Tamale

Julia Littmann is back in the here and now and will leave the oohing-and-aahing to her exchange partner from Tamale: Zakaria Alhassan.

After my three weeks as the guest journalist at the Daily Graphic, Zakaria Alhassan and I travelled together from Tamale in northern Ghana to Freiburg. Temperature on departure: 37 degrees. But, then we already froze together in the departure terminal at Accra Airport. Wherever possible, even ridiculously large rooms are deep-frozen by air conditioning in Ghana. By contrast, on the plane the temperatures were practically moderate. While flying, I think of my climate footprint and fret, guiltily, but my love of travelling through the air is irrepressible in spite of the climate. It still always has something of the childish magic of wondrously floating on a flying carpet. It seems that Zak feels differently in this respect. He jitters until the landing. Afraid? “No!” he bravely protests.

The seven or eight degrees on our welcome in Frankfurt are real. Our shivering is, too. The drizzly rain, the tiredness after a night flight – we were surely both in more sparkly moods. In Freiburg, the Goethe-Institut promptly equipped the exchange journalist from Tamale with a city map. I asked for one of those during my three weeks in Tamale in vain. “We’ll take care of it,” was what I heard from day one. In the meantime, I’ve learned that hardly more than a sketch of the labyrinthine city about the size of the palm of my hand printed on some travel guides exists. Yet, for my Ghanaian colleague, starting right out with a perfect city map is hardly a locational advantage. Reading maps is so uncommon in Ghana that Zak, even in his greatest distress, would probably not even try to orientate himself by means of the exact abstraction on the page. He finds his way using landmarks like prominent buildings.

For the rest, very soon after arriving in his boarding-house apartment, the Ghanaian journalist discovers one invaluable locational advantage: thanks to WLAN, Zak has access to the internet there 24 hours a day. He then surfs as if intoxicated. This would not be thinkable in Tamale even on a good day, where blackouts and network failures alternate with astonishing reliability. You want to check and answer your email, or even attach files or tiny pictures? Often, it requires a number of attempts and it never goes quickly. Sometimes just to email a single article of mine to the Daily Graphic or the BZ, I have to cycle the four kilometres into town from the neighbourhood internet café to there discover that the office is also disconnected. So, off I go again between the Daily Graphic and the internet café, drenched in sweat and powdered in dust. Although the many articles I wrote for the Goethe-Institut were then translated wonderfully and swiftly by Faith Gibson-Tegethoff, they have not yet been printed in the Daily Graphic. “They will all be printed,” explains my colleague Zak, who cites the huge supply of exchange programmes as the reason for minimal interest in any real collaboration. But, from now on, the “Close-Up” will finally take place with my articles in the Daily Graphic. So, while Zakaria Alhassan enriches the BZ with his African perspective, the exchange will be visible practically simultaneously in Accra and Tamale, too. Zakaria Alhassan wants to report for the Badische Zeitung mainly about the lives of the Ghanaians in Freiburg and, as a practicing Muslim, he is also interested in the lives of Islamic people in Freiburg. After I let him look over my shoulder for a month at the “Emails from Tamale,” Zak will now take the baton from me and describe his Freiburg experiences in the BZ – he’s already promised a report on his stroll across the Christmas market.