Christie Brown is a Ghanaian-based luxury women’s fashion label aimed at the contemporary African woman. It was founded in March 2008 by creative director Aisha Obuobi and named after her grandmother Christie Brown, a talented seamstress.
Obuobi’s creations extend from bespoke gowns to statement pieces to accessories, all inspired by African culture and art.
They’ve featured on the runways of Africa Fashion Week and Paris Fashion Week, and in the pages of Vogue Italia, Harper’s Bazaar, Black Hair and Glamour.
Obuobi worked with tie-dye and batik for her latest collection, Resort 2013. It’s flirtatious, whimsical and part of a collaboration with Grace of Grazia Fabrics, who has built a 20-year-old batik/tie-dye business.
Sought-after residential neighbourhoods have developed in Accra in the last ten years, some with sophisticated names like Manet Cottage, Manet Ville, Trasacco Valley, Taysec Gardens and Ballon Court. They offer the ultimate suburban lifestyle: beautiful homes, pools, security guards and location. Trasacco Valley, for example, looks like a neighbourhood the desperate housewives of Wisteria Lane could live in.
A street in Trasacco Valley. (Flickr/Talata M)One of the houses in Trasacco Valley. (Flickr/Talata M)
Lavender Hill sounds like one of these posh gated communities, but it’s not. Despite its pretty name, it stinks. This site is where liquid waste from the city is dumped into the sea daily, and residents and road users have been complaining of the stench and health hazards for years. The Accra Metropolitan Assembly (AMA) has been promising to shut down Lavender Hill since 2010, but the dumping continues daily.
I recently took a taxi from the CBD in Accra to Lavender Hill, a mere ten-minute drive. The taxi driver offered some advice on the way there: “My brother, you might throw up by the time we reach the end of [Accra Beach Road]. Even with the windows closed, you’ll still get the stench.”
We passed some houses when we reached Lavender Hill, and I stopped to chat to some of the residents.
Unlike me, Nancy Awuah wasn’t showing any discomfort with the foul smell in the air, and I did not want to show any disrespect by covering my nose. She and her husband moved to the neighbourhood from Maprobi since it was closer to where he works. “The smell was tough in the beginning but we have gotten used to it … other people live with other smells around them. In some parts of the country that l have lived in, the people have to smell cocoa waste all their lives and so [this] is the same,” Nancy told me.
I asked her about the health hazards of living near a highly polluted site. “We only smell the stench, what about those of you who eat the fish that feed on the human waste?” She had a point – most of the fish sold in the markets around Accra are sourced from the James Town fishing community.
James Mensah, who has lived here for ten years, gave me a short history of Lavender Hill. “At first it didn’t have a name because it was not part of any of the city’s suburbs and no one wanted to live here because it was a waste dumping site. But by the middle of the 90s, with the high demand for accommodation in the city, some smart people thought of making money by encroaching on the land around the place and built houses for rent. Desperate people who could not afford the high rent in the city moved in gradually and before we all knew what was happening, it had become a township and given an exotic name.”
City officials agree Lavender Hill is not fit for human habitation because of the environmental pollution that is caused by the dumping of human waste. “Once in a while, we hear that the city engineers department wants to build a modern waste facility here but it has taken years for the project to happen. We have come to see these city officials as people who only talk and do nothing,” James said.
The most recent promise came three weeks ago when the mayor of Accra, Alfred Nii Okoe Vanderpuije, gave citizens the assurance that Lavender Hill will be eliminated by June 2013. In its place, the AMA is building a scientific liquid waste plant that will recycle waste into organic material and biofuels for further use.
James and Nancy are sceptical about whether government will fulfill its promise this time. Until it does, Lavender Hill remains a blot on the nation’s pride. For the residents who live here, life is anything but sweet-smelling.
Francis Kokutse is a freelance journalist based in Accra. He writes for the Associated Press, Nation Media Group of Kenya and the Indo Asian News Service.
