The Internet in Ghana


June 14, 2002


MIKE PESCA: One person's fear is another's opportunity. While the Bhutanese worry that Western media and technology may overwhelm their traditional culture, officials in parts of Africa are trying to use the internet to fuel their economies and keep Africans from leaving to work elsewhere. That's what talk show host and journalist Christopher Lydon found when he traveled to West Africa and took to the airwaves. [MUSIC AND INTRO FROM RADIO SHOW PLAY]

CHRISTOPHER LYDON: I'm Christopher Lydon. This is a program we call Wide World on Broadcast Radio in Ghana.

CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Earlier this spring I hosted a call-in talk show for 2 weeks in Ghana. The mission was not so much to try out an American radio format on Africans as it was to listen to the talk of Accra - Ghana's capital. It turns out a lot of people were talking about what we talk about -- the internet.

CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Caller thank you for joining us.

FONDO: Yeah, good evening. The name is Fondo [sp?]. I think the internet's a powerful tool. We are not making the best use of it--

CHRISTOPHER LYDON: John Perry Barlow [sp?], lyricist for the Grateful Dead and now a cyber-philosopher, was one of our radio guests in Ghana. Barlow was a Montana rancher who moved into high tech without ever passing through a factory job or office work.

JOHN BARLOW: At best the internet can help Africa skip the industrial period. The industrial period is about turning human beings into interchangeable machine parts. I mean you come to Africa and you see still a sense of human connection that is almost entirely missing from the Northern Hemisphere. My desire was not to wire Africa so that the money could flow downstream but so that heartfulness and connection might flow upstream.

CHRISTOPHER LYDON: There are cyber cafes up and down the Ring Road known as Silicon Alley in Accra, but the biggest and brightest cyber hive of them all known as Busy Internet I watched the focused faces of mostly young Ghanaians staring at a hundred computer screens around the clock for many familiar reasons.

MAN: Everything you want is on the internet. When you want to know the weather of different countries, you can see it. You want to hear more news, you want to know what is happening in, in other countries at the moment you can see all that on the internet.

MAN: So far I've been able to correspond with a friend at South Africa, and I have another friend too in Britain whose name is called Greg. It is my dream one day to maybe meet them.

GLADYS: My name is Gladys, and I come to browse about 4 times in a week; sometimes to go to the singles [LAUGHS] -- cause you know it's exciting to chat on line, you know, you don't know the person - it's, it's, it's very exciting, you know?

MAN: I mean you can't imagine it. When we were starting Busy Internet we did not even imagine that this is how it was going to be like. You know? The, the traffic, the human traffic. I mean it's almost full almost every time. And we understand because we understand there is no place like this on the - in the continent of Africa.

CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Historically outside technologies like the train, the telephone and Western weaponry all served the colonizing powers better than they served Africans overall, so you have to ask yourself is this another Northern trick being played on the Africans? How different will the internet be? Herman Chinnery Hess [sp?] runs the biggest little software company in Ghana.

HERMAN CHINNERY HESS: I'm Ghanaian, and I grew up in Ghana. Now there's, there's certain fundamental problems that the internet access addresses. Basically it kind of bridges the gap and it basically puts Ghana in touch with the world.

CHRISTOPHER LYDON: It sounds a little bit like pre-bubble internet hype in America a few years ago, but it's a shiny new bubble from the African angle.

HERMAN CHINNERY HESS: If we educate fantastic architects in Ghana, they can take Chinese government contracts and do them over the net, and then win the contracts internationally because the internet doesn't know color - it doesn't know race - it doesn't know country of origin - it doesn't know -- see what I mean? Suddenly - boom -clean slate. We can participate anywhere we like.

CHRISTOPHER LYDON: There is a darker side of the internet dream in Africa. Already there are cyber sweat shops in Ghana processing New York City parking tickets and doing other humble data processing jobs at very low wages. Another point -- the internet for some users here is not about jobs in Ghana -- it's an escape route to the West. A lot of those e-mail messages we saw at the Busy Internet Cyber Cafe were really a sort of S.O.S. -- get me out of here. But here is the question that was tossed back at me. For a Ghanaian on the way to England, say, who might take a job watching TV security monitors on a London parking lot, wouldn't it be a better deal to stay in ghana and monitor the same parking lots through a web connection? Herman Chinnery Hess.

HERMAN CHINNERY HESS: I've met very few Ghanaians who actually enjoy living abroad. They want to live in Ghana. I mean as long as they could sit in Ghana and work - and, and a decent wage - they won't go! They would - rather than go to the West, they'll go to their village and provide their services on line. This can happen with psychologists, doctors, anybody you can think of -- unless there's a physical contact required.

CHRISTOPHER LYDON: Chinnery Hess would love to see internet villages in Ghana doing the complex work of the world or selling goods that aren't available elsewhere.

HERMAN CHINNERY HESS: I'll tell you what I imagine the future of the internet is. Some small village community have a bunch of mango trees, and they plant a particular kind of special mango which only grows in this part of that village, let's say. And now the whole village makes a thousand dollars a year. They now have some group in Japan who love these mangos because they use them to eat with sushi or something, and so they buy 10,000 dollars of mangos every month.

CHRISTOPHER LYDON: It's a long road from cyber cafes to widespread cyber employment. Phones are still few in Ghana. About 1 in a hundred Ghanaians has one. Phone bills are high. Web access is shaky at times. But finally it was a young man, Edwin Beta [sp?] on the staff at Busy Internet who persuaded me that there's more than technology at work here. Edwin Beta sent me an essay he had written called Shaping the Future. It's the internet that wires up Edwin Beta's vision. "More than any preceding generation," he wrote, "we can exercise control over how we use our time and energy. Shaping our future depends on the choices we make. We must practice giving ourselves the things that sustain us. It is God's will that we live abundantly. What we have is the universe's gift to us. What we become is our gift to the universe." As I read Edwin Beta's essay, I couldn't imagine an African of a century ago laying track for railroad barons like Cecil Rhodes taking the same inspiration from an imported technology. For On the Media, I'm Christopher Lydon.

MIKE PESCA: Coming up, the NBA won't give up the funk, and why [IN RUSSIAN ACCENT] in Russia -- TV watches YOU!

BOB GARFIELD: That was Mike's Jakob Smirnoff [sp?] impression. This is On the Media from National Public Radio.