By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Let us get one thing clear: there is absolutely nothing, whatsoever, “sophisticated” about abject cowardliness and clinical stupidity parading in the guise of protective rationality, as some of my most ardent and invariably misguided critics would have their audiences believe. Among the Akan, the one proverb that I most resent has this to say: “I am using my stupidity as a protective shell for longevity.” But what is the use of an unexamined life, however long the latter may be or last?
This sublime approach to philosophical reasoning was the salient quality that distinguished the Ancient Greeks from their neighbors and, indeed, the rest of the world. Anyway, let me take this prime and solemn opportunity to remind my largely misguided political opponents and critics, including one who has yet to learn the spelling of the African birth-order name and surname of “Badu,” the tenth son, that “The Road to Kigali” is in no way one that I conjured or invoked out of a vacuum. Rather, it is squarely predicated on my studious observation of the way that politics has been practiced by Akan-hating Ghanaian ethnic minorities during the turbulent and checkered course of the past three decades.
The idea that, somehow, the great pre- and postcolonial specter that was Akan political genius, as gloriously manifested by the Akwamu in the West African sub-region and, relatively recently, by the Akyem, Asante and Denkyira, not necessarily in the preceding order, has been definitively tamed and “pacified” by these Ghanaian ethnic minorities acting in concertedly violent solidarity could not be more patently false. Indeed, it clearly must have been such lunatic illusion and faux-political logic that prompted a Trokosi Nationalist to recently presume to heartily celebrate the supposed fall of the 2012 presidential candidate of the New Patriotic Party and, with the latter, the glorious accession and hermetic domination of Ghana’s political landscape by non-Akan ethnic minorities.
Needless to say, watching Mr. John Dramani Mahama play president at the behest of Dr. Kwadwo Afari-Gyan, the presumptuous chairman of the Electoral Commission, gave me no mean measure of amusement. That Dr. J. B. Danquah should be rabidly assailed by these “genitally mutilated” uppity ethnic minorities, made the “Joe Blackie” sort of cantata all the more poignant and prophetic. By the way, that tribal cynic who flaunted Mr. Mahama’s “Otani” status in a bid to forcing us Akan-majority protesters of the fraudulent spectacle that was Election 2012 to swallow our proverbial pride and get along or ship out, as it were, ought to be told bluntly that there was a far and away better “Otani” who was legitimately and convincingly elected president of our Republic while Mr. Mahama was still a secondary school student. That astute and erudite scholar-statesman was, of course, Dr. Hilla “Babini” Limann.
What I am alluding to here, of course, is the pathetic picture of an unforgivably ill-clad Mr. Mahama wielding the Akan monarchical sword of authority before the global media. Needless to say, the preceding spectacle of a plainly-shirted Mr. Mahama nervously seated on Mr. Kofi Antubam’s praetor’s chair or stylized modern-Akan royal stool caught me literally toppling off the edge of my couch. I seriously didn’t expect the Bole-Bamboi toughie to scan our national presidential archives for the resplendent “Otani” precedent that was the Gold Standard inaugural ceremony of Gwolu’s own Hilla Babini Limann, the Sorbonne- and London-schooled political scientist and constitutional scholar.
You see, when the immortalized Dr. Danquah asserts that Ghanaian culture is inescapably Akan, even as Akan culture is inextricably Ghanaian, only a clinically certified victim of dementia could dare impugn the scholastic integrity of Nana Kwame Kyeretwie Boakye-Danquah. Couple the preceding with the fact that Mr. Mahama has been gazetted in spite of the fact that he clearly did not win Election 2012, and this political burlesque could not be even more repugnant. Needless to say, after this travesty, I have sworn to give away my Gonja-made Batakari – or raw-cotton tunic – to the Salvation Army. Now, don’t ask me what I imagine the SA will do with them (I have a dozen of them). The fact of the matter is that once one has pushed the proverbial old woman over the ledge of a window, does it really matter whether she lands on her head or her butts?
Anyway, what prompted this write-up, in Ghanaian media parlance, was an article captioned “Ghana Parties Claim Machete Attacks [to be] Political[ly] [Motivated]” (See Modernghana.com 12/13/12). The article details the allege attack of merchants and entrepreneurs in the downtown area of the Ghanaian capital of Accra in what, I presume, was once called the Makola Market. I used to live in the vicinity while growing up in the late 1960s. Today, the location has assumed the smug and overstated image of Ghana’s longest-ruling dictator and tyrant, Chairman Jerry John Rawlings. It was also here that during the June 4th 1979 so-called revolution, imposed on Ghanaians by the Rawlings-led Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC), hundreds of market women were stripped naked and raped of both their corporeal dignity and merchandise.
At any rate, we learn that following the fraudulent declaration of Mr. Mahama as winner of Election 2012, some disgruntled burly youths went on the rampage and physically assaulted merchants located around the Rawlings Park. What makes this story quite fascinating is the laughable attempt by some National Democratic Congress operatives to fault members and supporters of the main opposition New Patriotic Party for this patent act of savagery. Thus we have NDC Deputy General-Secretary George Lawson facilely claiming that “an NDC person was beaten and we had to call for help.”
But even as the NPP spokesman, Mr. Sammy Awuku, rightly pointed out, it is the NDC that has the unenviable history of antagonizing entrepreneurs and making the very occupation of entrepreneurship seem like the most heinous act of criminality, perhaps only next to murder which, by the way, the NDC government is most notorious for.
Anyway, as I said before, “The Road to Kigali” is one that is more dependent on the unruly behavior of NDC operatives and apparatchiks than any other assembly of cynical Ghanaian politicians and their followers.
*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
Dec. 21, 2012
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