Ghana Seduces Kaiser Expatriates
Spokane’s Dave Emerson leaned forward in his restaurant chair and grinned.
“Fufu is an acquired taste,” he warned. “Fufu bites back.”
Sampling exotic cuisine - even African dumplings with the digestibility of Silly Putty - is part of the fun of international travel. But since the late 1960s, some Kaiser Aluminum employees such as Emerson have gotten more than a tourist’s taste of life overseas.
They come here to manage the Volta Aluminium Company smelter. That gives them a front row seat in the Third World theater, the chance to watch a new country lurch toward democracy.
They find a rich culture and poor people. They leave with a deep appreciation of what they have back home.
“We have too much. We have more than we need,” said Angie Cavanaugh, who was in Ghana for eight years with her husband, Joe. “If everyone had that opportunity, the world would be a little bit different. It would be more tolerant.”
Volta Aluminium Company, known as Valco, began production in 1967. It’s one of four Kaiser smelters, similar to but newer than Spokane’s Mead plant. It’s in Tema, an industrial port of 250,000 people. It is 17 miles down a four-lane tollway from Ghana’s capital of Accra, where Valco has a second office.
In Valco’s early days, Kaiser had to import everything it needed, from doctors for its own hospital to chickens for its commissary. Up to 164 American workers were brought in to get the plant on line and keep it running. It was an adventure so noteworthy that it’s often mentioned in the obituaries of Kaiser employees.
Gradually, Ghanaians were trained to fill all of the labor jobs and many of the management posts. Now, only 11 upper managers are from the United States. Much of the housing Kaiser built for its American staff is rented to Ghanaian managers or people from other countries.
The non-Ghanaians call themselves expats, short for expatriates.
The Kaiser expats stay for at least three years. The managers are offered the chance to come, and often accept because it involves job titles or challenges they might not otherwise enjoy. They and their wives, and occasionally their children, also come for the adventure.
“Everyone should have a chance to live in a developing country,” Heather Emerson said. “I wanted my boys to realize how most of the world lives.”
Her husband, Dave, Valco’s production manager, has also worked in Venezuela and the Ukraine.
“In Russia, I was staggered by the low standard of living,” he said. “It was a cold version of Ghana.”
Then he corrected himself. Ghana’s economy, at least, is on the upswing. Democracy has taken root. There’s an emerging middle class. But most families can’t afford a car. What many Ghanaians call home, Westerners would call a hovel.
The Emersons’ older son, Luke, who attends college in Bellingham, Wash., has visited in Ghana. Son Christopher is the only American student at the international high school in Tema.
When Christopher Emerson returns with his family to Spokane this year, he’ll carry memories of extreme differences in wealth. Of Mercedes on the motorway and of beggars who approach when those luxury cars slow down. Of stunning native art and of “no urinating” signs that are routinely ignored.
Christopher may be the only student at West Valley High School who’s had a chauffeur to take him to class. Hired help is easily affordable for the Americans in Ghana. But they are keenly aware of the economic gap between themselves and their cooks, gardeners and drivers.
The Emersons contribute to the schooling of their housekeeper’s daughter and plan to continue after they leave. Heather, like many of the Valco wives, is active in an international women’s group that raises money to help Ghanaian women and children.
One big difference between Heather Emerson and other wives is that she has a job, teaching kindergartners at the Swiss school in Accra.
Angie Cavanaugh, who was in Ghana from 1986 through 1993, left behind a teaching position in the states, as well as four grown children. While the Emersons have cell phones and access to the Internet, the Valco families back then didn’t even have telephones.
Being out of touch with her children was hard, Cavanaugh said. But there were rewards.
“We didn’t have TV. They only had one channel and that was very limited. We listened to BBC and Voice of America, and we read and we read and we read,” said Cavanaugh, whose husband is back at Kaiser’s Trentwood plant after working as maintenance engineer and security manager at Valco. “All of the sudden we had these beautiful leisure hours to enjoy.”
The expats bought produce at the local markets, fish at the shore. When the Cavanaughs were in Ghana, they learned to do without Western products that they couldn’t get through the company commissary.
The same was true six years ago when current Valco managing director Ron Helton arrived.
“The first six months after I came here, I would have stolen for Doritos,” Helton said.
His wife, Connie, said that their early visitors from the United States brought them iceberg lettuce, which now shows up twice a week in a certain Accra supermarket. Kids are hawking Pringles on the street corners now, next to women offering fried plantain, a native banana snack.
“When I first got here, it felt like I was back in the ‘60s,” Connie Helton said. “The expats said: `Oh, you don’t know what it was like five years ago. You really have it easy now.”’
