Ghana reflects progress led by Africans

ACCRA, Ghana (AP) -- Coby Asmah is a success in a part of the world that is hardly ever equated with success.

The design and printing business he launched from his dining room table 14 years ago now employs 54 people. He drives a new gold SUV, dresses as sharply as any Madison Avenue executive and vacations in the United States. And despite winning U.S. citizenship, he has chosen to stay in Ghana.

Asmah belongs to an Africa all but unknown outside the continent -- one of growth and business opportunity, with a tiny but rapidly spreading middle class.

Fifty years after Ghana became the first African country to gain independence, Africa's economies are expanding by 5.4 percent a year -- compared to a world average of 4.2 percent -- and are projected to hit almost 7 percent next year. Investments are up. Banking firm Merrill Lynch & Co. concluded that Africa now offers investors as much potential as Russia.

These signs of economic hope come as the world is increasingly aware of its broader stake in Africa. Rich countries fear any disruption in the flow of resources out of Africa, which now rivals the Middle East in the quantity of oil it sends to the United States. Terrorism has revealed the danger of failed states, and hundreds of thousands of African immigrants flee to America, Europe and the Middle East every year.

The picture across the 48 countries of sub-Saharan Africa is still very much a patchwork. But a yearlong exploration by The Associated Press shows that progress -- while fragile -- is finding a foothold, in spheres ranging from democracy to education. Perhaps most strikingly, after few results from five decades of advice and $568 billion in aid, today's developments in business, education, government and other areas are being led by Africans themselves.

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The cruellest voyage

In 1992, Kingsley Ofosu fled poverty in Ghana for the promised land of Europe. But the journey had barely begun when he witnessed the callous murder of his fellow stowaways. He escaped, and an article in the Guardian brought his story to the attention of the world. Hollywood and fame followed, but now he is back in Ghana, living in poverty again. Nick Davies, who wrote the original story, visits him in Accra and hears how it all went wrong

Monday December 3, 2007
The Guardian

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Sam Jonah in The Economist

The sunny continent
Aug 21st 2007

From Economist.com
Africa’s optimistic businessmen

...Mr Jonah is a larger-than-life hail-fellow-well-met Ghanaian, who made his first fortune by selling Ashanti Goldfields, a Ghanaian mining company, to South Africa’s mighty AngloGold. (He jokes good-naturedly about The Economist’s somewhat sceptical coverage of his business dealings several years ago.) He is now doing well in private equity. As evidence of his bullishness, Mr Jonah is trying to raise $250m to build long-distance roads across Africa—the lack which is one of the most obvious failures in the continent’s infrastructure. His goal is to find 50 successful African business people, each willing to invest $5m in the fund, and then to use multilateral funds to leverage the money into the billions. “People in Africa, if they come together, can make a big difference,” says Mr Jonah. “What I want to do is put my money where my mouth is.”

There is increasingly a pro-African mood in the global business community nowadays, says Mr Jonah. “Access to finance is much better; now when I go to New York seeking a lot of money, I get a warm welcome.” Admittedly, much of this warmth is focused on the mining and natural-resource sectors that are Mr Jonah’s base—although, like Mr Ibrahim, he says enthusiasm is starting to spread to entrepreneurial parts of the economy. Strikingly, Alan Patricof, a veteran American venture capitalist, has reportedly been raising a venture-capital fund for Africa, and is not alone in seeing new opportunity in small and medium enterprises there.

One reason Mr Jonah is optimistic is that he regards Africa’s post-colonial difficulties as not particularly surprising or problematic. “People fail to appreciate the huge challenges African countries faced at independence,” he says. “When you think where we have come from, there has been tremendous progress.”

Moreover, much of the “help” Africa has had from outside has been of the wrong sort. By way of illustration, Mr Jonah points to three once impoverished European countries—Spain, Portugal and Greece—that might have stayed poor had they not been “rescued by their sugar daddy, the European Union.” The point, he says, is that richer European countries invested in these poor countries, “not as charity, but because they saw a win-win opportunity.” The same is now true of Africa, he argues. With a handful of headline-grabbing exceptions, “everyone in Africa is now getting their act together, with free markets and democracy.

