Greetings from Ghana: An Englishman's Adventures from the City of Accra

By M. J. Poynter

Greetings from Ghana is a comical tale set in the city of Accra in 2002. Inspired by real life events this autobiographical novel is an action packed adventure of endless mishaps and mayhem. The story begins in the English countryside from where M. J. Poynter takes the reader on a rip-roaring journey into Ghana and through the bustling streets of Accra. Set in a tropical paradise under the blazing heat of the African sun, the author travels around the affluent suburbs, along the highways and into the citys red-light districts. Here he meets an array of colourful characters who add to the storys sense of mystery and intrigue. The authors use of vivid description captures the vibrancy of African life and depicts the trials and tribulations which many of its people face. Told through a series of amusing anecdotes, Greetings from Ghana is an inventive tale which brings the city of Accra to life!

• Language: English
• Publisher: AuthorHouse UK
• Release date: Jul 8, 2008
• ISBN: 9781467886192

M. J. Poynter

M. J. Poynter is an English writer who grew up in apartheid South Africa during the 1980s. He lived in the small coal mining town of Witbank situated a hundred miles east of Johannesburg in what was once called the old Transvaal. From 1976-1988 M. J. Poynter completed his primary and secondary school education during what he often refers to as the thirteen wasted years. In 1989 he moved down to Durban where he completed a three year National Diploma in Theatre Technology at the Natal Technikon. At the beginning of 1992 his family decided to return to the UK where they currently reside in the county of Lincolnshire.

Book preview

GREETINGS

FROM GHANA

An Englishman’s Adventures

from the City of Accra

By

M. J. POYNTER

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© 2009 M. J. Poynter. All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author.

First published by AuthorHouse 9/30/2009

ISBN: 978-1-4343-8271-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-4678-8619-2 (ebk)

Printed in the United States of America

Bloomington, Indiana

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Contents

ONE

TWO

THREE

FOUR

FIVE

SIX

SEVEN

EIGHT

NINE

TEN

ELEVEN

TWELVE

THIRTEEN

FOURTEEN

This story is based upon a series of events which took place in the city of Accra in 2002. The names of characters and institutions are purely fictitious but the names of streets and locations are accurate in order to create an authentic sense of time and place. While an element of fantasy has been used in creating this story, all of my observations of everyday life are entirely real.

M. J. Poynter

ONE 

Finding a Job

I had completed a Masters degree in July of 2000 and for the past eighteen months I had been successfully unemployed! I had completed dozens of application forms and sat through numerous selection tests, but so far, these had proved to be a complete and utter waste of time. On a few occasions I was invited to attend an interview, but on these few occasions I usually found myself sitting in front of an overly aggressive personnel officer who took great delight in asking me a succession of stupid questions which had absolutely nothing to do with the job for which I had applied. As the weeks turned into months I became more and more despondent and found myself falling into an ever greater depth of despair. It was in such a state of despondency that I found myself looking through the pages of The Guardian newspaper. As usual there was nothing that offered me any hope of ending my predicament of continuing misery so I turned towards the back of the paper and noticed a section called Overseas Vacancies. At first there was nothing of interest but then I noticed a little advertisement near the bottom of the page. I quickly read through the advert and discovered that it was a vacancy for an Associate Director of Learning and Resource Development. I had absolutely no idea as to what that meant so I read through the job description again. Motivated individual needed to develop educational resources for learning and development. The applicant should have excellent communication skills and be able to work on their own initiative. Send a covering letter and CV to Mr Robert Benson, P.O. Box 263, Cantonments, Accra, Ghana. I paused for a moment and read through the vacancy once again, it sounded interesting and mysterious and I felt a great sense of hope at the prospect of applying. I sat for a few moments contemplating my next move when suddenly a question entered my head and slapped me straight between the eyes. The mailing address for this vacancy was in some strange place called…Accra. What kind of a city has an obscure sounding name like A-c-c-r-a, and perhaps more importantly, where the hell is Ghana?

