But New Year’s Eve, for some freakish reason, sits in a category all by itself.  It seems to be the one night that people really act freely, conducting themselves with the reckless whimsy of sailors with a sole evening in port. It is less of a celebration and more of a ritualistic cleansing, which  may be due to the fact that at least subconsciously one can attribute everything that happens on New Year’s Eve to “last year.”

This, along with a number of other reasons, is probably why I haven’t had one bad New Year’s Eve in the last decade. Rarely, if ever, do I make any sort of elaborate plan for New Year’s and 50% of the time I have no plans at all. On many occasions, the night has started out languidly and I have wondered if the streak would die, but it never has.  Yet this year, my yuletide felicity was threatened by an adversary so grotesquely powerful and omnipresent that it would make even Dick Clark cringe.  It was the only force, outside of the police, which had the clout to isolate me from everyone I know and stuff me into a pocket of self-reflection where I stumbled helplessly throughout the streets like a lost dog.

Of course, I am talking about my Iphone.

The Iphone and the corresponding meteoric rise in “smart phones” is arguably the most influential development of the last decade.  It’s become ubiquitous and ordinary at such a breakneck speed that it’s shocking to think that three years ago you were novel (possibly even cool) for having an Iphone.  In my life, owning the Iphone has changed a number of things, the most important of which are that (a) I can settle any trivial argument instantly and (b) I never have to ask for directions.  It is also an incredible device for looking preoccupied and vaguely important in situations that are socially awkward (mostly election day parties).

But there is a downside to so much technological privilege: dependency.

There are now people in this world who have become incapable of even simple navigational skills without a digital map accompanying them.  Furthermore, there are people who appear to be unable to experience any part of human existence without translating it to the rest of the universe via Twitter.  But, to be honest, most of these people likely had serious life problems before they bought Iphones.

Fundamentally, the Iphone is just an extension of the cell phone and the home phone as it simply makes it so much easier to communicate in and navigate the world and, when it is occasionally unavailable, makes the world seem like an impossibly complicated place.

This is what happened to me on News Year’s Eve in the French Quarter in New Orleans, Louisiana, when AT&T users (the only company to service the Iphone) congregated in such mass that for two hours nobody with an Iphone had service.  Thousands were stranded and transformed into refugees of the digital world. Lost in transit between groups of friends, I walked down the Riverwalk, slaloming between clots of revelers and facing the fact that I might spend the entire night alone.

I have been alone a lot this year.  I have been alone on three different continents and in a dozen countries and I have not minded at all.  But nobody wants to be alone on New Year’s Eve, when the ball or the baby or some piece of illuminated machinery drops from the heavens and drunken single people under thirty wonder which borderline unattractive person they’ll regret making out with.

Of course, the Riverwalk was flush with interesting things to see.  There were white people and black people and a number of people from Florida and Ohio (teams who played in the Sugar Bowl) and a multitude of tough-looking teenagers wearing wife-beaters and flannel and drinking malt liquor out of water bottles.  There was an excess of cleavage, an excess of knee-high black boots, a scarcity of kazoos that almost caused a fistfight, and an odd number of people who appeared to be suffering the same fate of Iphonelessness as me.

The baby fell, the fireworks exploded, the protracted makeout sessions climaxed and a number of people from Ohio attempted to drive down pedestrian walkways in their mini-vans.  It was 2010, a new year and a new decade.  My phone reception picked up within minutes and I was soon reunited with a pack of friends, many of whom had spent the last two hours floundering in the same state of abject loneliness.

We were filled with a desperate energy–a frenzy incited by isolation and cemented by the compulsion that we had dodged a bullet and needed to make up for lost time. I gestured feverishly, explaining my plight, while a friend answered a build-up of text messages. As he tapped away, he whirled toward me and his phone careened off my fingers, into the air, and then onto the cement with a thud.  The LCD screen was cracked like a glass spider web.

I was strangely jealous of the carnage.  In fact, at my basest I wished I had broken my own phone.  This feeling–the idea of hating the evolution of technology simply because it breeds dependency–is likely something one could only experience in the most recent millennium.  I doubt that in 1920 anyone whined about the nuisance of “having to do everything with the lights on” and forgetting how to work under candlelight.  Although maybe I’m wrong.  I simply know that the idea of living  without a phone that can track my progress toward a 7-11 with a light blue GPS ball feels boring and primitive regardless of how pathetic it is, which is probably why I resisted the temptation to smash mine next to my friend’s.

Instead, we shrugged, picked up the pieces and walked on happily to a party featuring a giant tree house, which I didn’t leave until 7 a.m.   Thus,  my streak of epic New Years continued (three in a row, since I’ve had my Iphone).

