Tema and Ada Foah

I hadn’t given the sun much thought until Saturday morning. It is obviously always there, even when it’s hidden by big black rainclouds. The high temperatures make it hard to forget. When you talk to Ghanaians in bright sunshine they will very sensibly steer you into a shady spot. Other than that I hadn’t considered it further. I was in Tema, Ghana’s main port on Saturday morning. There is nothing to see and no real town centre. I was between tro tros and the only thing worth looking at was the ‘Presbyterian Church on the Greenwich Meridian’. The church had a guard’s booth, which I thought was a little unusual. The church was modern and nothing special. I walked through the gate and smiled at the guard. He asked me my business. I said I just wanted to look at the church. He said there was a charge and produced a neatly ruled hard back exercise book with a list of charges in the front. After the concessions there was a one Ghana Cedi charge for adults, a two Ghana Cedi charge for foreigners and a five cedi charge for ‘rich persons’. I tried my usual line that I was a volunteer, resident in Ghana but this did not wash. I enquired whether I might fall into the category of ‘rich person’. The guard looked me up and down and thought I might. I assured him I wasn’t and I reluctantly settled on being a non-rich foreigner. I thought for the money the guard might act as guide but once the fee was fixed he lost interest in me. The Meridian is marked by a line in the grass along the church’s boundary wall with a couple of curious posts at either end. A little south of here it vanishes into the Gulf of Guinea and presumably it does not resurface until Antarctica. While thinking about this I realised that the Northern Hemisphere’s longest day had just passed and that the sun must just be returning south from the Tropic of Cancer some 18 degrees or so north of my current location. Sure enough the sun was to the north of me, as it had been since April. I was just used to the sun always being in the southern sky. I had registered when I arrived in Ghana last September that the sun was very high in the sky and in the middle of the day there were virtually no shadows at all but that was my last thought on the subject.

Leaving Tema, I spent the next couple of days in Ada Foah a small town in the Eastern Hemisphere on the west bank of the River Volta just north of its estuary. The town fits neatly between the river and the ocean. On the ocean side stands a distinctive Presbyterian church. Saturday was obviously grounds tidying day. There were a good number of parishioners at work with tools and flowers. Some of the men were busy scything the long grass with their machetes. Still nearer the sea was a tiny British cemetery, totally forgotten, many of the graves were almost completely destroyed either by vandals or the waves. I could only make out one name – Captain A. Cooper, died April 11th 1926, aged 50 years. West of the town, the strip of land gets gradually narrower. There is a small fishing village which I visited after the church. It is punctuated by small lagoons crossed by wooden bridges. In one, boys were punting around dropping, lobster pots for crabs (crab pots?). It was a peaceful spot. I was greeted politely by everybody and occasionally steered back towards the correct route through the houses. I was invariably asked where I was going, although heading towards the headland there was very little choice in the matter. There were young men mending nets, ferrymen negotiating the estuary with boatloads of passengers, one man was weaving rushes into wall panels and, as usual, children were everywhere, many of whom were inclined to follow me around. Those that saw my camera demanded: ‘picture, picture!’. Eventually you relent, take the picture, show it to them and they all get tremendously excited. The pictures are usually good but it doesn’t seem quite right to take them. I did, however, say a firm no to the small boy who wanted a picture despite the fact that he was not wearing a stitch of clothing.

I spent much of the rest of Saturday at a very pleasant small hotel overlooking the river. I enjoyed beef in red wine sauce with chips and a couple of beers at a leisurely pace and watched the assorted vessels pass by.