I walked over to the bookshelf and picked up an old copy of the Hutchinson Encyclopedia which had been published some time back in the 1970’s. I turned to the middle of the book which contained a twenty page atlas of the world. I sifted through the pages of the atlas and found a detailed map of South America. I looked carefully at the map trying to locate Ghana but instead I found a place called Guyana situated between Brazil and Venezuela. I remembered seeing a film about Guyana when I was twelve years old called The Story of Jim Jones (1980). At the time I knew absolutely nothing about the life of Rev. Jim Jones but the film certainly left a lasting impression. Jim Jones was a charismatic leader who tried to address the social concerns of the poor, he created the People’s Temple and attempted to build a wholesome community free from the decadence of modern day life. In 1978 Jones moved the People’s Temple into the jungle of Guyana and created an agricultural cooperative which was aptly named Jonestown. Here Jones attempted to create an agrarian utopia of spiritual bliss but instead he created a labour camp from hell! Nearly a thousand of Jones’s followers found themselves reduced to peasants forced to work long tiring shifts in an authoritarian commune whereby all activities were devoted to the practice of subsistence farming and preserving the ideals of the Temple. As the months passed Jones became ever more paranoid and suspected that outside forces were plotting against him and his community. Becoming increasingly detached from his followers and unable to hide his addiction to prescription drugs, Jones proclaimed himself to be the reincarnation of Christ and adopted the status of a god who commanded absolute obedience from his subjects. Before long he had slipped into the role of a paranoid dictator who routinely ordered his supporters to practice suicide drills as a last resort of preserving the community against an invasion from outside. The final moment of reckoning came when US representative Leo Ryan arrived with a number of reporters in order to conduct a tour of Jonestown. They had heard some disturbing allegations of human rights abuses and had come to investigate. When Ryan and his delegation tried to leave, along with several members of the People’s Temple who wanted to defect, they were ambushed at the airstrip by Jones’s henchmen. The ambush resulted in the death of Leo Ryan, three other members of the delegation and one member of the People’s Temple. Fearing that the consequences of this misadventure would result in a US retaliation and the destruction of Jonestown, Jones ordered his followers to embark upon a final act of revolutionary death. Acting on his fatal instructions some 913 people poisoned themselves by drinking a lethal cocktail of fruit punch laced with cyanide. But not all of Jones’s followers were willing to participate in this macabre ritual of mass suicide! It is believed that some of his members resisted and were either shot or forcefully injected with lethal dosages of cyanide. Jones was later found dead sitting in a deckchair with a bullet hole in his head surrounded by piles of dead bodies all rotting in the sun. With the exception of this little piece of macabre information I knew absolutely nothing about Guyana, and fortunately, as this was not the country that I was looking for, I turned over the page and continued my search for Ghana.

I found a large map of Africa which looked promising. I looked directly at the map of Africa and located Chad and the Sudan. Then I looked back and noticed Nigeria. There were a small cluster of other countries just to the left of Nigeria, so I scanned across the page and that’s when I spotted Ghana situated in between Togo and the Ivory Coast. I looked carefully at this rectangular country and noticed that the city of Accra appeared to be on the coast. Then I looked at some of the surrounding countries and saw that Sierra Leone and Liberia were situated in the same neighbourhood. This was a slightly unnerving discovery! There had been a number of reports on the news about gross human rights atrocities committed by rebel forces in Sierra Leone. I had heard about a notorious rebel leader called Foday Sankoh whose Revolutionary United Front had waged a ten year campaign of terror against the civilian population. Sankoh ordered his band of guerrilla forces to cut off the arms and legs of small children as a means of controlling the civilian population through fear and intimidation. There were numerous reports on the BBC depicting the harrowing images of little children with severed limbs. These were the victims who bore the gruesome testament of the rebel’s campaign and provoked the British government into taking military action. In May of 2000 a force of some 800 British paratroopers were finally sent to liberate Freetown from the madness and carnage of civil war. The neighbouring country of Liberia, which had sponsored the war in Sierra Leone, had also become embroiled in a civil war of its own. From time to time the country’s president, and former rebel leader, Charles Taylor made the news headlines with provocative comments which bordered somewhere between the insane and the bizarre. The only other country which I instantly recognized was Nigeria. For years Nigeria has been a lawless state embroiled in the ruthless politics of oil and corruption. Yet another African state with an infamous reputation and in 1995 the BBC did not hesitate to criticize the Abacha regime for the execution of author Ken Saro-Wiwa along with eight of his compatriots. I looked back again towards Ghana and carefully considered the position of this small rectangular shaped country in relation to the other countries of West Africa. I quickly came to the conclusion that Ghana was not exactly situated in the safest part of the world but there again it was situated right next to the equator which meant that it would be hot and sunny there all year round. I looked out of the window and saw the grey dismal clouds that appeared to permanently hang over the skies of rural Lincolnshire. I looked across at the fens with their damp wet fields of Brussels sprouts and savoy cabbages which could be seen for miles in every direction. Then I looked down at the map of Ghana and decided to respond to the vacancy in the newspaper.

