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发表于 2007-3-10 11:08
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Nkrumah, Ghana's founder, embarked on an ambitious program, building schools, houses, roads, a new port, factories. The idea was to wean Ghana from trade and investment with Britain and the other colonial powers. But Nkrumah's policies came at a high price. Industrialization cost millions, and the government neglected cocoa, Ghana's traditional export crop, which brought in most of the foreign exchange. Ghana's economy began to fall apart. In 1964, in a move that would be repeated by other African leaders in the decades to come, Nkrumah declared Ghana a one-party state and himself leader for life. The early optimism was replaced by a deep sense of disappointment and lost opportunity. "There were a lot of problems," Kwame says. "People were getting hungry. Nkrumah was looking to the East for help. He kept paying everyone's salaries, but things were not working how he planned." In early 1966, with the President on a visit to China, the army seized power. "We all waited to see if the military could do a better job than the politicians," says Kwame.人在德国 社区" L# a. b9 _7 u: `; l9 ^# [6 s
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It could not. For the next two decades Ghana was racked by instability and economic mismanagement. A revolving cast of military leaders left people with little faith in their government and no chance to change things. It was a cancer eating the entire continent. Beginning with the first successful coup in sub-Saharan Africa, in Togo in 1963, at least 200 attempts were made to seize power in Africa over the following four decades; 80 or so were successful. Bitter civil wars erupted, some of them tribal struggles for natural resources, some of them prompted by foreign powers. By the 1970s, Africa had become one of the hottest fronts in the cold war. "We had lots of fears. There was no freedom of speech," says Kwame, about the time of troubles. "You go about, and you see the army. The economy was getting worse." By the late 1970s, Ghana was a mess. A drought had pushed up food prices; jobs had disappeared. "Bribery and corruption is all over the world, but where it is too glaring, it kills the economy," says Kwame, who moved his family to Accra and opened a small construction company. The hopes of independence had vanished.csuchen.de3 B4 ^; h. X7 k: t! \8 h8 T9 I
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Kwame's daughter Suzzy Afua Deh was 5 at the time of Ghana's first coup. She remembers those early years with fondness. "Life then was easy because my father worked," she told me as we sat outside her two-room concrete-block house in Lapaz, a poor neighborhood of dirt roads and street hustlers in northwestern Accra. "Everything was O.K." Suzzy, now 46, stayed behind with her grandparents in Fodome when her parents moved to Accra. The extended African family has always been a welcome insurance policy when times get tough.
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1 n, }; D, a2 K1 B* E, L5 MAfter school, Suzzy decided to continue her studies. She was 15 and wanted to be a secretary. But Ghana's economy was collapsing, and a crunch in the supply of building materials meant there was no work for her father and no money for fees. Some people's lives are changed by poor grades or a bad decision. For Suzzy, it was a cement shortage. Unable to afford college, she drifted for a few years. At one point she tried to join the police force in Accra. After Suzzy aced her exams, the senior officer refused to let her start training, apparently because she didn't have the money for a bribe./ h. x5 f# s5 A0 y5 j+ H
9 S( I6 L, m( U1 v0 g7 @In 1980, at just 19, Suzzy married Gershon Aka, a bank clerk 12 years her senior. The first few years of married life were a strange combination of personal joys and national disaster. Suzzy and her husband had two children--son Jubilant, now 25, and daughter Nutifafe (Peace), 23--but drought and hunger were tightening their grip. "You would go to the forest and search for cassava," says Suzzy. "Whatever you could find."
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The country remained under military rule. In 1979, Flight Lieut. Jerry Rawlings deposed another military government in another bloody coup. But Rawlings was different from earlier leaders. Although guilty of human-rights abuses in those early years, his government instituted a series of free-market reforms that slowly got the economy moving again. Suzzy, who today lies awake at night worrying whether her children will make it home safely, liked Rawlings' emphasis on security. "There was not much armed robbery; you could move about at night," she says. Gershon shakes his head. "Suzzy hadn't seen anything different before, so she couldn't compare," he says of Rawlings' time. "I felt we needed something new. You could not speak freely. There was no freedom."
