I put off going to the Nigerian, Togolese and Beninois Embassies until I had nothing left on my to-do list but getting my visas for my next trip... so I finally dragged myself out of bed and into a tro-tro last week to confront my red-tape fate. There are few places I dislike more than embassies and few people I dislike more than embassy men. The embassy man is the guy who stamps your passport. Before he does, however, he holds onto it for a while, knowing full well those precious moments are his. At the Nigerian Embassy, the embassy man told me - with a smile and after I had submitted my application complete with the $56 fee and all - that I could not apply for a visa from Ghana without a Ghanaian residence permit and that I had to go back to my country – France – to get my visa. At the Benin Embassy, the embassy man told me I’d have no problem getting two visas, one for my three-month stay in Benin and the other to transit to Nigeria, and kindly accepted the 70,000 CFAs ($140) I had to dish out for them; the very next day he informed me that under law I could not have more than one currently valid visa for Benin in my passport at the same time. My favorite, however, is the Togo embassy man. This embassy man invited me into his office and shared with me the challenges he had to overcome to pull himself out of a northern Togolese village and into his Embassy office. He discussed, as he held onto my French passport, 15 years of French sanctions on Togo and how it killed the Togolese spirit. He speculated about the French presidential runoff on Sunday and claimed that Segolene would win because she was much prettier than Hillary. He observed, with disdain, how important “Francophonie” is to the French identity. It was a lengthy soliloquy. I sat there, legs and arms tense, nodding and staring at my passport in his hands, deferring to him.
Then this embassy man asked me about the origins of my last name. I hesitated for a few seconds, weighing the pros and the cons of a truthful response in my mind, and finally admitted to him that my father was born in Algeria. He looked up at me, raised his eyebrows, and smiled. In that instant, his tone and expression changed entirely, as if he had realized for the first time that there was a person sitting across from him. And then… he spoke to me “as one African to another” about the economic struggles of African countries. He asked me what I was studying. He listened to my response. He called me an expert in West African politics. And the next Segolene. He asked me for my email address. And then he stamped my passport.
I got home that evening and crossed the “GET VISAS” item off my to-do list. It was a sweet reward, though the experience made me feel a tad sleezy. My tactics ranged from name-dropping (Nigerian Embassy), to passing as “African” (Togolese Embassy), to making a scene in the Embassy lobby (Benin Embassy). But I got all my visas and I suppose this, too, is fieldwork... and I suppose these embassy men are only half as arrogant as those who stamp the passports of Africans wishing to travel to Europe or the United States.
Visas mean transitions and, with a third of fieldwork under my belt, I had many people to thank and bid farewell to this week. Sola, my survey enumerator, is busy running his shop, selling pure water for 100 Cedis less than everyone else, and campaigning for the next legislative elections. Kofi, one of my initial connections to the immigrant community in Nima, continues to run his bilingual school for immigrant children, proudly showing off the trophies and awards they have won in soccer tournaments, dancing and drumming competitions. Doris and Dan have expanded their shop, setting up a station in front to sell breakfast omelettes in the mornings. Our curry-sniffing campus guard is gone, rotated to a different campus gate with the coming of the new month. Henry, his replacement, has already proposed to JAB. The half-dozen children we cross on our running path every day have learned our names and call out to us with the same fervor and enthusiasm they used to say
Obruni!... only this time we respond just as enthusiastically.
One day we land here with our work goals and our daily habits and the next we are gone. Our West African adventure meets their daily reality and for a brief period of time we are part of each other's lives. And as much as I’ve complained about the lack of friendship and intimacy, I will miss many people here. To them, we’re the obrunis who always asked for mangos, but not too ripe; who preferred to walk to campus under a high noon heat than take an overpriced taxi (obruni inflation); who could never figure out how to unplug their pen drive safely from the computer; who always asked for dishes with no meat – and that means no tuna and no chicken either; who actually didn’t believe in Jesus; who ran around campus every day and sweated much more than everybody else; who never fully figured out how to cross a road, or hand wash clothes or pound fufu. To us, they’re the ones who made these past few months in Accra much more than just a grad school lab… a place to explore, discover, criticize, vent about, cry about, laugh about, and write about. A place that evoked in us affection one day and frustration the next.
But never indifference.
