moving somewhere as completely and bewilderingly different as ghana is one long roller coaster ride. there have been plenty of ups and downs, but the time has been flying by as of late. i recently celebrated my centennial in ghana - 100 days.
as i write this, i'm off on vacation for a couple weeks, and before i get back to work, i'll have hit the official halfway mark of this 248 day journey. to me, that sounds amazing, considering there have been days i thought would never end, that made me feel like packing it in and going home.
i'll be heading to accra to meet tristin today, who's visiting from home for a couple weeks. i can't wait. i can't wait for a familiar face that i can communicate with full bore. i won't have to use half-english phrases like "i'm coming" instead of "i'll be right back". explaining what you just said to someone who doesn't understand gets exhausting.
we'll celebrate tristin's birthday on saturday. on sunday, we'll cheer on the ghana black stars at the first game of the african cup of nations football championships. i've always wanted to be at a game among fans who live and breathe the sport, and they don't come much more passionate than ghanaians. on monday, we'll start a two week beach tour along the coast in the western region. then it's off to kakum national park for a night or two of camping on the treetops. then a few days in kumasi, where tristin will be besieged by my drooling male colleagues who have been driving me crazy asking when their new wife will be coming. it's making me laugh just imagining it.
as difficult as things have been at times, work has been really busy and really productive lately. and i'm starting to see real tangible signs of success.
my young intern/protege muftaw, who i've been working with a lot, completed his first feature story yesterday. (listen to it here: http://jhr.ca/fieldnotes/index.php?view=section&iid=9447&sid=72) he's a bright young guy from kumasi's muslim community. he literally comes from the most unfortunate, poorest upbringing i've ever seen. the literacy rate in his community is 10%. most people live on less than a dollar a day. both his parents are dead. he lives in a tiny room in a slum, which rents for about three dollars a month.
but despite that, he's gotten his education, he's articulate, ambitious and passionate about journalism. he has no formal training, but makes up for it with lots of ideas and energy, and he soaks up knowledge like a sponge. we've been doing human rights related stories every day. i've seen him grow by leaps and bounds, and it's been so gratifying. just the other day, the news editor asked him to put together a demo tape. which means he's considering hiring him and actually paying him.
back in september, when i met my fellow journalism trainers and the jhr head office people in toronto, they told us not to expect too much. we decided if we could do one really good story or open one reporter's eyes to the importance of human rights, we'd be satisfied. but theory is one thing, and dealing with reality another. as with most people, i am my own harshest critic, and there have been some dispiriting days.
but without beating my own drum too much, helping one young guy fight his way up from the bottom makes it all worthwhile.
Wednesday, January 16, 2008
Tuesday, January 8, 2008
chapter 12: mister big stuff...who do you think you are?!
from the outside, ghana appears to have the foundation of a solid democracy. the constitution codifies individual rights, representative democratic institutions, independent judiciary, all the trimmings of what we in canada see as a good liberal democratic feast.
power to the people!
but if you examine that foundation a little closer, you'll notice a lot of it is built on uneven ground. there's a lot more to really putting power in kofi q. public's hands than meets the eye. and there's a lot going on at the unconscious level that takes me back to first year political science, and in essence, the whole reason for my being here.
are universal rights really universal?
i have no trouble arguing that freedoms like speech, religion, thought, assembly should be universal. but i've come to realize that for most people here, even if they pay lip service to those things, the reality is much different.
ghanaians excercise a kind of orwellian doublethink when it comes to their place in the pecking order. leaders at all levels constantly talk about serving the public, but they know that millenia of social conditioning will ensure that it's really the public serving them. respect the chief, respect your elder, respect authority.
such is the “BIG MAN” culture. it basically means that people who command a lower level of power in society will constantly be kept waiting, are not entitled to all the relevant information, and do not dare question or show disapproval. it's a way of showing your hierarchical inferiors who's boss.
the only person who can stop the big man is a bigger man.
a ghanaian friend recently had to pay a bribe to the police. he was promoting a movie he produced, getting one of his (28 year-old) 'boys' to put up posters around the city. the 'boy' was caught plastering some on a wall with a warning against posting bills, and subsequently taken into custody. my friend was called onto the carpet. we went to the cop shop. after sitting and exchanging pleasantries with the police, my friend eventually went inside, paid a bribe of thirty ghana cedis to get himself and his 'boy' out of trouble. once we were back inside the car, i asked him if it didn't make him angry.
