Tombs Called Homes

The rate at which humankind creates problems with money—problems that it then needs to solve with money—befuddles me.

In Maslow's hierarchy of needs, I clearly understand that one core thing we need to survive is housing. A roof over your head. Somewhere a person can feel physically safe. Like, if you don't have food to eat, but you have a place to sleep, you may be able to live to fight another day. But imagine you have no place to sleep and barely anything to eat—how do you conjure the energy or figure out the mental grounding that you need to plan and even attempt to orchestrate the living you need to fight another day? That is with the assumption that the other day is even guaranteed. But this is besides the point.

Back to my initial thought. We as a race—yes, the human race—have aced the game of creating problems that we pay for, only to attempt to find solutions which we will also eventually pay for.

What do I mean?

A few days ago I saw on my WhatsApp status one of the agents post. Now, when I was trying to find an agent to find an apartment in Accra, it was an extreme sport, and this particular one—I think she was the one for whom 3000 cedis a month was "too small" an amount for the property she carried. Good riddance, arbi? Clearly I am not her target market, which means the average Ghanaian is not her target market either.

Anyway, I saw a post for a house priced at about 850,000 Ghana cedis, which is give or take 80,000 dollars. Wow. Some people—most people in Ghana—would never see that kind of money in their lives. But how does that concern me?

It does, in many contradictory ways.

Once upon almost two decades ago, I could have never imagined seeing that kind of money. Over the span of my cumulative adult life, I have made and spent much more than that—but remember, oh, I have been an adult for begins to count... legally, 14 years.

But I also know where I am from.

I am not the ward of some rich politician or business tycoon who has a monopoly either on public funds or high-level goods. Neither am I the ward of a highly skilled niche professional whose services were in such high demand that money was thrown at them. My parents did not inherit generational wealth, but what they inherited was a generational sense—to ensure that their children would get a good enough education, in hopes that we could move closer towards being able to possibly… one day… count 85,000 in a sitting. Lol.

All jokes aside.

One of the places that shaped me, we went to the river to fetch water, and I remember when the first community pipe was created. Another place, we shared the downstairs flat with the landlord's daughter. Another place, we slept in the boys' quarters of a bungalow with a shared bathroom and kitchen. Another place… you get the drift.

The average Ghanaian was me and my family—until my immigration to the Western diaspora. And even with that, I cannot count and show you 85,000 dollars.

Anyway, back to the problems we create for ourselves.

The house was flat-roofed. The entire compound was tiled, with only about a casket-sized worth of space for decorative flowers or plants (and that's even if they are used for that). The whole house—the entire compound—had not one plant.

I damn near lost my shit, because in addition to the foolishness of half-ventilation that is en vogue in the name of "sliding windows," I truly wonder: why do people keep creating tombs and calling them homes? It is even sadder that these tombs are priced as such. We live in a tropical climate, my gee. The sun has been rising hot for the last couple of years to the point that the entire agricultural seasons have shifted. White people are calling it global warming, but the farmers who cannot afford irrigation systems are saying: "The rains are not falling when they are supposed to, so our crops are dying."

Now we build a home. No one wants to use reflective zinc or aluminum roofs anymore. No one wants to have slanted roofs anymore. Forgetting that before the white man came with his cement, we built with what was in our environment. Some of the coolest homes you would enter are those built with clay and thatched with grass. Yet somehow, we let "Western civilization" convince us that our traditional forms of architecture were backwards.

Everyone and their grandmother now want a house made of cement. I get it—it is stronger and more durable, blah blah blah. Okay. Build with cement now. So, then what happened to full-fledged windows? That one too, we have thrown it away and exchanged them for "modern" sliding windows that technically give us half the fucking amount of ventilation that the space actually cut out for the windows allow.

What happened to louvre blades or shutters? (You know, those wooden blade-like things we could open and close to let air in? It was very common in the colonial boarding schools most of us may have attended)

So now we sit here in a nation whose electricity is not dependable, in a climate that screams for greenery, and build tombs—eii sorry oh—I mean houses, for 85,000 dollars. Houses that require electricity-powered cooling in the name of air conditioners. Air conditioners that would have to be changed in a few years if not sooner because of damage from the unreliable electric grid. An electric grid that might need to have a backup generator if we are to maintain a humane way of living in these tombs—I mean homes. Generators that'll need to be powered by petroleum or diesel. Petroleum or diesel that keeps getting expensive because the whole world is at war, and even if it's not expensive, it pollutes the atmosphere so the inhabitants of these compounds will be sick because there are no plants to take in these harmful gases and in turn give us oxygen.

And now we buy and build very expensive tombs, and then get sick, and then spend more money to get better, and eventually die—and we are not even buried in these expensive tombs.

SMH. Life no balance.