Huckleberry Finn should never go to reggae night

"You need to lighten up," says my husband.

“What?” I say defensively. I’m a Capricorn. The words don’t compute.

“No one wants to read about doom and gloom. There’s so much that…well it’s not all like that is it?” he says.

“I have a sense of foreboding that if I write about the nice stuff…” He cuts me off: “You have a sense of foreboding about everything.”

I know this is nothing to do with tending towards the real. It’s because he wants me to write about The Fishing Trip. But that would involve a loss of face, and I won’t be drawn.

“Write about the fishing trip,” he says, eventually, then picks up a kit bag and heads off. He’s going for a week to East Africa to chase the story of Somalian Pirates’ wavering demands for a couple of captured Brits.

Odd trip for a West Africa correspondent, I say. Why’s he off there? “British lives in danger,” he says. It calls for hands on deck from all corners of troubled, starving, war-torn, famine-ridden (not everywhere, remember?) Africa.

He’s going to miss the beach in this heat, I think, mucking about in temperate water, playing cricket with Magnus, finding a rare breeze that wafts smells of fish cooking on the grill.

Fish I didn’t catch.

Let me explain first that I have never thought myself an expert.

I spent a childhood in Wales persuading my father to spend rain-soaked evenings in ugly estuaries so we could catch flounder and plaice, and he would stand patiently with me in gales while we hooked tiny crab and threw them back.

In three years of this we caught one edible fish which my mother cooked and shared four ways. It didn’t matter that we caught little; I went to escape a wasteland that was children's TV.

That was a long time ago. Now I was ready to fish the great shoals of rare and beautiful fish that I would girlishly wrestle from the sea and bring home and serve to my own family. They would marvel at my skill, and I would feel like a huntress.

I knew there were tilapia in Ghanian water, a strong-spined fish you cook with cocoyam leaves, or with okra in a hot stew that’s slippery, like an overbloomed swamp whose crocs have long gone in shame, but which tastes like chilli velvet.

And much else besides: yellowfin and big-eye tuna, mackerel, sardines, sea bream, blue marlin and further afield barracuda.

But all this needs practice, requiring a trip to the beach for some concentrated learning. The boys come along for moral support, but it isn’t the peaceful mission I desire.

“Welcome to reggae night!” shouts a boy from a bar. He pulls up three plastic chairs for us to start drinking beer. One of us is 6, but that’s the least of my new problems.

I’m here to dip my hook quietly into teeming sea, but there’s a cacophonous crowd fired up for a big night and we’re suddenly centre-stage.

The fishing rod is an immediate source of entertainment. Fishing here is a job done with boats and nets, not a hobby. They want to help. Someone wants to buy the rod from me. He’s persuasive but I can’t, it’s the closest I get to adrenalin sport since a ski accident that broke my leg for a year.

They want to know everything.

“What’s on the line?” I show them hooks and beads and weights. I demonstrate how to put the rod together and how to use the reel, and I show them where in the water I want it.

“What are you trying to get? You want tortoise?” I assume they mean turtle. Magnus would cry forever.

The bit I am dreading is the inevitable next question.

In anticipation, I pick up the tackle box and pretend it’s time to move to a better part of the water, but they’re pretty jazzed up, they really want to know what this is all about.

And then it comes: “What food are you using to catch the fish?”

This is the bit my husband loves.

I’d prefer to produce a baby’s leg than show them what I’ve got. I had no time to stop for bait on the way; there was a risk of missing the last of the light.

So I took what I could from the fridge. Something that might sashay in the sea and fox the fish into thinking it was food. But it’s not really going to work, and it’s not going to pass muster with my new fishing friends.

They see I’m hesitant, and while two of them keep me protracting another looks in my fishing box and pulls out the “bait”.

I wish away my audience but it doesn’t work. They have found my oyster mushrooms, and I shudder.

So there we are, Huckleberry Finn and the Strange Bag of Fungi. The reggae boys are politely perplexed. I’m crestfallen. I reach for a magic goat horn but there isn’t one there.

“You won’t catch,” says one. “I’m getting you a fish.” He disappears into a bar and returns with a sardine’s tail, cuts it up and puts it on the hook. Then he asks me for more money than I would’ve paid for the entire fish at the market.

I disappear into the sea, a leg-wounded Fisher King, and pray to the god of Ghana and all his ancestors that I don’t fall over in the waves.

I try to fish, but I entered the realm of slapstick some minutes ago and now find it hard to stay serious. My sardine tail catches two plastic bags, one white, one black. I achieve racial harmony at least.