I sent off a covering letter and CV to Mr Robert Benson but initially I didn’t expect to even receive a reply! However, to my astonishment Mr Benson telephoned the following week and conducted an impromptu interview. I nervously answered all of his questions and he thanked me for my participation and said he would contact me again within a couple of days. Two days later I received another telephone call and Mr Benson unexpectedly offered me the position of Associate Director for Learning and Resource Development. At first I was shocked and didn’t know how to respond. There were so many things I needed to discuss with him before I could make such a big decision.

Wow, that certainly is an unexpected offer, I replied.

Don’t worry, laughed Mr Benson, I’ll send you a copy of the contract and all the details you’ll need to know about moving to Ghana.

Right…okay, I replied with a great sense of apprehension in my voice.

Once you’ve received the contract you can read through the details, continued Mr Benson. If you have any questions feel free to call me at anytime.

Right…okay, I replied again.

If you agree to the terms and conditions of the contract I’ll send you a plane ticket and you can fly out at the beginning of next month.

Right…okay, I replied yet again.

Mr Benson then thanked me for my interest in the vacancy and hoped to hear from me again very soon. I said goodbye, put down the phone and sat for a couple of minutes trying to collect my thoughts. All of these events were happening so fast that I needed to give myself time to think. By the end of the week I received a package of information from Ghana. The front of the envelope was covered with dozens of small brightly coloured stamps all depicting various types of birds and animals. I opened up the envelope and perused through the contract and the details of the job description. From the information provided I discovered that Mr Robert Benson was a very successful Nigerian businessman. He had been living in Ghana for several years and realized that there was a great deal of money to be made from education. In a country where many children are very poorly educated due to the lack of proper teaching resources, Mr Benson realized that there was a huge demand for good learning materials. While he recognized that the state could barely afford to pay teachers their basic salaries and couldn’t possibly find any money for better materials, he realized that foreign aid agencies would gladly supply the funds needed to develop better teaching resources and improve standards in education. As a businessman Mr Benson seized the opportunity to create an NGO (Non-Governmental Organization) which would specialize in the development of teaching resources for state schools. Working in close collaboration with the educational authorities Mr Benson had formed a working partnership with over thirty schools in the Greater Accra region. Mr Benson’s ambition was to create an organization that would develop a series of high quality teaching and learning aids which would be specially tailored to meet the needs of various schools. In order to accomplish this Mr Benson had founded an organization called Technology Helping Education For Tomorrow (THEFT). This was a non-profit making organization which would use a high-tech computer network equipped with all the latest software packages needed to produce a variety of high quality teaching and learning aids. THEFT had also acquired a number of high speed laser copiers and various other pieces of printing equipment needed for producing large quantities of published material. As the founder and president of THEFT, Mr Benson had successfully used his business contacts to raise several millions of dollars to start the project. In seeking more information I checked out the website and discovered that THEFT was a registered NGO with several other prominent Nigerian businessmen included on the Executive Board of Trustees. Reading through the job description I discovered that as the Associate Director of Learning and Resource Development I would be expected to liaise with various schools and develop a series of learning resources designed to address the specific learning needs of that school. Most of the work would involve putting together packages of worksheets and outlines for activities which teachers could then apply in the classroom. It all sounded very interesting and rewarding so the