Anger Waiting for a Cause in the City of Accra

Two young men snatched a phone in broad daylight and bolted. One slipped away; the other was bagged by oh ten thousand ‘petulants’. They hurt and hammered the hangdog with sticks and stones and switches until their gall seemed to peter out. Then, a jobless Beelzebub fetched a grubby jerrycan of grimy engine oil. They soused him slick with the stuff, and made him glug a gallon or two.

Smiling Monsters after Dark in the City of Accra

Man Mountain, hanging like a treacherous cliff over a forlorn length of the shadowy Spintex Road in the mini-principled city of Accra, why are you counting on a lift from strangers with that tarzan torso just because you can smile?

The Village Fool Lives Long

Years ago, while crawling back to this smothering city from a country cruise, my team mates and I gained on a hamlet as the day lit out. The family was back from breaking rocks, bones, pods, grounds or whatever hard work they did. The evening feast had been finger-licked. Father and mothers, siblings, dogs, cats and birds huddled together in a close circle to ululate an uncouth song. The father fooled, frolicked and tripped the light fantastic in the middle. The women and children egged him on. Stress almost kayoed me today at work, and I remembered that simple, solid scene.

African Marriage Doesn’t Need the Church

Imagine my holy hang-up when a parish prescribes principles for neo-nubian nuptials: dwindled dowries, laundered lists, ‘liposucked’ linguists and alcohol alternatives. Church, stay out of African marriages. You have your own mysterious matrimony. We can pray without the Paternoster.

Songs That Seduce

Scores of songs have seduced us silly by stirring us from soothing slumber, and sucking sweetly at the heartstrings in the ensuing twilight-zone spell. 

The Papaya Fruit Girl

In the sea of sellers of anything, she flared her loveliness in my view. Too pretty, too dee-lee-cious, to stride the sour streets. Too sweet in eyes and nose and oh her lips to schlep diced papaya; swaying on her head, swaying to the beat of her body-full of  ‘S’ shapes in its strut-n-swirl. The flask woman behind her – bland, sun-blistered battleaxe – she didn’t stir a single whisker of my heart. Silly, sad me: pouring pity on the flower, sweeping scorn atop the bug. But beauty is such a disabler! Oh that stimulating papaya fruit girl on the sunny streets of Accra. Will I see her tomorrow too?

The Sentry and the Squatter in the City of Accra

In the city of Accra, at genteel Ridge, at 9 am, a man in hermetic jeans was looking to leak his liquid privy into a drain. I shuddered to see him crook his legs to enable him to sag the seat of the asphyxiating denim for release.

Not quite ten metres away, another man in a white caftan was squatted over the same poor drain, doing similar business. I thought I caught him cast a disgusted glance the way of the standing man as if to ask which lowlife would hang his dispenser out on broad-daylight display.

I was desperate to stop and correct the squatter’s delusion that he was the better man, but I had to hurry to the office to go spend a penny.

All About the Head

His head was save-me-Lord uncomely - hardly humanoid, neither miles near any familiar fine-formed fruit. So, in a football match Ghana was bossing, why did he have to diss a Tswana boy's head in public?

Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone

Senegal – No Football Lions

Twisted, rangy sinews, a sixty-minute engine and sharp snipers will maul a second-rate skirmish, but not a six-match contest. Your problem is seeking to admit yourself into the Pride when you’ve only roared once.

If I Don’t Speak Up Because It Didn’t Happen to Me

Any State that treats the fourth estate with the third degree because it sees them as the fifth column is crude. It’s that simple. In truly democratic countries, the ‘security’ job is carried out like infra-red light. Not in Ghana! We run it like fireworks on New Year’s Eve.

Because of our hairy history of railroading our impotent institutions of democracy, any bloke in boots, a beret, a big belt and a badge – never mind whether they’re even private security – demands deity-deference because they can slap-slap you to Paga, Pluto and then Purgatory.

Paradoxically, the most disciplined and brightest security outfit by far in our democratic sparks has always been the military.

So when Ghana’s national security enforcers advertise their brawn like a neon billboard right outside a court of law, you’d expect their civilian masters to pull the leash and put them in the doghouse.

Why should our shadowy moles unleash their cloak-and-dagger 'yawa' on the streets and sow insecurity in the deepest hearts of the lamb they’re sworn (?) to protect. This week, they pummelled a girl journo and rent her clothes to dishonour her. If she was taking shots of an unfolding public scene which they resented, why not simply arrest the offending camera. And even that...