Threads:
Changes and Continuities
in Ghanaian Women's Lives
QUOTES FROM THE THREE WOMEN:
Grandmother: The only time my late husband slept in his own house, was the day they brought his corpse home to lay him in state. Considering how much we’d gone through to put up that house. How much we’d suffered in the hands of landlords, and to think he never lived to enjoy it, is the saddest memory of my life.
Mother: “David is six years old but he doesn’t look his age… and that’s because he has a hole in heart… we’ve gone to Korle Bu but they say the machine has broken down”.
Daughter: I’m looking for work. Any work.
If their lives were a play, then I’d say I can’t wait for the next scene… and yet for some reason, I’m also afraid to see it. Even after shooting my last frame, it was evident to me that this drama, with its strong opening and constantly meandering plot, has only just began. As you watch the images however, it would help to remember that nothing here is staged. This is pure, unrefined reality TV. The sorrows; the choices: whether good or bad, the hopes and dreams: be they small or big are real, sometimes inherited and foretelling.
Grandmother’s father was Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah’s driver. He was with Nkrumah in Guinea when his overthrow was announced. He couldn’t come back home just like his king. After many years in exile, he returned, an old man, full of stories but one who didn’t get to witness the blossoming of his dear brood. The essence of this story, is to tell you that the burden of child raising and the push to attain some social significance, however small, has been a burden for the Ghanaian woman, long before Grandmother’s time. Her mother became a single mother due to the choices some politicians made.
Fortunately for Grandma however, she didn’t have to raise her children all by herself. She married a fireman. She herself has held her matron position at the Korle Bu Teaching Hospital, TB unit for a long time. Everyday, even now, she has to find ways of getting her heavy basin of lunch up the stairs to her frail patients, and at 5pm, meet her fellowship members at the Korle Gonno Anglican church or go straight home to the house she built with her late husband… and is now filled with some of her children, many grand children and tenants.
Mother is the one I spent the most time with. She wakes up everyday at 2am to fill her gallons and tanks with water. By four am, her customers will start arriving, coins in hand, to buy buckets of water.
Business is bad during the rainy season. Mother’s biggest headache is David; her youngest. He has a hole-in-heart condition that is impeding his growth. At six, he’s small for his age. Hope is two blocks away, Korle Bu Teaching Hospital but feels out of reach to mum.
Daughter. She enjoys flexing with her mother’s mobile phone.
She’s completed SHS 3 and is looking for a job. Any job. Unlike her mother, and grandmother, she’s not religious. Actually, she prefers to do her laundry on Sundays.
On the Sundays she chooses to make up with God, she doesn’t go to the Anglican Church her mother and grandmother patronize.
She prefers the more modern and fashionable Lighthouse Chapel, sticking out down the road from their house.As one from Mars, normally when I had taken the time to observe a woman, it was solely to satisfy primal instincts. I’d been the voyeur, the predator, the charmer. That was a role that came naturally but this assignment was totally different. It was an invitation to re-look at all the women in my life. My own grandmother. Her sacrifices. Her love. The songs she made for me. All the men who walked through her life like already used celotapes. They covered a lot space, had children with her… but none really stuck. At least not for long. My mother, hmmmm that’s a story for another day… and today… I share my life with a woman who obviously is more intelligent, more educated, more giving… and as we approach the challenge of raising our a daughter together, I can only wish the the positive will continue.
This assigment was education for me… and as you view these images, may you look again at what sacrifice, what price women have to pay everyday… and the hurdles society deliberately places in their way everyday.
Enjoy yourself. Thank you.
