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The last few days I have been going round picking up gifts for friends and family back home in Sweden. Finding things that are genuinely Ghanaian proved to be more difficult than I first thought.
Truly Ghanaian are chocolate and cocoa products, a few other processed food items like spices, pineapple marmelade, roasted nuts and Ghanaian cloth – both wax prints and batik. Then we also have the jewellery like beads in every colour and shape. At least the big, heavy glass beads I have seen are produced here. The smaller ones a market lady says she buys from a man from Niger, but she wasn’t sure of their origin.
Today I also got to know from a reliable source that a lot of the “Made in Ghana” wax print cloth at the market is acctually printed in China. For a country like Ghana with a spiralling turism industry it would of course be good if the country could both gain jobs and profits themselves from selling things “Made in Ghana”.
As for me, I am tomorrow going back deep into the community 1 market in Tema to continue my quest.