African assignment

As my wife and I were driven the few miles from the Accra airport in Ghana to the University campus, we felt the balmy evening wind from the Atlantic Ocean. We saw the Ghanaians walking with stately posture along the side of the road; the women, with babies bound to their backs, neatly balancing heavy loads on their heads. Some of them smiled broadly at us and waved friendly greetings. We saw the “Mammy Lorries” careening down the highway as though collisions were impossible. The accident rate is very high. Each lorry, with people packed tight as sardines, expressed the individuality of its owner by its strange printed sign (“It Pains You Why”, “Fear Woman”, “No Time To Die”, “Walk Alone No Friends”). We passed the cassava patches near a mud‐hut village and entered the campus of the modern University of Ghana just at dusk of the short tropical twilight. The avenue of mahogany trees and palms was a proper setting for the spacious, airy buildings of heavy, white concrete with red tile roofs. Our own home was located nearly in the middle of the campus about three fourths of a mile down this avenue. The old diamond mines of the Accra plains were near the campus. The rich gold fields of this former Gold Coast Colony, now largely commercially replaced by the cocoa groves, lay in the mountainous area to the north, an area inhabited by the Ashanti tribe whose aggressive forays fill many pages of African history. Our later week‐end trips into the interior were adequate proof to us that we were in a land of great contrasts.

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