Sub-verse VI: Northern Regions Part I: Northern Region I

Sub-verse VI: Northern Regions

Part I: Northern Region I

Finally they reached their destination. The man sitting in front turned around as they entered the station and asked Abdul if he had already booked a hotel, otherwise he could help him do so. Abdul nodded and thanked him for the unfailing Ghanaian hospitality.

Disembarking at the Tamale STC yard, Abdul headed straight for Dunia Hotel at Sakasaka the receptionist at Sunyani had indicated as budget but nice. And she was right.

Abdul spent the afternoon walking about the Tamale municipality, wondering which of the people he passed in the street could be a distant relative. He felt deeper pain when elderly boys chased and caught a child a parent was running after and handed the shivering, shrieking boy to the mother who dragged him away by the ear, from time to time smacking him with a large baton. Certainly some African Americans were related to these people here. Blessed are those who could easily trace their ancestry.

Abdul found Tamale to be a small friendly town with mainly one storey concrete houses covered with aluminium roofing sheets. He also saw a lot of motorbikes in the town and not so many cars, most of which were taxis. A lot of people went on foot or rode bicycles along bicycle lanes which were clogged with pedestrians, hawkers, and goats, forcing the cyclists to be extra careful. Abdul learnt to pay attention to the cyclists while crossing streets after one scraped him and another narrowly missed ramming into his side. In the town he saw guesthouses, bars, restaurants, a market place, small shops, clinics, internet cafés, and lots of mosques around which apparently healthy people and those with various sorts and degrees of infirmities crouched under umbrellas and begged for alms. He especially enjoyed standing at a corner and watching the tro-tro depart from and arrive at the Tro-Tro station located right next to the STC-station, on Bolgatanga road, just north from the market.

Abdul again found the north of Ghana different from the south in many ways. The first striking contrast was the weather. Although it wasn’t yet the long dry season—or the harmattan—which starts in November and lasts until March, Abdul found the high temperature almost unbearable. He was also struck with the facial differences of southerners and northerners. Some of the people in the north look almost Asian to Abdul while others appeared Sahelian, or North African. What struck him next was the religious aspect. While he found a lot of churches and stores with Christian inspired names in the south like ‘Jesus Is In Control Store,’ where almost everyone seemed Christian, in the north Islam appeared to predominate, with Tamale littered with many mosques. Contrary to the impression on the road, he was also to note that in the district and regional centers of the Northern Regions most of the buildings were erected with cement-sand blocks, reinforced concrete structural framework, and corrugated iron, aluminium or asbestos-cement roofing sheets over a timber substructure. Contrary to the predominantly round huts of villages, the plans of the urban buildings were rectangular.

Abdul ate supper of the popular northern dish of rice balls the hotel staff called tuo zafi or popularly TZ—known in the south as omo tuo—accompanied with green leaves soup, beans, and cowpea the locals called tubaani. He topped it off with the local beverage pito brewed from millet and which tasted like sweet beer.

The following day when the approaching dry season northern sun already blazed like bonfire in the early hours of the morning, Abdul crouched in an overloaded Toyota truck with a wooden body and wooden seats heading up for the Upper East Region, one of the other two Northern Regions regrouping the Upper East and Upper West regions slave routes. He would begin northwest with Bolgatanga, the Upper East Regional capital commonly called Bolga 170 kilometers away, and go northeast to Bawku; then he would travel westwards to Paga from where he planned to come down to Wa, the Upper West Regional capital, then further down to Larabanga and then continue east back through Tamale to Yendi from where he would go down to Savelugu and Salaga before returning finally to Tamale for his flight to Accra. Now he needed to see on these routes the important sites, relics and ancestry of the slave trade to understand further what happened to his ancestors. The slave holding and camp sites, water troughs, rivers and wells where captured slaves were made to drink from and bath in, walled villages, caves for protection, included in the slave route would let him know how those atrocities happened to them.

The approaching dry season from November to April rendered the vegetation sallow.

“During the rainy season in June to August, the landscape becomes a lush green plain,” a passenger beside him explained as if he had read Abdul’s thoughts.

Abdul nodded, imagining how nice that would look.

For the moment he was fixing the architecture which varied from village to village due to the ethnic mix. While the traditional layout for the mud buildings was circular, Abdul noticed some rectangular huts. As they rumbled through the north-eastern section of this area, he noted the buildings here were circular and arranged as cells around an inner yard. He found their conical, thatch roofs or flat mud roofs with a mud parapet exotic.