Ghana Experience – Part 5 – People

The people of Ghana are very friendly. When you pass someone, even someone you have never met before, you need to say “good morning,” “hello,” “good afternoon,” or something else appropriate. Many of the staff at the Ramada Resort knew my name by the end of my stay there, so I was often greeted with either “Hello, Mr. Alan” or “Good morning, Mr. Russell.” Everyone from the people at the front desk to the wait staff in the restaurant to the maintenance people were equally friendly.

That was also true everywhere else I went. The only non-Ghanaian people I saw apart from other guests at the resort were a couple of tourists at the market in Accra sitting in the same restaurant. I stood out, not only as a white person, but as someone much taller than nearly everyone else I encountered, but I did not feel any pressure from that – just as someone of interest when so few people were in the places I was going. So I tried as best I could to greet everyone just as they greeted me and felt quite comfortable doing so.

Of course, since I was in the company of Shirley and other various members of her family, that helped. Besides Shirley, I met her father, her mother, and her brothers (two of them helped pick me up at the airport when I arrived and they lived in the family house (it had two separate units so Shirley and her mother lived on one side and her brothers on the other side). I also met a couple of “aunts” (not sure if they were her mother’s sisters, or some other connection), and a couple of her “cousins” (again not sure just how everyone was connected – the youngest one, Esther, age 8, Shirley called her “niece,” but I think she was actually the daughter of one of Shirley’s cousins, making her actually a “cousin, once removed,” but “niece” is as good an expression as any.

While everyone I came in contact with spoke English, it is not their primary language. Rather, they all spoke a tribal language. I suspect most were speaking Ga, as the area I was in is primarily a Ga area. But even the TV programs were a mix of English, dubbed English (soap operas from a Spanish-speaking country), or a tribal language (probably Twi, the primary language of the Asanti people who comprise nearly half of all Ghanaians).

I was not able to pick up any of the native language while I was there, so I just listened to the flow of conversation around me.