Makola Mall

I stood on the street of the Makola mall in the central area of Accra. In front of me there was an unbelievably huge and congested market. On a narrow street, the vehicles were sharing the road with hundreds of people. I believe if I can overlook this place from the air, I would see a huge scrambled salad in a heavy and dark color. I say dark not only because of the color of the skin of many people, but also because of the aged signs and advertisement of shops, through which I can hardly identify their original color. Along the road, numerous shops occupy the buildings that are two floors to four floors high in general. The shops are not only on the ground floors as I usually see in China and US, but the balconies on the floors above were opened as shops that sell medicine, shoes, furniture and so on. Exterior stairs allow people to go upstairs to see what is sold. Because there is such a concentration of shops in a limited space, every shop-owner managed to attract the passerby by all means. For example, many shops removed their gate, making me clearly see what was sold here. Some owners even extended their commodity shelves onto the street, so that the passerby needed to look at these shelves in order not to clash them. I felt the Ghanaian government does not pay much attention on how a shop should be operated, and let the owners do whatever they want. This has made the street appeared to be extremely crowd and messy.


There is saying that desperate people do desperate things. I think it is applicable to describe a country in which people are anguishing and struggling along the poverty line. I realize that urbanization has created many problems in this country. The opportunities of the city allure countless people to emigrate from the rural area. However, no one will be ensured to have food once the capacity is reached. People need to compete each other more fiercely in order to add some more rice on their plate, or they have to put down their dignity, and beg money from others, especially the Oburoni (white people). I heard from Chinese people commenting that blacks are poor because they are lazy and greedy for money. But I think that this problem is more complicated than that. It could be brought up by urbanization, which may reinforce people’s search for money regardless of the ways they use.