A Mixed Up, Disjointed Late Night Reflection on the Great Authentic

Today I ate breakfast at a beachfront hotel, and sat at a shaded table on an elevated patio, from which I could look out and down and see the chaos of color that was fishermen hauling in their catch and women selling fruit and kenkey on the beach a few feet away, in what metaphorically felt like a whole different world. Except that it wasn’t. The cliché contrast was apparent enough – hot chocolate on one side of the wall, a water sachet on the other; 2.30 for an egg omelet and toast on one, 0.45 for an egg sanwhich on the other; mainly white skin, mainly dark skin. But what didn’t seem cliché was how interconnected we all were – I wouldn’t be there without them, they wouldn’t be there without me, and although there definitely was a ‘them’ and a ‘me,’ I’m pretty sure the fear of feeling superior from where I sat, gazing out from on high, was only in my head.

I want to be the person who could just as easily see the beauty in someone next to me at that restaurant as in someone beneath me on the beach.

I don’t want to feel guilty for who I am, or for enjoying the things that I can afford to enjoy, like breakfast on a hotel verranda and two cups of Milo. I don’t want to be so driven by the pursuit for the Great Authentic African Experience that I can’t appreciate those luxuries, especially because they are authentic too.

“Authenticity” is such a bizarre concept, when you think about it. Anything that is, anything that is happening is authentic. I tend to think of it as a static ideal, something to be reached, but really, it’s a flowing, constant reality to be lived rather than attained.

There’s this mall here, most people call it ‘Shoprite’ after the big WalMart/Safeway-esque store that dominates the side of it facing the highway. A lot people see it as a bizarre space, a little piece of America transplanted on African soil, either an oasis of luxury or a sad symbol of globalization. But it’s in Africa, so in some ways it is authentically African, it is an authentic space, an authentic African experience. Which would you say is more authentic – the mall that sells Puma bathing suits and cell phones and Nutella, or the drums and koras and tantabens that most Ghanaians don’t know how to play?

Going back to the beach this morning -- as I enjoyed our tourist haven, I also loved seeing the things that not everyone sees: the dirt path that leads through school kids and halfway built hotels and laundry lines and brick thatched huts and a beach with only one man from Kineshie in the surf with his arms spread wide and rain clouds in the distance. When I sat down to write this, I wondered if it made my hypocritical, to write about not pursuing the Authentic, and then write about how wonderful that ‘real’ experience was. But it’s all real and I want to take it all in equally.

I was thinking (the rather obvious thought) that I’d never be a local here. But then I realized that I’d like to free myself from this local vs. global dichotomy … maybe this seems a little academic to apply to breakfast at the beach, but in one of my classes last semester, Professor Hart kept circling back to the same theme, the idea that there are these false dichotomies set up, layered upon one another to mutually reinforce each other. On the one hand, you have the passive, traditional, local; one the other, the active, modern, global. These words map onto the lens I’ve sometimes looked at Ghana through – with the people I see and meet as being helpless and stuck where they are, while I am empowered and able to move through their space. But it’s not true at all – this divide really isn’t there, or at least, excuse my hippie, tripped out image, but I imagine a row of dots and lines, except that now the dots are becoming lines too, we’re all lines, and the only difference is that some of us have resources to be moving faster or farther, but we’re all in motion, and it’s not all the same but it’s not all one-sided either.