Christina ~ May 17

 

Maybe the hardest part of being in a world you don’t understand is figuring out who to trust, who to hang your hat on, who to associate yourself with. I had experience with this sort of thing since I had been the new kid in school almost every year from kindergarten to my first year in high school, sometimes even the new kid in the middle of a school year. So I knew something about figuring out a social scene, who to encourage, who to watch, who to wait for them to come to me, and most important, who to avoid. So setting up a living situation in the city of Kumasi and in the small market town of Wa was tricky. 

 

I had choices. In Kumasi, Alhaji Ahmed, one of the richest of the cattle landlords, offered me a room in his house. But I’d noticed that the other landlords and traders said negative things about Alhaji Ahmed, that while his offer of a room in his house seemed like a gift to my research, it might not turn out well. So instead I became Alhaji Ibrahim’s stranger, the Wala landlord related to Abu Iddi in Wa. The cattle trade was by definition a world of northern strangers selling their cattle in the southern city in Kumasi. The northern strangers were always connected to a Kumasi landlord, a landlord who shared a northern ethnicity – some were Wala, some were Dagomba, some were Fulani. The landlords were their brokers, their Goldman Sachs or Morgan Stanley, but more, much more than that for the northern traders stayed in their landlords’ houses when they came south, were fed by them, had to trust them in the market for the landlord was the center of every trade, every purchase by a Kumasi trader or butcher. So I became Alhaji Ibrahim’s stranger just as I had been Abu Iddi’s stranger in Wa. Yes, I was a clueless white woman from New York City, but all the same, I fit into an existing social construct, that of an outsider dependent on, represented by, a powerful local landlord. So when Abu Iddi said I was his stranger, it meant something that everyone understood. He represented me. And I was dependent on him.