The CURE conference was a great success. Many people were energized by meeting each other and talking about similar prison and criminal justice difficulties and ways to deal with the problems.
So far I have not been in one prison in Africa. The Nigerian officials were helpful in some ways but still I was not allowed to photograph in their prisons. I could see from the outside that they are not in good condition and are overcrowded. Most of the people, 75% or more, in Nigerian prisons are waiting for a trial or some other resolution to their cases.
Now I am in Accra, Ghana - and striking out. The prison systems of many African countries are in such bad shape that they are "national secrets".
I confess I am tired. The situation here is that 75 to 80% of the people in prisons and jails are only charged, not convicted of any crime. The crime they are charged with may be minor but they could wait in prisons for years before going to court or being found not guilty. Some languish in prison because their paperwork has been lost.
My best photos so far were of the cassava harvest in a very small village near Atchanve, Togo. I went out with twenty women and a few men, they pulled up the tall, thin stalks of cassava
plants to reveal the cluster of sweet potato-like cassava tubers. The women placed the tubers in large basins and then hoisted the basins to the top of their heads and carried them down
the path back to their village. They sat in a circle under the trees peeling the cassava.
After the cassava was peeled and washed then it was put through a gasoline powered grinder. The white paste was then placed in plastic sacks that had tiny holes in them so the water
could be pressed out of the sacks. The large metal press was an innovation. Previously they had used a large teak log to press the sacks. Once pressed the semi-dry paste is then placed
in basins over a low fire where it is dried completely into flour. The flour is named gari, a staple of the diet. Gari production is one of the few ways for people in the remote
villages to make cash.
I went to one village in Togo that was certainly beyond "pre-industrial". They would have no contact with civilization as we know it except for Father Ryan who helped them have a water
well dug. Not even a tiny FM radio in the whole village.
I type this from an internet cafe in a mall in Accra that looks like any mall in the U.S.. The difference is the disparity between the haves and the have nots here in Africa is greater
than any place else I have been. Even in the municipal dump in Matamoros there were FM radios and even television sets, newspapers. People could leave the dump and go to town.
The
poverty of the Tarahumara in the Sierra Madres was not as great as the poverty I saw at the end of the line in Togo.
