Ladies and gentlemen, it is my proud honor to present  my Web pages on Ghana, thus far: http://www.travelingtiger.com/travelingtiger/africa/ghana/ghana.html
Got back uneventfully from Bobbo’s house yesterday night.  I had originally planned to leave for Medassi early this morning, but Steve, a fellow-traveler who collects kente, had planned to go visit a kente dealer today, and since this dealer works with collectible kente, I decided to tag along and see piles of kente.  (Duh!)

We did indeed see piles and piles of kente, and I took a bunch of photos (not sure if any of them will come out, though – I was at a bad angle and it’s very difficult to get photos to do justice to kente).  Some of them were gorgeous – handspun, indigo-dyed ones from Mali particularly attracted to me – and some of them seemed a bit humdrum for me.  I left Steve to bargain with the dealer for me on a green-and-yellow kente that I absolutely loved.  If I don’t get it, though, I won’t be too upset – I already bought one that I like, so I don’t really need a second one.
I finally found Busy Internet, and sure enough, they have wireless and Ethernet connections for laptops.  So I have been busy uploading my web pages – it’s a slow process, sadly, but I think I will finish in time to meet my guide Chuku, who will be taking me to Medassi in the morning.  There I’ll spend a day studying with an adinkra maker (adinkra is stamped cloth in very complex patterns), seeing how they boil the bark to make the ink, then stamping some of my own pieces, then carving my own stamps out of pieces of calabash gourd.  I plan to visit several Ashanti weaving villages and see if I can work out a day of lessons, then head north to Tamale and find the one remaining indigo dyer in Dagoba, the main production center for indigo-dyed, handspun fabrics.  Rumor has it there’s a handspinner there as well.

Anyway, I had better run soon – my website is nearly uploaded, I’m caught up on email, and I need to meet Chuku.  The next time I update my blog, I’ll probably be in Medassi, north of Accra.

Sorry for the radio silence the last few days, but I’ve been obsessively weaving (and only Mike knows just how obsessive that can be 🙂 ).  And making rapid progress.  While my stripes are still wobbly and my edges far from neat, I’ve successfully woven several yards of kente.  Today Kwame helped me weave a placemat, which doesn’t sound like much, but it took eight hours of intense, unrelenting concentration at the loom to complete.  (My back, legs, and butt are all sore.)  Sort of my graduation present, because I’m moving on tomorrow.  Back to Accra, to meet up with Chuku and head north to Medasi on Tuesday.

I’ve really enjoyed weaving on the kente loom.  It’s been intensely fascinating and experientially wonderful.  While a relatively simple technique with only two threadings and a supplementary warp, using the loom clearly requires a great deal of practice and ability.  I found myself trying to focus in four areas at once, and really having to concentrate to get my selvedges even, my stripes some semblance of straight, my warp evenly covered with weft.  As a hobby weaver, I really enjoyed the challenge of making something on the loom.

But more than that, there is something wonderful about learning from a master weaver from a totally different culture and tradition.  It’s not just about the teaching of craft, it’s also about meeting people and getting to know them, just a little.  Craftwork, the urge to create, is universal, and I find that creative folk recognize each other wherever they go.  Sort of a universal community, I guess.

I’m finding it hard to talk about the experience without diving either into unwarranted generalizing or timeworn clichés.  Suffice it to say that there is a huge difference between reading about something and doing it; between reading about adventures in Africa and actually stepping out into the tropical sun; between talking about kente and actually weaving it.  To weave kente is to step into a long tradition of weavers, if only for a moment.  Perhaps that’s it: to a Ghanaian, weaving is a spiritual act.  Bobbo and I were talking about this earlier today.  Weaving is religion, with significance beyond simply throwing the shuttle and beating the fell ““ even beyond the universal spirituality that calls people to create.

More prosaically, I have bought a beautiful diamond kente in burgundy, gray, and gold, which is about the right size to be used as a (large) tablecloth.  It matches my tapestries from Laos perfectly.  I think I will put it on my dining-room table ““ with plastic to protect it, it shouldn’t get dirty.  I love it.

