An AU Committee On Cultural Standards Must Be Established!

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

The cultural savagery induced by some African governments and individuals in recent weeks is becoming too glaringly embarrassing to be allowed to persist without any remark. And the fact that such untoward anomaly has violently reared its ugly head at the very moment that many African leaders and politicians are vehemently clamoring for the process of the continent’s unification to be expedited makes the preceding all the more disturbing.

While most instances of such regressive cultural anomalies exhibit themselves under the specious guise of “Religion,” whatever the latter may imply, quite a remarkable percentage of such instances are perpetrated by misogynistic bullies and arrant fools.

On June 18, 2009, for example, a young Ghanaian woman resident of Berlin, Germany, was brutally assaulted by two Ghanaian soldiers in the Ghanaian capital of Accra, for daring to wear a military camouflage outfit – or fatigues – which, by the way, Ms. Ewura Oye Felde, the assault victim, had freely and openly purchased in the German capital for voluntary work in Ghana, where she was visiting. And, in fact, as Mr. Musah Ibrahim Musah, of AfricaNewsAnalysis.com reported, on the day of her brutal assault, Ewura Oye Felde was on her way to a volunteers’ camp in the heart of Accra.

And on the latter score, it is worth pointing out that this is not the very first time that a Ghanaian woman has been brutally assaulted by Ghanaian soldiers, on the dubious grounds of the woman, supposedly, observing the wrongful dress code. We must also quickly add to the foregoing the fact that the overwhelming bulk of such incidents occurred under the sanguinary watch of longtime dictator Flt.-Lt. Jerry John Rawlings. Thus it was virtually predictable that Ms. Ewura Oye Felde would be brutally assaulted under the watch of the so-called National Democratic Congress (NDC), a pseudo-civilian political party founded by, you guessed right, Flt.-Lt. Jerry John Rawlings!

One of the two alleged assailants was promptly identified as a Private Nii Adjetey. His criminal accomplice, however, could not be readily identified, obviously because he had refused to give his name to eyewitnesses. At the time of this writing (8/4/09), nothing had been heard about the outcome this brutal assault case. It is our fervent hope that Ms. Betty Mould-Iddrisu, Ghana’s Attorney-General and Minister of Justice will give this grievous national contretemps all the “teachable” highlight that it deserves including, of course, promptly and drastically bringing Private Nii Adjetey and his unidentified criminal accomplice to book.

Then also, as if the foregoing incident was not outrageous enough, on August 3, 2009, the French News Agency (Agence France-Presse) reported the morally flagrant case of a Sudanese woman who was facing the patently uncivilized judicial sentence of 40 lashes, because Ms. Lubna-Ahmed al-Hussein, a journalist with the United Nations Mission in Sudan, had mustered the rare temerity to wear a pair of pants – or trousers – and gone to a Khartoum restaurant to relish a hearty meal with her friends and associates, largely other Sudanese womenfolk. At the time of this writing (8/4/09), Agence France-Presse had reported that 10 of the 12 women who had, all, worn a pair of pants to eat at the unnamed restaurant, had already “accepted [the] punishment of 10 lashes each” (See AOLNews, “Journalist Prepared for 40,000 Lashes” 8/3/09).

What makes the case of the Sudanese women outright preposterous and even risible, were it not so criminally insuperable, is the rather ironic fact that the president of the Sudan, Mr. Omar Hassan Ahmad al-Bashir, is currently wanted by the International Criminal Court (ICC), for deliberately causing the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Sudanese civilians in Darfur and other parts of that country. What is equally curious, however, is the adamant and unconscionable refusal of most African leaders, including Ghana’s President John Evans Atta-Mills, to solemnly undertake not to afford Mr. Bashir asylum, should the latter be imminently ousted from power.

But that Ghana’s President Atta-Mills should condone the untold atrocities perpetrated against the Sudanese people by Mr. Bashir, is only to be expected; President Atta-Mills is staunchly backed by a man who possesses a criminal record which is nearly as morally opprobrious as that of the Khartoum kingpin, including having deliberately and covertly caused the assassination of three Ghanaian Supreme Court judges.

Similarly, many of us avid observers of Ghanaian political theater were not the least bit flabbergasted by the fact that President Atta-Mills would, perhaps after drinking too much Libyan coffee for his own good health, sheepishly, albeit shamelessly, return from an African Union summit in Sirte, Libya, and begin feverishly and erratically preparing for Col. Muammar Gaddafy to be crowned “King of Kings” by the Ghana National House of Chiefs, obviously in riposte to President Barack Hussein Obama’s recent brief tour of the country. Thankfully, the dignified and cognitive genius of Dr. John S. Nabila, president of the NHC and former Minister of Presidential and Special Affairs, promptly ensured that Ghanaians would not be made a laughing stock in the eyes of the international community. In due course, it is our fervent hope, whoever attempted to subject Ghanaians to such epic ridicule may very well have to be brought up on the charge of High Treason.

At any rate, what makes Ms. Lubna-Ahmed al-Hussein’s case rather edifying and outright admirable, is her decision to fight the criminal Sudanese statute that makes it “indecent” for a woman to wear trousers in public all the way to the highest judicial levels of the land. “If I’m sentenced to be whipped, or to anything else, I will appeal. I will see it through to the end, to the Constitutional Court, if necessary. And if the Constitutional Court says the law is constitutional, I am ready to be whipped not 40 but 40,000 times,” Ms. Al-Hussein declared.

Then, of course, there was the equally mortifying recent “Boko Haram” lunacy in Northern Nigeria in which Mohammed Yusuf, an alleged Taliban-linked Jihadist, went on the rampage with his gang of thugs in a bid to forcibly cauterizing all Nigerians from what the pseudo-Islamic sect leaders claimed to be “The Sin of Western Education.” By the time that the Yar’Adua government was able to squelch such mass madness, approximately 1,000 Nigerians, largely civilians, had reportedly been killed.

I have said this before, and I hereby repeat it once more: It is indisputably salutary for Africans to fervidly dream and work towards continental unification in an increasingly technologically complex world. The preceding notwithstanding, it is equally critical that all the key players of such epic and landmark project put their proverbial houses in order beforehand. Else, at the end of the process, our collective lot may well become one of infinite regret, outright shame and abject misery.

Needless to say, an African Union spearheaded by the scandalous and swashbuckling likes of Messrs. Gaddafy, al-Bashir, Kagame and Jammeh; and the tentative and diffident likes of Monsieur Atta-Mills; and the intransigent likes of Mugabe, Museveni and Nguesso is, by every palpable measure, irreversibly bound for perdition.

What needs to be done now, in order to opportunely head off unintended catastrophic consequences, is for the AU Secretariat to promptly establish some cultural and behavioral policy parameters/principles as a general criteria for gaining admission into an organically unified AU. Simply being located or resident on the African continent should not qualify any individual or nation-state for automatic membership in the AU. There ought to be rational and civilized rules of engagement. This is the Danquahist position, a pragmatic, rather than a sophomoric and/or idealistic unification.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is also a Governing Board Member of the Accra-based Danquah Institute (DI) and author of 20 books, including “Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana” (iUniverse.com, 2005). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@aol.com. ###