The Human Population Tsunami by Martin Jacoby

“What is happening,” a local priest told me, “is that our society is to a certain extent being disintegrated.” People from the town offer varying reasons for the exodus – lack of jobs, enticing “greener pastures”, deteriorating climate – but they agree that it cannot go on indefinitely, this whittling, or Nandom will never prosper. In Nandom, the numbers are much higher: half the population has gone. The figures are inexact, but about 20% of those born in northern Ghana are now thought to live in the richer, more urbanised south. Migration has long been part of life in the dry reaches of west Africa, but in recent years, with economic development taking place elsewhere and erratic rains making rural life increasingly difficult, more and more people are taking to the road. The buses are important to Nandom, the administrative centre for more than 50,000 people – chiefly farmers – in one of the poorest corners of Ghana, because the population is leaving. The rest of the time, it’s the buses themselves, privately owned mini-vans known as “tro-tros”, daubed with prayers for the road – “Lord Have Mercy”, “My Redeemer Liveth” – that provide the action: the logic-defying piling on of people and goods, the waiting, in midday temperatures of 40° Celsius, for enough passengers to fill a van.

You would call it a station if it was anything more than a triangle of reddish dust, surrounded by fast-food stalls, general stores and the rural bank. It is here, in one of the northernmost towns in Ghana, that the buses come and go. The heart of Nandom is a fork in the road.

The Human Population Tsunami by Martin Jacoby