Foreigners are greeted warmly in Ghana. The Americans don’t fear for their safety, though there was some nervousness last year after U.S. embassies in Tanzania and Kenya were bombed. The State Department recommended that Valco beef up its security, and for a month there were armed guards on the smelter grounds.
The guards accepted food as payment. Emerson recalled with a chuckle the sight of one man with a machine gun in one hand and a Valco box lunch in the other.
Weapons were commonplace when Jed Daniel came in 1966 to supervise potline construction. There had just been a coup overthrowing Kwame Nkrumah, the leader who had brokered the deal that brought Kaiser to Ghana.
“I arrived with a 1-year-old kid and a seven-months-pregnant wife,” he said. “When we went down the airplane stairs, here were these guys with machine guns. My wife looked at me as if to say, `Do we really know what we’re doing?”’
The family experienced several coups during seven years in Ghana. But they packed a lot of good memories when they left - with five kids.
“You can blame that,” Daniel said, “on 12-hour nights spent in air-conditioned bedrooms.”
In February 1982, two Valco employees from Spokane were held by Ghanaian authorities for four days and investigated for spying. Terry Dean Swaney and Clyde McLean Spears had amateur radios, and Swaney had recorded military transmissions during a coup led by nowPresident Jerry Rawlings. Valco managers said he did so because he felt he was witnessing history in the making.
Both Americans and a German co-worker were deported.
Leon and Peggy Buckles got to Ghana that spring. Soldiers were everywhere. When they got off the plane, they were looking down the barrel of an armored personnel carrier.
Americans were told to stay in their homes at night, not even go out on their terraces. Leon Buckles needed a pass to go to the smelter after dark.
“You felt threatened at times. I had a machine gun stuck in my ear,” he said. “A lot of people left. People had breakdowns. But it kept getting better.”
Buckles enjoyed life in Ghana so much that he stayed 15 years, even after his homesick wife returned to Spokane. He got a cabin on the Volta River. He and two friends revived a derelict power boat and went ocean fishing for sailfish, marlin, snapper.
The Buckles’ photo album shows lions in forested northern Ghana and Gold Coast castles that had been frequented by explorers and slave traders. The couple used the post as a jumping-off point to visit many parts of Africa and other exotic places.
The Americans brought training and business savvy to Ghana, which needed both. There’s no big language barrier because this is a former British colony. English is the official language, though many people are most fluent in their tribal tongue.
There are big cultural differences. The Americans learn that Ghanaians are likely to be late for meetings or dinner parties. They know speeches will go on forever, and everyone’s a speechmaker. Their hired help may practice voodoo. Newcomers eventually accept such things and enjoy the slower pace of life.
Valco managers must deal not only with government bureaucrats, but also an entire hierarchy of tribal chiefs. In Tema, the top man is Nii Adjei Kraku II. He’s tremendously influential in the community.
“We see him regularly,” Helton said. “We invite him to the plant. We go to his palace when he invites us.”
Families are large and woven as closely as Ghana’s colorful Kente cloth. Everyone who gets a paycheck is responsible for the others. If a man is laid off because power shortages limit aluminum production, a lot of people could go hungry.
“If you’re a Valco worker, you’re one of the best paid workers in the country - and the entire family, from your parents to the children of your cousins, depend on you,” Helton said.
The cultural exchange spawned by Kaiser-Valco has worked in both directions. Some Ghanaian professionals have come to the United States to get training, or to live. Among them is Alan Phillips, a Cambridge-educated chemical engineer who moved to Spokane 10 years ago.
“There’s a lot of culture shock coming to the States,” he said. “One of the major things was I felt cut off. … Everything here focuses on what’s close around. People don’t know as much about the rest of the world.”
He finds American media extreme, but noted that he was accustomed to newspapers repressed by their government.
“It’s only recently that they’ve begun to develop a little bit of backbone,” Phillips said.
In Ghana, university space is very limited. Exams taken at age 11 and 16 determine the course of one’s career, Phillips said. He is impressed that, in America, a determined truck driver can decide to become a professor.
“This is a country of second chances.”
All Kaiser managers mention how eager Ghana’s people are to learn. Daniel, who eventually oversaw all of Kaiser’s smelters, remained impressed by that trait during his many trips back to West Africa.
“I love Ghana. I left part of me over there,” he said. “It was very rewarding because you could see the people improving, and you knew they wanted to improve. Anybody who has ever been to Ghana will say it was one of the best experiences they had with Kaiser Aluminum, any time.”