My Role Being "The Man."

My study abroad experience here in Ghana has thus far been educational, challenging, personally touching, life-changing, and now with the latest developments, ventured into the world of surreality of celebrity. Indeed, this blog is now recounting the exploits of a semi-professional actor in Ghana. I said it in a recent blog post, I'll say it now, and I will probably say it again before I leave: sometimes the truth is stranger and far more mysterious than fiction.

Let me back up, since the reader is most likely and quite understandably lost. This tale begins last Friday, as I was spending my lunch break with my friend, Mavis, in the food court at Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST). I was approached by a tall young man with bright gray eyes who said his name was Kenneth. He introduced himself and said that he was helping to produce a film which required an obrunie man, and he was wondering if I was interested in playing a role in a film production.

My first reaction, as per any time when approached by a random stranger in a foreign country, was to say "No, thanks," and move on. Then I felt a rather large wave of sympathy for this man considering that he was looking for a white man in Ghana, no easy task by any stretch of the imagination. So we heard him out, and in the end he offered me 200 Ghana Cedis for participating, which is roughly 150 dollars and would sustain me for the rest of my time in Ghana. My inexperience at haggling led me to accept the offer without asking for a higher bid, but I was elated at the opportunity to be financially in the black and accepted.

My role entailed playing a British Governor, known in the Twi language as "Amrado," in the colonial era. The film recounts a tale that has previously mostly been known only among the Asante (the term "Ashanti," I have learned, is the Anglosized version of the Asante). It tells the factual tale of the Asante, known for their trickster ways, deceiving my character out of a tribute of the Golden Stool, in the process initiating the "Ashanti Wars" of the early 20th century. And believe me, the fact that my thoughts have constantly drawn back to existentialist musings of a Westerner in Africa and am now playing the literal colonizing oppressor in an important Ghanaian film did not escape me. Oh, the irony.

Ghana's film industry is small but it produces many pictures notable not so much for their quality as much as the simple that such a poor country can still present formidable entertainment. Nevertheless, there is a considerable number of Ghanaian movie stars, and many of them were acting in this important film production. So when I went to film my scenes in the picture, I was acting with some of Ghana's most recognizable actors from film and theater. It was the Ghanaian equilvalent of a Hollywood movie.

One funny anecdote in the filming is that my character leads a small regiment of African soldiers to speak to the Asante king, queen, and chiefs. So in the film I am powerful and intimidating, but filming this scene meant one obrunie playing a colonial official surrounded by native Ghanaians, as well as a Nigerian. This film is impressive for this small country, and one of the indicators of that is that they obtained real unloaded rifles from the period, and we were supervised by an actual police officer with a loaded AK-47. So after marching up to the Asante symposium, I prepared to begin reading my lines when I here a rifle load behind me. Needless to say, I got a little nervous, and it wasn't all stage fright.

But filming went off without a hitch, and at one point one of my "soldiers" served me pineapple juice while another scene was filmed. And to top it off, I was excused from school for this Wednesday when the filmmakers will take my homestay brother and me to Cape Coast to film one last scene. Since they didn't tell me about this in the initial agreement, they tacked on another 100 Ghana Cedis for the inconvenience (Cape Coast was the home of the African portion of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, and was also where the British based their operations since they couldn't go inland without the high risk of getting malaria). I'll only be there for a day, but we will return to Cape Coast for my school program in late October to tour the slave castles and whatnot.

So my pilgrimage to Ghana has taken quite an unexpected turn. In a sense it's a shame that this strange series of events happened, as it will prevent me from writing more about my experiences in Ghana. As I was telling my parents last night, this blog has only documented a small fraction of my observations and experiences here, even without this latest tale. In any case, the next few days will be interesting, and this may be my last blog post for a few weeks. After returning from Cape Coast I will be spending two weeks in a local village doing research on some aspect of life there. I'm sure my next blogpost will have plenty, so until then...