I look over at Magnus who’s been drawing animal pictures in the sand during the whole episode but has seen that the boys have found the mushrooms. He looks back, apologetically, fondly, thinking: “I love her but I don’t think I am hers.”

Why Olivia and the goat horn are making headlines near you

“I placed a goat’s horn into the stomach of my sister to prevent her from having children,” says Olivia, 19.

It’s not my usual morning reading, but it’s compelling.

It’s a news story about a girl who’s been a witch since she was 5, and is now being exorcised in a church whose congregation are “stunned”.

She continues: “They gave my mother’s heart to me to eat and our queen witch feasted on my mother’s head, as my culture demands.”

Hell that’s bad, though maybe Mama had it coming, having ignored Olivia’s wishes to be exorcised for 10 years, by which time it was too late.

“When I was 15 my mother took me to a Man of God in Ivory Coast…but a strong burst of smoke came out of my nose and mouth as the pastor faced me…he was not strong spiritually to face the witchcraft spirit in me, so we left.”

Olivia’s troubled, for sure, and she’s been on the rampage against her family.

Among ills inflicted are abject poverty (she has stored their savings in her cauldron), a lifetime of pain for her grandma, in whose stomach she has placed a shell, and the headless, heartless mother, eaten.

And the goat sister. For she has spent “the last ten years…going to all lengths to find a solution to her barrenness, wasting a lot of time and money in the process.”

I lack grasp of matters cloven-hoofed, but shouldn’t belly-full-of-goat-girl have mentioned it to her physician?

Luckily it doesn’t matter. A preacher, Prophet Michael Osei, can save her. He can make her vomit the womb-held horn (figure out the exit route for yourself, I am foxed), exorcising Olivia and stunning his (rural) congregation in one sweep. Thank God for men of God, for they can save the world, the witches and hell fire! even the football.

And their PR machine’s not bad either.

The story’s amusing, but I bristle, because I think it’s also pernicious. It’s running on at least two popular news outlets in Ghana and there is no indication that a journalist has done anything to question the legitimacy.

I check the reader feedback. It’s a mix of fear of “witches and wizards”, calls for “a proper journalist to investigate” (at last!) “who this queen witch is” (oh), and something sensible from Naa Shomey: “This is the kind of thing that makes such false prophets perpetuate such nonsense. Why is it that most accused witches are women and young children?”

Thanks to Naa. I think she has hit the nail on the head.

The likely origin of the story is a revivalist church, which confirm or "discover" signs of witchcraft, operate on a profit-making basis and most that practise exorcism will put on a performance like Olivia’s for the purposes of financial gain.

Promise double digit dollars to a teenager with her heart set on some slingbacks and a night out, coach her and poof! she’ll ham it up about the goat and the smoke and the bloke who couldn’t fix her. The crooked bombast of a preacherman gets a quick return on investment, winning the support of troubled families who have no access to basic social services, and use the church as their moral reference point. Pass the collection plate!

The knock-on effects are felt as far apart as Tanzania and Tottenham, Angola and Hackney, Congo, Tower Bridge and Harlesden. You name it.

In the Democratic Republic of Congo alone, Unicef estimates that there are 25,000 abandoned children in Kinshasa and more than 40,000 country-wide. More than 70% have been accused of witchcraft.

One of those children is Cedric, who was 8 when he watched his village, just outside Kinshasa, turn against him after his father was killed in an accident. He and his brother, denounced as sourcerers, were beaten with stones and chased away. “I knew I was not a witch. They only did that because they did not want to look after us,” Cedric said. They sought refuge in an aunt, who gave them to a pastor to be exorcised. Together, the aunt and the pastor beat the children until they ran away. Cedric lost his brother along the way, joined a gang and slept in “stinking alleys, oozing untreated waste”.

Pastor Michel Kabi, who runs an organisation set up to counter witchcraft, says accusing children of sorcery is an easy way out: “People are too poor and desperate themselves and are frightened of having to look after children too.”

Children who are uncomfortably close to your doorstep.

They include Victoria Climbiè, an Ivorian girl who was tortured and killed in Tottenham due to witchcraft accusations. Boy Adam, whose mutilated torso was discovered floating in the River Thames, and Child B, an 8-year-old child brought to the UK from Angola, who was beaten, cut and had chilli rubbed in her eyes after her aunt and two others believed she was a witch.

All of these cases had their origins in Africa.

