“Kristi, you need to come to the riverside right now. Hurry.”
“What? Why?”
“There’s something I want you to see. There’s a…a…a fowl in the water. Come and see. Hurry!”
“Okay okay, I’m coming.”
This was the early morning call I got from Kwesi soon after a phone conversation I had with the Peace Corps doctor about my mind numbingly painful sore throat, which turned out to be strep. Luckily, my energy wasn’t suffering any ill affects, so I made my way to the river, because Kwesi never calls me with a cryptic message like that telling me to be somewhere without coming to get me himself. So I shuffle my still sleepy self through a deserted Damanko on a Sunday morning toward the river. It seems half of Damanko was lined up along the riverside, at the water-fetching area that was functionally created by the last rainy season’s flooding. Even during the busiest water fetching times there’s not even half that many people standing at the riverbank.
The spectacle was a hippopotamus. (“Kwesi, you know fowl means ‘bird’ right?”) Silly me and my American-ness and my embedded NPS identity had me wondering if they were gazing at a live one, perhaps foraging in the river. I had memories surfacing of visitors encroaching unwisely into the personal spaces of bears. I envisioned a similar scenario here since Ghanaians don’t know how to keep a safe distance from ANYthing. Then I remembered where I am and, of course, the magnificent animal was already dead. Hippos live in many large rivers and lakes in Ghana, especially in the national parks, and there is even a sanctuary in the Upper West. But I don’t think anyone in Damanko, even the elders, remember ever having witnessed one, though there are tales and traditional beliefs surrounding them. The places my Ghana guidebook says hippos can be found are a long way from here, though the River Oti runs right into Lake Volta.
So Kwesi insisted I remove my sandals, and I rolled up my pants and waded into the shallow water. I let Kwesi elbow his way through the crowd surrounding it and I got my first glimpse of a dead hippopotamus. She was a magnificent beast, pale gray and pink in color, her elegant eye rolled into the back of her head, her lips surrounding her massive snout peeled back slightly to allow small glimpses of her massive gray and dirty tusks. Her head was as big as my torso, her body massive, her feet as small as my hands. Mob mentality was rapidly setting in so there is not much opportunity for contemplation and reverence, but I was able to snap a few pictures (and everyone is extremely happy to let the White Lady do so) and I got out of there quick. After a lot of gawking, the men assuming responsibility of it towed her back out into deeper water with ropes and anchored her there and covered her with bush branches. Everyone either dispersed or hung around.
Later the chief will come and see it, and the appropriate traditional belief leader will perform a ritual, then the hunters will do what they will. Hippos mean lots of money, because they mean lots of meat, and how many people get to say they’ve eaten hippo meat? Hippos are very dangerous animals—they kill more humans in Africa than any other mammal. If there is one or two hanging around in the River Oti, how many fisherman or women and children fetching water would be in danger? They also graze on rice and okro crops. Konkomba lore says these animals have a bad spirit, that when gazed upon by pregnant women, a child will be born with a deformity of the mouth (“looking like” a hippo—I’m guessing maybe a cleft palette?). The ritual performed by the elder takes away that bad spirit and makes it safe. This is yet another brush with African juju that I have yet to untangle—of course anthropologists dedicate whole careers trying to understand such beliefs.
After this I went back to the house, because I needed water for my throat and I needed to rest and cool down lest my fever return. I went back in the early afternoon, and the crowd of people had doubled. The proper rites had all been performed and the small group of men were trying to figure out how to move it. This posed a problem. She was easy to maneuver in the water like a boat, but even a hundred men pulling on a rope couldn’t budge the great beast.
