Wednesday 5th August 2009

Today's excursion - to visit the house of a Jew who came over to Ghana … er … a long time ago - was generally agreed to not be as interesting as some of our excursions. Cochran married a Ghanaian woman and as his fifth generation descendants told us, he was eventually buried in the house we visited (not wanting to be buried in a Christian cemetery.) The Caribbeans among us are familiar with such stories and the lighter-skinned progeny of such pairings.

Although Professor Mensah did not yet have the fancy museum-style documents that laid out the geneology of the family, the interviews had already been done with family members. What struck me was the traditional oral way the elders of the family laid out their history and key events - typical of this region that was (is?) judged by Europeans to have no history that could be formally recognised.

We then had a shopping trip. The funniest thing about this was a Ghanaian colleague who remarked: "Some of these people just want to buy the WHOLE of Ghana!" Carvings, drums, marakash, art, bottle openers, coasters, shorts, T-shirts, material, walking sticks, earrings, keyrings, shea butter - all were available and bought by the shed load. Most of the stuff, to Ghanaian's credit, was beautifully made and there was not a 'made in China' sticker on anything! The most interesting thing I bought? Some delicious fried fish from a street hawker!

D