in Ghana, but to our disap-
pointment, there was a custom's strike in Takoradi and our
trunks were still 150 miles away. We rented bedding, cutlery,
and dishes from the university. Clothing was something else. I
cut the legs and sleeves off the children's pajamas and washed
their playclothes every day. Janice and I had one cotton skirt
and blouse apiece. We called them our uniforms. My husband
was a sly one and had carried enough summer things all through
Europe to do him. I refused to pay the high prices for more
summer clothes, so it was like Christmas the day our trunks
finally arrived. Even old clothes had acquired charm and beauty.

Old-timers say if the newcomer doesn't get sick the first two
weeks that he is in West Africa, he is immune to the water,
germs, and new food. On our tenth day in Ghana, Janice came
down with African stomach "palaver." She knew this was the
end, and at times did not care. She ran a high temperature, had
vomiting and diarrhea, and perspired profusely. The college
doctor came every day. He was cool, calm, and collected. I dis-
tinctly was not. Win and I would be up once an hour all night
fixing glucose and water, since Janice was dehydrated, giving
medicine, and putting cold packs on her head when we weren't
mopping up the floor. After five days, she quickly recovered
and her first comment on getting out of bed was, "I've lost
weight. How wonderful!" I muttered darkly about nineteen-
year-olds as I staggered off to rest. Fortunately, none of the rest
of us were ill a day.

Eventually we began to catch on, settle down, and feel at
home. I asked friends who had lived in Ghana what they did
how they spent their daysand they seemed to me to be pur-

HOME ON THE HILL 31

posefully vague. Now I began to understand. Everything takes
more time and energy. People drop in. At home, they call first
to see if it is convenient. In Ghana, if they have driven ninety
miles to visit, they are welcome whether it is convenient or not.
Another can of something is opened without apologies.

Friends and neighbors drop in constantly for coffee, a
squash or tea, and conversation. There is no television, the near-
est movie to the university is eight miles away, and the radio is
not especially entertaining, so people read more, and it becomes
increasingly easy to take a siesta every afternoon. Though feel-
ing that nothing has been accomplished, by 9 P.M. one is
exhausted. Schedules are suddenly not as important as they
were. There is a vague feeling that the body is being tried by
the tropical heat, and that one must adjust and not fight it.

CHAPTER III

Downtown to Accra

ACCRA, THE CAPITAL of Ghana, is a city of contrasts. It is on the
seacoast, but has no real harbor. It has large department stores,
but outside their doors by the open drain is the improvised
counter, soap box, rough table or bucket displaying penny
goods, cigarettes, and small-portion groceries. Beside it squats
the vendor, usually a woman, her babies suckling or sleeping,
while her other small children play at her feet.

In Accra, there are the soft-spoken, friendly Ghanaian, but
also the Yorubas, Hausas, and Ibos from Nigeria, British govern-
ment workers, missionaries of many sects, Western-educated
Africans, politicians, and a confusion of Syrian, Lebanese, Indian,
Greek, Italian, Swiss, German, and American "commercials."

Accra, a city of 200,000, lies 5M degrees above the equator.
It is humid the year around except during the harmattan sea-
sononly the sea breeze makes it livable. Over half of the popu-
lation in Accra is from the Ga-speaking tribe.

It is a colorful city. Many of the men wear the rich bright
handwoven kente cloth and the loose smocks or Roman-like
togas, and a majority of the women dress in gayly printed
mammy cloth. The large prints may be of leopards, giraffs,
flowers, the flag of Ghana, or face of Queen Elizabeth II.
Ghanaians love bright colors; orange, gold, yellow, red, and
purple are the favorites.

Accra abounds with native dressmakers, and they do a lucra-
tive business; yet Norman Hartnell, dressmaker to the Queen
of England, flew a collection of his clothes to Accra and held a
most successful fashion show with African models at the leading
hotel just before Christmas.

DOWNTOWN TO ACCRA 33

In Accra every extreme flourishes. The juju man and a
qualified doctor may live on the same street with equal pros-
perity. The squalor of slums where thousands of people per
square mile inhabit a shackland with indescribable smells, dust,
and open drains may be right around the corner from important
business houses with high ceilings, air conditioning, and the
latest business machines registering imports and exports. Under
the shining Coca-Cola and petrol signs will be the inevitable
chickens, stray goats, and sheep. The goats and sheep in Ghana
are not like those in the States. These resemble a small, smooth-
haired dog, skinny and fleet of foot. One will see the young
Ghanaian women in Western dresses with hair plaited in short,
pert pigtails and young men in pastel shirts of transparent nylon;
but the poorest pedestrians will still be barefoot, their soles
toughened to leathery hardness.

Accra is the capital of a black society. There are no white
settlers as in the Congo, Union of South Africa, and other parts
of Africa. Whites cannot own land. This is the African's country
and you are his guest. There is no feeling of hostility or uneasi-
ness. We never locked our house nor worried when we left the
children alone. There is no color bar in hotels, night clubs, or
cinemas. I have often been the only white person in Y.M.C.A.
lectures, classes, and social groups and I was always greeted
and made to feel welcome. The Ghanaian has genuine warmth
and courtesy. If you stumble in the street or accidentally bump
into anything, strangers will quickly take notice and say sin-
cerely, "Sorry, sorry." You feel they mean it. They have, I think,
a real courtesy of the heart.

Smartly uniformed policemen direct traffic efficiently at all
main intersections. They do their job with courtesy and a sense
of humor. The first week in Accra, I was trying to master the
gear shift and remember to drive on the left-hand side of the
road. I came up to the roundabout and the impressive uni-
formed policeman. I wanted to turn right and instead of keep-
ing left around the roundabout, I sharply turned right just as I'd
do in the States and passed in front of him. Horrified, and too

34 AFBICA A WORLD IN PBOGBESS

late, I saw my mistake. He simply put both hands over his face,
shook his head, and smilingly motioned me on.

Accra had no traffic lights until their independence. One
patriotic Ghanaian, admiring a newly installed set of lights at
an intersection, was heard to remark, "Isn't it lovely that they
chose the same colors for the traffic lights as our flag: green,
gold, and red?"

In addition to the three modern department stores, there are
streets of shops of all kinds and descriptions. In some the walls
are hung with shirts and shorts made on the premises, and
imported miscellany of all kinds spill over counters and floor-
plastics, fountain pens, jewelry, crockery, carryalls, and rain-
coats. Some are bazaars with bales of yard goods of every con-
ceivable weave, pattern, and color. Dainty fabrics spill out of
these dim bazaars in ethereal voiles, nylon, velvets, gauzy,
chiffons, batiste, and imitation lace. Some shopkeepers have
most of their wares displayed on the ground in front of their
shops. Many of these shops are not wired for electricity and
still use kerosene lanterns for light. There are two hundred
registered goldsmiths in Accra. Their gold jewelry is so pure it
has little appeal to Western women as it is a red gold and is
not especially becoming on white skin. It is more attractive
against a dark skin.

Then there are the native markets. Here are wax prints,
hundreds of bolts of the gayest of mammy cloths. There are
beads, books, vegetables, fruits, groundnuts, palm oil, fish, fresh
meat, polka-dotted hardware, nylon dusters merchandise of
every description. The market "mammies" run these stalls. All
adult women are called "mammies" and they dominate the trade
in Ghana. From a thousand stands these women carry on their
business in the market place, bazaar, and in the street. They
are talkative, gay, vigorous, and robust, with big, protruding
tellies (this is something adds to the attractions of a woman
here). They often have good earnings so that they can afford to
send their children to private secondary schools. Many of them
live on their own or with their children, mother, sisters, and sis-

DOWNTOWN TO ACCRA 35

ters* children, while the husbands, who frequently have several
wives, live by themselves, one wife at a time sharing the house-
hold. The women and children belong to her family. After a
-wife has had a child it is the custom for her to go to her family
for two years until the child is weaned. She cannot take a
chance of getting pregnant until the child is weaned, for it
^would surely die. That was one of the reasons, naturally, why
a man has several wives. What use was a wife to a husband
.shortly after she had had a baby! Under the "extended family
.system" in the matrilineal society the brother is responsible for
his sister and her children. While the younger people with
steady jobs complain about relatives moving in with them, it
is a tradition difficult to break. It is actually a system of
social security. Each family is expected to take care of its own.

The market place always abounds with small children and
noise. Those who can afford the three dollars a month may send
their children who are old enough to a nursery school near the
market, which is run for the mammies' children. The babies are
always tied on their mother's back with the sling of her skirt-
wrap. They seem so much a part of the women, and of their
dress, that mother and child lose their separate identities. You
grow accustomed to seeing a small head peering from the
drapery folds. Despite closely confined limbs and being held in
one position, the babies scarcely ever cry. There is their mother's
warmth and motion, and as one African mammy said, "Their
bellies get plenty of chop anytime." "Chop" is the African word
for any kind of food. They cook chop, buy chop, serve chop.
Chop is a word used as loosely as "dash." One cook-steward
sadly wrote his employer-family, who are good friend of ours,
that during the summer he had been forced to chop his bicycle.
They immediately understood that he hadn't hacked it into
pieces but had been forced to sell it to buy food. So chop to
the West African means food in any sense of the word.

Behind the stands in the native markets, the mammies cook
chop, feed and bathe their children while carrying on their
business. Maybe they cannot read or write, but believe me,

36 AFRICA A WORLD IN PROGRESS

they can count and add up. They are shrewd and industrious
and have an important standing in the country. Women play
so great a role in Ghana that no reform can be carried on with-
out them.

The mammies, with their babies on their backs, their loads
of yams, plantains, baskets of oranges, or other paraphernalia
for street-trading balanced steadily on their heads, are a familiar
sight on every street. The shape of the object, size or weight
has nothing to do with the things carried on the head. You
may see a woman with a water can or a load of five-foot-long
firewood balanced on her head, or it may be a small school
boy with a bottle of ink on his head as he walks to class.

One of the gratifying surprises to the Westerner in Accra
is the big Kingsway department store on Kwame Nkrumah
Avenue. It was opened only two years ago at the time of the
independence celebrations. It is more than a store; it is already
an institution. Majestically it rises from the avenue like a temple,,
four stories high with a parking lot and window displays that
would not be out of place on State Street. Here friends meet
in the cafeteria or coke bar, visit the beauty shop, look hungrily
in the magazine and book section for airmail editions of Time
and Newsweek. Occasionally a Saturday Evening Post (rarely
over a month old) could be found bringing the United States
vividly to tropical verandas and siesta time bedrooms. No one
knows the excitement and joy of getting American magazines
until he is 7,500 miles away. For a short while you feel in
touch and caught up in the momentum of life at home; then
before you know it, you have read it all. It is a temptation to
devour new magazines in a single evening and have to endure
a famine until the next lot comes.

Even on ordinary days, the Kingsway is crowded with a
heterogeneous variety of shoppers. Along the counters, promi-
nent African hausfraus with large shopping baskets rub elbows
with Accra's white wives. Missionaries, with long lists, from
up country, wives from remote agriculture stations, bachelors
from secondary schools all are replenishing their larders for

DOWNTOWN TO ACCRA 37

another month. Visitors to town always carry long lists, their
own and their neighbors. There are no evening shopping hours
or corner grocery stores. All stores are closed from twelve until
two, so one learns quickly to shop early. When I was new and
green, I would just be getting my shopping underway by twelve
o'clock, and the stores would all close down. That meant an-
other eight-mile trip back to town.

Within the store one could almost forget the hot, steamy
West Africa outdoors. Here are high ceilings, whirring fans,
tiled floors, the click of the supermarket's turnstiles, tinkle of
cash registers, and soft African voices buying and selling. And
the Kingsway boasted the only escalator in Accra. It was such
an attraction when it was first installed that many came in not
to buy but just to ride on the "modern miracle."

The cold store is air-conditioned. Here one could buy frozen
turkeys and Armour Star Weiners from the States, chickens from
the Union of South Africa and bacon from Denmark. Meat is
prepackagedsomething that is rarely seen in England or on
the Continent. The Kingsway, which is a part of the great
United Africa Company owned by Unilever in England, mod-
eled its supermarket and cold store after the supermarkets in the
United States. The whole store confirms the city's keen interest
in the newest goods and methods from Western production
lines. Fresh eggs could be had for a price of one dollar and
twenty cents a dozen. In the fruit and vegetable bins, fresh
coconuts are a nickel, pineapples a quarter, bananas a penny
a pound, oranges a penny apiece, but fresh carrots, cabbage,
celery, and apples are all imported and are really luxury foods.
These prices made the shopper realize anew that she was in
the tropics.

The Kingsway is the only store in Accra to offer installment
buying. Here the householder can buy a refrigerator, radio, or
washer and enjoy it as he pays for it. Charge accounts are also
very popular. The doubtful blessing of Western ways is becom-
ing very popular even in blackest Africa. At the end of the
month when the statements arrived, many husbands wished

38 AFRICA A WORLD IN PROGRESS

their jobs were up in the bush far from the temptation of the
supermarket.

The European experts worked hard at streamlining the mer-
chandise, gearing their machineries to a faster pace and attempt-
ing to introduce a modern sales psychology. Sometimes their
success shone like a beacon over departments which worked
with smooth precision; other times the new regime creaked and
showed signs of strain when human nature refused to co-operate
in this new show of efficiency. When trusted supervisors collab-
orated with a customer, probably a relative, in carrying off val-
uable merchandise, when the salespeople mysteriously took sick
on "busy" days, and when salespeople from different tribes re-
fused to work together in the same departments, the managers
thought longingly of going home on leave the sooner the better.
I had great sympathy for this pioneering store. I did sales-train-
ing for them at intervals for a year's period. Mr. Labi, their
African sales-training director, was a stoic and phlegmatically
kept plugging at basic sales-training day after day.

I had had long experience in training sales people in the
States and teaching salesmanship in the university. I had even
written a successful book on sales-training. So I came with de-
termination and enthusiasm to give them a new sales philos-
ophy. It was just what one general manager, Mr. Bethell,
wanted to accomplish, and he wished me luck. I soon found
out, "If the customer handles the merchandise, she'll soil it; if
you give her refunds or credit, shell take advantage of you;
if you offer to order it, she won't buy what you have; if you
encourage charge accounts, she won't spend her cash; if you
listen to her and her problems, shell waste your time." Of
course they were right in every instance and they almost con-
vinced me that maybe Marshall Field and his, "Give the lady
what she wants," and Sears Roebuck with their, "Satisfaction
guaranteed or your money back," were just asking for trouble.
But I tried how I tried to convince them that the customer
was always right. When I patiently and firmly explained how

DOWNTOWN TO ACCRA 39

we cater to the customer's wishes in the United States, they
looked pityingly at me.

