Life in the Zongo - Q-News July 2006, Issue 367

Amid the squalor and sprawl of Ghana’s overcrowded cities you will find the Muslim zongos. Where a cruel history meets an uncertain future and where caravans of hope collide with convoys of despair, Abdullah Bradford found his faith and more.

Ghana brings many delights, but none more so, than interacting with the colourful, vibrant, inquisitive Muslims of the zongo. It was in a zongo, less than three years ago that I embraced Islam, making my shahadah in the presence of a fine looking black, wiry Sheikh, whose sharp facial features were softened by his elegant, pointed chin-beard. His tall wife, several of their hawk-eyed children and my Ghanaian wife-to-be, all witnessed my testimony of faith, not once, but three times. He wanted to make sure that my broken Arabic reached the heavenly Divine. Ever since, the zongo has remained a geographical and cultural space that always kindles my excitement and expectations - just as they never let me forget the cruelty of poverty and the legacy of colonialism.

In the modern era, overcrowding, woefully inadequate sanitation and dilapidated buildings are the hallmarks of the zongo. But the word - originating from the Sahel region of the north - means ‘caravan’ and was once used to describe the areas where trans-Saharan traders would rest their ware-loaded camels as they stopped on the fringes of towns and settlements in the south to barter cattle and cloth for salt and Ashanti gold. Before long, the zongo areas became permanently settled by northern Muslim migrants. But by the turn of the (twentieth) century, the British colonial masters had found a new purpose for the outlying zongo areas: convenient out-of-sight, out-of-mind locations to contain the northern migrants they were exploiting as a source of labour for colonial expansion. The early economic migrants from the Muslim north provided the cheap labour to build, and work in, the grandiose towns that were designed and implemented using the white man’s ‘town and country planning’ codes. Even the local indigenes were included, and catered for, in the grand city master plans, only somebody forgot the northerners, as they were left to fend for themselves in invisible zongo spaces.

In West Africa - sometime after the arrival of firearms, maize, syphilis and tomatoes - the ‘garden city’ concept finally arrived, and with it the early seeds of gentrification that were to create the environmental and social problems that are encountered in the modern day zongo. During the colonial years, urban expansion slowly gained momentum, and then independence in 1957 pushed this process a little faster, until it finally gathered juggernaut pace in the rapidly globalising era of the new millennium, thus bringing new meaning to the concept of peri-urban change. Consequently, the zongo settlements, which were once conveniently sited on the periphery of provincial towns, are now to be found smack in the middle of sprawling metropolises such as Accra and Kumasi.

In Ghana, urbanization has become self-perpetuating as economic migrants from the north continuously descended on the cities of the south in search of lucrative, but nonexistent, urban employment. For example, on the streets of Accra and Kumasi, droves of pre-pubescent girls and young women are to be found working as street hawkers or market porters; their goal is one of the same, to earn enough money to buy kitchen wares before returning north one day in hope of securing marriage.
No kitchen wares, no husband.

When the sun sets in urban Ghana, hoards of northern girls can be seen walking back to the zongo suburbs, like Nima in Accra and Aboabo in Kumasi, where sleep awaits them in dilapidated and overcrowded rooms that are shared with the infamous malaria carrying vector: the mosquito.

For me, the zongo remains the age-old traditional ‘caravan’, but now rather the temporary stopping place for the modern nomadic, although my romantic reflections for this culturally unique space are often dashed, for example, when my pregnant wife required treatment once more for malaria or the eyesight of the child from next door further deteriorates because the parents simply cannot afford the necessary hospital treatment. But it is the Muslims of the zongo that have taught me what lies at the real spiritual heart of Islam: charity, generosity, love and peace. When these four qualities are present, the zongo remains the colourful and vibrant ‘caravan’ of the ancient past where nomadic travellers spread Islam through action and example, but when they are absent, the zongo becomes the squalid urban slum, the true hallmark of globalised poverty and the colonial legacy, where fundamentalism and despair breed, thrive and potentially spread due to ingrained misery and continued and persistent global exploitation.

Abdullah Bradford has a PhD in development and environment. He is a member of a disaster response team for a British-based international relief organization. Together with his zongo wife and two children, he lives a simple and rustic lifestyle.