ALBERTO MORAVIA
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book on Africa, speaks of Accra in 1954 in these not very attractive
terms: "It looks like a collection of tin hovels interspersed with dilapidat–
ed frame buildings and tawdry hole-in-the-wall shops under moldy
arcades. The impression a visitor is apt to get is one of an almost
desperate squalor. . .." Two or three years ago, perhaps. Besides, we
have already mentioned that this is not the only modem building in
Accra. A brief visit to the modem part of the city reveals ministries in the
most modem style built on pilework of reinforced cement, with long
verandas of the colonial type; onto them open the doors of rooms in
which, amid the Swedish style furniture, government officials in sleeveless
shirts and white trousers examine papers, aided by secretaries who are
invariably pretty and well-dressed; cottages buried in the dark, brooding,
tropical vegetation; villas dotted with balconies.
The streets of this residential area in Accra wind through exuberant
flowering gardens like paths in a huge park; in these streets, one sees
few pedestrians and many automobiles of American and English make.
Naturally, the city of hovels that Gunther spoke about still exists
now, alongside the modem and luxurious city. Ten minutes by car
from my hotel, the asphalt of the roads becomes yellow earth, and the
cement constructions lined up in orderly rows along the sidewalks are
replaced by innumerable huts and "tukul" gathered like mushrooms
at the edges of the steep excavations. And the center of Accra certainly
isn't modem: a sprawling street that looks as if it had been yanked out
of a small town in the Far West with two lines of uneven mismatched
buildings, here a modern building all of glass, there a hut with a
corrugated tin roof, further on a long low factory of two floors, even
further on a shanty with a straw roof. And along the sidewalks, alternat–
ing with crowded parking lots, are the open markets with the merchandise
laid out on the stones and the women vendors, all enormously corpulent,
hidden under huge straw hats, their thighs overflowing the tiny stools
on which they're seated.
Between these two cities, the one modem and luxurious, the other
decaying and poverty-stricken, there is no intermediate zone whatsoever,
no area of average middle-class houses; just as in Accra and in all of
Africa there has been no phase of transition between the colonialism
of yesterday and the neo-capitalism of today. It has gone from soldiers
in
cork helmets to bankers in printed vests ; from the ancestral hut to
the skyscraper, abruptly and without transition. The young government
official who works in the most modem offices has a father who lives in
a hut on the savanna and drives his flocks to pasture, holding a
