Max Alexander Read online

  It’s a compelling argument—but searching takes time. Gates himself recognized the challenge: “Sometimes market forces fail to make an impact in developing countries not because there’s no demand, or because money is lacking, but because we don’t spend enough time studying the needs and limits of that market.”

  Which helps explain why so many market-based innovations for the developing world are large-scale corporate mobilizations. Gates mentioned the efforts of GlaxoSmithKline to develop affordable drugs; Prahalad wrote about Unilever’s success inventing a more effective way to iodize salt using molecular encapsulation, preventing mental retardation in Indian children while making money. These are multinational behemoths that can easily drop a few million into research and development with relatively little overall risk. Their developing-world missions are the corporate equivalent of the World Bank, or the Peace Corps—admirable business ventures, but hardly adventures. I was looking for the place where venture and adventure intersect. As I was about to learn, it was a dangerous crossroads with no traffic light.

  1. Dead Heat

  Out of the plane and onto the molten tarmac of Kotoka Airport, you smell it right away. Africa has a smell as distinct as the subway of Manhattan or the eucalyptus of Laurel Canyon—pungent and exotic yet vaguely familiar, like burley pipe tobacco or pontifical incense.

  “Welcome to Ghana,” said Whit as we walked through immigration, past a large sign warning that pedophiles were decidedly unwelcome here, and into the January glare of my first morning on the oldest continent. The previous afternoon we had met at JFK—he from Seattle, me from Maine, along with Harper—to connect to Accra. Whit had been in Ghana, laying the groundwork for Burro, from August to November of 2008, and Jan had been in charge since he left. So far the company consisted of Whit, Jan, Kevin, the Tata pickup, and a few thousand batteries. My plan was to spend the first month of 2009 there with my son (who had been given an independent study project on recording Ghanaian field music for his high school), during which time I would annoy Whit as much as possible, explore the country, and, if things worked out, prepare for a much longer stay later in the year.

  Outside the terminal, a gang of aggressively friendly touts immediately surrounded our luggage cart, fighting for the opportunity to guide us to a taxi. “No, no, no thank you, we’re okay,” said Whit, but nobody listened or cared. The rule seemed to be that anyone with his hand touching any bag on the cart was entitled to a tip, so a dozen dreadlocked men with outstretched arms frantically huddled around us, tripping over one another, grasping at luggage and arguing as we pushed through the crowd, looking like a giant moving tarantula. “We’re waiting for someone,” said Whit. “We have a ride. No taxi. No thank you.” Harper, dazed with jet lag, wandered off to the snack stand and came back with two Red Bulls. One was already empty and he was working on the second. “He’s gonna come down hard,” said Whit. “Charlie!”

  Across the parking lot, waving from the door of an older Mercedes-Benz, was a big, tall, athletic man with a wide smile. He was wearing gym clothes and shaking his head at the gang surrounding our overflowing luggage cart. “Hey, Whit! Sorry, I can’t get any closer.” Whit’s Ghanaian business partner waited for us outside the security cordon. We piloted the luggage cart and the attached porters in his direction. Charlie (not his real name) yelled at them in Twi and tossed some brightly colored bills. He hugged Whit. “Welcome back!”

  “You still driving this old wreck?” said Whit.

  “Who can afford a new car?” said Charlie. “We have not rented enough batteries yet. Besides, it holds a lot of baggage.”

  It did, amazingly, and we were off to Koforidua on a Sunday afternoon.

  I liked Charlie right away. Like many Ghanaians I would come to know, he was generous, sincere, and completely unflappable, relying on an endless taproot of humor to cope with the daily indignities of African life. Stopped at a red light in front of Ghana’s new presidential palace, a curvilinear metallic ziggurat that is meant to suggest a traditional Ghanaian chief’s throne (called a stool) but looks more like a rocket launch pad from the 1939 World’s Fair, Charlie stuck his arm out the window and gestured to a tall young woman selling bags of fried plantain chips from a bowl on top of her head. He quizzed her in Twi in what was obviously some form of mock indignation, and the two exchanged pleasant banter until the light changed and we sped off.

