Hi Guys and Gals!
For your reading pleasure, the journal of our recent trip to Ghana - I hope you enjoy it! It is extremely long (I think the longest journal I've written so far) so you might want to print it out and read it later. I have just finished it and haven't proof read it at all, so excuse any grammatical or spelling errors!
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The Sights and Sounds of Accra
These are the memoirs of my first ever trip to Ghana. It’s been a great 4-day adventure, and an experience that has been laced with joy, sadness, excitement and utter surprise, each to varying degrees. When my brothers and I set out from Heathrow on Thursday for Accra, we thought that we were just going for our mum’s 50th birthday celebration on Saturday, but we got a lot more than we bargained for! It turned out to be a much bigger party than we had envisaged – 150 guests from different countries around the world convening at the La Palm Beach hotel in Accra signalled that my dad was really going all out to celebrate this milestone in his wife’s life. The choice of Ghana may not seem so obvious, but given that he went to University there and needed to relinquish a 30-yr promise of taking my mum to Ghana, then the choice was in fact perfect!
The journey actually started the day before we travelled on Wednesday – after working late, we literally had to drive across London in the middle of the night (with like 2-hour traffic on the A406) and to Reading and back, making sure we picked up all the big cardboard boxes that had the party gifts we were to take to Ghana with us for the festivities. After a full night of driving, we didn’t get back home till 6am (people were already on the way to work!), which gave us about 3 hours to pack before leaving for the airport. There weren’t really any complications at the airport, we left London as scheduled after 2pm and embarked on the 7 hour or so trip to Accra. For me, one of the big bonuses of this trip was that as Ecowas (Economic Community of West African States) citizens, Nigerians do not need visas to go to Ghana, so that saved the trouble of numerous embassy visits and appointments – finally that Green passport has been useful for something!
A word about the flight – too much turbulence! It didn’t help that I recently listened to a message in church where the speaker described how on a trip to Africa the plane he was in dropped by 1000ft suddenly in turbulence – the message may have been about overcoming fear but my remembering it during our own period of serious turbulence didn’t exactly help matters! Not much else to say about the flight – since we hadn’t slept all night, the initial plan was to sleep for the duration of the flight, but instead I decided to use it to catch up on movies I hadn’t seen. I started off with “Cars” – very deep and funny animated flick which really had me thinking over and over about the moral of the story. Then there was “Click”, typical slapstick Adam Sandler comedy about a guy who was using a remote to fast forward parts of his life he didn’t like – let’s just say that I was dying to fast forward the whole movie to the end! By the time I got half way through, I decided to see it through so that my time wouldn’t have been wasted – and in the end it actually had quite a deep message also – so I guess it wasn’t all a waste! I managed to squeeze in Lion King before we landed – yes, to all of you who said I had a deprived childhood for never watching this movie – eat your hearts out, I finally did it!
Finally, we landed at Kotoka International Airport at about 9pm local time. As we stepped off the plane, I saw the sign “Akwaaba” at the entrance to the airport and I knew I was certainly in Ghana (I believe it means welcome?). The air was warm yet cool, and not too humid – quite a contrast to the sea of humid heat I was expecting and was used to from my trips to Nigeria (perhaps it was simply because we landed in the evening?). My dad had an old Ghanaian colleague who was on the same flight as us who had offered to put us up on the first night, before we moved to the La Palm Beach Hotel on Friday night, so we had met him on the plane before take off. However when we landed my younger brother Sola aptly pointed out that we didn’t even know whether we were being picked up from the airport. Luckily for us, our parents, who had flown from Nigeria on the same day, were at the airport to welcome us. So we went to my dad’s friend’s home in Achimota and we had dinner there and got acquainted with him and his wife before we were shown our rooms. It was barely midnight when we crashed – remember that it had now been 48 hours since some of us had slept!
Before we went to bed however, we did receive some really sad news. My parents were coming from the funeral of my first cousin, which was held in Lagos earlier that day. Quite tragically, he was among fifteen Lagos State University Students who died when the boat cruise they were on capsized about a week ago now. Although he had visited and stayed with us briefly some 10 years ago when we were still in Nigeria, we were never really close and never really in touch. My heart goes out to my uncle’s family because I can only imagine what they must be going through right now – a young promising life snuffed out way too soon – he was only 24 years old, and I understand that he used to play an instrument in his church. It was a sad reminder that sometimes life is way too short to lose touch with certain people, to harbour grudges with people you may never actually see again, or indeed to not cherish loved ones and people that you care about while they are around. May his soul rest in perfect peace.
