Ghanaian Cultural Teachings, Part 1: The tro-tro

A tro-tro is simply an old Hyundai van (and let me say, as an aside, that as the owner of a Hyundai myself, I was proud of the amount of marketing they did during the World Cup, right up there with Coke and the local cell phone providers here in Ghana) that has been retrofitted to fit no less than eleven passengers (and the driver) into the cargo space and to cart them around in an economic (and decidedly not ergonomic) fashion. It is essentially the public transportation system in Ghana. A tro-tro can be taken just a mile or two down the road (for about 20 pesawehs) or from Accra to our rural village Klikor for six Ghana cedes. Long distances in a tro-tro are unpleasant (for all the imaginable reasons that accompany long drives in cramped, outmoded vehicles with fellow passengers with varying levels of hygiene) but are unfortunately nearly unavoidable if you want to go to places outside of the main cities in Ghana. If Ghana has anything resembling what Westerners know as “emission standards” then they must be easily skirted by a quick bribe or simply largely ignored, because these old Hyundai vans belch out an ungodly amount of black smoke, which a passenger can’t help but intake during rush hour because every window in a tro-tro is kept open to allow for something resembling A/C.

Any long distance trip in a tro-tro will feature multiple stops by the Ghanaian (pronounced Guh-ney-un) police and immigration officers, whose diligence on the job seems to be something of a crapshoot. One constant word of warning, however: they don’t like to be photographed.

Lastly, these tro-tros, along with taxis (their upscale brethren here in Ghana) all have a message on their back window and a small circular sticker inside the vehicle, in the upper right-hand corner of the front window, that will inform the passenger of which English Premier League team they support, which nine times out of ten is Chelsea because of their many African players. These two things appear on every vehicle without fail. The messages on the back, though, are the real treat. They are necessarily brief, but all fit within three categories. The first, and far most common, is a religious and slightly dogmatic dictum like “Let us pray”. The second is an industrious adage like “No food for the lazy man” and the last is, from what I can tell, just the name of the car, like “Accra Express”. It should be noted, though, that while English is the official language of the country, it is hardly the first (there are as many as 37 local languages), and while all the government messaging (like street signs) and most of the commercial messaging (ads and radio) are in English, you will almost never hear it in conversation on the street. This is all to say that these tro-tro messages tend to truncate their axioms in ways that sort of mangle the intended meaning.