The Elizardeathans and the warrior kings of Ghana

By Amenuti Narmer

If you cannot quite make out the etymology of the term “Elizardeath,” be not dismayed. It is not readily evident. This is entirely my fault. I could level with you and expose straightaway its hidden meaning and the secret agenda—although it’s no longer a secret since you’re reading about it now—behind the occult manifestations of its terror.

But bear with me. The roots of “Elizardeath” are petrifyingly complex; its derivatives are even more stupefying; much of which is stooped in reality and the rest in mysticism.

Accordingly, I admit to you that the ensuing paragraphs are a sober, academically exacting attempt to deal with modern mysticism and the occult of Elizardeathanism as an important part of our intellectual inquiry and cultural life in Ghana.

I shall try not to call anyone’s religion loony mysticism, even if they believe that a “great” Italian criminal flew into the sky after he was murdered and buried for his indulgence in sorcery, miracle, witchcraft, mysticism and prostitute-worship.

While you may be interested in the etymology of “Elizardeath,” and the complexity thereof, you are probably more interested in what “Elizardeathanism” has to do with Ghana. I shall proceed to make a claim and from this claim present to you how the Elizardeathans in Ghana continue to enslave, oppress and drink the blood of Ghanaians.

Literally. This, I understand, may come to you as a shock. But shock is good, so long as you don’t get a cardiac arrest from the fried imported turkey tail you’ve eaten for the past fifteen years. So, bear with me.

While you were busy focused on fried turkey tails and kelewele, a queen far, far away had her claws on your neck. Literally. For more than sixty years, since 1957, our leaders have convinced you that Ghana gained her independence from a tiny island off the cost of a midget continent, Europe.

More, you’ve been peppered with ideas about decolonization, neocolonialism, neoliberalism and the antics of democracy and the rule of law in Ghana. All of which you’ve swallowed hook and sinker. Fine. You’ve been told that this part of the world used to be called the Gold Coast.

Not Ga Mashie, not Bibiani, not Ntoaboma, not Sogakofe, not Walewale, not Yendi, not Lawra, not Paga, not Bogoso, but the Gold Coast. This too you have accepted. Fair enough. You’ve been convinced that from the dust of the coast arose this new name, Ghana, which is derived from the Soninke language. That “Ghana” means “Warrior King.” Sure. It blows our minds to know this about ourselves.

Still, some in Ghana claim the Ghana Empire (c. 200 until c. 1200) ancestry, although there’s very little evidence to this effect. Yet, others claim that G.H.A.N.A is an acronym for “God Has Appointed Nkrumah Already.” Nkrumah here is key, since it was Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana who led talks to make Ghana an independent republic.

Then again, independent republic here is the notorious key. In fact, it is the issue. It turns out that the leaders of our country didn’t quite understand the new terms of contract that they signed in 1957.

So they signed away another important destiny of the peoples of our lands, in what they call The Commonwealth of Nations or the Commonwealth. It is not to be confused with the Commonwealth of Independent States, which is the old Soviet rendition, however unnervingly awkward and terrifyingly similar, in its purpose and its posture.

The colonialists and their African puppets (although I think the word “ignoramuses” is the more appropriate word) claim that the Commonwealth is an intergovernmental organization.

But all fifty-three nations here were territories of the former British Terrorism Cartel. Moreover, they’ve also managed to convince the rest of us that the cover organization for this British terrorism operates by intergovernmental consensus of the member states, including Ghana and Nigeria, organized through the Commonwealth Secretariat, and non-governmental organizations, organized through the Commonwealth Foundation.

Gibberish. Baloney. Won’t you say? Let’s unpack the deeper meaning. The Commonwealth dates back to the time of decolonization. The British Cartel that once unlawfully occupied our lands agreed that “increased” self-governance of its territories was the best route to managing the limitless resources they had to control in Africa and beyond.

So the territories, one of which the terrorists called the Gold Coast (for its gold and human beings turned into chattel slaves), was constituted by the London Declaration of 1949. This declaration established the new state that is Ghana, first as a member state of the British Cartel, and second, as “free and equal.”

Our “freedom” is not without this irony. Who in Walewale wanted first to tie her wealth to the commonwealth of the British Cartel, before her freedom and human equality were guaranteed? Apparently, only Kwame Nkrumah and his horde of ignoramuses knew best.