So on Friday, we eventually lazily crawled out of bed around 10 or 11am, had breakfast and started getting ready to move over to the hotel. We had a long day of packaging gifts (that would be given to all the guests) ahead of us. I tried to get in touch with Mide and Tomi – they school in Ghana (Accra and Kumasi respectively) and they were in town. Their dad was my dad’s best man and had apparently introduced my parents back in the day. Their parents had also flown in from Lagos for the ceremony. Before I continue, to my Ghanaian brothers and sisters, I’ve really got to give it up to you – everything you’ve told me about Ghana is true. I am beginning to understand why so many Nigerians are now furthering their education in Ghana as a viable alternative to moving to the US or UK. You guys are truly more sophisticated, more organised and much cleaner than Naija (sorry all my Nigerian peeps, its true!). Okay, apart from Abuja. But if it’s a choice between Accra and Lagos, Accra takes it hands down! I haven’t been to Lag in nearly two years now, so maybe I need to go back to update my notes, but there were a whole lot of stores in Accra that I wouldn’t have dreamed of seeing in Naija – Wranglers Jeans, Woolworths, Nandos etc. Several branches of Barclays Bank were also littered across the city – guys, watch this space, I could ask for a transfer to Africa – if I pack up and move to Accra, then you'll know why! Meanwhile for Barclays, Nigeria is one of two NCCTs (Non-Compliant Countries and Territories), along with Myanmar (I know, I’d never heard of this island either!). Actually, stop press – I just checked and Naija was removed from this list in June – hallelujah!
After seeing some of the sights of Accra, we arrived at the hotel at about 3pm and waited for about an hour for our rooms to be ready to for us. In the meantime, we chilled out in the lobby meeting a lot of guests who were also arriving from all over (mainly the UK and Nigeria) for the festivities. You can’t imagine the number of times that we were approached by old friends of our parents who would say things like, “don’t you remember me?” or “I knew you when you were still a baby!” – but it was cool though! Friday was pretty uneventful, Tomi came to the hotel with her friend AJ and they helped with the packaging of the gifts, which we spent most of the afternoon doing. Mide arrived at the hotel later on and then we joined her friend Ngebi (from Cameroon) for dinner at Frankie’s, a restaurant in Accra’s famous Osu area aka Oxford Street. We went out to a couple of bars and clubs afterwards and by 2am or so we were ready to go home. We decided to go back to Mide’s to watch some home movies, but when we got there her selection of movies wasn’t that great and since we were all so tired anyway, we just crashed there until the next morning.
Saturday was finally here, this was my mum’s big day. We woke up at about 10am and took a taxi back to the hotel. On the way back we managed to see a few more sights and chatted with the taxi driver about Hearts of Oak and Asante Kotoko when we passed the football stadium. When we got back to the hotel, our parents and most of their guests where in the hotel restaurant having the buffet breakfast, so we joined them. We wished her happy birthday and grabbed something to eat as the buffet was closing. Again, most of the day was spent getting ready for the evening festivities which were due to start from about 8pm. We had loads more packaging to do for gifts that others had brought, so we sat and did this while watching Chelsea beating Portsmouth live on Supersport as well as the highlights of the other Premiership matches on Saturday. By 7pm, we were all running around all over the place, making sure that everything was in place for the big event. We all had to give speeches, my brothers and I, and also my mum and dad. My mum had brought the hairdressers to her room and she was working on her speech while they put finishing touches to her hair. At this point, it was literally a few minutes to 8pm, my dad called me into the adjoining room and then closed the door. He said to me that after the opening prayer and remarks, there was going to be a surprise that my mum didn’t know about. He proceeded to bring out 2 rings from his pocket and explained that he had gotten a priest for the ceremony and he was going to ask her to renew their marriage vows! My brothers and I were to be the page boys, so we were to bring the rings on a cushion towards them when called upon to do so! Whaaaaattttttt??? My mind was truly blown – I was almost speechless! This was truly on another level! What a special gift to give your wife on her 50th birthday!!!
