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My wife and I had stayed at the old City Hotel in Kumasi many times during Ghana's troubled years some 25 to 30 years ago. Now the new Golden Tulip Hotel had refurbished its predecessor and we wanted to see what it was like. It was certainly aimed at a wealthier clientele. Just sitting in the reception area required a payment of $5 unless you were a resident.
The dining room was empty, but the food display was among the best we had ever seen in Africa. Featured was an all-you-can-eat buffet for 28 Ghanaian cedis. With the new cedi now worth more than a dollar, that meant the cost of dinner per person was $30, or the equivalent of the average Ghanaian's monthly income.
I was reluctant to partake of the generous spread before us, but friends who accompanied us were insistent and offered to pay. Even then, we all felt rather guilty, so we agreed that the two men should have the buffet, while the two ladies would eat off the à la carte menu, which offered meals at half the price. That way, the evening came to a total of less than $100 for four, still a great deal of money in a comparatively poor, third-world country.
One of the great ironies of our contemporary world is that while the number of people starving has never been greater at 800 million, the number who are overweight is even greater, at 1 billion.
During dinner we remembered the famine in Ghana 25 years earlier, when a buffet like the one set before us would have been unthinkable. Then we had struggled just to survive.
There were long periods when the only foods available were coconuts and green oranges. People lost weight rapidly. I remember the gap between men's shirt collars and their necks increasing by the week as the food supply worsened.
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