Silence in the Library

Ghana is a noisy place. The main culprit is music blasted at peak volume from speakers in shops, tro tros and funeral gatherings. Add to this; singing and chanting from incomplete and effectively open air churches, omnipresent ring tones, liberal use of car horns and a wide selection of very vocal birdlife and you get quite a cacophony. After a while your tolerance to all this sound tends to improve and it begins to fade into the background. It was in the pin drop silence of the Balme Library at the University of Ghana in Legon, yesterday that I really realised just how noisy everywhere else is.

Jill, Danielle and I had decided to visit the University for the day. Not a conventional tourist destination, but reputedly it had a good bookshop (rare to non-existent in Ghana), a botanical garden and pizza within a couple of hundred yards of the entrance.

The University was founded in 1948, as part of the preparation for independence being made by the colonial rulers. The original architecture has a strong Japanese theme and you can clearly see how the main buildings are set out like an eastern temple at the end of an imposing avenue. At the head of the avenue, a flight of steps lead into a sequence of courtyards heading towards the Great Hall. The effect was a little spoilt by the facts that, being Saturday, it was washing day and the student residents of Commonwealth Hall had, by necessity, festooned the courtyards, with drying washing (the smell of Omo was powerful) and that at the end of the Hall, the doors were firmly padlocked meaning we could only glimpse the University’s tower through very grimy glass. With a little more effort we could probably have found an alternative route, but by that point pizza was a bigger draw.

The bookshop was excellent. There was a good selection of material on Ghana. Danielle and I were particularly take by a school atlas with well presented maps of Ghana and the sub region showing population, vegetation, climate, raw materials and so on. The nearby Balme Library (which along with the elusive tower and a statue of three interlocked figures called ‘Nuturing’, features heavily on the 5 Ghana Cedi note) had an even bigger collection of material on Ghana and Africa in general. We spent an hour dipping into an array of volumes. I found an academic study into tourism in Ghana carried out in 1974. It contained the line: “It is an open secret that many Ghanaians regard some foreign tourists as having corrupting influence on Ghanaian society because of their irreligious outlook to life, anarchist and egotist morality, strange aethestic (sic) values and deviant dressing habits.”, but the survey undertaken indicated that Ghanaians were a rather less concerned and more relaxed about visitors than the ‘open secret’ indicated. There were collections of Stanley’s correspondence, a survey of cocoa farmers carried out 25 years ago with a questionnaire not dissimilar to the one we have used on the Cadbury project and a recent, fascinating book on beads. The last included an account by a native of Koforidua, born in 1922 that referred to a dispute which escalated into a war between the people of Koforidua and neighbouring Effiduase in the late 1920’s. “One day the Omahene [chief] sent three of his men to take messages to the Chief of Effiduase. One of these men was killed, the second was detained, and the third was tortured and sent back to Koforidua with his ears cut off.” There was also an account of an ‘intrepid archaeologist’ who took a Land Rover full of corned beef out of Legon in the 1950s, “...as he went along he ate the corned beef and collected artefacts. When the space in the Land Rover had been converted from corned beef to artefacts, he came back to Legon.”

The campus was a very pleasant place to spend a few hours. It even had benches from which to enjoy it. The botanical gardens could do with some attention, but still provided a very pleasant place to walk. Within a short distance of the entrance we saw a variety of interesting flora and fauna. We returned to Koforidua at dusk having had a good day. The pizza wasn’t bad either.