Above the line

I work as an agricultural extension officer in the Northern Region, which means I travel between farming communities advising on crops, soil, water, and practices. It is not the work people imagine when they think about Ghana. It is not Accra. It is not the coast. I've been writing essays and short fiction about the north for five years because I'm tired of reading accounts of the country that treat the north as either underdeveloped backdrop or exotic contrast to the south. Tamale is a city. It has traffic and markets and politics and restaurants and people with complex lives. The Dagomba kingdom has a history that predates European contact by centuries. The Sahel edge is real and immediate and changing the way people farm. None of this appears in the Ghana that gets written about abroad. My essays have been published in two Accra-based literary magazines and in an online journal based in London that covers African writing. The short fiction is slower, partly because the material is rich enough that I keep stopping to check facts. The story I'm finishing now is set during the yam festival in a community I know well, and the central conflict is about land title, which is both the actual legal problem facing that community and a very good subject for fiction. Both things can be true.