Somebody's Heart Is Burning (12 page)

I dawdled around Accra too long and arrived a week late for my next work camp in Kaleo, Upper West Region. MC Brown was there, and I was looking forward to seeing him. I hitched a ride from the regional capital of Wa on a tall truck, bouncing along painfully with metal implements of all sizes grinding against my sides. My legs were somewhere down below, sandwiched between two heavy metal poles with prime potential to roll. I had the uncomfortable sensation that in the event of an accident or even a particularly ill-timed stop, I could be sliced neatly in half.

I tried not to think about that, but instead focused on chatting with Katie, an Englishwoman I’d met in Afranguah who was also catching a ride. When I boarded in Wa, the men on the truck had shouted, “
Obroni
, your friend, your friend!” and parted to reveal a slender figure with light, stick-straight brown hair sitting in the bed of the truck.

“Katie!” I’d said in surprise, and the men had roared with glee. Ghanaians are under the impression that all white people know each other, and they take great delight when this idea is confirmed. I’d been on many buses in which the people around me had excitedly called my attention to some hapless
obroni
riding in the back. They were always extremely disappointed when I claimed not to have met the person before.

The Upper West Region of Ghana was drier than the coastal areas where I’d previously spent time. It was almost October now, too, and the rainy season was drawing to a close. Though still very hot, the air was less muggy here, and therefore more bearable. As we drew closer to the Sahara, the tropical landscape gave way to flat, grassy savanna with scattered clumps of trees. The huts here were round, rather than rectangular like the ones on the coast. They had conical thatched roofs and were often grouped together in extended family compounds surrounded by smooth mud walls.

The most conspicuous trees in this region were the baobabs. Comical and monstrous, a single baobab often stood alone in a field or on the crest of a low hill. No two looked alike. Their enormously thick trunks resembled either a single bark-covered cylinder or multiple cylinders welded together. They could grow up to sixty feet tall and twenty-five feet in diameter, though many were much smaller. Their short branches stuck out from their trunks like deformed arms and radiated off the tops like bad haircuts. Legend had it that the baobab complained so many times to the creator about where it wanted to live, moving gradually all over the African continent, that the creator got fed up with its whining and stuck it in the ground upside down, with its roots in the air.

The men in our truck were boisterously good-natured and soon began teaching us songs. By the time we arrived at the camp, we were belting them out at the top of our lungs. Katie and I waved and shouted as the truck clattered away, its tires spraying us with pebbles and dust.

Katie had been at camp for a week already. She had gone into Wa that day to mail a letter and purchase some supplies. While she went to store her supplies in the kitchen area, the camp leader, a heavyset man from Accra called Facts (“Fats?” “Facts”), told me that the other volunteers were at the construction site and would be back in about an hour. If I would like to set up my bed and wash, he said, I could greet them when they returned. I nodded, eyeing the rain barrel full of greenish water with distrust.

“Be quiet when you go inside,” Facts cautioned me. “Our sistah is recovering from malaria.”

I groaned. Malaria had hit almost all of the volunteers in the camp, picking them off one by one like ducks in a shooting gallery. Because of mosquitoes’ aversion to me, I’d so far been spared.

I saw Nadhiri as soon as I entered the tiny unfurnished church where the volunteers stayed. She was curled on a mat in the corner, fast asleep. The sight of her sent a painful jolt of adrenaline through my bloodstream. I felt like a gunslinger in an old Western, grimly anticipating a showdown.
Out here,
I thought,
there’s
nowhere to hide.

When Brown returned from the work site, sticky with sweat, I threw my arms around him and kissed him on the cheek.

He returned my hug stiffly and pulled away first.

“How’s camp?” I asked.

“Fine, fine.” He looked at the ground.

“Yeah? What’s going on?”

“Camp is very nice. Excuse me please, I must bathe now. Tonight I cook the dinner.”

I stared in disbelief as he headed into the church and emerged again moments later, carrying a bucket and towel. He gave me a small, perfunctory smile, dunked the bucket into the rain barrel, and disappeared behind the reed screens. He avoided me the rest of the evening, but I noticed him going in and out of the church several times, carrying food and water. Once I peered in and saw him kneeling by Nadhiri’s mat, placing a cloth on her forehead.

“So you and Nadhiri became friends?” I asked him as we piled shovels and picks into a wheelbarrow the next morning.

“She is a very brave girl.”

“That’s great,” I said, forcing a smile. “Because from what you said before, it seemed like you had a lot of ideas about black Americans that . . . well, it seemed like the media had given you a false impression.”

“Yes,” he looked at me for a moment, then looked away. “My ideas have changed.”