My dad gave me the rings, and I left his room to finish off running some other errands that needed to be done before the ceremony started. I placed the rings carefully in the side pocket of my tuxedo – I kept checking my pocket every other minute just to make sure they were still there – I wanted to be absolutely sure they’d still be there when we needed to present them. My brothers eventually joined us at about 8.30pm and we walked down to the hall where the ceremony was to take place. With our parents not far behind, I whispered to my brothers what the plan was, and they were equally surprised – dad had kept that one quiet. I couldn’t help feeling like a secret agent, who was passing on highly classified information to his fellow secret agents. The intricacy of the planning was indeed second to none – our dad didn’t let us know what he was planning until minutes before the ceremony, because we didn’t need to know a moment before. When we arrived at the hall, which was in a building adjacent to the hotel reception, we were ushered to the entrance, where we were to be shown to our seats. At that point, a lady came up to my brothers and I and asked which of us was going to hold the plate (which the rings were to go on). My mum, within an earshot of us, heard this and asked what it was we were going to be holding, but my dad dismissed this and said it was nothing! Phew, that was a close one – even if she was suspecting something at this point, she couldn’t have guessed how big the surprise was going to be.
We walked into the hall and there was a band to our left playing some soft soulful jazz music and a dance floor, which was for later on in the evening, to the right. Ahead of us and down a few steps was the main part of the hall, well decorated with about 15 round tables for guests and a high table for special guests of honour, who included my dad’s best man and his wife, and the wife of my dad’s boss. My brothers and I were ushered to our table at the far left corner of the room, which were not exactly the best seats in the house, I might add. Never mind, I was planning on moving around with my camera the whole night to get the best shots of the high table, the speeches and of course, the renewal of the wedding vows. The ceremony eventually kicked off at about 9pm. After the opening prayer and remarks, it was announced that the couple were to be renewing their wedding vows. My mum’s jaw dropped – the look on her face was one of utter shock and disbelief – absolutely priceless! As the priest stood up and called them forward, you could see she was shaking. My dad read his vows and when my mum read hers with a quiver in her voice. This was like being in a movie! I really couldn’t believe my eyes….it is truly amazing to be able to witness your parents getting married – this was all I could think as I looked on in total awe. I never realised or thought that my dad was such a king of romance, but this was confirmed when he gave his speech afterwards – when he talked about how we won my mother’s heart back in the day, wooing her for the better part of four years, I began to see exactly how he was able to capture the heart of a woman as beautiful as my mother. And I dare say that he has done it again!
The ceremony continued with my mum’s sisters who had flown over from New Jersey and London giving speeches – they both mentioned how privileged and honoured they were to actually be there, having had to come from such a long way. I too sat at my table and could only marvel at how surreal it was to actually be at such an occasion. It felt special to be one of a select few who were in the room that night. It was the second time in a fortnight I had felt that way. A couple of weeks before, I had the privilege of being at the wedding of a Ghanaian friend of mine in Birmingham – it had the same feeling of exclusivity that wedding receptions I had previously been to didn’t have. Essentially, when you get married out of town, you can be sure that your whole community isn’t going to turn up at your reception uninvited. So you can imagine how extra-special “out of continent” must have felt. The ambience in the room that night is truly something that words fail to replicate. As the groom at his wedding, my Ghanaian friend gave such a heart warming speech about how his mother had sacrificed so much in moving to the UK to give her kids a better life, and I echoed his sentiments about my mother in my own speech that night. Olu, myself and Sola rendered our speeches in that order and we each showed a lot of appreciation for our parents in the best way we knew how to. We each presented our mother with a gift – let’s not get carried away and forget that this was her 50th birthday celebrations!
In between speeches we had nice spells of dancing, music and comedy. The first guy that played that night was Mark Tontoh, who was part of a band called Osibisa, which was part of my dad’s vast music collection when he met my mum back in 1976 (apparently, he was really into his music then – he still is!). Translated from the local language, Osibisa means “criss cross rhythms that explode with happiness”, and their music was a unique fusion of African, Caribbean, Rock, Jazz and Latin – you can imagine my surprise when I heard the guy singing in Spanish! The second act that played that evening was Malek Grayem. Apparently, he has four bands in Ghana and was the entertainment prefect at the same secondary school that my dad attended all those years ago! And for anybody looking for a good MC, I would recommend this guy called Holy Mallam (I think), who is a comedian that was flown over from Nigeria to MC the event – a lot more charismatic and funnier than many MCs I’ve seen in recent times!
