Ghana, Black Star Rising

by Donal Leader / Edmund Rice International

I was a young boy when Ghana became independent. I remember seeing the photographs of Kwame Nkrumah with Queen Elizabeth in the newspapers at the time. Ghana, the first African colonial nation to become independent. The year was 1957. Fifty years on Ghana has been on a roller-coaster ride as Ghanaians lived through dictatorship, military rule, economic crises, corrupt and incompetent governance, structural adjustment programmes, near-famine and internal conflict.

Today, Ghana is on its way again. As I sped to the airport through Accra downtown I was caught up in one traffic snarl after another, evidence of the bustling intensity and energy of today’s Ghana. New buildings, major hotels and an explosion in the informal business sector drives home the message: Ghana means business. Maybe now the hopes of independence can be realised.

But go North close up to the Burkino-Faso border and it’s a different country. Getting off the plane in Tamale I was blasted by the searing Harmattan kicking up a dust-storm across the arid plains. Way to the North lies the Sahel, one of the areas of the world that is teetering on the brink of environmental collapse. Shift the compass a little further east and you are in striking distance of Chad, a failed state if ever there was one, and, of course, Darfur is just over the horizon.

I had the opportunity of visiting in turn Tamale, Bolgatanga, Kongo and Navrongo. I was working with the Presentation Brothers and the Christian Brothers who have schools and formation centres in the North. In Tamale I saw the spanking new football stadium where the Africa Cup was played some weeks ago. An enormous shining white testimony to modernity surrounded by humbler tin-roofed compounds, ramshackle Mom and Pop kiosks and clusters of round mud hut houses.

The stadium was paid for and built by the Chinese. Enough said. Something tells me the rondavel huts will still be there long after the stadium has fallen into rusting oblivion. Visit the Tamale and Navrongo markets and you will see current news headlines come alive before your eyes. Look for Ghanaian locally grown rice. You won’t find any. Instead, the rice comes from the USA, and Asia. And the price of rice has doubled in the past year due to environmental crises in Australia and a decrease in the availability of land for rice production because of the diversion of land resources into biofuels. Lack of investment in small-scale agricultural production and increasing reliance on supposedly cheap imports have also contributed to current food insecurity. You don’t have to tell Ghanaians in the blistering heat of the far North about food insecurity; they know all about it. The rest of the world can learn a lot from them.