Korle-Bu Hospital - a Dark Tourism Attraction?

As has been discussed in the series on Dark Tourism in Ghana in Public Agenda's tourism column, Ghana seems to be on top not only in slavery-heritage tourism that reflect death, horror, atrocities, destruction and suffering but also in colonial heritage tourism, another legacy of horror. Through servant-oriented education, conscientisation and thinking we have been left with colonial legacies of governance and development that are haunting our present existence in a modern world.

The latest dark tourism attraction is the Korle-bu Teaching Hospital in Accra where the main national colonial surgical theatre lacks a generator and basic hygienic facilities and where post-surgery patients are falling off hospital beds onto the floor to their death. There is also good traditional music to be enjoyed from the keynotes emanating from the leaking drops of water from the roofs of hospital wards into strategically positioned buckets.

The trip to hell

A farewell to health and livelihood, a medical referral to Korle-bu is a death sentence, the kind which Amnesty has not yet considered for inclusion in their vocabulary. For the dark tourists, the greatest attraction is that of having to watch a live presentation of people dying slowly to the music of the strikes of doctors, nurses and other health workers as well as experiencing the parody of a health system meant to keep the population of Ghana healthy and alive.

The Ministry of Health may be doing very well, in the media, but it might as well be attached to the Ministry of Tourism & Diasporan Relations for the full realisation of its Dark Tourism potential.

Life may be priceless but not at Korle-Bu. Death rather is. Besides, it further generates funeral tourism, a domestic tourism potential that does not need promotion for its mass attraction to Ghanaians. The designer coffin makers have prayed hard enough.

Our Doctors and Nurses may be enjoying brain tourism abroad but do the rest of us back home need to be victims of a self-indulgent dark tourism as well as involuntary participants and victims?

Image versus doublespeak

Although some may nominate the colonial administration as perpetrators but at the time the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital was envisaged it was not meant for the amoebic growth of the city population of Accra. With Ghana@50, we can only boast of a major health facility being converted to a dark tourism attraction, one of the horrors of bad governance. Health, it seems, is now a state of mind. If you are still not convinced nation branding will give you a little idea as Ghana is now the name of a disease causing worm- (Guinea) Ghana Worm. It may sound like a joke, but such bad branding of our country based on our strength as the second most guinea-worm-endemic country is an embarrassment to those responsible for the health administration of this country that are giving the country a bad name.

Next time a Minister or an almost late Honourable needs an emergency, let's not spend the country's resources in sending them abroad for treatment. They need to experience the work of their own hands. Korle-Bu must be their destination, whether as dark tourists, perpetrators, facilitators, victims or patients. Better health facilities have been traded for a new presidential castle and others ad infinitum.

Flog them if you can't treat them

And as if the morbid attractions at the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital are not morose enough, some nurses have taken it upon themselves to make the dark tour more tantalising by adding patient flogging to it. Whether it is out of sado-masochist tendencies or other only God knows. A young female child was the victim of medical assault by a young nurse at the Hospital, an incident the mother alerted the media to on the morning of Monday November 13, 2006. The young female child still bore the 'scars and stripes' of the Korle-Bu flogging flag, a keepsake of the dark tour at Korle Bu at 50.