‘Comfort’ a delightful woman about my age with about triple the energy, agreed to take us on a 3-4 hour tour of the market. She is a staff member at the Bed and Breakfast, ‘Four Villages Inn’ where we stayed.
The market spreads out over acres and along old rail ties from a not in use train system. One of the first things we did was to climb up to the top of a building to get a general view of the place.
Although there are open air booths surrounding the main market place, the inner part of the market is made up of shops that are sort of a metal container-type thing that are all lined up down often very narrow alleys. I’ve been to markets before and it is very easy to get lost in them because each alley opens up to another and there is no real order. But this was big-time. Had we not had Comfort I think I’d still be wandering.
The shops are grouped, food, clothing, shoes, material, beads, kitchenware, ‘fetish’ items (a type of juju/voodoo where you can buy all sorts of bizarre things like fertility dolls, monkey heads or tiger paws…) etc. Within each grouping it is interesting that each shop looks virtually identical to the one next to it. The same stock, displayed in a similar manner for the same price!
I was glad I’d lived here for almost a year before I tackled the market- guide or not. Everything is fast-paced and the aisles are narrow. Everyone is going somewhere with goods to deliver or selling stuff off their heads. Every few aisles there will be a preacher with a loud speaker screaming out hallelujahs, you might turn a corner into a cart full of bags of grain or a man with a huge lead pipe on his head. You could step in a pothole filled with mud or on a chicken…You have to look down and up and side to side and that’s just to navigate-if you want to stop and buy/look/rest or get out of the sun you must jump out of the way of the ‘flow’.
One huge advantage of being with Comfort is that we could stop and talk to the shop keepers.
We were shown how they make shoes.
We were taken to row upon row of tailors (male) who’s job was to sort through (donated from abroad) clothing and update them: add a decal to a shirt, put pleats in a skirt, add a cuff to jeans. Then these clothes go off to be sold. The pure quantity of clothing and inventory and workers was just amazing.
Finally I wanted to say something about the symmetry of selling. This isn’t just true for the market it’s true for anything being sold in Ghana. It’s all about symmetry and order and the beauty of display. From pyramid-shaped stacks of mangoes on the street, to a lady walking around with a huge platter of peanuts on her head individually placed in a cone formation, to stacks of dirty old tires on the side of the road. Everything is painstakingly displayed with beautiful symmetry.
I will leave you with my two favorite pictures of the day.
This takes balance!
Look who I found hiding....
3 comments:
Way, way cool! What did you end up buying, anything? Who else was with you? I'm adding the Kumasi market to my list of places I need to go. :)
Amazing images, and great commentary. I'm excited and intimidated at once.
How are the stalls secured at night? Do they pack up all their wares, or are there some kind of gate or door they put on their stores?
All of the carefully displayed wares are packed into the metal stalls and locked each night. Rebecca and I commented to each other about the amount of time it must take to unpack/pack each day.
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