I am thinking of buying a second kente, with the typical Ewe riot of patterns, but am not sure ““ I only have so much space to store stuff, and only so much money to spend on kente.  There are also the Ashanti tribe’s kente, which are reputedly quite different.  So much craftwork, so little space to display and enjoy it.  It’s a sad, sad thing.  I wish I had a 5,000 square foot house I could use to display my textile treasures from around the world.

I have put together several webpages on Ghana and specifically on kente weaving.  I will try to get them up tomorrow or Tuesday, when I go by Busy Internet, which is reputedly the best Internet café in Accra (and thus in Ghana, since Accra is the capital/largest city).  Meanwhile, I continue to use the stone-knives-and-bearskins method of reading my blog entries off my laptop screen and re-entering them into the Internet café’s machines.  I gots a computer, you gots a computer, but you com-PU-tah don’t talk to my com-PU-tah.  Oh well.  At least I’m getting them up on the Web.

Anyway, I am stupidly and silly proud over my placemat.  It doesn’t look anything like the one Kwame gave me (his work has straight stripes, mine are all wobbly), but it’s mine and I love it.  It’s definitely going in my display case once I get back home.

It’s amazing how fast one adapts to one’s surroundings.  For example, I can now ride in the front seat of a rickety old car, with no seat belt, as the driver careens wildly from one side of the road to another at 40 mph to avoid potholes, pedestrians, and the occasional cow, and pulls out to pass going head-on into oncoming traffic (and barely missing both the head-on collision and the passing car), with no second thoughts.

Of course, my first thought is usually “Holy-cow-mother-of-jesus-I’m-going-to-die,” followed by a fervent prayer not to reincarnate as a ground squirrel, but hey, you can’t have everything, right?

Things are going great in Ghana.  Kwame and I have been working on weaving a sampler, a single long strip of kente with quite a few Ewe designs in it.  Today I’m going to ask him to help me weave a placemat, so I can get an understanding of how they get those designs to line up so exactly.  It’s very slow work, about 7 hours for about 3-4 feet of woven strip, but even that should be enough to get me a small placemat, spread out over the next two days.  I hope, anyway.  I’d settle for a napkin. 

Ghanaian food is rapidly starting to wear on me.  Mostly what I’ve been offered so far consists of some kind of starch (boiled yam, a sticky mixture of cassava and corn flour mixed together, eaten with the fingers, a “bread” made from corn but not resembling cornbread in the slightest) and some kind of spicy, tomato-based stew with fish or meat, coconut or palm oil in it.  Tasty, but day after day is a little much.  I’d give a bunch for a burger right now.

Speaking of burgers, there appears to be a place in Accra that serves various bits of interesting game meat ““ zebra, kudu, antelope, etc. (nothing endangered).  I may try going there once I get back to Accra.

I am surrounded by kente.

I woke up this morning, peeked out my door, and kente!  Kente everywhere.  The walls were covered with them.  Some are simple checkered patterns, some are complex diamonds with figures of animals inside, some have stripes and plaids and woven-in symbols which I believe have meanings to the Ewe.  I’ll have to ask Kwame about that.

Yesterday, Kwame showed me the basics of kente weaving – how to measure the warp, make the cross, wind the warp without it tangling, thread the heddles and sley the reed, and weave plainweave and a little bit of design.  He would demonstrate for about 3/4 of the task, then let me try, so I got a feel for it but it didn’t take forever.  I’m not going to go into too much about that because my nascent web page on kente covers it, along with photos and some short videos, and they communicate the process of kente weaving better than I could in words.  Suffice it to say that I spent a good several hours just getting down plainweave – without a reed fixed at 90 degrees to the fell, I found it difficult to beat evenly, and tended to get a convex fell as a result.  After I had figured that out, I spent some time paying attention to my selvages (edges of the fabric) – Kwame’s looked machine-even, mine looked ragged.  It did go better after Kwame waxed my threads a bit with a candle- they had a tendency to fray and get fuzzy, and then start sticking together.

