#I found out recently he’s been bemoaning never getting to be a grandfather again and I’m like

[raeathnos]

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[chaptersinprogress]

the prank wars  |  the start

At that point, his legs gave out from under him. Sliding to the floor, Tsuna let out a hysterical laugh. Why had Grandpa thought that this would be safer? He’d rather take his chances with the Italian police!

For the resident chief of police, Superintendent Hibari Kyoya, was more famously known as the Demon of Namimori.

Rating: T

Warnings: NIL

Pairings: NIL

Prompt: The protagonist is a prankster, who’s dared to prank the local police station, only to get into a prank war with the local police chief - by @short-story-slam

“Gah! This is all stupid Reborn’s fault!” wailed poor Tsuna.

His troubles had all started the day his father had come home after disappearing for nearly 5 years.

“My darling Nana, I’m home!” sang Iemitsu as he entered the Sawada residence.

As Nana exited the kitchen wondering what was going on, he scooped her up in his arms and spun her around joyfully. Giggles burst out of her as she embraced him. Her husband had come to visit!

“Mom?” yelled Tsuna as he thundered down the stairs. “What’s going - oof!” he yelped as he slipped and tumbled down the stairs to land in a heap at his parents’ feet.

“Tuna-fish!” said Iemitsu joyfully, opening his arms for a hug. “Come say hi to Papa!”

The 14-year-old frantically scrambled away.

“No way!” he cried in shock. “You’re back?!”

“Tsu-kun,” scolded Nana. “Is that any way to greet your father?”

“Aaah, it’s ok. Tuna-fish just hasn’t seen his papa in a long time. Besides, I have good news for you darling! My boss has got the company settled permanently, so that means we can be a family again! He’s even arranged for us to move near the work site, so we’re all going to Italy!”

Nana gasped. Her husband would be home again, and they would be moving to an exotic country too!

“But darling, what about Tsu-kun’s studies?” she said frowning. “He hasn’t been doing very well lately. We can’t afford to pull him away from school now.”

“I told my boss about that too,” Iemitsu said. “He’s kindly arranged for Tsuna to stay with his family at his place, and he’s even got a tutor for him!”

A dark figure dressed in a finely-tailored suit stepped out of the shadows and loomed over the shivering boy.

“Chaos, No Good-Tsuna,” the man said, glittering black eyes shining out from the depths of his fedora’s brim. “I’m Reborn. I’m here to make you the new leader of the next generation.”

And that, was merely the beginning of his pain.

“Happy birthday No Good-Tsuna,” said his tutor with a cheerful grin, his eyes lit with mischief.

‘Oh no,’ thought Tsuna helplessly. ‘He’s got that look on his face again!’

“For your 15th birthday,” Reborn continued mercilessly. “I have brought you a present that will make you into an even better person than you were last year.”

The door crashed open.

“Kora where’s the brat!” demanded a man in military fatigues with a huge rifle slung over his shoulder.

A woman, similarly dressed, whacked his head, “Stop being so loud, idiot!”

Reborn’s eyes gleamed.

“Meet Colonello and Lal Mirch,” he gestured dramatically at the couple. “They’ll be your fitness trainers starting from today.”

Tsuna could only let out a pathetic whimper.

It only got worse from there.

“So you’re 16 today huh, No Good-Tsuna.”

Tsuna gulped. He had a bad feeling that he knew where this was going.

“Looking forward to your surprise?” Reborn asked evilly.

The beleaguered teenager shook his head frantically. As if he had any hopes of changing his demon tutor’s mind.

“Well, too bad,” he said as the door crashed open in a parody of his 15th birthday.

“Voiiii!” screamed a long-haired man with a sword for a left hand.

“Hieee!” Tsuna shrieked in return, jerking backwards in his seat. The chair toppled over from the force, sending its occupant crashing to the floor with it.

A hand grabbed his shirt collar, and Tsuna found himself face-to-face with the scary man. A large shark-like grin filled his vision. The teen felt liquid splatter onto him as something crashed into the man’s head and shattered.

Tsuna slowly looked past the scary man’s shoulder and meet ruby eyes set in a heavily-scarred face which advertised “DANGER”.

The weight supported by Squalo’s arm increased considerably. The long-haired commander turned back to his prey, only to find an unconscious limp noodle hanging from his grip. Tsuna had fainted clean away.

