One Day I Will Write About This Place (29 page)

Later, in the evening, we get in his uncle’s Peugeot, and he drives
me to meet my guide. I am struck, again, by the fluidity of his body language,
and even more by his solemn maturity. There does not seem to be
anything he cannot handle.

But his attitude toward me is overly respectful. He plays boy to my
man. Does not contradict anything I say. It is disturbing. Before we get
to the suburb where his friends are hanging out, he turns to me and
asks, his face awed, and suddenly boyish, “Have you been to America?”

…

We find them, Alex and I, at dusk, a group of young men sitting by
the road, in tracksuits and shorts and muscle tops. They are all fat-free and pectoraled and look boneless, postcoital,
and gray after a vigorous exercise session at the beach, and a swim and a shower. One of them
has a bandage on his knee and is limping. They are all fashionably
dressed.

I ask around. They all come from middle-class
families. They are all jobless, in their twenties, not hungry, cushioned in very small ways by
their families, and small deals here and there.

Hubert is a talented soccer player. Twenty-one
years old, he is the star of a first-division
team in Accra. In two weeks he will go to South
Africa to try out for a major soccer team. His coach has high hopes
for him.

“I am a striker.”

He looks surprisingly small for a West African football player.
Ghanaians are often built like American football players. I conclude
that he must be exceptionally good if he can play here.

“Aren’t you afraid of those giant Ghanaian players?” I ask, nodding
my head at his hulking friends.

He just smiles. He is the one with the international offers.

Hubert agrees to take me to Togo for a couple of days. He is mortified
by my suggestion that I stay in a hotel. We will sleep in his mother’s
house in Lomé. His father died recently. Hubert is in Accra because
there are more opportunities in Ghana than in Togo.

“Ghana has no politics.”

…

I offer Alex a drink. To say thanks. We end up at a bar by the side of a
road. A hundred or so people have spilled onto the road, dancing and
talking rowdily and staggering. Alex looks a little more animated. They
are playing hiplife—Ghana’s version of hip-hop, merged with highlife.
It is a weekday, and the bar is packed with large, good-looking
men, all in their twenties, it seems. There are very few women. We sit by the
road and chat, watching people dance in the street. This could never
happen in Nairobi—this level of boisterousness would be assumed to
lead to chaos and anarchy, and it would be clipped quickly. Three young men stagger and chase each other on the road, beers in hand, laughing
loudly. Alex knows a lot of the guys here, and he joins in a little, in his
solemn way.

I notice there are no broken bottles, no visible bouncer. No clues
that this level of happiness ever leads to meaningful violence.

After a while, we find a table on the pavement. I head off to the bar
to get a round of drinks. Some of Alex’s friends have joined us. “You
don’t drink Guinness?” they ask, shocked. Guinness is MANPOWER.

When I get back, I find that a couple has joined the table: a tall man
with large lips and a round, smooth baby’s face, and a heavily made-up
young woman with sharp breasts and a shiny short dress.

The rest of the table is muted. They do not meet the woman’s eye, although
she is their age. The man is in his thirties. He shouts for a waiter,
who materializes. His eyes sweep around, a string of cursive question
marks. People nod assent shyly. He has a French African accent.

Alex introduces us. He is Yves, from Ivory Coast. He is staying at
the same hotel that I am.

Yves laughs, his eyes teasing. “Your uncle’s hotel. Eh.”

Alex looks down. Nobody talks to me now. It is assumed Yves is my
peer, and they must submit. They start to talk among themselves, and I
turn to Yves.

“So. You are here on business? Do you live in Côte d’Ivoire?” I ask.

“Ah. My brother, who can survive there? There is war. I live in South
London. And in Chad. I also live in Accra sometimes.”

“Oh, where do you work?”

“I am in oil—we supply services to the oil companies in N’Djamena.”

We talk. No. He talks. For a full hour. Yves is thirty-three.
He has three wives. One is the daughter of the president of Chad. The other is
mixed race—a black Brit. The third lives here in Accra. I wait for him to
turn to his girlfriend by his side. He does not. And she does not react.
It is as if she is worried the makeup will crack if she says anything. It is
impossible to know what she is thinking. He has money. She will wear the mask he needs. Every so often, he breaks from his monologue to
whisper babyhoney things in her ear.