A boy rows a skiff down a flooded street in Rizal Province, Philippines

I was sitting in my hotel room in Macau, when a newsflash came across the television about catastrophic flooding in the Philippines.  Provinces outside Manila had been ravaged by another typhoon–the third in the last month–causing a number of low-lying areas to be inundated with water. A waterborne illness called leptospirosis was also ravaging the affected areas.  I wanted to see how people coped in a world overrun by water, so I booked a ticket the next day.

I flew into Manila and reserved a hotel room in Quezon City to situate myself closer to the flooded provinces.  I arrived at dark by bus.  It was a confounding place to be dropped off after a long day of travel.  The streets were teeming with people and bright silver jeeps (called Jeepneys), which were spray-painted with exotic designs and blared music.  This was public transport, I was told.

My hotel was close to the bus station, but to reach it I needed to climb an elevated footbridge that hung over the crowded avenue.  The steps were dark, and at the top I almost slammed into a legless man who was sitting in the middle of the walkway.  His head was hung downward, his eyes facing the ground.  His right arm was outstretched and held a paper cup full of change and I dropped a coin in it–though, when it plinked against the others, he didn’t budge.

A blind man was playing a muddy, yet surprisingly sound version of Eric Clapton’s Layla a few feet down, with a sign hung around his neck describing his plight.  I weaved around him, bypassed a beckoning prostitute and hustled down the stairs of the footbridge and into my adjacent hotel.

The next morning, I met with the OXFAM relief team that was working in the Rizal provinces, where most of the flooding had taken place. The first storm, they informed me, had been Ketsana, and it had caused most of the damage.  The flood refugees numbered in the thousands.  They had been evacuated to a number of shelters, but in the following storms, many of those shelters had been flooded as well.

The cause of the flood wasn’t just nature; but man, too.  Most of the victims were squatters who had settled in areas on the border of various tributaries.  Their refuse had gradually clogged water passages, preventing the flood waters from draining properly.

I went to Rizal Province later that day and saw the flooded neighborhoods with my own eyes.  The streets had become canals, and taxi drivers congregated in a circle offering a number of homemade skiffs for transportation. The main evacuation center was a hub of activity, but had taken on approximately a foot of water, which residents splashed through.

I hired one of the boatmen and proceeded through the neighborhood.  It was mostly deserted–the water neck-deep in some spots–but I did spy one couple napping on top of their home.  They had managed to set up a pair of functioning speakers, and Michael Jackson ballads drifted through the air.  Many of the other residents shared a surprisingly jovial attitude–especially the children, who swam playfully in the disease-ridden water.

One of the converted evacuation centers was a Presbyterian church, run by Korean native Armando Guiraldo. Guiraldo told me the church was housing approximately 50 families.  “We are sad because our homes were destroyed, but we are happy because we have so much community relief,” he said, adding that he still holds church service every Sunday.

Relief workers noted that the neighborhood had extremely strong communal ties and the cohesiveness was partly responsible for the high spirits, but even they expressed surprise at the peaceful and positive attitude of residents.  Inside Guiraldo’s church, children giggled and played soccer, while mother’s hung laundry and prepared food. There was no vibration of panic, none of the wild fear one would expect to accompany the destruction of homes.  People had simply made an adjustment–as radical as it may sound–from living on dry to land to living in a flood zone. Even the stray dogs, who sunned themselves on narrow planks of wood, looked perfectly at home.

For more images of flooded areas in the Philippines, check out the photo gallery.

The Macau Skyline

Macau–Macau is a special administrative district located 40 miles from the coast of Hong Kong. It’s a former Portuguese colony, currently controlled by the Chinese. Like Hong Kong, it enjoys considerable independence. There is no gambling on the Chinese mainland, but there are 18 casinos in Macau. There is more gambling than any city in the world, including Las Vegas.

I went there to play Texas Hold Em. I’d yet to cash in on the American Dream, so I figured I’d give it a whirl on the other side of the globe. The slogan for Macau, as advertised on countless tourist buses and signs, is The City of Dreams. But what sort of dream is Macau trying to realize?

The peninsula–where most of the population resides–is a schizophrenic place, with two different identities wrestling each other for control. You can experience the contrast most vividly at dawn. My first morning, I woke up freakishly early and took a jaunt to a park above my hotel. A number of newly paved running trails weaved through the woods. There were fountains and park benches alongside congregations of sage-looking Chinese men performing Tai Chi.