And his torture culminated on one fine day.

“Tsunayoshi, I believe you have almost finished your training to take over as the next boss of Vongola Corporation,” said Timoteo as he and Tsuna sat on a park bench enjoying ice-cream.

The elderly man had been like the grandfather he had never had. He spoiled Tsuna dreadfully, always looking out for him and treating him to things whenever they met. There was also the fact that he was the current boss of VongCorp.

“Well, Reborn seems to think so,” was all Tsuna said, chasing the sticky trail of ice-cream that meandered down his arm with his tongue.

Timoteo nodded before adding, “There’s still the graduation task.”

Tsuna paused his chase. Graduation task? How come he’d never heard of such a thing till now?

Seeing the look on his successor’s face, the boss laughed.

“Well,” he started sheepishly, the emotion foreign on his elderly visage. “It’s something my mother had started when she was about to take over as boss, and I wanted to carry on the tradition with you.”

“You see, as the only female boss in the history of VongCorp, she faced a lot of backlash. People said she was not fierce enough or that she did not know to let loose and stuff, contradictory I know, but it was unfortunately something that came with the time.”

“So she decided to show them up and shut them down. She proceeded to wage a prank war against the brutal chief of the police, and get away with it without being identified. No one dared question her afterwards. She let me try my hand at it before I was about to take over. And I want you to have the same experience.”

Tsuna gaped. Pranking the Italian chief of police was not something he wanted to do. Especially since they had recently started a bloody campaign against the mafia. He did not want to get on their bad side, thank you very much.

As if reading his mind, Timoteo said, “It’s too dangerous to prank the Italian police at the moment. So I thought maybe you could prank the Namimori chief instead. I know it’s been a while since you went back to your hometown.”

Tsuna thought about it. He didn’t want to disappoint Grandpa, and he’d had enough experience around Reborn to pull off a decent prank or two. Yeah, he could do this. If it made Grandpa happy.

When Tsuna nodded in agreement, Timoteo clapped his hands. “Well then, you should probably get introduced to the judges scoring you! I think you already know them quite well.”

The bad feeling was back.

Tsuna despaired. He should’ve known it wouldn’t be that easy. When had anything in his life been easy?

Timoteo waved at someone behind him. Tsuna turned slowly. A group of familiar figures made their way to the two.

“Your judges are Reborn, Colonello, Lal Mirch, Xanxus, and Squalo.”

Reborn pushed the brim of his fedora up with his handgun. With a damning smirk, he said, “You’ll have to impress each and every one of us to pass No Good-Tsuna. And you only have 7 days, so make each one of them count.”

Which was why Tsuna was now trudging through the streets of Namimori in the dead of winter, bemoaning his fate. He glanced back longingly at the direction of his hotel where he had left Hayato. He’d rather be in the toasty warmth of the hotel too.

Sighing, he slapped his cheeks and muttered to himself, “Get it together Tsuna, the sooner you find out who you’re supposed to prank, the sooner you can get back to bed.”

It took him a few tries, but through a combination of his memories and begging for directions, he finally managed to stumble into the police station. As the blast of warm air hit his face, he released a grateful exhale. At least he was no longer in danger of losing his fingers or toes.

He took two steps towards the reception desk, and promptly stopped short. The policeman manning the desk had his hair styled in a familiar pompadour. Tsuna let out a disbelieving chuckle. That sure brought back memories. It looked like even after leaving the Disciplinary Committee, the former member still retained the hairstyle. Shaking his head, he approached the officer.

“Ah, excuse me sir?” Tsuna ventured.

The policeman looked up from his report. “Yes? How can I help you?”

“Erm, I’m quite new here, just arrived actually, and I was wondering who the chief of police is?”

“Oh,” the man blinked. “Well, the chief of police is Inspector Hibari Kyoya.”

Tsuna froze. He must have heard the officer wrong. Surely he must have.

“Hibari...Kyoya?” he managed to gasp out.

“Yes,” the officer replied. He narrowed his eyes at Tsuna. “Is something the matter?”

“Ah, nothing! Nothing!” Tsuna stammered, waving his arms frantically in front of him. “I just wanted to confirm the name that’s all!”

