When Critics Expose Their Own Insecurities and Cancers of Envy

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

Last Sunday (June 22, 2008), a quite quaintly interesting feature article was published on Ghanaweb.com. The article was titled “Ghana Homepage Stumbles On” and was authored by somebody calling him-/herself Wonyonsi Wonyonsi. The article was “quaintly interesting” because it presumed to “objectively” portray the character and personality of yours truly to the Ghanaweb.com reading public and the global community at large. To be certain, yours truly was featured as only one of five regular and “major” feature columnists that Wonyonsi Wonyonsi deemed to be worth exposing for public scrutiny, although reading through the entire article, I could not help but come away with the rather funny impression that the author had, indeed, intended to exclusively score yours truly, for whatever capricious reasons, than all else, for my name ran through almost every paragraph of Wonyonsi Wonyonsi’s 14- or 15-paragraph essay. Obviously, the author seemed to have a damn humongous axe to grind with yours truly, gauging by the largely scornful, sarcastic and outright vitriolic diction of the author.

For starters, the critic appeared to have a big problem, and I mean a really big problem, with the prolificity of my journalistic output, even while also shamelessly pretending to grant yours truly the democratic right not only to unfettered expression, but also my right to be frequently published by Mr. Francis Akoto, the publisher of Ghanaweb.com. On the latter score, this is what Wonyonsi Wonyonsi had to say: “It is only proper to start a description of some of the stalwarts of GHP with Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Associate Prof[.] at a community college. He has written nearly 250! articles to GHP…. It is worrying that he alone writes so much.”

Now this is a very serious accusation from somebody who claims to respect the culture of democracy; still, believe it or not, such patently irrational expression of anguish on the rather bizarre grounds that yours truly is a worrisomely prolific writer, is typically Ghanaian. And such irrational attitude, believe it or not, prevails much more among the ranks of Ghanaian intellectuals than any other group. Maybe it has something to do with what Mr. Charles Asante (a.k.a. Okyerema Asante), the renowned drummer-musician, famous for his stints with such global mega-stars as Paul Simon and South Africa’s Ladysmith Black Mambazo, sings about on one of his CDs. The title is “Crabs in a Bucket,” and it talks about the seemingly pathological penchant of many Ghanaians to want to reduce everybody else to their own levels and/or statuses in life, whatever and wherever these might be. Having, thus, started on such insufferably regressive note of envy, is there any surprise, therefore, that Wonyonsi Wonyonsi would also gloat, rapturously, over the purported fact that: “His [Okoampa-Ahoofe’s] pieces are almost always met with a deluge of insults”? But what is even more flabbergasting, the critic continues, “[H]e is completely impervious to them and continues to churn out articles with irritating frequency.”

Here, what needs highlighting is the fact that critic Wonyonsi Wonyonsi actually believes that yours truly ought to be visiting the Ghanaweb.com website primarily to read and heed the largely gratuitous and impertinent comments of readers with such abominable names as “Junior Hitler,” “Wo Maame No Gbemi,” “Ewe Nationalist,” “Julo Jato Rawlings” and, of course, “Wonyonsi Wonyonsi” for instructions on what to write as well as how frequently to have my articles posted on Ghanaweb.com. You see, there is a proverb among the Akan-speaking people of Ghana, Côte d’Ivoire and elsewhere, that whenever a critic points her/his index finger at the subject (or object) of criticism, the other three remaining fingers invariably point squarely at the accuser/critic.

Secondly, it is rather arrogant for someone who accuses yours truly of being guilty of “haughtiness and bigotry” to be describing yours truly as “Associate Prof[.] at a community college,” for I have never hidden from my readers the fact that I teach at a particular community college, with a specific name, located in a specific geographical region in the United States of America! Or does Wonyonsi Wonyonsi presume her-/himself to be effectively cutting yours truly down to size, literally and proverbially speaking, by appearing flippant about my institutional affiliation? Indeed, by being so disdainful and contemptuous, which of us, really, comes across to readers as being “haughty and bigoted”? Or maybe the writer just came across these two emotionally-charged epithets while composing his article and whimsically decided to deploy them against yours truly, in order to see how effective they might be?

