Book Review: To the Thirsty Land - Revisited

The pulse of a nation is fairly captured by its miscellany of biographies, memoirs and autobiographies. They may represent inchoate ideas, drafts of histories, paradigms and worldviews, but in all they are a means by which a nation savours the essence of its experiences.

Eleven years ago Evans-Anfom, a distinguished surgeon, scientist and scholar, a key figure in the establishment of the first medical school in Ghana and a founding member of the West Africa College of Surgeons, introduced us to his memoir, which constructed an evidential case for patriotism. To The Thirsty Land is indeed an ode to patriotism.


Designed with your life in mind, that’s what a country is to its people. With a constellation of fantasises, mosaic of values and expectations woven into this relationship between people and their country, it can be romantic, laborious, and tainted with betrayal but in the end opens a unique symbiosis for trust. The betrayal component is however essential to this adventure, which eventually leads to self discovery when the oracles fall silent.


Evans-Anfom’s autobiography To The Thirsty Land captures this relationship. It mounts an exhibition of Ghana’s socio-economic and cultural trajectory through Evans-Anfom’s life experiences – fluidity of identity, education, faith, relationships, and career.


It unravels the hope and failures of the leadership with the help of the people, the divisive entrenchments of facets of colonial heritage, coup d’états which exploited the insecurities of the people, and revolutions which magnified them, and both, ineffectual efforts of humans to understand one another.


The question remains though of how two interlacing narratives could have travelled different trajectories, one successful, not losing its bearings, and the other still struggling under the same circumstances and conditions.

How was Evans-Anfom able to cast himself as an equal participant of Gold Coast and later a voice to do justice to the inaugural goals of a freshly independent country, the first independent country in Sub-Sahara in 1957 whose ‘potential was as huge and as mysterious as the darkness of its nights’.


From the outset of his book, Evans-Anfom trumps the value of social protocol reflected in the dynamics of his extended family, his firm roots in Ga culture, his early education and upbringing in the Presbyterian faith— something he would touch with interest, operate within its parameters of flux and tensions and in the end transform it constructively to bring social progress.


His deft and extensive employment of social protocol helped him form character and individuality, all of which stood him in good stead in critical decision making time throughout his life.


Social protocol according to Joseph M Reagle is a set of protocols that enable individuals and communities to express social capabilities. Although Reagle’s concept of social protocol is framed and employed to examine social aspects of computerization, its usage and relevance has been critical in all civilisations, and therefore an old concept.


The goal of social protocol according to Reagle is to have the ability to make verifiable assertions, to build reputation, to solicit advice, and defer to a trusted source which are equally relevant for individuals, families, groups and communities.

There is an indissoluble link between economic performance and social capabilities and perhaps Evans-Anfom’s memoir should command the interest of the intellection and professionals of the great nations of West Africa whose wobbling economies and pockets of social unrests are to some extent a reflection of deficiencies in the quality and effective use of social protocols within their development agenda.


What qualities qualified and validated the efficient use of social protocols (education, family values, and faith) by the inter-war generation of West Africans to help them create a hopeful future for the next generation who seemed to have failed? Did a new era of independence and its circumstances bring a different dynamism to the social protocols? Yes.


Were they successful in manoeuvring this new terrain to the advantage of their communities and nations as a whole? Yes. It was the authenticity of desire, innocence of originality, and fertile imagination, which harnessed their ability to reason with instinctual impulses, to translate their dreams into reality and to produce such remarkable patriotic self-sacrificing attributes fundamental to the building of new nations readying for independence.


At their retirement most of them had built reputation backed by a life-content rich with selfless achievements. A mutation must have taken place since then, the only reason for the yawning absence of such qualities in the generations that followed.


However, the sub region’s social fabric possesses the ability to repair this damaged region within its social DNA–where ‘development and behaviour will be aligned with purpose and values,’ a hope, a pulsating rhythm, which runs through Evans-Anfoms recommendations at the end of his book.

Now in his nineties, Evans-Anfom, mostly confined to his wheel chair, is still an avid reader with a ready smile and an unassuming posture in a shrinking frame; but as a young man he had grown up in Gold Coast, where Accra was his worldview, the Akuapim Hills a botanical experiment, and the rest of the country a sleepy backwater.


Throughout his formative and fledgling years his life choices re-echoed Paul Goodwin’s view that ‘People don’t make the journeys to come and die, they make them to come and live’; and here it refers to the journey of life, which Leon Edel advices should be infused with poetry – “the poetry of existence, of trial and error, initiation and discovery, rites of passage and development, and the inevitabilities of aging,” which Evans-Anfom’s life has faithfully exhibited and still does.


Evans-Anfom’s distinguished social capabilities helped him promote interactions and forge new connections to aid in the development of his nation as a whole and reinforced national pride, evident from the following quote from his book, “It is very interesting how one’s horizon shifts and recedes as one gets on in life.


In the elementary school, my horizon was just the outskirts of Accra. At Achimota College, my horizon receded and became the boundaries of Gold Coast. Why? Because then I met Gold Coast boys and girls from all parts of the country.


Then later in Edinburg, my horizon shifted to the international scene, specifically to Great Britain, for the duration of the war. After the war, it shifted to Europe and, subsequently, during my working life in my travels around the world and meeting all sorts of people, visiting many countries, my horizon really became the geographical end of the world!”

Evans-Anfom’s timeless worldview to the development of his country has been similarly expressed in the editorial words of Earl Lovelace with regards to the literature of the continent, “I have this impression that this literature of Africa, the Caribbean and Asia is viewed as a thing apart, that it belongs to Africans, Asians and Caribbean people and not to the world …


"We have to get rid of these postures, comforting as they may seem, for whether it is as supervisor of civilisation or as victim of oppression, both prevent us from the responsibility for the far more exciting and essential task of building in these times a new and human society. We can only do this from where we are, with the experiences that we have; what we share is language, imagination.


"Nobody is born into the world. Every one of us is born into a place in a culture, and it is from that standpoint of that culture that we contribute to the world.”


Evans-Anfom’s life has played ahead of his interpreters and detractors and that is what makes him great and ahead of his time.


The title of his memoir To The Thirsty Land is very much relevant for a country and a sub region still struggling to move beyond their inaugural goals after independence.