He backed away with shaky legs, and once he had made it out of the station, ran back to the hotel and slammed the room door shut. At that point, his legs gave out from under him. Sliding to the floor, Tsuna let out a hysterical laugh. Why had Grandpa thought that this would be safer? He’d rather take his chances with the Italian police!

For the resident chief of police, Superintendent Hibari Kyoya, was more famously known as the Demon of Namimori.

[sweaterkittensahoy]

A broken branch of the family tree

My Great-Grandfather (maternal side) taught me how to play Cribbage. We played many times over the few years we knew each other well (and I treasure those years to a depth that I cannot speak to). I won my first game against him, then my second, and after that, he absolutely ruined me every single time. 

Occasionally, he would move my pegs instead of his own. Raised up as a respectful Southern daughter (at least where grandparents were concerned), I never corrected him. 

More than occasionally, he would tell me this story: 

“Did I ever tell you how I learned to play Cribbage?”

(Many, many times.) “No, I don’t think so.” (Because I loved this story, so it always felt new.)

“Well,” and he would clear his throat like the man in his nineties he was, though I rarely considered what that meant, “every night, my father and I would play a game to see who would milk the cows in the morning.”

Great-Grandpa had grown up helping settle South Dakota. There, he would meet my Great-Grandmother (who, funnily enough, would be the maternal answer to a male name on a female person that I would later inherit from the paternal line). They would move to Nebraska, and Great-Grandpa would be the reason--to this day--that Gordon, Nebraska has such finely made roads. But, before then, he was a farm boy, and this was his story.

“And let me tell you, I learned how to milk a cow.”

I laughed every time because his delivery was that damn good. Even as a young teenager, I recognized that sense of timing in myself, and I cannot describe to you how important it is that I found it it my Great-Grandpa and could say my biological father (snake oil salesman of lowest regard) was not the reason I could cue a laugh. 

When Great-Grandpa died (I was 16; he was 97), my grandmother bequeathed me his Cribbage board. It was only years later, when I grew up enough to understand my grandmother’s sensible view of the world, that I would discover she also carried that ability to cue laughter. (We were at a parade, and people in it carried a Confederate flag, and Grandma deadpanned to me, ‘And it’s the Democrats ruining society,’ and I laughed so hard I nearly fell over.)

Grandma plays Bridge and Hearts and a few other card games you associate with older women with a blue dye rinse. Except Grandma would roll into her grave prematurely to roll over in it if she ever ended up with a blue dye rinse. She is currently 84, on her third marriage (having divorced the first man and buried the second), and very likely having more fun in life than half of you ever will (that’s not a judgement; she’s just that way). She tried to teach me Bridge, making me the dead hand so she could guide me through. She tried to teach me Hearts the same way, and both times, the conclusion was clear: They’re not games for me. Hell, I could never beat an old man at Cribbage. What chance did I have against three living ladies at Bridge or Hearts even when one was on my side?

Great-Grandpa died when I was sixteen. When I was in my twenties, my mother and I were reminiscing on my times with my Great-Grandfather, and I mentioned how badly I had lost to him time and again.

“But, I mean, he was in his nineties and had played his whole life. I never really had a chance.”

“Oh, honey,” my mother said, on cocktail number I lost count because I’d been drinking, too, because it was the only way we could be honest with one another (she didn’t care for my honesty until she’d had a few; I craved hers while stone sober). “Grandpa counted cards.”

“WHAT.”

“And he was colorblind. Green-blue.”

“WHAT.” The time he moved my pegs came into sharp relief. Always green-blue. Never when I played red.

Mom looked at me with the glassy perfection of the truly fucked up, and I am sure I stared back in the same state. “You didn’t know?”

I stared. Waiting for her to laugh. She did not. “No! Why would I know?”

“Oh, I thought you knew.”

This casual brush-off confused me for years. Why would I know? Who goes to their parents and asks, “Hey, is there any special skills that 90-something old man has that can lead me to be ruined at Cribbage for three goddamn years?”

Years later, comfortably into my marriage and starting to really understand the exact toxicity of my relationship with my Olympic-level drunk mother, my husband and I went down to visit for Christmas. After many, many hours at a relative’s house, we came back to my parents’, and my mother suggested we find a way to relax.

“How about poker?” my husband suggested. We’d both recently gotten into Texas Hold ‘Em. We were all playing from Mom’s penny jar, so it was agreed the four of us--Dad, Mom, the husband, and I--would get to name the game as dealer. 

