When Bereaved Celebrities Become Vigilantes

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

Garden City, New York

July 9, 2014

The Castro Story is one that is rather sad and tragic, if only because it is also a story that is all too commonly global and historic. Well, I have just learned about a fetishistic and apocryphal dimension to it; but I prefer to leave the latter elements to those better qualified to deal with the same. For now, though, my attention is focused on how two reporters attempting to professionally do their job of systematically and meticulously unravel the mystery surronding the widely reported drowning of the Hip-Life musician, Mr. Theophilus Tagoe (aka "Castro-The-Destroyer") nearly got mauled by some alleged hangers-on of Ghanaian soccer star, Mr. Asamoah Gyan and the latter's elder brother, Mr. Baffuor Gyan, in the Eastern Regional Township of Ada (See "Castro Girl Not 'Maame Water'" Daily Guide / Ghanaweb.com 7/9/14).

And here may be recalled, once again, the widely reported drowning of Castro and his purported girl-pal over the weekend of July 5 in the estuary of the Volta river and the Atlantic Ocean. The pair, we are told, had gone jet-skiing. Castro is reported to have drowned while in the archetypally gallant process of attempting to rescue his alleged girl-pal, whose name has now been officially given as Ms. Janet Bandu, a former student of an institution called IPMC and the Ghallywood Academy of Film Acting. I suppose the foregoing names represent two separate post-secondary professional-training institutions of some sort.

At any rate, this tragic incident appears to be culturally and Biblically coded in two discrete, and/or distinctive, ancient myths, namely, the Creation Myth of Adam and Eve and the Mortality Apple of the Bible, or the Forbbiden Fruit, on the one hand, and the Divine Disobedience Myth of Jonah in the Belly of the Whale in the historic township of Nineveh, in present-day Iraq, on the other. The Nineveh aspect of the story concerns the alleged skipping of school by Ms. Bandu in order to share a blissful moment or two, of riverine pleasure, with her widely alleged beau.

Of course, in the original version, the subject of providential disobedience, the Prophet Jonah, is ultimately redeemed; and this unimpeachably edifying narrative for posterity and the ages has been mnemonically and indelibly etched in our epic memory banks. I am, however, a bit skeptical about the Adam and Eve sub-textual narrative, as the latter rather unmistakably and unwarrantedly attempts to fault a victim who may well have been inescapably victimized by the narrative of the predictable fall, in retrospect, of a widely liked and evidently prosperous prophet of Hip-Life. A sort of Samson-Delilah situation, if one may be authorized to draw in such a poignant analogy.

In the end, though, it is the physical assaulting of those paid to both uncover and expose the painful and even unpalatable truth that ought to take precedence here, if Ghanaian society is to function and progress in the salutary manner of many a contemporary democratic political culture. Ordinarily, one would expect soldiers in the morally unregenerate mold of the Rawlings kind to have "manhandled" Messrs. Benjamin Tetteh and Daniel Akpalo Nyorngmor in the manner in which the Gyan hangers-on are reported t have done to these two gentlemen.

Mr. Tetteh, we are told, is the Eastern Regional Correspondent for Joy-Fm, while Mr. Nyorngmor regularly reports for Radio Ghana. In other words, these two gentlemen are no cub reporters, or media novices, who deserve to be treated as rudely and crudely as they were, allegedly, treated by these ghetto urchins and hangers-on of the two Gyan brothers. What I am unmistakably suggesting here, of course, is that the alleged assailants of Messrs. Tetteh and Nyorngmor ought to be promptly arrested and vigorously prosecuted; and their alleged principals, namely, Messrs. Asamoah Gyan and Baffuor Gyan, ought to be severely sanctioned for negligently allowing their human pit-bulls to so callously savage these prime purveyors of democratic justice and leadership accountability.

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