Africa Tour Journal Continued....

The drive out of Nigeria is comparatively uneventful- Lagos is still a swirling mass of humanity and metal that defies belief, but we don’t have any run ins with self appointed gatekeepers on the way to the border. Sunday, bless him, has accompanied us again, and his presence calms us and lets us know that all this is normal. Or at least, it tricks us into thinking so. It seems that leaving Nigeria is OK- it’s coming in that causes your wallet to slip out of its pocket. Of course, leaving Nigeria means you have to enter Benin, and this time we are made to wait five hours parked before a dusty wooden oil drum-supported pole. Sunday cajoles and argues like the pro he is, but this time we are up against sheer, obstinate opportunism, and even he can’t take it anymore after a while. When he tells us he has to leave I readily agree- he has done everything so far and gone way beyond what we could have expected from anyone, and now that we are merely arguing and pleading to get into Benin it really isn’t his problem anymore. We are not facing danger now- just the danger of spending all our money at the border, and the absurdity of it this time is a bit much to handle. The ‘problem’ (which translates as an excuse to squeeze more money from us) this time is that our transit visas to cross Benin were originally only 48 hours and so have expired. We already knew this, since buying these visas was the only way for us to get into Benin from Togo in the first place, and had agreed to buy additional transit visas on the way back (damn the torpedoes, full speed ahead). But of course, anything out of order is grounds for new negotiation here, and so the immigration officer claims we should have gone to the Benin consulate in Lagos, and that we will have to turn around and go back there to get our visas today. This is out of the question, and he knows it, but it ups the ante as far as what he’s really looking for is concerned. We end up paying double the normal price of visas- $20 each instead of $10, and then I have to sit with Alex and the ‘assistant’ as he leisurely copies down the information from each passport and writes out new visas for us, periodically putting down his pen and holding his arm in a mock display of the carpal tunnel syndrome that comes from not having enough small bills slid his way. Somehow we manage to get all the visas without paying him anything, probably because Alex keeps the atmosphere light by telling the assistant how good he is and how good an assistant Alex is in keeping him company while he endures the sheer terror of writing out each visa.

This gets us across the road to the wooden pole gatekeeper, who demands cassettes when he finds out we are a band, and then sends us across the road yet again, where Alex must slide some bills to the ‘health officer’ before he stamps our visas allowing us the privilege of driving through Benin on our way back to Ghana. This in turn gets us about a hundred yards down the road, where we are stopped at yet another wooden pole to make sure the papers for our bus are in order (surprise, they aren’t), and must wait there as Chambas is pulled into a small wooden shack to settle the matter. Chambas has become our friend, not least because his hilarious Fu Manchu-meets-Ghana accent never fails to crack us up, but he is not the most diplomatic member of our crew, being much more prone to screaming at an official that his bus is licensed and ready than to the slightly subservient and apologetic attitude that seems de riguer for getting anything done quickly at an African border crossing. This, coupled with the fact that Chambas rarely misses a chance to brag about the fact that he’s packing heat right there under his right hip, makes me grab Alex and beg him to follow Chambas and do all the talking everytime Chambas is called out of the bus. This seems to be working in this case, Alex inserting all the right “Please sir, we beg you”’s and “God will bless you”’s as the motley assemblage of uniformed border guards, immigration officers and random hangers on debates the wisdom of letting this bus full of Americans past the final wooden pole, until Eric, our Ghanaian cameraman, decides to snap a picture of a truck driver next to our bus. One of the border guards spots him, storms on to the bus and orders Eric off so he can confiscate his camera, Eric frantically stashing the tape in the camera in his bag unnoticed before he hustles off and into the wooden shack. A heated shouting match ensues, and we are made to wait yet another half hour while this is eventually sorted out, with more small bills, allowing Eric to rejoin the bus with his camera intact. Finally we are cleared, and as we roll under the last wooden pole about 6 hours after first arriving at the border (a scant 200 yards or so behind us), I feel an odd mixture of relief and annoyance at being made to wait so long for something so basic that I am relieved when it’s finally over.

We roll through Benin in a couple hours, arriving at the Togo border just after nightfall. Our enemy now is time, with the Ghana/Togo border closing at 10 PM a few hours away and us determined to make it home to Accra that night. So the Togolese border guards who make us pay extra for ‘proper’ bus papers annoy us more for the fact that they take so long doing it than for the fact that they’re corrupt bueauracrats intent on enriching themselves at our expense. We already know the drill, a few of us joke to each other, why not just tell us up front how much it’s going to cost and let us pass through right away? This streamlined border/toll booth idea has its appeal, but the realistic truth here is that nothing at an African border crossing- like anything in Africa itself, it seems to me- is streamlined, so it’s a good two hours later before we finally push off from the Togo side of the border, checking our watches and calculating the time needed to reach the Ghanaian border minus any unforeseen delays like goats in the road or Chambas’s need to pull over and pray to Mecca. Of course, the first of the only delays we need to worry about rears its ugly head not twenty minutes drive from the border in the form of a random checkpoint established by soldiers collecting a ‘large vehicle’ toll for, wouldn’t you know it, vehicles just like us. This takes a few minutes of negotiation before we’re on the road again and headed for the next checkpoint a little ways down the road, where we offer half of what the stated toll is and move on. This continues at least twice, the last time the soldiers waving us through when they don’t have the correct change to give us from the toll agreed on when we offer a larger bill. All of these delays tighten the nerves in our stomachs and make us uneasy as we pull nearer to Ghana- we are hungry, having no time to pull over for a decent meal, and exhausted and dirty with sweat after over 12 hours of sitting in the bus in the heat waiting for yet another bribe to take its desired effect and let us pass yet another checkpoint. The thought of arriving at the border after it closes- of spending the night in the bus at the border or of turning around and driving back to Lome and looking for (and paying for) another random hotel room, is as unappetizing as the smell from the open sewers that line the road as we near the border.