Mom bemoaned Hold ‘Em when my husband announced it. She also dismissed any version of poker where you got to trade part of your hand. I was surprised at her opinions. I remembered a lot of penny-ante poker with the neighbors when I was a kid, but I didn’t recall Mom having any real stance in the type of play. 

The deck got to Mom. She called Five Card Stud, no trades. She demolished the rest of us at the table. As I watched her gather up the pennies that had been hers in the first place, it dawned on me. 

Great-Grandpa counted cards and taught Grandma. Grandma counted cards and taught Mom. My brain always tries to count cards, but it can’t. Because Grandpa had one drink a day (seven and seven), Grandma had one beer a day (Budweiser), and Mom seemed to be in competition with herself to find the bottom of the bottle (or box) of booze. 

I missed out on a family secret. One that could bring fun and a bit of excitement to my life. Great-Grandpa passed it to Grandma through Cribbage, who passed it to Mom via Hearts, but it never made it to me, even though I have the itch in my brain, because Great-Grandpa and my grandma understood that counting cards and liquor both required a type of discipline, and my mother couldn’t do both at the same time. 

I unearthd Great-Grandpa’s Cribbage board recently, and a favorite bar in town has a weekly night. I need to brush up on the rules and expect not to win. I don’t know all the tricks of the game, but at least I can tell the story of my great-grandpa teaching me. 

“And he got really good at milking that cow!”

As long as I can land the laugh, I’ll be happy with my legacy.

[detroittoaccra]

Here we sit, the day after Pres. Obama’s farewell address and a little more than a week before the inauguration of a new President (I’ll admit…I still have a hard time saying his name) whose victory was considered inconceivable by many.  There’s been a lot of ink spilled trying to explain and understand the election.  Many of these articles claim to have the answer.  In reality, of course, there is no single answer.  Like anything else, this particular event (with all of its consequences) is the product of multiple, overlapping and sometimes contradictory processes.  Among those many explanations, I am sympathetic to the perspective of people like historian Timothy Burke, who has written quite persuasively about the need to move beyond dismissal and mockery and indignation toward Trump supporters.  If, he argues, we were surprised that this many people would vote for Trump given what seems like obvious deficits and detractions, we clearly don’t understand the population of the United States as well as we thought we did.  Our circles are drawn too closely.  Our perspectives are too narrow.  What is needed is the same sort of analytical, ethnographic lens that we bring to other parts of the world.  That lens encourages us to understand people on their own terms, to take their concerns seriously in order to understand the choices they make and the values they hold.  Burke calls, in a way, for a new methodology, used by scholars, politicians, and the general public alike, to think about our present concerns and visions for the future.