I went in with a firm resolve and high hopes to break them
of saying, "Yes, please," and "No, please." If you ask them if
something is in stock, you invariably get, "No, please." When
it was explained to me this was their way of being polite and
gracious and the "please" added on was to soften the blow of
having to say "no," I gave up. Before the year was over I
found to my astonishment that I was saying, "No, please."

Another expression in West Africa that always frustrated
European shoppers beyond endurance was the salesperson say-
ing three simple words, "It is finished." Those three words
slowed your days and tested your temper. If asked, "When
will you get some more?" they'd reply simply, "I cannot know.
It is finished." You'd be frantic wondering if they meant for a
week, a month or forever.

In the heat of the day, I forced my long-suffering husband
to drive me to five shops looking for typewriting paper. There
was none to be found. I told him in desperation that I doubted
that I would ever find any typewriting paper. He said madden-
ingly, "You must keep calm. Didn't they say it was finished?"
So when I started sales-training, my secret goal was to be calm,
insidious, and clever and break them of saying, "It is finished.*

I explained all the alternatives to a sales class and suggested
that they say, "It is temporarily out of stock, will you check
again next week? We expect a shipment soon," I then asked
them if they didn't think those phrases sounded better. There
was a long pregnant silence, then one hand went up, "But, Mrs.
Cone, if you don't have any, it is finished." I silently acknowl-
edged defeat and went on to the next stage of the sale. I confess
I'm not above saying smugly to the family when they've eaten
the last crumb of something and want more, "It is finished."

The African salespeople take their jobs very seriously. Being
a salesperson carries both prestige and a better salary than most
any other. They regard it as a career with status more than

40 AFRICA A WORLD IN PROGRESS

do salespeople in the States. You can advance up the scale from
trainee, assistant salesperson, head salesperson, supervisor, to
manager. They were proud of their freshly starched pastel uni-
forms that the store furnished and of the various store bene-
fitsas recreation and lunch room, store nurse, welfare lady,
and a regular pay check. The African salesperson is patient, un-
failingly polite, friendly, and he tries hard to please.

They lose their sense of humor and are terribly sensitive if
they are called "silly" or "stupid." Those two words are anath-
ema to them. It ruins their efficiency for the morning if they
are called stupid. We were working very diligently on sugges-
tion selling in the store at one period. A very bright salesgirl
reported that when she had sold a tube of tooth paste that
morning she had suggested a special that they had on tooth
brushes. The customer looked at her icely and said haughtily,
"Of course not, what a stupid thing to say." It was not at all
stupid, but logical, and the girl was crushed. We told her a fit-
ting comeback would have been, "Oh, I beg your pardon, but
I thought you had teeth." This cheered her enormously and all
of us in tiie sales class had a good laugh. How I wished I
could have had classes for the customers!

If some of the so-called European ladies could have seen
themselves from the other side of the counter they would not
have been so smug. The salespeople actually hid when they
saw certain battleaxes bearing down on them in the dress de-
partment The hapless overworked European manager had to
serve them herself. Of course, when you knew the salespeople,
you understood that they had their own way of sizing up a cus-
tomer. If they liked and respected you, they could not do
enough for "Madame." If they said, "Has the lady' been
served?" beware, for by calling you a lady, they didn't feel that
you were a lady at all. It was used in a derogatory way.

Their wages of thirty-five dollars a month for a salesperson
to sixty dollars a month for a supervisor are low by our stand-
ards, but very good in Ghana where the national income aver-
ages one hundred seventy-five dollars a year.

DOWNTOWN TO ACCRA 41

Before I leave the department store, I must mention the
necessity of learning a new vocabulary in order to shop. I have
threatened to make up a list of words and leave it for the
American Embassy to give out to all new innocent Americans
who arrive in Accra. I could never find baking soda in the super-
market. After several weeks, I finally asked a clerk where I
would find it. After much explaining, the light dawned and she
said, "Oh, you mean bicarbonate of sodayou find that at the
chemists/' I did know by then that the chemists is the drug-
store. Waxpaper is "grease proof paper"; granulated sugar is
castor sugar; corn starch is corn flour; cookies are biscuits; jello
is jelly, and so on.

Downtown Accra has eighteen cinemas. They show mostly
American movies, and unfortunately, grade B ones at that. How-
ever, it is a very pleasant experience to go to the cinema, as
part of the seats are always out from under the balcony in the
open air. It is cooler there and you can see the moon and the
stars. The cinemas show two features. At the end of the first
one, the house is emptied after the Ghana National Anthem is
played and if you want to see the second feature, you come
back in and pay again. The first half hour are advertisements,
mostly singing ones, on everything from laxatives to banking.
They are amusing the first time, but after that you'll find your-
self singing for days the little ditty that starts, "She banks her
money in the B.W.A. (Bank of West Africa)."

Night clubs with foreign-sounding names like "Week End
in Colorado," "Week End in Havana," "Seaview," and "Lido"
are quite popular. "High life" is the favorite music and the
dance "high life" is a shuffling two-step completely suited to the
tropics. You can do it all evening and still have energy left.

It was not exactly easy to "eat out" in Accra. There were
no restaurants. The few hotels had dining rooms where you
could eat with assurance. The Kingsway store had a cafeteria
for sandwiches, drinks, and cakes, but, of course, this was open
only during store hours. The Y.M.C.A. served drinks and snacks.
The local "chop bars" served the Ghanaians, not the Europeans,

42 AFRICA A WORLD IN PROGRESS

as they serve the native food of yam, plantain, kenkey, fufu>
and cassava.

One evening when I was tired of my own cooking and com-
plained that everything tasted the same, Win took me to the
swank Ambassador Hotel for dinner. There was a breeze on
the candlelit terrace, but the menu was disappointing. When
our ordinary meal of creamed chicken and canned peas was
brought, I was astonished to see the couple at the next table
being served a thick steak from a charcoal-broiling cart. Baf-
fled and outraged, we called the headwaiter and told him we
saw nothing like that on the menu. Unperturbed, he smiled
and said, "Of course it isn't on the menu." He added we could
ask for it the next time.

Another evening, we drove to the Lisbon Hotel terrace and
were having a cool drink, when I noticed a cart on the edge
of the terrace with a huge sign, "Hot dogs, two shillings or
28j each/' The young African, in a white coat and cap, was
doing a rushing business. Drooling in anticipation, I ordered
a hot dog. I decided our ideas weren't the same as I bit into
a tasteless sausage.

The food stores were closed from Saturday noon until Mon-
day morning. If you ran out, you either did without, or bor-
rowed from your next-door neighbor.

CHAPTER IV

Chop Every Day

PREPARATION OF FOOD in the tropics is at best a tricky and de-
batable matter. In a climate where every form of bacteria
thrives in the moist heat, decay follows fast on ripeness and any
food left uncovered or fly-visited may gravely endanger the
family's health. One of the first sights you become accustomed
to is the top of the refrigerator filled with bottles of boiled
water instead of the usual bottles of milk. Every house on the
college compound is equipped with a tall crockery water filter
as a matter of course, and all drinking water is boiled and fil-
tered. It can be time-consuming just keeping enough water
boiled and cooled, for you drink more water in a hot country.
Steward Andrews thought it was a lot of work for nothing, and
when I found he was boiling the water only three minutes,
I took over and timed it to at least ten minutes.

His ideas and mine clashed many times. One of the best
examples of our world-apart thinking was the day I discovered
him scrubbing the kitchen floor with the same sponge as he used
on the dishes. I am convinced he never understood what all
the shouting was about. He promised faithfully never to do it
again, but I am sure mainly because he didn't want to upset
Madame and have big palaver.

There is an off-beat flavor which pervades every meal. Af-
rican-produced vegetables, meat, fish, and eggs are permeated
with this "tropical flavor" or perhaps it's the constant 85 tem-
perature and 85 humidity that make it impossible for anything
to come to the table with a crisp look or taste. Any raw vega-
table, as lettuce, tomatoes, or carrots, had to be soaked in a

44 AFRICA A WOULD IN PROGRESS

chlorine solution called Milton. Dettol, a disinfectant to put in
the dish water, and Milton are two necessities on the kitchen
shelf in West Africa.

The white man's taste and foods do not appeal to the cook-
steward's own palate. He loves spicy dishes, hot with chili pep-
pers or heavy with curry. He likes all kinds of stews rich with
palm oil or groundnut oil served with yam, plantain, or cassava.

One West African dish that Madame let the cook have com-
plete charge of was "country-chop" or groundnut stew. Here she
could teach him nothing. This dish has become a part of tropical
life and is served at least once a week. In fact, it was served
the first three times we were invited out to 'dinner in Accra.

Groundnut stew is made basically with chicken. It swims
in rich, pungent juices with plenty of palm oil and is served
with a heaping platter of rice. Around this impressive dish are
little side dishes of chopped onion, pineapple, grapefruit,
orange, tangerine, shredded fresh coconut, red and green pep-
pers, chutney, bananas (both raw and cooked), groundnuts
(whole and crushed), powdered ginger, and chopped boiled
egg. One night I counted fifteen side dish accompaniments to
the groundnut stew!

Here is a favorite recipe of groundnut stew from a Ghanaian
cookbook.

GROUNDNUT STEW

3 cigarette tins groundnuts 1 teas, pepper
6 smoked fish 2 teas, salt

4 tomatoes / Ib. meat

6 onions 3 pints cold water

6 okras 6 hard boiled eggs

6 garden eggs 2 tab. groundnut or palm oil

1. Prepare and cut meat, onions, and tomatoes and divide fish
into small pieces. Fry in hot oil.

2. Prepare rest of vegetables and add water.

3. Shell eggs and put in stew which should be thick.
5. Serve hot with banku, ampesi, or kenkey.

CHOP EVERY DAY

45

Measurements were invariably given in cigarette tins which
dismayed and stopped me, as I had none. I would never venture
forth to live in a foreign country again without including an
American cookbook. Such a little tiling, but I was lost without
it. There were plenty of English cookbooks in the shops and
libraries but all measurements are given in ounces and pounds
which meant buying a scale. One day I made a dish of jelly
(jello) according to instructions on the package and it never
hardened, I had used an English pint measure and too much
water. It was frustrating trying to cook even the simple dishes.
Here is a suggested Ghanaian menu for the week:

Breakfast
Mon. Rice and Beans

Tues. Cora meal and

porridge
Wed. Cora porridge

Thurs. Com porridge
Fri. Com beans
Sat. Yam porridge

Midday

Boiled cassava
and palm nut soup
Kenkey and
bean stew
Groundnut soup

Cassava and
bean soup
Kenkey and palm
nut soup

Kenkey and bean
stew

Sun. Com porridge Groundnut stew

Afternoon Evening

Fresh raw fruit Com soup

" Fufu and garde

egg soup

" Cora and

fried fish

Plain soup

Cassava and gai
den egg soup
Boiled cassava
dough and okn
soup
" Kenkey and

garden egg stev

Most stewards know twelve different ways of folding dinner
napkins. The first time I saw the stifi white damask napkin,
intricately folded, standing bold upright in the water glass with
a bright-red sprig of flowers stuck in the top, I thought I was
imagining things. It really was a work of art, and I admired it
accordingly. We spent a week end in Kumasi with our friends
the Duncansons, who had a steward with real artistic flair.

46 AFRICA A WORLD IN PROGRESS

The napkins were folded in a different way for every meal we
had.

One of the most disheartening battles waged in the kitchen
was against ants. They were formidable. They invaded every
corner and crevice. When a box of cookies was opened, the
children were encouraged to eat them all, for the ants found
them even in tins or the humidity made them limp within an
hour. We had the usual screened larder-cupboard with the legs
set in kerosene-tainted water, but our ants still found their
way in. Weevils in the flour was another nuisance. Flour was
suspect if it had stayed too long on the store shelf, and the
weevil larvae had gotten a good start. Steward thought baking
would take care of that, so why not overlook a weevil or two.
I never learned to share this nonchalant attitude and sifted all
the flour myself.

For each meal, milk was made from powdered milk, or cans
of evaporated milk were opened. Cream could also be had in
tins. You soon learn to take your coffee black. Local fresh
vegetables and fruits were not usually bought in the stores,
but from the market mammies at outdoor stalls. I went to
Comfort, a typical fat, jolly, generous, mammy who saved me
anything unusual. From her I bought grapefruit, oranges,
lemons, limes, coconuts, egg plant, pawpaws, and avocados.
During certain seasons she might have green beans, carrots, and
little tomatoes. These were very expensive and had little flavor.
She always dashed me with a bunch of bananas (the whole
bunch probably cost three cents ) for coming to her. The Kings-
way carried the imported fresh fruits and vegetables like apples,
cabbage, turnips, and potatoes. Once for a long period, all
the stores were out of potatoes. Then one day there was a big
sign outside the cold store at Kingsway: "The Potato Boat Has
Arrived." I hurried happily in to buy a precious bag and not
until later did I realize how different this was from my past
thinking, Potatoes at home are so plentiful that the surplus
is an embarrassment to Congress.

All of our packaged mixes that we rely so heavily upon

CHOP EVEBY DAY 47

pie crust mix, cake mixes, pudding mixes, pancake mixes are
nearly nonexistent. One store did get some cake mixes in, and
they were snapped up immediately. I remarked crossly to my
husband that no doubt the American wives had bought them
up. You soon learn to shop differently. When something comes
in, as canned corn, pop corn, tomato juice, pie cherries, or
applesauce, you never buy one or two cans but a dozen, for
you may not see any on the shelves again for six months.

If you live on a Western diet as most Europeans do in
Accra, you eat imported food, and it is expensive. We figured
that food in Accra cost us about the same as in Chicago, and
we did not eat as well. We gave the children vitamin tablets
and we all took Vitamin C or ascorbic-acid tablets daily. A
dentist in Accra told us that most people in Ghana suffer from
gum and teeth trouble due to lack of Vitamin C. And this in a
country that grows citrus fruits! Due to the soil a glass of
fresh orange juice has less of Vitamin C here than it would
at home. Then, the steward will squeeze the juice the night
before for the next morning's breakfast or make the noon meal's
fruit salad right after breakfast if you don't keep a sharp eye
on him.

