Saturday, October 20, 2012

The Age of Innocence

The Age of Innocence is gone. We buy late-night Kelewele at 5pm, and do dawn-jogging at 7am. Twenty of us at a pub are no match for 4 gunmen. Saturday night-crawling is a far-off, silver-screen fantasy. Security is merely a word we teach four-year-olds.

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Thursday, October 18, 2012

2016

Four years from today, you'll leave home on Monday and get to Accra City Centre on Wednesday. If you don't take too long about your business, you may make it back home by Saturday. But we'll still vote for leaders.

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Wednesday, October 17, 2012

A Robbery Victim's View of Mob Justice

Days after my rebuke of the Nigerian mob murder, a robber's pistol poked my chest. And a friend's question probed my beliefs: do you still condemn mob justice? I thought about the shiny, black, cold metal and the nine years' worth of data lost. Then, my answer run out boldly: Yes. Mob justice is wrong and the lynching murder.

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Thursday, October 11, 2012

Hideous Humanoids, Barbaric Beings

Four boys are lacerated, eviscerated, excoriated and incinerated by a mob of maybe ten. Thousands, literally, feast on the cruel skill of their local ‘gladiators’. A few officers of the law cower among the rabble in this arena of the gory and the gruesome. They do nothing to stop the baying wolves. If they try to stop the lunacy, their reward would be a flaming pneumatic garland.


In my knowledge of African history, criminals and suspects may have been punished by flogging, burial-while-alive, banishment, capital punishment. BUT it happened after a trial; a trial by the elders or, indeed, a trial by ordeal before the gods and their priests. The punishment was cruel sometimes and the trials not credible in today’s conventional wisdom.

BUT THERE WERE TRIALS BEFORE PUNISHMENT!

We were cheated into colonialism, yes. We inherited some great legal norms, though, to add to valid virtues of our own. Joy!

So when (and why) did we learn to seize suspects, untried, to bludgeon-n-burn to death? Why are we more barbaric today than 500 years ago?

Wednesday, September 26, 2012

Bon Apetit

I should have bulls-eyed on my food at Golden Tulip Kumasi City Hotel. Or I should have focused on the horror movie of the distinguished-looking old man to my right, gouging himself with wine and enough rich food to feed a dozen pigs.

The swimming pool is just outside the restaurant. It has a terrace on which diners can eat open-air. So in they walked when I was just about to throw up for the gourmand sat to my right.

A boobs-a-spill girl likely sixteen; a fully-clothed lass maybe fourteen; then a grand papa, couldn’t have been below fifty-five. He’d brought them dining. That they wouldn’t walk together, and her curious get-up got me thinking that the sixteen year-old and the almost-geriatric were in a relationship. Well, an arrangement.

I looked around to assure myself that nobody had seen my curiosity. I was wrong. Everybody in the room must have been thinking the same scadalous thoughts, including the gentlehomme with the piggish appetite. When our eyes met, he was choking down the laughter. The moment seemed to call for words, so I said, “Bon apetit”.

I was really referring to his wolfish traits, but he burst out laughing and sprayed strawberry gateau over his table-for-one. Then, it hit me. He though my “Bon apetit” was meant for the grand papa, his below-legal liaisons and whatever pleasant pastime we thought they were headed for. 

Tuesday, September 25, 2012

Financial Controller

There is a smutty lunatic hectoring the elbow room of the Dzorwulu Access Bank ATM. He’s a scary totem pole in the day time, still as a statue in his self-imposed straitjacket. He comes to life at night, using all the space to swing his imaginary cats. The punch buttons must be squeaky clean, for nobody ever uses them. Maybe the bank doesn’t know he stands there. Maybe they know and like it.

Sunday, September 23, 2012

The Cat-Kicker

Inside the wooden fencing, they’re watching a La-Liga match. Outside, where the loudspeakers bellow loud, we sit among the smoking tables, each two less than a metre apart. The varicoloured bottles remain arranged on the tables when a round of drinks is done like some mating-dance plume show. A couple huddles near the perimeter opening. He’s having a drink. She’s having a drink and eating out of a plate. Her mouth drops almost all the way to the table. I’m watching the obscene curvature of her ... backbone, when I see two cats circling the table. One can no longer wait for scraps and bravely rubs against her leg. With a shout above the music, she kicks the poor cat in an airborne arc into the crowd. Who kicks animals anywhere? And who kicks felines on a date?

Saturday, September 22, 2012

Triplets at El Wak on a Saturday Morning

On a twilight cruise for Saturday soccer at Labone. Aviation Road is already abuzz with busy-bee Accraians. The traffic lights fire red before I can cross Giffard Road into Cantonments. I don’t like stopping here: not fifty feet from where the runway-gobbling plane scythed through the swarming street.  Three sets of tiny feet identically shod in bright-red ladybug-like shoes pitter-patter across one lane. Their mother plods behind them. The first stretches out her tiny hand and wriggles the fingers at passing cars. Her two sisters repeat what she does. One, two, three, four, all cars are hypno-stopped. They sail across in a straight line in rhythmic step. Mother ‘walruses’ awkwardly behind them. Then, they are gone. Beautiful. Beguiling. 