I’m from the part of the country that voted for Trump in large numbers.  Many of the people I grew up with are skeptical of government intervention, in part because they (or their families) were forcibly moved by the federal government in the huge electrification initiatives throughout the Tennessee Valley that provided hydroelectric power by damming the region’s many rivers.  They feel like their taxes are reinvested more often in rural areas than in their own towns.  And they feel increasingly ostracized by a larger national community who have, for generations, looked down on them as rednecks and hillbillies, living backward lives far away from cosmopolitan urban centers.  Whereas young men and women of my grandparents’ generation lived the American dream, young men and women today face increasingly constricted economic opportunities as factories close and ship jobs overseas and local stores are pushed out by big-box stores like Walmart.  Today, people imagine the 1930s-1960s as an idyllic time where all things were possible – one could stay in your community, close to your family, and still move up in the world.  That nostalgic vision was inevitably more complicated in reality.  My grandparents, who died recently, left behind a house they built themselves in a community that they essentially founded as well as a relatively large estate that ensured they lived without care or concern through their final days.  My grandfather, the son of a man who always seemed to be losing whatever he had, was the first in his family to graduate from high school.  As a child, he had malaria.  His grandmother was Cherokee and collected herbs to make poultices and teas.  His Christmas gifts sounded like they were straight out of Little House on the Prairie.  He started his rise through the local telephone company climbing telephone poles as an installation and repairman.  He took advantage of company programs to train future leaders, taking college courses during the summer in Kansas, away from his family, living in a fraternity-like circumstance with other young men overseen by a house mother who cooked their meals and washed their clothes because he had classes from sunrise to sunset every day of the week. He spent the early years of his career moving around (sometimes by himself and sometimes with his family) through the region and around the country, laying telephone lines and establishing branch offices.  He ended his career as the president of the local branch of the telephone company, refusing further advancement (even after the company offered significant promotions) that would require him to move his family again.  My grandmother often said that he saved her when he married her.  Her early life was harder.  Her father was illiterate, did not possess a driver’s license, and was unable to hold a job long-term, even if he was a highly skilled builder with an intuitive understanding of mathematics and geometry.  He worked on farms and in coal mines throughout the region, moving his family frequently, making and selling moonshine on the side to supplement the family income.  Every time they moved, my grandmother got a little farther behind in school.  She was ultimately so far behind – and so embarrassed by their poverty – that she dropped out, barely past middle school but possessing a natural intelligence that was envious but not always obvious (i.e. “book smarts”).  Her mother sent her off to help her older sisters.  At one point, she traveled across the country by train to help her sister in Denver.  Upon arrival, she found that her brother-in-law had run off, leaving her sister and children with nothing, living in half of a chicken coop.  At one point, she admitted that one of the lowest points in her life was having to steal canned food from the cellar of the house next door to have something to eat.  She begged her father to allow her to marry my grandfather before she turned 18.  He agreed.  But even then her early life was far from easy.  They lived in tiny apartments and frequently relied on friends and neighbors for gifts of food to supplement my grandfather’s meager income.  His income also continued to support his parents, who continued to struggle on the farm, and her parents, after my great-grandfather became ill and was no longer able to work.  Their life didn’t get easier until much later, well after my mother and her sisters were born.  It wasn’t an easy ride.  And it took a little more than working hard.  His ability to change the circumstances of himself and his family over the course of their lifetimes required a political and economic context that created opportunities, supported the right to a fair wage, and encouraged local business.  His ability to accumulate wealth required an early investment in local companies that were progressively swallowed up in ever-larger corporations – now monopolies – which meant good things for the value of his stock but made it harder and harder for most people to enter the market or accumulate wealth on the same scale.

I’ve thought a lot about my grandparents’ experiences over the last year.  In part, because this year was marked by a series of illness and ultimately their death – within 6 weeks of each other.  But also because their stories are precisely the kinds of stories that people point to when they bemoan the present and look to the past with nostalgia.  On the one hand, it does often feel like the experiences of people like my grandparents have been ignored in the grand American narrative.  But neither of them would recognize the vitriol and hatefulness and bitterness they see today.  The “better days” that people point to weren’t easy.  And they weren’t available to everyone – many of their family members’ experiences testify to that.  Opportunities are, in many ways, much more expansive today than they were when my grandparents were young.

When people point to the “good ol’ days” and seek to insulate their communities from difference and change, they often miss an opportunity to think more systematically about a set of issues (practices, processes, values, laws, etc,etc) that connect them to other people in this country and around the world – people they would never have an occasion to meet and who in many cases might be profoundly different from them.  When they demonize people of difference, they ignore the lessons that people like my grandparents learned early on.  The hardships my grandparents faced taught them that hard work was not a guarantee of wealth and that poverty was no indication of a person’s goodness and morality.  My grandfather frequently told me that the best people and the hardest workers he knew were also the poorest.  They both made it clear that we were not better than anyone by virtue of our relative privilege or education, and that we should always be kind to others even if they were unkind to us because you never knew what someone else was going through.  Implicit in that was an understanding that the relative social standing our family held in our small community came with expectations and responsibilities.  People were always watching us.  That was not an excuse to be snotty or uppity.  Instead, it was a command to expand our circle of care ever wider to include as many as we could, most particularly the most vulnerable among us.  Doing that didn’t require being condescending.  It meant recognizing the humanity and goodness of others.  That attitude was always best incapsulated in my grandmother’s admonition not to “be ugly”.  For me that meant more than a set of behaviors; it was a way of being that came from the inside and radiated out into the world, shaping the way that you were perceived just as much as who you were.  Kindness came through being polite and respectful. But much more than that, it came from the tone you used, the assumptions you made, the respect you had for a person’s abilities and intelligence, the offer to help anyone in need. Nana was certainly humble, and it was clear to us that we were no better than anyone else. But part of being good and kind also meant being willing to stand up and speak out when something or someone was wrong, even (or especially) if they were wrong about you.  When you could help, you should, and that help should be given without conditions or expectations or assumptions or judgement.  Help came in all sorts of forms – financial certainly, but also through encouragement, education, and support.  Helping others often meant giving them a chance – the kind of chance my grandparents were given but which they realized so many others never had.

