Crikey! Crocodiles! And Pikworo Slave Camp
"What's the difference between a crocodile and an alligator anyway?" I asked Courage the day before
"Oh, you know, I don't know, it's probably like the difference between pear and avocado, some people make a difference maybe, but we just call them all pears. Maybe an avocado is a type of pear"
This crocodile is apparently named Tangwi
Sunday, May 28th, Day 24 - Normally I always sleep really well, but Saturday night, a night before I had to get up at 5am, I first of all was awake writing things until after midnight, and then when I tried to go to bed the power was off and thus the fan and thus it was both stifling hot and mosquitos were buzzing around. This hotel doesn't have mosquito nets in the rooms but as long as the ceiling fan is on there's no mosquitos. I actually ended up getting up in the night and getting my bee suit, that light one made of the blue material you may have seen in pictures, and laying it over my face. But anyway all this is to say I got substantially less than five hours of sleep.
The occasion of getting up early was to go to the famed crocodile pond, which we believed to be four hours drive north (essentially at the Burkina Faso border). Cecilia, a friend of all of ours from last year (when she worked for the guest-house), had been the one to come through with a car and driver. To travel 93km there and back and spend the day with us would be 800 cedis ($71.46). We got a slightly better deal on our weekend adventure last year ($74.88 (600 cedis at the time) to travel 110km) but last year our car seemed to be in constant danger of breaking down and for some reason every police checkpoint wanted to question us. This time neither of those was true and our driver was chill so its all good.
We left the hotel around 6:17am, Williams, Cecilia, the driver and I. The roads were, well, Iiii would say "very smooth, in very good condition," and in fact I did so, to the incredulous surprise of my associates. "These roads seem good to you??" "Well, you have to understand, I just came from Guinea-Conakry" "Ohh."
The territory we drove through was mostly I guess you'd call it savanna, but not your typical Serengeti savanna of sparse accacias. This was grassland dotted with enough shea trees or groves of other trees to perhaps be just shy as being classed as open woodland or something. Visibility while level with the terrain was only about 100m or so, though it undulated a bit. Passed through one or two small towns, they seemed nice, not too congested or ramshackle. One even had working traffic signals, practically the only time I've seen such in Africa!
Arrived at the town of Paga around 9:00am, so after only a 2.5 hour drive. Drove down a very rough sideroad (I just realized I was going to write "side street" but changed it to road because it wasn't paved, I'm not sure I had consciously realized a street must be paved (further tangent, I just googled the etymology of street and road and street is from latin for "paved" while road is from "to ride" so the etymology seems to bare out this distinction. Thank you for baring with mem on this etymology tangent)).
Anyway we drove through an arch and came to a pond of maybe an acre of area, surrounded by open grass commons with goats grazing on it. At first there were no staff in attendence but a guy sauntered over from where he'd apparently been hanging out amongst some rocks on the far side, and one or two others materialized from the woodwork soon after.
Entry fees they said were 20 cedis ($1.79) for locals and 40 cedis "for the white man" ($3.57)(Yeah they dontgiveafuck about such PC niceties as not saying they're charging different depending on race lol). And 50 cedis also for Williams DSLR, which I think he tried unsuccessfully to haggle over for a few minutes. I was paying for everyone anyway. Oh and we also needed to buy a guinea fowl to feed the crocodiles, which would be 36 cedis but then (as a result of negotiations?) that turned out to be included in the fees we'd paid.
All that finally sorted we walked down to the waters edge. I couldn't see any crocodiles lounging on the shore or floating in the water. But the guy just walked right up to the shore shook the young guinea fowl he was holding right at the waterline and then stepped back as a crocodile just kind of lumbered out of the water. Like a well trained pet dog it just kind of crawled right out and sat there as the guy, sidestepping in a wide berth around its jaws I noted, went around behind it and began manhandling the beast. He gently slapped its back like the proverbial car salesman thumping the roof of the car he's selling, he lifted its tail. Then he beckoned me to come around, giving its mouth a wide berth, which I needed no encouragement to do.
I had to of course hand my phone to someone else to take pictures of me with the crocodile and I am always absolutely astounded people can be so bad at taking pictures. Especially someone like this guy for whom a major component of his job is taking photos of people posing with the crocodile. Seriously look at the original version of the above picture before I straightened it out and cropped it. Why can't people take a straight picture?? And is it rocket science to try to make the subject more or less fill the frame? Or take the below picture of the three of us:
I suppose I was better off when he left the subject far from filling the frame because this one can't be rotated to the vertical without leaving gaps in the corners.
After we'd all done all our posing, the guides tossed the hapless guinea fowl into Tangwi's gullet. Apparently all this is possible just because for generations people have been feeding the crocodiles when they're well behaved, and they've essentially become somewhat domesticated in the sense that they've learned in their lizard brains that its an easy lifestyle to let these primates entice you ashore, monkey around you a bit, and feed you.
I mentioned we had been to a slave site the day before, and one of the guys was like "we have a slave site here too, want to see it??" and at first I wasn't sure, would it just be another baobab tree and the same things? But it was still only 10am and we were out here we might as well see some things. So we got directions from them and when we finished with the crocodiles we drove across town and out just a bit the other side until we were just beside the house of the "most famous [soccer] player in Africa"'s house, or so Williams informs me (Abedi Pele?).