Friday, September 21, 2012

Automatic Car Wash

I was thrilled earlier this week to see an automatic car wash open right outside my neighbourhood on Spintex Road. My hood was far from dusty, but the elements had gnawed at the tired streets. Then, some smart person chose to cover it all with pavement blocks, and then the pavement with cement dust. Now a car can only stand clean for one hour.

Today I went to the car wash. It’s owned by two Lebanese old men. They take pleasure in pressing the buttons themselves. The car is lathered and washed with electric pompoms and semi-dried with electric dryers.

A few metres further down, four Ghanaian lads wipe the cars dry. That’s the real story of this post. They are filled with so much hate. They insult their employers from the time you drive in, and theirs is the last voice you hear on the way out – insulting. They speak in Twi, of course, and try to draw me into their xenophobia. I ignore them. When I’m ready to drive off in my shiny car, one of the owners capers up to me and asks in a friendly voice, “It good?” Although it took longer than your regular one-hose car wash, I’m going back there.

It was those boys’ attitude that needed to run through the car wash, not cars.

Tuesday, September 18, 2012

The Foolish Get Scammed

It’s not sinister spy stuff. One contented brain, two eagle eyes and three grams of good grammar – the essential toolkit. The steed of cyber fraud will canter far from your prudent purse. I mean, what self-respecting ‘British’ CENTER has a website wriggling with worms of American English?

Friday, August 24, 2012

This is Not Education

How does a boy end J.S.S.
Unable to spell his name?
Is he a buffoon, more or less
Or's the system to blame?

How does a girl attain Legon
And know naught from the books?
Education's a great, big con
If no one cares or looks

How do the youth land a new job
And never had a coach?
They're thrown out to the working mob
And crushed flat like a 'roach

Thursday, August 23, 2012

Jobs Hanging on Trees in the City of Accra

Who's jump-started the jobs-jalopy in Accra? I haven't seen it hobble past on the street below my office window. It's just the passport-hunting, jobless flock. So where's the Ghana High Commission going to conjure nine-to-fives for jobless Ghana-Brits to return to? Political possum-play.


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Tuesday, August 14, 2012

Memories of London 2012

My keepsakes from the Olympics: the thrice-striking lightning Bolt; Farah winning Mo than one gold medal; Jess the GIANT tadpole; the Baltimore Bullet killing it in the swimming pool; Golden Girl Gabby Douglas.

And then there was the bonsai Bukom boxer; went into the prize fight with only brawn; beaten into a pulp of boiled bambara beans by the lanky Nipponese 'blowman'. God, his bewildered oafish look!

Friday, August 3, 2012

Country of Necrophiliacs

This dead president's legacy may be immortal. Yet, the leftovers are a common corpse. We clownish-clash over which family has the title deeds to the esteemed cadaver and what pencil of land it will lie six feet under. Why? We are a country of necrophiliacs.

Tuesday, July 17, 2012

Illegal Mining Affecting Girls

Illegal mining in a needy district should blow boys' education into smithereens. But why is it dynamite for damsels too? 'Galamsey Boys' are youthful, loaded, walking neon lights. They bedazzle the girls to choose the procreative trimester over the academic one.

Tuesday, July 10, 2012

Education Failure. Yes Sir.

Teacher:                    Two plus two equals 4. Understood?

Pupils:                        Yes sir!

Teacher:                     Should I go over again?

Pupils:                        Yes sir!

Teacher:                     But all of you understood it?

Pupils:                        Yes sir!

Teacher:                    Computer.

Pupils:                        Yes sir!

Teacher:                     Skyscraper.

Pupils:                        Yes sir!

Teacher:                     Pathetic.

Pupils:                        Yes sir!

Teacher:                     Mo te m'asee? (Do you understand me?)

Pupils:                        Dabi (No!!!!!!)

Thursday, July 5, 2012

Street Animal

Self-reproach is when you catch your thoughts not sparing a moment for the people who work in the streets. But how do you feel touched for the construction worker who’s savagely shovelling rocks and scoring hits on passing cars.

He looks up surprised at each cling and clang. The scowl on his ferret-face says how dare we steer our cars to hit his precious projectiles! How I wish a raptor or ‘saurus would drag him back into the cave he crawled out of this morning!

Tuesday, June 26, 2012

Bootlick Airlines

Cowering on a thirty-minute flight, meditating on how long it took for a light plane to bite the dust (in these days of mishap), I was squirming – and not just me – at the slimy gallons of apocryphal adulation the cabin crew poured all over a minister of State in the faux-glorified business class separated by a flimsy blue curtain. “Welcome, Honourable Minister, ladies and gentlemen.” “Have a pleasant flight, Honourable Minister...” “Goodbye, Honourable Minister...”

Monday, June 25, 2012

Flimsy Banku Buffets

Perched at the buffet saloon of a shiny hotel on a soggy Kumasi night, sampling senseless delights and wondering woolly whys the local chophouses don’t offer as-much-as-you-like banquets to he-who-goes-there.

Wednesday, June 20, 2012

The Mental Fence

When I was in primary school
And being smart was still cool
They'd group clever kids in one class
And  stragglers in the quicksand mass

The best they'd call Class Yellow or A
The worst class, D or Grey
They ran two tracks of intelligence
Separated by a mental fence

Class A reached the good high schools
To the rest, they gave hand tools
Nobody got a second chance
To outgrow the Childhood Trance