As I’ve reflected on my grandparents’ lives over the last year, I have a keen sense that they were exceptional – the kinds of saints that walk among us, as they were described by the pastor presiding over my grandmother’s funeral.  But that doesn’t mean that their lives – or rather the values according to which they chose to live their lives – should be unattainable or exceptional.  Loving with unflinching depth and openness requires us to be vulnerable and sometimes – as was certainly the case in their lives – means that we get hurt.  But it also makes us less likely to fall victim to hate and fear.  When we privilege goodness and care for others, that means more than our own pocketbook or any ideology.  That’s the thing about the current political climate – and the various forms of racism, misogyny, xenophobia, and homophobia that I witnessed as a child – that I find so perplexing.  Because the struggle that I heard about, saw, experienced didn’t lead to fear.  It led to an open embrace.

I’ve also thought a lot about my grandparents’ experiences over the last year because I’ve been struck by the kinds of parallels between their experiences and the experiences of men and women in Ghana whose stories I have collected over the last 10 years.  As I wrote to my grandmother right before she died, those people might seem inconceivably different to her.  They were from West Africa, and they were entrepreneurs who came of age in the context of British colonial rule.  But, I thought that their stories and values and concerns would sound very familiar to her.  The older men I interviewed loved telling stories of their lives.  Their work was their life – a source of pride and a symbol of skill and professionalism, but also status.  They worked long hours to provide for themselves and their immediate families, but also for a large extended family and in many cases, strangers who came to them as apprentices wanting to learn their skill.  The drivers at what is arguably the oldest union in La, live in a place that people throughout Ghana condemn as dangerous.  I was told not to go there.  And yet, they are regularly called by union leaders, government officials, and police to adjudicate disputes and consult on difficult cases.  The gentle nobility of the most prominent union leaders, their warm embrace, and their constant encouragement always felt familiar.  They came of age at a time when a different sort of social and economic mobility was possible for people of modest means.  I thought my grandmother would like them.  But more importantly, I thought that she would find something in common with them.

I experienced the unfolding of the US election against the backdrop of this research as well as Ghanaian conversations about their own impending presidential election.  Life in Ghana isn’t easy these days either.  As I’ve explored before, electricity shortages (aka dumsor) and profound income inequality mean that the kinds of opportunities available to older men and women who came of age in the 1930s-1960s are no longer respectable paths to respectability and wealth, even as the daily costs of living continue to rise.  The experience of precarity, which has caused increased anxiety in the US, is both an old reality and a new experience in contemporary Ghana.  Over the last year or more in Ghana, I have heard increasing discontent from a wide array of Ghanaian citizens – from the city’s poorest residents who have long had sporadic access to electricity, to highly educated youth who are frustrated with the lack of economic opportunities in the country (and the need to charge technological devices like cellphones and computers to run their entrepreneurial ventures), and the country’s business elite who have been forced to shut down businesses or fire workers as the result of the increased costs and strain on machinery associated with electricity outages and reliance on generators.  Over and over again in July 2016, people told me that they were fed up with government of all sorts.  Many people were disgusted by the current government under the leadership of John Dramani Mahama and the National Democratic Congress.  For some–many, clearly, given the recent victory of Nana Akuffo Addo of the National Patriotic Party in the recent December elections–that inspired them to cast their vote for the opposing party.  These realities were evident to many in the lead-up to the Ghanaian election, which was thought to hinge on popular perceptions of the economy.  For others, discontent was translated in various forms of “dropping out”–of the economy by abandoning the quest for formal sector employment and turning instead to entrepreneurial ventures focused on digital and social services or leaving urban areas altogether to return to farming (running their own farms or collaborating with farmers to establish artisanal chocolate production, for example.  This discontent is echoed in conversations in Ghana and across the continent about whether “informal” workers’ lives matter.

