The Anthropolgist in Me

Every once in awhile, that inner anthropologist in me rears its ugly head. This is one such time. You are warned.

First, I should explain that there is a lot of royalty in Ghana. Each village has its own royal family from which the chief is chosen. As a side note, children are members of their mother's family among the Akans, so you cannot be chief if your father is chief. You can only be made chief if your mother is a member of the royal family.

The Akans in the village of Obo traditionally bracketed their lives in burials. When a baby was born, their umbilical cord was cut and buried. For the average joe, they marked the place by planting something, or maybe with some stones. If the baby's from the royal family, the cord, along with some gold, is buried inside one of the houses owned by the royal family. After they died, bodies were buried designated cemataries with graves marked by plants or stones or wood for non-royals. Now, graveyards look much like American graveyards, with engraved tombstones.

But upon their death, members of the royal family are buried- again with a lot of gold- inside the house of their family; the living and the dead cohabit the same space. For example Mus's grandfather, who was chief of Obo, is buried under the stairs in the house currently occupied by Mus's great uncle and his auntie who believe that I'm an armed and psychotic carrier of exotic diseases.

Two things are readily apparent:
1.Royal families must have a lot of very large houses to host all the deceased.
2. Grave Robbing must be an extremely lucrative profession here.

Apparently, at one time gold was so common in Ghana that chiefs would just give it away or paint themselves with it without hardly a bat of an eyelash. Even while Mus's father was growing up, he was given bags of gold to spend. Chiefs owned the land, and the land was full of gold, so the chiefs thought that the gold would always be there for them and spent it without a thought for its value to their children and grandchildren. Now the government of Ghana has sold the rights to most of the gold in the country to foreign mining corporations; the chiefs have no access to the gold on their own lands as it's been sold to someone else, and the people see no profit from the fact that they live on land filled with gold.

I fear that, once the gold is gone, Ghanaians will find themselves with empty pockets and radioactive water supplies. It's already happened in South Africa; in certain areas, cattle have been deemed unfit for consumption because their water supply tested as radioactive.

And now Ghanaians are excited because oil has been found in the country. I fear the worst. Look what the discovery of oil has done to Nigeria- increased divide between the very rich and the very poor, increased corruption, increased crime (both violent and white collar). Not to mention the destruction and pollution of their land. The reality of it is that the politicians will get rich, and the people who live on the land with the oil, the farmers and fishermen whose livelihoods depend on that land, will be left without any means to make a living and little or no compensation.

That's just messed up, man.