At the bizarre hour of 3:30 am I set off with my daughter for a 7 a.m. flight from Lunghi International Airport to Accra. She is to start university in Ghana. In an ironic twist of fate we Sierra Leoneans, who loved to call our land the Athens of West Africa, we who gave Ghanaians their first, decades-long taste of secondary and university education, we now look to Ghana for quality education. Our educational system has deteriorated to the point where almost every institution is suspect. Meanwhile Ghana, the home of the West African Examinations Council, has been achieving outstanding results in regional exams for many years. Literacy in the latest UN HDI report, at 71.5% is more than double Sierra Leone's figure of 32.4%. As a Ghanaian friend of a friend asked, “What happened to you people?”

And it’s not just in the educational area that Ghana has been outstripping Sierra Leone and its West African counterparts. Its global reputation has risen dramatically in recent years. Three US presidents, Clinton, Bush and Obama, have visited; the United Nations has officially placed Ghana in its medium human development category, one of only two West African countries to escape the bottom category. Multinational companies have set up regional headquarters there; Ghanaian incomes are high by West African standards; the country's export earnings are strong - it is the second largest exporter of cocoa in the world. We are on our way to West Africa's star. How has Ghana been able to do it? I wonder. Maybe this trip will help me to find out.

Kotoka International Airport is decent but cold, actually somewhat like ours but bigger. The toilets are clean in both, with running water and soap. Good, good! The Ghanaian immigration agents are serious, unsmiling. I am surprised that the terminal is sparsely populated, just as Lunghi was, although this may have something to do with the relatively early hour we arrive. However once we get outside, I find a large assembly of people patiently seated on benches and am told they are waiting to meet arrivals, so evidently airport traffic will pick up during the day.

Once we set off I quickly see that Ghana has invested serious amounts of concrete on their roads. Their highways stretch endlessly, three lanes in either direction and fly-overs are two a penny. There is much sign of commercial activity, both formal and street selling. I am struck by the numerous displays of local produce sold along the roadside. Yams, oranges, pawpaws, plantains and much more are piled into little roadside stalls, evidently providing employment and income for a good number both within Accra and outside it.

I am eager to explore Accra. “Everything works in Ghana”, my Ghanaian guide, an unabashed Ghana-phile tells me proudly as he shows me the Uber service on his smart phone, taxi drivers on call within 3 minutes of where we are, moving even as I watch them on the tiny screen, available to take me anywhere I might want to go. Despite myself, I am impressed. True, it’s not a local technology, but it’s quickly been adopted and from this evidence seems to be working flawlessly.

“Ghanaians take pride in whatever they do. If they’re making something they want it to turn out with quality Even the roadside produce sellers take great pride to stock and arrange their stalls with to make them attractive.”

The houses impress me. Ghanaians certainly seem to take great pride in them. In the wealthy areas we are driving through, the houses are immaculate, with unblemished paint and manicured shrubs and lawns. There is considerable greenery in Accra, even in the face of a teeming population. And most of it is carefully planned and controlled, not like the bush that quickly springs up in Freetown. The open spaces are well-ordered, without the wild, anarchic weeds that seize control in Freetown. I wonder whether there is something so very different in the climate that alters the whole environment. The rainfall and humidity are reportedly much less. Is that the big difference? In the area I stay the houses and compounds seem so effortlessly immaculate – I’m yet to see someone actually working on them, painting, trimming shrubs or the like – and this is towards the end of the rainy season – that I wonder if our torrential downpours are a major part of our environmental torpor. Accra feels somehow more ordered than the Freetown I've just left, more...more pristine, more European if you like, somehow different. I think long about this, and much later, after I'm back in Freetown it finally dawns on me. Well before the end of the rainy season in Freetown an invasive mold/fungus/mildew has taken over much of the exposed cement surfaces: the fences, outside building walls, even concrete drives in light-trafficked or shadowed areas. We are so used to this in Freetown that we barely even notice it, even though it's all about us as we move around. Apparently, because of the drier conditions, there is much less of this in Accra. Does it also affect our agriculture? I wonder.

I try kenkey, a famous Ghanaian staple, and am disappointed at its blandness. The preparation is not helped by the fact that it is served with canned sardines and a few side condiments. Lord have mercy! Later I try Ghanaian foofoo, which apparently is pounded from plantains, not the cassava of the Sierra Leonean variety. It is light, stringy and without character, submerged at the bottom of a large bowl of very salty palm nut soup. I shudder to think what our Sierra Leonean chefs would think to see their foofoo emasculated in this way. Maybe what I’ve heard is true. Maybe Sierra Leone does have the best cuisine on the West Coast. I decide I will give Ghanaian cuisine one more try - I'll sample their banku, another popular staple, whenever I get a chance.

“Ghanaians absorbed more from the British colonial masters than Sierra Leoneans. Ghanaians are more receptive to positive, new ideas. Ghanaians are fundamentally different from Sierra Leoneans. It’s in their culture.”

I’m a little disconcerted to find I can’t understand most of the conversations around me. I had expected English to be more widely spoken, because I’d been taught that Sierra Leone is unusual in West Africa in having a lingua franca, Krio. Apparently my understanding  was limited: Accra has a lingua franca, Twi, as the other areas have their own lingua franca. To accommodate visitors from outside their area, locals can and do speak English when necessary.

