Ghana Odyssey by Walter Dallas

In 1975, I decided to make my first serious attempt at playwriting. I thought you had to go to an exotic place to write a play, so I quit my teaching position at UC Berkeley, sold my car, and moved to Hawaii to condo-sit for a friend who was going to Africa for a year. He had received a generous grant to travel the continent and create an African study-guide for the Hawaii school system. I finished the play, Willie Lobo, Manchild, shortly before my friend was to leave for Africa. The grant included funding for a photographer who would also serve as his assistant. I knew nothing about photography, but volunteered, bought a modest camera, and read and memorized the user guide and tips on the flight from New York to Dakar. From that brief stop, off we went to Liberia, Ghana, Nigeria, Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania, Egypt, Algeria and Spain. Well, almost.

We both loved Ghana, so the two weeks we were to spend there turned into six months! In each country, we rented an apartment and flowed with the locals; we shopped in local markets, learned to cook traditional foods and developed more than a taste for palm wine. The people in Ghana were the most welcoming people I had met anywhere in my life. I remember commenting how much I liked a new friend’s shirt. After a while he left to “run some errands.” A short time later, he returned. The shirt had been washed, pressed, and gift-wrapped for me! He literally gave me the shirt off his back. By the end of the six months, I had made so many friends, taken theatre and dance courses at the University of Ghana at Legon, and had actually taught an acting workshop there. Ghana also provided an opportunity to reunite with a Ghanaian classmate, a playwright, with whom I had studied at the Yale School of Drama. The two weeks –turned to six months time flew by.

By the time we finally left Ghana, we had spent most of our funds and could not complete the entire trip; also Uganda was off-limits because of military dictator Idi Amin’s regime of terror. Thousands of refugees from Uganda were illegally flooding into Tanzania and Kenya and were met with extremely unwelcoming treatment. After six months on the continent, my friend and I were walking very differently, more “African-like,” and, because it was so easy to learn, we were not only speaking conversational Swahili fluently, we were speaking English with an East African accent. When we were overheard speaking Swahili late one night on a dark Tanzanian street, we were stopped at gunpoint by the police and accused of being Ugandans. We had long since stopped carrying passports and even as we denied the illegal alien accusation in English, we were still suspect. I finally turned on the thickest southern American accent in the world. Only then did the police with those huge automatic weapons, believe we were Americans and released us. When I finally got camera-happy, in Dar es Salaam, we were escorted at gunpoint off an island for photographing a military facility.

It was an amazing year. Ghana seeped into and touched my heart, my spirit and my consciousness and has never left. I was forever changed. I saw rituals and celebrations and festivals and families and generosity and joy and ethics and art that influenced my writing, my approach to theatre, and to life itself. I’ve gone back many, many times through the years. I have many protégés there and serve on their advisory boards for their theatre-based organizations. A few years ago I was gifted a breathtakingly beautiful mountainside plot of land in Berekuso, a suburb overlooking Accra, by my Yale classmate. It is Berekuso, in the country of the most beautiful people I have ever known, that I have selected as my final resting place when that time comes. Meanwhile, in July 2009 I adopted and have been supporting Hillside, a primary school in Accra, the capital. This year, Hillside expanded to include a junior high school that has been given my name. It was only in the last three or four years that I have actually gone back to Ghana as a real photographer. My goal has been to capture the heartfelt beauty and richly textured emotion and elegance of my people there.

And now a flashback: that play I went to Hawaii to write, Willie Lobo, Manchild, was produced, after that African Odyssey, to great acclaim in the Bay area and Atlanta, and went on to garner an Emmy Award for KQED-TV in San Francisco.