Sounds like Coming to America – that expensive Eddie Murphy all time classic that was also pure gold in triplicate. We enjoyed its rare cinematographic lush, the plot, and the pomp - all of which left behind a mesmerising score - for the records. Esi Aidoo, a Ghanaian resident in Milton Keynes, England, may have seen the movie a thousand times. With a well fed royal aide singing ‘She is your Queen to be”, and dancers slugging it out in colourful robes, as elephants and Zebras hum along, Akeem’s face would lit up at the sight of his American bride. The Zamunda girl, his father’s choice, wasn’t bad at all, but we were all happy that Akeem would rediscover Lisa. Great plot!
Kofi Amenyo, our version of Prince Akeem, at least for this hour, is also coming to America, to look for a bride. Unlike Akeem, Kofi doesn’t have a royal luggage, a personal jet, or aides to tend his shoes. And for sure, he will not walk on flowers. But he speaks very good English. He writes well, too, combining a very effective register with an almost impeccable collocation for our reading pleasure. If he manages to put on a British accent, even if it is not the quintessential kind, he wouldn’t need to necessarily get a job as a cleaner at McDowell’s, as Akeem did, to get himself a Lisa. But Amenyo knows that good English alone will not do; he would need to show a few things to convince any good woman that he is up to the game. By now, Kofi knows that it is still possible to lack in the midst of plenty: women abound in America, and indeed all over the world, but there would always be men who would not find any.
In his Ghanaweb article on the subject of marriage, a good feature that was published last week, Kofi Amenyo made available the findings of some surveys carried out in the United States about why African-American girls are not finding good men to marry. The figures were interesting and very revealing. How are the women going to cope? Their men are in jail, the whites do not fancy them, at least not for marriage, and the well educated career-focused ones do not find a good match in the African-American man, most of whom are not as degree-hungry as the West-African from Ghana or Nigeria. And with current statistics that most women actually earn more than their men, the situation may get worse, especially because women are also doing better in school than men.
I don’t know if the situation is peculiar to America; It may be a global problem. Honestly, is it that difficult to find a partner these days? Well, marriage has never been an easy adventure, and not everybody would succeed in finding even the worst of partners. There would always be women who would never find a man. They would want to make do with the most uncaring and unpromising son of a pauper, but even those would be very scarce. That does not, however, mean that our wives should be grateful for having our sort for husbands. My wife always jokes that she married down, and sometimes when I take a casual survey of myself in a mirror, I wonder how unmistakable her assessment is. She sure could have found a much better pretender. That is one of the troubles of many women who are not finding men: They still hang on to an imaginary Prince Charming.
In the inner recesses of their innermost thoughts, most women, even the stark illiterate, harbour those idealistic thoughts of marrying a rich man from a very respectable family. And just being rich is not enough; there must be visible signs of financial stability. He must also be good-looking, preferably above 6ft or at least 5ft 11inches. Anything short of that must come with lots of other goodies to compensate. So, even though women seem to be earning more important degrees than men, we still have to answer to questions on the kind of jobs we do and what our long term plans are? It would be great if he had a mortgage and a nice car. So, just as people immediately think of South Korea when Korea is mentioned, forgetting that there is ever a North Korea, we are comfortable to talk of a woman having a good marriage when her husband is resourceful and responsible. Does a man have a good marriage because the wife has a good job? And the Bible doesn’t seem to have helped matters very much: Do we have an equivalent quotation for that scripture in Proverbs that says he who finds a wife, finds a good thing? It is mostly implied that a husband is also a good thing, but the Bible doesn’t put it in explicit terms. That, methinks is the problem with being a man: most things are only implied and assumed until there is a proof. Women would do well to prove themselves beyond having a great shape and a gorgeous face. They should know that being a woman is not enough because transvestites do not have such a hard time pretending to be women.
Still, many women believe that if there was ever a third sex, many men would not get as much as a glance from women. And so, like Prof Higgins in My Fair Lady, a lot of men have stopped wondering why women always have too many inconsequential things on their minds. You would think a good job plus a great house would go a long way, but many men soon find out after marriage that a good job is never enough, even though that often is the attraction. But they still have to pass the job test anyway: ‘So, what do you do for a living?’ Never mind that she may not be doing anything herself. And often, men, especially those who do not have great jobs, find answering that question as difficult as the most dreaded one: “what size are you?” We don’t have the privilege of asking what size a woman is after a successful date when all signs are showing green. We must be forthcoming with our age but you take a woman as she is: she is priceless and timeless. Meanwhile, time really waits for no man; they are the first to tell you.