To be fair, life isn’t harder for everyone in Ghana these days.  If a person hadn’t been to cities like Accra, Kumasi, or Takoradi for 10 years and returned today, the persistent familiarity of the city’s open-air markets and street vendors would be contrasted with the increasing prevalence of shopping malls, boutique hotels, art galleries, movie theaters, wine bars, coffee shops, cupcake stores, and bistros.  Some people in Ghana are doing well.  An Afropolitan class of young Africans, with connections to the US and Europe, is increasingly defining the image of these cities, through popular culture – like the YouTube series An African City and literature like Taiye Selasi‘s Ghana Must Go (see also her TED talk about identity and belonging here) and Yaa Gyasi‘s Homegoing– and through media narratives of “Africa Rising” (most closely associated with writing in The Economist beginning in 2011 and recently questioned once again).  Many of these “Afropolitans” are returnees – children of Ghanaian immigrants, who grew up in the US and Europe, and have now returned to the birthplace of their parents to take advantage of the seemingly endless opportunities in “underdeveloped” markets or to escape the racial violence and discrimination of the West in favor of a new community of belonging where difference appears to be based less on skin color and more on achievement.

Many people of all stripes participated actively and enthusiastically in this Ghanaian election – much like those elections that preceded it.  But the world weariness of so many – the belief that the election was unlikely to change much, a desperation born out of a lack of opportunity and a perception that the system is rigged against them – that signals something much broader.  In the aftermath of the Brexit vote and the election of Trump, Thomas Piketty has called for a rethinking of globalization, necessary in order to stem the growth of “Trumpism”.  Piketty argues that “the explosion in economic and geographic inequality in the United States over several decades and the inability of successive governments to deal with this” set the stage for Trump’s victory. While Trump’s policies are unlikely to actually address or reverse this growing inequality (and, Piketty and many others argue, are more likely to exacerbate it), the anti-establishment and anti-intellectual streams of his campaign seemed to be the more convincing narrative for a group of voters who seem convinced that the global elite are not listening and do not understand (or care about) the realities of their stagnating or increasingly difficult lives (*we must keep in mind of course that, while much of the analysis in journalistic venues as cast “Trump voters” as a homogenous bunch, the characterization by Piketty and others reflects only a portion of Trump supporters.  The diverse motivations that explain the outcome of this election are likely much more complex than any single theory or argument could pretend to encapsulate).  Many people in Ghana – and across the continent – might concur.  There were a shocking number of people pulling for Trump when we visited Ghana in October.  And, beyond that, there is increasingly public discontent over national government leaders – voiced, for example, in protests over dumsor – and international development, aid, and governmental agencies.  For some like Piketty, this requires a re-orientation of globalization, rewriting trade agreements in a way that would enable governments to address rising national and global inequalities rather than exacerbating them.  For others, like Cornel West, the election of Trump signals that “the neoliberal era in the United States ended with a neofascist bang.”  On the international stage, the recent recognition by the IMF and 200+ economists acknowledged that decades of policies based on economic theories that emphasize austerity as an economic strategy to drive growth were wrong (too little too late for many parts of the world, including Africa, where these policies have been shown to fail for decades), gives some hope for a shift in strategy.  In other corners, however, little seems to have changed, as the United Nations voted to replace the Millennium Development Goals with Sustainable Development Goals, which continue to fail to acknowledge the historical and structural roots of contemporary poverty.

The complaints in Ghana are part of these larger national and international narratives.  Neoliberalism, austerity, development – these all have indelibly shaped the Ghanaian economy and defined the possibilities (or lack thereof) for Ghanaian citizens in an immediate way for decades.  And while structural and systemic analysis of the processes of globalization are important, it is equally important to think through the ways these processes are instantiated.  For Ghanaians, neoliberalism, austerity, and development are manifested in the frustrations over dumsor or the wasteful inefficiencies of ill-suited road building projects or the priorities given to “new urbanist” visions over local solutions for the urban majority.  It’s important to understand these frustrations not only because it helps us better understand and attack inequality on the ground but also because it forces us to interrogate our own practices and assumptions as academics, practitioners, and global citizens.  And it provokes a reimagining of what infrastructure or development or urban planning might look like if it embraced the realities of the majority rather than ignoring them.  It seems like that’s needed more than ever right now.

Populism, Discontent, and the Failure of Global Elite Imaginations Here we sit, the day after Pres. Obama's farewell address and a little more than a week before the inauguration of a new President (I'll admit...I still have a hard time saying his name) whose victory was considered inconceivable by many.