Christmas Eve and Xmas: Cape Coast and Anomabu

"Evil Ewok village and Dirty Dancingesque Beach Resort" Anna E. Koelle


We spent Xmas eve day getting to Cape Coast from Busua, the usual nightmare of hot buses and cars, sitting with your knees tucked up to your chin, your feet on a tire, dragging bags through car parks, asking each driver, Cape Coast? and struggling on down the line of parked vans. We toured the Cape Coast Castle, the seat of slave exports for that part of West Africa, built in the 17th century. Archeologists removed a foot of human feces from the male slave dungeon before exposing the original floors. We toured the castle with an African family, and standing in the dungeons, the condemnation cell -all lit by a naked bulb on a wire- the "Gate of No Return", as it was truly, hideously called, where slaves passed from the castle for the last time before being loaded onto waiting ships, I wanted to crawl under a rock. We left for Anomabu around 5 in the evening, and got dropped off on the highway on the edge of town, in a sandy lot with our bags at dusk. We set off into this sandy, derelect town -the only images of it I retain are a big greenish, stone church and endless narrow streets between cement shacks leading to the ocean and big, heavy fishing boats and garbage on the sand- in search of a certain cheap hotel listed in the guide. We asked people along the way but no one spoke English, only Fanti, and the only word they understood was "hotel". They pointed and said, "at the sea". They dispatched two little boys to guide us to the hotel; one of them, bless him, carried my duffle bag draped over his head like a snake. Here we began a forty minute march, first through the streets of town where each child rubbed their fingers together and said, "cash, cash, cash" and followed us to the beach till we were at the center of a chaotic, bumping orbit of skinny kids in cotton dresses and torn underwear. Their numbers swelled along the beach; they followd us as we plodded along, speaking a fake, wordless English -just approximating the sounds- and laughing. We kept asking, "Where? Where is it?" and the boys, who spoke a little English, pointed down the beach, insisting, "hotel, hotel." We didn't see it till we were right on top of it, and -shocker- it wasn't the ten dollar a night establishment we were searching for, but a huge, fancy beach resort crawling with ex-pats. White people as far as the eye could see, a little beach-hut village of them. The Anomabu Beach Resort: imagine the resort where Baby and her family stay in Dirty Dancing: the cabins, the white families, a big central dining hall hung with lights, all set on a beach in Ghana half a mile from a ramshackle fishing village. Weird. Every book in the lending library in the dining room was in German, except one copy of The Divine Secrets of the Yaya Sisterhood.