Disclaimer: The spelling is horrific as I can't spell well, the word processing program I use doesn't really do spell check, the google blog site wants to do it in spanish cause I'm in madrid and I hate profreading. Hopefully nothing gets lost in translation.
The topic of conversation on the morning talk radio was what would you do if you found out your mom was a lesbian? About a third of the callers said they would have no problem with it (I recall that nearly all in this category were the female callers), another third would give the women in question a good beating and then disown her and the rest were split between outrage that such a situation could even exist and expressing a desire to murder their own mother. The consensus in the office was that a good beating followed by disownment would suffice, while murder was a little over the top. My office is entirely staffed with Pentecostal Christians who go to church nearly everyday and abstaine from every form of vice save the occausional coke-a-cola.
Later that day, I traveled with a younger co-worker, Clement to his father's home in the mountains outside of Accra for the yearly tribal festival. In typical developing world the fashion, the trip which could not have been more than a few dozen kilometers took several hours and involved three vans and a taxi and a trek across urban Accra. While walking through Accra at night my attention was caught by a man standing in a large circle of light, ringed with people, and shouting in as scary a voice as he could muster. The light was cast by a large construction style spotlight on the top of a poll with a speaker besides it blaring his creppy voice. I asked Clement what it was all about and he replied that it sounded to him like a voodoo magician performing for the people. As we neared, he did indeed have several small dolls on a table underneath the spotlight and Clement proceeded to tell me about one time when a voodoo guy came to his village.
The man had come and done his usual street performer routine, gotten the crowd all riled up and was about to pack up and go when he made one last claim - if any man had a gun he should bring, shoot him and he would heal himself, or something along those lines. He probably never thought that in these parts, a place where people still hunt with slingshots, anyone could possibly have a gun. It's equally possible that in the midst of the frenzy he had created he actually believed he had the power to repel a bullet. But, either way, a man from the crowd stepped forward and said that he had one at home as his father had been a government executioner. He persauded by the man to go and fetch it and so he did. Then the voodoo magician, against the man's many protests convinced him to point the gun at his chest and pull the trigger. He insisted that he could heal himself and everything would be fine. The executioner's son did so and the crowd watched, enthralled as the man writhered on the ground, apparently performing ancient voodoo magic. After a few minuets he stopped and was pronounced dead.
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