  “What was that about?” asked Whit.

  “I asked her why she is not in church today,” Charlie replied, laughing. The son of a Unilever executive who was a part-time minister, Charlie, fifty-six, inherited the preacher’s ardent voice if not his precise spiritual calling. Although like most Ghanaians he is among the faithful (and married to a devout Catholic, a minority religion in this former British colony), mostly Charlie proselytizes for business. His upbringing was middle class by American standards but relatively privileged for Africa. After attending Accra’s Achimota School, a boarding institution from the colonial era and one of the most prestigious secondary schools in Africa, he majored in biochemistry at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, anticipating a medical career. But the physician’s life was not for him, and he went on to study timber management. Most of his business ventures have been in the building trades—manufacturing high-quality construction materials—and he owns several properties around Accra and farther to the east, in the Volta Region of his ancestry. Charlie is a member of the Ewe tribe; besides English he speaks Ewe, Twi, and Ga, which is Accra’s indigenous language.

  “Look at this,” said Charlie, this time in English, gesturing over the hood as we idled at another red light.

  In front of us, a truck carrying maybe thirty young men in its open cargo hold lumbered past, hiplife music blaring from speakers, the men dancing and waving red, white, and blue flags picturing an elephant and the letters NPP—the National Patriotic Party. “Let’s hope they are going home,” said Charlie as the music slowly faded and the truck disappeared into the heat, shimmering like a mirage. “Enough of this already.”

  One month earlier, Ghana’s presidential election had been too close to call. The sitting president, John Kufuor of the NPP party, had served his two-term limit, and his potential successor, Nana Akufo-Addo, was running against John Atta Mills of the opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC). The dead heat had forced a runoff just a few days before our arrival, and Mills, a fifty-six-year-old lawyer and university lecturer with a gap-toothed smile that made him look like a black David Letterman, won. But in Africa, elections are never over when they’re over. While most Ghanaians were expressing pride that the country could now count two consecutive democratic transitions to opposition parties (a record for postcolonial Africa), plenty of NPP loyalists were still agitating, claiming the election was rigged, a challenge for any party not in power, to be sure. (Observers from the Carter Center said it was largely free and fair.)

  Swirling under the surface was an undercurrent of ethnic animosity. Ghana has taken measures to ensure that its political parties are not tied closely to ethnic groups. National parties must have viable offices in every region, and parties may not include ethnic names or symbols in their regalia. Nevertheless, the NPP stronghold is the central Ashanti tribal region, while the NDC was founded by a member of the Ewe tribe—the former military head of state, Flight Lieutenant Jerry John Rawlings.* Although Mills is not Ewe, he was Rawlings’s vice president. And Rawlings—who sent three former dictators and five generals to a firing squad in June of 1979—was still very much on the scene, speechifying and prognosticating. Further stirring the pot was the country’s partisan tabloid press, which regularly ran block-type headlines proclaiming NDC THUGS RAID NPP RUMPUS OR NPP PLOTS NDC MAYHEM.

  Compared to many African countries, tribal tension in Ghana burns at a very low flame; it rarely rises above the level of ethnic humor. Any serious tribal conflict seemed unthinkable, but the election did seem to be bringing out the worst in people, and some of the roving bands of polit
ical supporters acted more like street gangs cruising for a fight. These were not gangs you would want to engage in political debate.

  “So what happens next, Charlie?” Whit asked. He had been home in Seattle for six weeks over the holidays, following the Ghanaian election on the Internet, and he was anxious to catch up on the ground.

  “I think things will be okay,” Charlie said. “People are starting to calm down. But right now the problem is that Nana has not conceded. He needs to get up and say that.”

  We were heading out of town on the main road north toward Koforidua, two and a half hours away. Whit had chosen the town for his test branch because it was within a day’s round-trip drive to the air and shopping hub of Accra yet far enough away to be out of the limelight. As our car switched back and forth up the Akwapim Ridge, Charlie pushed the accelerator to the floor and passed a banana truck on a blind curve. This was not a lightly traveled road; I estimated the chance of an oncoming vehicle to be high, perhaps once every few seconds. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them I noticed other cars doing the same thing, going both ways, as if it were completely normal to risk an explosive, dismembering head-on collision to gain a relatively small time advantage on a Sunday afternoon. Harper, who had just finished driver’s ed back in Maine, gave me a wide-eyed look. “Don’t try this at home,” I said.

