West Africa XVI: Ghana--Church, Cooking, and African Heroes (11/11/23)

We explored Accra during the final day of our tour, November 11, 2023, and also during the next day, until our plane left.  A highlight, during our visit to Ghana, was to see how active the LDS Church is.  There are more than 100,000 members of the Church in Ghana, with more than 200 wards and 29 stakes.  We went to church, on Sunday, in one of the many Accra wards, or congregations.  We drove down a narrow street with tin-roofed shops on each side until we saw this sign.  Inside the block was a spacious LDS church.  The entire leadership of the ward and stake was Ghanaian, with the three Spendloves and one missionary from Pleasant Grove, Utah, as the only Anglos.  The format of the meeting was the same as at home, as were the hymn books, but the Ghanaians sang with a beauty and fervor unknown to our Utah congregation!

We also visited the Accra, Ghana temple.  The style was very familiar, although the temple was protected inside a gated area, which also held a stake center with large cultural hall.

We wandered through the stake center--so familiar, but the staff names were very different--Samuel Appiah Kubi!

We heard African rock music coming from the stake center.  We entered to find a Relief Society conference, for Church women, in full swing.  Tables were spread around the cultural hall, with teachers instructing the women on various African crafts (beading, tying headdresses) and in cooking African foods.  Drummers were preparing to play, so the women could dance.  

Our friend, Deanne Wilde, who was a missionary in Ghana, said that the Church members miss having drumming in LDS worship services.  Drumming sessions are often added to social events.
We visited, with our tour, the monument honoring Nkrumah, first president of Ghana and one of the earliest and most prominent of African freedom fighters.

This Time cover was devoted to Nkrumah in 1953!  The Pan-African freedom movement didn't truly flower unto 1960.

Groups of school children visited the monument to learn about the George Washington of their country.

An excellent museum showed paintings of Nkrumah and artifacts from his life, as well as portions of his speeches, displayed on huge screens.  The screens mentioned the rumor that Nkrumah had been assassinated by the CIA because of his friendship with Russia during the height of the Cold War.

We also visited the home and grave site of W.E.B. Du Bois, a prominent Civil Rights leader from the United States, who moved to Ghana at the end of his life and died there.  Long before the days of Martin Luther King, Du Bois had advocated aggressive actions to obtain equality for blacks in America.

Du Bois' grave was covered with flowers and gifts from well-wishers, many years after his death..

Along with  those serious monuments, we also stopped at a carpentry shop constructing specialty burial caskets in unique shapes.

The store manager showed us a casket in the shape of a soda bottle.

Until the owner died, he/she could use the casket as a cabinet.

The caskets began as wood cylinders, which were then hollowed out, carved, and painted.

One customer wanted to be buried in a Ghana Airlines plane.

Another wanted to be buried in a cell phone.

And a third wanted to be buried in a U.S. bank note!

The insides of the caskets (at least the ones not being used as cabinets) looked reassuringly traditional.

We said goodbye to our tour group at an elegant buffet dinner at one of the Accra hotels.  It was a good group and a good time.  There were 15 of us, so this photo shows only one of the two tables.

Mike arranged a cooking class for the morning before we left.  It was at a caterer's home, with the food laid out on a table in the garden and cooked over a charcoal fire.

Michael ground peppers for the jollaf rice, fried fish, and fried chicken.

The food was plentiful and delicious.  

We were joined, in our class, by two women who worked for USAID.  One was in Accra to attend a conference on food security and the other was a data specialist, running surveys on the effectiveness of programs sponsored in Africa by USAID.  The woman on the left was originally from India.  The woman on the right was named Elena and had an accent I found hard to identify.  When I noted her accent and said I couldn't place it, she said she'd prefer not to tell us where she was from.  Mike suggested she was probably Russian.  Being Russian during these days of the Russian Ukraine War no doubt raises lots of questions for her, and perhaps some hostility.  After the cooking class, our driver took us to the airport, where Mike flew to Sao Tome and Dave and I flew to Amsterdam, and then on to Salt Lake City.