Chaos was mounting. More people were coming wanting to get a glimpse, of this thing they had only heard of or seen in pictures. In Ghana, when an order has not been established by tradition, or something has to be done or grabbed on the fly, its every man, woman, and child for themselves. This means you have to fight for what you want when you are in a crowd, because chances are, there’s not enough for everyone—special foods, seats on a certain bus, space in the obroni’s pictures, a space from which to see something (like a football game or a hippo). Personal space looses all meaning. Crowds begin encroaching to close to breathe. When this happens, the cultural answer is a stick. Everyone is afraid of a stick—they’ve all had one used on them throughout every part of their lives. Even 2 year old Blossom has started practicing his stick swing for self defense. So when the crowd gets too close—steps over the foul line of the soccer pitch, say—some appointed adult takes a thin, flexible stick and starts whacking a shins and feet. This is usually enough to send people flying. The crowd moves surprisingly quick. Pretty soon I could see the bush branches over the crowd’s heads disappearing as it desperately tried to keep the crowd back. Because the water covered shins and ankles the branches grabbed the silty mud and was slung at the crowd repeatedly. Having already seen the hippo that morning, I was perfectly happy to observe from the bank.
Eventually, defeated by simple ways of moving her, a tractor arrived. They somehow hooked the great hippo to a chain and drug her onto the riverbank a ways. The crowd, and the branches, moved along with her. Kwesi was determined how to get me through the crowd again to take more pictures. Before I could argue, he barged through in typical Ghanaian fashion. Then we were again at the edge of the crowd where about six men with branches were trying in vain to keep the crowd back. Several people around me tried to get me to pose with it, or get closer, but I didn’t want to get smacked. “They won’t hit you” they said, which really I knew to be true (at least intentionally), but how do I explain to them the guilt of taking advantage, big or small, of any white privilege the give me? It may seem insignificant, but anyone else who approached it would get hit, but I wouldn’t, intentionally, because I am white. These small instances occur sometimes and hard to explain the complicated web of feeling around equal treatment, hospitality and friendliness, and skin color. So I let Kwesi lead me around to the head, quickly took a few pictures and got out of there.
All in all, as I watched the whole episode today, it got me thinking about a theme that was often present in grad school—that of culture and environment—and our expectations of its intersections. After a history of white Europeans dismissing the environmental knowledge (e.g. balance, natural medicines, cultivation, etc) and the destruction of much of that knowledge, in many ways, we have made a complete 180 in our perceptions. Instead of demonizing (patronizing?) them, we now romanticize them. Anthropologists are probably guiltier of this than most. Romanticism is the genesis of our profession. Thing about Native Americans, how persecuted they were (in many ways still are), but now how romanticized they are in the subject of nature and environment. Don’t we now expect these cultures to have great spiritual knowledge and wisdom about the Earth that somehow goes beyond science? How much of a trope is it to have a sweeping camera shot of a vast landscape in the Western U.S. with a voice over of an old Native American man reciting some ancient poem or proverb with drums and singing in the background? Part of the Green Movement chases this romantic ideal of harmony with nature and tries to recapture this idea that native cultures all over the world have a deeper understanding of the Earth that industrial nations lack/have abandoned/lost. As Kwesi and I were leaving, some women were discussing the breakdown of tradition—how in “the olden days” women and children were not allowed to set eyes on it until the bad spirit was exorcised. But now everyone runs to see it regardless. White missionaries overwhelmingly succeeded in the “dominion over the Earth” lesson, so now everyone’s response to our questions of bush hunting is “God put them here for us” without looking much further. How much traditional knowledge did that erase? Christianity, Islam, and juju get all mixed up around here. Why should I expect them to revere this awesome creature with ceremonies and celebrations and prayers of thanksgiving, or possibly worship that didn’t enlighten my cultural experience? I guess what I’m saying is that I’m sad that this event was not met with some great unique cultural grandeur, just jumbled chaos and curiosity, but then mad at myself too for expecting them to conform to my idea of how they should behave and regard nature based on my Western ideas of how non-Western people should act. Isn’t that just as prejudiced? I’m not saying that what they did was without reason or mistake—there’s definitely some education that could be done here—but it is obvious to me that this experience of contact with a big part of Mother Nature showed some fault lines in the structure of current society. This interaction between Mother Nature and no longer completely isolated African village manifested in the hippo shows the haphazard dance of community/village/country in development. Some new ideas get mixed in with old ones, and newer trends of thinking haven’t taken hold so loosely controlled chaos ensues.
No comments:
Post a Comment