A Day on the Run

When I woke up this morning, I had no idea that I was embarking on a day of criminal acts.

It all started out innocently enough, as such things usually do. I had made several friends at the guest house where I was staying in Accra, and hired a car to take us out to see some of Ghana’s sights for the day.

At first, the driver refused to seat five of us in his tiny subcompact. With him, that made six, and if you’ve ever tried to squeeze four adults into the narrow backseat of a tiny little car, I’m sure you can appreciate the logistical challenge.

Nevertheless, I laughed it off and insisted. Where there’s a will, there’s a way, and after my transportation experiences in Mali, if I had enough space to wiggle just one little finger I considered it a genuine luxury. I talked and reassured and bullied the driver into it.

So, a car full of white sardines, off we went.

It’s a two-hour drive from Accra to the other prominent coastal city, Cape Coast. My first clue that something wasn’t going to go as planned came about 30 minutes in, at a toll on the outskirts of Accra.

The driver stopped the car on the side, and said I should walk across the toll and he would pick me up on the other side. The car was only rated for 5 people, and otherwise he would get arrested. Oops. This little detail was news to me.

Nevertheless, still in the Senegal/Mali/Burkina mindset, where you could also toss in two people in the trunk and hang a few more off the roof with nary a second thought, I didn’t take this particularly seriously.

Until the police officer stopped me on the side of the road, of course.

“You! Stop!!” he commanded. Not in a casual, friendly way. More in the “oh boy am I pissed and wait ’til I get my hands on you” kind of way.

“Why are you walking?” he barked.
“I like to walk,” I responded.
“Why are you walking here?”
“It’s a beautiful day,” I responded. “Nice scenery.”

This did not impress him in the least. He actually got quite worked up.

“I saw you get out of the car!!” he yelled. “Car is too full and you try to walk and lie to police!”

Then he points to the car waiting a couple hundred meters up the road.

“Go get the driver!” he barked. “Bring him for questioning.”

Uh-oh.

One of the passengers was walking back to see what was going on and I quickly waved her off. The less people involved, the better.

Time to change tacks. I grabbed the officer by the arm and gently led him away from his gang of machine-gun wielding foot soldiers. This is entirely my fault, I began. We’re just ignorant tourists so eager to see more of the beautiful country of Ghana…

After the requisite talk and a little gift on my part to support the absolutely outstanding work that he and his officers were doing to secure the roads of this country, I was free to go.

Our driver was quite nervous when I returned to the car, but I explained to him that I had taken care of it and that we could continue. I also told him that if there was another checkpoint to let me do the talking, instead of trying this ridiculous tactic of trying to sneak one person across on foot.

Well, wouldn’t you know it, but not fifteen minutes later, we started coming up on a police checkpoint in the middle of the road. Police cars and trucks on either side, and officers with machine guns everywhere.

This is when our driver did one of the stupidest things ever. He floored it. Panicked that he would be arrested for carrying too many passengers, he pressed down on the accelerator and tried to hurtle through the checkpoint. #Q$%#@$!!!

I yelled at him to slow down, to no avail. His mind had switched off.

The sight of police officers springing to attention and waving him down vigorously with their guns snapped him back to reality, and he pulled over.

The officer that came up to the door was furious, and he ordered the driver out of the car immediately. As he exited, he turned to me in a voice cracked by fear and said “Gabriel, help me, I’m in big trouble.” No kidding.

The officer yelled at him. Told him he was sending him to court that very instant, and that the car was impounded. The driver pleaded and wailed and groveled. I tried to reason with the officer as well, but he was having none of it. This guy was very, very pissed off. Frankly, understandably so. Who in God’s name tries to rabbit through a police checkpoint?

We had an impassioned exchange for a good ten minutes, our driver getting more and more desperate, practically babbling. Finally, I grabbed the driver, pushed him around, and yelled at him. Told him that what he’d done was stupid and foolish and what was he thinking and that the officer was right and that he should shut up.

Then, I turned to the officer and apologized for the driver’s terrible behavior and promised him that I would personally see to it that he never did such a thing again. The driver had already tried to bribe the officer, which had only seemed to further inflame him, so I appealed instead to his kindness and simply asked that he find in his heart, as an upstanding religious man, to forgive. That clicked, and a hefty fine later, he let us go.

So you can imagine our joy when we came upon a third police checkpoint.

This time, I got out of the car to talk to the officer first, and warmly shook his hand by way of introduction. He pointed at the car and stated that it was carrying 6 people, when it only had officially had capacity for 5.

Of course, I responded with a big smile. But we’re all very skinny white people.

He burst out laughing at that one, and with a friendly bill in a handshake he let us go with a chuckle.

Which is how, on my last day in Ghana, I bribed three different police officers in less than three hours.