My mum gave her heart-warming speech, thanking all the special guests and everyone else who had taken time out to be there on her big night. There were also closing speeches from a couple of the special guests of honour on the high table as the event began to wind down and draw to a close. By this time it was 2am and everyone was really tired. But even as the formalities were over and the event was coming to an end, there was still enough time for everyone to hit the dance floor one last time – and boy did the golden oldies show us how it was done back in the day or what? My dad especially, I couldn’t even be on the same dance floor as him! It was real nice to see him enjoying such moments as I know how hard he’s worked in life for his family, so he deserves to enjoy such moments and many more! The scenes that night were really reminiscent of one of those wedding movies where everyone is on the dance floor switching partners, being merry and basically just celebrating life – if only every moment could be like this.
It’s 3am and guests are leaving – I’m totally shattered so I retreat to my room to crash while Olu and Sola take our cousin Della out to see the night life in Accra. She had missed her flight from London on Friday, thanks to some rather bizarre circumstances surrounding some really atrocious customer services with Virgin on Friday, so she had to take the BA flight which only got her to Accra on Saturday night, just in time to catch most of the ceremony. She was instrumental in sorting out all the gifts for the party that we had carried to Ghana, and many thanks must go to her from us for all the effort she put into arranging the party gifts!
I’m up by 9am on Sunday, and getting ready for the church thanksgiving service we were having and also packing to check out of the room. Again, we had the buffet breakfast at the hotel and headed for the church at about 11am. I met some French speaking colleagues of my dad who had read my journals from my time in Nice last year (didn’t realise that he used to send these to his friends!), and we conversed in what little French I remembered for a bit. They were very encouraging about my level of French and it was nice to be able to understand them and say a few words, one day I hope I’ll be able to pick up French again properly and maybe even return to France, I think it’s a difficult language, but a very beautiful language to speak if you learn it properly! Anyway, I digress – we had the thanksgiving service and they recognised people who were celebrating birthdays, including my mum, and they also recognised the whole Nigerian party (that’s us), who had come to Ghana to witness my parents renewing their vows. After the service, we returned to the hotel and we basically chilled out for the rest of the day. We hung out in the lobby a bit, saying bye to a lot of the guests who were leaving, and we even had time to watch Arsenal totally hang Reading out to dry! As it approached the evening, we decided to go out to buy some last minutes souvenirs as our flight to return to the UK was for 10.30pm that evening. After getting a few things, we returned to the airport, said goodbye to Mide, Tomi and their parents, and also to our parents who were staying back and then travelling to Kumasi the following day for their second honeymoon (at least that’s what I’m calling it!). We left the hotel at about 7.30pm with our Aunt who was returning to the UK on the same flight as us.
I would say that getting on the plane and the journey back itself were pretty uneventful, but this story would not be complete if I didn’t mention the behaviour of the Ghanaian custom officers, both on our arrival and departure from the country. On arriving on Thursday, a customs guy at the exit of the arrival lounge was trying to demand the visa in Sola’s passport – they would have taken us for a ride if we weren’t sure that we didn’t need a visa. And on leaving Ghana on Sunday, at the departure gate, the guy was trying to claim that a “security feature” was missing from Olu’s passport – of course he just wanted money, so we handle the situation calmly and after 45 minutes or so of claiming that his superior on his way to inspect the passport – he quietly returned the passport when he realised that he wasn’t going to get anything out of us. So, we arrive back in London at 6.30am on Monday morning. The story should end here, except that our exit from Heathrow airport was so eventful that it is definitely worth a mention (bear with me, I know this is longer than usual, if you’ve come this far then well done!). Yet again, we were stopped by customs, this time supposedly because their sniff dog was a bit too interested in Sola’s hand luggage for there not to be drugs in it. They used this as their excuse to empty every single one of our suitcases and hand luggage we had. After observing how they selectively let loose the guard dog on only certain passengers passing through customs – I had to conclude that the dog was a bit clueless and really was just excited to be smell different aromas from around the world. I tempered my impatience by telling myself that they were only doing their jobs, but I couldn’t help thinking that it was all a bit of a joke, how they looked in every single nook and cranny of our boxes like they really expected to find some kind of illegal substance?
