Barbie Dolls and Peacocks at the Accra Mall

I was just speaking with Old John. I asked him to tell me about markets long ago in this land. He said before colonisation, there were no fixed marketplaces where you could go and buy stuff daily.

There was a ‘watering hole’ where people and peoples from North and South met on scheduled days to barter salt for fish, cotton for iron, kontomire for cane rat, kola for white clay. When the goods were finished, they’d barter news. A man took a fifth wife; a woman had her Badu Dwan (a celebration of her tenth child); a boy and girl were banished from their town for festive fornication.

When the news is digested, messages would then change hands (or ears). A man sends his love to a maiden – he sends it with a guinea hen. A woman sends a half-piece of calico cloth to her daughter who lives with her sister at a far-off place.

Then, I told Old John about the Accra Mall; about the overdressed Barbie dolls and Peacocks that flock its corridors and spaces from morning till midnight. Old Man John said he was little surprised. Pre-colonial market day was also a time to show off wealth, magic, beauty, wives, horses, cattle, sons and daughters.

Old John thought the fixed market was introduced by European merchants to enable them offload their little-needed goods of European cloth, alcohol, guns and gunpowder, tobacco, mirrors and hats(!) to Africans!

So a mall may be American, but Accraians remain African!

A Gormless Ghanaian Game

Is it a Ghanaian game to gather gaudy clothes, glitter across the city, and haunt the hippest hangouts, just to see what Thomas, Richard and Harold are doing and to amuse oneself with hating and false laughter?

Education – Another View from Ghana

The Value of European Education? Puh-lease!

“Vincent Khapoya notes the significant resistance imperialist powers faced to their domination in Africa. Technical superiority enabled conquest and control. Africans recognized the value of European education in dealing with Europeans in Africa. They noticed the discrepancy between Christian teaching of universal brotherhood and the treatment they received from missionaries. Some established their own churches. Africans also noticed the unequal evidences of gratitude they received for their efforts to support Imperialist countries during the world wars”.

So I found the above paragraph here on Wikipedia. There are many truths in it. But I am not sure about the statement about Africans recognising the value of European education. The more I think about it, the more evidence I stumble upon that European education was useless to, and destructive of, the original African way of life. Even the things that shock our sense of human rights and humanity today (in our Europeanised minds) may not have been so bad in Original Africa. And before anybody starts listing dehumanising practices to me, I will simply say “Hiroshima” and add that Earth would have been safe.

Education – A view from Ghana

Atavistic Parrots*

Pencil-pushing parrots who speak the good English of their bird trainers. That’s what I think when old people cry that the standards of education have fallen. The standards had nowhere to go and fall. They were always low! And deliberately so!

The colonial educational policy was to train “natives” to be clerks: paper-filing, routine-thinking, data-memorising clerks. Simple truth! Fortunately, the system worked for the old people when they were colonial clerks, as well as when they became post-colonial bosses of even more clerks.

Now the world has moved on, and yet Ghana still uses the same old techniques. The educated elite rules the country, but it maintains or reintroduces policies to educate our children into colonial-esque clerks, who pass out non-equipped to be anything cerebral; anything that can think!

The education system today is just like it was yesterday. It was made for clerical training even in the universities! So, the atavistic parrots should please shut up! And some 'real' expert should please design a custom-made system for our poor kids.

*Parrots, because all they do is talk, talk, talk.

The Mechanics of a Curse

A girl in a compound house* loses her phone in broad daylight. About ten people were close enough to have filched the phone. A day steals by, and the phone has not been found. The ‘Landlord’ calls a house meeting. There is fulsome denial all round, and free-flowing suspicion-spiel. In the middle of the din, the victim takes a white egg from under her clothes, calls on a deity with a disturbing name to slay the thief, and shatters the egg on the floor. Two of the cruellest accusers immediately drop to their knees, and confess to the crime in rapids and waterfalls. The Landlord prevails on the girl to revoke the murderous curse. She calls for a bowl of water with a charcoal chip in it; this she sweeps over the egg remains. Then, there is peace. The curse is revoked. Is everything really that easy? I lost a pocket calculator I really loved seventeen years ago. I want an egg right now!

* Compound House - A house with a walled compound and several detached or semi-detached rooms or apartments usually given out for rent.

Scrambled Eggs, Scrambled Signals and Rejected Calls

While the police binge on scrambled eggs with their pay rise, armed robbers have ‘sexed up’ with ‘NASA’ equipment which scramble phone signals within one-hundred-metre radii, so victims cannot ‘SOS’. MTN fixates on sponging up each Ghanaian communication Dollar and Rand, and randomly retires the call signals at night, so all our calls are rejected. Where does that leave us? Between a rock, a hard place and a gunpowder store. To the credit of the police, even though their rapid-reaction teams are arriving about ten minutes too late, at our untraceable homes, at least they are arriving.

Uncivil Servants in the City of Accra

It’s like squirting shit in your face. At the General Post Office on sunless Friday to pick up a package, the watchdog women of the Customs are all pitchfork-frowning and hell-not-helping. This is the baby truth. The men hardly help too, but they handle you politely. These people stonewall you for thirty pinball minutes; then they tell you at 4 pm that they close at 4 pm; come back on Monday. For more of the same shit, doubtless. They don’t know yet what’s wrapped up in my pack, but they loathe me already. Envy? Well, I'll return on Monday to see their cesspool faces.