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You see, if you smugly claim to be an authority on Anlo-Ewe and Ewe history, in general, and yet you cannot get the initials of perhaps the foremost Christocentric scholar and authority of European Christian Missionary Activities in Eweland spelled out correctly, such the initials of the late Rev.-Prof. CG Baeta and, instead, you choose to spell the same as Rev.-Prof. CK Baeta, then, of course, you cannot be taken any more seriously than a writer who thrives on pure gossip and rumor-mongering as the primary sources of his/her documented writings or research. I am hereby referring to the author of an article titled “Revisiting the Road to Secession [sic] Agitation in the Volta Region” (Modernghana.com 12/8/19).
In the present column, however, I am far less interested in the preceding observation than Mr. Andy CK Kwawukume’s rather puerile and characteristically uncouth and unprofessional comment that was made by the latter under one of yours truly’s articles captioned “Let Us Settle the Western Togoland Problem Once and for All” (Modernghana.com 12/8/19), in which Mr. Kwawukume claimed, rather absurdly and curiously, to speak much less of the downright bigoted, that it was the Akans of the Akwamu Nation or Empire who actually invented the inexcusably benighted and globally odious cultural practice of “Trokosi” and then, somehow, exported this bona fide and thoroughgoing Ewe practice to the latter. The problem here is that this inveterate anti-Akan Anlo-Ewe fascist does not explain why the practice of “Trokosi” is totally nonexistent today among the very people who are alleged to have invented the same but remarkably prevalent among the Ewe tribesmen and women who adopted the same.
It is also rather risible that a writer who would have his audience believe that all Ewes share an organic cultural unity, and thus the imperative need to keep the entire erstwhile Western Togoland Region, until very recently the Volta Region, intact, would also vehemently reject the organicity of the Ewe cultural and philosophical practice of “Trokosi” by both conveniently and deviously claiming that the latter practice exists nowhere in Anloland but rather in the Tongu areas of the Volta Region, which, by the way, closely borders on Anloland. The clearly clinically self-alienated critic further claims that the cultural practice of “Trokosi” is the exclusive preserve of the “Dangme clans among the Ewes who brought that fetish or practice to the Ewes as fugitives from the Akawamus, all the way to Glidizi and Anexo in Togo.”
Now, this tack of logic is rather interesting, if also because of its scandalous salacity or salaciousness. We are, by the decidedly dimwitted lights of this diarrheal foulmouthed and patently uncouth and culturally innocent and untutored Anlo-Ewe nationalist, advised to equate these relatively recent “Dangme fugitives” from Akwamu suzerainty with the present-day people of Ada who, this pathologically confused critic appears to deem to be, at best, only “honorarily tolerated Ewes” by a gracious act of rarefied generosity unilaterally and exclusively conferred on the “lost Dangme souls” by their Anlo-Ewe hosts. And yet, this pathologically impenitent ethnic chauvinist and bigot would have Ghanaians and the rest of the world believe that, rather, it is the present writer who is an “ethnocentric bigot” and a “slimy jerk”!
But, of course, what is even more scandalous is the fact that Mr. Kwawukume clearly does not appear to have any qualms about the imperative need to objectively and forensically prove his rather historically and culturally quixotic contention that it was, indeed, the Akwamu people who invented the inexcusably savage practice of “Trokosi” and then exported the latter to the “Tongu-Ewe,” with the Anlo-Ewe being totally untouched or, in the words of this crusading Anlo SOB, unscathed and uncontaminated and devoid of the same. Dear Reader, you see, I am partly of Krepi (Peki) ethnicity and a direct descendant of Otumfuo Osei-Tutu, I, the veritable Lion-of-the-Great-Savannah. I have always been well aware of the pathological bigotry of the Anlo-Ewe, stereotypically speaking, as opposed to the rest of the greater Ewe multi-nation, and the Anlo-Ewe’s pathological geographical and geopolitically kleptocratic tendencies, largely tinged with envy, which recently found crass, brazen and wanton expression in the unforgivably benighted and epically failed imperialist attempt to stall the salutary and administratively all too civilized referendum that culminated in the landmark creation of the present-day Oti Region out of the Volta Region, when the multicultural and multiethnic indigenes of the present-day Oti Region, who have for decades suffered some of the worst and undignified forms of postcolonial second-class citizenship status at the hands of their Anlo-Ewe domestic colonizers decided that enough was enough.
You see, the politically cannibalistic clansmen of Mr. Kwawukume had hoped to perpetuate this barbaric and decidedly un-Ghanaian and parasitic geographical and geopolitical relationship as a means of permanently establishing their ethnic supremacy over the Oti people. It would be the much-touted and nationally acclaimed “Akyem Spirit of Inalienable Republicanism,” so eloquently and felicitously articulated by the putative Doyen of Gold Coast and Modern Ghanaian Politics, to wit, Dr. JB Danquah (See Danquah’s “Akan Laws and Customs and the Akyem-Abuakwa Constitution” London: Frank Cass, 1928) that would forever free the good and hardworking people of the Oti Region from Anlo-Ewe imperialism and the perpetual subjugation and enslavement.
If, indeed, as Mr. Kwawukume so smugly and impishly claims, it was the Akwamus who manufactured the odious and morally unpardonable cultural practice of “Trokosi,” then, by all means, let this Anlo-Ewe tribal bigot produce his evidence beyond such anecdotal puerility. It is also quite instructive to learn from the proverbial horse’s own mouth that, indeed, the terror-mongering secessionist leaders and agitators of the so-called Homeland Study Group Foundation (HSGF) have in the recent past made some recruitment overtures towards Mr. Andrew CY Kwawukume. There is a globally renowned maxim that runs as follows: “It takes one to know one.” You bet, of course, it does!
*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
E-mail: [email protected]