My weekend in Kumasi...

I wrote a lot about my weekend in Kumasi in my journal, so for this blog entry I will just type up some inserts from my time. It was definitely a good and rewarding weekend...

We left campus Friday morning, very much on time(which is remarkable) packed like sardines in a van too small to hold us all. Auntie Theresa, our program head, promised to get another van and come with the last few people shortly... As it was, I was in the first van sharing with my bag the very little room sitting on a wheel seat afforded. We tried to sleep on the drive, tried because the roads are so bumpy(in addition to questionable road quality, there is a remarkable number of speed bumps).
It was getting late in the afternoon when we finally reached KUmasi, home acocrding to my guidebook to 1 million people and to the Ashanti kingdom. In many ways it resembles Accra except for perhaps not so toxic. First we went to teh Ashanti palace museum which although perhaps not the most exciting guided tour was interesting on that prior to it, I knew very little about the kingdom. The current king I believe is the seventeenth, and the crown is passed down through the maternal line; moreover, a queen mother(not inherently the mother of the king; sometimes instead being grandmother, sister, aunt, niece of the king...). The current queen mother is over a hundred years old.
The Ashanti fought several wars with the British during the early years of colonialism, refusing to be humiliated. One such campaign was led by the queen mother when the king was imprisoned at Elmina castle. Incidentally, Mavis, a girl at Peace and Love orphanage, told me that story the other day, at least of sorts... She told me how the white men came, took all the gold and killed the people and then they came and took the children and killed the people but then a girl(she was actually quite old at the time and queen mother) took and hid the ceremonial gold stool and led a resitence which saw Kumasi besieged and eventually the palace sacked. I had not been sure what to believe about what Mavis tole me(some of her other tales of her own personal narrative I suspected being as much projected hope as reality). At her telling, of how the white men came and killed, I could not help being self-conscious of my skin...
At one point, the AShanti ruled almost all of present day Ghana spilling into Togo and Cote D'Ivoire. ONe line that stuck out was 'the Ashanti are a peace-loving people, so they are always ready to go to war'... Not exactly the best mode of peacemaking in my view. Still, overall the museum gave a good sense of what it means to be Ashanti, and as the Ashanti tend to be proud of who they are, that is a good thing to know. And that was only Friday...

We stayed at a guest house at the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology which was very nice, especially because we had our first hot showers in a month... perhaps we got more excitement out of that then is quite rational...

Saturday was a very full day as well as we went to three different craft villages(a kente cloth one, a cloth dying one and a wood carving one) where we got to see how things were made and were encouraged to spend our money. This weekend definitely had a shopping component too it, and especially in the villages one had the sense that the villagers viewed as rather like walking pocket books, and vendors here can be ruthless. My favorite line was ' and after we negotiate the price we can talk about marriage'. I shot that guy down a little, pulling in my imaginary fiance as leverage... he is very convenient to keep around... It was interesting to note at the villages though it was the men who did the most skilled artisan work. There are definitely gender rolls here, like only men can be fishermen.
We got to go to the market in Kumasi(the name is elluding me and I don't know how to spell it) which is supposed to be the biggest in Ghana and perhaps in West Africa. It was definitely big... At markets I feel much less like a walking pocket book and generally just in the way... Some people hiss to get your attention, but mostly because we are Oburuni's...
Inevitably on our whole program weekend trips a bus full of Oburinis even driving attracts a lot of attention, especially with the children who greet the sight of us with excitement; waving, chasing the bus even , and loud and happy shouts of Oburuni, Oburuni. We stopped at the market again briefly Sunday morning and got thoroughly lost with one of our Ghanaian student guides; we had absolutely no idea how to get back to the van...

I apologize for how long and rather unedited this blog entry is, but the internet is really slow today and I am almost out of paid time... Look for my next blog entry which is all about today's educational adventures where I feel like I learned as much in four hours about Ghana as I did over the last four weeks, but like I said, I am running out of time and my typing fingers are getting cramped...