Long ago when I was a kid, before anyone in Accra had a washing machine, there was this guy who used to come to the house every Saturday morning to do the laundry. I didn’t know his name and I don’t think anyone did either. We just called him “Washman”. Not Samsung, not LG. Just Washman. He was tall and muscular and couldn’t have been more than thirty. He got his muscles from doing our washing on Saturday’s and at other people’s homes other days of the week. I remember him crouched over a metal tub, half hidden behind a low cloud of soap suds with his arms flailing as he beat and pummeled the clothes into submission. And that wasn’t all. Washman only took a break when the clothes were drying and in the early afternoon he’d send his apprentice (sorry, he didn’t have a superhero name and if he did he kept it to himself) to bring the clothes in off the line. Then he’d get to work with one of these charcoal irons with a cockerel at the prow. He’d heat it up with glowing coals and I would hear the thud, thud long into the night as he pressed the iron down hard onto the clothes and folded them into perfect geometric shapes. The smell of newly washed, freshly pressed cotton is one I’ll always remember. I bet Samsung can’t do that.
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