So after brazing our last brush with customs, at least until our next trip, I decided to go to the British Airways counter to buy my ticket to Naija for Christmas, however when I got there my credit card was not being accepted. While I was on the phone to the credit card company to sort out the issue, I noticed a young black guy (baggy jeans, Tims, Bling bling chains, ring and watch – you get the picture) come up and try and talk to me. I initially ignored him as I was on the phone, but he actually waited till I was done on the phone before he proceeded to beg me for money to get to Norwich. My first reaction was what my first reaction usually is when strangers beg me for money – it was “I’m sorry, I can’t help you”. But he kept on and I realised the desperation in his voice when he went as far as saying that he would leave his luggage or watch or anything with me (I guess as collateral), until he could get the money to pay me back. I asked him a few questions and it turns out that he was a Portuguese national, who had grown up in Houston Texas, and he had arrived from Portugal this morning to England for the first time ever and with just 20 euros. I decided to help this guy get to Norwich because I knew that nobody else would, especially with the “young black youth” image he had going. In fact he told me that the police had asked him to leave the airport because they had noticed that he was begging passengers for money. In fact they even told him how to connect to Norwich. Before we left, I went back to the BA counter for the 3rd time and my frustration was heightened when I realised that my payment was still not going through, but I calmed down when I realised that perhaps I had gone there not to buy that ticket, but in fact to help our young friend Mutaro. His story was that he had gotten a job at a factory in Norwich through a Portuguese agency and he was going to work there to get started while he was in England for 8 months to save money to go to University and to realise a dream in the US (a dream he preferred not to say what it was, but that I’ll know it when I see it happen…). While I was careful, I wasn’t too worried about whether his story checked out, he did have an American accent, and when I asked him what languages he could speak, he said 5 including Spanish, French, Portuguese and English (and his folks are from Guinea-Bissau, so maybe their native language?). So any fears I had were kind of allayed when I tested his Spanish and French for a few minutes and it was very clear to me that he was fluent in both.
So we made our way towards terminal 3 to meet Olu and Sola to get the underground, and I was going to escort to Mutaro to Liverpool Street and help him with his ticket to Norwich - this was a young 21-year old guy who it was very clear to me had no idea of how he was going to get around, not to mention the fact that he had no money to get to where he was going. After we got our underground tickets, we were about to go down the escalators to get the train, when suddenly a policewoman came out of a room and bundled him inside very quickly. At this point, we began to ask ourselves whether it was the right thing to do to help him – I mean the moment anything becomes a police issue, then we really ought not to get involved or make it our business. But Olu said to me that if we left now, then the guy would still be in the same position as he was before even if the police let him go. So we bided our time, and after about 20 minutes, they let him go, and the policewoman explained that sometimes they just do random checks – the truth however, as he previously mentioned to me was that they had been monitoring him on cctv so they needed to check him out before he left the airport due to his “suspicious” behaviour while he had been hanging about the airport. Who knows, perhaps he had found these three customers for whatever dodgy dealings he was involved in and was leaving the airport with them. Afterwards when we were on our way, he told me how scared he was when they called him into the room and interrogated him for 20 minutes.
As we talked on the way to Liverpool Street, it became clear to me that despite the fact that his father was pretty well off and had homes both in Portugal and the US, he didn’t have a great relationship with his father, and in fact, was trying to be his own man, by coming to England to make something for himself, even without his father’s knowledge. This struck me as rather strange – it must be a serious wedge between father and son, for a son to leave the comfort of his father’s home and go to a country he has never been to before without any money to work in a factory. I told him about the story of the prodigal son in the Bible (at this point he mentions his family is Muslim but he doesn’t practice), and basically advised him to always honour his parents no matter what – and do what he can to make the relationship between himself and his dad better. Before we got to Liverpool Street, I tried to give him some advice about surviving in the UK – I told him to talk more clearly with less slang, and told him to forget about that whole business of wearing his baggy jeans half way down his boxers – he seemed very appreciative for all the advice. It was about 11am when we got to Liverpool Street Station, and after buying his ticket and giving him some lunch money, we parted ways. He couldn’t find the words to express his gratitude and I basically told him that God orchestrated our meeting in this way and that one day when he has found his feet in life, God will put him in positions to help others in similar ways.
I got back home eventually just before midday and crashed for a few hours. It certainly has been a long and very eventful four days. Now back to the hustle and bustle of real life tomorrow! Look out for the pictures from Accra – I will be sending them very soon!