Yves knows Kofi Annan’s son. He claims to be on a retainer for a
major oil company, seeking high-level
contacts in Africa. He looks at
me, eyes dead straight and serious, and asks me about my contacts in
State House. I have none to present. He laughs, generously. No problem.
No problem. Kenya was stupid, he says, to go with the Chinese so
easily.

This is the future. But most people do not see this…

He turns to Alex. “See this pretty boy here? I am always telling
him to get himself ready. I will make it work for him… but he is lazy.”

Yves turns to the group. “You Ghana boys are lazy—you
don’t want to be aggressive.”

The group is eating this up eagerly, smiling shyly and looking
somewhat hangdog. The drinks flow. Cuteface now has a bottle of
champagne.

Later, we stand to head back. Yves grabs Alex’s neck in a strong
chokehold. “You won’t mess me in the deal, eh, my brother?”

Alex smiles sheepishly, “Ah no, Yves, I will do it, man.”

“I like you. Eh… Alex? I like you. I don’t know why. You are always
promising, and nothing happens. You are lucky I like you.”

Alex looks very happy.

We separate at the hotel lift, and Yves slaps me on the back.

“Call me, eh?”

Early the next morning, we take a car from the Accra bus rank at
dawn. It is a two-hour drive to the border. You cross the border at Aflao,
and you are in Lomé, the capital of Togo.

…

Gnassingbé Eyadéma was a Kabye, the second-largest ethnic group in
Togo. The Kabye homeland around the northern city of Kara is arid
and mountainous. In the first half of the twentieth century, many
young Kabye moved south to work as sharecroppers on Ewe farms. The wealthier Ewe looked down on the Kabye but depended on them as
laborers. Eyadéma made sure to fill the military with Kabye loyalists. It
was called “the army of cousins” and was armed by the French. Alex is
Kabye.

Eyadéma threw political opponents to the crocodiles.

Lomé is hot, dry, and dusty. People look dispirited, and the city is
rusty and peeling and bleached from too much brine and sun and
rough times. Hubert points out a tourist hotel to me. It looks like it
has been closed for years, but the weather here can deteriorate things
rapidly. The tourist industry collapsed after the pro-democracy
riots
in early 2005.

Hubert is not Ewe. And he supports Faure Gnassingbé: “He understands
young people.”

It turns out that his family is originally from the north.

We take a taxi into town and drive around looking for a bureau that
will change my dollars to CFA francs. One is closed. We walk into the
next one. It has the characterless look of a government office. It smells
of old damp cardboard. They tell us we have to wait an hour to change
any money.

In the center of the city, buildings are imposing, unfriendly, and
impractical. Paint has faded; plastic fittings look bleached and brittle.
I have seen buildings like this before—in
South African homeland
capitals, in Chad and Budapest. These are buildings that international
contractors build for countries eager to show how “modern” they are.
They are usually described as “ultramodern”—and
when they are new,
they shine like the mirrored sunglasses of a presidential bodyguard.
Within months, they rust and peel and crumble. I see one called Centre
des Cheques Postaux, another Centre National de Perfectionnement
Professionnel.

There are International Bureaus of Many Incredibly Important
Things, and International Centers of Even More Important Things. I
count fourteen buildings that have the word
développement
on their walls. There are International Bureaus of Many Incredibly Important
Things, and International Centers of Even More Important Things. I
count fourteen buildings that have the word développement on their walls. In Accra, signs are warm, quirky, and humorous: Happy Day Shop,
Do Life Yourself, Diplomatic Haircut.

Everywhere, people are wearing yellow Togo team shirts.

We decide to have lunch. Hubert leads me to a small plot of land
surrounded on three sides by concrete walls. On one side of this plot, a
group of women are stirring large pots. On the other, there is a makeshift
thatch shade, with couches and a huge television. A fat gentleman,
who looks like the owner of the place, is watching
Octopussy
on satellite
television. There are fading murals on the walls. On one wall, there
are a couple of stiff-looking
white people waltzing, noses facing the sky.
Stiff and awkward, cliché white people. An arrow points to a violin,
and another arrow points to a champagne bottle. It is an ad for a hotel:
L’Hotel Climon. 12 chambres. Entièrement climatisé. Non loin du Lycée
Française.

