Greeted by Success in Hohoe

It is the rare day when a young man gets to shake hands with Success. My chance came Friday night. I had taken a bus to Hohoe (“ho-hwe”), the second largest town in the Volta Region of eastern Ghana. Stumbling groggily into the rather ambitiously named Grand Hotel, I met Success, the front desk clerk. Soon a large Star beer slowly started to disappear in front of me, faster once Libya scored on the Black Stars in the 83rd minute.

The next morning my travelling companions and I made our way to Agmusta (Wli) Falls. There, we were guided across swollen streams and through dense rainforest to the upper falls. Up – past fields of cassava and yam. Up – under the shade of palm, banana, and mahogany trees. Up – with butterflies at our knees, mist on our lips, and bats in the cliffs shrieking on the cliffs overhead. After two hours, the muffled roar of the falls gave way to a constant thunder. The path ended, and there, from a stream scarcely fifteen feet across, the whole might of the rainy season poured forth (Agmusta in Ewe means “let it pour forth), nearly on top of us.
It would have been a pleasant day if I had just taken a stroll around the tallest waterfall in West Africa and supported a community ecotourism project (60% of the 8 Ghana cedis I paid to go to the upper falls went to support community projects in Wli). But I didn’t hike the falls alone. I hiked them with Alfonso.

Alfonso, our guide, was born in Wli, schooled in Kpando and Accra, and now tours (in English, French, and Arabic no less) and farms his family lands. I learned from him that there are two growing seasons in the region. The first, major harvest comes in June and July. Fields are mixed cropped with corn, cashe minor growing season which harvests in December is just corn. Alfonso converts a portion of each season’s harvest into seed for the next planting. He can afford fertilizer, herbicides (which are relatively new to the community), and some hired labor. He clears and tills his fields by hand. His fields are fragmented, i.e. not contiguous. Land becomes fragmented because it is passed down to all sons, not just one (so not primogeniture). I don’t know if this inheritance scheme is generalizable beyond Wli, or even beyond Alfonso’s family. In Wli, surplus yields are usually sold in Wli, Hohoe, or Ho to middle men who take the crops to larger markets. Alfonso says they pay fair prices, but he also said that when farmers have money, farmers transport their crops to Accra themselves.

60% of Ghanaians are involved in agriculture. Here, agricultural economics is development economics. On a concluding note, two of the books I’m reading for theories of development, The Stages of Economic Growth by W.W. Rostow and The Theory of Economic Growth by Arthur Lewis, both call for a Green Revolution in Africa. Those books were written about fifty years ago. The Alliance for a Green Revolution in Africa, chaired by Kofi Annan, was founded within the past two years.