We’ll Be Fine…

Picture courtesy: Caroline Koomson. One of the wigs on sale…

The world quietened around me. In that strange hour before the sun rose, I found myself in familiar territory. The voice was sincere, and urgent and alarmingly distressed. The ruse was getting old and she knew it. She needed to come up with something new.

I met her silence and turned the conversation to a less uncomfortable subject. I’m listening to Nicki Minaj’s ‘The Pinkprint’ album. The lyrics are wonderfully nuanced.

Stanley was surprised I was listening to this record when he called and heard me playing it. He didn’t let the moment pass. Stanley often wondered where I picked up my musical tastes but I always enjoyed his protestations whenever he sat in my car and I played something out of the mainstream. I remembered all the times I had forced him to listen to jazz and classical music instead of the pop music he usually craved.

I have often wondered what the boundaries of realities were. It was a Saturday and the roadside pub was unusually rancous this morning. I am sitting at my favourite spot at the corner  sipping my favourite bottle of Guinness to a background music of Bob Marley’s ‘Rat Race’.

I have been staying away from the television and radio as much as possible these days. It was part of my new routine. But something on social media caught my attention. It was about a report from the Ministry of Roads and Highways  that GH¢150m had been allocated for the patching of potholes across the country. I must say this was a necessary budgetary allocation if one had ever used extensively the road network in this country. In as much as I applaud the ministry for their timely intervention in fixing the potholes menace, I must hasten to add that the ministry should consider penalising contractors and engineers who constructed some of these roads. How is it possible that roads constructed in less than ten years have suddenly developed potholes all over? In some cases, the roads lasted just a year or two, and after one heavy downpour, these ugly potholes reared their ugly heads. Try using the Jukwa to Twifo Hemang road and you’d see what I am talking about. I do not pretend to be a civil engineer but I have seen quite a number of the potholes patching teams on some of our roads and the backward nature of the technology deployed in the fixing leaves much to be desired.

A new machine from JCB, called the PotholePro fixes a pothole in eight minutes, I am wondering when our ministry would get at least two of such machines for every region.

Just maybe, the potholes may be serving a useful purpose afterall because without it, I shudder to think about the level of speeding I would have encountered on the Tema-Akosombo road.

I often eavesdropped on her funny, earnest, quite terrifying conversations. I wasn’t particularly worried but found them amusing.  I am listening to Nina Simone’s Four Women, playing loudly across the street. It is coming from a shop selling books in Accra’s busy central business district. I wondered if those using that stretch of road to the very many beauty cosmetic shops just across the alley understood the ideological implication of Ms.Simone’s music.

What was I doing at this hour within the central business district? I was going to a shop to pick up an order for wigs. How come I had not paid attention to the very fast-moving wig business in recent years? As I crawled through the choked central business district, I realised the biggest shops and by far the most ubiqituous now were the shops selling wigs. I had an inclination about the growing wig business after observing the trend of status posts by quite a number of my female friends on whatsapp but I wasn’t prepared for the sheer scale of it as I observed within the central business district.

A decade earlier, the craze of Brazillian and Peruvian wigs was on a low rise during my undergraduate days in university. The top models on television were spotting them. Most of the popular ladies owned one or two of such wigs. But the majority of ladies as far as I observed back then were rather comfortable with their natural hair and in some instances with a few extensions. So how did the craze of wigs displaced the preference of natural hair? The shop I was picking up my package was on the second floor of a four-storey building. It was one of three shops within the buiding selling wigs. The shopfront speaker just at the entrance blared off distorted hiplife from Kwesi Arthur.

What is it with wigs and the politics of beauty now? Writing about wigs in her short story, “Everything Counts”,Ama Ata Aidoo queried if; “perhaps her people had really missed the boat of original thinking after all?’. Is the wigs simply an easy way out? Just a hat or a turban, as Auntie Ama came down to in her story? Or was the wearing of wigs somehow complex than that?

The shop I entered was a potpourri of wigs of all kinds. I was pleasantly surprised and educated. I lost count of the number of ladies who entered the shop within the forty minutes I spent there. It was obvious this was a growing frontier of business.

The weaves, wigs and hair extensions market is estimated to be six billion dollars globally and growing at ten to thirty percent annually. Adi Godrej, chairman of the 3.3-billion dollars Godrej Industries, an Indian company, in 2018 said; “African hair is known for fragility and roughness, forcing African women to spend a higher proportion of their money on hair care than women in other parts of the world.”

I am sure my grandmother who kept her hair natural for ninety years would have a thing or two to say about that.

In 2021, Ghana spent 226 million dollars importing wigs, becoming the third largest importer of wigs in the world. Wigs became the fourteenth most imported product in Ghana. Have we lost the boat of original thinking?

Every part of the car rattled as it come to a stop just by the curb behind my window. I reluctantly got in. She insisted she wanted to take me out so I should park my car and she was going to drive to our destination. It was only her second driving experience beyond a distance of twenty-kilometres since she got her license a week earlier. I was not comforted by the fact that I was essentially a guinea pig for my therapist’s daughter’s driving adventure. But I had given her my word so there was no backing out. The seat belts were broken and dirty. You could feel the clogging of the ventilation ducts by the faulty air conditioning system, which made the inside of the car unbearably hot. It was obvious this 2001 Toyota corolla sedan had seen better days, Jenna turned out to be a better driver than I thought. It was a quiet journey. We stood at the beach, watching the fishermen silently. I handed over the copy of the the Daily Graphic newspaper I had been reading to her. I told her to check the article written by the veteran journalist, Elizabeth Ohene. The article was titled; “Regrets, I have a few”. She read it intensely in silence.

It was her aloofness and eccentricity which first attracted me to her. She was fascinated by my age and looks. Quite mundane. She insisted I looked like a twenty-five year old postgraduate student instead of the mid-thirties professional I was telling her. It was more than a year ago but everything was seared in my memory.

Picking up her thoughts after reading the article, she asked if I had any regrets in life. The beach was getting noisy and crowded. She didn’t wait for me to answer. “For a reasonably educated person like me, I have such an awful taste in men”, she said. Her face was thoughtful and kind, I was almost moved to tears for her, I wondered what private heartache could ail such a kind young girl at the relatively young age of twenty-two. I still kept thinking of Ms.Ohene’s article and Jenna’s question; “do I have any regrets in life?” I turned to her and asked a question in return, “for what is life if there are no regrets?” She smiled at me.

Pulling a sickie wasn’t something I was prone to but I took out my mobile phone and sent my boss a quick text that I was going to be late. His reply was swift. I should take care of myself, he said.

The terrifying desolation of my life in the past few months bugged my thoughts. It was now a great burden of my existence. Regrets are inevitable part of life…and I certainly have loads of them!