I called one of the media outlets to ask about their editorial policy. Is it appropriate to publish a story with no reference to the possibility that the facts might not stand up? And that ultimately mask a practice that in many other cultures would be called child abuse?

“Our editorial policy is our own business and is not for public knowledge,” says someone there. He’s a journalist. I ask what he thinks of it, personally. “It’s not right,” he concedes.

Western media stands rightfully accused of using large-scale suffering and backwardness as a means of reporting Africa (I feel dangerously close to falling into that camp, too).

But here are popular, urban Ghanaian media outlets giving credence to practices that demoralise Africa and give the rest of the world the idea that for this continent, there still is no hope.

Quite sticks a goat horn in my Hallowe’en spirit.

Ghanaian rain the least of the pain for Vodafone’s African adventure

“It’s raining!” shouts Magnus as he flings himself onto my bed at 5am while looking for things to do following the household ban on TV.

He opens the curtains and I open an eye. Rain of tropical proportions.

“Thank you London!” he says, and skips off.

I’m not sure why he’s so pleased. But I am delighted, because today caretaker Jonas can divert the gallons he soaks onto sun-baked earth to our reserve tank instead, so when water looters steal from the mains so they can survive, so can we.

Then I remember Vodafone.

The downpour that’s keeping us in rainforest garden is drowning cables elsewhere in town. There’s no way our broadband will be working.

I call the Vodafone man. “There are major problems,” he says. I ask if it’s the rain, he says no, of course not, then relents when pushed and says the problems could last the day. I hang up and wonder if the call will be used for quality and training purposes.

I switch to the MTN line and watch it whip through credits at unimaginable speed.

Vodafone must be finding it tricky in Ghana. The rain is one problem, but small in comparison to this: a report emerged last week calling its acquisition last year of Ghana Telecom, the state provider, “unconstitutional” and “illegal” and calling for the entire deal to be renegotiated.

It’s a slap in the face to a world class network that has entered a lucrative market with an extravagant promo promising a $1m grand prize which includes a luxury villa in Accra’s exclusive Trasacco Valley, a chauffeur-driven 4X4, motorbikes and scholarships in a draw that will be aired on national TV. Its presence here is inescapable.

On paper, Vodafone bought a 70% stake in Ghana Telecom for $900m in a deal that completed in August 2008.

But the report, commissioned by the incoming National Democratic Congress government led by John Atta Mills, said that "through a complicated series of financial arrangements" the actual price it paid was less than $450m - far less than the annual earnings potential of Ghana Telecom. Analysts say the figure in reality could be as low as $267m.

I call Vodafone HQ to ask about revenues from Ghana. They don’t break them out. So I ask my neighbours how much they spend on their mobile telephones. They estimate $120 a year. Add to that some broadband customers ($500 a year), some mobile broadband (costlier), heavy use by companies and NGOs, and the fact that the Ghana Telecom deal added 1.6 million customers to the Vodafone network, and the revenues start to stack up. It doesn’t take long to make the deal pay for itself.

In all of this it would be unfair not to mention what Vodafone brings to Ghana. It's made the country a key cog in its corporate and social responsibility programme, stepped up health and safety, changed electrical equipment to cut fire risk, and taught safer standards of driving. A spokesman in the UK tells me the company has yet to receive a copy of the report, and that it will decide how to react when the Ghanaian government makes an official statement.

The report, which is certainly available in Ghana, goes on to question why Vodafone's bid was approved when other firms, such as Telkom South Africa were offering higher bids for a lesser stake.

It adds that “although strong allegations were made about bribery and corruption, the committee did not have the powers and resources to investigate these claims”.

Ah! Right on cue, a chance for Atta Mills to act, to right possible wrongs of the former (opposition) government and come up smelling of roses.

Right? Wrong.

Contacted when the report emerged, communications minister Haruna Iddrisu told Ghana’s Joy FM radio station that the ""Government is of the opinion that the Committee overstepped its remit in expressing an opinion on the constitutionality or otherwise of the transaction."

So why such reluctance to act?

The report into Vodafone’s purchase of Ghana Telecom comes at a time when the NDC government is squirming from the fallout of the Mabey and Johnson bribery case. Mabey and Johnson is a British company that specialises in building bridges and it recently was found guilty of trying to bribe officials in a number of countries to secure contracts.