Later in the day, after I was starting to get bored with plainweave (and Heaven knows Kwame must have been bored to tears a long time before that), Kwame started showing me how to make the inlaid Ewe patterns.  It’s a supplementary-weft technique, with either one or two tabby (plainweave) shots between the pattern wefts.  The warp is done in polyester and cotton, roughly double the weight of sewing thread, and the supplementary weft is a bit heavier, in silk or rayon.  Of the two sets of heddles, the first set weaves plainweave and the second set weaves pattern, four threads together in each heddle.  When weaving plainweave, it appears to be an even fabric ()equal warp and weft showing), but when weaving using the pattern heddles, a weft-faced fabric results and the warp (ideally) does not appear.

I’d like to see Kwame’s work.  He says he’s been weaving for 29 years, which impresses me – (a) that’s a long time, and (b) he doesn’t look old enough to have been weaving that long.  I guess he’s older than he looks.

“Kwame”, by the way, is a very common name in Ghana.  Amonst the Ewe, it’s traditional to name a child according to the day of the week in which s/he was born.  So “Kwame” means he was born on a Saturday, and by tradition, all other male children born on Saturday would also be “Kwame”.  I’m not sure how they keep trake of all those Kwames – perhaps they go by nicknames in school, or last names.  I should ask someone.

This Internet cafe is having sporadic problems with their satellite connection, so I’m going to make this relatively quick.

Made it to the Volta Region with Bobo last night, and suffered through another suffocating night with no fan.  Apparently the every-five-day rolling blackouts are country-wide; most power is hydroelectric, generated by the dam in the Volta River, and unfortunately the water’s been low of late (says Bobo).  This morning Kwame, my Ewe tribe weaving instructor, and I started my weaving lessons.

If you’re thinking that I’m somewhere in the wilds of Ghana, with a nomadic sheepherder crouched down in his tent teaching me primitive weaving techniques, you can pretty much forget it.  Bobo’s a very wealthy, sophisticated Ghanaian, and has taught kente weaving workshops all over the U.S, including Berkeley and Oakland.  He’s got a huge compound (he has 11 sons and 7 daughters!) in, umm, in some town near Aflao (where I type this blog entry), with a small semi-guesthouse for foreign students.

That said, it’s still quite Ghanaian, or at least the food and weaving are.  What I’ve eaten of Ghanaian food thus far has been fantastic – I couldn’t describe it, but it’s very tasty, even without bats, rats, and the rest of the livestock.  🙂

Kwame and I spent most of today setting up to warp and weave in the Ewe style of kente weaving.  I’ll detail the process in a separate blog entry since I imagine it’s of very little interest to nonweavers (but maybe it is, I don’t know).  At any rate, I’ll have to write it up tonight, so you won’t be getting it now.  I’ve even taken a few short videos of Ghanaian weaving.  Kwame and I worked together for a good six hours today, and my back and hamstrings are sore, but I’m feeling very good about my progress.  I’ve learned to warp, thread, sley, and weave plainweave on the loom (more complicated than on a western-style loom), plus Kwame helped me do some tapestry-inlay supplementary-weft patterning in traditional Ewe designs.  Can’t wait for tomorrow!
One interesting thing today: Bobo called me over in the afternoon, and I came over to find God’s own pile of cracked coconuts.  They were busily scooping the coconut meat from the shell – and I’m talking giant sacks of coconut meat here – in preparation for taking it to the mill, where they would crush it, boil it, skim off the cream, and give them the resulting coconut oil to put into the food.  (Coconut oil shows up in nearly all Ghanaian cooking, or so I’ve been told – maybe that’s why it’s so tasty.)

Anyway, that’s the short version of the last day or so.  Tonight I’m going to start writing up my webpage on kente weaving, and hopefully I’ll be able to upload it once i get back to Accra.

Oh, and I do have a day job (I’m a software project manager) – but I was unemployed when I went through Southeast Asia.  right now I’m just on vacation.

One note for anyone who’s been trying to reach me: Yahoo! Mail login doesn’t work from this Internet cafe, so I can’t get my email.  I’ll try again from a different Internet cafe tomorrow.