By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Reliable information reaching those of us hardworking Ghanaians in the Diaspora, indicates the glut of television programming focused exclusively on the violent passing of Prof. Kofi Nyidevu Awoonor. In the context of the funerary profligacy of Ghanaian culture, this is all to be expected. What I resent, though, is the hypocritical moral grandstanding by the "filthy" rich and powerful politicians against a commensurately lavish funerary celebration of the lives of non-celebrity and non-distinguished, albeit responsible citizens, who lived rich and happy and meaningful lives.
Oftentimes, the hue-and-cry regards the financial burden inevitably wrought by such lavish funeral celebrations. I have absolutely no doubt in my mind, whatsoever, that government spending on the "State Funeral" of Prof. Awoonor is apt to shoot through the proverbial roof. Is this really what the progressive thinking behind the so-called Better Ghana Agenda is about? It clearly sounds to me more like a "Bitter Ghana Agenda." Come on, Mr. Mahama and the rest of the National Democratic Congress (NDC) rat-pack; you definitely can give us something far better to swallow and meaningfully digest than this maudlin mess of abject self-flagellation.
And here ought to be recalled the fact that in the wake of the Akufo-Addo/New Patriotic Party (NPP)-led Election 2012 Presidential Petition, key players of the Mahama "junta," including the newly-appointed Director-General of the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation (GBC), kept pestering and bombarding us daily with gripes about the prohibitive cost of televised coverage of the Supreme Court proceedings. Just a couple, or so, weeks ago, a Mahama cabinet member even claimed, without any forensically sustainable evidence, that the government had spent a humonhous $3 billion covering the Election 2012 judicial proceedings. And so just exactly what makes the passing of this one tribal bigot more significant than the constitutionally legitimate media coverage of the Election 2012 Presidential Petition? And then come to fathom the fact that we all thought all along that, somehow, the Mahama regime knew how to set and pursue materially and morally constructive agenda for the rapid development of our nation!
What amuses, though - which is not to say that it was altogether unexpected - is to learn of Prof. Kofi Anyidoho, an equally tribalistic and rambunctiously anti-Akan cultural commander of the Trokosi Revolution, and cousin or some such relative of the slain man, weaving a patently quixotic myth of bravado about a birthmark/scar on the forehead of Prof. Awoonor being the epic symbol of the latter's reincarnated spirit of "War-Lordism." According to at least one news report, Prof. Anyidoho claims that upon his deceased relative's birth and the sighting of the scar-like mark on his forehead, "some elders of the family enquired from their ancestors which of them was reborn as Kofi Awoonor," to which the oracular response came tersely as follows: "A brave man who had died in battle" (See "Prof. Awoonor Was a Warlord Who Died in Battle - Prof. Anyidoho" JoyOnline.com 9/25/13).
Maybe Prof. Anyidoho needs to tell the world precisely what "battle" his elder cousin was in the heat of prosecuting, when he fell by the bullets of the Somali-based Islamist militant phalanx Al-Shabab, on the very day that Ghana and the African Union (AU) were celebrating the birthday anniversary of the man whose leadership skills, Prof. Awoonor mordantly described as rancidly corrupt in his well-known experimental novel This Earth, My Brother. We know, of course, that the man had been breakfasting in Nairobi's upscale Westgate Shopping Mall when he was felled by a fusillade of high-powered rifle bullets from the Al-Shabab goon squad.
The logical question here is this: Would Prof. Anyidoho really have us equate such purely mundane and visceral act as breakfasting with an apocalyptic battle? And then exactly what kind of battle are we talking about here? Needless to say, I thought all along that the Armageddonian bettle of Anlo-Ewe chauvinists and bigots like Prof. Awoonor was more centered around Ewe hegemony over us Akan-people, the seminal creators of modern Ghana. Or maybe the purported birth-scar on Prof. Awoonor's forehead was that of the proverbial Biblical beast?
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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
Sept. 25, 2013
E-mail: [email protected]
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