When our publisher and executive editor Donald M. Suggs asked me to write a story about my visit to Ghana and Togo this month, I wasn’t sure what to say. Though I was a travel editor in New York before moving home to work with Dr. Suggs and can crank out travel editorial in my sleep, I don’t visit West Africa as a traveler. I visit as an in-law.
A good visiting in-law, in my view, does what he is offered or told to do, so I spend a lot of time in stuffy suburban living rooms and dusty village compounds, visiting with elders and paying respect for the deceased and ill. After ten years of regular visits I now have my own friends in Ghana and Togo outside of my wife’s family, but when I run off with them, we do utterly local everyday things like backyard barbecues and pool swims.
But on this most recent visit, it occurred to me, I did participate in two local celebrations. While both were private functions, they were large group celebrations that really had the flavors of Lome and Accra, the capital cities of Togo and Ghana.
In Lome we were invited to a large dinner party in a local restaurant to celebrate a young man’s successful defense of his Master’s thesis in finance. The restaurateur, Rosita, is one of my spouse’s oldest and closest friends, and her husband Guy (rhymes with “we”) is an immigrant from the Congo. Guy is friends with his home country’s president, and the young scholar we were celebrating is a nephew of Congo’s president. The dinner guests were the top elite of Congo, celebrating in fine style in Togo’s coastal capital, Lome, which has outlived its reputation as “the African Riviera” but still has an international, oceanic atmosphere.
Congo’s modern pop and rock music remains an international phenomenon in Africa, and Guy blasted soukous music off of CDs. Guy is a comedian among his friends, and he clowned to the soukous music and drew a few other people to clown around on the restaurant’s dance floor. But most of the guests from the Congo planned to change clothes and do more serious disco dancing in their hotels by the beach later that night. The dinner party was more about dining and wining.
Tilapia is the rage in Togo and Ghana these days, but our Congolese guests requested a delicious redfish from the Congo nicknamed El Capitan, which Rosita prepared in a light soup. They also requested a French sandwich that Americans know best through Vietnamese restaurants, where it is served as a Special Sandwich. It’s a medley of rich pork lunchmeats on a French bread roll with spicy mayo and fresh vegetables.
As for drink, the Congolese high-flyers moved to whiskey later in the night, but before and with dinner they poured Bordeaux. I happened to partner up with another of the Congo president’s nephews who was the family wine expert. Bombo has been cultivating an iron ore concession in South Africa so has been practicing his English, which is very good. In Togo people speak African languages and French, and I can’t understand a word of it. So I bonded with Bombo because he was speaking my languages – English words and French wine.
In Ghana we celebrated a milestone birthday for my wife. Her elder sister Mary Magdalene (M.M.) spared no extravagance. In her handsome suburban compound she staged a live highlife band, playing some of the most spirited, good-time music on the face of the Earth. Buoyant Band has a rock solid musical core with layers of percussion, a monster bassist, an electric guitarist playing in the palm wine fingering style, keyboards and horns, all fronted by a line of dancers and singers going full-throttle in voice and step.
M.M. arranged a local caterer for the event, with a few family contributions of favorite foods, and the foodline had a wide assortment of meats, gravies, starches, fruits and salads. We were in the mood for banku, a corn staple made in large balls that you tear into smaller balls that you then use as fingerbowls to serve yourself gravy. In Africa I never walk away from a fish soup or gravy if that’s an option, but there also was a meat stew that was savory and a little wild. Africans always cook with organ meats in the mix, so their gravies, soups and stews always have a wider range of flavors than many Americans are accustomed to. They also always serve two hot sauce options, one called fresh (with mostly raw ingredients) and shito, a dark paste with dried fish and roasted hot peppers.
Most modern Africans I know are very media-savvy and proficient. M.M. always hires a photographer and a videographer to shoot her events, and their work is as polished and exciting as anything I have seen anywhere. Our major family celebrations over there end up in large gorgeous leather photo albums and slickly produced videos that sizzle with the live music we enjoyed at our celebration.
My wife’s birthday party ended with a blazeout on the dance floor, which was M.M.’s concrete driveway. Buoyant Band and its dancers burned through a series of long, closing numbers, and one of our nieces pulled her beautiful young friends out of their chairs to join us middle-aged folks who had been dancing in small groups all afternoon. The mix of traditional steps from the Buoyant Band frontline and feel-good, affectionate moving about by our friends and family felt like West Africa at its best and most distinctive.