A European and American night was declared, in which we were to prepare a typical European or American dish for dinner. Jan from Germany, Katie from England, and I volunteered to cook. After much discussion about the menu, we decided on pancakes. They were simple to make, we reasoned, the ingredients were readily available, and they resembled Ghanaian food enough that we felt confident that people would like them. As the day approached we grew excited. Jan thought he’d seen a stand in town that sold small jars of jam. Could we create syrup by mixing the jam with water and sugar? How about melting down some chocolate bars for a real treat? We planned to mix bananas into the batter and have oranges on the side.

There was a slight ruckus with Facts over the request for extra eggs.

“Usually the campers fund this European night themselves,” he said.

“On my last camp the association funded it,” said Jan.

“Yes, mine too,” said Katie. “I assumed it would be that way this time as well.”

Facts grunted and scowled. He’d been in a surly mood lately.

“Well,” he said at last. “The camp may perhaps provide you with some eggs, but such things as chocolate you must surely purchase yourselves.”

On the day itself, we tried to get a buzz going around the camp.

“Pancakes tonight,” we announced eagerly at the construction site. A couple of local people who were working with us seemed excited about the prospect.

“You must not invite these people to partake of our food,” said Facts. “It is prohibited. Soon we must feed the entire village!”

At dusk I mixed batter beneath a baobab whose enormous trunk was actually four trunks joined together. We’d tried once to encircle it with our arms and found that we needed four people before our hands could touch.

Katie and Jan fried the batter in two iron pans. What emerged were crêpes, really, thin and slightly dense, not the fat cakey pancakes we eat in the U.S. Katie and Jan competed with each other over degrees of thinness. Jan was the professional— he and a friend had hired themselves out in Germany to make pancakes at children’s birthday parties.

I ran to the church to make the announcement: “Pancakes ready! Come get your red-hot pancakes!” then hurried back to stir the chocolate.

No one came. I returned to the church and poked my head in again. Several foreign volunteers lay crashed out on their sleeping bags. Nadhiri huddled in the corner with a group of Ghanaians.

“Come on, everybody!” I shouted. “Pancakes getting cold!”

“I guess I’ll set an example,” said a Danish girl, lazily setting down her book.

Ten minutes later, despite multiple trips by Katie and myself to promote our cause, not a single African had partaken of the food. Several Europeans sat around eating crêpes with chocolate and commenting nostalgically on the ones they’d had in France.

Nadhiri emerged from the church, set up a coal port, and began to heat up some leftover goat stew from the previous night. She didn’t even glance in the direction of the pancakes. Next to the stew she set a pot of rice.

Slowly the Ghanaians emerged from the church and made their way toward the stew.

“Castro!” said Jan eagerly. “Surely you’d like a pancake. Just one pancake?”

Glancing guiltily at Nadhiri, Castro accepted a pancake on his plate. The three of us were giddy with excitement.

“Would you like chocolate? Or jam? An orange?” Katie and I buzzed around him with pots and spoons, offering things. Looking down, he shook his head. He headed for the stew.

“Good idea—a savory pancake!” said Katie. “I’m sure they’ll go quite well with the stew.”

“Except for the bananas,” I murmured.

“Let’s make some batter without banana,” said Jan, “so they can eat them with the stew. Perhaps eating sweet things for dinner doesn’t seem right.”

While the pile of banana pancakes attracted flies, we hastily made up a savory batch, holding off on the sugar and adding a bit of salt. A couple of Ghanaians tasted them, but no one came back for seconds. Soon the savory pancakes too began to pile up.

“Perhaps I could invite some villagers?” I said to Facts, who hovered nearby, frowning. “We don’t want the food to go to waste.”

“The Europeans will eat it,” he said grimly. “If not today, then tomorrow.”

The Ghanaians sat aside, in a group, sharing the rice and goat stew. On my way to the bathroom, I overheard a snippet of conversation.

“See how they treat us?” said Nadhiri. “Like children waiting for a treat. They act like we’ve never seen a pancake before!”

Who’s us? I wondered angrily. You’re a girl from D.C. You have
more in common with me than you do with the Ghanaian volunteers.

“Yes,” said MC Brown, sitting at her side. “They come here thinking we live in trees, and they return home with the very same thought.”

After the disastrous dinner had been cleared away, Katie, Jan, and I lay on our backs on wooden benches, gazing up at the astonishing layers of stars and fighting off mosquitoes.

“She’s turned the Ghanaians against us,” I said bitterly. “A true gift, to inspire hatred and distrust.”

“Aren’t you being a bit dramatic?” said Katie. “Perhaps we simply served the wrong food.”

I cast her an arch glance.

“Really,” said Jan. “Maybe they thought it was cheap of us to prepare something without meat. Perhaps they were expecting McDonald’s hamburgers.”

“I’m surprised I haven’t seen a McDonald’s here,” said Katie.

“Oh, I’m sure it’s just a matter of time,” I said sardonically. “American culture is conquering the world.”

“You mean poisoning the world,” said Jan, and we laughed.

From the darkened doorway of the church, a high-pitched voice said, “American culture. I don’t think there is any such animal.”