The Right Medicine, the Perfect Poison
The Right Medicine, the Perfect Poison
Gana Gana in West Point
“Cut it,” he said and handed me the filthy blue plastic tumbler as we sat on the sand in front of a half-eaten shell of a building.
I sipped cautiously as the sun set over waves gently crashing on the thinning shore. The brown liquor called gana gana, or African whiskey, was impossibly bitter and set my chest ablaze. My acquaintance, C, as I will call him, laughed and finished the rest off, with a only a faint grimace.
C was a tall, wiry man in his early to mid-thirties with sharp features. His face was stern for the most part, but occasionally a sheepish grin would crack through his features, which he deliberately made fearful most of the time. He was a hardboiled hustler who I’d know for a few of the years I had lived in Monrovia while reporting in West Point, the city’s largest slum. West Point is a cramped ramshackle assemblage of zinc shacks set on a thin, sandy peninsula engulfed by the boundless might of the Atlantic Ocean.
Dressed in a fisherman’s hat, shorts and a short-sleeved checkered shirt, he stood up with the empty jar of gana gana under his right arm, ready to buy the ingredients for his friend so they could “brew” more. C had grown skinnier and more sinewy this rainy season. His usually shaved hair was thick and bushy to keep him warm, and he wore oversized extra layers to pad out his thin form.
Gana gana is a local Liberian liquor served from scratched plastic mayonnaise jars and poured through funnels into recycled glass bottles or straight into plastic tumblers. Its ingredients and brewing process are simple. Ingredients: a bunch of small rolls of tree bark and cane juice, made from sugar cane. Directions: Place the sticks in a jar. Fill it up with cane juice. Wait for 30 minutes to an hour. Take the sticks out and you have gana gana, a homemade whiskey, but with more bite.
With cane juice easy to access on the market and gana gana tree bark going for 20 Liberian dollars—about a quarter in U.S. currency—a bunch, punters can get a couple of punches for around 10 Liberian dollars a shot. Gana gana was almost always available in poor communities, which make up most of the cities and towns in the small West African country.
C usually smoked Thailand White—a low-grade form of heroin—off aluminum foil; on a lucky day he smoked a bit of crack or, “cocoa,” from a makeshift pipe. He earned his daily fixes by helping users smoke in a ramshackle drug den called Poto Corner, meaning “the place of the dirty, inadequate, or useless” in Liberian colloquial English.
But in recent times, gana gana had become his preferred poison. As the sky darkened and the wind swept over us, he shivered slightly and explained his need for the liquor’s bitter warmth. Rough tides had devoured houses, motels, and public toilets. Poto Corner itself had been wiped off West Point’s tiny map, its contents floating somewhere above or beneath the ocean’s surface. The sandy-floored shack C had shared with two other friends for a rental fee of $5 a month had also been snatched by the sea and he was left sleeping behind a tarpaulin in the half devoured building that was now a makeshift gana gana bar filled with men drinking and playing checkers. It was buffered by piled-up sand hemmed in by beaten metal and tree branches. He slept there in the early hours of the morning or when it was quiet.
“Gana gana will take away the cold and make you feel strong,” he told me. Whereas smoking heroine or crack made you shiver and feel “numb,” he said.
C was an ex-combatant, a hustler, thug, a “gronnah boy.” His friends and associates smoked cigarettes; “opium,” aka marijuana; or Thailand White, in a number of combinations, depending on their finances and taste. But all took their cut of gana gana, a drink they saw as manning them up, making them strong. It was even said to possess some kind of medicinal powers that helped clean the stomach and cure colds.
But gana gana wasn’t just a “gronnah” drink for local street thugs. Liberia’s working class took their shots after retiring from their jobs at the port, the car yard, the low-paying government job or the work they had found for the day. They lingered in bars made of corrugated zinc and chicken wire for a moment before heading home to dark houses with unstable or petrol-generated electricity and bucket baths in the yard, or to cheap candlelit motels filled with local working girls and women.
Liberia’s elite class of big men and sons of big men sat in bars with names like Scarlet, Gossip, and the Cigar Bar, cordoned off in VIP lounges with security details that were less there for protection and more part of some absurd mise en scene of power. Liberia’s everyman—who had countless family members to support and banked at a local susu savings organization rather than in the United States—swigged a few shots or got shamelessly drunk before stumbling back home, on any given night, which was easy to do in a community like West Point, which never slept. The big men drove home in gargantuan SUVs, throwing a few Liberian dollars out of their tinted windows to the artful beggars who mapped their movements around Monrovia.
For C and his cohort of friends in Poto Corner, who had been made homeless by the hungry tides and the downpours of Liberia’s relentless rainy season, gana gana was the right medicine, the perfect poison. It steeled them for future hardships, unexpected troubles, and inevitable tragedies. Gana gana’s bitterness broke through the numbness of hunger, the endless hustle, and the everyday indignities of poverty. It stung away the dull sadness of being a nobody in a society where there were so few somebodies. Cutting a shot of gana gana made the body burn with all of its might.