4/26

Three days in Ghana thus far. I have been keeping myself occupied, but not necessarily productive. Such is life typically when I first move into a country. I always have to take some time to orientate myself, both in terms of the quotidian and in terms of the research. I have spent the past few days getting to know my local neighborhood and the community next door. I spent one day trying to figure out Accra, but it was just a little much for me. It is not big really. The capital boasts about 3-4 million people in this greater Accra region. There is quite a bit of sprawl as well. It is more that I haven’t been able to distinguish any sense of the center yet. I think I will convince some friend (yes, I’ve already made a few of those too) to give me a guided tour.

I am currently living at a hospitalers guest house. The hospitalers were one of those groups founded during the crusade (like the knights templar) to secure the road for pilgrims. There are none at this guest house, which is run all by Ghanaian women. I wouldn’t mind having a few around, cause that typically means good food that is typically included in the price, and the potential for some whisky stock. Well, no luck. It seems there might be a curfew here, but I have been told by the Danish girls living in the compound but outside the building that if I show up too late I can always crash in the bathtub. Once things get moving that shouldn’t be a problem, but in the meantime I wouldn’t mind getting to know the local scene.

I have been attending the environmental film festival here these past two days. Today there was quite a moving film about the witch camps in northern Ghana. Like in many parts of Africa, there is a tradition of suspicion of witchcraft. Women here are often accused and beaten until they confess. Then they are taken to these witch camps where they are both “purified” and returned home, or they go to live there forever. As some Ghanaian men whose friend’s wife was sent there said, if they are past child birthing years, they won’t come back. While looking at the situation from a human rights standpoint, we would be moved to shut such camps down, the local culture would make this more difficult. While it might be easy for us to simply say that the people are wrong and these women should return home, that would not reduce conflict at all, but rather it would escalate it. As I see it, these camps serve as a non-deadly outlet for these accusations and suspicions. This may sound terrible to you, but it is coming from the perspective of someone who has lived in Tanzania and heard how people are contract killed because they are accused of being witches. At least here, there is life after accusation. So what is the way forward? There was a Ghanaian female parliamentarian, who, upon seeing the situation in the camps and the inability for the women to go home, recommended further education of the populace. Another man in the film suggested simply an overall improvement of the living conditions in the camp. This requires a comprehensive solution, of course, and I wonder what other traditional reconciliation rituals could be used, but it would seem to me that the first and most important step is to make these living situations for these witches in exile livable. They are, in fact, internally displaced people; they are woman who have been forced from their community by neighbors or family, for the sole accident of being a woman (typically older), around misfortune, and disliked by someone. I wonder if the churches are doing anything to help.