Swarm Creativity Blog

I had already been involved in a project getting computers to Kenyan schools for a number of years. When I was visiting Ghana for the first time, my friend Marlene and I went to see the Akosombo dam, which is holding back the Volta river to create the largest man made lake in Africa, and the second largest globally - as I was told. On our way back we were looking for a hotel to spend the night. When we came through the fishermen’s village of Anloga at the coast of Ghana towards Togo, we noticed a large and clean looking building in Western style among all the fishermen’s houses in native style. Our curiosity aroused, we came to the “Pin Drop Inn”, a neat little hotel. Quite unexpectedly, each of the rooms was up to Western standards, offering its own bathroom – with shower, toilet, and running water, air conditioning, and satellite TV. And most surprisingly, everything worked! I then started talking with Jerry, the owner of the hotel. His bright 11-year-old son offered to take me throu...

Usually I get along really well with the Ghanaians. Most of the time they are friendly people who are helpful and go out of their way to make guests feel at home. Occasionally, however, there seem to be clashes of cultures. I am still trying to make sense out of two tumultuous encounters with Ghanaian authorities where I only got what I needed after serious yelling, screaming, and threat of force. The first one occurred when I was applying for my visa for Ghana, the second one happened when we tried to check in for our flights back from Accra to Zurich. When I applied in June for a visa for my two children and me with the Ghanaian embassy in Berne, Switzerland, I was expecting a smooth process. After all, I had done the same thing last year, and had gotten back my passport with the visa stamp three days after I had sent it in. This time, however, things were different. I got the first warning, when, ten days after having sent in the passports, I got back a form asking for missing infor...

The state-run Ghanaian electricity company is periodically turning off electricity because of power shortages. One night we had no electricity in the house of my friends in Accra. As a precaution they had recently bought two Chinese-made lamps with battery chargers, each giving light bright enough to light a room for reading. That night, unfortunately, one of the freshly charged lamps went out after 5 minutes. I opened the lamp, and fiddled with the electrical contacts between bulb and battery. The light went on again. My friend then decided to go to bed and took the working lamp with her. My children and I were left with the temperamental lamp, which went out again after 3 minutes. Opening up the lamp cover under the weak light of another flashlight and fiddling with the contacts got the lights back on for another 3 minutes. After having repeated this process 4 times, my kids and I decided to give up on reading and went to bed. Next morning both lamps worked fine again, as did the ele...

Yesterday morning our houseboy killed a poisonous snake in our garden. The property of my friend is not that big, it has a small, but well-tended garden. The garden is fenced in, and the fence is lined by overgrowing flower bushes. When the houseboy was cutting the bushes, he suddenly got really exited and called us to show us a pretty large snake, about 1.2 meters long, with dark green and yellow stripes. The snake was resting high up in the bushes, right within the flower bush which had overgrown the side door where all the visitors were passing through. It was a pretty eerie feeling that we might have come and gone for some days right underneath a poisonous snake. The fix of the houseboy to this problem was as radical as it was short and brutal. He called another man from the neighborhood for help. With a long stick the houseboy threw the snake out of the bush on the street, and then the other man shattered the snake’s head with a large stone – Risk management by eliminating the ris...

While the driver and I were standing outside the car and waiting to have our inflated tire repaired (see previous post), my children inside the car were eating candy. When they saw a few kids approaching, they threw them out some of the shrink-wrapped candy. First, the kids did not know what to do with the little square pieces wrapped into glittering aluminum foil, but once the first one had unwrapped the candy and put it into her little mouth, a delighted smile lighted up all over her face. More children started flocking to the car, and then even some half-grown-ups joined them. My children were busy throwing candy out the car window. But then things started getting out of control. The swarm of kids became more aggressive, banging at the car door, so I started getting worried for my friend’s car. I took the bag of candies and stepped away from the car. Now the entire swarm, about 20 children, aged from probably three to sixteen years, was surrounding me. I could not get out the candie...

At the end of our beach holidays we drove back from Axim to Accra. Our friends had sent their SUV with a driver to pick us up at the beach resort. Suddenly, we were near the old capital of Ghana Cape Coast, our driver pulled the car in a filling station, telling us that he had noticed a strange sound. I then walked around the car, and noticed that one of the tires was flat. At the filling station, however, they told us that they were only equipped to pump gas and could not exchange our spare tire. Suddenly, and without comment, our driver disappeared, taking the car keys with him. We could do nothing but wait in the hot sun and make sure that our belongings left in the unlocked car stayed where they were. We were very relieved when 15 minutes later our driver came back, bringing with him a powerfully built young man in a mechanic’s overall. The young man then searched for our car jack, which, as it turned out, was not working. The young man disappeared again, and 20 minutes later, came...

Yesterday we went to the small town of Axim. Axim is an old town with a similarly old historic slave castle. My children and I walked around in the small town, looking at the slave castle and the street vendors and their stalls lining the sides of the street. While I was quite fascinated by the bustling street live, I was surprised to learn that my kids were less than taken with the colorful scenery. They found the streets and houses very dirty, and the smell coming from the open sewage canals disgusting. While the kids were right in that the red dust was indeed everywhere because the streets are mostly unpaved, and the canals indeed, well, stank, I found the scenery so full of life that I could have watched it for a long time. Not so my kids. After a ten-minute walk, and after quickly drinking a cold coke from one of the street vendors, they insisted to take a taxi and get back to the hotel as quickly as possible. It seems that becoming immersed into a new swarm is a long learning exp...