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Skinny-only message to African models

ACCRA, Ghana (Reuters) -- Skinny African girls may get to strut on Western catwalks but the fat ones have to stay at home.

This is the message being delivered to the 500 or so Ghanaians who have registered with the country's only international modeling agency, Exopa.

"A lot of them want to go. But not everyone has the chance to go because of the size the Europeans want them to be," said Exopa's Ghanaian director Sima Ibrahim.

As models on Western catwalks get thinner and thinner, their hungry look has sparked noisy debate about the pressure this places on girls and women to achieve perfection even if perfection means Size Zero, the smallest American dress size, the equivalent to a British size four.

In Africa, rolls of flesh are usually seen as a sign of wealth and status, not of ill health.

Few aspire to a skinny look, as those who look starved and ill too often are that way through misfortune, not choice.

But just as Africa's youth find themselves choosing between Western music and clothes and those rooted in their own tradition, they are now faced with two opposing images of beauty -- the Western ideal of an ever thinner frame and the African one of a buxom and well-rounded figure.

Nowhere is this debate clearer than in the African fashion industry.

Those who want to make it as a fashion model in the West are well aware they need to conform to Western sizes.

"Those that come here who are skinny, they know they want to go international. The others, they know they are big, they want a job here in Ghana," said Exopa's Ibrahim.

Freema Agyeman interview

Question time
Freema Agyeman makes her debut as Doctor Who's companion this Saturday. She talks about Billie Piper, race and kissing a time lord
Interview by Hannah Pool
Thursday March 29, 2007
The Guardian

BBC World Service Network Africa Ghana @ 50 coverage

6th March 2007
Live from Accra
Komla Dumor is live from the hub of the celebrations at Independence Square, where the party got underway at midnight and Ghanaians and visiting dignitaries have been enjoying the day.

Slavery's 'door of no return' in Ghana open to tourists

Story Highlights

• Elmina was "door of no return" for many Africans shipped off to slavery

• The fort was built by the Portuguese, later held by the Dutch and British

• Britain will mark bicentennial of its abolition of the slave trade on March 25

ELMINA, Ghana (Reuters) -- For many, it was their last glimpse of Africa.

Pushed through the "door of no return," millions of Africans were shipped from places like this whitewashed fort in Elmina, Ghana, to a life of slavery in Brazil, the Caribbean and America.
A band of light from that same door now cuts through the air in a small, dank room crowded with about 30 tourists.

"We are very lucky. Today we can go back out of this room the way we came," says Robert Kugbey, their soft-spoken guide.

As Britain marks the bicentennial of its abolition of the slave trade on March 25, Ghanaians are still coming to terms with slavery's impact on their country's development and the role Africans played in the capture and sale of fellow Africans.

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African hearts return to start firms

By Orla Ryan

BBC

Accra, Ghana

Haitian cook Marie Claire Rimpel is tired after a long day at her new restaurant, The Caribbean.

Serving the best of Caribbean food, the light and modern restaurant - in the heart of Ghana's capital - is a long way from her native Haiti.

Nearly three years in Accra, she is one of several people of African origin who have returned to the continent of their ancestors.

The stress of opening a restaurant may be taking its toll on Marie Claire, 68, but the move has clearly been worth it.

"It is a wonderful place to live, I feel at home here," she says.

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Viewpoint: African unity still a dream

My father, Ghana's first President Kwame Nkrumah, was a trendsetter in more ways than one.

One of his most outstanding legacies was a political commitment to African continental unity. The Arabic-speaking states of North Africa were, in his vision, no less African than those predominantly non-Arab states south of the Sahara.

With his initial encouragement, Arabs have since become active participants in the politics of Africa.

Nkrumah's was no easy mission. There were many in Africa and in the West who wished to extricate Arab countries from costly African commitments and interventions south of the Sahara.

But Nkrumah's special friendship with the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser - after whom I was named - was instrumental in cementing Arab-African ties.

This is an extract from BBC Focus on Africa magazine. For the full story click here.

BBC Africa On Your Street

Check out What's On Ghana's contribution to this BBC debate on the state of African music.

Feature: African music in 2006
A round-up of 2006 and look ahead to 2007
By Ilka Schlockermann
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/africaonyourstreet/feature_roundup06.shtml