As I navigated my way upwards in elevation, I reached Guia lighthouse, formerly used by the Portuguese to defend the city from invaders. From there, I could see the whole peninsula; it looked like two worlds smashed into one. In the foreground sat rows of narrow avenues crowded with dilapidated apartments, hole-in-the-wall restaurants, laundrymats, spice stores and other local businesses. In the distance, towering casinos shot into the air like gilded geysers and brandished huge, illuminated signs beckoning patrons.

A dawn later, as the first rays of sunshine began to illuminate the city, I was inside the gambling maw, seated at the poker table at the Grand Lisboa Casino. I had intended to leave hours earlier, but around three a.m. two Chinese men wearing outlandish sunglasses and designer shirts had plopped down at my table with a 50,000 Hong Kong Dollar marker.

“Those guys are junket,” a British expat said to me.
“What’s the junket?”
“Most Chinese high rollers take out a loan with loan sharks in Macau. If they lose it, guys like that track them down in the mainland and either collect or machete their heads off. ”

He added that the Junket were notorious for being extremely aggressive poker players. Sure enough, within five minutes of arriving at the table, they were stacking off with marginal hands and immediately reloading. They bet with the body language of men who use money as power. They didn’t slide their chips into pots; they picked them up in a single column and slammed them on the felt.

The other players at the table became unnerved by their presence. They were either intimidated by their strong bets, or induced into calling with terrible hands by the allure of breaking them for a big pot. Soon, the junket duo was rolling up big stacks. Then, a man sat down at the table, who I will never forget.

He was broad-shouldered with sandy, brown hair and a looseness in his movements that signaled a modest, yet intimidating confidence. He was silent and issued no greetings upon arriving, but simply bought in for the maximum. Then, from a plastic bag sitting next to him, he pulled out a pair of sunglasses and a large straw Vietnamese peasant hat. There was a chorus of laughter at the table, but the stranger’s lips didn’t even crack a smile.

Two hours later, I trailed him out of the casino into the brutal heat of the early morning sun. He had broken the junket–taken all their money with shocking ease– and sent them fleeing to the Baccarat table. He had not spoken a word the entire time. He was an enigma–a silent assassin–and as he left, his arms weighed down with chips, I dashed after him, only to watch him tip his hat to me as he peeled away on the back of a silver Kawasaki.

A tortured passenger awaits his fate in Mumbai

We were sprawled on benches, chairs and countertops in a restaurant called Celebrations.  There were fifteen of us from a half-dozen countries.  Some had resigned themselves to fate and drifted into slumber, but it was a painful sleep.  Their bodies were twisted and stuffed into agonizing positions to fit onto a bench or a chair.  A few stalwarts, including myself, were drinking at the bar and getting angrier by the minute.  We wanted blood.   We wanted the blood of a man who promised us salvation and then ripped it away.

Our flight from London to Mumbai had been delayed when a passenger suffered a heart attack, forcing us to land in Budapest.  For this reason, we arrived around midnight and missed our connection to Hong Kong. Jet Airways officials showed no sign of concern.  They simply herded us into a restaurant and explained that there were no flights to Hong Kong until midnight tomorrow.  We would have to wait in the airport for twenty-four hours, because Indian immigration would not grant us one-day visas to stay in a hotel.  We would not receive any compensation.  We would not even be allowed in the fancy lounge with the comfortable chairs and wireless Internet

Of course, it didn’t happen exactly like that.  It wasn’t one swoop of bad news, but a long protracted drama in which we were kept in the dark as much as possible, until the gory truth had to be revealed.  At first, we knew nothing. Then, the first rumors of the delay crept in.  After that, we heard about the problems with immigration.  We worked ourselves into frenzy, speculating on our future, until a customer service agent finally descended into the restaurant and delivered the news.

The crowd was rabid.  The agent had the appearance of a human being, but her unflinching robotics made me question if she was perhaps a mirage.  As she stood, reiterating her sentence, I snuck behind her and poked her gently in the fold of her bicep.  Her flesh felt squishy and real, yet she didn’t react to my prodding.

After she departed, they fed us, but we continued to be charged mercilessly for beer.  Then, around 6 a.m., those still awake began to buzz with the unmistakable hum of rumor.  I poked my head into a group and found out there was a flight to Bangkok in two hours. You could go there and fly to Hong Kong, if you wanted.  My cohort and I didn’t care about Hong Kong anymore.  We had no business there.  Bangkok would work fine.

I located the agent just outside of the restaurant, huddled conspiratorially with three or four other passengers.  They weren’t friendly to my intrusion, as seats were limited, but after a bit of finagling I arranged  two tickets.  The agent left and said he would be back in an hour.  We would be spared.

We went to the bar and toasted our good luck. We finished a round and nervously ordered another, followed by one more.  Then, the terror struck.  No one had wanted to comment on what was happening, as if pronouncing the obvious would make it more real, but finally an Englishman crumbled onto the bar, clasped his hands over his face and violently cursed the agent. “That prick; he’s not coming back,” he said.