  We climbed higher, dodging trucks and taxis. Soon Accra and the Gulf of Guinea spread out below us, felted in dust and smoke. Along the highway, fields had been set ablaze by farmers clearing underbrush before planting. Adding to the haze were street vendors, who fanned flaming charcoal fires below rice pots and shards of sizzling cocoyam and plantain.

  “Dad, they’re selling dope all along this road,” Harper said to me in a whisper, apparently not wanting Charlie and Whit, in the front seat, to know that he was onto an incredible scam.

  “What?”

  “Dope. Pot. Mar-i-juana. I can smell it. These guys are dope dealers, and they’re burning samples.”

  “They’re not selling dope,” I said dismissively, ignoring for the moment how he knew what dope smelled like. “And even if they were, why would they be burning samples? This is not Jamaica.”

  “Rita Marley lives up on this ridge,” said Whit on cue, playing tour guide, ignorant of our conversation in the backseat.

  “That’s right,” said Charlie.

  Okay, maybe they were selling dope. Maybe the free samples were some native Ghanaian version of creative capitalism. But no, it didn’t smell quite like dope. Then I placed it. The smell of Ghana was the smell of burning leaves from my childhood, a time before anybody cared about mulching or recycling or even air pollution, when leaf piles were set ablaze at the curb every fall. The burning fields and the charcoal fires smelled the same. In my youth the cities and suburbs of America were regularly on fire, and autumn was delirious and orange and black with smoke. I was ten in the summer of 1967 when Detroit was in flames during the race riots, and it seemed perfectly normal to me, just a little early. Africa is still on fire.

  “How did you guys meet?” I asked.

  “Serendipity,” said Whit. “We met last May in Accra. I was still just kind of noodling the whole Burro idea back in Seattle, and I found out there was a World Bank conference called ‘Lighting Africa’ in Accra. I thought that was a perfect excuse to come over, do some initial market research, and scope out possible partners.”

  “Why did you want a partner?”

  “Well, it certainly makes things easier. You can be one hundred percent foreign-owned in Ghana, but it’s a bit tricky. I really wanted someone on the ground who knows the terrain. Anyway, I had arranged a meeting with this guy who heads up the Ghanaian branch of a U.S. NGO that helps jump-start small- and medium-scale business enterprises in developing countries. They do the largest annual business-plan competition in Ghana, so I wanted to meet with them to get the lay of the land. In the back of my mind I thought maybe they would be a sponsor, and maybe they would know whom I should talk to as a potential partner.

  “So on the day of our meeting, the guy got called away on an emergency and he arranged for me to meet with another person from his group, a very smart woman named Afi. We met, and I could tell she was pretty excited about my idea. They hear all kinds of bullshit stories over here, and they’ve been through the wringer with snake-oil Western no-ops coming over. Charlie’s been screwed by these types in the past. So Afi was definitely sizing me up. I could tell we were connecting, and she was figuring this guy seems real and has integrity.

  “She told me she knew a lot of potential partners. ‘Let me think about it and get back to you,’ she said. The next day she called and said she had a guy she wanted me to meet. So we all met at the Golden Tulip Hotel—me, Charlie, and Afi. Charlie and I hit it off right away. I was very impressed with his entrepreneurial background; he had tried a lot of things. I could tell he was passionate about creating things that make a difference while making money at it. And because of his forestry and construction background, he loves managing work in the field; he doesn’t want to sit in an office like a lot of Ghanaian businessmen.”

  Charlie laughed. “Offices are so boring.”

  “Well, about fifteen minutes into that meeting, Afi dropped the bombshell that Charlie was her husband.”

  Charlie laughed harder. “She didn’t want that to influence anything.”

  “Afi did say she knew a couple of other people as well, but my time was short and I felt great about Charlie, I felt this could work. So it wasn’t the most rigorous executive search in the world, but I think it turned out really well.”