We arrive at the Togo side of the Ghana/Togo border and Christopher and I practically race out of the bus and straight to the border guard’s desk- it’s 9:45 and counting. Christopher asks in French if we can please hurry up since we’re trying to cross to Ghana tonight, and the official points to his desk drawer as Christopher tells me to couch up 5,000 CFA, about 10 bucks, which I hurredly lay on the desk for the guard to snatch up. We sprint to the Ghanaian building, where the border official tells us to move the bus past the gate because it’s about to close, but as we race back out to tell Chambas we are stopped by a Togolese woman in uniform and several Togolese soldiers, who order everyone out of the bus for ‘inspection’. I plead with the woman that we must bring the bus past the gate, there’s no time, which Christopher only half translates into French, knowing, as I do also, that there’s no use and that nothing here happens for a reason we could understand anyway. The Ghanaian officials, some of whom just told us to hurry and cross the border, are watching abstractly, uninterested in interfering. Chambas is yelling at someone, Christopher is pleading with the woman officer to let us pass, everyone else is standing around wondering if anything we could do will do any good or if we should just ride this out like everything else. Then somehow, for some unknown reason or maybe just because the Togo officers decided we were too much to deal with, we are ordered through the border and we hurredly shuffle through a tunnel and into the parking lot on the other side. As Chambas moves the bus into the parking lot the rest of us stream into the same office we had begun our journey in five days before and fill out the same questionairres as we did then, taking care to check ‘tourism’ as our reason for visiting Ghana and scrawling the address for the Kusun house in Nungua as our permanent address in Ghana. One by one our visas are stamped, one by one we emerge from the visa office into the warm breeze of the African night, and one by one we realize dejectedly we’re not out of the woods yet- the parking lot where the bus sits and where we stand is a kind of no man’s land in between Togo and Ghana- we have exited Togo and been granted entry into Ghana, but the final gate to enter Ghana in the bus lies west of us 100 yards or so, and it is well past 10 PM. What’s more, as we jog over to the bus we discover several Ghanaian border guards poking through our equipment, deaf to the shouted pleas to hurry up, that we must get through the final gate before it closes. I run over to the gate with Christopher, Bongo, and Eric and find the uniformed officer in charge ready to leave for the night and nonplussed at the prospect of our being stuck in this parking lot until morning. “God will bless you if you let us through” says Eric, which doesn’t make much of an impact either, but somehow he does grudgingly tell us that if we can get the bus over to the gate he will let us through. Racing back to the bus though, we find the border guards taking apart Jason’s drum case (looking for drugs? Voodoo trinkets? We’re not sure), then using Mully’s flashlight to look over the pile of bags and equipment in the back of the bus. They threaten to search the entire bus, surely dooming us to a night here on the fenced-in asphalt. We plead at them to reconsider, that we are only trying to make it to Accra tonight. And for the second time in the space of half an hour, the officials holding us relent, and wave us through. I don’t know why- maybe it was the Ghanaians with us insistently wishing religious favor on them for easing up on us. Maybe it was the sheer exhaustion in the thought of actually going through with a full search of this entire bus and all its American bags and equipment. But whatever it was, we found ourselves cruising through the last gate and wondering at our good fortune.

There’s something else though too. I don’t know if you noticed anything missing from that last episode, but I, and several of us on the bus, sure did: no money changed hands the entire time we pleaded and hoped to get into Ghana from Togo. This was not just unusual or unexpected or even just simply interesting. From our standpoint- the one that comes after spending your entire day in the hot sun cramped inside a bus shelling out more money you don’t have to border guards who treat you like an ATM machine- it was downright revolutionary. Ghana is many things compared to the countries we traveled in and passed through- poorer, on the surface, than Benin and Togo. Maddingly inefficient when it comes to anything running on time. Less fascinatingly full of contradictions, of significance to the world economy, than Nigeria. And yet, based on the woefully biased experience of one American in one bus crossing three international borders in one day, Ghana has the only working government of all four countries. The uniformed civil service employees at the Ghanaian border were just that- employees, hired by the government to perform a service larger than simply enriching themselves from the next passerby. A sense of law, of civic duty, was nonexistent in Nigeria, unnoticeable in Benin and seemingly irrelevant in Togo. Yet crossing into Ghana yielded much the same experience as crossing from Canada into Vermont- a uniformed beauracracy doing its job, poking into cargo and ultimately giving in to pleas of common sense. It would be easy to make too big a deal of this, to pound your chest in admiration for the Ghanaian civil service and wipe your eyes after getting misty with the thought of Ghanaian patriotism. Yet it’s hard to overlook it also- the nation-state that we take for granted in the west is a malnourished and disadvantaged non-native plant in West Africa. The anecdotal evidence tells me it hasn’t taken root in Nigeria and not really in Togo and Benin either, where tribal identity still rules and personal and familial enrichment trumps any kind of service to a higher governmental authority. But Ghana- perhaps because it gained its independence before any other African country, in 1957, or because alone among West African nations it has never undergone serious civil unrest or war- seems to be held together by more than just lines on a map drawn up by someone in the British or French foreign office early in the last century. It’s a country, with the sense of law and order that that word normally implies, and as we glided past the last iron gate and settled in for the last leg of our journey, we were weary and hungry but more than a little relieved to have made it somewhere that felt like home.