The U.S. Embassy in Ghana is a large, secured office building in the bustling West African port city of Accra, but for a decade scammers convinced some folks that their humble two-story structure — without security fencing, U.S. military guards,… or Americans of any sort — was indeed the office of the U.S. Ambassador to Ghana. [More]
ghana
Consumerist Contamination of Ghana
By 1.4.06
Over at the New York Times, Princeton philosopher Kwame Anthony Appiah has written an extremely thoughtful look on the cultural and consumerist “contamination” of traditional Ghanaian life. There’s so many good quotes in it, we could just go nuts with the blockquote tags, but overall, it is a remarkably fair piece on the recent influx of Western media and products into a largely agrarian, tribal African country; a piece on contamination, unlike most, that doesn’t sneer at third-world consumers as unthinking automatons too ignorant and unworldly to see their kente cloths as more “authentic” than imported Levis, but people who make cultural and consumerist choices based upon their own free desires, and who should be encouraged to continue doing so as the drivers of their own cultural destiny.
