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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Saturday, October 20, 2012
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.
This happened in Nigeria recently. It could have been Ghana or Kenya or South Africa or anywhere in Africa. (WARNING!!! IT'S REALLY, REALLY GORY!!!)
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
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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Sent from my BlackBerry® smartphone
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!
Pupils: Dabi (No!!!!!!)
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?)
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
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
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