Bye bye safe journey, part 1

The Ghanaian border station is less a station than a place to sweat while the three bored-looking guards whack your passport. It’s not exactly a formal sort of process. Being issued a receipt at the grocery store has more emotional heft.

As we file through, another American joins the line behind us. He’s way too tall for anyone’s good and is either Southern or an arrogant ass. A short conversation reveals he is guilty of both. He affects an exasperated air like African border crossings are a chore, yes, but just a natural part of life for guys like him.

Outside the border station things get interesting almost immediately. The same moneychangers, who we put off 50 yards earlier, are waiting. They are apparently permitted to move freely back and forth as they please. Each one offers the exact same rate as the next and none seem the least bit inclined to haggle. Certain subtleties of free-market capitalism have not yet made it here. We thank them but pass again, sure we’ll get a better rate in Ouagadougou.

By this time another group of men has taken a great interest in our little group. These are the bush taxi drivers, and they want to drive us to Ouagadougou. How generous of them. Enter Lumumba. You may recognize the name as this overly nice, way-too-familiar and altogether shifty guy shares it with Patrice Lumumba, the African anti-colonial leader who helped the Republic of the Congo win independence from Belgium in 1960.

Lumumba is not a driver. He is, he explains with a wide, solicitous smile, going to Ouagadougou just like us. He is Ghanaian, he tells me, and makes frequent trips to Ouagadougou. For a reason I can’t discern, he insists on showing me his passport as proof of this fact.

“I have a friend who works in the Ghanaian embassy in Ouaga so if any of you need to get a new visa I can help you do that,” he says. As it happens, Jeanne needs to do precisely that, and I wonder if he had overheard us talking. It is strange, but undeniable truism that when away from home, a facility with English becomes a kind of red flag when toted out by a certain type of person.

“OK,” I say, trying to put him off. We’re in the middle of a complicated negotiation with one bush taxi driver and I feel like I should help. The problem is the car can comfortably fit seven people, but they want to fill the car with our five and three more, plus the driver, for a total of nine. We might as well travel inside our own backpacks.

The back and forth goes on for 20 minutes, attracting an audience of some 15 men, all of whom have something to say in the proceedings. This is a ragtag bunch for whom this scene must serve as a kind of theater.

Finally, we seem to agree that it will only be us, Lumumba and another man for a total of seven. We stow our bags in the trunk and climb in. We will first be driven the short distance to the Burkina Faso border station.

I notice that Lumumba has taken the front seat and that as we drive he is feverishly texting someone on his phone. I can’t help but wonder, of course, if he is alerting his colleagues that he has a few tasty white fish on the line.

(Picture: The road to the Burkina Faso border)