signs in Ghana

Sign painting shop beside the road in city of Tamale

When we moved to Ghana in 2011, I started doing some reading about Ghana. An article on economics mentioned something new to me. It said that and important next step in Ghana’s economic development should be the naming of streets and giving houses and businesses numbers on those streets. Being able to identify the physical location of a person, or where a vehicle or other piece of property is kept, turns out to be an important for business, banking, and credit.

Before coming to Africa, I naively assumed that all places had street names and house numbers. In Burkina Faso, our first assignment, only a few main streets had names, I never saw numbers and I made my own map. Ghana has more – some streets with names, some lots with numbers, and there are several maps of the city for sale. See an earlier blog – The Rock that God Put – for a story of how I found someone in a good-sized town when I only knew the part of town he lived in.

Street corner in Adjiringanor, Accra

Businesses and churches want to be found. So they have solved the problem of lacking street names. The solution? Many roads wear a lively garland of signs. Intersections host a swathe of them, each vying for your eye so that you will see that their business, church or whatever is just down this street, if only you would turn here. The need for signage is an economic opportunity. Sign painting businesses proliferate along with the welders who make the bare signs for the imaginative painters.

Street corner near our place

The content of the signs is just plain fun. There is no other word for it. Not fun in the sense that they are to be made fun of, but fun in the sense that I don’t know what is coming next. Will it be the “Blessings come from God’s Great Covenant Beauty Salon?” Or perhaps the “Jehovah Lives Automatic Mechanic”, the “Out of Time Radiator Specialist” or the “Remember the Truth Photo and Video Studio”? I would love to have conversations with Ghanaian shop owners to find out how they chose the names for their shop, just like I did with a taxi driver to find out why he put Shame in his window.

Enjoy the signs, I sure do.

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I was attracted to the bright colors of this roadside booth painted like a Ghana flag. I didn’t really notice the words painted on it until I was looking at my photos of the day at home.

Sign - God's time is best - don't give up yet lottery booth

Lottery booth in Accra, Ghana

Ghanaians express their religion and feelings about life in sayings they put on their businesses, taxi windows, and more. In this case, the owner has pressed his religious beliefs into a commercial use. You see, this is a private booth which sells tickets to the national lottery! It is obviously in the economic interests of the owner that the buyers “don’t give up yet” and that they keep hoping for “God’s time”, which would be when they will win the lottery, of course.

It is easy to criticize this commercialization of religious belief, and even some missionaries get stuck in critique mode. In this case, if I am honest I have to admit that I tend to bend my beliefs to suit my needs and wants. It really is no small matter to let our beliefs frame our economic survival and not the other way around.

Besides, the statement “God’s time is best” almost surely expresses genuine sentiments, especially judging by the other businesses sporting the same words.