Escaping Nature: The Reality of Subsistence Life
by De Roy Kwesi Andrew
As my mother's mud home is washed away in floods in West Ghana, exposing the nation's infrastructural inadequacies, many in the West continue to romanticise about rural poverty, despite the advanced urban development aspirations of most Ghanaians.
During the summer I visited my family home, Achimfo and Yiwabra, in the western region of Ghana. My trip was the result of three days of torrential rainfall and flooding in the Aowin-Suaman district in the western region of Ghana, which affected 8,000 people in ten communities, including the district capital, Enchi. The flood occurred in the last week of July, and didn't subside until early August. Within 24 hours of the rain falling most communities along the river Disue and its tributaries were submerged in water. Consequently, about 600 houses mainly made of mud were washed away, leaving their residents homeless.
One of the communities most severely hit by the flood disaster, Achimfo, is where my 76-year-old mother lives. My mother's hut was one of about 110 houses condemned to rubble by the flood in this community of about 1,200 people. She told me she felt helpless as she sat by the roadside all night watching her home being gradually washed away by the approaching water. Victims of the flood, including my mother, had nowhere to lay their heads as the water kept approaching and were forced to sleep on the streets, and the few available places in the churches and cocoa sheds.
The lucky ones could stay with friends and relatives whose huts were still intact. However this was by no means a luxurious arrangement; the predominantly mud-walled, thatch-roofed houses usually contain just one small bedroom and accommodate everything from foodstuffs and stinking fish to rats and human beings. The houses are also poorly lit and lack good ventilation, let alone any other modern facilities. And yet, after the floods hit, up to ten people were forced to sleep together in single huts in these dire conditions.
Of course, after the water started receding, the flood victims had no choice but to erect the same old style of primitive huts all over again - as if they were living in medieval times! I very much doubt if anyone could afford to be protected by insurance, let alone housing that could withstand flooding. Indeed, out I went as well to chop down lumber and rebuild my mother's home from scratch with only an axe for resources. Yet this only led to my arrest by forest guards! My crime: to have felled a tree on our own farm without first obtaining a special license - the result of some of the green nonsense that is now rearing its ugly head in Ghana. It makes me wonder what a subsistence farmer is expected to do if he can't even subsist off his own land?
It was this naked exposure to nature's brute power that I had turned my back on when I first moved out of the countryside and into the capital Accra.
Born in the neighbouring Yiwabra, hope for a better future has been my dream since childhood. I wanted to escape my family's life in the countryside for the promise of the city, because rural life in Ghana does not pay. Subsistence farming, the mainstay of the rural economy, is a wretched way of life filled with toil. Backbreaking tools are what our farmers use to till the land (although western NGOs such as Oxfam patronisingly describe this as the application of "appropriate technology"). Over-reliance on such crude farming methods has resulted in low yields, low productivity and paltry incomes that can barely take care of a family in a rural setting.
My parents farmed for the past 70 years and yet my mother has little to show for this labour. Like most other rural-dwellers she still sleeps in a mud house, drinks from polluted streams and walks for long distances carrying heavy loads of cocoa and foodstuffs. This is not because it is idyllic to do so, and neither is it because it is part of our culture; it is because she has no choice! Farmers don't have the means to acquire modern tools and equipment for commercial agriculture. Education, telecommunications, health, water sewage, market and road infrastructures are either poor or nonexistent. It's against this background that swathes of people - especially the energetic youth - flee the rural areas to urban centres in search of a brighter future. This is why people in rural Ghana send their children to the cities to go and stay with friends and relatives; that way they can have a more meaningful and enjoyable life.
Indeed, now that I live in Ghana's capital Accra I am better off in all facets of life compared to my peers left behind in the village. I earn three pounds sterling a day as a trained teacher in a basic school, and I'm able to pursue further studies at a private university. I enjoy many of the trappings of modernity as an urban dweller: a variety of entertainments, quality education for my son, hi-tech hospitals, good roads, portable water, telecommunication, good housing, modern electronic gadgets (washing machines, kettles, microwaves, refrigerators, etc.,) and so forth. In fact, I'm putting up a five bedroom cement block self-contained house with modern toilet and kitchen facilities for my mother and relatives from my village. Neither this, nor my dreams of travelling to Europe, would ever have happened if I had stayed in my home village, uneducated and working as a subsistence farmer.
It is in response to some of these aspirations that so many people like myself have chosen to live in urban areas no matter what difficulties they may face. The 2007 UN report on urbanisation has said that over half the world's population - or 3.3 billion people - now live in urban areas, with this likely to expand to 5 billion by 2030. While my peers and I - along with the authors of the report - celebrate this trend, many in the West will likely bemoan these developments as an example of overpopulation or the destruction of indigenous culture and nature's beauty.
Whatever these critics may claim, the trappings of modern life and development are anchored in the town and city. Choices and opportunities are commonplace here, and as a result shanty towns are mushrooming at an increasing pace in many urban areas in Ghana. Old Fadama (Sodom & Gomorrah) in Accra is one of many such shanty towns sprouting from our cities. Day in, day out, squatters from all parts of Ghana arrive there in droves, all in search of a brighter future; this is in spite of the insanitary conditions, the mud and the mosquitoes. And yet squatters living in Old Fadama say they have good reasons for settling there. They are able to get portable water, a good education for themselves and their children, jobs in shops, offices and markets. They also get better incomes than they would staying in the rural areas and working on cocoa fields and engaging in subsistence farming.
Modern urban life has become a part of all of us in Ghana. We urbanites try our best to live it while rural dwellers, like those in my mother's village, can only dream it. Nothing could be further from the truth than that of the romantic image painted of rural African farmers living the idyllic simple lives close to nature and far from the stresses of the modern world. As the flood victims in my mother's village can testify, nature is cruel and destructive, while modernity offers security, comfort and the chance to truly fulfil one's aspirations. We in Ghana, especially in the countryside, live in constant uncertainty because we lack the infrastructure that protects us from the next random act of nature.
It would therefore come as no surprise to learn that rural dwellers are yearning for urban life and industrialization to release them from these shackles of poverty. WORLDwrite's film I'm a subsistence farmer... get me out of here! provides the real picture. Westerners who romanticise subsistence life and nature should think again or swap with Ghana's rural residents.
De Roy Kwesi Andrew
WORLDwrite, Ghana