Mirror Diary: Going on a trip down no-memory lane at Dansoman

The smart residents of the Accra town of Dansoman refer to it as DC. Obviously, these initials stand for Dansoman City, but the intended association with the US Federal Capital cannot be missed.

I have not been in Washington DC for a long while but I visited Dansoman last Saturday. It was a trip down on memory lane. I used to live at Dansoman several years ago. 

The old town has been erased and replaced with the symbol of much that exemplifies Ghana’s planning deficit. Of course, Dansoman looks richer than when I lived there in the late 1970s and early ’80s. 

There are more of everything – buildings, shops, filling stations, schools, hospitals, restaurants and people. There is now a double lane road running down the middle with traffic lights to help the flow of traffic.

 The police station is much bigger than the puny thing that used to sit across from where I lived. But of course, everything has changed. Dansoman is an opportunity missed.

Dansoman was envisioned to be a model of urban planning and for a while it showed promise of living up to its billing as the largest PLANNED estate in West Africa. It was not the first planned urban environment; there is Tema and in their day, places such as the Nyaniba Estate, Ringway and Labone, to name a few places in Accra, had elements of planned development. 

Suntreso and Kwadaso in Kumasi, Kalpohin in Tamale and other estates had similar elements. But Dansoman was planned from the scratch, taken off the drawing board and inserted in the Western fringes of Accra on low-lying marshlands bordering the famous salt ponds.

The detached and semi-detached houses were arranged in neat rows. Every street was clearly demarcated and led into the main high street which was also a kind of a circular road encircling the town and providing exits for all points north, south, east and west. 

The Dansoman plan had demarcated and reserved areas for schools, hospitals and other social and communal facilities such as the now well-known stadium. There are also places reserved for churches, mosques and places of worship as, of course, there were for markets and shops.

Today, houses, churches, schools and all kinds of facilities sit cheek by jowl in an unhappy mix of residences, businesses and even hazardous activities. Filling stations adjoin houses and there is not the slightest hint that safety measures have been considered in this urban confusion. 

If there is a correlation between the number of churches and the moral standing of inhabitants in any given community, Dansoman would be a sinless place. On some streets, every other house is a church of some sort – most of them bearing the usual exotic names, and operated from people’s homes. 

But don’t be misled by Dansoman’s apparent sinless potential because the number of churches may be challenged by drinking establishments which are also equally haphazardly located. That has not changed much because then as now, most drinking places were in people’s houses which is not a good idea. 

However, the churches have copied from the drinking bars. Dansoman is a no holds bar kind of place. A clinic sits next to a small restaurant which might abut a church sharing a wall with a drinking bar overlooking a crèche. Who cares?

It could all have been different if the planning ethos of the town’s founding and foundation had been maintained. The same expansion and development could have taken place in a better planned environment. 

The truth is that even with its anything-goes personality, Dansoman is a much better place for having been planned. Its arterial road network is much better than anything, say, the Spintex Road area, will ever have. It only tells you what might have been.

By the way, I have a small footnote place in Dansoman’s social history. I believe I was the first person to show films commercially at DC. It came about like this: one evening, while relaxing with friends, some of whom are rather high and mighty these days, I suggested that we could liven up the neighbourhood by starting a film club.

 In one of my few forays into social capitalism, I set up the Periscope Film Club to show movies once a week on Thursdays. We rented a place called King Solomon’s Club for the purpose. We rented the films from the Ghana Film studios which was then situated at where TV3 is based today.

We showed about four films and even made a tiny profit before the business collapsed, mainly due to what can be described as business terrorism. 

The moment Periscope Films started, a rival group also decided to show films, but where our effort was more social in origin, this gang was made up of more determined entrepreneurs. Obviously, they were unhappy that we had cornered Thursdays and thus limited their profit. 

They decided to employ hooligan methods, including ripping off our posters. In those pre-computer days, posters were very expensive so the film renters took down a big deposit for each poster they gave out. 

The opposition group was aware of this so they simply ripped off the posters. After losing the poster deposits twice or so, the capital for the business, which I had borrowed, began to dwindle so Periscope Film Club sank without a trace.

All things work well in the end. If the film business had succeeded, I would probably have become rich and gone off to live in a beach front condo in Florida. This means I would have abandoned journalism and you, dear reader, won’t be reading this article. 

On the other hand, Dansoman could boast an ultramodern multiplex cinema house called Periscope Film House and Arcade Incorporated, which the largest planned estate in West Africa deserves. On that front, here goes another dream or two dreams; dead or deferred?

Congratulations to GJA for  Asantehene speech

The Ghana Journalists Association deserves our congratulations on organising the 19th GJA Awards last Saturday. Commendations also go to all the awards winners, especially the Graphic contingent, which was spearheaded by the overall Journalist of the Year, Mabel Aku Baneseh. 

Award schemes are one of the many ways we can use to drill quality in our journalism, and God knows we need it by the bucketful today. I think the Affail Monney-led GJA executives and the Awards Committee have done well in continuing this rich tradition. 

This year’s awards have sparked no big controversy and in Mabel we have a winner whose work in the year in question was out there for all of us to read and enjoy. However, the real master stroke of the event was the presence of the Asantehene as the Guest Speaker. His speech was a master class in both the content and delivery. I know that social media sites were following it globally and the response has been overwhelmingly positive.

Otumfuo did not mince his words. He spoke the truth which only a person with authority can. He called on the powers that be, and named the President as that power to put things right. 

“We must look to the leadership of the state for solutions. The solutions, I have to say, lie in the bosom of one man and only he can provide the answers. So I say unto the President of the Republic, in the seminal words of the Methodist hymn, Master, speak thy servant heareth”. Classic. 

Writer's email: gapenteng@outlook.com