More, when the priggish idea of “free and equal” is further examined under the scrutinizing eye of the symbol of this “free association,” who is Queen Elizabeth II, and who is the Head of the Commonwealth, one is left with nothing warm and fuzzy left inside your bosom, but huge hairy pimples of cold chilling Neanderthal terror.

Can you even imagine that Nkrumah actually represented the best option for Ghana in 1957? Yes. Some people, some newly-acclaimed Ghanaians, amply schooled on the poppy Islands off the coast of the midget continent, actually wanted to stay, fully, under the rule of the British Cartel until we were matured enough to walk to the farm on our own.

Well, not exactly in those words. But certainly their machination to oppose Nkrumah’s “Self-Rule” even by the sententious standards of self-governance was akin to that picture, in every respect.

But why Queen Elizabeth, the queen of poppy terror? If you have no idea what this means too, bear with me for a second.

Like I said, shock is good. Sometimes we forget. Let me remind you of British imperial history. In its entirety, it is the result of a barbaric and ancient plot on the part of the poppies; a Papaveraceaen pact ranged against all humanity.

For centuries they schemed in their hedgerows and shitty pastures (poppies actually grow in shit), while they dined around huge dinner tables with forks and knives made from actual silver, dreaming up strange and cruel ideas, in those pale ugly flaring heads of theirs, communicating their vegetable conspiracies through codes carried on unwitting bees (while the rest of us in Africa just innocently assumed them to be having sex), until the time came to strike.

And hard, did they strike Africa with their conniving European hordes with a pungent hatred!

Ever since the dwarf, Frenchman Napoleon Bonaparte, first caught sight of the continent that gave Europe its civilization from his tall horse, poppy Europeans have never stopped dreaming cruel barbaric ideas against African humanity and all other African forms of life. Wherever that barbaric British cartel came in Africa, in the name of trade, poppies have followed with their canons, blood-lettings and sheer carnage. Colonialism and slavery are its most obvious landmarks. But there’s more to this hatred of life.

Queen Elizabeth herself is the poppy queen. The lady who’s been rumored to space shift between human and lizard forms, and who descends from a family known to have had human meat served at dinner—without salt and pepper—is plenty aware that her so-called Commonwealth is really her grey dish bowl from which she devours the carcasses of “member states.” Proper, even outside of Africa, she remains the actual monarch over lands full of people of African descent: Jamaica (95 percent Black), Antigua et Barbuda (89 percent Black), The Bahamas (91 percent Black), Barbados (92 percent Black), Grenada (95 percent Black), and more.

The taste and number of African flesh made available to this poppy queen, Elizardeath, is without number.

Even if this rumor about Elizardeath’s spaceshifting isn’t true – and I don’t see why it couldn’t be – it doesn’t matter. Conspiracy theory is always true in a sense, in form if not in content. Ghanaians might not be necessarily controlled by British creatures from outer space, but whatever kind of lizard that Elizardeath is, it’s one that is autochthonous to that island off the coast of the midget continent, Europe.

It is clear that her grip on our country Ghana, as an Agama lizard clasps my grandmother’s nim tree, continued after 6th March 1957 alright, and it seems that the London Declaration will enforce and ensure the grip of her successors too.

The declaration states that Elizardeath acts “as the symbol of the free association of its independent member nations and as such the Head of the Commonwealth”, whereby republics such as Ghana can recognize the poppy queen as head of the Commonwealth in addition to her heirs who shall also be future heads of the Commonwealth.

Consequently, our country Ghana exists in a milieu of perpetual slavery. This is the declaration to which our elite in Ghana subscribed and continue to subscribe, even without our consent.

To this end, you can arrange the little clues about the extent of the hand of Elizardeath and her Elizardeathans in the day-to-day affairs of our country and you’ll never be able to make a complete and rational account of things – but at the same time our Ghanaian community functions by this un-welcomed declaration of a commonwealth, which is a conspiracy.

No actions are innocent, every meeting of two—between our elite and Elizardeath—implies the express exclusion of a third, a fourth, a fifth, and so on, up to and including the twenty-seventh million, forty-third thousand and ninety-third Ghanaian.

We’re constantly told by our Elizardeathan elite in Ghana that this is a time of synoptic openness because we are now a democratic republic, having evolved from the lowly interstices of a Maatocratic backward water to higher ground; nothing is further from the truth.

It no longer makes sense to say, for instance, that you’re going shopping at the Accra Mall: you’re being made complicit in a conspiracy between yourself and the supermarket against your poor indentured grandfather who’s a cocoa farmer in Adowso in the Eastern Region. We’re all complicit, we’re all somewhere in the cold staring pyramid, and the poppy queen, Elizardeath, and her fellow poppies in Ghana are growing in straggly clumps all along its base.

