By Dr. Samuel Adjei Sarfo
Attorney and Counselor at Law
Those who have been taken aback by the recent stentorian statements by some Ghanaian chiefs on the June 3rd flooding have been sleeping like Rip Van Winkle, and do not know the implications of our culture and traditions. Those Ghanaian chiefs have confidently declared at a press conference that the demonstrators against the erratic electricity supply (Dumsor) caused the recent disasters that killed over a hundred and fifty people in Accra. This is because those demonstrators did not heed the warning to stop their activities during the annual ban on drumming and noise-making.
Now before anyone gets up to say “poppycock”, consider that these are well-educated and rather articulate traditional leaders who have prescribed their usual cause and effect by reference to their gods. And according to the mainstream African culture, this is how they are supposed to explain and rationalize all tragic phenomena. In this cultural context, these elders, although grey-haired and experienced, are under no obligation to use their brains to be logical or scientific or even reasonable. They are only supposed to declare, like some lobotomes, the ills of the country according to what the gods have revealed to them, not what science or logic or commonsense have declared to be the case. In the eyes of the African gods, no one can dwell too much on thinking. In fact any such thinking might well endanger all our culture and traditions which derive their power by the ultimate suspension of all brain activity. We must all have faith in our culture and traditions and stop this dangerous habit of thinking! We must believe!
So instead of the outcry against those risible declarations, we must believe without question because tradition is tradition. After all, tradition forever presumes and preserves the older ways of doing things and broaches no competition with the rationality inherent in the hard sciences. And since independence, we have solemnly agreed, even within our democratic constitution, that our traditions and culture should run concurrently with our education and socio-political worldview. Furthermore, we have never considered the two to be mutually exclusive. How then can we condemn those traditional leaders who are merely speaking in pattern with our true traditions and cultural beliefs? How come this suddenly feigned ignorance of the implications of our culture and traditions which we have sworn allegiance to protect?
Indeed, when one thinks of this whole traditional or cultural way of thinking, one can even argue that it has come to mean more to us than the rationality of scientific thinking. For example, despite our impressive investments in education, many Ghanaians retain their unflinching belief in witches and wizards, and our educated men and women periodically consult mediums that tell them that their drinking habits or lack of progress may be due to witches. Thus despite our education, there is enough space in our minds for superstition to occupy.
There are also all these devotees of false religions who steal millions from the Government and pay their share of tithes to the religious gurus who in turn sanctify their loot and proceed to make declarations of well-being for them and the nation. Thus despite modernity and science, there is enough space in our minds for false religion to occupy.
We attend schools under deprived conditions and refuse to invest in our children, and when they grow up to be victims of Sakawa or believe in somebody sitting in the forest to make them rich through juju money, then we feign surprise about their ignorance? By our lack of investment in our school system, we reap the results of gullible and vulnerable citizens incapable of any analyses, and we are disappointed? Thus despite modernity, there is enough space in our minds for the educated illiterates to occupy.
And when we spend millions training scientists who will never apply scientific thinking; or engineers who will never engineer anything; or writers who will never write anything; or teachers who will never teach anything; or doctors who will never discover treatment for any disease………when we vote for leaders who have never led in anything and call them messiahs of our salvation and revote them to office on every voting cycle, then despite modernity and science, there is enough space in our minds for charlatans to occupy.
And if we have dumb traditions and beliefs that find space in our thinking or lack thereof, how can we make any differentiation between poppycock and science when we have always got the two in admixture throughout our existence. Thus the hullabaloo against the traditional council’s diagnosis of the Accra tragedy is merely hypocritical; it should not affront our sensibilities because we have been confronted with similarly odious cultural and traditional viewpoints and unconsciously gobbled them down without any complaint since the very beginning of our existence; so why the doubts now? When it comes to the basics of cause and effect, we rarely know what cause will bring about the effect we desire. And that is why we attend churches and fast all day long for our economy to thrive in spite of our daily corrupt deeds. That is why a whole government can engineer judgement debts and other shady deals and loot the nation, and thereafter put our heads under the chopping board of the IMF. And when the push comes to shove, are we sure that the government’s diagnoses of the national ailments can be any better than that of those irrational traditional chiefs?
If we pour libation at our national gatherings and strongly believe that the dead will rise from their graves and shower their graces on the living, then our diagnoses of the national ails are no different from that of those irrational chiefs. And if we are told that somebody will descend from heaven to solve our problems for us; or we can behave as badly as we can because somebody has shed his blood for our sins two thousand years prior; or if we are refusing to be responsible citizens and engage in all shenanigans to dupe the nation; or sleep on our jobs and depend on a god to make us prosperous, then how different are we from those irrational chiefs making claims that the gods caused our woes?
Thus despite modernity, there is enough space in our minds for the kind of mindset and activities that will take our country back into the medieval ages.
We can all agree that we have messed up big time in how we contemplate the way forward. And for me, our only hope is the new breed of innocent leadership promised by our beautiful ladies from the Kwabre East and Kwabre-Sekyere constituencies, Ms. Francisca Oteng Mensah, and Ms. Mavis Nkansah Boadu. We have all heard from the traditional elders and their diagnoses of our ailments. We have also heard from those intellectual midgets who mistake grey hair for wisdom when all evidence in Ghana has so far proven the contrary. From the very beginning, those clueless traditionalists and senile politicians have prescribed remedies in sacrifices of chickens and cows and even humans; but where are we? There are still those of the traditionalist ilk who put up laughable shows to satisfy the touristic palate of the outsider. There are still those annually supervising the chasing of deer in the wilderness in satisfaction of rites sanctioned by their gods. There are those whose ancestors told them that a stool descended from the skies, and are still held spell-bound by the power of the stool that descended from the sky. Elsewhere, there are still those of the traditionalist ilk persecuting witches and tormenting them or confining them. There are still those blackening their ancestral stools or skins with human blood or inveterate rituals…….
And in the midst of all these, there are only very few of us crying out against the palpable ignorance. And among them are those young men and women who are bringing into being all these fantastical inventions with which the older generation daily grapple. And in our own backyard here have arisen two new generation politicians in whom I can safely place my bet, and yet some ill-motivated people still murmur and sneer. But I believe in Francisca Oteng-Mensah and Mavis Nkansah Boadu far more than most of these cacophonous lot mistaking their fart for intelligent speech! For too many of these people placate nonsense and welcome worse diagnoses than those advanced by these errant traditional chiefs, and yet claim to be experienced and mature or even educated. That is why we have hanging on our heads a government built on fiction and sustained by a myth created by a self-serving personage; and yet we look with hope on their evil deeds and may even vote them back to power. But we know with certainty that their modus operandi is to seek to divide our front by ethnic swipes while diagnosing or prognosticating a future era of national unity and prosperity.
And when they are done with their false diagnoses and fake prognoses, they go and hobnob over their next corrupt acts and scheme the worst methods of national destruction. And when they finish their acts of treasonable deceit, they then turn to the witches, the dwarfs, the goblins, the succubus and incubus, the necromancers, clairvoyants and dwarfs to blame for the evil deeds they have taken time to cause. And when the traditional chiefs cried that the native gods caused the flooding of our city which remains without gutters and drainage, why are we then surprised? After all, wrong prognostications and diagnoses happen to be our well-known forte. And so we are simply in total denial of a long running culture and traditional faith whose ugly face we can now see clearly in the light, although it has been hiding in the dark since the birth of our dear nation.
Samuel Adjei Sarfo, J.D., is a practicing attorney in Austin, Texas, USA. He writes the New Statesman column, “Thoughts of a Native Son”. You can email him at sarfoadjei@yahoo.com
