Navigating Accra by Plantains, Maize, and Other Unlikely Urban Features
I would venture to say that the city I know best is not Rome, Pompeii, Eleusis, Corinth, or Istanbul, all of whose histories, mythological antecedents, and archaeological records I have taken care to learn well. Nor is it San Francisco, Providence, Boston, or New York, cities in which I have lived for respectable periods of time and can navigate without difficulty. Somewhat paradoxically, I have never scrutinized this city on a map and know very little about its urban history. Rather, its topography has been etched deeply into my memory as a vivid set of synesthetic data.
Between my junior and senior years of college I spent three months living in Accra, the capital city of Ghana, where I worked as a volunteer at a local non-profit organization. Although I had taken a number of courses on general topics in West African history, literature, and so forth before deciding to pursue this opportunity, I engaged in few practical preparations for my trip. Relying upon the advice of contacts in respect to my housing arrangements and transportation from the airport, I made no independent efforts to figure out how to operate once I actually arrived. Even my volunteering plans were tenuous until I received notification two days before my departure that the organization had just hired someone under whom I would be able to work.
Perhaps needless to say, my first few days in Accra are a bit of a blur. Somehow I had failed to appreciate the implications of traveling to Ghana alone for three months without much of a plan when I decided that I wanted to spend a summer in Africa. After a adjusting to this idea, I began to venture out more confidently into the city.
To this day I am hopelessly disoriented by Accra’s urban lay out – a mass of borough-like divisions whose limits are not clearly defined and whose orientation within the larger city scheme remains a mystery to me. My volunteer position brought me to neighborhoods rarely if ever frequented by tourists and these regular routes were codified by the visual cues of a strip of grass, an unusual domestic façade, or familiar faces observing me with great curiosity. In order to get to the pedestrian portion of my commute I would first have to wait at an unmarked and ever-relocating spot on a dirt road near my dorm until one of several restored VW vans approached, broadcasting the name of my destination by means of a shouting young man hanging out of the sliding door. After arriving at a part of the city where, I would argue, the best maize and salted coconut were available for purchase, I then walked up a winding path toward a small market where taxis are known to congregate. With any luck I could convince one of the drivers to take me the remaining distance, although this often took some time as we waited for additional passengers. In spite of not having consciously thought about these routes and places in several years, their characteristics return easily.
Over the three months I spent in Accra, I memorized aspects of its urban layout using visual acuity I had never experienced while living or traveling anywhere else. Without the aid of street signs, systematic transportation, or navigational devices, I was forced to form my own associations with features that would otherwise blend into the landscape – a tree standing in isolation, a shady stretch of the road, slight swells in the road that preceded the best stop for accessing a dirt path leading to a friend’s housing development. While I also became acquainted with the city’s more bustling urban center, these random associations are far more salient for their intimacy.
Although I’m not certain whether the lens of sacred space is useful for thinking about my relationship to Accra, my movements throughout the city were highly coordinated and demanded close attention to detail, self-conscious cultural conditioning, and a visceral connection to my surroundings without which I would have been doomed. Long after I have forgotten the names of the suburbs I frequented daily, these features of the landscape and their associated figures are still so poignant that I am confident I could once again find my way back from any place in the city I ever had occasion to observe.
Posted at Apr 15/2008 11:06AM:
claudia: Heidi, i really like your description of the internalization of the landscape. Through ritual and repetition, pieces and sections of the city actually seem to become a part of you. In your example, landscape (ritual landscape?) not only creates your experience but also serves to organize it in a way.
Posted at Apr 15/2008 02:37PM:
Elisa: I also really liked the way you needed to create your own system of signification to navigate through this city. We seem to take for granted that our experiences are often tempered by imposed paths on the landscape, even when we try to personalize them. Perhaps this is why you feel as though you know Accra so well - its landscape is an active subject in your experience in ways that I do not believe I have ever had a chance to do.
Posted at Apr 15/2008 03:42PM:
keffie: What strikes me about your relationship to this place is the way in which it continues to exist for you as a memory (or memories). You bring up visual, kinesthetic, olofactory senses that work to engage your memory of this particular place.
Posted at Apr 21/2008 11:02PM:
Carissa: Heidi, I was so glad that you chose to write about your experience in Accra, my best friend is from Ghana, it is nice to hear someone else's perspective of the city. Your exercise made me realize that a sacred city does not have to be Jerusalem, but it is again made sacred through individual interaction. It also made me think that you do not need a level of familiarity with a city to consider it to be sacred. Here, you have demonstrated this, where through exploration the city developed a sacral quality. It is apparent that you have placed your own mark on this landscape.
