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.

Ghana Gospel Singers*

Job Requirements

1. Must be able to string 2 or 3 bible verses together.
2. Must sing in Twi and, sometimes, Ga or Ewe.
3. Must be able to sing-n-wheeze like a choking cricket in a can.
4. Must dance with zulu-energy and try ridiculous dance moves.
5. Must like formation-dance background singers.
6. Must be able to grin like a Cheshire cat for 3 minutes.
7. Must be prepared to act out sad and ecstatic scenes.
8. Must be able to cry on demand.
9. Must drink Oestrogen syrup every morning, if a man.
10. Must dress like a peacock or like a peacock with most feathers removed ;-)

Bonus Requirement

Must be prepared to symbolize success in flashy cars and humongous houses.

* While I stand by my post, I admit that gospel singers in other countries can be a class act!

Why I don’t go behind my house

Forty-something year-old mama, in the house behind, in our matchbox-size, hugging-house neighbourhood, why do you lie in wait (surely that's what you do) for my Sunday-sneak to the clothesline, and ‘ghost’ on me from your side of the three-foot wall, in your ice-blue negligee with stubborn nipples poking out and chubby side-boob folding out, to ask me questions about the law?