An Invitation To The Twi Linguistic And History Brains

If you are a member of the Akan group, you may have heard the term “Yaw Peese” from elderly folks around you. A high life musician borrowed the term for one his compositions in the late 1980’s or early 1990’s. In my quest for the meaning of this term, I spoke to a more grown up Ghanaian acquaintant, who would explain to me that “Yaw Peese” was a cloth or fabric that used to be worn in the past by the older generation. I have lost contact with my old friend but I still have some related questions and I would appreciate a response from the Twi brains who are well grounded in Akan history.

I wish to find out the constituent material of “Yaw Peese”. Considering the fact that animal skin leather and tree bark were among the clothing materials in the pristine era, you would hopefully appreciate my question.

When such a question is posed, the usual reaction from the ignorant and uneducated street thug, or others dissimilarly situated but equally ignorant, is a characterization of the entire discourse as “kolo” or old-fashioned. These are individuals who are properly called “kobolos” or hoodlums who are protégés of the grand “kobolo” of Ghana and for whom this master “kobolo” of Ghana is a role model. Their world is filled with nothing constructive but lawlessness and wee smoking and they constitute caricatures of a culture ludicrously termed “fast life”, which typifies the ghettos and slums of the western world. As their hallmark, by the time any member of this group finishes reading to the end of this paragraph, he/she would have called me “Koo Nimo”.

For such hoodlums who are averse to traditions, culture and history, I remind them that at the zenith of modern engineering, technological and scientific practices, lies occasional mimicry of processes in nature and technologies from the past. For example, Boeing Corporation is spending several millions of dollars to study and apply to modern aviation technology, the flight mechanisms of certain birds. You may have also noted that the design of the automobile “PT Cruiser” by Chrysler Corporation, appears to have borrowed a lot from the old “Morris Minor” that used to be manufactured by a British automobile company. If you saw the 1967 “Ford Mustang”, you would have noticed by now that Ford Motors Corporation is revisiting those designs in the current models of the Mustang. Normally, I would post this comment at SIL however; I decided to post it as a feature article to widen the scope of the readership and to improve the chance of getting accurate responses. I would appreciate generous and wise inputs as answers.