There’s a trending joke in Ghana’s business schools today that goes like this: a Canadian investor who owns a call centre in Accra dialled his business all the way from Vancouver, only to be greeted with: “Holla client, I gotta take your call big big up ayew …”
Baffled by the lack of ‘standard’ English, the owner revealed his identity to his employee and threatened: “I gotta take your call big big up? Do you think I’m still going to invest in your country and guarantee your job?”
The call centre employee’s fun and flexible street English is a new form of the Queen’s English that can be heard in Accra’s bars, hotels, schools, taxis and airports. When describing your recent whereabouts you say: “Aye wiv been dere now now.” When friends are hungry you’ll hear whistles of “Chaley, you chop?” and replies like “No, I go weg small.”
This blended language known as Ghanaian English is “the final curtain on the voice of colonialism”, one student I spoke to boasted.
I once struck up a conversation with the receptionist at a local lodge I was staying at.
“Have you eaten yet?” I asked.
She merely sighed and replied: “No I eat after small small, sir.”
“Small small?”
She shrugged and explained: “I simply mean I’ll eat when I show you your room.”
This increasing desire by young Ghanaians to ‘modify’ the Queen’s English has sparked a debate between conservative old Ghanaians and the street-savvy, upwardly mobile youth.
On one end lie the young, hip and patriotic who are busy inventing a new slang vocabulary. If you hear tax vendors saying “go quench”, they mean “die”. When you eavesdrop on hippie girls in a bank queue saying “wack, garl”, what they mean is “eat, girl.” If you spot a high school chap bitterly complaining that “I was held in a go-slow, man” he means he was caught in a traffic jam.
On the other extreme are old-school die-hard Ghanaians, usually Oxbridge-educated, who equate speaking with a proper London or ‘BBC’ accent with status and education. This group heaps derision and insults on the youth who’ve adopted the ‘lafa’ (locally acquired foreign accent).
But Ghanaian youth are proud of the lafa. Some may be Akan (a language spoken in South Ghana) speakers but they also don’t want to sound too ‘Londonish’ when they speak English. A variety of English exists in the UK itself, they attest. “You don’t expect [to hear] the same English in Aberdeen, Wales and Ireland,” a hippie college major scrolling through her iPad in an Accra boutique tells me. “Just observe the thick Yorkshire accent in Ian Rankin novels.”
Speaking English with an Oxbridge accent carried prestige for almost half a century after Ghana’s independence in 1960. Now, young Ghanaians are beginning to embrace Ghanaian English. These adventurous linguists claim that Ghana has outstanding achievers in chemistry, diplomacy, tourism, law or education who’ve never stepped a foot outside the country’s borders. They say that former UN chief Kofi Annan speaks fluent Ghanaian English on the international stage but is easily understood from Syria to Venezuela to Scotland.
The traditionalists, however, argue that while Kofi Annan speaks with a Ghanaian accent, his use of English grammar is perfect and, as far as they recall, they’ve never heard him addressing the UN General Assembly in “pidgin Ghanaian English”.
This generation of young language inventors have been spurred further by an explosion in technology, music and movies. In the past, many Ghanaians pop singers mimicked Madonna, Tupac or Beyoncé. Now a new brigade of local artists wearing Ghanaian name tags and brands have come to the fore. “The idea is to mix western music styles with our Accra accents and rhythms for a home audience,” explains Pio Fawcett, a local DJ.
This infatuation with a localised version of English is not unique to Ghana. Long back, our West African neighbours from Nigeria and Sierra Leone eased into speaking English on the international stage with a heavy local accent. Nigerians call it Pidgin English while Creole English is synonymous with Sierra Leone.
To douse fierce criticism from the educated Ghanaian elite that they’re diluting the Queen’s language, the youth argue that Ghanaian English unites the country. “We’re not watering down the Queen’s language,” explains Ammond Kotto, a dental science graduate who’s returned from studying in London. “Look at Israel. It was a disparate country of refugees coming from all corners of the globe until Hebrew became the common denominator that made it a nation.”
