Thoughts of a Native Son III

By Dr. Samuel Adjei Sarfo

Discarding Superstition and Reasoning Logically

Last month, a Ghanaian friend of mine came to my Law Office here in Austin ,Texas, USA to discuss the status of an immigration petition he had asked me to file for his mother-in-law. As we were making small talk prior to discussing serious business, his phone rang. He was reluctant to pick up the phone for fear of incurring my displeasure, but I encouraged him to do so. The call lasted for only five minutes but the effect on the friend was dramatic. As I closely observed him, I perceived his countenance change from anxiety to agitation to anger, all in a split second. My curiosity piqued, and after he finished his conversation, I jovially intimated that all calls from Ghana to the USA represented a singular purpose: a request for money. But my friend said that the matter was of a more serious nature. He told me that his friend who had hitherto been very well-off in life had suddenly come under a concatenation of misfortunes, having lost his job as an Accountant and as a consequence, also his wife and son. But he expressed his relief that after consulting the spiritual masters, it had come to light that the mother was the cause of all his troubles in life. The friend explained to me that after the mother had been forced to drink some concoction, she had confessed to all her misdeeds. He glibly concluded that it was his hope that from hereon, the friend’s troubles were going to end.

Upon hearing this account, I was dumbfounded and began blinking hard to see if I had been shuttled into the medieval age by some mischievous time machine. An apoplectic spell of fury took hold of my whole body, and my first impulse was to slap the friend across the face to make him wake up from his fantastical posture. But with some degree of uncanny effort hitherto alien to me, I subsumed my tantrum under a façade of turbulent calm and searched for ways to reason this issue out with my good friend:

“Suppose the mother had confessed that she was the wife of Pope Francis; would you have believed her?”

“That would indeed have been a matter of psychiatric condition.”

“Well then, take her confessions as a mere figment of a very troubled mind, and dismiss it as a psychiatric condition!”

“A psychiatric condition is a physical disease which is different from witchcraft. Witchcraft is a spiritual matter. The Bible itself says that we are in a constant struggle with the principalities of darkness.”

“Well, if so, then we should encounter many of these white people here confessing to witchcraft. The Bible arrived in their country long before finding its way to Africa. Why is it that nobody accuses anybody here of witchcraft? Or are we Africans the only people afflicted with the menace?”

The friend looked at me in disbelief and explained to me that as A.B. Crentsil said in his classic highlife piece, the whites use their witchcrafts to invent airplanes and trains and to perform other scientific feats while we blacks use our witchcraft to destroy each other.

In my mind, A.B. Crentsil’s popular song, “Ayen” played ominously, invoking memories of the late seventies and early eighties when our musicians composed many self-abnegating songs to traduce our own image as black people…..songs ranging from “Me Broni” to Obibini “Blackman” to “Obaa Kokoo” which elevate all whites or light-colored people above the darker complexioned ones and ascribe all evil machinations to all blacks. Finally I said:

“Well it seems to me that your mother in law who is on his way here will one day be a good candidate to blame as a witch were you to face any problems in the future.”

Instead of addressing my concern, my friend uttered something akin to too much learning being a curse and prayed to God that he would show me the light one day. No wonder when lawyers die, their faces are turned upside down…….

As ludicrous as the foregoing may sound, it is not an exception to the national perception held by even so-called intellectuals and political leaders. Some time ago, somebody declared in a sonorous voice that Ghana’s economic problems arise out of the activities of those who, with the aid of dwarfs, siphon money from the national kitty to impoverish the whole nation. Taking a cue from this other-worldly diagnosis of our present economic malaise, a notable cleric prayed for our weak currency to rise. The more ridiculous anecdote is that of the Math professor who paid millions to some illiterate scoundrels to turn paper to money. As we speak, a choice threat by most political leaders seeking to drive a point home is to swear by Antoa Nyama, a so-called powerful river deity in the Asante region. They have no clue that this whole shrine could well be one attractive nuisance for the gullible intellectual fool.

When Houdini’s mother died, his assistant to whom that world-famous magician had revealed all the secrets of his tricks asked him to perform a magical act to resurrect his beloved mother. In spite of the acolyte’s education concerning these tricks, he could not purge himself of his childish albeit deleterious faith. He is a typical example of a person through whose head knowledge passes undigested as a grain of corn passes through the stomach of a little bird.

So the problem with our people is the deep-seated superstition that enables us to maintain a chasmic hiatus between what we study as basic logic and what we imbibe as religious faith. The whole culture of sitting down to reflect deeply on our misfortunes and to change the dynamics of our conduct to effectuate positive outcomes remain alien to us; so we invoke the supernatural instead of the practical in resolving every problem we encounter in life…..We blame the witches, the dwarfs, succubi, incubi and goblins for our misfortunes and seek help from illiterate mountebanks for spiritual powers to overcome matters better resolved by simple reasoning…..We have the whole anachronistic institution like the chieftaincy established to promote superstition as a cultural endowment and to stifle questions and proscribe inquiry into acts of sheer folly. That is how we impose an artificial dichotomy between actions and consequences, science and nonsense…….

And if our education has not enabled us to acquire the wherewithal to reason with sagacity and perspicacity, we should validly question its use and jettison its forms if necessary. The stranglehold of religious superstition and its fascination on the minds of our educated elites symbolize the ineffectiveness of our current educational system to cure our people of ignorance. And the proliferation of religious masqueraders who are feeding fat on the people’s ignorance is further evidence that the country lacks the core personnel with the reasoning powers to usher the nation intellectually into the modern scientific times.

In the face of all these obvious failings within our educational system, the recent declaration of my former professor and Minister of Education, Naana Opoku Agyemang, that Ghana's educational system is the best in Africa leaves many people scratching their heads in wonderment. “Best” as in what?

As a matter of immediate solution, we should begin with a philosophy of education that enables the individual to reason deeply, analyze critically, repudiate all superstition and to affirm the patriotic spirit. The first ten years of the educational system ought to be devoted to nothing but effective communication skills through a massive reading culture, universal philosophical principles, patterns of problem solving, team building and the fostering of the patriotic spirit. This is how the next generation can take hold of our national destiny and propel us forward into the future of prosperity.

As difficult as it may be to posit, it is a fact that the present educational elite is a lost generation given to superstition and false religion. If the next generation of scholars were to have any chance of living up to expectation, they should be endowed with the craft of thinking logically and behaving intelligently. Our educational system will have fulfilled its unique purposes if all it does is to create men and women who jettison superstition, reason logically, behave intelligently and think creatively.

Samuel Adjei Sarfo, Doctor of Jurisprudence, is a general legal practitioner resident in Austin, Texas, USA. You can email him at sarfoadjei@yahoo.com.