Culture shock from experiencing different cultures is a real thing and I think it’s one of my favourite parts of travelling and experiencing people and how very different it all can be. In my chats with Emma and Olivia, they share their experiences with me about all the ways Ghana differ from Nigeria and their shock at these differences. Emma is a half Nigeria, a half-Ghanaian woman who has lived in Lagos most of her life and moved to Accra recently and Olivia is a Nigerian woman who lived in Abuja before travelling to Europe and now living in Ghana for almost two years.
Let’s Talk About The Ghanian Culture Shocks You Have Experienced
Emma
- The food is very different for me. The way Ghanaians eat eggs with everything is a culture shock for me. They eat soup with egg, stew with egg, and egg in every dish they make in Ghana.
- Ghana is very calm, very very calm, unlike Lagos where I grew up. Ghanaians are very calm. Lagosians are always angry but in Ghana people are very calm, and funny enough.
- The way they speak, if you are black they just automatically assume that you can speak Twi and you’re Ashanti. When people see me, the first thing they do when they want to ask me something is assume I can speak Twi and mind you, Accra is like the central region where it consists of people from different regions. Normally they should not just be speaking Twi but I guess that’s how it is.
Olivia
– Cost Of Rent And Dollar Driven Economy
The first one is the cost of the rent. I cannot believe that an economy can be so dollar driven especially in Africa. It was really strange to me, it’s still strange to me. As a foreigner, you need to get a non-citizen ID card, which is kind of an equivalent of your name and you should get that for $120. This means that the government also is charging in dollars, in a foreign currency and if the government can do that, that means private individuals feel the right to charge in dollars as well.
– One Bathroom Per House
Closely related to that and in terms of housing is that I found out that it’s normal to have one washroom or restroom in a two-bedroom house, even a three-bedroom house and I’m not used to that and maybe people will say I’m being bougie or something but I just couldn’t wrap my head around it. At least have 1.5, so have a bathroom and then have a toilet but sometimes you find the bathroom and the toilet is just one in a two, three bedroom apartment.
There was even a place I went to, I think it’s a four-bedroom house and it was a 1.5 bath and I was shocked… proper culture shock. Maybe all of this is because I feel like it’s good to have more bathrooms and I’m not used to it so I found that really shocking because even in most Abuja houses it’s not necessarily the case as it is here.
– Small Uber Cars
Another culture shock was their Ubers. Their Ubers are really tiny cars, very tiny cars like a Picanto kind of car. There’s what they call Toyota Vitz. That’s what I feel is more than 80% of the Ubers and it was a huge culture shock for me because I know in Nigeria, most Ubers are saloon cars but that’s not the case here.
– Uber Drivers Do Not Turn On Their ACs
Closely related to that, which would be my 4th culture shock, I guess, is that the Ubers about 98% of the time do not turn on their ACs, no jokes! You’re in this small car and the AC isn’t on! I found that really shocking.
– They Have Mixed Feelings Towards Nigerians
I don’t know if this was a culture shock because I had kind of read about it but they have mixed feelings towards Nigerians. I have interacted with a lot of Ghanaians, and most of them do not like Nigerians because they feel like Nigerians are loud and pompous and are coming to take over their country, have introduced cybercrime and fraud to their young citizens, and are very wayward and not trustworthy.
I found that really shocking and I’ve had to learn to speak like a Ghanaian when speaking to Ghanaians and I’ve had to be a bit reserved about being Nigerian. The funny thing is, in Europe, I would use my native name but here I don’t, I use my English name because I don’t want them to decode that I am a Nigerian upfront.
– They Won’t Rent To You Once They Find Out You Are Nigerian
My 6th point is tied to that and it’s when they find out you are Nigerian they would literally not rent a house to you. If it’s a product they know you’re trying to buy, most times they might also increase the price. Of course, this is not generic and everybody doesn’t do it but I found that once they figure that out, they think like Nigerians, we are ballers, that we have plenty of money so I have to put on my Ghanaian accents to get around sometimes.
– They Are Calm And Nice People
I think they’re really nice, calm people, which I find really interesting. I feel like maybe because most of my lived experience in Africa has been in Nigeria, I’ve travelled to other African countries but most of my lived experience has been in Nigeria, I found that people are a bit more fast-paced but here people are patient, they are very calm. they’re not in a hurry to go anywhere. You can just be waiting and they’ll say “mepaakyɛw, please wait ehn, she’s coming, okay?” and in my head, I’m “I’ve been waiting here for so long, what’s happening?”
– Food
Let me talk about food
I found that what they would eat with swallow, which here is Banku, Kenke, what they would eat with it is like pepper. Like pepper sauce and fish. How do I eat pounded yam with stew? Or they eat it with what they call “light soup”.