In any case, had Wonyonsi Wonyonsi cared to find out from Mr. Francis Akoto, our Ghanaweb.com publisher-editor, s/he would have promptly learned to her/his utter horror that, indeed, Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe has had at least 50 of his articles promptly killed off or refused publication by Ghanaweb.com for diverse reasons, but largely that of editorial policy. For instance, Wonyonsi Wonyonsi would have learned that whereas the Modernghana.com website has published a whopping 27 chapters of my ongoing series of articles titled “When Dancers Play Historians And Thinkers,” Ghanaweb.com, to-date, has only published some 5 or 6 chapters of the same series on its website. Then also, the critic may care to learn that about 10 or a little less number of my articles have been published by Ghanaweb.com as mainstream news articles, which means that while, indeed, these articles appear on the Ghanaweb.com search engine, they do not, in fact, appear among the main list of my feature articles or columns. And so, one may aptly ask: “Exactly what is the meaning of all this?” And my terse answer is that nearly as many of my articles as have been published on Ghanaweb.com, have either not yet seen the proverbial daylight of publication or they have been published somewhere other than Ghanaweb.com. In brief, the point I am trying to make here is that, Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe does not either go to bed dreaming of writing a certain number of articles in order to “irritate” the petty-minded likes of Wonyonsi Wonyonsi into throwing tantrums and worrying about their own self-perceived literary inadequacy. Rather, my sole objective is to write and write diligently and consistently as I know how, while leaving others to stew in their own miasmas of envy, jealousy and plain idiocy, should they so voluntarily decide!

Thirdly, on the question of my diction, Wonyonsi Wonyonsi waxes rather pathetic, and yours truly wishes that the critic had conferred with an expert on this question before presuming to lecture his/her readers vis-à-vis how effective or defective I may be with my freely, and unabashedly, chosen literary style. It is, indeed, a shame that this imperious and pontifical critic should come off as rather abjectly stolid and cognitively addled, by making such sophomoric and vacuous observations as the following: “Remove his ‘big words’ and stock phrases and the rest of his writing is extremely ordinary, even bland.” To begin with, what makes Mr./Ms. Wonyonsi Wonyonsi think, and presume, that once the reader “removes” any of the so-called big words from my sentences, or writing, whatever remains of such hatchet work would still be mine? No wonder then, that having befuddled him-/herself with the fatuous dream of having successfully gutted, or eviscerated my style of writing into an empty rhetorical shell, Wonyonsi Wonyonsi is able to convince him-/herself of having also effectively rendered my writing “extremely ordinary, even bland.” What kind of intellectual obtuseness is this? Is this, in fact, what the “Rawlings Revolution” was about? Making an embarrassingly legion number of Ghanaian youths become arrogant in their woeful ignorance, personal inadequacy and abject inferiority complex, I mean. And this is supposed to be the fault of Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe?

Needless to say, Wonyonsi Wonyonsi is hardly among the minority of Ghanaians possessed of this wretched trend of thinking. Not very long ago, for instance, a former graduate-school adviser of mine called to cynically complain about the fact that I write and publish with “irritating frequency,” and not just on Ghanaweb.com. He, therefore, presumed to advise yours truly to, instead, concentrate more on my poetry and other stuff. I think Prof. Kayabali (not his real name, of course) had been clairvoyant enough to guess at the likely damning target of my prolific literary output. Not long after I published my slim book titled Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana (iUniverse.com, 2005), the acknowledgment page on which he and his wife’s names appear, Prof. Kayabali called me, bristling, to vehemently protest that I had unduly magnified the historical stature of the Doyen of Gold Coast and Ghanaian Politics over and above that of the African Show Boy. That marked the rather unfortunate beginning of his clinical dementia. Today, at 61, and having once been prematurely employed by “The Osagyefo” in the local-language section of the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation (GBC-1) at 16 or 17, Prof. Kayabali continues to sulk and bitterly regret the fact that he hadn’t been able to stanch my “irritating prolificity.” Ultimately, whether I use the royal plural pronoun because I believe that “blue blood” (whatever that means) runs through my vein, is beside the point. The point is that you either like my style of writing or you don’t; but, please, don’t make such nonsensical claims as that yours truly dreams of turning out “a critically acclaimed novel.” Acclaimed by whom? Wonyonsi Wonyonsi? Then again, how many Ghanaians, other than college students and professors could proudly claim to have enviably cultivated any worthwhile and admirable culture of leisure reading? And am I either haughty of bigoted? Absolutely not! And do I see myself in much the same way as just about every other Ghanaian? Of course not! After all, isn’t my grandfather the Rev. T. H. Sintim, of Akyem-Asiakwa and Begoro? And do I have “blue blood” running through my veins? You had better ask Osagyefo Amoatia Ofori-Panyin II, the Diamond-King of Ghana about that one!

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is the author of 17 books, including “Romantic Explorations” and “Ghanaian Politics Today” (Atumpan Publications/lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@aol.com.