Our Sunday breakfast table was never complete without the
two white Aralan tablets beside each water glass as a chasten-
ing reminder of the malarial mosquito's existence. Few people
escape an occasional visitation of fever. The symptoms are a
headache, languor, slight fever, and aches in all parts of the
old chassis. The patient lying in bed, aching and sweating, is
apt to curse the anopheles mosquito for this tropical misery.
The Europeans who have malaria here are the ones who get
careless and do not take their Aralan, Paludrine, Mepacrine, or
whatever medicine they have chosen for a suppressent. Andrews
dragged around for weeks complaining of his health until I sent
him to the university clinic. The doctor promptly diagnosed it
as malaria and sent him to his uncle's house for a week.

Coca-Cola and Pepsi-Cola have invaded Accra and have
built large, impressive bottling works, but due to long indoc-

48 AFRICA A WORLD IN PROGRESS

trination by the British, squash is the popular drink. Squash is
a bottled syrup in lime, lemon, or orange flavors to ^hich you
add cool water to get the desired strength. Only Americans
add ice. Squash is served as an afternoon drink at parties, and
children take it to school in bottles for their midmorning drink,
because it is not safe to drink tap water. Most Americans have
never heard of squash until they land in West Africa then it
becomes a habit.

Never have I lived in a house where things fell apart so
frequently. The handles literally fell off the refrigerator and
oven doors, the screws were lost from the ironing board, and
Andrews dropped a new electric iron. The tops of peanut butter,
jelly, and pickle jars mysteriously disappeared never to be seen
again. When Steward had broken two sets of water glasses in
six months and had "borrowed" several cups and dishes for his
own quarters, I was forced to greater vigilance in kitchen
affairs.

The popular notion that life in the tropics is a simple lux-
urious business in which a procession of servants wait upon
your every whim, is far from exact. Human labor can be bought
cheaply, but in hiring it, you also take on their problems and
woes and relatives. Andrews put me on the defensive the first
day, when I was new and green. He said, "I must leave the
house at 8:15 on Sundays to catch the bus to go to church.
I am good Catholic."

I weakly said, "Every Sunday?"

Looking at me as if I were a heathen, he answered in
horrified tones, "Madame wouldn't keep me from going to
church, would she?"

No, Madame wouldn't, so on Sunday mornings I did the
breakfast dishes, peeled potatoes, and worked on the dinner.
No one could say I ever held back organized religion.

A few things disappeared, and when we in a roundabout
way asked if Andrews had seen any strangers around, he in-
dignantly said, "I would never have taken them, I am good

CHOP EVERY DAY 49

Christian, just ask my priest." I confess I never wanted to
push it that far. I accepted his word.

Quite often he was late getting back and had such wonder-
ful excuses that I was always curious to see what he would
come up with. His uncle was ill, another uncle had died, he
was bidding his cousin good-bye who was leaving Ghana, his
watch (the one we gave him for Christmas) stopped, he
missed the bus, the bus broke down, or his brothers dropped
in at his uncle's house just as he was leaving. It was always
plausible enough that you felt like a cad to object. It could
have been true.

Andrews came to us just before Christmas and wanted to
borrow 8, or about $23.00. We were surprised and told him
as he only made ,7, or about $20.00 a month that it was not
wise for him to borrow that much. We would advance him
3, or $8.40. He was crestfallen and sulked for several days.
But he took the money right before Christmas and went shop-
ping, armed with a duffel bag that he borrowed from us. He
came back resplendent with new sandals, slacks, and shirt. We
surmised correctly that Andrews had a lady friend. She came
around each morning with a huge tray of African food balanced
delicately on her head. This she sold to gardeners, stewards,
and construction workers for breakfast. Andrews' work suffered
in the following weeks. He spent so much time waiting for her
and then laughing and talking that I had to remind him that the
dishes were still undone. He devoted so much time to washing
and pressing his clothes that the house began to look something
less than shipshape. I kept hoping she would find a new terri-
tory to work. But Andrews' good manners never failed him.
He always said, "Good morning, Madame," and if we'd been
away on trek, he was always at the door beaming when we
returned saying, 'Welcome home, Madame."

Once, when he was late for the fifth time, I tried to fire him.
I said, "Andrews, you can go back to your uncle's house to-
morrow morning right after breakfast, I have had enough."

SO AFRICA A WORLD IN PROGRESS

He was up bright and early the next morning getting break-
fast. Afterwards, he took out the cleaning equipment and started
dusting. I said, "Andrews, I told you last night you were to
go this morning."

He looked at me calmly and said, "Patience Madame, I shall
do better." He did too, for a week, and I gave up. How can
you fire someone who will not leave? It was too hot to try to
figure that one out.

CHAPTER V

The Little Joys of Life

ON ONE SWELTERING MORNING as I returned from shopping, with
my clothes clinging damply to me, I crossly remarked, "A whole
morning gone and nothing to show for it."

My husband, who has a dry sense of humor, remarked,
"Why, dear, count yourself lucky to be a white woman in the
tropics, living a life of leisure."

"I'm the cook for five hungry people plus an extra child or
two and a few guests who drop in," I pointed out. "Not just
a woman in the tropics."

That morning I had been to all the stores looking for pota-
toes, black pepper, dill pickles, peanut butter, and brown sugar.
I spent the morning discovering, "It is finished." So was I. Just
trying to shop for ordinary things was time-consuming, frus-
trating, and exhausting. The shops were far apart, and on some
days the heat wilted frocks and spirits within the hour. On
those days there was nothing but to accept defeat, tear up
the shopping list which had been methodically made up, and
revise the menu.

After being used to shopping centers two blocks away and
evening shopping hours, it required much adjustment to drive
ten miles and search frantically for nonexistent merchandise
and be out of the store by the time it closed at twelve o'clock
sharp. Going into Accra meant giving up the whole morning
whether you wanted one item or twenty. I was hesitant about
complaining, for Win always kindly but firmly reminded me
that while I drove ten miles, many people had to drive one hun-

52 AFRICA A WORLD IN PROGRESS

dred miles to Accra to shop. This was supposed to raise my
morale.

The Hausa trader usually called once a month and this
visit was time-consuming. This tall, white-robed figure would be
followed by his boy carrying on his head the handmade wares
wrapped in a rug. The boy would sit outside. The trader would
remove his sandals from his dusty feet, bow, smile, and seat
himself in the middle of the floor. Dramatically he would spread
the carved ebony heads and bookends, ivory jewelry, and hand
woven rugs around him and wait for your approval. He always
remembered what you had bought the last time and brought
something different. He was a great actor, and haggling over
the final price was part of the act. Finally I would say, "This
is my last offer." He would sit silently for a few minutes and
then say sadly, "111 take it"

Harmattan time usually begins in December, and for a few
weeks a cool, dry wind blows from the desert region north.
During this period the sky ceases to glare. Through a gentle
haze the sun is an orange ball at which one may look with-
out blinking. The air is full of particles of dust which settle on
everything, and the furniture cracks. Our dresser top actually
buckled. For a few of the worst days, lips crack and eyes feel
dry and burning. After the break of the harmattan, the dry
season continues its motionless unrelenting heat day after day.

Market vegetables diminished to a few small heads of cauli-
flower and withered green onions. Small heads of cauliflower
cost two shillings or twenty-eight cents each. Our lawn be-
came brown and parched, the lovely bed of marigolds dried up
and died. The gardeners could not water anything, for Accra
had its worst water shortage in ten years.

At the university, one fared better than the townspeople.
We, at least, were allowed one tankful of water a day. Some
of our friends at the embassy in Accra had to get along with
a few buckets of water a day. We got the last bit of use out
of every drop. Water left from the laundry was saved to scrub
floors and flush toilets. The three children and I all took a bath

The Cones in Indiana

Ghana Airways Plane Readying for Take-off at Ghana Airport

View of Entire University College of Ghana

Aerial View of Downtown Accra

The New, Modern Kingsway Department Store

State Durbar Celebration in Full Swing

The Lovelv Miss Ghana

The Author in Her Tropical Back Yard

Ghanaians Picking Cocoa Seedlings

The Unusual Volta River Bridge

Henrietta and George Cone, Children of
the Author, in Ghanaian Dress

The Cones' Steward, Andrews

Freedom Arch in Accra, Symbolizing , the Infant Republic

A Nigerian Mammy With Her Child

Making Pottery in the Age-old
Fashion

Cleophas With Children in Christian Village

View of a Mining Town in Ghana

Builders* Brigade on the March

Ghanaian Woodcarvers Practicing Their Painstaking Art

THE LITTLE JOYS OF LIFE 53

in the same water. By the time my turn came, I confess it was
a deep pink color from scrubbing the red soil off them. We
boiled drinking water ten minutes longer. Accra was fortunate
that no epidemic broke out.

It continued hot, hot, hot, right through February, March,
and April. Clouds of red dust flew in. Palm-tree fronds grew
brown at the tips. The flowering shrubs wilted and ceased to
bloom. Leather lost its pliancy and grew hard; paper curled,
and hair crackled dryly when combed. It became increasingly
easy to lose patience over trifles. There was no escape from the
building up of heat and tension. There was a sense of wait-
ing, taut expectation.

The rainy season did not begin all at once. There were
flashes of lightning and rumblings in the distance night after
night. We watched and waited. Late in the afternoon, ragged
clouds would darken the sky. Then the wind began, and big
drops of water pockmarked the dust. Soon all was noise and
water. There was a wall of rain. It ran under the window shut-
ters and doors and over the concrete floor of the screened hall
along the bedrooms. We mopped up cheerfully from room to
room. After all, it was raining! The rain transformed every-
thing. Grass, gardens, flowers, and shrubs came alive. Villagers
hastily planted fresh crops. After a deluge of rain, the sky would
clear and the sun would come out, and the whole college com-
pound would look newly scrubbed.

But the rainy season brought its own peculiar problems.
Shoes and luggage became coated with green mould if they
weren't sunned every other day. Books became damp and
mouldy. Furniture took on a blue cast. Envelopes perversely
sealed themselves shut. Clothes were damp and would mil-
dew while hanging in the closet. We finally bought a little
electric closet-heater called "Peter, the heater," which helped
enormously. The bed sheets always felt damp during the rainy
season and had to be hung on the line every day. We became
accustomed to a constant musty smell.

After a rain, we had invasions of winged ants which fell into

54 AFRICA A WORLD IN PROGRESS

our food and down our necks and drove us out of the living-
dining room into the screened areas of the bedrooms. After
their only flight, they shake off their wings leaving a litter half-
an-inch deep on the floor. Those that survived frogs, ants and
other insects crawled away to go underground and form new
colonies.

Then the moths came in batches, some brown and orange,
some with shadings of white and grey, and fluttered madden-
ingly around our defenseless heads. The beetles were a real
menace. Some were two-to-three inches in length. With their
hard, glossy shells they crashed and zoomed into the lamps,
walls, and door glass making a frightening buzzing sound. We
waged constant war on ants of all kinds: little insidious ants
that covered opened food in the kitchen in a matter of minutes,
large black ants, and red ants that hid in the rug and bit our
feet and ankles. Win often killed centipedes in the bathroom
and once he killed a ten-inch black snake which was slither-
ing down the hall.

But our worse fright was our encounter with a five-foot
black cobra. Win heard a fluttering, crackling noise about ten
o'clock one evening by our front door. He quickly grabbed the
flashlight and investigated. There was a cobra right outside
the door fighting with a chicken. Win immediately set off to
find the night watchman who was resting in a garage doorway
down the street. The night watchman was as terrified as he
and by the time they decided to return, the snake had gone.

We called the head of the University Zoo, Mr. Mensah, the
next morning, and he immediately came over. The chicken was
dead on its nest of eggs from the poisonous bite of the snake.
He found the snake's path and was able to tell it was a black
spitting cobra. He asked us to keep the children in the house
that afternoon as a cobra's bite can be fatal within six hours.
The zoo keeper returned that night complete with face shield
and equipment and searched an hour for the snake. He kept
hoping fervently that he would find it, for he had no really
large cobras in the zoo at this time, only small ones. I kept

THE LITTLE JOYS OF LIFE 55

hoping fervently that he would find it, too. Finally, he buried
the dead hen and eggs and said without that inducement the
snake would probably not return.

The incident had an amusing side. A friend came out from
the United States Information Service to have dinner with us
that evening. As he got out of his car, I called to him and asked
him if he'd mind turning on the light in the garage so Win
could see when he arrived home from his class. He nonchalantly
walked over, hitting the bushes as he went.

"I wouldn't walk so close to those bushes/' I said.

He laughed. "Is there something in them?"

"It might be a cobra."

He was highly amused by this and asked, "Do you see
them often?"

"Well, we did last night."

"You re joking."

I assured him that I wasn't and that Mr. Mensah from the
zoo would be arriving any minute to search for it. "My God,"
he said, "you really do mean it."

As we sat on the back terrace he kept looking surreptitiously
behind him. I finally said, "Don't worry, Herb, cobras only look
for chickens."

"That is what's worrying me; that it will come around the
house looking for us chickens."

Our friends back home seemed to take for granted that living
in Africa meant hobnobbing with lions, tigers, and elephants.
We had to reply apologetically that apart from a stray horse,
goats, dogs, pigs, and monkeys we could only boast of all kinds
of snakes, scorpions, bats that flew nonchalantly through the
living room in the evenings, and orange lizards. The black-
and-orange lizards are really quite beautiful. They are so nu-
merous that you grow quite accustomed to seeing them sun-
ning contentedly on the back terrace, scurrying across the liv-
ing room, and even eating crumbs from under the table. They
keep the flies and small insect population down appreciably.
Qqpe in a while, a small lizard may fall from the ceiling into

56 AFRICA A WORLD IN PROGRESS

the bathtub while you are taking a bath. One of my friends
had one crawl out of her suitcase in Lisbon. This caused great
alarm and consternation among the chambermaids.

But one of the minor frustrations that assumed major pro-
portions did not come from wildlife, but from our neighbor's
red rooster. Every morning at five-thirty he came and stood
beneath our bedroom window and crowed long, loud, and tri-
umphantly. I never could figure out why he chose our window
for this dubious honor, as I'm hardly alive at that hour. It was
terrible to face each new day with murder in my heart.