Prof Higgins may have found the women around him demanding but at least he was prepared to marry Eliza, that common flower girl who took eternity to be able to say: “The rain in Spain rains mainly in the plain.” After all his bullying, he was proud and honest to confess: “I have grown accustomed to her face.” How many lady professors are prepared to marry a man with only a Bachelor’s or even one Master’s degree? They wouldn’t marry down past a certain level of education. That is the new definition for a long distant relationship. High-flying professional ladies in Ghana define a long distant relationship as the kind in which the woman has a lot more degrees and exposure than the man. For them, there is a long distance between the two, considering the amount of catching up he may need to do. The traditional definition of a relationship where the parties are poles apart has been replaced with this affirmatively active one by the laydees.
But, looking at things through the prism of reality, who really has a lot of catching up to do? What stops the degree-holding African-American women from going down to marry their working class neighbours? Have women forgotten so soon that our fathers made do with our illiterate mothers when girl-child education was not a priority for anybody? You would think it is time for women to return the favour, and help their men to take up courses to better their situation. My best friend’s wife just found out that one of her husband’s three degrees is actually a postgraduate diploma, and not a Master’s Degree, as she had always believed. Usually, this kind of trifle would pass in any normal human situation, but it is shaking the very foundations of that marriage. What has a postgraduate diploma that should have been a Master’s degree got to do with mortgage payment? Meanwhile, she is yet to complete her nursing degree, which she is even taking part-time at a not-so great university. Women are programmed not to help men up; the converse is the norm. The few ladies who sponsor their men abroad from Africa take their sponsorship money back when the marriage collapses, after they had taken custody of the children and possessed the house. How many men have tried doing such a thing?
As our brother Kofi Amenyo is coming to North America, I feel an urgent duty to advise him on a few things, and if possible offer a few tips on what to do to get a good girl. As he rightly observed in his article, I am in Canada, not in the United States, so I may not be able to paint an accurate picture of the American situation. These two countries are very different, and the people are also different. Even so, I would share a few experiences with Kofi and explore a few possibilities available to him:
1. What are the chances that Kofi would meet a decent and well-educated Ghanaian lady? There are always good ladies looking for men. The converse is also true. But how do they meet? Some say the ladies who have crossed their mid-thirties are spent-forces who have too many issues on their minds. They are usually submissive in the beginning but their real nature pops out after marriage, especially if the man stands to repair his immigration status on their account. Kofi must be prepared to endure the backlog of all the stress she piled up.
2. Kofi could go Ataka, most of whom, we understand have warmed up to the reality that Ghanaian men make good husbands. Some of them make good wives. At least, we share a common ancestry. But Kofi must be prepared for some shocking moments of truth. The Akata people are like the Jamaicans he knows in England. Despite our ancestry, most of them are happy that they can distance themselves from the photos of poor, malnourished children in Sub-Sahara Africa. The Ataka is neither white nor black. Kofi may need to find a definition for them.
3. Kofi’s third option would be to marry a white woman and commit to a life of never-ending concessions. But before he does that, he may want to research how many of these interracial marriages last beyond a decade. He may wish to refresh his memory with the Abraham Lincoln proclamation that it is not proper for whites and blacks to intermarry. Some say they are unions contracted out of sympathy and with time that ‘virtue’ wears off, whereupon the whites come to that realisation that the colonial master and the slave never got that close.
4. For a fourth, our new visitor has the option of going the third way, that not-so convenient junction between Ataka and Oyibo- that is the Hispanics. The few who have made pacts with their ladies have not reported a lot of bad news. There is also the option of marrying anybody from the broader African continent.
5. Finally, Kofi could do what some Ghanaian men have regretted doing: Get a girl in Ghana, get talking for a while, get her engaged, get her to America and get hell.
Benjamin Tawiah
quesiquesi@hotmail.co.uk