So what: the Head of the Commonwealth is just a symbol, it’s just a “nice way” of remembering our past and where we have come from as a nation. So, why not make Ga Mantse the head? Why not make the Awomefia the head? Why not make Asantehene the head? Why not make Yana the head? Why can’t the headship rotate if we are indeed now “free and equal” to the “colonial master?”

The problem is that our Elizardeathan elite are blinded by the shine of the queen’s forks and knives made from actual silver from our African backyards. They forget that every act of ritualized remembrance necessitates a simultaneous forgetting. They forget that remembering Gandhi—a controversial statue at the University of Ghana campus—excludes the memory of Corporal Attipoe. What’s remembered is the ritual itself, of walking by the statue of a racist every day.

The po-faced charade of Elizardeath and British Terrorists constantly staring us in the face every time we join hands at the Commonwealth Games (formally known as the British Empire Games from 1930–1950, the British Empire and Commonwealth Games from 1954–1966, and British Commonwealth Games from 1970–1974) is bloodcurdling, to say the very least. It is absolute terror to stare in the face of the shiny swords and knives over which our Ancestors suffered, over which we continue, even if only symbolically, writhe.

Nobody now seems to remember that the whole poppy charade of British imperialism was brought to our coasts by barabrians who were responsible for the brutal waste of millions of Kukuom lives, Nakpanduri lives and Kpetoe lives at the forts and castles of the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade.

Now they strut around in Ghana, buoyed by their resident Elizardeathan Ghanaian elite, with a fake badge of friendship in their lapel, and by its apotropaic magic the teeming ghosts of their victims, the Spirits of our Ancestors, no longer impede their sight but can only claw ineffectually at their shoulders.

If that queen Elizardeath as head of the Commonwealth were just a symbol inscribed with unfortunate militaristic overtones in its exploitation of Ghana, it could be opposed without much effort, but in fact it’s much more subtle and dangerous than that. We’re locked in a struggle against dreams and magic. Accepting the poppy queen as the ceremonial head of Ghana at the commonwealth doesn’t honor the victims of our sordid past in slavery and colonialism, it banishes them.

As long as we can fixate on the narcotic solemnity of these terrorists as our “Colonial Masters,” we don’t need to think about the mud and gas and rats, or the victims of slavery tried and shot by their “owners,” or the millions of innocents slaughtered before, during and after slavery, and the many African soldiers who fought and died in the two world wars of their terrorists, to prop up the British, or those ethnic and religious minorities who are even today compelled to demonstrate their patriotism by wearing poppy-patterned hijabs.

Ghana’s dalliance with the British and all things British is a drug; tomorrow a presidential candidate must travel to London to hold a meeting; a supreme court judge must seek medical advice in London; children in Ghana must take British examinations to get access to British universities for college and graduate work; the population ejaculates with pleasure when they see Elizardeath spaceshfiting on national television (as if spaceshifting was a new sport); and they expostulate when they cannot afford to travel to London to shop for a British-made wrist watch.

Ghana’s romance with British terrorists is a drug; the same tranquilizer out of the caves of France that has been sprinkled all over Francophone Africa; it produces a warped reality and traps us inside of it. If we’re to start really remembering the tragedy of the coming of Europeans to West Africa, the only way is to burn all the poppies, get rid of the Elizardeathans, wipe out their evil magic with fire, and look our ghosts, stare the Spirits of our Ancestors, squarely in the eye and with a contrite heart proclaim that we are sorry!

But that means that we must rise as Ghanaians to give meaning to the Soninke word, “Ghana,” and grow into the warrior kings it entreats us to become. Warrior kings who are not afraid to die; kings who are the sum total of the quotations of all their Ancestors; kings and queens who do not, cannot bow ever again to a poppy queen. Warrior kings who chatter their own destiny with a self-assertive manhood. This is what the twenty-first century calls on Ghanaian manhood—to be kings, not slaves.

This post is dedicated to the memory of Sergeant Adjetey, Corporal Attipoe and Private Odartey Lamptey who were killed by British Terrorists in the Accra Riots of 1948 for daring to regain their freedom from terrorism. The British head of terrorist cops, Superintendent Imray, grabbed a gun and ultimately shot these three heroes. May they rest in peace and continue to inspire us to completely break free from the blue demon.