The night after the cobra incident, I awoke feeling uneasy.
As I put my hand under the sheet, I felt something crawling.
I leaped out of bed, threw back the covers, and turned on the
lamp with one movement. There was a huge, black, shiny cock-
roach in bed with us. These cockroaches are as large as a half-
dollar and are loathsome things. I swatted at it, and it moved
towards Win. By then he was awake enough to swat it back
on my side, mumbling, "Whattsa going on? Whattsa matter?"

It was touch and go before I won the final battle. As I
crawled wearily back into bed, I said, "The words of the song
make sense."

At that my poor husband, now wide awake, sat up in bed
and said suspiciously, "What song?"

"The one that goes something like, *Why, oh why, did I
ever leave Indiana/"

CHAPTER VI

Classes for the People

THE INTELLECTUAL CAPACITY of a nation is as important as its
physical resources, be they cocoa farms or gold mines. One
of the functions of adult education in any country is to pick
up that potential ability which has so far slipped through
the existing educational net.

When Win had the opportunity to come out to the Univer-
sity college of Ghana to teach in the Institute of Extra-Mural
Studies, we knew the aim was to provide adult education at
an advanced level and that he would take his courses to the
people in their communities. But the things we didn't know
would fill a book. Most American college professors would
quail before the demands of a class of schoolteachers, cocoa
farmers, and government clerks in Ghana. You must be enter-
taining and intellectual, serious and witty. The students came
because they wanted to, and you'd jolly well better give them
what they wanted or they would stop coming.

There were regular weekly classes in International Affairs,
Economics, Comparative Government, Economic Geography,
French, Local Government, English Literature, Political Theory,
British Constitution, etc., held in one hundred different centers
in Ghana. The classes run for twenty weeks. One needs only to
compare Ghana with the surrounding territories to see what
an enormous advantage it is that there are opportunities within
the reach of the people for serious study under the guidance of
a qualified tutor.

Only a few thousand students attend Extra-Mural classes
but usually the leaders of the community were among them.

58 AFRICA A WOULD IN PROGRESS

Thus the benefits of the classes were extended to even more
people.

Teaching out in the villages, you come to know the people
and what they are thinking as you could in no other way. Some
walked three or four miles to attend the classes. Win had one
class sixty miles from Accra at a little village that was still in
the bush. There was no electricity, and class was held by the
light of a kerosene lantern. He picked up his students along the
way until the car would hold no more. Most of them were
primary-school teachers and quite isolated intellectually. His
class on International Affairs was the big event of the week.
Their curiosity was boundless. They asked searching questions
on the United States government, foreign policy, and political
parties things which Americans take for granted. Their knowl-
edge of the United States, geographically, economically, and
politically, far surpassed the average American university stu-
dent's knowledge of Africa who thinks in terms of big-game
hunting, Stanley and Livingstone, and the "dark continent"
not in terms of modern cities, schools, airports, libraries, and
a people who are going forward at an astonishing speed.

The classes were stimulating and challenging. I often went
along for the ride. And what a ride! The car bumped along
over the stones, sand, and potholes of many "first class" roads.
It was hard on the tires, springs, and engine, too. Cars in the
Extra-Mural department were short lived. The drive up to the
class was pleasant enough, but coming back it was nerve-rack-
ing due to the hurtling mammy-lorries. Mammy wagons, or lor-
ries, are the most common means of transportation in Ghana,
They may be dilapidated contraptions, wide open, with the
planks laid crossways in the back of the truck for seats or they
may be shiny new Volkswagen microbuses. Both kinds have
two things in common they are overcrowded and overloaded
with boxes and bags of produce, fowls, and perhaps even a
bicycle tied on the top. Secondly, they all have slogans embla-
zoned either across the back or front: "Never Trust a Beautiful
Woman," "All the World's a Stage," "Let Them Say," "Trust in

CLASSES FOR THE PEOPLE 59

God," "Never Despair," "Again," "So What?" "Still in the
Mood," "Happy Boy," "Pay the Man Now," and "A Beautiful
Woman Never Stays Long With One Man." As one big careen-
ing lorry whipped around us on a hair-pin turn one night, we
read "Still Alive." Win burst out resentfully, "How, 111 never
know." These vehicles could block the road ahead of an ordi-
nary car for miles, unmoved by the most desperate signals of
horn and headlamps. When at last the lorry driver signaled an
invitation to pass, they gave up so little of the narrow road
that passing became a test of nerves, calculation, and skill.

One rainy, pitch-black night, as Win was returning from a
class, he came upon a lorry stopped in the road with no flares
or reflector lights. This is quite common; if a car runs out of gas
or breaks down, it is never pushed off on the side but remains
right on the road. This night he was blinded by the glaring
headlights of an approaching car. He saw the parked lorry too
late. He braked sharply and pulled off the road. The car turned
over. He desperately pushed open a door and crawled out think-
ing it would catch on fire. Within a few minutes, four Africans
materialized out of the bush and helped him lift the little Opel
out of the ditch and set it back on the road. Two of them were
from the abandoned lorry. I said indignantly that they should
have been ashamed to show their faces. He said that far from
being ashamed, they were delighted to see him and hitched
a ride back into Accra with him. Miraculously he suffered only
a few bruises, and the car lost only a few chrome strips around
the door.

Another hazard was the goats and sheep that roamed the
roads. It was time-consuming if you killed a sheep or goat.
You had to count on at least an hour's palaver with the owner.
Perhaps the greatest difficulty in actually holding classes came
from natural hazards. A tropical torrent of rain would kill a
class quicker than the proclamation of emergency regulations.
Adult education has sometimes literally been brought to a halt
by the fall of a giant silk cotton tree smack across the only
road.

60 AFRICA A WORLD IN PROGRESS

One evening, Win promised the class a guest lecturer from
the French Embassy, but he unfortunately fell ill at the last
minute so Win drafted me. He nonchalantly said that there
wasn't any reason why I couldn't go and talk to them on the
Soviet government. I tried quickly to think of some but they
weren't good enough, so I gathered up some outlines (they
adore outlines, charts, pamphlets, anything that they can take
with them) and we set forth.

As we picked up the men students in the little villages and
at crossroads, he would explain that I was going to lecture to
them. They thought this was excruciatingly funny. "Madame,
lecture on Russia?" and this would set them off in howls of
laughter. Evidently a mere wife didn't meddle in her professor-
husband's job. Win was getting a little embarrassed at all this
derisive laughter. I took this amusement for some ten miles
then firmly explained to them that I had been teaching in the
university at home for several years and that I wasn't just
"housewife." I further explained I was teaching a course in Com-
parative Governments in Accra on Wednesday evenings to thirty
students. By now they were looking more respectfully and were
convinced that the professor wasn't "making joke" with them.
At the end of the class they all lined up, solemly shook hands,
and asked me to come again. I silently forgave them for their
previous ridicule.

One of the high spots of Win's classes in the bush came
when he gave out the half dozen copies of Time that he bought
for them each week. They were like children waiting for a
treat. I can't describe their pleasure in getting up-to-date news
of what was going on in the world.

Win taught a class in International Affairs in the village of
Asamakasee. It was a bright and interesting class. Clerks, school-
teachers, and supervisors from cocoa farms would eventually
arrive at 6 P.M. Discussion on Nasser, the Middle East, and the
Suez crisis would reach a high pitch. It would get so dark in
the room that Win couldn't see the map or blackboard and then
miraculously an African boy would bear a lantern in and hang
it in the middle of the room. Eventually the class would reluc-

CLASSES FOB THE PEOPLE 61

tantly end, and we would fill our car with students and start
the fifty-mile trip home.

Our ride home might be hazardous, but it was always inter-
esting. The small villages would be dotted with glimmering
lights from the street traders* stalls. Smoky, flickering oil lan-
terns lighted the ebony faces of the vendors and their stacks
of small wares and made a deep mystery of the darkness behind
them. There would still be smoke from the charcoal braziers
where the evening food had been prepared. Babies, goats, chick-
ens, and whole families mixed in small chattering groups. Then
the road would become a long, straight stretch of black silence
where the brightness of our headlights traveled softly over the
wayside bush, or dazzled to a standstill an occasional plodding,
head-loaded figure or illuminated a solitary bicycle rider.

My class in Accra was made up mainly of government work-
ers, teachers, and clerks. When we came out to Ghana, I meant
to have a year of leisure and not teach, but I decided I also
wanted first-hand contact with the Ghanaian. 1 never regretted
it. This particular class was unusually rewarding although at
times their questions, asked in all sincerity, left me momentarily
speechless. We were discussing the Constitution of the United
States and came to the second amendment in the Bill of Rights
which reads: "Since a well-regulated militia is essential to the
security of a free state, the right of the people to keep and bear
arms must not be interfered with." A hand went up and one
young man said triumphantly, "Aha, so that is why you have
so much shootings in Chicago, you let them bear arms." That
interpretation of the constitution surprised me, as I am sure it
would have surprised the Founding Fathers. Another time, a
student commented that our President was a very weak man or
he would dismiss Governor Faubus. It took me the rest of the
hour to explain that under a federal system, unlike a unitary
one, our President had no control over the Governor. He under-
stood me perfectly, but remained convinced that something was
wrong with the system if Eisenhower could not control Faubus.
One can understand his feelings.

In a new country still close to the tribal forms, it's not cus-

62 AFRICA A WOBLD IN PROGRESS

ternary to defend your enemies* right to criticize and attack you.
Democracy takes some explaining, and while the Ghanaian has
had the English for an example, he still thinks it's easier to
deport your enemy instead of converting him. Another thing
you might try some day is to explain why the Ford or Rocke-
feller Foundation gives away money. The first question is,
"What do they expect to get back from it?"

The things we take for granted need a lot of explaining on
the other side of the world, and I often felt terribly inadequate.
When the class began they were not used to an American ac-
cent, and they felt I "rolled my words." I figured out that I
pronounced my Vs" and I probably talked too fast. I said "mar-
velous"; the English say "mavelous." Frankly, I had trouble un-
derstanding them. They speak rapidly, with very soft, low
voices. But as time went on, we understood each other very
well. The last night of class several of the students gave
speeches. They like long, formal, flowery speeches and when
one concluded by saying he hoped "God would bless and keep
learned lady' and she would come again soon," I felt my eyes
misting over.

When you go out to a university to teach, you are a new
face with new ideas and you receive many invitations to speak.
One Saturday night, Win was invited to speak at a Teacher
Training College fifty miles from Accra. We were invited to
have dinner with the principal and his wife before the lecture.
They were old-timers who had been on the West Coast for
twenty years. He still wore the high mosquito boots with his
dress clothes. She had been "out" too long as they say on the
Coast. She looked at me but didn't see me. She constantly
hummed a little tune, staring straight ahead. We went to the
auditorium, and Win was introduced to the three hundred stu-
dents. He had talked for five minutes when the bats flew in.
They swooped in front of him, behind him, and over his head.
The principal and students paid not the slightest attention.
Win steadily talked on. I watched this spectacle open-mouthed.
If I had been on the stage, I would have jumped out the win-
dow and disappeared into the night.

CLASSES FOB THE PEOPLE 6S

Ghanaians like long programs with singing, speeches, and
much formality. I found this out by firsthand experience. Millie
Murphy, whose husband heads the Africa-American Institute
in Accra, was going on leave. She asked me if I'd mind sub-
stituting for her in a local secondary school's annual Speech
Day Celebrations. I would only have to present the prizes at
the appropriate time. I readily agreed. As I dashed off at three
o'clock, I told my family that I would be back in an hour or
so. I arrived promptly at three-thirty in my white dress, shoes,
and gloves and was greeted warmly and taken directly to the
playing field where we sat and watched the gymnastic display
for an hour. As the dust swirled about us, I became a little less
white. After refreshments, the singing and drumming began,
then the innumerable speeches. At last, I presented fifty books
as prizes. It grew dark. Then followed remarks by the chair-
man, votes of thanks, doxology, and benediction. I madly drove
home. I had been gone four hours!

Week-end conferences were a part of the Extra-Mural pro-
gram. They were held in different parts of Ghana, and the lec-
tures were grouped around one theme. It gives the people in
that area an opportunity to hear outside speakers. The resident
tutor in Trans-Volta Togoland, Paul Bertleson wanted to hold
a week-end conference in Tsito on "The United States Today."
We Americans at the university agreed to go and lecture. There
was tremendous interest and seventy-five Africans including two
chiefs walked, drove, bicycled, or came by lorry to the con-
ference. They arrived at the Awudome Residential Adult Col-
lege by tea time. As I was the only woman on the program,
the three other men allowed me to talk first on "Recent Elections
and Political Parties in the U.S." Mr, Birmingham followed
with "Economic Conditions in the U.S." He is a British Senior
Lecturer in Economics at the University College, but had just
spent six months lecturing at Roosevelt University in Chicago.
He held them spellbound describing the average income in the
United States. He candidly pointed out how hard the average
American works, that even very few high-salaried Americans
have servants, that we consider it no loss of prestige to work

64 AFRICA A WORLD IN PROGRESS

with our hands. Many Ghanaians feel as soon as they get a
college degree they are entitled to a white-collar job and
wouldn't dream of doing any manual work. They find it dif-
ficult to understand why Americans, who have big cars, radios,
"fridges/* and all kinds of labor-saving gadgets, work so hard.

For dinner that evening, we had rice and groundnut stew
made with palm oil. It is the universal Ghanaian dish. For
Sunday dinner the next day, more rice and groundnut stew,
but as a concession to us, they omitted some of the pepper
from the stew and put extra red pepper on the tables in little
dishes. I found the stew quite hot enough without adding more
red pepper. On Sunday, Dr. St. Clair Drake, a visiting Professor
in Sociology at the University College on leave from Roosevelt
University in Chicago, talked on 'The Situation in Little Rock."
Dr. Drake did a fine job on this. He was both fair and objective
and, as he is an American Negro, was listened to with great
respect. Win closed the conference by talking on "United States
Foreign Policy Today." These titles give a clue to subjects that
the African is tremendously interested in, and there were dozens
of questions after every lecture. A week-end conference is an
opportunity not only for intellectual stimulation but for social
intercourse. There is much laughter, talking, and singing.

