Exotic and Exuberant

Tourism in this hilly, West African region is never high, and it has declined sharply since Sept. 11, 2001. At Dagbe, however, the dancers, singers, and kente cloth weavers are optimistic. And since January, when electricity finally arrived in Kopeyia, their uniquely Ghanaian exuberance has been fueled and illuminated by artificial light, streaming from fixtures installed in 1997.

The Volta Region, sandwiched between neighboring Togo and Lake Volta, the world's largest artificial lake, draws only 5 percent of Ghana's tourists, most of whom flock to the slave castles on the Atlantic coast. Dagbe, however, has attracted international interest since it opened in 1991, tutoring 100 students annually from Italy, New Zealand, and, in Massachusetts, Tufts University and the Berklee College of Music. Accustomed to training music majors, the center is launching a new effort to lure families and the musically challenged with beach excursions, carving classes, and new nighttime concerts.

''People are trying to bury our culture with hip-hop and reggae music," Agbeli said. ''Our music brings us together."

Dagbe's entrepreneurial efforts are uncommon in this area that boasts impressive natural attractions long ignored by the official tourist industry. Still, Volta Region offers a West African experience in the region's safest country. Though roads remain hopelessly potholed, and visitor facilities nonexistent, the principal attractions are accessible, inexpensive, and usually vacant.

Thickly forested, with mangroves, palms, and wild mangoes, Volta Region is a welcome escape from Accra, the flat, coastal capital awash in honking taxis and acrid odors. The four-hour journey to Kopeyia is less than refreshing. Our State Transport Company bus, touted as luxury travel, filled quickly, then filled some more, idling in the parking lot as ushers jammed the center aisle with fold-out seats. On the eastbound Pan Africa Highway, it rumbled along past 8-foot-high termite mounds, swerving around deep craters with clattering windows and rattling doors.