Language purists in Ghana further argue that English is the mainstay of the internet and global commerce, and any country that waters it down will be sidelined. Ammond is quick with his rebuttal. “Do you mean China, a non-English speaking country, is left out of global commerce?” he asks.
Whatever the merits or demerits of this slang, speaking grammatically correct English with a Ghanaian accent is fine by me. However, “I eat after small small” is going too far down the Ebonics road.
They prefer to be known for preaching about peace and loving thy neighbour, but Ghana’s celebrity pastors are becoming embroiled by a rather ungodly row.
A well-known pastor has sparked outrage among his colleagues by making what Ghanaians are describing as an “earth-shattering” prophecy: that President John Dramani Mahama will die this year.
The reverend Isaac Owusu Bempah, founder of one of Ghana’s burgeoning new charismatic churches, the Glorious Word Ministry International, says that the message came to him directly from God.
Owusu Bempah, who first announced the prophecy on New Year’s Eve and has repeated it several times on local radio, has also cautioned that the president’s refusal to meet him might hamper attempts to avert the disaster.
“I have not been able to meet the president and inform him. A similar thing happened when I prophesied about the late President John Atta Mills [who died last year], but they turned me away,” he said.
But senior figures from other churches have hit back at the prediction, claiming it was unethical, and did not meet the criteria of a genuine prophecy.
“According to the new testament, if you give prophecy, it should edify, exalt or confirm,” said Bishop Dr Charles Agyin Asare, founder of the Word Miracle Church International and former vice president of the Ghana Pentecostal and Chariasmatic Council. “The scripture says we should judge prophecies to see whether they be of God, not that we should swallow them hook like and sinker. If I were to judge this prophecy, I would judge it incorrectly,” Agyin Asare added.
Dramatic prophecies are not uncommon in Ghana, where churches are big business and celebrity pastors compete to fill conference centres, theatres and arena for special weekend long services and prayer gatherings.
Agyin Asare, one of Owusu Bempah’s main critics, says he himself was called to ministry after hearing the audible voice of God in 1983 calling him to “heal the sick, raise the dead, preach the kingdom”.
But less than a year after Ghana’s last president John Atta Mills died suddenly in office, there has been limited appetite for predictions of doom in the presidency.
Worshippers raise their hands in thanks to God for the election of John Atta-Mills as president during a service at the Pure Fire Miracle Church in Accra on January 4 2009. (AFP)
“We lost our president last year, and if [Owusu Bempah] was really concerned, the president is a Christian, he has a pastor, he could seek audience with him. But if you just dump your prophecy into the public domain, then you are just trying to scare people. That is not what a Christian minister is supposed to be doing,” Agyin Asare said.
Owusu Bempah was not available for comment, but it is not the first time the reverend, who is a regular fixture in the media in Ghana, has warned of impending disaster. A previous prophecy that Ghana could descend into civil war during December elections failed to materalise, after a new government was elected peacefully.
He is not without controversy. In 2011 he was accused of impregnating a member of his congregation whose mother brought her to the church to be exorcised of an evil spirit. Owusu Bempah denied those allegations, blaming a junior pastor in his employment who he said had fathered three children simultaneously with members of the church. He admitted taking the young female member of the congregation in to live with him in his home.
There is no official regulator of churches in Ghana, where two-thirds of the population is Christian and church attendance is high, although no figures exist. But some Christians are critical of the conduct of Ghana’s churches. “Most of these churches and their leaders are affiliated to a political party, they just make money out of the ignorance of the people,” said Charlotte Biney (49), a resident in Accra. “The churches hypnotise them and the people believe whatever they say. Even educated people fall for it – deep down in our culture most of the people believe in spiritualism and devilish spirits. It’s mind-boggling – sometimes you look at them and ask yourself what’s wrong with them.”
Such is the level of concern about the conduct of some churches that even pastors said that there should be closer monitoring of the activities of church leaders. “I think that there should be more ethics in ministry,” said Agyin-Asare. “Being a pastor doesn’t mean you are not accountable – you should be accountable to your church and you should be accountable to a group of ministers. As human beings we are not perfect – God calls imperfect people to do his work.”
