When I lived here, a common question that would thread through conversations was one of how long. How long have you been here, and how long are you going to be here. I’d have these conversations with both expats and Ghanaians, and I loved being able to answer the first part in years and the second part in a shrug and a smile.
But there was always the feeling of inevitability in departure — I knew I would leave one day. What I didn’t realize was that when I did leave, I would leave a thread of me, a piece that would be picked up, a chip reinserted when I landed at Kotoka and took in my first breath of Accra air, that heat of the airport runway.
I also didn’t realize the fear that would linger with every departure from the city, one that would remain an unspoken heaviness until I had another visa in my passport and a plane ticket booked. That fear that I might not come back.
Accra, my home for a significant chunk of my adult life, is a terrible and wonderful place. It’s changing rapidly — this week I’ve taken Uber cars across the city when the cell phone data network is reliable enough to summon one. I drink lattes with friends in coffee shops, with a luxury I can’t really have every day in my rural hometown.
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But then, so much is staying the same. Development, in the capitalistic form as highlighted by hire cars and frothy drinks, is limited to a select part of the population. On my way to an overpriced hotel breakfast this morning we passed three women sleeping on the sidewalk at 8am, wrapped in mosquito netting. There are potholes in the roads that could swallow tires whole. There is the mind-numbing line of morning commuters squeezing through congested bottleneck intersections manned by police. There is the ever present fear of dumsor, better now but the question lingering of until when. Inflation, the cedi, salaries that, if they come, are far from a living wage. I’m not being political — I’m saying what I see and what I hear, today and in years past.
I drove myself batty trying to reconcile the plural states of this African city, which looks to me like so much of the future of the emerging world. Eventually I drove myself right out of the country. But never away. Reconciling will be a life’s work for me, and one that I will probably never accomplish. And that’s okay, because the only way I’ve ever been able to leave is knowing I will come back.