One another wall, there is an ad for this restaurant.

A topless black woman with spectacular breasts—large,
pointy, and firm—serves brochettes and a large fish on a huge platter. A black chef
with sparkling cheeks grins at us. A group of people are eating, drinking,
laughing. Fluent, affluent, flexible. I order the fish.

When we are done, we make our way out and look for a taxi. There
are more taxis than private cars on the road. Hubert and the taxi driver
have a heated discussion about prices; we leave the taxi in a huff. Hubert
is furious. I remain silent—the
price he quotes seem reasonable—but
Nairobi taxis are very expensive.

“He is trying to cheat us because you are a foreigner.”

I assume the taxi driver was angry because Hubert did not want to
be a good citizen and conspire with him to overcharge me. We get another
taxi, and drive past more grim-looking buildings. There are lots
of warning signs: Interdit de… Interdit de…

One.

Interdit de Chier Ici. No shitting here.

A policeman stands in front of the sign, with a gun.

In several hand-painted
advertisements women are serving one thing or another, topless, with the same spectacular breasts. I wonder if they
are all by the same artists. Most Ghanaian hand-painted
murals are either barbershop signs or hair salon signs. Here breasts rule. Is this a
Francophone thing? An Eyadéma thing?

It could be that what makes Lomé look so drab is that since the
troubles that sent donors away, and sent tourists away, there have not
been any new buildings to make the fading old ones less visible. They
have gone: the licks of fresh paint, the presidential murals; the pink and
blue tourist hotels with pink and blue bikinis on the beach sipping pink
and blue cocktails. The illusions of progress no longer need to be maintained.
The dictator who needed them is dead.

We drive past the suburb where all the villas are, and all the embassies.
Nearby there is a dual carriageway, sober charcoal gray, better
than any road I have seen so far. It cuts through bushes and gardens and
vanishes into the distance. This is the road to the presidential palace
that Eyadéma built. It is miles away. It is surrounded by lush parkland,
and Hubert tells me the presidential family has a zoo in the compound.
Eyadéma was a hunter and loved animals.

We drop off my luggage at Hubert’s home. His mother lives in a
large compound in a tree-lined
suburb. The bungalow is shaped like a U.
The rooms open to a corridor and face a courtyard where stools are set.
His mother and sisters rush out to hug him—he
is clearly a favorite. We
stay for a few minutes, have some refreshments, and take a taxi back to
the city center.

Driving past the city’s main hospital, I see the first signs of sensible
commerce: somebody providing a useful product or service to individuals
who need it. Lined along the hospital wall are secondhand imported
goods in this order: giant stereo speakers, some very expensive looking;
a drum set; bananas; a small kiosk with a sign on its forehead: Telephon
Inter-Nation;
dog chains; a cluster of secondhand lawn mowers; dog
chains; five or six big-screen
televisions; dog chains; crutches; steam
irons; a large faded Oriental carpet.

An hour later, we reach the market in Lomé, and finally find ourselves
in a functional and vibrant city. Currency dealers present themselves at the window of the car—negotiations
are quick. Money changes
hands, and we walk into the maze of stalls. It is hard to tell how big it
is—people
are milling about everywhere; there are people sitting on the
ground and small rickety stalls in every available space.

There are stalls selling stoves and electronic goods, and currency
changers and traders from all over West Africa, and tailors and cobblers
and brokers and fixers and food and drink. Everything is fluent, everybody
in perpetual negotiation, flexible and competitive. Togo’s main official
export is phosphates, but it has always made its money as a free-trade
area, supplying traders from all over West Africa.

Markets like these have been in existence all over West Africa for at
least a millennium. There are traders from seven or eight countries here.
Markets in Lomé are run by the famous “Mama Benzes”—rich
trading
women who have chauffeur-driven
Mercedes-Benzes. These days, after
years of economic stagnation, the Mama Benzes are called Mama Opels.