The next day we set off for Accra city centre, making a quick tour first around the campus of the University of Ghana, Legon. We pass along the George W. Bush highway, an expansive thoroughfare recently constructed with American Millenium Compact money. The trip into town turns out to be a long one, more than an hour and a half, notwithstanding the 6 lanes of highway that stretch before us. Traffic pours forth in either direction, more vehicles than you would see in Freetown in a week, marshalled by traffic lights all along the way. As we approach the city center we pass gleaming office blocks and hotels, set in expansive, verdant grounds, facilities that would grace any European capital. In certain sections though where traffic is backed up street traders work the lines of vehicles, selling trifles from trays just as they would in Freetown. The gleaming towers that surround us seem testament to a greater disparity of wealth here.

At first sight, Black Star Square and Independence Circle are breathtaking in their size and beauty. The monuments are in more or less pristine condition, as they were built, huge public spaces, unsullied by  street traders or lack of maintenance as they might be in other African capitals. (There is some confusion over the names: Black Star Square, Black Star Gate, Black Star Monument, Independence Square, Independence Arch all seem to be in use). Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Centre is another huge public space, the mausoleum and statue of the country's first president surrounded by greenery perhaps four times the size of our modest Victoria Park. These sites are all incomparably different, and greater than anything we can offer in Freetown. Ghana’s leaders even at Independence had huge ambition, a clear idea of the greatness they thought their country could achieve.

Not far from Independence Circle, behind the National Stadium, I visit Osu cemetery. The grave dressings are magnificent, incomparably richer than anything to be found in Freetown. Loved ones are enshrined from head to toe in luscious, carved marble, beautifully engraved. But the grave organization is surprisingly poor, completely without order, graves tightly jammed one against the other, so that movement between them is difficult.

The National Museum is closed, I am told, under renovation for the last three years. I visit the Museum of Science and Technology, but find a deserted caricature.

I want to read more about this Ghana.  I look for a good bookshop. After several inquiries and puzzled responses I am directed to a small bookstore in downtown Accra that seems to belong to the Methodist Church, where I find mainly school texts. The national library is close by, housed in a modest building probably smaller than Sierra Leone’s equivalent. The modest collection of books on display appears not to have had many recent additions. I ask for a couple of well-known history texts, and after a cursory search of a small section the librarian on duty tells me they are not available. He doesn’t use the aging card catalog, which is in evidence, and my strongest hunch is not to ask for any sort of electronic listing of books. A-a-a-a-a-y, as the Ghanaians like to say. A-a-a-a-a-a-y!!! These are not good signs. A nation that doesn’t read is a nation unprepared to compete in the modern world.

As I move away from the brimming shopping malls, the super-highways and the glittering hotels it becomes clearer and clearer that Accra has its fair share of street traders, of poor and destitute. They are not immediately obvious to the visitor, perhaps carefully marshaled by the authorities away from prestige areas, but they are very much there. In the poorer areas I come across petty traders with their bits and pieces spread across the sidewalk just as they would be in Freetown. Every so often I pass a beggar camped out in the streets, sometimes hoping for a handout, sometimes withdrawn and desolate. In Accra even the beggars are more controlled than their Freetown counterparts. I pass a lunatic on the streets, stark naked for all the world to see, ranting to himself just as he would be on the streets of Freetown. In Makolo, a huge outside market stretches before me. Vehicles, pedestrians and street traders compete for every inch of space on the three-lane thoroughfare. Petty traders have taken over this area just as completely as they have done on Sani Abacha St., Freetown.

There is concern on the news about the fate of the cedi, which has dropped since my arrival a week ago from 4.75 to 4.85 to the US dollar. I do more research. The Ghana New Cedi has suffered horrendous depreciation since its inception. The trade balance and budget deficit have been long-term sources of concern. Yes, cocoa is being exported, but rice is being imported in increasing quantities. I learn from radio and TV of one of the big issues in Ghana: illegal gold mining, known locally as galamsey;hordes of illegal Chinese miners have taken over large swathes of farmland to prospect for gold, denuding the villages, polluting the land and rivers, and raising concerns of a drop in Ghana's agriculture. It is apparently causing much bitterness in the countryside. Are these villagers the ones now hawking on the streets in Accra? Part of the galamsey problem is that in the prevailing traditional land tenure system so widespread in West Africa, many of the villagers do not own the land on which they farm. When Chinese appear with ready cash, the family elders and/or chiefs are easily won over. I look at the refugees caught fleeing Africa for Europe via the Mediterranean. Ghana has its fair share.

So what do we have here? The same old West African story with minor Ghanaian modifications? An elite of politicians and the wealthy, built on God-given natural resources and the backs of poor cocoa farmers trapped in a hopelessly outdated socio-economic system? A glittering superstructure funded by centuries of exploitation of huge natural wealth built on a crumbling, shaky foundation that propels uncompetitive rural poor to scrabble for survival in Accra and flee for refuge in Europe? A government, possibly more efficient and disciplined than many of its West African counterparts, but still unable to make the fundamental transformations that the country requires in order to be globally competitive? A country moving backward compared to the rest of the world, but moving backward less slowly than its West African counterparts? So it SEEMS to US like it’s moving forward? I don’t know. I really don’t know.

...Forward to Part 2