I frequently noticed in Ghana that while my opposite was trying to do the best for me, his failure to explain me his reasoning converted the result into the opposite. Sometime this can go to some extremes where the motivations on both sides are not really clear. Our experiences in the beach restaurant at the romantic Axim beach resort set an excellent example. It is no easy thing to get ice cream in Ghana. Electricity breaks down all the time, and frequently it is turned off for half a day which means that it is hard to keep ice cream in its icy state for extended periods of time. The more pleasant our surprise, when the menu of our beach hotel in Axim offered ice cream. When we ordered our ice cream, the three of us chose chocolate and strawberry from the waiter. We were slightly surprised when the restaurant manager himself proudly brought us mixed strawberry and vanilla ice. When we informed him that we had ordered strawberry and chocolate, he deeply apologized and promised to bri...

Our adventures started well before boarding our flight for Accra. Seven days before we were supposed to get on the Lufthansa plane from Zurich to Accra – I was still in Boston at that time – I got a phone call in the middle of the night from the travel agent, telling me that the flight to Accra had been cancelled by Lufthansa. He could not explain why. I then started calling around, and in the end the travel agent was able to book a flight for the three of us one day later than planned from Alitalia, through Milan instead of Frankfurt. The reason Lufthansa could not fly was that it had started a squabble with the Ghanaian government about landing rights. As it was flying from Frankfurt to Accra with a stop in Lagos on behalf of Air Ghana, the Ghanaian government wanted compensation for these flights, which Lufthansa refused to pay. After a week of squabbling, the two parties came to agreement, and our flight back to Zurich should now happen with Lufthansa as planned. Our flight with Al...

This summer we (my son, 14, and my daughter, 15 years old, and I) are spending our holidays in Ghana. The “official” purpose of our trip is to install 12 computers and set up an Internet cafe for the secondary school of Anloga, a fishermen’s village at the coast of Ghana close to the border to Togo. Unofficially, we are also visiting friends in Accra and spending sunny days at the long Ghanaian beaches.

During my visit in Ghana we planned a big tour to see more of the country. So it was really unfortunate when the 4 wheel drive vehicle of my friends broke down. The gearshift in our car suddenly stopped working. The only gear still working was the reverse. Fortunately this happened not too far from home, so I drove home backwards! My friend then called one of her Ghanaian friends for help. About two hours later he came by Trotro, bringing along a mobile car mechanic. Quickly, the mechanic located the broken part, and took it out. Him and the friend of my friend then disappeared by Trotro to a street market, where they got a generic spare part and temporarily fixed our car. The next day, we drove to the used car parts market in Accra, trying to find a replacement part. For more specialized goods there are various dedicated markets outside the main Makola market, such as a huge market dedicated to only selling used car parts. Booths staffed by independent entrepreneurs display heaps of...

While there are supermarkets in Western style in Accra where the tourist or expat from the Northern hemisphere can buy almost everything, this is not where Ghanese people shop for their food and other daily necessities. Rather, they go to the Makola market, which I found yet another amazing example of self-organization and swarm creativity. The Makola market is not only at the heart of Accra, it literally is THE heart of Accra. Located in the middle of the town, it is the place for 90% of Accra’s inhabitants to buy all their goods for daily life. Other than submarines and aircraft carriers, there is very little that can not be bought at Makola market. There is no central control, each booth is operated by its owner. At the top of the range are the established stores, where a room facing the street has been converted into a market stand. At the other range of the spectrum, little vendors display their wares on a blanket on the sidewalk. Heaps of shoes, staples of fresh and dried fish, l...

When I was already back in Switzerland, I heard that one of my Ghanaian friends had just had a very bad car accident with a Trotro. While driving with her passenger car to the farm where she was the manager, she had collided with a reckless Trotro driver. While she was only slightly injured, the Trotro had been irreparably damaged, and the entire busload of passengers had been seriously hurt. I guess this is the the drawback of self-organization, in that each Trotro driver wants to maximize income for himself by driving as rapidly as possible. On the balance between public good and optimizing his own gain, this driver tried to tip the scale too much towards himself, with very bad consequences for himself and his passengers.

One day my Ghanian friend asked me to look at her PC. She wanted to install new language training software, and the PC sound board did not work properly. I noticed that the sound drivers were not correctly installed, and decided to reinstall WindowsXP. At the end of the installation process, Windows asked me for my authorization code. I was working on an 18 month old HP Pavilion that my friend had bought with Windows XP preinstalled when she was still in Switzerland. When I had entered the authorization code, Windows tried to verify it over the Internet. Oops! Out of luck, as my friend did not have an Internet connection at home. Private Internet is still an expensive option in Ghana, at costs of at least about $50 per month, even over a dialup line. I was then offered a list of Microsoft phone numbers to call to verify my authorization code. Unfortunately, both phone numbers given by Microsoft for Ghana did not work. Finally, I ended up calling the Microsoft Hotline in Redmond, over m...

In summer 2006 I was visiting an old friend in Ghana. There I encountered amazing examples of swarm creativity and self-organization entirely outside of the realm of the Internet. It already began when I was picked up at the airport of Accra by my friend and her husband. When we drove back to their house I noticed that the streets were filled with small vans of all types, ages, and makes, starting and stopping at odd locations, and picking up groups of people at every corner of the street. When I asked my friends about these vans, I learned that these minivans, called “Trotros”, were the public transportation system of Accra, providing fast, efficient, and cheap transportation in this city of 2 million inhabitants. The most amazing thing about the Trotros, though, is that each van is owned and managed by its driver, without central coordination. More on later posts