The tattoo

A few deaf people here have gotten a tattoo on the inside of their lower arm. In print: their name, and the name of the village, Adamorobe. (Also see: photosite Elena Rue). I had not seen such tattoos on hearing people yet. On the last day of October – I had been in the village for two weeks – I started a conversation on the subject. I asked Kofi: “You have that tattoo on your arm, why don’t the hearing have one, and the deaf do?” He started to explain that they serve the purpose of not getting lost outside the village. He knows how to get to Accra – the capital which is situated about ten kilometres further on – and he knows how to get to different other places. He learnt getting around from Samuel, an older deaf man from Accra who has lived in Adamorobe for a long time already and who tutored the deaf bible studies, and who also took them to the capital.

Well, to try to get somewhere here in Ghana, you arrive at huge, seemingly chaotic ‘lorry stations’ filled with mini buses (‘trotros’) scattered among the place: the buses we sack in Europe, are used here as public transportation. You mostly get to the right bus by asking around. “The bus drivers do not recognize the sign for Adamorobe”, Kofi told me. And writing down the place name is not that obvious. Kofi is a farmer who never attended school. Samuel taught him how to write his name, but to remember ‘Adamorobe’ is more difficult. Therefore, he shows his tattoo to people at the bus station and that’s how he gets to the right tro-tro. “I don’t want to go to my land each day again over and over again”, he explains to me. It feels good to get away sometimes. And to, at those moments, show everybody that he, Kofi, travels to and from Accra on his own.

A few weeks later I heard a story about Kwadzo, who is tattoo-less. He once got lost and spent months away from home. I asked him to tell me that story. He had to go to a cocoa farm (a lot of people from Adamorobe have worked on cocoa farms outside Adamorobe or have emigrated there). He knew the way, but when he signalled he had to get off the bus, the driver just kept on driving. He ended up somewhere he did not know his way. He walked around for quite a while before he ran into the police but he did not succeed in communicating where his home was. He worked on a piece of land for a couple of months, which the police helped him obtain. One day, the police finally found out where he was from and he was taken back. Everybody was ecstatic that he was not dead. So there you see. A tattoo can keep you out of a hell of a lot of trouble.

A few days ago, at a funeral, I saw a woman with a similar tattoo. A hearing woman. I peeked at her arm to read what was written underneath her name: “Oyibi”. Oyibi is a village near Adamorobe. This meant that those tattoos are not something specifically from and for the deaf people. A hearing person who speaks, can without a doubt tell a bus driver or a police officer the name of her village. For a moment, I was confused.

Once of a sudden, I remembered a conversation with Kwame, the first to have such a tattoo. He told me that he got it under pressure of his father, when he went to work in a cocoa zone outside of Adamorobe. Because – as his father told him – if you die in a bus crash (there are quite a few fatal incidents here), how will they know who you are and where to deliver your body? In Europe they look in your wallet. To find your ID. So maybe those tattoos are just like a kind of passport, and they get a more broad meaning and function for the deaf?