One of those countries was Ghana when the NDC was last in power in the 1990s. Two ministers serving in the current NDC administration have resigned pending an investigation into their alleged role in the bribe-taking scandal. So flinging mud too enthusiastically at the former New Patriotic Party government for its handling of the Ghana Telecom sale risks some of the mud coming back.

And it risks the country's own attractiveness as a place to do business.

Ghana has done well in recent years to market itself as the good news story of Africa.

Compared with its neighbours – Cote D’Ivoire, Sierra Leone and Liberia, that’s not particularly hard, and while Nigeria remains a smog-choked punishment of a place to do business, Ghana is a safe and stable Anglophone alternative just three countries to the left.

Amid the billions set to flow in thanks to oil exploration that’s revealed one of the richest African prospects in years, is $500m or so lost on a telco deal really worth the quibble?

Niger, the unreported Guinea of West Africa

On Tuesday October 20, Niger, a vast uranium-rich state in West Africa, will see the final swing of President Mamadou Tandja's constitutional wrecking-ball.

Tandja changed his country's constitution so that he could hold a referendum which, naturally enough, gave him an overwhelming mandate to serve another three years in office on top of the normal two-term limit. Niger's supreme court ruled that Tandja's referendum was unconstitutional, so he shut it down. And to make sure nothing else got in the way, he dissolved the national assembly in case it tried to forestall his patriotic destiny.

The umbrella opposition group, Coordination of Democratic Forces of the Republic, is boycotting the election, saying it's not only illegal but will be rigged so that President Tandja can pack it with cronies. And what might a national assembly packed with Tandja's supporters do? Approving unlimited terms for their man would be a good one to start with.

Does the the rest of the world care enough to impose sanctions? Not really, and this is the menace.

Africa's wealth of natural resources leads to an inevitable hypocrisy among countries with the wealth to tap them.

Take Guinea, for example. Here is a bauxite-rich country in West Africa where soldiers of the military government led by Captain Moussa Dadis Camara killed more than 150 opposition demonstrators on September 28. ­­

Last week Ecowas, the sometimes ineffectual Economic Community of West African States, met in Nigerian capital Abuja and imposed an arms embargo on Guinea as a result of the killings.

The problem is that Guinea already has plenty of weapons. When your enemy is unarmed civilians, you don't need sophisticated military hardware. AK-47s and men willing to use them is enough. And does anyone really think Guinea buys weapons from West Africa? Go north a bit and think Ukraine.

And to prove that Guinea is in good shape, the China International Fund, a private vehicle, is planning an eye-watering $7bn investment - almost the country's entire GDP - for infrastructure, mining and oil.
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A leader in The Observer today asks whether China will earn more respect in Africa than the west did during centuries of trade, subjugation and exploitation. (What it doesn't touch on is why Africa is unable to capitalise on its own natural resources. That is a big subject, requiring courage to write, and is for another day.)

The Economist says the Chinese investment "mocks human rights in Africa".

But what will be said about Niger, where an absence of bloodspill has kept it largely off the western news agenda, but where opposition supporters started gathering today against Tandja's rule? Few reporters are based there and even western news rooms have trouble remembering whether it's part of Nigeria, the Niger Delta or somewhere else (it's somewhere else).

The Chinese know where it is.

In July, Reuters Africa reported that the country had struck a $5bn deal with Chinese state-owned oil company CNPC to produce oil and build a refinery. A planned multi-billion dollar pipeline across the Sahara is also due to pass through Niger.

So does France, which relies on Niger for energy security, and which could be a boost to Tandja's confidence. A meeting this summer between Nicolas Sarkozy and Tandja (pictured together above) resulted in French nuclear giant Areva building a $1.69bn uranium mine in northern Niger.

Alex Vines, head of the Africa programme at think-tank Chatham House told Reuters
in July that one-third of French nuclear power, which supplies nearly 90% of the country's electricity, comes from Niger's uranium. "(On) energy security, a different logic kicks in" he said.

For its part, France said in July that there was no mixed message, and that it was not satisfied with Tandja's referendum plans.

Despite last week throwing its weight behind Ecowas' arms sanctions in Guinea, France has remained silent so far on Niger.

And so has the western media. Maybe reporters are still consulting maps. Or maybe they are waiting for the "pavement jam", expat reporter speak for bloodshed.

Africa, Accra, Asbestos...Trafigura

My husband calls just minutes after the Trafigura news reaches me from a colleague in London. "There is asbestos outside the school," he says. "I've spoken to them, they're having it disposed of. Can you check, later?"