We couldn’t find him; they wouldn’t let us past security.  We wondered if he had done it just for the sick fun of watching us squirm.  But it didn’t matter.  It all quickly became a blur.

I slumped onto a couch and oscillated back and forth between consciousnesses like a pinball.  The restaurant filled up and the bright lights and clatter of dishes and conversation made it impossible to sleep.  I was kicked out of the VIP lounge twice, maybe three times.  Finally, I broke down and handed over my credit card.  The price didn’t matter; I just wanted one of those black leather recliners.  I would have given my life for it.  I had been debased beyond the point of recognition.

The Jet Airways officials returned to Celebrations restaurant around six p.m. the next day.  They led us, like tranquilized dogs, through a maze of security checks and luggage claims before finally shoving us onto a plane.  They are, by far, the coldest, most brutal individuals, I have ever encountered.  It seems unfortunate that they have chosen the airline business as their base of operations.  It would be much more appropriate if they were employed as enforcers in a Gestapo.  I would prefer to be waterboarded and have my genitals mangled by electric shock than ever fly their airline again.

This is the first of a number of posts I’ll be writing about my travels in Asia.  Check back for more articles or read  my previous posts on West Africa.

Kunati, an Accra art vendor.

My last day in Accra.  I’ve been here for three months.  In twelve hours, I’ll be on a plane to Germany.  I eat wachi for breakfast.  It costs a quarter.  It’s a spicy mixture of spaghetti, beans and rice.  I used to hate it.  Now I eat it everyday. I’ll miss it big time.

I jump in a sweaty tro-tro and head to Osu, where I meet up with my friends in the vacant lot they live in.  It is the  site of a hotel that was previously demolished.  There’s a huge steel foundation and a wall.  The wall is covered in graffiti.  There are  portraits of Bob Marley, Helle Sellaise, Kwame Nkrumah and Barack Obama drawn on it. There are pictures of lions and a map of Burkina Faso and a bunch of writing in different languages and dialects that I can’t understand.  There is only one phrase in English.

Art is a mission,
He reminded his fellow artist,
Not a competition,
Some men use the
Art to cause confusion

To get into the lot, you have to go through a huge steel gate.  When I enter, Daoma, Kunati and Baba are sitting in the corner.  They know it’s my last day.  They give me a Goni (an African guitar), with my name carved in it.  Daoma wears a necklace with a huge Africa medallion and he ties it around my neck.  Kunati gives me a handful of wood carvings.

I give them clothes–all of the clothes I brought, but don’t care about any more. A glorious purge; I give them anything I haven’t worn at least five times in the last month. It’s like Christmas.  They are fighting over a lime-green Hilfiger shirt.  Kunati is strutting  around in a pair of grey slacks.  Baba’s got my socks on. I’m wearing more jewelry than a Hollywood starlet.

What do you do in a vacant lot with your friends on your last afternoon in Africa?

You drink beers, play drums and freestyle rap.

Baba tells me his DJ name is Baba Wisdom.  Kunati says he doesn’t need a DJ name.  “I’m Kunati, that’s who I am,” he thunders.  Kunati raps fast.  He’s a lyrical cyclone.  He raps sitting down on the pavement.  Behind him, the wind blows litter onto a group of mattresses.  One of those mattresses is Kunati’s  He doesn’t rap about that.

Baba provides the rhythm for  Kunati’s rap.  “Bop, Bop, Clack,”  Bop, Bop, Clack.”  Then Baba raps.  He’s sitting in his wheelchair.  It’s slow at first, then picks up speed.  Baba raps in French.  I always thought of French as a feminine language.  Suddenly, it’s not.

Then I rap.  Then the sun sets.

When I wake up it’s 6 a.m. in Frankfurt, Germany and I’m freezing and stumbling drearily across the tarmac into a waiting shuttle bus.  And in the terminal, I chase Carlsbergs with Carlsbergs to try to kill the pressure that blitzkriegs my neck and my shoulders when I see American media pundits gesticulating  on T.V., but I can’t.

“Bop, Bop, Clack.”  Bob Bop CLACK.

For more images of Accra street life, check out the photo gallery.

I will not die here. I am not meant to die here, in the rain, in Togo, tonight.  But if this motorcycle taxi keeps driving at this speed, if this cascade of warm African rain keeps falling, if the sun doesn’t rise soon, if we kill one more round of aperteshie, it  seems inevitable that something bad will happen.  But it doesn’t, so I continue to breathe and we continue to ride on.

