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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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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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?

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. 

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.

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?

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.