Letter From USA: Of Buffoneries and Straying Souls

A couple of events set me thinking this past week. The first one had to do with our tirelessly traveling salesman president’s latest stop-over in England to inaugurate what was supposed to be a memorial to one William Wilberforce. The second one was the vitriolic reaction from the black community that followed the said inauguration at the University of Hull.

One enraged Black activist is quoted as saying of the Ghanaian president: “First and foremost we need to register very seriously our concern with the president of Ghana. Because oftentimes we have these buffoons who just play in the hands of our enemy. They have no knowledge of self and therefore are just willing to be used because if he was not compliant in this we wouldn’t have this problem.”

Apparently, the white folks at Hull had contrived a nice story about slavery, and at the center of it, they had placed their white-skinned brother, William Wilberforce. In this alter- narrative of the slave trade, Wilberforce is said to have led the campaign against slavery and is thus put forth as a shining example of why your benighted black person must be perpetually pliant to the avuncular pretensions of his white counterpart.

But a story such as Hull is telling, one needs a black factor as a collaborator. They found the willing collaborator in our own John. He went and said all the things the white folks wanted to hear. Perhaps—and this is not beyond the warped logic that rules our politicians—perhaps he also found a white speech writer who researched and gave him all the details about how William Wilberforce is supposed to have freed black slaves.

The tag of a buffoon being slapped on Mr. Kufuor is rather tempting to adopt. I could actually provide further examples of mis-acts by the president that would fit into the buffoon-y category. But I also wonder whether Kuffuor’s faux pas this time is not only a result of a well-coordinated plan by colonialists and neocolonialists to alienate us from our selves. Whether it’s not a chip in a long history of some of our own playing the self-hate game loudly enough to get the wayside approbation of their foreign masters. You see, not long ago, our history books fielded all the nonsense about Wilberforce, Livingston and Granville Sharp and others saving us slavery and barbarisms of other sorts. And we had all kinds of history teachers who rolled these “histories” off their tongues as though they were automatons set in motion by the foreigners’ propaganda machineries. The same people also provided us with nonsense about why blacks should set up images of folks like Lincoln in their rooms and deify those images because supposedly, we were saved by them!

Kufuor obviously has learnt all that history. He has constantly harped on how he was educated in the white man’s schools, and apparently, over there he learnt the ways of the white folks without blinking his eyes, even once to see if there might be other sides to those histories. In learning these things, he has also come to value himself only in terms of what these fools say.

Today, our presidents are good or bad in terms of what the World Bank or somebody at the White House or on Downing Street says. Is there any such thing as our own voices? NO! Not in the world that the likes of Kufuor and co inhabit.

And why is it so? They have been alienated to the point of self-hatred, and they have become perpetual drones and receptacles through which the voices of their masters pass unchecked.

In the days of slavery, these same types were the factors. They were the middle men who facilitated the sale of our people by organizing raids on behalf of the white man. On other occasions, they betrayed their own kinsfolk for the bottles of rum or pieces of calico or the occasional maxim gun to go on further raids.

Of course the rewards have gotten better now. They get invitations to Western capitals to be congratulated on how compliant they have been in implementing new forms of slavery in their countries. Invitations where they get congratulated on how they give an African face to the depredations that come along with neocolonialism.

If one weighs all these advantages, it becomes clear why Mr. Kufuor will be out in Hull singing the praises of William Wilberforce, while forgetting all about the millions of black men and women who shed their blood. The millions whose heroics whether on the high seas in slave revolts, or in rebellions on plantations eventually turned the tide and made the inhuman system carve in. Apparently, Kufuor has not heard about the Haitians. He has not heard about Nat Turner. He has not heard about Cinque, he has not heard about the thousand other names who gave their lives to stop it all. But he knows about William Wilberforce because his white masters have only let him in on so much.

And he would have us too to learn how to praise Wilberforce by and by. I am almost tempted to call Mr. Kufuor a buffoon too. But you will not hear it from my mouth, not today at least. Others are already saying it, and perhaps deep down in his soul somewhere, Kufuor himself must know he has given them cause. His global tours bring him to Chicago this week, and perhaps I might get the chance to ask for some clarification as to whether he thinks he is a buffoon or not, but for now, I’d rather ask you guys to keep your expectations low.

It’s a wise choice for our times.