Life in Ghana: Driving in the dark
In the early 1980s, a British High Commissioner to Ghana was traveling overnight on his way back to Accra from the Volta region when his car hit a pile of unmarked gravel used for road repairs. The High Commissioner received serious leg injuries and his wife’s injuries were fatal. A few years earlier, a British engineer employed at a brewery in Kumasi had suffered a similar fate, crashing into the rear of a parked logging truck on an unlit road. Driving in Ghana during the day was dangerous, driving at night was dangerous enough to deter many private drivers from venturing beyond the limited confines of the city lights.
A driver who is familiar with road conditions in Europe or North America may have difficulty imagining African road conditions at night, because many of the aids he takes for granted are absent. In the 1970s and 1980s in Ghana, most highways had no markings to delineate the edges and only a few major highways had a broken white line to mark their center. All rural roads and many urban roads had no overhead lighting, traffic signals were few and far between, often obscured by foliage, and easy to miss. Potholes lurked in the shadows, and pedestrians and cyclists without lights or reflective clothing were nearly invisible in the oncoming headlights. Cars with a single headlight were common and were sometimes mistaken for a motorcycle with disastrous results.
The bumps may hide at night, but they don’t go away. The most dangerous were those that broke the edge of the road in a large jagged sawtooth. Instead of a broad white line shining in the beam of the headlights to clearly define the edge of the road, there was a black void in which lurked V-shaped craters waiting to knock the unsuspecting driver off the road. Instinctively turning away from these edge terrors, the driver drew ever closer to the dazzling stream of advancing headlights that could at any moment cross his path in a desperate circumnavigation of their own potholes.
While in the 1980s many vehicles drove at night with poor and faulty lights, other motorists seemed determined to show off the power of their headlights. Not only the headlights were dazzling. Taxis and trotros often created a similar impact with additional high powered brake lights. These seemed intended to produce a visual simulation of a horn blast and could be considered redundant in competition with the constant cacophony of the audible kind. Life on the road at night can often be short on light, but never short on sound.
In Ghana, the popular style of music was ‘highlife’. By night as well as by day, the taxis carried streams of highlife music, spilling through the open windows of their cassette decks and making children dance in waves through the city streets. At night, the contributions of the taxis blended into an all-pervasive scene of high life, of which their yellow wings and illuminated ceiling signs became a potent symbol. For the driver who planned to travel far, it was better to give in to the temptation to delay with taxis in the bright lights of the city and postpone departure until the first light of dawn. Driving at night could easily lead to the permanent achievement of a great life of a different kind.