The Hard Way: A 75-Dollar Bicycle Revolutionizes

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Outside Magazine March 2004

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The Hard Way
Freewheeling
Welcome to Ghana, where commuting is a nightmare—and optimism is a bright-yellow bike of one's own


	(Illustration by Jeff Soto)

AS WE RIDE UP TO THE FISH FARM, a mob of women crushes against the tall metal gates. They have walked here through suffocating heat and humidity, from mud huts dotting the Western Sahara veldt, carrying tin basins on their heads. Packed together, they are desperate, determined, on the verge of breaking down the fence. Workers inside are wielding sticks to keep them from clambering over the top.

Brad Schroeder, my unflappable guide, squeezes his yellow bicycle straight into the fray. I follow on his heels. The gates crack open just long enough for us to slip through to the compound beyond, the surge of humanity attempting to follow us inside.

A tall man in sunglasses, his shaven head glistening with sweat, greets us. "What's going on?" yells Schroeder as they smoothly execute the Ghanaian handshake: white-man clasp, brother clasp, white man, brother, mutual snap of the fingers.

"Giving away free fish," replies Mark Amechi, smiling broadly.

Amechi, 33, is the Nigerian-German owner and operator of Tropo Farms, a fish company he founded here, near the banks of the Volta River, in the West African nation of Ghana. He has a master's degree in aquaculture and raises tilapia, a one-pound white-flesh fish he sells to the markets down south in the Atlantic-coast city of Accra, Ghana's capital of two million. Just this morning, Amechi traveled to the nearby village of Asutsuare to announce that he would be handing out 3,000 pounds of undersize stock. That's roughly seven pounds of perfectly good fish per person, worth about $2.50—more than a day's wage for a rural Ghanaian. By the time Amechi got back to the farm, word had spread and a throng of villagers had arrived to claim their share.

"Might as well help out the local families," explains Amechi. "The fish would rot otherwise." He invites us into his un-air-conditioned office and proffers a bottle of ice water and some oranges. Schroeder and I have just cycled 65 brain-baking miles north from Accra, across rolling farmland, and we're dripping profusely in the equatorial heat.

Schroeder, a 27-year-old from Charlotte, North Carolina, is the Ghana program officer for the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy (ITDP), a nonprofit, nongovernmental organization based in New York whose mission is "to promote environmentally sustainable and equitable transportation worldwide." His current goal is to make bicycling in Ghana more economically feasible and reliable by importing well-built bikes designed for the rugged conditions in Africa. Until now, Ghana's bike market has consisted primarily of new and used single-speed city bikes from Europe and shoddily built imitation mountain bikes from Asia—which sell for between $40 and $100.

In 2002, Paul Steely White, ITDP's Africa regional director, spearheaded a plan to create an affordable bicycle that would combine the dependability of European bikes with the versatility of mountain bikes. Then he teamed up with Waterloo, Wisconsin-based bike giant Trek to create just such a product. "The challenge," Trek president John Burke told me, "was to build a durable, high-quality bike that was actually affordable for Africans."

American bike builder Trek designed an affordable, six-speed steel hybrid sturdy enough to withstand Ghana's roughest roads.

Manufactured for Trek in China, the so-called California Bike—named, according to White, to give bicycling a successful, upscale image—is a banana-yellow, six-speed hybrid mountain bike with a chrome-moly frame and fenders, sturdy rear rack, and puncture-resistant tires. To date, ITDP has imported 600 of the bikes to Ghana and sold them to local companies and dealers at cost.

Schroeder is irreverent, inexhaustible, realistic yet irrepressibly optimistic—the kind of guy who solves problems with an élan born of directness. He works like a dog, drinks like a fish, and pops beer caps off with his teeth. He and I had spent the last three days wheeling through the thickly polluted, impossibly congested, blaring, sweltering, treacherous streets of Accra.

Today's ride is our first into the bush—it's Schroeder's mission to deliver the California Bikes we are riding to a village to the north and to check in on Amechi's recent acquisition of 26 bikes for his employees. The bikes cost $75 each; Amechi picked up 30 percent, and the workers will pay off the rest of their purchase through deductions from their paychecks over the next seven months.

"So how're the bikes working out?" Schroeder asks Amechi, speaking clearly even with an entire orange in his mouth.

"Brilliantly," Amechi says. "Already they've become something of a status symbol. The men are quite proud of them. Some of my guys were walking five to ten miles to work, so I've seen a significant decrease in tardiness. They have so much more freedom now. A few even ride home for lunch. There's a newfound self-esteem." Glancing out the door to the front gate beyond, he pauses. "Would you excuse me for a moment?"

Amechi springs to his feet, races into another room, then flies past us and out the door, shoving shells into a shotgun as he runs. The villagers have burst through the gates and are rushing helter-skelter toward the ponds to get their fish. It's bedlam. Amechi raises the shotgun and fires into the air. They freeze. He fires again, and then, shotgun in hand, charges the mob, bellowing at the top of his lungs. The crowd spins about en masse, hightailing it back out through the twisted gates, where Amechi will have them wait to be let in, ten at a time.

I'm stunned, but Schroeder merely shakes his head: "Giving anything away for free never works."

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