One Law I'd Abolish

Dangerous Risk Adrenaline Suicide by Fear of Falling

The crime of 'Attempted Suicide'. If I could reverse one law, this would be it! What business of the State is it, if I remove me from this world?

The Mistake

Even in your silence,
I feel the vital sense –
the telling thrashing about
of your throbbing heart.
That is true love, no doubt.

Even behind the pretty eyes
that turn soulful and soft
each time you look at me;
and through your wordless signs
I feel your love, for sure.

*Poem written in my past for the wrong person.

I Wish I Could Take This Back

There's no bigger critic than a guilty conscience.

About 5 years ago, I knew a girl called Josephine. Pretty, quiet, good - and she was my friend. But she changed her phone number. She gave the new one to me, but I did not save it. I went to her house, but they'd moved. We were really good friends. I think I must have hurt her. If I could take back something I've done to someone, I'd take back the silly way in which I lost contact with Josephine.



Is there anything you've also done to someone that you wish you could take back?

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.