KORLE AFTER THE SECOND WORLD WAR

But the major reason that the antimalarial campaign of the Second World War was forgettable is because it was never completed. By 1945, just as Lt. Ribbands and Major Macdonald declared victory over the mosquito, the Allies had opened up the Mediterranean, and transshipment across the Sahara was no longer necessary. The number of troops stationed in Accra dwindled, and the Americans hastily terminated their involvement in the antimalaria campaign. From 1942–45, the Gold Coast government had been responsible for funding only eight per cent of the work done by the Malaria Control Group, while the rest had been covered through the Lend Lease programme (65 per cent) and by the British armed forces (25 per cent). In 1945, the Allied forces left the Gold Coast Public Works Department with the entire cost of maintaining the massive drainage works built on the Korle watershed as well as the responsibility of spraying DDT around the city. A year later, it was evident that the Gold Coast government would never muster enough funding to keep a perpetual campaign against malaria going—the Public Works Department did not even have a budget to screen the windows of bungalows in the city, let alone reinforce miles of concrete embankments along the Odaw River. Major Macdonald’s attempt to squeeze infrastructure funding out of the Americans had worked temporarily, but the war was simply too short to complete the project.

In 1946, crew working for the Gold Coast Public Works Department were further disheartened when aerial photos revealed dozens of quarries, salt pans, and borrow pits around Accra, too numerous to monitor and too expansive to spray regularly. The effects of human habitation had created a niche for mosquitoes to flourish, and any dream of eradication was untenable. The British returned to a policy of malaria management—by relying on quinine prophylaxis and the occasional spraying of waterways to prevent mosquito infestations. In the short term, the effects of DDT made the city notably healthier, and use of the chemical became commonplace. For the price of only four pence a tin, DDT even found its way into homes, where people used it to control lice and bedbugs. Kingsway, the largest department store in Accra, dispensed the drug at their chemist department and advertised it as a product created for the “eternal benefit of mankind.” Unfortunately, the mosquitos in the area quickly developed a resistance to the chemical, as they did in many other parts of the world. By the 1950s, the Korle Lagoon and its tributaries became mired in silt, and malaria was once again endemic in Accra.

When the soldiers were demobilised and the spraying crew departed, the identity of the lagoon as a goddess among the Ga was easily revitalised. In 1946, after several years of bitter disputes over the stool, Nummo Ayiteh Cobblah II was installed as the priest of Korle. Cobblah became a prominent religious leader in Accra, as a moderate during anticolonial riots in 1948 and as a friend to Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah. When Cobblah was enstooled, he resuscitated the rituals of the annual harvest festival of Homowo, establishing his rights to communicate with the spiritual forces that inhabit the lagoon. As she had for centuries, Naa Korle asserted herself as a moral force within Ga culture, a goddess with the ability to define states of collective well-being in the city.

INTERLUDE: HEALING THE SICKNESS OF COLONIALISM

In the early 1950s, when the colony of the Gold Coast was on the verge of independence, a unique type of healing culture developed among a group of Zarma-speaking migrants from western Niger, known in Accra as the Zabarima. At the time, the Zabarima were the fastest-growing segment of the Muslim population in Accra, reaching 4,000 by 1954. Working in the most menial of jobs, such as carrying loads around the market, recycling used flour bags, or scavenging for used tins and bottles, the Zabarima survived on the margins, and their religious and healing practices reflected their social station. The Zabarima had immigrated from a part of Africa that had been Islamised for hundreds of years, but many of them were also worshippers of a pantheon of deities known as the Hauka (a Hausa word meaning “crazy”). Jean Rouch, a French filmmaker who followed the activities of migrants around West Africa, claimed that at the peak of the Hauka movement, there were approximately 100 Hauka gods in West Africa and that approximately 30 per cent of Zabarima migrants to the Gold Coast were possessed. Unlike Ga priests and spirit mediums, who worshipped and practised in public, the followers of the Hauka operated in secret. Indeed, their ceremonies would have remained largely unknown if not captured on film by Rouch, who was invited to one of their gatherings in a village suburb of Accra.

Jean Rouch’s footage of a Hauka spirit possession ceremony is striking. It includes several men and one woman gathered around a Hauka shrine in a courtyard decorated with fluttering Union Jacks. Rouch, the narrator, tells the viewer that those gathered are suffering from illnesses caused by sorcery and witchcraft and that they have come to seek the help of the Hauka deities. On the cue of a single note from a violin, the participants are slowly filled with spirits representing different colonial characters, perambulating chaotically before the camera, making grotesque faces, and foaming at the mouth. The most powerful god was Gomno, the “governor,” a deity represented by a colourful mound with a pith helmet—an image that Rouch paralleled by interposing a scene of the Gold Coast governor Arden-Clarke wearing full regalia at an official ceremony in Accra. Other prominent characters represented the network of colonial officials, including the train engineer (who marches relentlessly back and forth), the sergeant at arms (who berates the participants), and a doctor’s wife (who mediates disputes). The film climaxes with a series of heated arguments among the spirits, and a frenzied meal of dog-meat soup. After they eat, the spirits slowly leave the bodies of the possessed, and the exhausted migrant workers load themselves onto a truck, bound for their regular lives in Accra.

When Rouch screened the film in Paris in 1954, it created a scandal. Some critics thought the film, entitled Les Maitres Fous (The mad masters), was a fake made with paid actors. Others thought it was a racist portrayal of colonial subjects as ethnographic specimens. Anthropologist Marcel Griaule called the film a “travesty” because it stereotyped Africans as savages; he urged Rouch to destroy it. More recently, Les Maitres Fous has been celebrated because it depicts a form of mimicry that expresses the colonial mentalities of African subjects. As Rouch had always argued, the Hauka cult made a bold statement about the psychological effects of colonialism, representing a kind of social healing that allowed immigrants to cope with their subordinate status under White colonial rule. The “mad masters,” he maintained, were not Africans but the colonial ruling classes, who, within the context of the cult, represented the authoritarian structure of colonialism. The antithesis of benevolent colonialism, these spirits revealed a menacing crowd of military and technocratic elites fumbling about, fighting, arguing, and screaming. Even the character of the doctor’s wife, who plays the role of the mediator among the gods, becomes complicit in Hauka imaginings of colonialism, adding strength to the argument that the colonial subjects of the Gold Coast always regarded medical workers as agents of colonial power.

[This piece is culled from a book authored by Jonathan Roberts, titled: Sharing the burden of sickness: A history of healing and medicine in Accra]