Taxis and TV

Travelling in taxis is an interesting affair in Accra.  They are, along with TroTros, the main form of transport, and are everywhere.  They beep at you to offer their services, but also for all other sorts of reasons many of which I have yet to fathom.  The way it works is you negotiate with the driver before you get in, and agree on a fee to your chosen destination.  Often there is a dance of negotiation or bartering with several drivers, before they lower their initial ridiculous price to what you know it should cost.  The taxis themselves are in varying degrees of disrepair (it doesn’t seem like MOT or emissions testing are a concept here) and several times our journey has been interspersed with a quick bit of roadside mechanical engineering.  If you’re lucky there’ll be a seatbelt in the front, but almost certainly none in the back, and it’s not uncommon for 4 people to (illegally) squeeze onto the backseat and then try to avoid the glare of the police torches at the patrol stations that are set up on main roads to deter such behaviour.  Mostly there is a soundtrack of extremely loud music-  hiphop, rap, hiplife, dancehall; or evangelical Christian preaching.  Occasionally the taxi driver will try to encourage you to marry him or sponsor his younger brother to play football for Arsenal.

Today after our session at the school was finished, Elliot, Frank (another of the volunteer team), and a pupil Ishmael from the school took a taxi to the studios of TV Africa, one of Ghana’s 4 main TV channels, to do an interview we had found out about the day before, set up by a poet friend of Elliot’s, named Oswald.  We were expecting it to be part of a current affairs piece or arts segment, so when we got there and the producer turned up saying ‘so what we are hoping to focus on in the discussion today is the issue of child actors and child protection’ we were a bit gob-smacked.  Apparently in Ghana, although there is legislation to protect child actors, it is not really enforced, so children are not provided with any tutoring during shoots and are often cast in graphic roles in horror films or as prostitutes or gangsters with no regulation of how the children are treated on set or what they are exposed to.  For the interview I was sat on a sofa opposite the anchorwoman wearing the most fantastic bright blue headscarf, and next to me was an actress who is also a child activist, called Abena-sika (Abena because she was born on a Tuesday).  It was really refreshing to be speaking with two articulate and empowered women, making a change from the entrenched gender roles and pervasive sexism that I have been finding pretty challenging since I arrived here.  It turned out to be an interesting discussion (although I was totally winging it!) and we got to talk a little bit about the Akosia project too, which was great.  Another Ghana first!