The highlight of the whole Extra-Mural program is the
New Year School. It has become a national institution in the
West African adult-educational world. Two days after Christ-
mas, some three hundred fifty teachers, civil servants, cocoa
farmers, businessmen, chiefs, clergy, and housewives, arrive at
the University College to take up residence for ten days. It is a
mixed audience forming one of the most interesting groups a
lecturer can have. It is a colorful audience; the white shirts and
grey trousers are there, but also the kente cloths and the north-
ern smocks with a few Yoruba dresses in between all bright-
ened up by an ingenious array of ladies* wear. Some have come
a long way from the savannas, the forestland, and the towns
from all over Ghana, and some even from other countries in
Africa. Above all, it is an audience that wants to know what is

CLASSES FOR THE PEOPLE 65

going on in the world. They will listen carefully but not leave
it at that. Whether the lecturer is a cabinet minister, a world-
renowned expert in constitutional law, or an ambassador, there
are many, and often searching, questions after the lecture.

The students attend seminars of their choice in the morning
for two hours. International Relations, which Win taught, was
very popular and had one of the largest enrollments. In the
afternoon, they could read in the library, take tours to the new
harbor at Tema, or attend drumming and dancing. After dinner,
there were the open lectures given by world-famous people
from Nigeria, Gambia, Canada, United States, United Nations,
and Australia. Elizabeth Drake, from Chicago, whose husband
was teaching at the university, and I were asked to represent
American women's viewpoints on the women's panel on the
last day of the New Year School. Most of the young Ghanaian
women in front of us were schoolteachers. They came with
searching questions. They weren't satisfied with the old ways
of a man going out alone socially and being the absolute ruler
in his household. Yet they didn't understand the new ways. I
know they did not believe Elizabeth and me when we told them
that men washed dishes, changed diapers, and even helped cook
in the States. We didn't make an impression, for what African
man would do those things? I really felt inadequate and a world
apart trying to explain equality between man and wife to them.

The New Year School provided an opportunity for exchang-
ing ideas with people from different parts of Ghana who never
have occasion to meet, for hearing new viewpoints expressed
and re-examines old ones, and for living in the surroundings
and atmosphere of their leading university. For ten days they
had a chance to partake of the educational bread.

There is still much to be done in adult education, but the
Extra-Mural classes have speeded up the development of the
citizens who run the country. Great credit should be given to
Mr. David Kimble, Director of Extra-Mural Studies, for this
ambitious program.

CHAPTER VII

Christmas in the Tropics

CELEBRATING CHRISTMAS in the tropics requires unlimited imag-
ination or none at all. It is as unreal as trying to celebrate it in
the States in July.

The calendar and the mounting dry season told us Christ-
inas was close at hand. So did Accra's largest department
store. The loudspeaker blared out Christmas carols from the
first of November on. The shopping season opens earlier in
Africa than at home. Expatriates have to mail their packages
and cards to the U. K. and the States by the 10th of November
if they were to arrive at their destinations by December 25.
There was no choice shopping had to be finished early.

It may seem difficult to work up any Yuletide spirit when
you are overcome by the heat, but children's enchantment with
Christmas is not easily quenched, which proves that geography
is only a state of mind. We perspiringly prepared for the
Christinas season, not the way we would have at home, but. . .

We stocked the larder with imported U.S. frozen turkey,
canned fruitcake, plum pudding, and all the goodies we could
find in the shops. On the afternoon of Christmas Eve, the Shin-
ns, our next-door neighbors came for tea. Their thirteen-year-
old daughter, Caroline, was home from boarding school in Eng-
land for the holidays so she came with them. She introduced
an "other-world feeling" when she told of the snow she'd gone
through in London the day before to get to the airport. After-
wards Win, the three children, and I drove around to friends'
houses delivering small packages to their children. We decided
then we would drive down the road to the Lisbon Hotel by

CHRISTMAS IN THE TROPICS 67

the airport and see the Christmas trees and lights. We had
br<A?ht no Christmas decorations from the States with us and
we nad nearly worn out our one Christmas record "Around
the World at Christmas" sung by Bing Crosby. So we sat in
the glow of the gaily colored lights on the little imported trees
on the Lisbon terrace drinking orange squash and listening to
their recorded Christmas carols.

Strangely enough, it didn't seem incongrous to be sitting on
a hotel terrace with our children on Christmas Eve. There were
no traditions to live up to, nor was there any pattern to fol-
low. The full moon and big, warm stars seemed utterly unlike
the frosty stars of other Christmases. I think the feeling of
unreality began earlier in that Christmas week when we at-
tended an all-university carol service in the outdoor theater at
Commonwealth Hall. Here we sat in the bright moonlight under
the stars in sun-backed dresses singing "Silent Night" and "Good
King Wenceslas" with poinsettia trees in full bloom.

A week before Christinas, the American Women's Group in
Accra had staged a carnival on Ambassador Flake's lawn.
Games, homemade cakes, pies, and candy, a fish pond, fortune
teller, hot dog stand, popcorn, and homemade Christmas pres-
ents all contrived to bring an American flavor to an exotic set-
ting. We worked as hard as I ever did for the P.T.A. or church
bazaar at home. We cleared three thousand dollars for Prime
Minister Nkrumah's community-chest fund. It was an Ameri-
can carnival, but the milling crowd was international. Leba-
nese, Egyptians, Indians, French, Nigerians, Syrians the whole
International Community came plus a thousand Ghanaians.
They loved every minute of it.

Even our gifts to each other were different this year. At
home we always buy a present for the house. This year we
bought five beautifully carved Ashanti chiefs' stools, one for
each of us, for the house. We decided we would think of how
we would get them home later. Ivory jewelry, beautiful carved
heads, ebony elephant bookends, and calabashes were ex-
changed happily to everybody's satisfaction on Christmas morn-

68 AFRICA A WOULD IN PROGRESS

ing. I had asked Win earlier if he had any yearnings for any-
thing special. He promptly said that he wanted a Koran. Pri-
vately, I thought this a little odd for a deacon in the Reformed
Church of America, but that seemed far away. This was here
and now, so he had his Koran on Christmas morning.

We carefully took from the closet the little artificial tree
that the previous householder had left and set it on the table
Christmas Eve, and the children confidently hung up pillow-
cases and hoped Father Christmas would not forget them. Hen-
rietta, our seven-year-old, explained to me earlier that you
didn't hang up stockings in Ghana and look for Santa Glaus,
that all the children in her school room hung pillowcases and
waited for Father Christmas. There was no question of what
she and George would do. If it was Father Christmas who
remembered the good children in Africa, she and her brother
would fall in line and hope for the best.

Christmas morning we went to Legon Hall chapel to an all-
university family service. George, our six-year-old, was asked
to pass the collection plate for the first time. There was no hes-
itancy, but he showed no faith in his fellow men, instead of
letting the plate go down the row, he squeezed past in front of
them and never let it leave his hand as they dropped their
money in. All of the parents showed a fine charitable spirit
towards this new way of passing the plate, but his contem-
poraries glared angrily as he stepped on their toes. Henrietta, of
course, said that she had never been so humiliated.

We invited a marine who was stationed at the American
Embassy to share our Christmas dinner. He was feeling that
Milwaukee was quite far away that day and as I picked mari-
golds for the table and made iced tea, I felt Indiana was not
exactly next door. Anyway, we decided to make the best of
both worlds and planned a trip in the afternoon to the beach
to cool off after the traditional Christmas dinner.

After the exhausted children had fallen to sleep, we switched
on the radio to get the nine o'clock Voice of America broadcast.
The announcer described the weather on Christmas Day in

Ghanaian Children at a Day Nursery

r : j*Sjm ' ^^"ijf^j^^

Observance of Ramadan by Moslems

Bookmobile Visiting a Remote Area

Author's Daughter (second from I) at Child Welfare Ball, Ambassador Hotel

Dredging Diamonds From the Rich African Earth

All-African People's Conference in Progress

Kofi Antubam, a Leading Artist, Painting the Murals in the
Ambassador Hotel

Weaving Kente Cloth on foot-guided Looms

Dr. Cone at Class Meeting at the University

' '' ''* <: "

Dr. Cone With His Adult Education Class

Drummer With "Talking" DrumsMale and Female

Comfort, the Market Mammy, Selecting Vegetables

Cocoa Beans Drying on Palm Leaves

Market Mammies in Market Scene

CHRISTMAS IN THE TROPICS 69

Chicago, Sioux City, Perth Amboy, and Beaver Falls with the
snow and zero temperatures. Of course, it was midafternoon in
the States as we were six hours ahead in West Africa. As we
listened to the American accent, we could hear the drumming,
clapping, and dancing of the houseboys in Christian Village,
a mile down the road. It wasn't hard then to feel a world apart.
The day after Christmas is Boxing Day, a national holiday.
Early that morning the gardener, night watchman, garbage col-
lector, and ex-car boy all called for their dash.

The following day we went with the Friends Group to the
beach for a picnic. We arrived just before a beautiful harmattan
sunset, had a swim, ate our picnic supper and then sat by the
big breakers until the full moon rose slowly and majestically.
African and European voices blended with perfect harmony,
singing all the old familiar Christmas Carols until the small chil-
dren began falling asleep. We reluctantly gathered up our things
and turned homeward in the warm, still moonlight.

All through January, boxes arrived with gaily wrapped pack-
ages from grandparents, relatives, and friends. The last box ar-
rived in the middle of February, and Christmas cards sent by
surface mail kept coming until February. It was exhilarating.
Every card and package we opened was Christmas all over and
brought a touch of home. So despite equatorial snags and
tropical heat we did not lack the spirit of Christmas.

CHAPTER VIII

On Trek

WE ARRIVED IN TAMALE at night. We had made the long trip in
one day, leaving behind us a cloud of yellow dust for five hun-
dred rough, winding West African miles. We left the Accra
plain on the coast at daybreak in a blinding rain and drove
north through the Ashanti rain forest. Here it is difficult for
the eye to become accustomed to the blue of the vast hot sky,
to the red richness of the steaming earth, and to the brilliant
green of tropical vegetation.

It was our first trip to the Northern Territories. The North-
ern Region or N.T/s, as they are familiarly called, contains over
one half the area of Ghana but only one-fifth the population.
The terrain is flatter, dryer, and hotter than the rest of Ghana.
The savannah land is not as productive as the rich cocoa farms
and forests further south. It lies too close to the Sahara. Here
there are fewer schools, more illiteracy; a poorer diet, more
disease. The southern Ghanaian, who wears the rich kente cloth,
looks down on his more primitive kinsman in the north in the
white cotton smock. When Prime Minister Nkrumah wants to
identify himself with the North, he always wears the N.T.
smock. It is good psychology as well as good politics.

The University College holds its annual Easter School in
the Northern Region every spring. We knew Win would be on
the program, so had waited until then to visit the North.

When you take a trip in Africa you go "on trek." In the
old days when missionaries, traders, and government olicers
tramped through the African interior with equipment slung
on bearer's poles, they took what they could and subsisted on

ON TREK 71

native food when their food ran out, and journeys were counted
in days rather than hours. This arduous way of covering the
country involved hardships, dangers, and disease, but they did
get to know the territories and people more intimately than is
possible when using modern transportation.

Today many of the main roads are admirably surfaced, and
traveling by car and lorry is generally successful if the driver
makes allowances for breakdowns, has an emergency supply of
petrol, and carries food and water. It isn't the kind of travel-
ing Americans are used to. The petrol stations do not have rest
rooms, and there are no restaurants or hotels along the way.
There are few hotels outside of Accra. There is not a single
place to get a drink of water until you reach a rest house. The
government runs all the rest houses and there are two kinds,
to one the motorist brings all his own food, bedding, towels, and
supplies and may have to do his own cooking; in the other, a
catering rest house, meals are served. All rooms must be booked
ahead, as there is a great demand.

The four of us Jim Lipscomb from Texas, who was setting
up a School of Business Administration at the University Col-
lege, Dr. St. Clair Drake, Win, and I expected to make the
five hundred-mile journey in one day so we had not brought
the usual amount of gear cots, bedding, nets, water filters, and
chop boxes.

We were slowed down by a streaming wall of rain as we
were ready to take off that morning. When the rainy season
begins, it often rains every morning* Then we lost our way and
drove an extra fifty miles. The roads are poorly marked or not
marked at all. It is hopeless to ask directions. The question,
"Is this the road to Mampong?" would invariably bring the
reply, "Yes, please." After all, the African wants to be agree-
able and make people happy.

Thus we arrived at Yegi, our only ferry route across the
Volta River, at five minutes after six. The ferry stopped at six,
and the boys had gone home. There were a half-dozen lorries
waiting patiently until the ferry started again at six the next

72 AFRICA A WORLD IN PROGRESS

morning. We felt panicky. The village had no lights, no hotel,
no restaurant. We had eaten peanut-butter sandwiches and
boiled eggs all day. We decided there must be a way. A guide
took us to the toll keeper's house. He was not there, but
with his son we toured the village. By the time it was dark we
returned to his house. He was suddenly "at home." We sus-
pected he had been there all the time and only hoped we would
give up and accept the inevitable. We persisted and after much
palaver and offering to dash him and his ferry boys generously
he decided to allow us to cross. Americans call such infectious
bribery "graft" but it pervades every kind of African association
or service. (You find some exceptions among the civil servants.)
It is harsh to condemn the practice of dashing, since white men
in the tropics are regarded as plutocrats. An hour later, the toll
keeper rounded up his boys and we crossed the ferry by the
headlights of Jim's car.

There had been no petrol stations for miles before we
reached the ferry, and we were running low on fuel. We asked
in the first village where we would find a station. We were told
just 118 miles more. There was nothing to do but go on as far
as we could on borrowed time. Two hours later, we coasted
to a stop and climbed wearily out of the car. The intense dark-
ness and night silence were strange, even awesome, as the
silence of remote primitive places can be to people who are used
to the reassuring background of town noises. It was not a
still silence but alive with an undercurrent of chirping insects
and small, secret sounds and always the sound of the distant
drums. We did not have long to wait, as the first lorry that
came by stopped. The driver had an extra drum of petrol and
willingly sold us a gallon. Another lorry stopped to see if he
could help us. Here, no car would dream of passing a motor-
ist in trouble by day or night. We finally arrived at the govern-
ment rest house at Tamale at 9:30 P.M. They had stopped serv-
ing at nine o'clock, so dinner was finished. So were we. We
gloomily ate more peanut butter and cheese in our rooms and
fell exhaustedly into bed.

