11 Dec Ghana — Paradise of Earthly Desires

There are a lot of reasons to visit Ghana. Peggy went because the Peace Corps sent her. I tagged along because I like to be with Peggy. And because I wanted to see a forest elephant. They have them right outside Accra, the capital city.

In the Visitor’s Centre at the Kakum National Park there was a testimonial to a sighting not more than ten years earlier. And a photo to back it up, or so the caption said. And who were we to argue? It could have been a forest elephant. The picture was taken at night with a motion-activated camera and an elephant at night is no more indiscernible than anything else in the jungle.

The park is too steep, and too muddy, and too jungly to walk around in checking for tracks, or spoor, or stripped branches. Besides, who wants to blunder into an elephant? No telling what a surprised elephant might do, so you do your looking from an aerial walkway high in the canopy

 

 

Which would work better if you could see anything through the leaves.

If gloomy dungeons are your thing,

 

 

Ghana has a slew of optimistically re-branded “slave castles” where millions of Africans were accumulated before shipping out to the New World.

The country has crowded fleets

 

 

of ocean-going canoes

 

 

painted and carved into works of art for men to take deep into the Gulf of Guinea in search of fish

Ghana has one of the few functioning democracies in all of Africa. But the real reason to go there is for the coffins. Accra must be the only capital city in the world with a coffin district.

There’s nothing modest, or off-the-rack, about a Ghanaian coffin. They’re as individual as the individual inside. Or, at least, as the individual was before he was inside. Shops overflow with effusive, brightly-colored shapes that to most people in most places throughout most of history, don’t scream “dead person inside.”

I wish Peggy had been able to see them with me. Being in public with a beautiful, vibrant woman makes me feel worldly and accomplished above my station. But, as happened on lots of our trips, she spent most of her time trapped in meetings. So, the day I went to see the coffins, it was in the company of a lady who’s husband was stuck in the same meetings.

Now I don’t want to sound overly sensitive, here. The lady was perfectly lovely in the only place loveliness is supposed to matter. But in the places people can see, what they saw was a white couple among a sea of brown faces, assumptions were made, and I wanted to yell, “No. Not this one. I have a very pretty wife. This one’s nothing more than afternoon’s entertainment. I’ll have her back to her husband by supper and we’ll all pretend this whole thing never happened.”

I don’t know how long it would take to build a Ghanaian coffin, but you get the impression that if you don’t want your corpse lying around for months gathering flies, it’s a good idea to commission one in advance. Besides, who wouldn’t want to bring something like that home and caress it and admire it and show it off as an inspiration to children and an admiration for friends? Why should your survivors be the ones to have all the fun?

In a Ghanaian coffin you can fly up to heaven in your own, personal, Air Ghana charter

 

 

or inside a giant bird.

 

 

You can paddle your way to the afterlife like a pharaoh in a solar boat

 

 

or on a fishing boat.

 

 

In the belly of a crocodile,

 

 

or be carried out with the trash.

 

 

You might not be able to take it with you but, maybe, it can take you with it.

 

 

When you get to heaven, you can be refreshed,

 

 

eat everything you want

 

 

and keep on doing whatever it was you did that sent you to heaven in the first place,

 

 

except there’ll be lots more of it.

 

 

Which, when you think about it, is the whole point of being in heaven.