My friend Baba is on the backseat of the motorcycle across from me and he’s snapping pictures with my camera.  Baba has polio and he can’t straddle the bike because of it so he positions his legs crossways and howls like a demon as he whooshes by me.  It’s 4 a.m., the streets are dark and vacant, and I’m soaked with rain.  There’s a memorial, or a statue, or some sort of icon in the middle of the city and we pull up to it and snap twenty out-of-focus pictures and then fly off, and as usual I’m in the dark about where we’re going but that’s fine.

These motorcycle taxi drivers have quickly become our best friends.  We hit bar after bar after bar with them and my wallet becomes lighter and my mind moves faster and now I want the bike to fly and NOW I want the bike to burn the asphalt off the road!

On the back of this bike, I know that at any second we could hit a slick and go careening into the blackness of the shoulder and my life would end, and I enjoy that fear.  Thoreau dug into the marrow of life in a shack in Concord, but he should have tried a motorcycle in Togo and I’m dripping with exhilaration and Jesus this rain is really starting to come down hard.

We slam to a halt in the middle of the street.  The night freezes.  I tumble off my bike and Baba does too, but somehow neither of us are hurt.  Instead we just laugh like we’re insane and then we’re back on again and he howls and I howl and the drivers howl and our yawps boom over the engines and I feel like I’m riding into battle.

A motorcycle taxi driver pours moonshine in Lome, Togo

There is only one taxi driver who wears a helmet, which is why I picked him, because I assumed that he was the safest, and sure enough he keeps that helmet on all night while he out-drinks everyone.  And he leads us, like a pack of lions, through the fog and back to his house. There I meet his mother who is just waking up to begin the day.  Her business is selling moonshine.  My man with the helmet takes out bottle after bottle and pours and pours. “Do you sleep with that helmet on?” I crow.

My man with the helmet takes me home at dawn.  Lome looks woebegone in the morning, like a sickly child.  I want to go to the beach–”Let’s swim I shout!”- but instead we piddle back to the hotel and I climb into bed where I sleep four abreast with strangers.

When I wake up at noon, I’m still dead drunk and everyone else is gone. The night clings to my mind like a strange reverie; I know it happened, but I don’t know how and why.  I know I loved it, but I’m not sure if I’m proud or frightened by that fact.  I look at the pictures on my camera and they make me shiver.

For more pictures of nightlife in Togo, check out the photo gallery.

A body contortionist in Lome, Togo

My friend Baba says we should go to a bar called Panini because it’s the best Lome has to offer.  Lome sits on the ocean in the West African nation of Togo.  It’s a broken city, full of huge decaying buildings that point to a much rosier past.  Its main road is a long sweeping boulevard that abuts the oceanfront and is populated mostly by motorcycle taxis.  The drivers drink heavily on weekends, and wrecks are prevalent.

We charter four motorcycle taxis to the bar.  The place is packed.  The main attraction is dancing, and throngs of people clog the dirt street.  Prostitutes, most of whom are well under age, dominate the dance floor.  Two or three of them wiggle into the center at a time and gyrate wildly.  Their hips explode like cannons, from angles that seem inhuman, and with an unabashed sexuality–a fierce, wild lasciviousness that frenzies the bar.  At one point, a fat hooker bends over and displays her massive ass while her companion slams her pelvis into it.

When they finish dancing, they collapse in adolescent laughter and mingle about, chatting.  They’re just girls again, and it dawns on me, suddenly, that if it wasn’t for the ass-hugging hot pants, the massive gold hoop earrings and the thick lip-gloss, they could be at a junior high dance.

Other people are dancing, but no one dares to lay claim to the dirt road, which is acting as the main stage, until a fat man in grey sweat pants sidles by.  His eyes are coal-black, vacant and wild–the eyes of a man barely clinging to his mind.  The hookers clear a space and he swivels his hips and jiggles the fat of his gut beneath a stained white undershirt.  The crowd whoops and cheers.  They approve.

A prostitute at a bar in Lome, Togo

The jiggler has one other move, which involves grasping the drawstring on his pants and pulling it to his mouth like a microphone, and when he does this, everyone cackles, especially the hookers, who shower him with small change and scream for him to “Dance, dance, dance!”  Someone hands him a half-finished beer and he swigs it down.  He doesn’t stop dancing while he drinks, and the beer spills from the corner of his mouth and tumbles down his hairy neck and onto his shirt.

The most spectacular performance comes from a body contortionist, who suddenly appears next to me with both of his legs over his head.  He then hops, like a toad, across the road, holding this freakish posture.  I’m impressed and pay him a dollar, but no one  else is interested.  When he tries to hop back onto his chair, a security guard pulls it out from underneath him. Everyone laughs riotously and minutes later the fat man in the grey sweat pants is back jiggling his gut again by popular demand.

