Reading the DAILY GRAPHIC

I’m months away, I think, from being able to say anything about Ghana that I’d trust: none of the assumptions that I’m used to relying on about time, about poverty, about religion, about government services, etc. seem to hold in the same ways there, and some of what I saw—at the slave dungeons at Elmina and Cape Coast and on the half-built highways passing the businesses that some might use to illustrate Ghana’s status as a kind of model of development—so fully dispenses with basic historical narratives I’ve relied on, that I’d need to reconstruct them or assemble news ones before I could begin a sentence with the words “Ghana is….”

 

But there is something I think I can now say about Semester at Sea as a program.  I think my experience during the time the ship was docked at Tema might have been in some ways typical: I went on two SAS-run field trips and made two other trips into Accra, one in a private car and one on the shuttle that SAS had arranged to take people from the dock.  Some students may have made more such trips, but I’d guess that quite a few had approximately the same number I had.  And here’s what I find: having picked up Thursday’s edition of the Daily Graphic, the main newspaper, I have enough knowledge now to understand a bit of the context for the great majority of the stories.  Here on page 1 is something about the government fraud scandal that we were told about by a State Department official who boarded and briefed us the morning we arrived; the lead article is about the ceremonial opening of the “George Walker Bush Motorway,” built with a Millennium grant from the US, which was described by the guide on the bus that took me and others on that highway on our way to the dungeons.  Inside, there is a full page headed “Tamale in Focus,” a set of articles about the place where our Ghanaian interport visitor Sheriff Ghale is from.  And a page of “Regional news” describes a workshop designed “to encourage the use of local languages,” a seminar on “electronic waste,” and a forum on maternal care: each of these relate to topics discussed in particular courses offered on the ship. 

 

Semester at Sea, as a study-abroad program, faces reasonable skepticism about its relatively brief stays in various countries.  But if the quality of the programming is such so that it can render legible the crucial events of the times and places of its visits—even if that is but a passing knowledge, which mightn’t be expected to apply if the same newspaper were picked up a year later—then, as a series of comparative experiences, the knowledge it is offering seems to me to have real traction.  As in any kind of education, the responsibility must ultimately fall upon the student to retain the knowledge and to build upon it: it will be up to our students to extend the ship’s teaching, and their in-port experiences, so that the same set of newspapers (or web sites, or briefing memos) could in fact legible to them some time from now.  But the slice of Ghana’s present to which we were exposed, coming in between similar slices from Manaus and Cape Town, seems to me to have been an extraordinary privilege.  And if my experience was at all typical, the mnemonic force of what we saw, heard, and did seems likely to make a lifetime of building upon the brief visit to Ghana almost unavoidable.

 

We sailed yesterday past the Prime Meridian.  I’m told that the captain and the crew made jokes about making sure none of us would miss the spot—that there is a buoy there, that one can pick up mail at that buoy, etc.  No, it’s not easy to spot these things.  But that doesn’t mean that they aren’t, in some important sense, there.