Rhapsodies On ?Kindness? ? Verse 23
Was it Einstein or Edison who said that genius is 99% perspiration and 1% inspiration, or something to that effect? Well he couldn?t have been more correct. I have always thought that there is a relationship between underdevelopment and human excrement, but for years the connection has eluded me.. Given that all human beings, rich or poor, from developed or underdeveloped countries, perform this necessary human function made it even tougher to establish this connection.
Only last night, however, I had an epiphany when I read an article in the BBC news online about three Kenyans who had died in a public latrine, while trying to retrieve a cell phone that had fallen in when the female owner was doing her own thing. For a reward of 1000 Kenyan Shillings ? about $15 ? three men had died an ignominious death while a fourth had to be stopped from pursuing the same fate. Only then did the connection between underdevelopment and human excrement hit me.
It is quite a simple relationship. Underdeveloped countries just love human excrement. As my grandmother would say, ?ye de dware?, literally, ?we bathe in it?. Technology has made it possible in the industrialized countries to avoid seeing human faeces throughout a lifetime, if one so desires. You can do your thing into a water closet toilet, without looking into the bowl, flush the toilet, and off it goes through the sewers to the sewage treatment plant, where it is treated and the effluent released into streams, ready to be purified as drinking water.
It is a totally different story, however in underdeveloped countries like Ghana. There seems to be human excrement everywhere. Smelly public latrines, in the uncompleted houses that are all over Accra, on the beaches and in the slums. Our venerable Korle Bu hospital sits close to the biggest cesspool of all, the Korle Lagoon.
Take the bucket latrine for instance. In this day and age, this twenty-first century of unbelievable technological wonders, and still in Ghana, people are paid by the State to carry other people?s excrement in buckets, and on their heads. And if that weren?t disgraceful enough, there are actually some tribes who have specialized in this undertaking. I?m referring to the Kru from Liberia and the Kabre from Togo who have established quite a reputation for their dexterity in carrying human excrement. In Kabre it is rumored that a prospective bridegroom must present his broom, the major tool of excrement gathering, to his in-laws as part of the dowry to the bride.
Growing up in Koforidua, there was one excrement carrier who was in charge of the Srodai area.. We called him Mr. Pwe. He went about his work beyond the call of duty. Normally shit-carriers work only under cover of darkness but Mr. Pwe would be seen during broad daylight, sweeping, carrying and cradling, admonishing and wrestling with the stuff. The neighborhood children would follow him, at a respectful distance, singing,
?Who dey for top??
Mr. Pwi will willingly oblige us by responding, ?Accra man dey for top?.
?Who dey for bottom?, we would query again,
?Kruman dey for bottom!?
Then he would begin gyrating and farting along as the children broke into a jingle,
Obi ba , Obeta, Pwe -Pwe , Pwe-Pwe (Someone?s approaching, he is about to fart, Pwe-Pwe)
Sometimes the bottom of the bucket would be leaking, or the gyrations would cause the top to spill, and Mr. Pwe would be dripping with his odious load, but nary a complaint would he make. In the end, Mr. Pwe met his creator and destiny when he fell into the Regional Human Excrement Pit whilst directing the shit-truck as it backed up to dump Koforidua?s daily load. A fitting death for a remarkable man!
Cleanliness, they say, is next to godliness, so obviously in a society that has taken public toilets to unprecedented levels, where public bathing beaches are situated vicariously with defecating grounds, where whitewashed public pit latrines sit in splendor smack in the middle of residential neighborhoods, godliness is surely bound to be compromised. And when godliness is thus compromised, impious acts like corruption, patronage and crime are bound to plague the body politic.
It must be that when the winds blow off the Atlantic, and pick up the first smells from the beaches, mixes them up with that of the defecating grounds in Accra, and then purrs into the offices and houses of the ?powers that be?, the stench just warps their powers of reason, and leads them to think that the Ghanaian state is merely an instrument of personal material gain.
Ghanaian public toilets are definitely a fascinating sight. First of all, to find a spot that is clear of faeces is a challenge. But once you do find one and look around you, you would notice the walls all the way to the ceiling are smeared with excrement. I have never seized to wonder, how the stuff got all the way up there. Have you?
In Tudu, the public shit house used to near the old Farisco. At the entrance, just above the stairs that led to the inner sanctum, an attendant sat all day selling paper - mostly half-pages of foreign newspapers exported by Diaspora Ghanaians - to customers, all day long. Maybe in this ?Golden Age of Business? this morbid activity could be considered Private Sector Participation, driven by market forces.
Yet the corrupting influence of the stench of faeces is not limited to the ?big shots? alone. Commoners are affected too. In Sahara, where from time immemorial, a nightly theatre plays itself out, of throngs of residents lined up on the Odawna gutter, silhouetted like crows in the night sky while they squat and do their thing, many an armed robber has been apprehended. De Gaulle, and now Hope and Ziggy, have become household names of hardened criminals who have used Sahara, on the banks of the Odawna as their refuge.
On a personal note, I had quite a typical small town boy?s experiences with human excrement. I grew up in an area blessed with two public latrines, surrounded by the Trinity of the Catholic Church, the Department of Social Welfare and the Kings Palace. And presiding over all of these was the mighty rock, Obuatabiri. It is no wonder that there were low clouds always hanging on Obuotabiri, what with the combined stench from the latrines, religion, a moribund traditionalism and a shell of the welfare neo-colonialist state.
I was lucky to escape the stuff throughout boarding school from the age of 5 until in university I encountered a new system called ?layering?. As a result of water and toilet roll shortages, students just did their thing in the WC and then put a layer of paper over it. And slowly as the stuff piled up, we screamed for Mr. Bayantokro, and Mr. Ayangban, those work-horse cleaners from the disadvantaged Northern regions, to come clean our mess up.
But absolutely nothing prepared me for teaching at Abusco. Lacking water and toilet roll, the school had commissioned an ?atonko?, a long pit latrine, that had a red curtain in the middle to separate teachers? performance from any visual interpretation by the students on the other side. I became quite unpopular because I refused to do my defecation with the teachers and did it instead with the students. One day, the excrement truck crushed near a tributary of the Birim, where the school got its water, emptying its load into the river.
For those who don?t like what I write, all I can say is, ?ashewo a ashewo a , koyi wo bin! (If it makes you mad, go carry your own excrement!)
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