Carved wooden hangers for beautiful Ghanaian dresses

Sonya Carpenter was a young English teacher from the University of Warwick teaching a course on labor costs and financial accounting at the University of Kumasi in Ghana. Kwame Mainu’s restored wife, Comfort, had offered to take Sonya on a dress-shopping spree, so one early Saturday morning in 1997, Kwame took Sonya to Comfort’s home, where she was presented with breakfast. Ashanti of red bean stew, fried ripe plantain and gari. Kwame could never understand how women could run to the shops after a meal like that, but that’s what Comfort and Sonya did, leaving him with the previous two weeks’ output from London printers.

Kwame Mainu’s main concern was helping small engineering firms in Ghana improve their technology and business skills, but he had also been involved in efforts to stop the illegal export of narcotics. On a visit to a local engineering shop, Kwame learned of the manufacture of hollow wooden hangers and suspected that they would be used to conceal drug packages. The machines were ordered by a company called Sika Ye Na (money is tight) Enterprise, which had several businesses in Kumasi.

Kwame was quite content to wait for the ladies to return. If he wanted the news, he could turn on Comfort’s new satellite TV and watch CNN, or for deeper analysis, he could turn to The Economist and The New Scientist, but his mind kept drifting back to the shopping phenomenon. In his late forties, Kwame was well aware that there were many characteristics of the fair sex that the feeble male mind could never fathom. One of them was female addiction to shopping. Once they went on a shopping trip, there was no known way of predicting when they might return. It was time for lunch and Kwame realized that he should eat alone, so he called the maid and asked her what was easy to prepare. After lunch, he took the opportunity to enjoy a long nap. This time, he expected to wake up naturally and he was not disappointed.

Later, with the London posts completely digested, Kwame was about to turn on the television when he heard the crunch of Comfort’s car on the gravel drive. After a short interval, Sonya burst in with: ‘Look at the beautiful dresses we found!’ Comfort soon followed up with: ‘There are so many new stores opening these days, Kwame. Cessie opened a new clothing store on Prempeh II Street and named it Sika Ye Na after her other businesses. We buy loads of the latest styles. Each dress comes with a beautiful carved wooden hanger. Cessie says that she is shipping cargo to Ghanaians in the UK. I’ll give you the ones you need to retrieve for Akosua. I’m sure Afriyie will want to copy them.

‘I’ll take the dresses,’ said Kwame, ‘but leave the hangers.’