Accra, June 2012 –I am walking with my new friend and namesake, Auntie G, down High Street, Accra, towards the arts and crafts market when I hear “Jambo! Hakuna Matata!” interspersed with “Bafana Bafana!”. I immediately know I am the one being addressed, in that instinctive way foreigners in new places know when they are spoken to, even when they can’t see the speaker. Busted! So much for my illusion of blending in. Crafts vendors – the ever observant eyes of every African city – can read me as either Kenyan or South African, even before I betray my foreignness with my heavy accent.
Now, I have nothing against Bafana Bafana. To misquote South African writer Ndumiso Ngcobo, some of my best friends are South African. But even they don’t want to be associated with the perennially losing Bafana. Certainly not on the streets of Accra, when the Black Stars have just massacred the Lesotho Crocodiles 7 – 0 in a World Cup 2014 qualifier. But with the Black Stars’ subsequent lackluster flickering at the 2013 Afcon tournament – only second to the Chipolopolo’s misfiring – I might be persuaded to reconsider my views on Bafana. Okay, truth be told, with Kenya’s consistent record of perpetual insignificance on the African soccerscape, I have little business holding an opinion on Bafana. Like most of my compatriots, I have long reconciled myself to the fact that we are more of an athletic nation, with occasional flashes of brilliance in cricket and rugby, when our ancestors have enjoyed a few good puffs of the fabled Malawi gold.
But today, on the streets of Accra, I could live with being associated with Bafana Bafana. It is the touristic“Hakuna Matata” that gives me malaria, with its evocation of The Lion King and Baroness Karen I-Had-a-Farm-in-Africa-Blixen. I suppose it inadvertently reclaims tourism as still mzungu (white) terrain in Africa. It marks me as a pretender to touristic pleasure; sadly, some ideas are just frozen in place like that. The curio vendors at the crafts market in Kampala, Uganda seem to be dynamic – at least in so far as they responded to wazungu tourists’ protestations against being called mzungu by printing souvenir T-shirts with the legend “I am not Mzungu” (talk about lost in transcription!). Still, it will be a while before we send young Simba and his matata back to Disneyland. Then again, as my friends subsequently pointed out, maybe the ever gracious Ghanaians meant “Hakuna Matata” with Bafana Bafana, and we must all just chillax about the losing spell. I quite liked this reading.
But while we are on this ultra-optimistic mode, can the artists please drag their African men and women out of the frozen fantasy of bare breasts, earthen pots, and skinny necks weighed down by tons of beads, and get them across to this side of the millennium? Dare I hope that they will start painting the actual men and women who walk the streets and footpaths of African cities and villages?
Along with my friend Wambui, who shares my exasperation at the ubiquitous Afri-xotica of huge ceramic pots balanced at impossible angles on chiskop’d heads, I look forward to the day I will walk into a curio market in an African city and find colourful canvas upon colourful canvas of young people in luminous green skinny jeans, stylish tops and trendy handbags, swinging to “I go tell my papa, I go tell am say, you be waka waka baby” with Flavour N’abania; or a book club of fabulous middle-aged women in Kinshasa joining Twitter wars about the next random artist who thinks female genital mutilation is funny enough to parody in a black-face cake installation. While my pedestrian grasp of high art probably renders the subtle insights baked into the grotesque Swedish cake illegible to my artistic palate, I am sure the not-mzungu tourists can be persuaded to let go of their fantasy Afri-xotica, and embrace the reality of Africans’ glocal citizenship in multiple cultural landscapes.
But if everyday reality is too boring for the not-mzungus, then we can let them eat black-face-sponge-cake art. New markets might just keep the crafts-makers in business. I, for one, will be ready to buy that canvas featuring a septuagenarian shaking a leg to Cabo Snoop’s Windeck in downtown Yaounde, while his Salva-Kiir-style black-cowboy felt hat sits on the table next to his bottle of Zambezi Lager and his copy of Ahmadou Kourouma’s Allah n’est pas Oblige (Allah is not Obliged). Yes, Africans are busy pondering the child soldier phenomenon, from Sierra Leone to Uganda, from the DRC to Sudan; and yes, we do have a penchant for beads and trademark printed ‘African’ wax kitenge fabrics (bless the Dutch for this African authenticity). In fact, I am wearing both my multicoloured beaded necklace and my beaded breast cancer awareness month pink ribbon as I write this. But we are larger than our wars and our poverty: we dance, we dream, we read, we think, we sommer enjoy a good cold lager after a long day’s work; and yes, we pay taxes too, incidentally.
