GHANA (September 22-25)

I didn’t have one main event in Ghana like Barcelona in Spain or the Berber Villages in Morocco.  Instead, I did something different for each of the four days there, in the port of Takoradi.  However, I encountered a strong reoccurring theme throughout every activity and experience: music. 
It sounds silly to say that music is everywhere in Ghana because, to some extent, music is everywhere everywhere.  From where I am writing this, outside on the 6th deck of the ship, I hear rhythm in the constant crashing and swooshing of waves and the shuffling of feet in addition to the more obvious music coming from my headphones.  There was always pop music on the tour buses in Ghana (thanks, globalization).  Then, there was the soundscape of the Kakum National Forest.  But what I am really talking about is the way that many Ghanaians weave song into conversation. 
From my extremely limited experience, music seems more accessible in Ghana.  It is not limited by training and setting the same way it is in the US.  It is also more closely tied to other art forms and audience participation is commonplace.
The first two days in Ghana, I saw performances.  They were drumming and dance with some poetry and acting thrown in for good measure.  The first day was a workshop, so of course we participated, drumming and dancing too. 
The second performance was marketed as a “Bamboo Orchestra”, which to me implied that the audience would be formally separated from the musicians, and we were for most of it.  We sat in rows of chairs under a tent outdoors, as the performers sat under an opposite tent and struck sticks of bamboo together percussively in the complex rhythms of this region of Africa.  Then, some of the performers emerged from their tent and began dancing and acting out comic stories about attraction and environmentalism.  Finally, they expected the audience to get out and dance with them, so we did.
The next day, on the way back from a tour of a water village where our guides sang spirituals as they rowed, our guide on the bus taught everyone a song about a vulture that eats out of the trash and won’t come home.  Even though he admitted having a terrible voice himself, he insisted on us singing with him to boost morale because we were falling asleep. 
On the last day, I was done with organized tourist activities, so I went to a beach with friends to surf and swim.  There, we encountered more music and singing and dancing, right there on the beach. 
Finally, that evening as the ship pulled away from the pier, the vendors outside serenaded us away.  There was music everywhere.