ON TREK 73

The next day, as soon as classes were over, we drove fifty
miles out to a typical northern village called Dboya. I had never
been in a village like it. We parked the car and an ancient
African poled us across the White Volta in a leaking canoe.
We approached the village on foot in the 99 heat. I felt like
Stanley looking for Livingstone. Fortunately, almost immedi-
ately we met an educated young Ghanaian who was part of a
United Nations health team stationed in the area. He spoke
excellent English and interpreted for us. He told us with engag-
ing candor that this village of 1,500 had the highest rate of
sleeping sickness in Ghana plus yaws, leprosy, Guinea worm,
and a blinding disease called onchocerciasis.

Some fifty women and their naked little piccans followed us
around the village staring at me. When I asked the man from
UNICEF why they were staring, he said that I was one of
the few white women to visit their village. He presented us
to the chief and acted as interpreter. The chief, a man of great
dignity, sat on his throne chair in a dim, hot, dirty room. We
all bowed and shook hands and inquired about his health. He
motioned us to sit on a bench in front of him and promptly
presented us with a dozen eggs as his gift to us. Not knowing
we would be so honored, we were quite unequal to the occasion
and had nothing for him. We politely inquired if he would
allow us to give some small coins to his numerous piccans, or
children. He graciously consented.

We watched the villagers dye cloth in huge vats in the
ground. This day everything was coming out navy blue, which
is a favorite color in the North. Some were weaving cloth. Some
were cooking chop. Many sat motionless in any available shade
doing absolutely nothing. We were consumed with thirst, and
our guide said we could buy some bottled soda water. That
seemed too good to be true. We went into the only shop where
a sleepy clerk climbed up and took a dusty bottle of soda water
off the shelf and handed it to us. We were not fussy at that
stage, we dusted the hot bottle off, and champagne never tasted
better. Soon we set out for the canoe and crossed the river

74 AFRICA A WORLD IN PROGRESS

again. It was full of people swimming, bathing, washing their
clothes, and getting drinking water. The river was the social
center of the village. It seemed as unreal and melodramatic as
if I had stumbled upon a Hollywood set of The African Queen.

The next day we drove one hundred miles to the border
and crossed over into the French Territory of the Upper Volta.
We visited mosques the north of Ghana is predominantly Mos-
lem. We visited a crocodile lake where the small boys begged
us to buy a live chicken so we could use it for chop and lure
the crocodiles out of the water. My stomach rebelled at the
thought of this, so one chicken was saved from being chopped.

We visited the market in Bolgatanga where they weave the
colorful baskets and sew the unbleached white smocks. One
enterprising young vendor kept wanting me to buy "women's
dress." I found out his idea of "women's dress" was not quite
what I had in mind. It was a narrow adjustable leather belt
with straps of leather six inches long fastened to the front of
the belt. This is the part of Ghana where women wear the
least clothes. They may wear the belt with the leather strips
attached, or the belt may have two tufts of grass, or they may
wear only a piece of cloth around their hips. The ladies of
the Accra Women's Club in the South have been waging an in-
tensive campaign to get clothes on the women in the North.
They have been collecting clothes in the U.K. and the States
to distribute. They have made some progress, but at times
they must think their cause is hopeless. They had given some
yards of cloth to one young woman. The next time she saw
them coming, she rushed into her house and proudly draped
the cloth around her shoulders, more as a trimming, and came
happily out dressed in only the belt with the tufts of grass.
I'm not sure that the women in the hotter northern climate
will be happy or comfortable dressed in yards of the mammy
cloth they wear in the south. The piccans mostly go naked.
The men wear the smocks and Western dress, although some
are still seen in the loin cloth. The women complain that the

ON TREK 75

men work and take the money and buy clothes for themselves
and give them nothing for cloth. It may well be true.

We saw mud and wattle villages with thatched roofs where
the people share their huts with livestock, chickens, and goats.
The people are all friendly, but instead of calling you "Ma-
dame," they call you "sister," showing the missionary influence.

It was an exciting week in Tamale. Win killed a scorpion in
our bedroom. They are quite common. The veterinarian told
us that his five-year-old son had been stung at least three times.
We ran out of boiled water and drank gallons of unboiled
water and hoped we wouldn't get stomach upsets. We slept
under nets which we detested as they kept out the air, but they
also kept out the mosquitos.

Earlier in the year, we had made trips to Cape Coast and
had seen the castles built by the Danes, Dutch, and Portuguese
and later used to hold slaves until they could be shipped off
to America. We visited Takoradi, one of the largest seaports
on the west coast of Africa. Here were ships from all over the
world the harbor can berth nine large ships at once. We saw
ships loading cocoa, manganese, gold, and precious diamonds.
Takoradi is Ghana's main port until Tema is finished. Takoradi
has had the disadvantage of being 120 miles from the capital,
Accra. Tema is only 12 miles from Accra. Accra itself has no
true harbor. Ships must stop two miles out and all cargo has
to be brought in on little surf boats. It is a risky business, and
many people have lost their trunks and precious baggage to
the sea. If passengers come by sea to Accra, they take the little
surf boats and then are carried on the backs of strong Ghanaian
seamen the last one hundred yards unless they want to wade
in. Mrs. Birmingham, the seventy-year-old mother of a friend of
ours, arrived from the U.K. for a visit by ship. She was sur-
prised and amused to arrive in so unexpected and unconven-
tional a manner.

We took a short holiday at Amedzofe, one hundred miles
north of Accra in a range of hills along the French Togoland

76 AFRICAA WORLD IN PROGRESS

frontier. This beauty spot is 2,900 feet above sea level and is
the highest point in Ghana. Here was a well-built government
rest house, low and sprawling, with a long terrace across the
entire front. It afforded a panoramic view of miles of alternat-
ing yellow and beige, patchworked with green, and traversed by
trails as narrow and lonely as desert paths. In the full moonlight,
car headlights slowly wended their solitary way up the winding
road, and the kerosene lanterns lighted the small villages below
us.

The rest house had two huge bedrooms, each boasting a
bathroom. Between them was a large living-dining room with a
real fireplace. The evening air was quite cool, and sweaters and
a fire were a luxury we never needed in Accra, yet still had per-
versely missed. The mornings reminded one of the Midwest in
autumn, and the coolness of the dawn lingered until midday.

Here one brought his own food and bedding, but the rest
house had an experienced cook-steward who was in absolute
command. The guest took a bath when he brought the buckets
of hot water, had early morning tea when he knocked, and
ate the food the way he prepared it. I upset him the first day
when I had forgotten the onions to go with the meat and po-
tatoes. He was crestfallen and kept saying, "No onions for the
meat?" I regretted it too. The guest book was a good after-
noon's entertainment. It was full of names of prominent diplo-
mats, cabinet ministers, and businessmen. Their comments on
the steward were delightful but left not the faintest doubt that
he would stand any nonsense. If a spoon was missing, you paid
for it; if you did not keep your back door closed, it was your
fault that snakes came in. One guest wrote that the preciseness
and inflexibility of the steward must have been learned from
the German missionaries. Win was highly amused by such com-
ments. His inscription in the book read: "This book would be
far more interesting if the steward could write his comments on
the guests who have stayed here."

The most striking and distinctive craft in Ghana is undoubt-
edly the weaving of kente cloth. It was introduced one hundred

ON TTREK 77

fifty or more years ago, probably from North Africa, and is
carried on today in a few traditional centers. Bonwire, a small
village outside Kumasi, the capital of the Ashanti, is the most
famous in Ghana.

Brightly colored silk threads are woven on simple looms
into strips a few inches wide and six yards long. These strips
are sewn together into a cloth which is usually worn on festive
occasions, toga-fashion, with the right shoulder bare. Prime
Minister Nkrumah and Finance Minister Gbedemah have made
the kente cloth a familiar sight in many capitals of the world.

The beautiful multicolored patterns of these cloths appear
to be the spontaneous designs of individual weavers. Actually,
each pattern is standardized, has its own name, and represents
a clan or proverb, as "A rich man has many friends."

We drove to Bonwire on Sunday morning. We were not in
the village two minutes before we were politely told the chief
would be glad to grant us an audience. We accompanied our
guide across the street and upstairs to see the chief. Our host,
Mr. Duncanson, who has lived in the Ashanti region for sev-
eral years, said, "Speak only if you are spoken to, never cross
your legs or feet when sitting in front of the chief as it is con-
sidered disrespectful, and do not leave until given permission."
Other things that a Western person must remember are not
to gesticulate with the left hand, to always proceed through
a door first, and when shaking hands with a group to start on
the right and proceed counterclockwise around the group.

The chief was sitting in his throne chair on a small platform
in one end of the room surrounded by his linguist, attendants,
elders, and a little boy called his "soul bearer." We shook hands,
bowed, and seated ourselves on a bench along the wall. After
pleasantries were exchanged, the linguist told him we were in-
terested in seeing kente cloths, as we understood the most
beautiful ones were woven in Bonwire.

He ordered several kentes to be brought and displayed for
our inspection. These cloths may cost anything from seventy-
five dollars to four hundred dollars. I decided on a beautiful

78 AFRICAA WORLD IN PROGRESS

green, gold, and white design to be made into a kente stole.
The design was called Koku ne kra Tamo the cloth for Koku's
soul, named after a queen mother who was defeated and killed
in battle against Opoku Ware, King of Ashantis' from 1730 to
1742. For this intricately patterned stole I paid twenty-eight
dollars. Queen Koku must have been a happy queen. The cloth
representing her soul is very gay and festive-looking. After a
reasonable length of time, we were given permission to take
our leave. We then toured the rest of the village and watched,
fascinated, as they wove the kentes.

CHAPTER IX

Bicycles and Lagos

MY FIRST IMPRESSION of Lagos, the Federal Capital of Nigeria,
was that at least half of the population rode bicycles. Lagos
derives its name from "lagoon" in Portuguese. The old town is
crammed on a small island, eight square miles, where some
300,000 people live. It seems airless and is hot and muggy day
and night.

The white buildings peer out through the trees along the
edge of the lagoon, which is the harbor, and a great water high-
way running from French territory on the West to the Niger
and beyond. The only link between Lagos Island and the main-
land is the famous Carter Bridge. All roads converge at the
bridge; there is no other crossing except by lagoon ferries or
canoes. The bridge is one-half mile long and during morning
and evening rush hours is packed with reckless cyclists six
abreast. It is an unnerving sight to see thousands of bicyclists
threading their way through the heavy traffic with bells ringing
and white shirts or robes billowing out behind them. Later,
when I looked out of the staff training room on the fourth floor
of the Kingsway department store into the parking lot and saw
hundreds of parked bicycles, I realized just how important a
part it plays in the Lagos transportation system.

I went to Lagos to do sales-training with the staff at the
Kingsway store. This store, owned by the powerful United Af-
rica Company, was the first department store in West Africa
and is still the largest with over eight hundred employees. It is
located on Marina Avenue along the waterfront. I stayed out
by the airport at the Ikeja Arms Hotel. I was picked up by the

80 AFRICA A WORLD IN PROGRESS

JCingsway driver every morning and driven the 17 miles into the
city. Every morning as we wended our way through the sprawl-
ing warren of slums, walled and roofed with rusty pieces of tin,
metal, cardboard, and debris and cut across alleys filled with
chickens, piccans, filth, and stench, I was freshly impressed by
the modern miracle that was the Kingsway.

As we left the car, we pushed our way through groups of
beggars, small urchins, and bold street vendors hawking cheap
watches, fountain pens, and sunglasses. Then we stepped
through the doors of the store into the twentieth century. Here
was cleanliness, order, well-groomed salespeople, self-service,
and a profusion of Western goods.

Brand-new commercial procedures were at work here. I was
always amazed that they worked so well in the midst of so many
difficulties, such as the capriciousness of the electrical current
that stopped the operations of cash registers, escalators, and
elevators. One muggy day, Mr. Sam Oyelola, their African
training director, and I were on our way up in the lift when it
suddenly stopped three feet below the fourth floor. Our eyes
were just at knee level with the people waiting for the lift.
We steamed helplessly. Finally they handed fans down to us
and the other two dignified Nigerian gentlemen sharing our
plight. After much advice and sympathy from people down on
their knees peering at us and a great deal of advice on how
to extricate us, they slowly pulled the elevator up by hand.
Two minutes later, the current perversely came back on.

I felt sticky as soon as I left my air-conditioned hotel room
at 7 A.M. until I returned at 7 P.M. Lunch hours were 12:30
until 2:30 P.M. and the entire store came to a halt. I quickly
ate in the staff lunch room that first day and thought I'd go
back to the training room and rest. I soon changed my mind.
Every chair, table, and divan in that large room was covered
with sleeping Africans. At every desk in the main office that I
had to pass through, there was an African with his head down
on his arms, fast asleep. The halls, doorwaysevery place were
filled with people sleeping. I decided that I might as well join

BICYCLES AND LAGOS 81

them. I returned to the furniture department, chose a nice sum-
mer divan and joined the other six women managers who were
already asleep. There I lay motionless for an hour trying to
ignore the perspiration running down my back. I contrasted
those lunch hours to the ones in Chicago years ago when I
was a copywriter for Montgomery Ward and did all my shop-
ping during my lunch hour, sometimes had my hair done, kept
social luncheon engagements, and still had excess energy left
at five o'clock for the evening.

Just a little over one hundred years ago Lagos was a mud-
bank in swamp territory, and its location on a lagoon made it
ideal for the slave trade. There the British navy fought its last
official battle against slavery in 1851. Today it is a modern har-
bor handling three million tons of shipping annually. Instead
of "black ivory" they handle bags of cocoa, palm kernel, and
mahogany. Today the swamps have been drained, and houses
are being built on what was only a few years ago black mud.
Every kind of extreme flourishes as Lagos hastens towards the
future and independence in October, 1960. Lagos has a hand-
some, well-kept semi-European quarter with pretentious houses
called Ikoyi. A few blocks away are the worst slums in Africa.
Here houses are ramshackle, dilapidated, and overcrowded and
sewage flows in open drains under the floorboards. The Ikeja
Arms Hotel where I stayed was literally set down in the middle
of the jungle. It had a main office, lounge and dining room. The
guest rooms were attached to this, forming a square around an
open courtyard. My bathroom window opened to the jungle.
I could sit by the swimming pool, with jungle only two feet
behind me. Of course, it was 17 miles from the main part of
Lagos, and this whole airport area was not too long ago a deep
forest of palm trees and high bush.