Baba says we should leave and go to another bar, so we stand and walk toward the roadside, but on our way out chaos erupts.  A scuffle has ensued, apparently among drunken friends, and the security guard pulls out a giant cane and menaces the participants.  At the same time, the hookers eye me leaving–the only white man in the bar–and come rushing over, their long acrylic nails groping at my arms and beneath my belt.  We round up four motorcycles on the quick and I peel the girls off me, but before we pull out of the traffic, I spy a naked man recumbent on the ground.

He is contorted into the fetal position on a patch of mud next to an open sewer.  His head is partially obstructed by the tires of a truck, but his body is visible, along with his genitals, which are pinned between his legs and twisted in a strange way.   I think he might be dead, but then see his arm twitch.  No one seems concerned, and the girls resume their shimmying feet away from his head.

For more pictures of nightlife in Lome, check out the photo gallery.

]]> http://www.danlawton.com/2009/11/01/a-scene-from-a-bar-in-lome/feed/ 0 http://www.danlawton.com/2009/10/19/strung-out-on-my-balcony-in-accra/ http://www.danlawton.com/2009/10/19/strung-out-on-my-balcony-in-accra/#comments Mon, 19 Oct 2009 14:38:45 +0000 Dan Lawton http://www.danlawton.com/?p=510 This is the last of six posts I have written about the witch camps of Northern Ghana. You can find additional posts below.

“When will you file your story?” Cephus asks.
“Soon, it will happen soon.”
“It is about witches, right?”
“Yes, witches and wizards.”
“Where did you see wizards?”
“In Yendi.”

Cephus is the managing editor of The Mail, the newspaper I work for and he is calling me about the witch article, which has yet to be started.   Not only have I yet to start it, but none of the notes have been transcribed.  They are all scribbled in my tattered yellow notebook, which sits in the rucksack below my bed.  The only thing I have looked at so far are the pictures.

It has been two weeks since I left Gambaga and I have spent most of the time on my balcony.  It’s a private balcony,  attached to my massive ocean-side room, all of which costs me about six dollars a night.  My guesthouse is managed by a woman named Perpetual, but she is currently on vacation, so most of my interaction is with her sister Sawah.

Today Sawah is doing my laundry and I am watching intently from my balcony.  The pools of flesh around her elbow flap as she scrubs my jeans.  She wrings the soap from my underwear with the force of her palms.   She hangs my light-blue dress shirts from the line with care and they bounce, ever so gently, as the wind whips past the beach, the palm trees and the stone gazebo in the yard.

Today, Sawah does my laundry.  But most days, she spends her time sitting with a look of abject hopelessness on the stairs.  The stairs face a wall.  She could easily face the ocean, which bursts in torrents of white against the huge black rocks on the beach, but instead she faces the wall.

I try to write in the late afternoon, as the sun hemorrhages over the water in hues of purple and orange, but I can’t produce a word.  I want to get a drink with Sawah and stare at the wall, but Sawah never drinks in public–she stumbles and slurs in public, but she only imbibes alone–so I go to the bar by myself, and then walk along the beach through the piles of litter that dot the sand.  My thoughts begin to blur and pool.  They run in jagged, uneven lines, like a glass of spilt water on a dirt floor.  Mostly, I am awash in images– Polaroid pictures flipping through my brain.

I see Simon at dinner, eating voraciously, confiding his “secret” belief in the specious nature of the supernatural, licking the frothy head of a Guinness; the Gambaranna, cloaked in his flowing white tunic, staring ahead with his soft brown eyes, as I slip money under his rug; the Juju man, stonewalling me with his obstinate guru bullshit, mocking my questions in his tiny shack full of antiquated weaponry and voodoo charms; the guys at the bar laughing at the idea that witches may not exist; the youthful organizer, Ernest Cudjoe, telling me in his perfectly polished English, “It’s not up to me to decide who is a witch or not;” Magaji –the guilty witch–confessing spiritual murder listlessly with her dead gray eyes.

I see a copy of The Crucible in my hand in high school, a fantastical play about something that happened in America four hundred years ago and something that is happening in Africa right now. “Did you hear about the witch that flew into Nungua the other day on a broomstick without clothes on?” I recall a friend asking me.  ”RITUAL MURDER TAKES ANOTHER VICTIM,” a newspaper headline proclaims. “BOYS TURNED INTO SNAKES FOR BLOOD MONEY,” another shouts.  I fixate on the dent in the forehead of the wizard in Yendi; the nail hole looms large in mind.

