Ed is Dead!

I’ve been in Ghana now for about a week, after leaving this place a year ago. Teresa (another MA student working under the same supervisor as me) and I both agree that it feels like we never left. It’s great to be back! The first few days were spent in Ghana’s capital Accra, where we had to meet a representative of the Ghana Wildlife Commission so that we may pay a hefty research fine and ask for official permission to conduct research at BFMS. This task had Teresa and me scrambling through various parts of Accra looking for someone (anyone) with the proper equipment to make passport-sized pictures of each of us and to photocopy our passport signature pages. Needless to say, we got all of this done in one day (a miracle when you’re on Ghana time) and we even got the chance to meet some rich Ghanaian people who introduced us to Joe, their pet monkey (mangabey) who was tied up on a rope outside of their large home. Poor Joe did not seem like a happy monkey. He is bound to get even more depressed as he reaches sexual maturity and decides that all he really wants is to be free so that he may find himself a mangabey girlfriend or two (or three).
The cultural differences between our ‘Western’ and Ghanaian societies enable some interesting situations to occur. Wherever we go we are constantly called “obruni” (i.e. white man or stranger). Speaking for myself, I feel shame when I hear myself called this. Obruni seems to sum up the spite that Ghanaians and many other Africans feel towards the white colonialists who came to Africa to ravage the land and people. I feel shame when I hear someone call me obruni because I know that I am white and with the colour of my skin come certain implied wrong-doings (sins maybe?) that I cannot change ... they are in my history. Well, maybe not my personal history since most Romanians were generally the ones being persecuted by various totalitarian regimes rather than doing the persecuting, but you get my drift. Actually Ghana has always reminded me a lot of Bucharest, Romania, around the time when I grew up; right before and after the Ceausescu’s communist crap ended. The country was a mess compared to nowadays. I don’t mean to offend Ghana because I like it here, but I find comfort in some of the familiar comparisons I find with my own childhood.
Other than being called obruni, a white person must get used to being petted (we have considerable more hair on our arms than Ghanaians), getting our hair pulled and/or stroked, and our freckles poked and picked at (I don’t think Ghanaians have freckles generally). A white tourist must also get used to the public urination and defecation, and if you are a woman, constantly being asked if you have a husband. The answer must always be “Yes, and he is big and strong and can beat you!” or you will never escape. Either way you should be prepared to receive several marriage proposals, because any white woman in Ghana must be looking for a man to show her how to be a woman right? Teresa has a list she has actually written down, of the best/worst pickup lines she had ever received from Ghanaian men. She has a lot of them, but my favourite has always been the most shocking: “I want you to be my girlfriend! Do you know why? Because I have a big black penis and it will make you very happy.” LOL
Cell phone service in Ghana is amazing! The country literally bi-passed the entire landline phone system because by the time individuals were ready to get a personal phone, cellular technology was already super. Something that has never happened to me here before which has occurred to me within the past few days, is getting strange phone calls from some Ghanaian who keeps yelling at me “I want you to stop calling my wife. I want you to stop seeing my wife. Do you understand?” The first time this happened it was 1 am and I had no fucking clue what was happening or what continent I was. The next few times he called I told him (at first politely and eventually forcefully) that I was a Canadian woman and he must have the number mixed up. I said I don’t know his wife, I have never called or seen her (i.e. I am not having a secret affair with this woman) and he should stop calling. His reply was confusing, but generally he still believes that I am a Ghanaian man with incredible voice and accent altering abilities, and that I am indeed fooling around with his wife. A woman (his wife maybe) also called me several times this morning. She spoke only Twi and we clearly did not understand one another.