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Today Ghana is democratic, and its economy is growing. Yet Suzzy and Gershon still struggle. After being forced to retire from the bank, Gershon opened a small office offering secretarial services. But his computer broke last year, and he rarely gets any business. To make ends meet, Suzzy buys food at Accra's central market and then resells it around her neighborhood. The family is perpetually behind on its $16-a-month rent, and when I visited last August, the power in the house had been switched off after a meter reader said the meter had been installed illegally. The couple, who now have four children, including Wisdom, 2--Suzzy calls him "our surprise"--often wonder how they will eat.3 U) P7 V: k: H! ^
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Suzzy's two hours of joy a week come on Sunday at the Global Evangelical Church, a large building filled with simple wooden benches a 10-minute bus ride from her home. Gershon goes to a more traditional Presbyterian church--a certificate of honor on the wall of the family's tiny living room commends him for being "a reliable choirmaster"--but Suzzy and the kids prefer the excitement and entertainment of evangelical preachers. Christianity, especially Evangelicalism, is growing faster in Africa than anywhere else on the planet. Promising riches not just in death but here on earth, the churches often provide Africa's urban poor their one chance to hope. For Suzzy's third-born child, that's especially true.
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& h9 n/ V5 P- q QDelight Kofi Aka was born in 1988, just as things in Ghana began to improve. Now 18, Delight is tall and lean, with the naive swagger of someone who has not yet known failure. He is in his final year at a boys' Catholic boarding school in the Volta region, one of the best in Ghana. The family cannot afford to pay the school fees (some $600 a year), but two years ago, Suzzy convinced her pastors at Global Evangelical that her son was gifted and deserved a scholarship. Grandfather Kwame paid the $150 entrance fee, and Delight was handed the best chance in years of securing the family's prosperity.人在德国 社区9 |8 u9 N5 U$ u- d# S$ b7 H
2 m) v4 S# w ]& U* A8 S. v# C It's common in Africa for massive expectation to be invested in a single child. "You have to force out the one that is intelligent," says Kwame, "so he can be the breadwinner for the family." That's tough for those left behind--Delight's older brother and sister both left school at 16 and struggle to find work. It can be tough on the chosen one too. Delight was singled out at a young age and sent off at 13 to live with his grandfather so he could attend a good junior high. "I feel responsibility," he says. "It's a priority to study hard and become something, and if I fail any of my exams, it will be a disgrace to my church and my family. Everybody's eyes are on you."
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For school, Delight is reading The Gods Are Not to Blame by Nigerian playwright Ola Rotimi, which transplants Sophocles' Oedipus Rex to Africa. Delight talks about his hope to study chemical engineering or agriculture at university. He pronounces Catholic "Cad-lick" in his lilting Ghanaian English. In the family house there is a small table in the corner with a stove sitting on it. Pots and pans stack up under chairs that line the walls and on the shelves of a bureau that also holds a tiny color television. There is a small refrigerator, the insulation in its door showing through the rust. Clotheslines crisscross beneath the plasterboard ceiling. "I'd like a new house," he says. "That's my dream. That my family can live in a better home."
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NATIONAL PORTRAIT: The Deh family at home; from left, Suzzy, holding her 2-year-old son Wisdom, Delight and Kwame人在德国 社区% g/ c- n+ B! u4 _' l: K$ O$ g
8 g, K; I) K. M. {( @+ cSuch are the tempered hopes of Africa these days. Delight is neither as optimistic as his grandfather was at independence nor as pessimistic as his mother. His generation has lived through the time of the Rwandan genocide, in which Hutu militias killed 800,000 Tutsi and moderate Hutu; the brutality of Sierra Leone, with its arm-chopping gangs of child soldiers; the elemental fighting in the Democratic Republic of Congo, beginning in the mid-'90s, known as Africa's First World War, a series of conflicts that killed 4 million people. But he and the millions of young Africans like him also have the incredible leadership of Nelson Mandela and the redemptive tale of South Africa to inspire them and, in places like Ghana and Mozambique and Tanzania, the sense that the future will be brighter than the past. The Dehs are one family, one story, in a continent that is just getting started. |
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