By Dr. Samuel Adjei Sarfo
Attorney and Counselor at Law
Unlike those who posit that culture should be necessarily dynamic to reflect the evolution of human thinking and ways of life, our understanding of culture and tradition is ossified, akin to taking a slice of our most ancient life and melting it into a sacred gemstone which forever remains unaltered and unalterable, although out of sync with its surroundings. Thus, if one reflects on the Ghanaian cultural milieu, one cannot help but recollect the trope in John Keat’s 1816 poem called “Ode on a Grecian Urn”. In this poem, the juvenile author is full of impressionable admiration for an ancient urn on which is captured bucolic scenes of a sedentary life: a life of dancing and drumming and rituals and festivals in which the characters appear oblivious of the reality of the times.
This poem resembles the situation in our culture and traditions in which one chapter of our excitable albeit somnambulist lives were captured as if on a digital film, and transported by some time machine into the present life, after which we swore a cabalistic oath that it shall never be changed, never be improved, never grow or never reform. That is how we are no different from the drawings on the Grecian Urn in John Keat’s poem.
Otherwise, how do we explain the style of wearing our clothes that has remained the same since the time of Julius Caesar. Or why on earth the King within our culture must ride in a palanquin to the festival ground when his Mercedes Benz idles under the breeze of the Iroko tree. Or why our virgins must dance naked before the eyeballs of our local gods for the certification of their pre-pubescent chastity? Or why our able bodied men will enact war-songs in pursuit of lonely deers? Or why our kings sit in repose, arrayed in fantastical gears to enact well-worn spectacles of bellicose posturing to the curious outsider………
One effect of our fixation on these bunkum is that they impose manacles on our creativity and inflict on our psychology a mind that cannot think beyond the borders set for it by the ancestors who lived and died thousands of years ago. Because we are under the false impression that keeping faith with their manner of lives and narrow view of the world is an indispensable duty which we owe to them.
But if our ancestors truly see us as humans who must be respected, then their edicts to our generation will not be a commandment to live in their ignorance and let knowledge pass by us like a grain of corn passes undigested through the stomach of a little bird. They would rather we aspired like eagles and developed better ways of doing everything. Our ancestors, if indeed they had our welfare in mind, would rather we made better laws, did better analyses of issues, created new poems and new songs, made use of our intellect to utter words of wisdom whose import will be sacred and true for generations yet unborn…..
The ancestors will not be happy for us to repeat their simplistic proverbs without thinking about their validity on our modern lives. For example, they will not want us to believe that if a neighbor’s beard is burning, all that we should do is to fetch some water and put it by our beards. Rather, the edict will be for us to hurry and put out the fire afflicting the beard of our neighbors,so that we also can preserve our barns, not merely our beards.. The ancestors will not tell us that each one is for himself and that God is for us all. Rather, the edict will be to see God in each of us, and treat each other as one great nation in love with ourselves and others. Our ancestors will not command us that we should kill somebody because the person is an infidel, and that we are the only children of God. Rather, they will see the spark of the divine in all others, and bid us see ourselves in each. Our ancestors will not encourage us to be in fear of ourselves, or each other or women or some other persons not of our tribes. Rather, the rule will be to be optimistic and hopeful, believing that we shall give to each a chance to prove himself, and not to conclude that he is wicked when he has not been given the chance to be either good or bad or even apathetic. And finally, our ancestors, if they are indeed people of honor and love and respect and dignity, will not encourage us to be mean-spirited to our women, and insinuate that they are inferior in any way, and construct a panoply of cultural taboos around their barrenness, or widowhood, or right of genetricem, or freedom to choose whether to marry or have children or their menstrual or biological cycles. Rather, we will see them as part of humanity deserving of all dignity and all rights regardless of their gender, creed or breed.
And we will not be caught up in ancient falsehoods that there exists certain rights of others to rule rough-shod on others while these others’ right to live in dignity is circumscribed or abridged by the mere color of the oppressor’s blood. We will not be vulnerable to the liar from outside who will claim that his kind saved us from our sins, or that we will inherit the virginity of heavenly vestals by spilling the blood of the innocent ones.
In the end, our salvation will never lie in the sanctum of a stubborn adherence to a culture that is unchanging or sacrosanct. Rather, it will lie in the pursuit of a culture that breathes, a culture that can evolve to face the peculiar challenges of our times; a culture that abhors prejudice with its concomitant hatred; a culture that sees every Ghanaian as one and that proceeds in intellectual inquisitiveness and scientific analyses and creativity…… and not pre-packaged in asinine hopes and faith that some superhuman beings are yet to descend from the heavens to set things right.
We should become critical thinkers not subservient to the life that was led before us; or the clothes that were worn before us; or the proverbs that were uttered before us; or the prayers that were said before us; or the songs and drums that were played before us; or the dictatorships that were established before us; or the foods that were eaten before us; or the rituals that were performed before us; or the multifarious questions that were never asked before us and yet were answered for us……….
We are the freeborn, and our minds should be unfettered and set free to roam like the phantoms over the mountaintops. Our imagination should explore the remote knowns and unknowns; our hearts should triumph fearless over superstition and proclaim the true causes of all effects no matter how obscure or secretive or exoteric or cabalistic……
For indeed, the talons of our morbid culture and tradition run deep into the very fabric of our beings and will continue to hold us back, and even if we began the work of uprooting its toxic nails today, it will take us another three thousand years to free ourselves from its servile metastasis, or even share in some infinitesimal sense in the deluge of the world’s copious creativity, rationality and science and culture. We are too far clogged into the darkness of a frozen past; we remain marrows in an anachronistic os wherefrom we cannot rise.
But that does not mean that we must continue to sleep on our oars. The work to extricate ourselves from the manacles of ignorance ought to continue. Perchance, down ten or twenty generations, our descendants who will be utterly oblivious that we were once some sparks in their continuum, will finally experience some atavistic serendipity that we, like themselves once existed. And thus must be honored, not by libation or fake rituals performed on some festival days, but by the fact that they inherited from us the strength of their own sagacity, perspicacity and insight: the right to think critically.
Samuel Adjei Sarfo, JD, is a trial lawyer in Austin, Texas, USA. You can email him at [email protected]