« Flashing in Ghana | Main | Ishmael »
April 5, 2005
San Francisco in Accra
My taxi crawled through the afternoon traffic, windows rolled down all the way, the black and gray clouds of exhaust streaming in. I was hot and sweaty and dying for some sort of very cold refreshment. We were almost home. Then the Fan Milk man appeared and I leapt out of the cab.
Fan Milk is a local creation, and is frozen yogurt or soft ice cream sold in small plastic bags, sort of like well-branded water sachets. Fan Milk is sold mostly by young people on bikes with Fan Milk coolers attached to the handlebars. One Fan Milk packet is 2,500 cedi, or 30 cents.
As I tore into my icy Fan Milk, a parade of hundreds of boisterous young men took over the street. They were dressed in black and red, and they were walking, biking and riding on two huge flat-bed trucks. Nigerian crooner 2 Face's hit "African Queen" blared from speakers on the trucks.
And then I saw the men in dresses. Red dresses. Their hair done up in women's styles, they sashayed down the street waving. Other men had their jeans pulled down far enough to reveal red sequined thongs. I couldn't believe it.
"Hey," I asked the CD vendor standing next to me. "What is this?"
"Oh, it's the university kids," he replied laughing. "Today is their day."
He went on to describe something like a 'senior' skip day in the U.S. The emphasis here, he told me, was that the students get to just act as crazy as they want to for a day. These students, he explained, were from University of Ghana, Legon (a suburb of Accra).
As the parade flowed by, people in cars and along the roadside laughed and waved.
"This doesn't bother people?" I asked.
I had to verify with him that certain of the parade-goers in drag were really men. It felt like just another day in my hometown of San Francisco, but Ghana is a religious and fairly conservative country.
"No," he said, chuckling. "It's their day."
The parade passed in about five minutes, and the street was instantly enveloped in choking gridlock again.
I asked my hosts here about the parade, and asked other expats and Ghanaians about the parade. Most of the expats hadn't heard of this tradition and didn't believe it. The Ghanaians just laughed and said "Yeah, that's their day."
Just goes to show the multiple layers of every society and how just when you think you have even the slightest handle on a place, something happens that makes you realize you don't have a clue.
Posted by Cathryn Poff at April 5, 2005 2:25 PM