In contrast to the other slave site, this wasn't in a dense village of huts but kind of the suburbs of Paga town, houses were square, cinderblock, tin roofed. At the slave site there was one very nice ornate looking hut as well as an open sided one beside it with benches in it for visitors to sit.
Once again there was no one present when we arrived but from a group of children pumping a hand pumped well nearby one ran off to get someone and soon enough a guide arrived by bicycle.
These guys actually had a printed out laminated admissions fee list nice and professional looking. It matched the fee structure of the crocodile pond exactly except that they had the delicacy to refer to me and persons like me as "non-Ghanaians" rather than "white people." And as at the other place they were very concerned about Williams' DSLR, wanting to particularly know if he was making a documentary, which I suspect by the way they were salivating to find out if he was would probably have entailed a huge increase in fees. It doesn't help convince them that we're not that he wasn't just snapping pictures with it but videoing and interviewing.
Anyway that all out of the way we finally got started. The guide informed us that in 1704 someone came here from elsewhere, it is not known where, and asked the locals to give him some land, and they gave him the land right here. Unbeknownst to said locals, our guide informs us, this guy had a nefarious business plan -- to start enslaving people around him and selling them into slavery. He was soon joined by two (brothers? friends?) from Mali and/or Burkina Faso (ie north of here), and they continued this trade up until 1764 "when Europe outlawed slavery and it was no longer profitable" ... which is a curious assertion, I didn't think a significant number of slaves went to Europe and I don't know of any European country that specifically outlawed it in the 1760s.
There's a wikipedia article on this slave camp. The facts in it are all referenced from various websites that all say the same thing word for word, ie I think they're citing eachother, ie I think it only reflects what the one guide on duty the day whomever the original journalist of the first of these articles was came by. But it says the slave camp was active from 1704 to 1845, that slaves were here sold to " English, French and Dutch slave traders" (our own guide said they were sold to native slave traders who took them on down towards the coast and it was only at the coastal forts that white slave traders picked them up, which I think is more plausible. Our guide had specific names he gave for the founder of the slave camp here and his two accomplices, which I didn't try to memorize assuming I could google it later but they aren't listed in this one set of information all the wiki sources repeat. Basically my feeling about the sources here is that they're pretty unreliable and it would be nice if a scholarly source could shed some light on the matter.
But anyway. So then we proceeded on the walking tour. The "slave camp" site is atually kind of nestled behind a rock outcropping, giving it a naturally defensible position and a classic "bandit encampment" a la DnD kind of feel. We were shown numerous holes carved into the rock by slaves to form the bowls they would have to eat out of, shown where they'd been chained up and where they were auctioned (just various hollows among the rocks), a rock they were chained to as punishment if they displeased the slavedrivers, this rock being in the full sun all day long. Climbing to the tallest rock, which we were told had been used as a watch tower, there is now a tree overhanging it and Cecilia started picking the berry-sized little fruit and eating them. She offered me some which I ate, I've tasted a fair few unknown bush fruits this trip. This one, like most undomesticated fruits I find, has very little pulp beween the seed and rind. It tasted kind of like the exaggerated grape flavor of "grape flavored" things that grapes don't actually taste like. I found it pleasant. the plant identification app couldn't identify it and Ceci just said they call it grapes.
One poignant thing here was when we were shown where slaves who died in camp had been buried in a mass grave, there are now grave markings and evidence that not too long ago some flowers and wreaths hand been placed there. And our guide told us that on June 30th they'll celebrate "permanent emancipation day" in memory of those who died in slavery.
And then we returned to shelter we'd begun at. By now a more senior guide had arrived and he was just very concerned we might be making a documentary. Oddly enough after talking to him a bit Williams seems to have come to the conclusion with them that it would be a good idea for him to come back at some point in the future and make a documentary here.
Altogether, I think this slave site was much better developed for tourism than the other (though jeeze it sounds kind of morbid writing that. For slave sites to be tourist sites. But they ought to be preserved in memory of a dark time and as a place for descendants of persons trafficked in the trade to be able to come and see). As I said I personally would have liked to feel like the information coming from guides was a bit more consistent, and wonder if their attributing it to three guys from up north isn't just a convenient way to put responsibility off of their own ancestors.
Then we started on our way back home. Stopped at a place for lunch, the picture of which I include here just because it amuses me how it kind of parallels the picture from our weekend trip last year.
Visited a reservoir, and then continued all the way back to Walewale. I had had enough money to pay the driver when we started, but I hadn't accounted for all the admission fees and such so I no longer had enough. No matter there's always ATMS, and in fact I was wondering why I'd bothered to go out of my way to get USD dollar bills to bring. But then the ATMS at both banks in Walewale weren't working, thank god I have USD bills ... which I'll have to exchange tomorrow but thankfully the driver was satisfied to take partial payment now and the rest later, since I think he's a friend of Cecilias.
This afternoon our fearless leader Dr Courage has left us, I have learned for the whole week! But Samual and Steven from last year have arrived along with two new guys, who during the brief time I met them over dinner I don't think said anything so it's yet to see what they'll be like. Anyway, one week down, four or so to go! If we'll get as much sightseeing done on all the weekends as this one I'll be quite pleased.