After a few stressful days we finally got the guesthouse at BFMS. This is our home! It is marvellous. Teresa and I (well mostly Teresa because she is quite a bit stronger than me) carried all our kitchen and room stuff out of storage and set things up. Our make-shift kitchen consists of a gas stove and a few shelves, in the open air. The bathrooms have toilets which are flushable by bucket water we get from a manual pump in the garden. Our daily showers are generally also done by bucket water. The water we drink is run through a ceramic filter that we fill via ... yes you guessed it, buckets! Needless to say, in a few weeks I expect to have stronger arms than I ever would have working out at the gym in Canada. Pumping water, in addition to our 10 to 12 hour days following monkeys through the forest, standing on our feet all day with binoculars raised, and going for bi-daily 12 km runs, are bound to get our white flabby asses in shape. Only to get flabby again once the field work is over and we return to Canada, but what can ya do? Our meals are modest yet delicious...or at least Teresa’s are since I can’t cook worth a damn. I would rather open a can of beans for dinner than cook something that other people may actually try to ingest but I can learn...eventually.
At the time when I am writing this, I have only seen monkeys two days. I LOOOOOOVE THEM! I missed watching monkeys so much I didn’t even know it. I have seen some of the main groups that I will include in my study (Wawa, Splinter, B2, Dadie, Red Tail) and things are looking good in term of infants. B2 has 2 young infants! My MA study focuses on finding any potential kin biases in allomothering behaviour in the ursine colobus monkey. That is, are the aunts, grandmothers, sisters, more likely to hold and care for the infant than females who aren’t related? If so, than my findings may provide strong support for the ‘kin selection’ (a theory developed to explain “altruistic” behaviours that are not properly explained by Darwin’s theory of natural selection). It was nice seeing all my old friends (still talking about monkeys), and I was surprised to see how some of the young ones have grown. All of a sudden, young males are more filled in and handsome, and females are larger and look almost adult size. A few horrible things did occur while Teresa and I were gone. Ed, the alpha male of group Splinter was shot by the villagers because he was believed to be dangerous! It’s true he attacked several people, including some poor students on the U of C Primatology Field School last year, as well as a primate researcher friend of ours who had stayed here for several months, but still! The monkeys here are supposed to be protected. At Boabeng-Fiema, it is a cultural taboo here to kill them (monkeys are associated with local gods) and the colobus are nationally protected under Ghanaian law. Furthermore, the tourism industry here has reached a point where the anthropogenic effects of tourism and constant human presence are starting to have negative effects on the natural behaviour of the nonhuman primates. It no surprise that Ed, who’s group ranges in a highly tourist visited area of the forest, had began acting aggressively towards people. I am a bit worried about the current state of Splinter group at the moment. Male-male competition for females and a good quality territory are quite high in the ursine colobus here. When humans interfere in these matters, I can only imagine what poor Splinter group did without their protective alpha male. Several outside males likely came in and fought over access to the females, fighting for top rank as alpha. In the process infanticide could have occurred... The situation with Splinter still needs to be assessed though in the next few days.
In addition to this sad news about Ed we also heard that Marika, a crazy tourist lady had come in while we were gone and began building tree houses throughout the forest! She wanted to make cute little bungalows where tourists could sleep and be ‘one’ with the monkeys. Incidentally, the first tree house she built was in Ed’s range, and we’ve heard that she was attacked by him twice (probably in the midst of her building project)! Poor Ed was probably just taking his family for a nice meal to a favourite tree - the exact one where the tree house was being built - came across Marika, freaked out and lunged at her. Ed’s murder is probably her fault ... I blame Marika. Apparently Marika is also dead; she died in Kumasi (another city in Ghana). Teresa and I think someone got fed up with her crap and stabbed her in the heart. This idea isn’t too far-fetched as she had already been stabbed in the heart once in her youth, but then she had survived. All of this is no joke...people like this exist. Unfortunately they tend to have money; they come to Ghana where they offer their money to naive and poor local farmers so that they can continue being insane. In Europe and North America we call these people mentally deranged and dangerous and we put them in institutions where they can be kept under control. Or we give them drugs to numb their psychotic tendencies. Marika evaded such treatment and escaped to Ghana where she finally met her doom.