Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Hunter's Campfire Digging for Mudfish in Ghana..

My wife lived in Ghana for two years while in the peace corp.
She went home for Christmas one year to visit her folks and when she returned the villagers had eaten her cat.

First white women the village had known.
Sorry for the 'jack, ain't often Ghana comes up!

I was waiting for a lawyer to pop out.

Oh, wait....those are mud sharks.

I think you may be confused on what a mud shark is...

Maybe she was living among the Ewe ("Eweh"), it was in the Ewe area (Southeast Ghana) that you would see signs outside chop bars (AKA restaurants) saying "Yes, we have cat soup today". And in the markets there you'd see these real depressed-looking cats tethered in cages who's nine lives were clearly about to run out.

I don't recall Ashantis ever ate cats, we had a few in my village. Ain't no fat cats in West African villages. Most all the chickens too are free-range and hatch their own young, a cat which ate baby chicks would be dispatched petty quick. And's besides people, there's more'n a few things in the bush that would take out a cat.

Yet, there was one cat in my village known to me the whole three years, a female, skinny and scrawny as all get out, but friendly enough. It never did use up all those lives when I was there, but had clearly already lost at least a few. When it had litters I would guess three out out of four of the kittens wouldn't make it.

Dogs were another story, though I never had either dog or cat soup. Most dogs you did see, skinny basenji-looking things, belonged to hunter/poachers and would trot along at their heels when they went into the woods. If you had five dogs in a village of 1,000 people, that was a lot. Children herded sheep, and nobody herded the pygmy goats. The sheep were hair sheep, no wool, kept mostly to be eaten.

'Nother thing is, rabies was common, and a real health hazard, people died of rabies more'n snakebites. One morning I was eating at the chop bar in my village in a place as usual walled off with corrugated iron sheets. Next thing I know I hear the sound of many running feet on dirt and the repeated warning shout of "Onniooo!" ("mad dog").

What happened when that happened is that able-bodied guys would take up their machetes and long poles if they had one and intercept the dog. One time in the driveway of the the Peace Corps office in Accra when this happened the staff pinned the animal with a ladder before killing it.

I was a habitual distance runner and pretty quick on my feet in those days and would have joined in in a heartbeat except that if the Obruni (me) joined in, I might become a distraction more than the dog was (I used to tell 'em that before White folks came to Africa they had nothing to talk about, they prob'ly STILL gossip about "Mister Mike" and its been 34 years).

I'm sure they dispatched that dog though I wasn't there to see. Didn't thing anything of it at the time, just went about my business, so did everybody else.

Anyhow, I was there for the "December 31st Revolution" AKA the coup that brought about the second coming of Junior Jesus AKA Flight Lieutenant JJ Rawlings and its aftermath.

Interesting times.

Birdwatcher

How about a white female lawyer dating a black guy?


Anyway, interesting thread. I've never seen these fish before.

She was lucky they didn't eat her!!!

She may have wanted them to...

Chicken, what else?

Actually there is a point there...

Why do some "races" proceed onward from the bottom much faster than others.

I"m not so sure that the ones way behind the times, like in Africa, are all that dumb though, Most days I don't enjoy a lot of what this "modern" world has brought. But then there would be way to many africans for me to be happy, I'm most happy with almost no one else around.

But I've deeply digressed.

Intelligence and innovation. Or lack of it.

I can enjoy a cell phone, use the internet with it, take pictures, text...

But, I certainly can't build one from scratch.

Same principle.

In Ghana they can't imagine why we Americans don't walk around with silly grins on our faces all day long, given our fabulous wealth (ie. the average American compared to an average Ghanaian subsistence farmer).

Two things they notice if they actually get to live here: 1) we work all the time and 2) we live lives of social isolation, the two being related. In Ghana one constantly interacts with one's neighbors for better or worse and even buying tomatoes in the marketplace entails a lengthy conversation. Here we get home and shut ourselves in.

OK, it ain't the electricity or trucks or houses or restaurants or big screen TV's or bass boats that makes us better off or happier, if no one has these things you don't miss 'em.

What makes us better off....

a) The Rule of Law and a reasonably non-corrupt legal system.
b) Ready access to quality medical care.
c) Freedom to travel.
d) The ready availability of higher education.
e) Equal opportunity regardless of ethnicity or gender (more or less).

That's what separates us from them.

Birdwatcher

Birdwatcher, Did you get sick much from having gone native, so to speak? I do enjoy your stories of travel and adventure.

Back in the days Ghana was one of the most non-violent places in Black Africa. Certainly nothing at all like the most dangerous places in the US.

Go anywhere in Ghana and because you were an obvious foreigner, you'd have a free meal and a roof, hospitality even from folks who didn't have a pot to pee in. That's the way it was.

Back then before cell phones you'd be assigned to your village or whatever and they wouldn't expect to see you or hear from you for at least three months, at which time you were expected to show up in the Peace Corps office for your quarterly 5cc of gamma globulin against Hepatitis.

When the military coup went down New Years '80/'81, Peace Corps called all of our families back in the US to say that we had been located and were safe at our sites. This was a crock, they had no way of knowing. One guy had flown home to California for Christmas without telling 'em and fielded that call himself, in his parent's house.

So thirty or so young Americans released into the country for two or three years at a time, no reliable way of contacting them, no way they could summon help in an emergency.... maybe accountable to appear once every three months ... and most times nothing ever happened, certainly not at the hands of violent criminals.

Sadly, today of course they give out satellite cell phones where they can track your movements just in case. Sucks :o(

Birdwatcher

Peace Corps says boil all your water. I was in a time and place where that was impractical/borderline impossible. Half the year rainwater was abundant right off of the roof, in the Dry Season (our winter) I was saved by a reliable spring back in the woods.

The thing is with most waterborne diseases is that humans gotta put 'em in, nobody lived upstream of me so I chanced it, drank it straight, sometimes cloudy, sometime with little critters in it and all. Seems like I got away with it. Though in the last severe dry season of '82/'83 I had to walk two miles up the mountain every evening to the next village for drinking water where serendipitously a German team had just come through and drilled a borehole well.

(Those German guys were there for TWO DAYS putting in that well and my students from there never mentioned it. I was irritated, I probably coulda cadged all kinds of sympathy beers and such from those guys).

Everybody gets giardia, you have it all the time, its a minor irritation. Everybody gets malaria, at least in theory, back then you kept it knocked back with 500mg (??) of chloroquine phosphate every Saturday (so you'd remember to take 'em). Two bitter little pills, don't leave home without 'em or you'll be dead inside of six months.

Worst I got was one time I was laid up with a splitting headache dry-heaving green water for three days while experiencing minor hallucinations. Never was diagnosed; some anonymous virus.

Living in that time and place, doing what I was doing, absolutely friggin' rocked. I taught young folks at a boarding school (they all are) who were very serious about getting an education (the alternative was a lifetime of drudgery on the farm) and on weekends and school holidays I worked with a Dutch Methodist mobile vaccination team, driving vehicles, compiling records and maintaining vaccine guns.

Came back after three years. Longer'n that and the malaria drugs could begin to mess up your liver, eyesight and hearing. Also, the longer you stay the less mainstream American you become, you get out of touch, it was time to come back.

Birdwatcher

Heck the natives around here just buried fish heads to grow stuff. I didn't know they had fish seeds.