We’ve been living in our neighbourhood for almost twenty years now. Our house is directly opposite an Islamic school, with a playing field in front of both our home and that of our neighbours. These neighbours are Muslims, and the man of the house is a prince from a royal family here in Tamale. Although he is not the crown prince, he comes from a respected lineage. He has two wives, and they’ve been a constant source of trouble for us since we moved here.
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From the very beginning, the first wife has been dumping rubbish right in front of our house. We’ve asked her countless times to stop, but she never has. Over the years, the garbage has piled up into what now looks like a small mountain. They don’t use gas for cooking, so they burn firewood and dump the ashes along with their daily household waste right there. Sometimes, even their children defecate on that heap.
When the second wife joined the household, things got worse. She has two children and though she seems a little more educated, she’s just as careless about cleanliness. Before they built a toilet, she used to defecate on the same rubbish heap too. She would usually wait until evening prayers when it got dark, then come out to relieve herself there.
We had intentionally left tall grasses in that area to reduce erosion and stop the rubbish from being washed into our compound, but it hasn’t helped much. Anytime it rains, all that filth is carried into our yard. Every morning, we wake up to clean and burn rubbish that’s not even ours.
Because of this, people who pass by think we are the dirty ones. They see the mess and assume it belongs to us. But the truth is, we burn our refuse daily, so it never piles up. When we confront our neighbours, their usual defence is that they burn their rubbish “every three days” — which is an outright lie. Sometimes, they can go four months without burning anything.
They only clean up when there’s a big Muslim festival and people are coming over to eat or when the park in front is being prepared for mass prayers.
One time I was preparing the yard to plant corn. Because of the rain the night before, rubbish had again washed into our compound. It was on our trees, around our design blocks, everywhere. My mum came out and got frustrated. She shouted insults at their house. “How can women be this dirty? If you don’t see anything wrong with what you are doing, then why won’t you dump the rubbish in front of your own house?”
The women didn’t come out, but they heard her. Later that day, we saw them doing a half-hearted cleanup. When they finished they dug a small pit to dump more rubbish in.
My mum asked their children, why they couldn’t dig the pit on their own side of the yard. The women, together with their eldest daughter (who’s in her first year at the university), just laughed and mocked my mum.
Shortly after that we woke up to find plastics and waste all over the place, even inside and outside our gate. I decided to gather the rubbish and throw it into the same hole they dug. As I was doing this, the second wife came out to send her kids off to school in a tricycle (yellow yellow/ pragya). She frowned when she saw me, then said in Dagbani, “Isn’t this witchcraft? You’ve come to throw rubbish into our pit just to curse us.”
Mind you, this so-called pit is right in front of our house, not theirs. The second wife is about my age, and the first wife is not even as old as my eldest sister, who’s 43. The man himself is probably around my sister’s age or younger. With all that youthfulness, they can’t clean. My mum, who is old and retired is the one who wakes up every morning to clean their filth — it’s exhausting.
Everyone in the neighbourhood fears this family because of their background. People say the man’s late mother, who was a queen, was accused of witchcraft. As the king’s second wife, she allegedly tried to kill her sister-wife’s children so hers could inherit the throne. She was caught, banished, and later settled here with her son, our neighbour.
Now, they’re threatening that if we ever dump rubbish in front of their house in retaliation, they’ll start throwing it directly into our rooms. We’ve tried to resolve this peacefully several times. We even took the issue to the chief’s palace.
The first time we went there they told us to bring an elderly man to represent us. My father is late, and we are not natives of this place so no one takes us seriously.
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By and by, we managed to get someone to help take the matter to the palace, but we lost the case. The palace sided with our neighbours. I suspect bribery was involved.
We don’t know what else to do. Where can we go next? Which human rights or sanitation agency can we report them to so they’ll be forced to stop dumping and finally clear the rubbish heap they’ve been building for over twenty years?
—Rose
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There is an office of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) at the district assembly you can report such matters to. Try to gather evidence such as pictures and videos of them in the act to support your case. As a first step the EPA will issue them warning and directives. If they persist the EPA will arrange them before Court.