The world according to me

While being in Ghana I had the chance to meet up with Jerry J. Rawlings former president and military leader of Ghana. I was curious and had lots of questions. I wrote about it, but the text got pretty long, so I will publish it in three parts. Enjoy part I:


Last stop Boom Junction (Part I)

How do you address a former president? It is none of my every day problems. I was at a loss. ‘Good Morning, Mr. Rawlings’, would that do? Or would that be too informal? If I remembered it correctly, protocol demands that you call him Mr. President even if he is just the ex-president. But ‘Good Morning, Mr. President’ would sound somewhat subservient. Choosing a greeting, it seemed, would have some importance, because it kind of set the stage for the conversation that was to follow.

People had told me about Boom’s hypnotic power and I didn’t want to be blinded by nice words. I wanted to be hard and piercing. Popular or not that man was responsible for a good amount of hardship and, at least morally, for the deaths of a number of dissidents and former military leaders. They call him Boom for he had been a fighter pilot and was famous for his hyperactive no-nonsense way of solving what he perceived as problems.

I had plenty of time to mull over the question. I had already spent half an hour drinking coffee that Rawling’s boy had served. I was faithfully waiting for the big man sitting in his study in his colonial style residence in Accra trying not to drown in his big brown leather couch. Feigning activity, I started taking notes about the interior of his study; the frightening gang of Mastinos, Great Danes, and Dobermann patrolling around the huge garden; the flight simulator software sitting on a shelf next to miniature aircrafts models and other petty facts that promised to hold some sort of explanatory value. When I ran out of details, I fell into some sort of vegetable coma. The air condition was going at full blast, slowing me down to the speed of a snail on a cold autumn morning.


His hands were trembling

He came without making a fuss. I don’t know what I had expected, but he wasn’t all that impressive. He was a big man alright. The lean figure I had seen on black and white army photos was no more. He was about 1.85 meters tall and weighed maybe 100 kilo. Instead of the tight olive army pants I had seen in the books, he was wearing a cream colored traditional shirt with some stains on it and grey pants. His full beard and his hair had turned salt and pepper. He had Ghanaian traits, but a lighter complexion inherited from his Scottish father.

The most striking feature, though, was his failing physical strength. He seemed hung over and he excused himself for being late by saying that he had slept in. His hands were trembling like you see it with people suffering from an early stage of Parkinson. He didn’t say much in these first minutes and kept massaging his temples. He wanted to know about me, why I came. But my answers didn’t really seem to get through to him. He left after a short while, saying he had to swallow his pills.

He seemed to have regained some vigor, when he came back some 15 minutes later. It kind of reminded me of Kurtz in the Heart of Darkness, who’s most remarkable feature is his voice, a booming organ that summons the ghosts of the past. Same here; once locked up in one of his monologues, Rawlings was back to his old energetic self. Still, I never lost the impression of facing somebody who was spending more energy than he had left.

Drowned in memories

I had prepared a two page list of questions separated into different topics like economics, politics, revolution and personal history. I had changed their order several times to create a flow, something close to a real conversation. I finally decided to start with his personal background, make him talk about things that should be comforting him. Than, gradually, I wanted to switch to more delicate questions finishing off with full-on accusations.

It didn’t work out at all. We were talking for about three hours and he answered maybe a third of all my questions. Still, I enjoyed it, because he wasn’t evading my questions in that gruesome style practiced by politicians and the like; he was answering straight away. It was more the crazy amount of stories stored in his memory and his volition to tell them all that put me off the tracks. I asked him about how to organize a coup and he ended up telling me stories about how he and his men had cultivated cassava on the fields surrounding the army barracks and that, when the plants were ripe, leading officers had come in, filling the boots of their cars without even asking.

It was all very interesting, but rather like a walk through a maze than a clearly structured interview. He had this annoying habit of never finishing a sentence, of constantly rephrasing what he was saying and always trying to put as much content in a sentence as possible. It works while you are there. His tumbling prose combined with his deep authoritarian voice creates a sense of urgency, of someone who really has a message. But if you listen to the tape later on, you are left with a lot of useless fragments, allusions, and overtones - and very little meaning.

I had read about most of the stuff he told me. I liked some of his anecdotes, things you don’t get in the books. Unfortunately, he also gave me quite a number of political propaganda about the current government and its president, J. A. Kufour, who had won the elections in 2000. Rawlings accused him of being corrupt, which he probably was, because corruption is woven into the very fabric of this society. He also accused him of having led the country onto the brink of a tribal war and of ruling with fear and the suppression of fundamental rights.

(to be continued)

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