Ghana Life: An American Bushman in Tamale

In a developing country like Ghana, there were many projects in the 1970s and 1980s funded by overseas development agencies. These invariably employed one or two expatriate experts who were intended to pass on their skills to local co-workers. Most of these American and European consultants were hard working and dedicated people who found a way to work harmoniously with their Ghanaian colleagues. A few, however, fell short of these standards, and some displayed ill manners that won them the appellation ‘bushman.’ This is how one young Ghanaian engineer, Kwame Mainu, met such an expatriate bushman for the first time.

As always in Tamale progress was slow, but Kwame managed to keep things moving forward for several weeks until the new manager arrived. The United States Agency for International Development (USAID) must have had great difficulty in finding a replacement for Frank Johnson because from the outset it was obvious that the new man was not of the same calibre. A white American in late middle age, Jim Connell was betrayed by his speech. Hardly able to form a grammatical sentence and using expletives for punctuation he seemed to see his mission as persuading the natives that there were also bushmen in America. Kwame was shocked. All the foreign advisers and volunteers he had previously met had impressed him with their good manners and correct speech. Now here was a representative of God’s Own Country who expressed in his demeanour all the frustration of an unemployed school drop-out.

Kwame found it difficult to work with Jim Connell from the outset. For one thing, he made it very clear that on his inadequate salary he intended to do as little as possible. He left most of the work in Kwame’s hands but was quick to criticise when anything went wrong. Jim possessed few of the practical skills that Frank had brought to the work and refused to improvise when the correct tool or material was unavailable. His manner soon exhausted the fund of goodwill built up by Frank at the Regional Administration, and official support was in danger of drying up. Kwame found himself constantly having to make excuses for his new oboroni boss. The workers, who would have walked across the Volta Lake for Frank, began acting as though they would like to throw Jim into it.

One thing that particularly upset Kwame was Jim’s attitude towards women, especially those working on the project or numbered amongst its clients. Young and attractive women were often described in crude language as exhibiting provocative behaviour inviting instant rape, which Jim would have administered personally but for his advanced age and marital status. Kwame was warned that if younger male Peace Corps volunteers were assigned to the project they would surely execute this sentence. Yet in Kwame’s experience the Peace Corps volunteers that he had worked with would not have behaved any differently from himself. They might have taken a girlfriend but rapists they most certainly were not. He could only ascribe Jim’s remarks to some form of sexual frustration. He was glad that his wife Comfort and daughter Akosua had returned to Konongo and were not exposed to the foul language and crude innuendos.

The episode with Jim had given Kwame much food for thought. He had never met Jim’s sort before, even in England where he had met many abrofo. Most of the Europeans and Americans he had come to know had been friendly and hard working people. Some were reserved and seemingly cold at first but all had responded eventually to his wide white grin. They demonstrated in their approach to work, to a greater or lesser degree, what his father had sometimes referred to as a ‘sense of vocation’ and at other times as the ‘Protestant work ethic.’ They put their work first and seemed to pay little attention to material reward. Frank Johnson, for example, had paid from his own pocket to keep the work moving forward. Jim Connell was the first oboroni colleague that Kwame had ever heard broadcasting complaints about his salary and terms of employment.

Until getting to know Jim, Kwame had held the largely unquestioned view that, with the notable exception of his father, all Ghanaians were materialistic. He regarded this as a symptom of their poverty. The matter of money, how to get it and the cost of desired objects, seemed to dominate most conversations. On the other hand, abrofo seldom mentioned money and Kwame attributed this to their relative affluence. In Jim, however, Kwame had met a relatively rich man who was obsessed with getting richer and did only as much work as he could not avoid.

Kwame’s stereotypes were challenged. If some abrofo behaved like Jim, how was it that he had not met such people in Coventry? Robert Earl, Fred Brown and even Mrs Chichester had not behaved in this way. Kwame remembered overhearing some of the foundry workers discussing their pay and complaining about income tax but they had changed the topic as soon as he approached. He also recalled reading in the Guardian newspaper that England was becoming increasingly materialistic under the rule of Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. So there must be some materialistic abrofo, he concluded, and materialism is not only caused by poverty. He filed this new-found insight for future reference and review.

Akwesi Berko
To learn more about the intriguing story of the grassroots industrial revolution in the turbulent Ghana of the second half of the twentieth century, read John Powell’s novel The Colonial Gentleman’s Son or his non-fictional account The Survival of the Fitter. More details of these books and photographs of the informal sector artisans of Suame Magazine in Kumasi will be found on the following websites.
http://www.ghanabooksjwp.com/
http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_ss_i_0_28?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=the+colonial+gentleman%27s+son&sprefix=the+colonial+gentleman%27s+son

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