Of course I agree. "It" is corrugated roofing material, white, old and toxic. I went to look. It is under a tree in the sun, flaking and broken and in the path of an easterly wind that blows towards our house.

"Having it disposed of" assumes there might be some municipal authority that will come in suits and masks to take it away. But asbestos worry hasn't reached these parts. I can make this statement with a small degree of authority because of a conversation with caretaker Jonas about the ironing board earlier this week.

"I can do the ironing" says Jonas, a muscular Ghanaian. "You can't", says my husband, a muscular Brit, "it has an asbestos hotplate". As much as I enjoy this homoerotic housewife chat, there is an important subtext. Jonas is a clever man but he has no idea about asbestosis. And nor do I, much, but that's because I've never had to deal with a potential cause. The locals don't because no one has told them, and they waft past the roofing in long skirts, sweeping up fibres into the sultry haze and moving about their business.

I check with the school later about the disposal. "It's all in hand" says the secretary, who dismisses me but shows no plans to follow it up. We walk home on the opposite side of the road, Magnus breathing through cupped hands.

An expert on the Trafigura tale says the level of toxic waste dumped in neighbouring Ivory Coast was enough to "bring a major city to its feet". A major city might have warned its people not to go outside and breathe the fumes that caused miscarriages and deaths, to work from home, to stop the transport system. I don't think that happened in Abidjan.

Do Africans care about rubbish dumps? I don't know. I queried Google. It said "Did you mean: do Americans care about rubbish dumps?"

On a day when Trafigura is top news, I didn't expect that. There's not much more I can say.

After one week, this much I know...

Writing a blog about a subject as emotive as Africa is hard. At some point I shall write about turmoil or the lack thereof, music and dancing and joie de vivre, but I am underqualified to do it yet. I've been cosseted in a luxury hotel with wifi and three pools and now a beautiful house with a caretaker, aircon and the world's biggest bed (photo to come). I haven't been to Sodom and Gommorrah, the slums housing 55,000, which the authorities plan to destroy. I haven't seen the local effects of HIV or the sadness of poverty I haven't been to the part of the beach the locals use as a toilet, nor inside single rooms housing neighbours' entire families. When I do, I'll have a rounder picture.

Other visitors warn me not to go near the scruffy town beach, but I do. They say the hawkers make it unpleasant. I have found it to be anything but. They exist, but you can exhaust their persistance in seconds by talking of English football. I take Magnus (aged 6) for back-up. I know all of the clubs but none of the players. So Magnus, a gentleman, takes over converstion while I look at the sea and examine opportunities for fishing.

I am lost when local children who play in the garden (like Jacob, pictured) ask to come inside the house. Our (British) landlady says the tempation to steal is too great. We have reporting equipment here that could provide three years' wages a pop. We have bought a rope swing and paddling pool in the hope it will not be an issue, but I know in time they will come inside and watch TV, and I won't want to give them back.

The beautiful photographs that are an inevitable consequence of this stunning colourful land will be impossible to post to this blog as an inevitable consequence of the stunningly poor upload speeds. To maintain my marriage to the web, I have bought both a Vodafone broadband connection and mobile broadband from South Africa's MTN. I am single handedly propping up their share prices. The Vodafone service is unreliable, affected by something as basic as rain. My Blackberry is an expensive luxury I turn on only on work days.

The taxis are universally ancient, the doors falling off, suspension gone. When a driver left his seat to help me with bags, his car rolled off and he caught it through the window. Asking for seatbelts seems absurd, but we do it. The views are incredible.

I am scared to go fishing. It was one of the things I looked forward to most, but visiting the tackle section of the supermarket has dampened enthusiasm. Rod fishing hooks at home measure a couple of inches. None here measures fewer than 10. I can only imagine what they can catch.

Lifeguards are unqualified. Some parents even more so. At a local hotel, as staff packed up at 5pm, they found the body of a child at the bottom of the pool. It took them three hours to find the parents. I am taking my boy to the pool for eight solid hours at weekends to make him a stronger swimmer. I have taken him out too deep and watched him cry for help and never want to go there again.

Nights that start at 6 when the sun goes quickly still feel like winter. Even in the tropics with the aircon off. But you sleep soundly knowing the sun will stream through the shutters in the morning, and that the cockerel will bang on for six hours solid.

Six months, five free days a week, three fishing rods, one broken knee, one six-year-old boy, twice London prices in Accra's overinflated rental market, pink chickens in the marketplace, gold in the ground, oil in the seabed, three generations of university education, an African democracy.