“i am very angry,” he said. “thirty was too much.”
apparently, he didn't mind paying a bribe. It was the amount he was pissed off about.. i should mention that my friend is a radio presenter for a station with a large audience. it apparently never seriously crossed his mind to yank down the dirty cops' pants in public. instead, he phoned the district supervisor, who agreed the bribe was excessive, and chewed them out.
a couple weeks ago, me and a colleague had a meeting with the kumasi metropolitan assembly public relations officer. we showed up. she wasn't there. we hung around for a while, and she casually came ambling in as we were leaving. i asked her why we hadn't been notified that she wouldn't be there. if looks were flying daggers, i'd have been on my way to the morgue. she was angry and surprised, unused to being challenged in that way. i didn't back down. as a foreigner here for a limited time, i have that luxury. but i've seen this woman run roughshod over my young colleague before if he appeared to be critical.
i've also observed members of the army lazily lounging or sleeping on the job day after day, when they were supposed to be standing a post. did they not have enough to do, or were they exposing the people they were supposed to be guarding to danger? in almost any other country with liberal democratic institutions, this kind of disciplinary vacuum would be met with howls of anger from the taxpaying masses. but a suggestion that this is a story that should be told always elicits a helpless shrug of the shoulders from my ghanaian counterparts, meaning it wouldn't be worth the trouble it would cause.
i've tried to educate my colleagues, especially the young ones, that respect is fine, but as members of the media, they have a responsibility to occasionally challenge the big man, whether he (or she) likes it or not. part of a maturing democracy is citizens standing up to authorities who are overstepping their bounds, and it all starts with the journalists. this may result in disapproval or even ostracism. but can there be a cross cultural exception made in this case? not if ghana's journalists are to be truly independent.
"mister big stuff, who do you think you are?"
with apologies to jean knight, sometimes even the big man has to be cut down to size.
power to the people!
but if you examine that foundation a little closer, you'll notice a lot of it is built on uneven ground. there's a lot more to really putting power in kofi q. public's hands than meets the eye. and there's a lot going on at the unconscious level that takes me back to first year political science, and in essence, the whole reason for my being here.
are universal rights really universal?
i have no trouble arguing that freedoms like speech, religion, thought, assembly should be universal. but i've come to realize that for most people here, even if they pay lip service to those things, the reality is much different.
ghanaians excercise a kind of orwellian doublethink when it comes to their place in the pecking order. leaders at all levels constantly talk about serving the public, but they know that millenia of social conditioning will ensure that it's really the public serving them. respect the chief, respect your elder, respect authority.
such is the “BIG MAN” culture. it basically means that people who command a lower level of power in society will constantly be kept waiting, are not entitled to all the relevant information, and do not dare question or show disapproval. it's a way of showing your hierarchical inferiors who's boss.
the only person who can stop the big man is a bigger man.
a ghanaian friend recently had to pay a bribe to the police. he was promoting a movie he produced, getting one of his (28 year-old) 'boys' to put up posters around the city. the 'boy' was caught plastering some on a wall with a warning against posting bills, and subsequently taken into custody. my friend was called onto the carpet. we went to the cop shop. after sitting and exchanging pleasantries with the police, my friend eventually went inside, paid a bribe of thirty ghana cedis to get himself and his 'boy' out of trouble. once we were back inside the car, i asked him if it didn't make him angry.
“i am very angry,” he said. “thirty was too much.”
apparently, he didn't mind paying a bribe. It was the amount he was pissed off about.. i should mention that my friend is a radio presenter for a station with a large audience. it apparently never seriously crossed his mind to yank down the dirty cops' pants in public. instead, he phoned the district supervisor, who agreed the bribe was excessive, and chewed them out.
a couple weeks ago, me and a colleague had a meeting with the kumasi metropolitan assembly public relations officer. we showed up. she wasn't there. we hung around for a while, and she casually came ambling in as we were leaving. i asked her why we hadn't been notified that she wouldn't be there. if looks were flying daggers, i'd have been on my way to the morgue. she was angry and surprised, unused to being challenged in that way. i didn't back down. as a foreigner here for a limited time, i have that luxury. but i've seen this woman run roughshod over my young colleague before if he appeared to be critical.
i've also observed members of the army lazily lounging or sleeping on the job day after day, when they were supposed to be standing a post. did they not have enough to do, or were they exposing the people they were supposed to be guarding to danger? in almost any other country with liberal democratic institutions, this kind of disciplinary vacuum would be met with howls of anger from the taxpaying masses. but a suggestion that this is a story that should be told always elicits a helpless shrug of the shoulders from my ghanaian counterparts, meaning it wouldn't be worth the trouble it would cause.
i've tried to educate my colleagues, especially the young ones, that respect is fine, but as members of the media, they have a responsibility to occasionally challenge the big man, whether he (or she) likes it or not. part of a maturing democracy is citizens standing up to authorities who are overstepping their bounds, and it all starts with the journalists. this may result in disapproval or even ostracism. but can there be a cross cultural exception made in this case? not if ghana's journalists are to be truly independent.
"mister big stuff, who do you think you are?"
with apologies to jean knight, sometimes even the big man has to be cut down to size.
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