Sunday, October 21, 2007

Scalp confidence 1



Driving through southern Ghana, you will have time to study the roadside, because there will be cars, and vans and tro-tros (Ghanaian version of a taxi) all with engines running, all with exhaust streaming, all keeping you in one place for a long time. Many of the larger trucks will have Christian blessings painted across their backsides. But despite this goodness of spirit, you will be stuck, in the midst of too many cars on roads that are too skinny. And very often deadly.
Stay long in Ghana and you will learn that in some families, every other child has died in a car crash.
But never fear, because as it often does in this, the former colonial Gold Coast, the English language will delight you.
A billboard in the steamy air, a beautiful, smiling woman, advertising personal grooming products that promise "Scalp confidence."
And as you sit there with your caucasian head, waiting for the strand of cars to give way, and for every driver to move on to his home in Teshie, Nungua, or Accra, where a tv provides blue light in the wet air, and troupes of small boys, still in their pumpkin-colored school uniforms, scramble with a soccer ball in the dirt that's like powder, you will consider that scalp confidence is a good goal.
At least something good to start with. Having your head clean and solid and causing you no worries.
On another drive on another day, through a more rural place: a hand-lettered sign in chalk: "fresh cat meat and palm wine."
It may occur to you at this point that you are very far from home, where entrées run more towards "Bronco burgers," named for the local college football team, chef salads, and where "exotic" means adding malt syrup to your chocolate shake.



In the same little town on the way to Kumasi, where "Mr. Murphy's Artistic Hair Theatre" offers barbering and, one would guess, access to scalp confidence, brown, round-bellied goats run beside the road.
They resemble moving bagpipes with legs.



Old women walk along, selling rectangular loaves of bread. The words "love" and "hope," written in batter, are baked into the tops of the loaves.
In another neighborhood, a tall green cactus grows into the road. Someone has carved "love," and names, into its flesh.
In Ghana, you are blessed by commerce, by traffic jams, by bread, by cacti.


(All photographs, except for "love cactus," by Lillian Sizemore)

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