There are probably few people out there who have not at some point received a beguiling email correspondence from a dulcet West African claiming Christian values and a gargantuan stash of money somewhere that he or she is desperate to share. If so, and if you are foolish enough to follow it up, it is likely that in due course you will discover at the other end a Nigerian ‘businessman’.
419 Fraud
Nigerian internet fraud, or 419 Fraud after the relevant Nigerian legal statute, is nowadays an international business. It principally takes the form of what is known as Advanced Fee Fraud, but these days it can be anything from massive social security fraud in the UK to sympathy and confidence panhandling on the streets of just about any major city in the world. The issue of Nigerian internet and general fraud has been the subject of countless investigations and ‘stings’ over the years, and the media is replete with exposés, hard luck stories and warnings.
The favorite trick is to flood the information superhighway with spam mail formularized basically along the lines of a bureaucrat representing the forgotten wealth of some African demagogue. This demagogue, some real some fictional, died recently leaving a trunk full of cash in a safety deposit facility somewhere. In order for our new friend to discretely move the money he needs a trustworthy foreign partner who, in exchange for a multi-million dollar share, needs only to hand over his or her banking details.
No Comments
By Colyn Alcock
When the rainy season kicks off in Ghana, a strange metamorphosis
overcomes the locals. Down Cantonments Road, the usual jovial swagger is
lost under the graying skies and replaced by a sullen, cagey attitude, even
bad temper. I think there is genuinely something here about the
way climate affects people, when the sun came back, the smiles broadened
once more as Ghanaians reveled in their lifeblood, sunshine.
I recently changed to an even cheaper lodging, Hotel Christiansborg. For 10
dollars a night I get a fair sized room with lounge and bathroom, watched
over by the owner, Old Man Benjamin. When I arrived he warned me …
No Comments
By Colyn Alcock
Ghana welcomed me with an impressive monster of an electrical storm at 35,000 feet, out of the plane window it looked like God was taking photographs of his little piece of heaven that fell to earth. The lights of the capital flickered blue yellow and white below like hundreds of thousands and fireflies, the plane touched down and I stepped out into the hot wet blanket of an African night.
Since then my prose falls apart as my senses have been drenched in the weird, the fabulous and the downright crazy! To give you a real time sense, …
No Comments
People and languages
There are over 50 distinct groups of peoples in Benin, and each speaks a different language or dialect. The most widely spoken language is Fon, which originates in Abomey, the old capitol of the Kingdom of Dahomey. Fon is spoken throughout the south and central parts of Benin. The Fon people are known to be assertive and industrious, traits that have helped them to find work in all corners of the country. Other languages that you may come across include Adjara spoken in the Mono (Eastern) region, Mina (commonly spoken in Grand Popo and Togo) Nagot (a …
No Comments
This job, you just never know… six months ago I wasn’t contemplating even coming to Ghana and now here I am hanging out with Rita Marley, wife of the late Bob Marley, contemplating horticultural potential and sussing out how we can develop her estate into a sporting space for the local kids in the community.
Read More About This Article
No Comments
One of the most interesting and encouraging bits of news to come out of the growing African travel scene is the emergence of Liberia as a potential surf destination.
What is surprising about this is not so much that the wave potential along the 2500km West African coast is so good, but that a nation battling with such elemental processes of recovery and survival should have looked up from its labours long enough to notice the fact.
Liberia is like an abused child. It has been sodomized for so long by so many that the national psychosis seems too deeply entrenched to ever heal. Since the day that Charles Taylor reinvented himself as a Liberian techno-warlord, wave after wave of trauma have swept over the little West African nation, until it began to seem unimaginable that one race of people could absorb so much horror. The imagery that flooded out of Monrovia during the battles for control of that city was mind numbing in its barbarity. The heavily armed, drug dazed and pre-pubescent terrorists, with the power of life and death in their hands; the infamous snuff movie of Samuel Doe’s final hours; warlords here and warlords there; and the wide eyed and terrorised civilians, circling like fish in a net, cut down and killed whether they turned to the left or the right.
No Comments
By Colyn Alcock
The old song goes, “if you go down to the woods today, you better go in disguise.” Nobody mentioned the exhausting experience of shopping in Accra.
Take one oversized, humungous life-sized blender, tens of thousands of argumentative Ghanaian shoppers, a slightly greater number of street hawkers on amphetamines, cacophony of taxis blaring their horns on the burning tarmac, the occasional club wielding shirt-sleeved policeman and one White Boy anxiously clutching his bulging wallet under the west African sun, and you’ve got Makala Market, the main “shopping mall” of Accra.
Somehow, I’d been persuaded to take RR, one of the …
No Comments
By Colyn Alcock
Allow me to pose a question for you to ponder. When was the last time that you took a major life decision that wasn’t based on a need to further your career, improve your lifestyle, develop or deepen the quality of the close relations you have? Take this situation. I run a business that is thriving to say the least, live in a fairly gorgeous house, in a pretty gorgeous town, with a nice group of caring friends, and yet I’m leaving all that behind for the summer and heading for Ghana.
OK, basic history/geography/cultural question -where’s Ghana? …
No Comments
Nicky McLean treks through the Dogon Country in Mali, West Africa, famous for being a culture that still ives in cliff-side villages and has managed to keep its old way of life. Dogon country is prime attraction to travelers, not packaged tourists, to West Africa, but Nicky warns: Be prepared to negotiate.
Read More of This Article
No Comments