On several evenings, having nothing else to do, I took my
cushion and walked across the courtyard to the Ikeji outdoor
movie. I suppose nothing illustrates quite so well the world of
difference between Africa and the West as the movies. We do
not laugh in the same places or at the same thing. They think

82 AFRICA A WOBLD IN PROGRESS

a love scene is hilariously funny. An American sociologist study-
ing audience reaction to movies in Ghana was amazed that
Sentimental Journey, a sad love story of a woman dying of can-
cer, played constantly to full houses. On further study, he dis-
covered it was the scene where her ghost appeared that drew
them, not the love scenes. Another time when watching the film,
Prime Minister Nkrumah Visits the United States, I was amazed
when the audience broke into loud laughs at the scene of an
American attendant rushing out with an umbrella to cover the
Prime Minister and Vice-President Nixon during a sudden
shower. In West Africa only chiefs have umbrellas carried over
them. One of the most popular American movies is King Kong.
It has great symbolic meaning to them.

After I had finished sales-training, Win and my Aunt Hen-
rietta, who was visiting us from the States, flew over to Lagos
and joined me. We rented a car and drove from Lagos to
Ibadan, the capital of the Western Province, on a hot sticky
morning in March. The road wound through mangrove swamp
and palm oil bush for ninety miles. The soil in West Africa is
red laterite, and when roads are built of it, they soon become
bumpy and are tremendously dusty in places. It is a busy road
filled with mammy wagons, goats, herds of white, skinny big-
horned cattle being driven from the North, plus the usual
head-loaded pedestrians which make driving a hazard.

Ibadan is an amazing place. It is the largest city in Nigeria
with a half-million people and the largest "African" town in
Africa. It is spread for miles over low hills, and has hundreds
of acres of rusty tin roofs. It has existed less than a hundred
years and started as a military camp during the Yoruba wars
of the last century. Here is the brand new and very handsome
legislative building, to shelter the House of Chiefs and the
House of Assembly. There are now all-African bodies. Parlia-
ment was in session and we were able to visit and observe the
\ T i?erians in action one morning. The official language in Ni-
*ria, as in Ghana, is English, for which we were grateful.

There are many new office buildings and a few miles out is

BICYCLES AND LAGOS 8tf

the huge area of the new University College. This handsome
glass structure opened in 1952 and is affiliated with the Univer-
sity of London, as is the University College of Ghana. All of
the buildings except the Protestant Chapel were designed by
the well-known and controversial architect Maxwell Fry, and are
modern, ornate, and colorful. You could forget you are in trop-
ical Africa here. Some critics think its buildings too elaborate--
it has a library of 125,000 books and too expensive, just as
they think the University College of Ghana too luxurious and
expensive.

We stayed at a modern guest house on the university
grounds. The cook-steward gave perfect service, but we still
slept under nets as the house had no screens. We visited the
new five-hundred-bed University Hospital that is the first in
Nigeria where doctors can be trained. There is a new nurses'
training school attached to the hospital. I was amazed that there
were only two private rooms on each floor of the hospital, the
rest of the bed space is in huge wards.

After days of perpetual dampness, we were happy to fly
back to Accra and our house on the hill. The ocean breezes
were much appreciated.

CHAPTER X

Special Occasions

THE ALL-AFRICAN People's Conference was held in Accra the
second week in December, 1958. It was fascinating to have a
ringside seat at this history-making event. Some two hundred
official delegates and one hundred fraternal delegates and ob-
servers from all parts of the world attended the colorful sessions
held at the Accra Community Center. The assemblage drew
political and trade-union leaders from the Cape to Cairo, Dakar
to Zanzibar.

Plans for this conference stemmed from the Accra Confer-
ence held in April. Here the eight independent countries of
Africa met together for the first time. They decided it would
be a tremendous thing if all the other African countries could
be represented. Officially this was impossible as in many cases
their governments were not African. So it was decided to issue a
call to organizations and labor groups representing the people
of Africa to come to Accra in December. Here they would work
out tactics and strategy for nonviolent revolution in Africa.

As we walked down the long flag-draped driveway on that
first morning to hear Prime Minister Nkrumah give the opening
address, the drive was lined with hundreds of people bearing
signs which read, "Hands Off Africa," "Africa One Voice,"
"Down With Apartheid," "Down With Colonialism," and "End
Racialism." These signs also were hung about in the auditorium
where the conference was held. The placard-bearers were all
in good humor and there was no evidence of hysteria or ill wilL

There was great organizational confusion during the con-
ference, and matters were further complicated by seating

SPECIAL OCCASIONS 85

arrangements in the conference hall. Delegates, press, and
unofficial observers all sat together giving nonparticipants op-
portunities to influence applause and cheering. These oppor-
tunities were not missed. The day that the telegram was read
from Khrushchev, the observers from Russia and Red China
staged a demonstration quite out of proportion, cheering and
applauding.

The Accra Conference was the first large-scale meeting be-
tween French and English speaking Africans. The translations
at every meeting were tortuous and time-consuming. The secre-
tariat typists went on a strike at 5 A.M. the final day of the
conference and said they simply could not stay awake any
longer. Consequently, texts of several resolutions did not appear
until the day after most delegates went home.

The conference was divided throughout the week between
the Cairo group and sub-Sahara Accra group. Delegations were
allowed a maximum membership of five, but the U.A.R. sent
twenty people. Competition between Cairo and Accra con-
tinued through the conference and reportedly accounted for
many of the disputes over location, powers and staffing of the
permanent secretariat, and the wording of certain resolutions.

There was a seven-man Russian observer-team, but they
had no hand in the decision-making process of the conference.
The steering committee voted early to exclude both Russians
and Americans, thus making no distinction in status between
the two. The seven Russians gave press interviews, paid a call
on Prime Minister Nkrumah, visited Kumasi and mixed with
African delegates. The Russians also gave out toy Soviet
medallions to everybody who would take them.

There were many pro-Communist observers present. Two
important ones, Mrs. Paul Robeson and Mrs. W.G.B. DuBois,
were from America. Dr. DuBois, the ninety-year-old father of
Pan Africanism, was in Moscow, but his wife read his speech.
The American ambassador's wife introduced Mrs. Robeson to
me one evening at a cocktail party. She was gay, witty, and
talkative. She spent a great deal of time telling us stories

86 AFBICAA WOBLD IN PROGRESS

about her white daughter-in-law. At the same party, we met
the former president of Nkrumah's alma mater, Lincoln Uni-
versity, a congressman from Michigan, a few African scholars
from the United States, and several Nigerian chiefs. This
same party had a disastrously hilarious ending. Our host's
house is located in a section of Accra where many market
mammies sell. That evening some twelve of them crashed the
party. They boldly walked in with their gaily printed dresses
and turbanned heads and surrounded the bar. They laughed,
sang, clapped their hands, drank, and talked loudly in their
vernacular. The guests thought it far more amusing than did
the hostess. She had no idea of how to cope with this invasion.
She wrung her hands, muttering, That this should happen
to me."

We saw Mme. Sekou Toure, the young, attractive wife of
the President of the new republic of Guinea, several times. She
was part of their official delegation, and was a handsome strik-
ing figure. We entertained a Southern Rhodesian delegate, Ken-
neth Kaunda, at tea one afternoon. He admitted that he fearecf
that he would not be permitted to leave the country again,
once he was back in Salisbury, Rhodesia. Since then he has
been arrested and detained because of his stand on independ-
ence in the Central African Federation. He is the head of
the Zambia National Congress in Northern Rhodesia and is
agitating for independence now. The British governor has ac-
cused Kaunda of keeping Africans from voting in the present
set-up, and he has been banned from the Zambia National
Congress. Kaunda is a growing favorite among other Pan-
African Nationalists.

Since the Accra People's Conference was not financially sup-
ported by the countries represented (many of the delegates
came surreptitiously as their countries were still under colonial
powers), feeding the delegates posed a problem. Special appeal
to Ghana farmers led to donations of various foodstuffs, and
busy secretariat officials had to take time out on occasion to
deal with the arrival of gifts of live cows. An army-type kitchen

SPECIAL OCCASIONS 87

was set up at the modern Ambassador Hotel to take care of the
feeding problem. Several chiefs showed up at the conference
leaving money and gifts. The Asantehene, ruler of Ashanti, sent
nearly three hundred dollars.

The conference came to a close one day later than scheduled.
We were there that last morning. Dr. Robert Lee, an American
Negro dentist living in Accra, led the entire assembly in a song
"Give Me That Old Freedom Spirit" sung to the tune of "That
Old Time Religion." There was much handclapping and stamp-
ing of feet.

The All-African People's Conference had given many of the
leaders in Africa a chance to meet for the first time, size each
other up, exchange experiences and advice. One leader said
the conference "marks the opening of a new epoch in our
struggle for the total emancipation of Africa" and was the begin-
ning of the "final assault upon colonialism." Tom Mboya, the
young and dynamic chairman from Kenya, said, "It is not a
question of will we win; we come to ask ourselves how and
when we will in the shortest possible time." Even a South
African paper, Die Burger, called the black leaders at the Accra
Conference "formidable opponents."

Another special occasion was Ghana's second anniversary
celebration on March 6. As the Ghanaian press said, "We cele-
brate freedom day with jubilation by the ton!" Thousands of
spectators from all over Ghana gathered at the Accra Sports
Stadium on that morning. There, schoolchildren, Girls* Brigade,
Women Police, the Army, flag-carrying fishermen, students of
the Ghana Nautical College, market women, and the Ghana
Police Band all took part in the march past the reviewing stand.

A beauty queen was chosen. Unlike in the States, she can
be married with children and still be "Miss" Ghana. There was
drumming and dancing. That evening the Prime Minister gave
a party in his garden at Christiansborg Castle. There was such
an overwhelming crowd that the supply of drinks was quite
inadequate.

During Anniversary Celebration Week there were elaborate

88 AFRICA A WORLD IN PROGRESS

fireworks including a likeness of the head of Nkrumah. A match
was dropped accidentally into a crate of fireworks that went
off prematurely. It could have been disastrous, but fortunately,
only a few received minor burns. The university presented a
play in honor of Independence Week; there were football
matches and an agricultural fair. The entire city hung out flags
and bunting. In other regions outside Accra, independence
celebrations were well observed. It was a gala time.

The newly built American Embassy was dedicated in Accra
on Lincoln's one-hundred-and-fiftieth birthday. This was quite
appropriate since he is the best-known and most revered Ameri-
can in Ghana.

All Americans living in the area received engraved invi-
tations to the opening. The embassy building was designed by
an architect from Chicago who copied it after the Wa Naa's
house in the Northern Territories. It was made from Ghanaian
mahogany with four large facsimiles of the Great Seal of the
United States carved on each outside wall. It is a building to
be proud of. It cost $250,000. It is beautifully furnished and
completely air-conditioned.

American Ambassador Flake introduced Prime Minister
Nkrumah who gave a short speech and declared the embassy
building officially opened. At that point the Stars and Stripes
were unfurled over the embassy, and the Ghana Police band
played the "Star Spangled Banner." It made all of us Americans
present think nostalgically of home.

The majority of the population holds traditional animist or
pagan beliefs, but Christianity, spread by the missionaries, and
Islam have attracted at least a third of the population, and
there are churches of various denominations as well as mosques
in many towns. Of course, there are more mosques in the North-
ern Region.

Thus, besides the indigenous religious rites and customs,
the festivals of the Christian Church and the great Ramadan
festival of the Moslems are celebrated. Some of the indigenous
rites and customs are libations, outdooring, planting and har-

SPECIAL OCCASIONS OU

vesting festivals, and drumming and dancing for memorial serv-
ices. Libations are poured to call down the favor of the spirits
on the welcoming of a guest, opening of a building, or on any
other important occasion. Outdooring is the introduction of a
newborn child into the family or clan. The Christian Church
celebrates Easter and Christmas. Ramadan is the month in the
Mohammedan calendar in which Mohammed received his di-
vine revelation. It is observed by the faithful by fasting during
the day. They eat only after sundown.

Apart from religious festivals, the traditions of the country
are as varied as the languages of its people. Each tribe has its
own forms and customs, but there is one institution which is
common to all chieftaincy and the ceremonies associated with it.

The most illustrious chiefs are the paramount chiefs, and
though their customs naturally differ, among the Akans each
chief has a stool to symbolize his authority and the soul of his
people and a retinue which includes a linguist. This official
carries a linguist stick, or staff of office, topped by a carved
emblem often covered with gold leaf, and enjoys a high pro-
fessional status interpreting the language of the court which
draws freely on the history and philosophy of the people.

An important feature of chieftaincy is the preservation of
the cultural heritage and among each people traditional festivals
are celebrated. These are occasions full of the color and dignity
endowed by centuries, and from miles around the people flock
to join in the festivities.

The climax of a festival is frequently a durbar, a word used
here to denote a great gathering of sub-chiefs and their followers
to greet the paramount chief.

A durbar begins with a formal procession through the town
lasting for perhaps an hour and a half. The lesser chiefs are
followed by the paramount chiefs, riding in palanquins (cov-
ered litters carried by four or six strong men) attended by their
retinues and shaded from the sun by vividly colored umbrellas,
twice as large as the average umbrella, which are made to whirl
and cavort in time to the state drums which are following.

90 AFRICA A WORLD IN PROGRESS

Having shown the chiefs to the people, the procession comes
to a halt in the durbar ground. Here, ceremonial greetings are
exchanged. This is followed by the paramount chiefs address
to his people and refreshments until the drums start again and
the dancing begins. The day we drove sixty miles to Kibi to a
durbar, we were caught in a torrential rainstorm. The rain
came so swiftly and in such large amounts that the windshield
wipers were useless. The windows steamed and we couldn't
open them as the rain poured in. Parts of the road washed away.
Mammy lorries pounded by, taking three-fourths of the road.
The sky grew dark. By driving fifteen miles an hour, we at last,
thankfully, reached home.

Though drumming and dancing are an essential part of the
durbar, they are not confined to this occasion. "Talking drums,"
for example, are used to give the traditional calling sign in
times of sorrow and joy, peace and war, but drumming as an
art also exists.