Light soup can be as light as pepper soup but slightly thicker but it’s not like our Nigerian soups and they’re like stew texture, some might even be a bit more watery and I think they use corn starch to thicken it. I find it very interesting and I’m always like “I need my leaves in my soups” as a proper Nigerian babe now. And is the other way around for us so that was really shocking.
They don’t have pounded yam here and they don’t have moi moi even though they have beans. But they make Akara here, which they call Koose. They have other swallows like fufu. They also eat yam and would eat boiled yam. They call their fried yam “yam chips” but not pounded yam and I love pounded yam so that was shocking to me. I am sad for me.
– Their Pastries Are Not Great
This is relative but I feel their pastries are not great. Their meatpie….makes me crave Nigerian meatpie with all the fillings. Their pastries can be dry. It was shocking to me that their pastries are not great. Even with bread, there are one or two places where I would get bread that I would like, most of their breads are kind of bland.
– Great Electricity
A culture shock to me in a good way is how great electricity is.
Hadassah, the electricity is great!
Just yesterday our light went off. Normally, before when they have routine maintenance, they would actually make announcements, can you imagine that? Just yesterday the light went off and they didn’t make any announcements. I heard that one of their substations caught fire, I was like “we are sleeping without light today” but power was back within 3 hours, can you believe that? In Nigeria, they will just go to sleep and wake up the next day, in fact, it can take up to a week.
Here, even when they take the light, except they are doing planned maintenance which can take up like 6 hours sometimes, at least this is for where I am, where I stay, electricity is really good, really really good. It is commendable. I don’t rush to go charge my phone because I’m like “there is no hurry in life, lol”. We have a generator where we are and we’ve never turned it on for once and we have been living here for over a year.
– Great Restaurants
They also have a lot of good restaurants and international restaurants which I think is a good culture shock
– Sizeable Number Of White People
Another culture shock for me was that they have quite a sizeable number of white people here. There are so many, so many white people living here and some of them are even married to Ghanaians, and have kids here. There’s someone I used to go to that has been living here for over 50 years and she’s white, I think she’s European. Yeah, they are very welcoming to foreigners −white people.
– Good Roads
Their roads are also very good. Not all the roads are great, but they have pretty good roads, I’d say. When you have to travel to places outside Accra, unlike Nigeria where travelling interstate can be quite challenging but here, the roads, for most of them, are actually good. I have travelled to about three or four places outside of Accra that are long drives, about 2 to 4 hours, and the roads were good. The system is quite efficient in that sense. It’s really laudable.
– Tourism
They are big on tourism. I don’t know if this is influenced by the fact that they have a lot of foreigners, but they are big on tourism. They have really nice resorts, they have packages with different tour companies. Although, I will say that sometimes it can be a bit unfair in some places. For example, you’ll go to a place called Kakum National Park, if you’re a local (Ghanaian) the price is reduced but foreigners will have to pay double or triple of that.
I always wonder why a foreigner has to pay a different amount. It doesn’t matter your nationality, even other Africans, as long as you are not Ghanaian, you’ll pay a different fee. It makes me think and feel like if we go to other countries and we are asked to pay more because we are foreigners, how would we take it?
But they do have a good tourism mindset, tho I feel like there is still a lot to be done for it. I feel like there are still massive untapped potentials because they are a coastline country, so they have so much more they could do with the spaces that they have.
– They Say “please” A Lot
They say “please” a lot.
How could I have forgotten to mention this? They’ll say
“Good morning, please”
“Thank you, please”
“She’ll be with you shortly, please”
“It’s okay, please”
There’s “please” in everything.
– They Speak Their Language A Lot
They have this language called Twi, spelt “T–W–I but pronounced “chwi”. I can’t say the percentage of Ghanaians can speak it but I’m going to hazard guess and say almost all Ghanaians can speak it. Maybe 95%, but I might be wrong. They speak their language a lot! Just the way Pidgin English is in Nigeria, but this is bigger than Pidgin in Nigeria. They would rather speak Twi over English.
You’ll see that most times when a conversation is in English, it is because one of them is a foreigner. And if you are black, they just automatically assume that you are Ghanaian and they will start speaking Twi to you.
– They Play Nigerian Music A Lot
I am shocked and surprised at how much Nigerian music is played here. The way they play Nigerian music, you’ll think it’s Ghanaian music, because they play our music all day long, everywhere, no jokes! Even in church, you’d hear them singing Nigerian songs down to the ones that are in local languages. You can hear them singing “olorun agbaye o, you are mighty” They actually love Nigerian music, they LOVE our music and I feel like they play it more than their own local music.