Tamale

The panorama from jalousie windows on all sides, the view of the morning bustle on the marketplace, of honking cars and beeping mopeds, which at all speeds elegantly push their way along the street and between them, next to them, in front of them, behind them are people, dressed in more colours than we previously thought possible in our spectrum: it is like a foreign familiar film.

The dominant street adornment in the middle of the dusty red medial strip of kilometre-long Bolgatanga Road, a main artery going right across Tamale, are red Vodafone advertising banners. Two things loom everywhere above the flat city: minarets and mobile phone masts. Both go under a bit in the wonderful milling crowds. There is so much going on between all the little sales stalls, corrugated iron shanties, clay brick houses, a never-ending back and forth of young women with children carried close on their backs, men on bicycles groaning under the loads of towers of pails or mountains of fabric. By contrast, the women stride along entirely impassive to their burdens, often not only their infants, but, for instance, huge platters of whole fruit shop displays – on their heads.

Above the throaty croaking of strange birds, the blare of wobbly boom boxes, above the babble of voices and racket of engines, five times a day the voice of the muezzin, here called the "Lanzan," is heard calling to prayer. Tamale is a chiefly Muslim city; approximately 85 percent of the population are of the Islamic faith.

Speaking of the (estimated) facts: recently, the news was published in Ghana that it is the country with the world’s highest density of mobile phones. Vodafone, here we are! And although Tamale is spread out in the savannah an arduous twelve-hour journey from the capital city of Accra, the city of 500,000 is, thanks to this pole position, closely linked to the global village with its worldwide mobile phone ranking. "Away" was once different. There was just a pad of paper and excited notes. Today, blogs immediately capture exotic impressions. A picture puzzle arises between here and there, between the 48th parallel and shortly before the equator. It’s on every channel and not only the phones, but also web searches, emails and blog deliveries work just as precisely as they do in the centre of Freiburg.

Apart from the power cuts, when, the boom boxes are silenced for a few hours. Also, and far less comfortable than that, the fans stop blowing the warm air about with their flapping blades. Only the honking does not stop, the throng, the constant movement from here to there, baskets full of fruit, barrels of oil, jars of water, fetched somewhere and taken somewhere – without hurry, but as if pulled on a string. The only ones that hold their positions are, of course, the Lanzan on the minaret and the mobile phones.