Auntie G and I walk to the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park a few metres away from the crafts market. Both the park and the monument are simple, elegant, Africanist tributes to the grand-père of Pan-Africanism. He is finally resting in peace, enjoying his third, and hopefully last, rest, as Auntie G quips. His first resting place was in Guinea, where he died in exile, and then he was moved to his home village of Nkroful, before being buried here, under a huge grey-marble Baobab-like tree. The Memorial Park guide, Salim, tells me it is called a Gossip Tree. I suspect he is pulling my leg, but I like the name. The tree’s head is cut off. According to Salim, the Gossip Tree was traditionally a resting spot for men to catch their breath after a long day’s work in the fields before returning to the homestead. The feminist in me chuckles at this rock-solid acknowledgement of men as partners-in-gossip. I briefly visualise Nkrumah gossiping with his wife Fathia Rizk Nkrumah, who lies across from him; occasionally joined by Selassie, Nyerere and W.E.B Du Bois, as they debate the African Union’s decision to move the July 2012 summit to Addis, because Joyce Banda refuses to honour the Old Boys’ solidarity which continues to postpone Sudanese president Omar al-Bashir’s trip to The Hague.
The cut-off head of the tree, Salim tells us, is a metaphor for the untimely death of a great man, whose wisdom could have made many more contributions to society. It is a fitting tribute to Nkrumah’s unfinished Pan-African project of unity, liberation and prosperity. Diagonally across from the tree, Nkrumah stands tall and equally headless, his torso gazing blindly across the manicured gardens to the Supreme Court buildings. Beside his right leg sits his head on a separate, much shorter slab. I can’t help noting how the headless statue mirrors the headless tree; and the unfinished business signalled by the cut tree. I am fascinated by the headless statue and its head. Salim explains that Nkrumah’s statue was beheaded during the 1967 coup – Operation Cold Chop – which ousted Nkrumah while he was out of the country, and for some time afterwards the head could not be traced.
The headless statue of Kwame Nkrumah, with the head mounted next to it. (Flickr/Rowan Collins)
Apparently, an elderly lady eventually brought back the head and handed it over to the ruling party. She insisted on anonymity. I have so many questions about this lady. What impulse drove her to do such a risky thing, like picking up the heavy bronze head of a deposed president, beheaded during the coup, while his real head was safely in Vietnam? What relationship had she had with the head and its owner, as Nkrumah went through the now predictable cycle of resentment and nostalgia that marks Africans’ relationship with their first generation nationalist liberation icons? Why did she choose to return it? Why the anonymity? The ellipsis of the lady’s story mirrors the elliptical treatment of the coup by the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park’s museum, with its brief and highly allusive references to the coup. This ellipsis nonetheless looms large in the sparseness of the museum’s collection; predominantly featuring Nkrumah’s items from Lincoln University, where he did his undergraduate studies, and an impressive range of books he authored.
As Salim explains, a lot of Nkrumah’s personal effects were vandalised and destroyed during the coup. The museum’s tentative archive of the coup sits equally awkwardly beside the decision not to re-head Nkrumah’s statue, when his head was returned, but rather mount it beside him, as a historical document. In the space between the headless statue and the head sitting beside a right foot with a huge chunk missing from its thigh, lies a fascinating story of the complexities of the icons of our lifetimes, who simultaneously embrace and undermine our best efforts to sanitise their human blemishes in our perpetual pursuit of one-dimensional god-like icons.
Grace A. Musila is a non-athletic Kenyan. She writes in her personal capacity.