The talking drums of Ashanti consist of a pair of drums
tuned to different notes. Their 'language" forms the basis of
some of the Ghana languages or the vernaculars, which are
tonal. The talking drums are still used to convey stylized mes-
sages and summonses in the villages. When we were visiting
the Duncansons in Kumasi, I was amazed to learn at the new
Kumasi College of Technology in Ashanti, that talking drums
are used instead of a bell to announce meal times and the end
of classes.

On several Sunday afternoons, we went to Christian Village,
where most of the faculty members' stewards and cooks live, to
watch the drumming and dancing. Always it was the occasion
of a death in the village. It might be several Sundays after the
burial. Due to the tropical heat a person must be buried on the
same day that death occurs. One afternoon, we went to Achi-
mota Village, where our own steward lived, to watch. The
widow or widows plus the brothers, uncles, father, mother, and
other immediate family sat in the mourner's place. Others came
with drums. It took awhile for them to warm up, but eventually.

SPECIAL OCCASIONS 91

after much talk and palm wine, they started. This dance was
the Ewe dance and is done by jerking the shoulders back and
forth in time with the drums. Each individual dances alone
and adds his own interpretation. It is vigorous and swift-moving.
The African has a perfect sense of timing, and as the dance
proceeds drums and dancers work together to produce a deep
and satisfying harmony of sound and movement. On several
occasions we were the only white faces present. They always
gave us a warm welcome and showed exquisite courtesy. The
head man in the village shook hands with us, gave us a seat
and told us how pleased they were that we had come. Others
came over to greet us.

The dancing master in Christian Village was the cook for
some very close friends of ours. He had many talents. He not
only was an excellent cook, but a graceful dancer, showing
originality and flair. He also had four wives whom he dressed
from the same bolt of cloth. That, if nothing else, would show
his talents in human relations. At the end of the dance we would
gravely inquire, as was expected of us, if we could meet the
family and extend our sympathy for their bereavement. We
would be taken over and introduced. We would solemnly shake
hands and leave ten shillings with the member who was acting
as treasurer for the afternoon. It was extremely interesting and
occasionally the women joined the men dancers within the
circle and took part in the dance.

The last special occasion I want to mention is a convocation
at University College. They are held usually once a year in
honor of the graduating class. We call them commencements
in the States. It is a scene of great formality and academic pro-
tocol. Women dig out hats, stockings, and gloves for this occa-
sion. Faculty members wear their academic hoods and robes
and march slowly to the raised platform where they sit stiffly
throughout the program. Since the faculty come from many
different universities throughout the world, their hoods are of
different colors, and their hats are of various shapes which con-
tributes to the making of an interesting-looking gathering.

92 AFRICA A WORLD IN PROGRESS

The principal of the college, as their president is called,
gives the main address, citing progress and announcing plans
for the future. Then the dean of each division presents his
candidates for degrees. Fortunately, this ceremony is held
late in the afternoon in the open air in one of the Hall's gardens,
so it was quite pleasant and almost cool.

After the faculty marched out in best Cambridge style, the
rest of us were ushered over into another part of the garden
where dozens of stewards in starched white uniforms served
refreshments.

CHAPTER XI

Going Home

THE WHITE MAN in West Africa lives constantly in two worlds.
During his tour he maintains by air mail letters, magazines,
newspapers, and radio strong ties with his native land which
is his true base. Always one mode of living shadows the other.
Though he is settled in a house with family, personal belongings,
and an interesting job, he is always wondering how things are
"at home." One foot is in the coast one at home. Because of
these roots, the white man is never likely to become a part of
West Africa.

One thing that contributes to this feeling is the fact that no
European can own land in Ghana. Land can be leased for
building a house, and mineral rights can be leased, but this is
AFRICAN country. No European can enter Ghana to seek
employment without government permission. Every cocoa farm,
and there are thousands in the country, is African-owned. De-
spite the Ghanaian's warmth, courtesy, and appreciation, we
always felt like polite guests in a strange household. Perhaps
the fault lay more with us than with them. By the end of a
tour, most Europeans are looking forward to seeing new faces.
Familiarity has bred an acute craving for a change. The same
people meet, smile, talk with small-town frequency at the shops
in town, at the college buttery, senior common room and eve-
ning gatherings.

Even gregarious, sociable people have been known to remark
when invited out for an evening, "I hope the Joneses are not
there. I exhausted all conversation with them the last two
evenings."

94 AFRICA A WOULD IN PROGRESS

To the people back home, West Africa is visualized as an
equatorial adventure story with a carefree life filled with tall,
cool drinks served by a retinue of servants and with parties
every night, or it is pictured as a bleak, lonely existence filled
with dangers and hardships. For most Europeans living in West
Africa today, neither picture is true. Perhaps the people who are
staunch moderates and follow the difficult middle path between
the two extremes are not as book-worthy; perhaps they are
ordinary, but they are durable. It still takes remarkable deter-
mination and constant effort to create a true home in tropical
Africa.

To most of us, home means a place where we can have
privacy and shut out the noisy demanding world for a while.
Perhaps we can retreat behind a wall or hedge or a sturdy
fence, or close drawn curtains until we get rested mentally,
spiritually, and physically until we get our second wind, so to
speak, and go forth again.

In West Africa's European houses there can be no such
withdrawal, the Coast literally comes in the doors. Part of it is
due to the complete openness of the houses. There are no shades,
draperies, Venetian blinds, or curtains. One's life is really an
open book to friend and foe. While you may arrange your
physical dwelling to your own ideas, you are dependent on
paid African workers to keep it running. This brings Africa
into the heart of your home for twenty-four hours of the day.
You are never alone. The steward walks noiselessly through the
house on bare feet, the gardener works beneath your bedroom
window before you are out of bed in the morning, the garbage
collector is at the back door, the odd-jobber at the front door,
the fruit seller rings his bicycle at the side door, and the night
watchman sits patiently, silently, and majestically in his white
robes on the garage stoop at any hour you return home in the
evening.

Take the case of Cleophas. He was a driver in the Extra-
Mural Department. From the first day that we arrived in Ghana,

GOING HOME 95

Cleophas adopted us. He drove us the first three days to shop
and do errands and look around for a secondhand car.

He gave us advice, both good and bad, on everything. The
first day that I shopped for groceries, I was unnerved at having
this tall African wheel the grocery cart around and look over
my shoulder as I selected every little item. I soon became ac-
customed to his big smile and unfailing helpfulness.

Cleophas drove me to my Extra-Mural class each week. He
drove entirely too fast. I would be bouncing all over the back
seat and would finally say in exasperation, "Please, slow down
this instant, Cleophas." He would turn around and smile and
say, <e Yes, Madame/' I am sure he never cut the speed one bit.

He was born under an unlucky star. He wrecked the uni-
versity car the day before Christmas in a town ninety miles
away. The officials promptly put him in jail. On Christmas Eve
we drove over to Christian Village to take his little boy gifts
and his wife money for chop.

He was always showing up at breakfast time or at noon. If
we sat down on the terrace in the afternoon, there would be
Cleophas telling us his latest woe.

One afternoon he showed up in a state of agitation, great
even for Cleophas. He said that his wife was just about ready
to deliver and would Dr. Cone come quickly and drive her to
the midwife. Win literally roared out of our driveway on his
errand of mercy. He came back in a little while looking shaken
but pleased and said, "Well, we got her there in time."

The next morning Cleophas dropped in, all smiles, and said,
"Aah, she delivered a boy within five minutes after you got her
there, Dr. Cone."

Win shuddered and said that thank goodness she waited,
as delivering babies was out of his line. Cleophas added they
would like to call the new baby boy Komla George. "Komla"
because he was born on Tuesday, and "George" after our son.
We thanked him for bestowing this honor upon our house.

It is traditional in Ghana for the Akans to name a boy for

96 AFRICA A WORLD IN PROGRESS

the day of the week on which he is born and add any other
desired name to that. A boy born on Sunday is Kwesi; Monday,
Kodjo; Tuesday, Komla or Kobla; Wednesday, Kweku; Thurs-
day, Yaw; Friday, Kofi; and Saturday, Kwame. Girl children
are named Sunday, Akousua; Monday, Adwoa; Tuesday, Abena;
Wednesday, Akua; Thursday, Yaa; Friday, Afua or Efu; and
Saturday, Ama. It really simplifies naming children.

Most white women in the tropics innocently imagine an
easier regime than that which they had at home. After all, a
white woman reasons, she will be free of time-consuming domes-
tic chores; no more dishwashing and peeling potatoes, just
"gracious living/' She soon finds she trades off her elastic domes-
tic independence. Rules and set times must be kept to main-
tain discipline and keep the household machinery running
smoothly. After all, Madame must keep her dignity and dine
properly even though she'd love to eat a sandwich in bed in
her old housecoat. Then again while she may not have to stoke
the furnace or scrub the floor, she takes on different duties. She
is responsible for watching for food spoilage, overseeing kitchen
cleanliness, ant invasions, and the constant food shopping to
keep up both the family's health and morale. I agree with the
writer who wrote that the chief occupation of a wife is little
affected by geography, it is about the same anywhere in the
world home-making and husband-helping.

As the day approached for going home, we had little time
for sentimental preoccupations with either the past or the
future; the present claimed us with all the problems of break-
ing up housekeeping, of getting boxes, trunks, and three chil-
dren sent home, beside planning a six-weeks' trip through South
and East Africa and the Middle East for my husband and me.

The last weeks were hectic. We had to sell the car, washing
machine, iron, electric kettle, toaster all the things it seemed
were bought only yesterday. We were dismayed that we had
bought so many books when we started tying them up in six-
pound packages for mailing. Trunks and boxes had to go as
unaccompanied baggage by sea two weeks before we left if we

GOING HOME 97

were to fly. There were all the forms to fill out and arrange-
ments to be made with our forwarding agent. We discovered
to our chagrin that we sent only four chiefs' stools to be crated,
the one that was in the bedroom was completely forgotten. Now
how to get that one home! The key to the trunk was misplaced,
the luggage had turned a moldy blue, and our only cool-
weather clothes smelled mildewed. The routine in the house
broke down, and only the thoughts of going home made the
frustrations and irritations bearable. I know one woman who
insists they stayed a second tour because she couldn't bear the
thought of all the work of packing up to go home. Those last
days as I aired clothes and packed I felt that she was a woman
with vision.

As we prepared for our return to our other kind of life, we
were also busily getting visas, and writing for hotel reservations
in the eight other African countries we intended to visit on our
way back to the States. It took six trips in the sweltering heat
to the United Arab Republic Embassy before we found anyone
in who could grant us a visa. Then he nonchalantly said the fees
had gone up die first of the month to six dollars each. We pro-
tested that we had been there several times before the first of
the month and had never found him in. He blithely said we
would still pay it if we wished to visit Cairo. He added, "It is
really reciprocity, for the United States makes it difficult for
us to enter/' We resignedly paid him the twelve dollars. This
was the only sour note.

We kept wondering how it would feel to be cool again.
Friends assured us that as we went south to Johannesburg it
would be winter with 40 temperatures. They recommended
taking undershirts and hot water bottles things that had not
entered my mind for over a year.

During the last two months, we had been saying good-byes

to friends who for various reasons were going on leave early,

then came the day that we put our own three children on the

Pan American plane for Chicago. We were to wait until Janice

sent us a cable saying that they were at home safe and sound

98 AFRICA A WOBLD IN PROGRESS

before we took off on our own tour. As their plane winged out
over the Atlantic, I was filled with misgivings wondering
whether we had put too much on nineteen-year-old old Jan.
After all, Henrietta was only seven, George only six. My hus-
band, ever the philosopher, reminded me that we had care-
fully thought and worked it all out. Couldn't I please relax
and enjoy the first freedom in twenty years?

So we began doing things for the last time the last drink on
the back veranda to watch the ever-changing sky, last look at
our tropical back yard, green again now that the rains had
started, last trip to the top of the hill at the college to watch
the sunset, a farewell trip along the beach fringed with palm
trees. This afternoon the sea was deep violet, torn by enormous
roaring breakers. I was reminded of the day we had arrived.
All of this, we would miss.

At last we began to say good-bye to Accra: to European
and African friends, to American friends at the embassy, to col-
leagues at the university, to friends at the Kingsway; and to the
Ghanaians who had helped make life easier Rose, my dress-
maker, Comfort, the fruit market mammy, the postmaster, and
Kwesi, the secretary who did all my typing without one com-
plaint about my handwriting. We said good-bye to the Friends
Group, with whom we had worshiped every Sunday, with real
regret. I was touched when my Hausa trader came to say
good-bye and brought me a dash in the form of an ivory brace-
let. The meanings of the things you have experienced have
become a part of you. Good-byes are felt many months after
the words are said which mark the moment of parting. I thought
of what the great missionary Mary Kingsley had said, "If you
don't leave W.est Africa after a first tour, you will never be able
to leave." I knew a part of me wanted to go and a part of me
wanted to stay. I knew I had changed and would never feel
the same about Africa again. I could neve* feel detached nor
impersonal while some of my dearest friends were Africans. I
was now personally involved and committed.

Andrews was crestfallen that we were leaving. He had worn

GOING HOME 99

an air of funereal gloom for weeks. He had asked us to write
him a recommendation for a good store job. He just couldn't
possibly work for anyone else as a steward after having worked
for us, or so he said. I took this as a doubtful compliment. He
probably meant no one else would give him Sundays off plus
every afternoon. We dashed him liberally and gave him a recom-
mendation to the Kingsway to be a porter.

Finally all goods were disposed of, our suitcases were packed
and waiting, and our coats, looking unfamiliar, were draped
over the back of a chair. Already the house had lost all traces
of us and seemed to be waiting impersonally for the next tenant.
For the last time we looked under beds, into drawers and
closets, and checked money, keys, tickets, passports, visas, and
addresses.

Our obliging neighbors Bill and Audrey Tordoff drove us to
the airport. We left our tropical house with mixed feelings
again torn between two worldssad to be leaving a place
where we had been happy, and glad to be on our way home.

There lay the long sleek Pan American Clipper which would
carry us south to Leopoldville and Johannesburg, the first leg
of our journey. Soon we were walking up the air ramp. Seen
through the tightly fastened window, the hot tarmac of the air-
port and the shimmering heat suddenly seemed remote and shut
away. In a matter of minutes, after a year of living in Ghana,
we found ourselves again on the outside looking in.

We looked around us at the American decor of the plane,
American stewardesses, magazines, iced water and then outside
to the sun-drenched tropical airport. There was a world of
difference a world in progress.