March 18, 2001
No. 6
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Independence Day Weekend
March 6 was the 44th anniversary of Ghana's gaining independence from the British. It was a Tuesday, which gave us a four-day weekend with a lot of adventures. There are some similarities to the Fourth of July in the U.S. There may be no baseball, hot dogs, apple pie, or Chevrolet, but there is soccer, kebab, sugared popcorn and taxi cabs!
Tomas, Tim and I went to a soccer match on Sunday. Joe and Heather from PBS came along as well. The Accra club team, Hearts of Oak, were playing against the Kumasi team, Ashanti Kotoko. This is the equivalent of a Duck/Beaver game in Oregon or a Gator/Hurricane game in Florida! It's a very big rivalry, and lots of Kumasi fans made the four-hour trek down to Accra. It's not possible to underestimate the passion for the Hearts of Oak team and its players. The Hearts were most recently Africa Club Team champions. A large number of the Ghanaian national team, the Black Stars, play for Hearts of Oak.The team's nickname is Phobia, which is a really handy piece of information to know in Accra. If you get into a taxi that has the blue/yellow/red team colors displayed from the rear view mirror, you can just cheer "Phobia", and you become instant friends with the driver. (The fare doesn't get reduced, but you have a great time discussing soccer!) If you wear your Phobia badge, other fans will yell "Phobia" to you. The official response to such a greeting is "The boys are good!"
The match was fun to watch, although the officiating was so incredibly bad, even I could tell that the calls were ridiculous. With each red card for Phobia, we added another luxury home that ref must have in Kumasi. Bad officiating, and the fans' reaction to it, is pretty much universal! Hearts scored one goal in the first half, but Kotoko came down in the second half to score as well--not a difficult feat at this point considering how many Hearts players had been ejected. The final score was 1-1.
I thought my days of following sports just to have something to discuss at the office were behind me, but I definitely made a good impression on my TSS colleagues (all guys except one, of course) when they heard I had been to the match.
On Tuesday, we went to Independence Square, which across the street from the stadium and picturesquely overlooking the ocean. Armies of school boys and school girls, with uniforms and banners, stood in formation in the square, as did a few military units. It was sunny and hot. I cannot imagine such a huge group of American schoolkids standing quietly at attention for the hours that these kids did. At regular intervals, one of them would faint and be hauled off by a stretcher.
Finally, the big motorcade rolled in, carrying President J.A. Kufuor to preside over Independence Day ceremonies for the first time (he was newly elected in December--the first new president in Ghana in 20 years). He reviewed the troops and the schoolchildren, he lit the flame at the Unknown Soldier's monument, and gave a speech. He is a very good speaker. Ghanaians I spoke with later praised what he had to say, the main theme being the need to overcome existing tribal differences and to also reunite after a divisive national election.
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e-mail: jean@welltempered.net