  “You could do a lot worse,” said Charlie.

  “No shit. I could have gotten a total operator who’s just a crook, some flashy guy tooling around in a Mercedes—”

  “What are you saying? I drive a Mercedes.”

  “I meant a late-model Mercedes, the kind with air bags and a CD player.”

  “Oh you are bad!”

  Just when I thought that our luck in overtaking large vehicles up steep hills must surely run out, the gods took pity on us and we pulled into the traffic of downtown Koforidua, where passing became impossible even by the relaxed standards of Africa.

  2. Living Hell

  Ghana is a country of striking beauty, roughly the size of the United Kingdom yet considerably more diverse in climate and landscape. The lower third of the country is dominated by verdant rain forests teeming with neon-colored birds and orchestrated by the treetop chatter of the white-tailed colobus monkey. Along riptide-laced Atlantic beaches, hundred-foot-tall coconut palms (in their prime natural habitat) hover like extraterrestrials over raffia huts where fishermen tend their nets in brightly painted dugout canoes. Colonial-era rubber and palm plantations march along the coast road, which winds through beachfront villages huddled below the whitewashed parapets of slave castles—the oldest European buildings in sub-Saharan Africa, illogically bright and romantic, the kind of places that in the West would be converted into boutique hotels with horizon pools and mojito bars, but in Africa crumble inexorably, like decaying teeth. In the north, the rain forest gives way to drier savannah, and villages far off the missionary track are clustered around medieval mud-and-stick mosques—pincushion palaces with the uninhibited creative charm of a child’s sand castle. Herds of migratory elephants, hippos, and waterbucks roam vast reserves that are barely accessible and (unlike the travel-magazine game parks of Tanzania or Botswana) virtually un-touristed. Way up near the Burkina Faso border are communal lodges painted in striking geometric patterns, sacred colonies of giant hammer bats, and strange tribes where women still wear “lip plugs”—six-inch wooden discs inserted (one can only imagine painfully) in distended, pierced lips to create the effect of grotesque cartoon duck bills. The east of the country is defined by claw-shaped Lake Volta, the largest man-made lake in the world (created in the 1960s by the Akosombo Dam, which powered my brother’s battery chargers), where moldering steamers straight out of The African Q
ueen chug hesitantly between forgotten outposts with pulp-novel names like Kpando and Yeji, and waterfalls sluice down jungle escarpments.

  Koforidua is not one of these places. Koforidua—population roughly one hundred thousand, the same as Gary, Indiana, which could well be its sister city—is the kind of place that guidebooks euphemistically refer to as “a good jumping-off point” or “a decent enough base for exploring the wider region.” In other words, “the bus turns around at this backwater, so we are obliged to tell you something about it.” Perhaps it is unfair to say that Koforidua is to Accra what Gary is to Chicago. It is, in fact, the capital of the misnamed Eastern Region (the Volta Region lies farther east). In Europe, Koforidua would be the kind of busy small city, like Tours or Sheffield, that offered a range of hotels and restaurants to suit any budget, plenty of public transportation, and convenient access to nearby tourist attractions. But Kof-town (as it is called), while undeniably busy, is not in Europe. It offers no nearby tourist attractions save a couple of admittedly decent waterfalls and a weekly bead market of regional and, arguably, even international importance so far as handmade beads go; it boasts only three substantial restaurants, serving related pathologies of the same brown food; and it lays claim to just a few overpriced hotels inconveniently located several miles outside of town.

  Hotels, at least, were not our issue. We had a home. Of sorts.

  My brother’s rented quarters, which tripled as residence, Burro corporate office, and its first pilot field branch, occupied the entire second floor of a two-story colonial-era municipal building on a busy downtown street called Hospital Road. (The local hospital, may God have mercy on your soul, was indeed a short walk east.) The first floor accommodated a grocery store the size of a bus shelter and—taking up the remaining fifty feet or so of street frontage—a cluttered electronics concern, open until well after midnight, that mostly trafficked in gargantuan secondhand sound systems powerful enough to shake paint off the walls.