I want to write an op-ed, like I do in America whenever something offends me.  In America, I can call people out, I can  castigate them if I think they’re false or hypocritical, but in Africa my voice is so small.  I want to say that Northern Ghana is in the Stone Age and that these beliefs retard development, democracy and human rights, but my pulpit is so flimsy here. And who would ever feel sympathy for a witch?  And even those who might–like Simon–still don’t believe that maybe these men and women aren’t witches at all.

A deluge of pity hits me, followed by a breathless moment in which all I can hear is the mortar-like pounding of the waves.  Pop, pop, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang! The rocks take their beating peacefully.  The tide crests, the sun fades, and a violent bout of loneliness descends upon me in its wake.   It hurts more than usual this time.

Visit the Gambaga archive for all the posts in this series or check out the photo gallery for more images from the witch camps of North Ghana.

The chief of the Yendi camp alongside accused wizards

Simon picks me up at 5 am. It is not yet dawn but the moment preceding it, and I can feel the impending energy of the sun pressing violently against the black clouds. The motorcycle weaves jaggedly across the dirt road and past the prison, the canteen and the hot yellow Western Union that signifies the end of town. The sun punches through the clouds, flooding the plain with a soft, purplish glow. Men, women and children pour out of the bush and onto the road, proceeding toward town with baskets of goods on their heads.

Simon and I are going to Yendi, to visit Ghana’s biggest witch camp, which holds over seven-hundred individuals. The village was the site of a small war–more aptly described as a chieftaincy crisis–in 2003. The violence was the result of a long-lasting dispute between the Abudu and Andani tribes, which vie for power in the area. The conflict began when a mob stormed the palace of the sitting Ya-Na ( the regional chief), beheaded him and then killed another forty townspeople. In the aftermath, only a few of the perpetrators were brought to justice, and hostile tensions still hover in the area.

The witch camp in Yendi is not actually located in the town, but about forty kilometers outside of it. Before we begin the trek, we visit with members of Songtaba. a non-governmental organization (NGO) that advocates for those accused of witchcraft. The organization is coordinated by Enoch Cudjo. A college graduate with a degree in social work, Cudjo is young and brash. He wears a bright purple dashiki and, like others, is a bit nervous about talking to the press. However, after a few minutes of feeling me out, he expounds on his efforts to help those in witch camps.

What Songtaba primarily focuses on is integrating community members and “accused witches” together so they can live cohesively. Cudjo says that one strategy that has been particularly successful was building a well for a village inside of a witch camp, thereby forcing the townspeople to interact with the accused witches when they fetched water. As I had with Simon, I ask Cudjo whether or not he believes in the existence of witchcraft and/or that the women in the camp are witches. The question jars him, and he refuses to answer outright. “It is not up to me to decide who’s a witch and who isn’t,” he says. “Instead, I prefer to work on enhancing integration.”

Simon and I depart and head toward the camp. As we grow closer, the road becomes increasingly bad and the landscape bleak. We stop for gas on the side of the road, where three teenagers have a small station where they sell liters of fuel contained in beer bottles. Two of them have chunks of scarred flesh surrounding their navels from poorly cut umbilical cords.

Finally, we enter the camp. The architecture is identical to Gambaga and the small, crude huts stretch as far as the eye can see. Simon finds the chief sitting under a tree. He is dressed in old dirty clothes and appears nowhere near as regal as the Gambaranna. I purchase a libation (a bottle of aperteshie) for a dollar as a gift, and the chief gives it a blessing before slugging down a glass. There is only one plastic cup to drink from so we pass it and the bottle around. Finally, it is my turn. I grimace and slurp down three ounces of the clear, potent moonshine, trying to minimize my shiver to the delight of the chief and his advisors.

The language spoken is too rare for even Simon to understand well. However, there is one young boy who speaks English and he is summoned to assist me in interviews. The chief says something to one of his assistants and two minutes later a half-dozen beaten looking wizards appear. They are covered in dirt and mud and two of them are wearing ski caps with crescent points at the top; oddly, they do look a bit like wizards

Previously I have conducted all my interviews one on one, but I decide that because there are six wizards, and I am half -drunk on moonshine, I will host a roundtable. I direct the wizards to all sit on one bench and they do, patiently awaiting my inquiries like Catholic schoolboys preparing for the confessional. I ask them why they were accused of sorcery. Madjuri, who has been at the camp for three years, says that he killed some young boys.

“Did you really kill them or were you just accused of killing them?” I ask.
“I killed them,” he said.
“Well, why did you kill them?”

As the question is being translated, every one–the chief, the translator, the wizards and Simon–begins to laugh. I realize it’s a ridiculous question, but I don’t know what else to ask.

“He doesn’t know,” the translator responds. “He says he just did.”

