PicoBlog

As I sat on a veranda in Kasoa, a town playing hard-to-get just outside the clutches of Accra, I closed my eyes and listened to the intermittent rattling of brave cars navigating the treacherously pot-holed road outside. The road is called Knife Street and my mind sets to work imagining how a knife could have sliced these deep trenches in the road, waiting to swallow up the tasty tyres of a Toyota Corolla or whatever the meal of the day happens to be. And I chuckled to myself.

These side-roads lie perpendicular to, and a few inches below, the tarmac of the main road that cuts sharply through the neighbourhoods west of Accra. The gentle drop down from the road to the dirt track swiftly became associated with a feeling of nearly reaching a destination. I could imagine the comforting sensation that must have filled my hosts’ chests when, after forty minutes of jostling, sweaty traffic streaming from the city, the car swings left and dips into its old tyre prints. 

Later on, I was pleased to find out that my imagination, though apt to get carried away and assume where it doesn’t know, had been dancing around the truth like the last whirlpool of water draining down the sink. Spotted on my favourite perch on the veranda, my host accosted me, just seconds after an unfortunate motorist outside crunched the underbelly of their vehicle on an unyielding ridge. My host didn’t wince, he smiled with a broad grin:

“It is not like this in the UK, eh?”

Being but one day into my stay I was at pains not to give the impression that I was here scrutinising the differing merits of the road surfaces in Ghana and in the UK. So I matched the smile and simply responded:

“They’re different!”

My host settled down in his seat opposite me and I thought he leaned forward conspiratorially. He had my full attention.

“When I first drove a 4x4 in England, I was underwhelmed. They put me on a gravel track and told me I was ‘off-road’. I wasn’t off-road.”

His elegant fingers danced as he sketched this scene in the air to me. Now his thumb pointed to the wall that shielded the veranda from the bumpy road outside.

“That is where you want to drive a 4x4.”

Some time passed, and then:

“You see, that road outside is untouched. Not like the main roads built by the government or by Chinese contractors. You can imagine that it has not changed since God put it there, since our ancestors used it.”

His laughter betrayed a sense of delight and pride in the road’s unique character, while also being checked by the knowledge that its idiosyncrasy came at the cost of convenience. I was buoyed by this assessment. In a few words he had cut to the core of what I had been mulling over in long, drawn-out, rambling thoughts: that the beauty and wide-eyed excitement of traversing Knife Street was its preservation of history and identity in juxtaposition to the new-builds and modern conveniences around it.

This is to say, it was a reminder that the more convenient our lives seem to become it does not follow that they have really been enriched or improved. Indeed, some conveniences may take us further away from nourishing feelings such as that of knowing that you’re almost home.

If you asked any Bolt driver doing the rounds in Kasoa mind, I’m sure they’d have a thing or two to say about that.

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