An accused wizard in Yendi who had a nail hammered into his head

The wizard on the far end of the bench catches my eye. He’s dressed in an oddly fashioned royal blue jacket; it looks like something that a sea captain might wear. He has a massive scowling face, and I notice a strange indentation on his head. He tells me that he was accused of witchcraft by two young boys who said they saw a vision of him in their sleep. He was beaten by a number of different men, approximately a dozen times. Then, one day they held him down and pounded a nail into his skull. The nail is still in his head and he can no longer see out of his left eye.

I take a dozen pictures of him, like he’s an animal at a zoo, and then give Simon the wave that means I’m finished. I toss my Yendi translator a weird psychedelic eagle t-shirt that was sitting in my bag–his shirt has more holes than cloth–and bump fists with the remaining wizards before leaping on the back of the motorcycle. We have to push it to get back to Tamale before dark, and I bob up and down as the bike plunges through rut after rut.

Back in Tamale, I pay Simon $40 for five days of work. It comes out to $2 per hour and it’s more than he’s made in the last month. We sleep in a terrible hotel–everything else is booked because of a convention–and I wake up in the morning to a cockroach sidling up my leg. I head to the bus station and two hours later I am riding on the big, comfy STC passenger bus back to Accra. I’m done with Gambaga. I sleep the whole way; I need it badly. I haven’t slept right in a week.

Visit the Gambaga archive for the first three posts in this series or check out the photo gallery for more images from the witch camps of North Ghana.

Magajia Dahamat Seidu

Magajia Dahamat Seidu is an admitted killer.  She murdered a child in her village of Zeongu almost twenty years ago.  She cursed it and  it died mysteriously.  She doesn’t know why she did it.  She just did.

At least that’s what an article from last year’s Daily Graphic tells me.  Simon shows me the article in his office when I ask if there are any witches who have confessed to witchcraft.  He saves all newspaper clippings that mention the camp.  I ask him if I can talk to Seidu.  A half-hour later, I’m sitting on a tiny footstool, chewing nuts and staring into her tiny wrinkled face and pooling brown eyes.

Seidu tells me, in short measured sentences, that, yes, she is a witch, and, yes, she did curse a child to death, and, no, she doesn’t know why.  “I just opened my mouth, and it spoke,” she says. The woman is not stable. She is unable to answer many of my questions, and it becomes apparent that Simon is filling in the gaps during translation.  I am a bit wary of her eyes–they are uncomfortably vacuous and constantly staring through me. I decide to cut it short after ten minutes.

“Done,” Simon says, surprised.

That night I have Simon and his wife, Evelyn, over for dinner.  I find a woman who will make me pasta and I order a six-pack of Guinness.  Simon shows up five minutes early in his best shirt, a faded Chelsea soccer jersey.  He drinks the beer with a disquieting fervor, not even waiting for the foam to recede.  Evelyn tells me that she has “small malaria” and asks if she can have some of my medication (I keep a prescription of malarone in my bag when I leave Accra).

I don’t eat any of my chicken, it tastes horrible, so they inhale it together, including the bones.  Suddenly I realize that I have spent the last three days looking for the answers to my questions about the Gambaga witch camp, when the best source was always sitting in front of me.  “You know, you must have one of the strangest job titles in the world,” I joke with Simon. “How did you ever become the manager of a witch camp? ”

Simon and Evelyn Ngote

Simon’s English is very good, although he has no formal education, and he unwinds a long, tightly constricted narrative about his past. He is from a small village, close to Gambaga, and has lived in the region most of his life.  He became involved in social work in the eighties, primarily assisting victims of river blindness, an insect-borne malady that affects the aged in rural areas.  One job led to another, and most were affiliated with the Presbyterian Church.  In 1994, he was offered his current position in Gambaga.

Simon cares more about the witches of Gambaga than anyone else I have met.  “I want them to live a decent life,” he tells me.  “I don’t think of them as witches but social outcasts.”

“But, do you believe that they are truly witches?” I ask.

“My wife thinks I’m crazy,” he whispers, smiling at Evelyn, whose English is very poor, “but I don’t think all of the allegations are true.”   He delivers the line as if he’s confessing an infidelity, a state-secret or a radical conspiracy theory.  The shocking thing is that in northern Ghana Simon’s belief–that witchcraft may not exist–is borderline sacrilege.  In fact, Simon tells me that if he attempted to debunk witchcraft in rural villages his efforts would not only be fruitless, but could damage him professionally.  “I would lose my credibility, people would think I was a crazy man,” he says.

Visit the Gambaga archive for the first three posts in this series or check out the photo gallery for more images from the witch camps of North Ghana.