Features
GOOD NEWS FOR FOOTBALL FANS – C K GYAMFI LEFT AN AUTOBIOGRAPHY! By CAMERON DUODU
When I became editor of the Ghana edition of Drum magazine in the early 1960s, I used to double as the paper’s main Sports Writer.
My pen name – a tongue-in-cheek nomenclature if ever one existed – was Kokooase Adowa [Duiker Found Under The Cocoa Trees]! I am sure this had something to do, subliminally, with the fact that I had long, thin legs as a child, and that could run so fast on errands for my elders that one of them renamed me “Motor!”
Anyway, in the guise of Kokooase Adowa, I once visited the Black Star camp when the national team was preparing for a match with another African country. As soon as the team’s glamorous right-winger, the late, inimitable Baba Yara, saw me, he launched an attack on me for something I had written about him in Drum:
“You said in your report that I should use my left foot every now and then, but that’s precisely what I did in that match! Maybe you didn’t watch the match closely?” Yara charged.
The Black Star player-coach, C K Gyamfi, intervened at once to forestall an argument between myself and his most precious possession.
“What he was implying, in saying that, “Gyamfi explained, “is that he knows you’re an ambidextrous forward, but that your natural instinct is to use your right foot more often than your left. You, of course, can’t notice that you’re doing that, because your whole mind would be on the game as a whole and not on individual moves you might or might not make.
“There are some criticisms that are made of us as players from the point of view of an admirer, not that of a critic. You have to read an article carefully before you can detect such nuances. For instance, in that same article that you’re cheesed up, about, he remarked that a ball I had shot at goal would have earned us a goal had I passed it to someone else better placed than me!
“Now that’s a serious criticism to be levelled against a player-coach, who, after all, is in charge of strategy and should set a good example to his players.. But he added that he wondered why “Gyamfi of all people” should have done that! In saying that, he was revealing so0mething about me, which was that he expected me, with all my intelligence, to make an impeccable decision about what to do whenever I got the ball! You can’t call that a ‘criticism’!”
My head swelled when Gyamfi defended me like that. But Baba Yara, who had a very sharp wit, immediately retorted that “What he did is like when a Fulani man wants to punish you: he will hit you, but then immediately bend down to breathe air onto the stricken spot, so that the blow wouldn’t hurt you too much!”
Everyone laughed. And the tension which was about to arise between me and the players was instantly dissolved. Gyamfi, as the players’ protector, had defused a situation that could have ignited into hostility by the players towards me. This, of course, would have been reflected in my next report on the team’s performance. Yet football players long for adulation, and hostile criticism against them gets to them all too easily.
The intercession by Gyamfi in the threatening altercation between me and Baba Yara revealed to me that Gyamfi wasn’t just simply a very good player who had risen to become the national coach, but also, that he was a first-class psychologist and an expert manager of men’s egos. He had saved me from the tongue of Baba Yara, but at the same time, he had subtly taught Yara something about the delicate art of cultivating diplomatic relations between footballers and sports writers.
Indeed, so broad was Gyamfi’s intellect that his coaching method was total – he took charge of the players’ sensitivities, whilst, at the same time, exacting the best physical and mental performance from them. In other words, he was a coach whose qualities comprised both intellectual depth and technical prowess – a ‘Mourinho’ before his time; an Alex Ferguson who didn’t allow the results of his man-management skills to be scuppered by a prickly personality.
I recall these things about “C K” because I am in the very happy position of having been given a sneak preview of the Autobiography Gyamfi left behind when he passed on 2 September 2015. Apparently, C K had been painfully putting down his recollections of his long, illustrious football career, during his retirement and even when was enfeebled by illness. He was fortunate enough to befriend by a very young student called Fiifi Anaman, who, as it happened, was a “football enthusiast’s football enthusiast.”
Despite the half a century of years that constituted the age-gap between the two men, they developed a rapport which enabled “C K” to entrust what he had written to Fiifi, to enable him to “ghostwrite” the fantastic Autobiography that is about to be published by that indefatigable and shrewd Publisher, Fred Labi, proprietor of of Digibooks.
Entitled “Black Star: The Autobiography of C K Gyamfi”, the book is certain to become an instant best-seller when it appears in our bookshops in a few weeks time – hopefully, before the 5th anniversary of Gyamfi’s passing.
It makes for enchanting reading. We learn all about Gyamfi’s beginnings as a footballer in junior and senior school. His crawl from club to club until he arrived at Kumase Asante Kotoko, to attain national stardom alongside James Agyei, Kwaku Duah and others; how he got disaffected with Kotoko but instead of merely leaving the club, formed his own team to contest – dangerously – for local popularity, against Kotoko, in Kotoko’s own home-base – Kumase.
And so on and so forth until – he became the national coach of the Black Stars, and won the African Cup of Nation three times
for Ghana!
I can’t wait for a copy of the printed book. Can you?
Not if you are a real football fan – say I!
Features
Tears of Ghanaman, home and abroad
The typical native of Sikaman is by nature a hospitable creature, a social animal with a big heart, a soul full of the milk of earthly goodness, and a spirit too loving for its own comfort.
Ghanaman hosts a foreign pal and he spends a fortune to make him very happy and comfortable-good food, clean booze, excellent accommodation and a woman for the night.
Sometimes the pal leaves without saying a “thank you but Ghanaman is not offended. He’d host another idiot even more splendidly. His nature is warm, his spirit benevolent. That is the typical Ghanaian and no wonder that many African-Americans say, “If you haven’t visited Ghana. Then you’ve not come to Africa.
You can even enter the country without a passport and a visa and you’ll be welcomed with a pot of palm wine.
If Ghanaman wants to go abroad, especially to an European country or the United States, it is often after an ordeal.
He has to doze in a queue at dawn at the embassy for days and if he is lucky to get through to being interviewed, he is confronted by someone who claims he or she has the power of discerning truth from lie.
In short Ghanaman must undergo a lie-detector test and has to answer questions that are either nonsensical or have no relevance to the trip at hand. When Joseph Kwame Korkorti wanted a visa to an European country, the attache studied Korkorti’s nose for a while and pronounced judgment.
“The way I see you, you won’t return to Ghana if I allow you to go. Korkorti nearly dislocated her jaw; Kwasiasem akwaakwa. In any case what had Korkorti’s nose got to do with the trip?
If Ghanaman, after several attempts, manages to get the visa and lands in the whiteman’s land, he is seen as another monkey uptown, a new arrival of a degenerate ape coming to invade civilized society. He is sneered at, mocked at and avoided like a plague. Some landlords abroad will not hire their rooms to blacks because they feel their presence in itself is bad business.
When a Sikaman publisher landed overseas and was riding in a public bus, an urchin who had the impudence and notoriety of a dead cockroach told his colleagues he was sure the black man had a tail which he was hiding in his pair of trousers. He didn’t end there. He said he was in fact going to pull out the tail for everyone to see.
True to his word he went and put his hand into the backside of the bewildered publisher, intent on grabbing his imaginary tail and pulling it out. It took a lot of patience on the part of the publisher to avert murder. He practically pinned the white miscreant on the floor by the neck and only let go when others intervene. Next time too…
The way we treat our foreign guests in comparison with the way they treat us is polar contrasting-two disparate extremes, one totally incomparable to the other. They hound us for immigration papers, deport us for overstaying and skinheads either target homes to perpetrate mayhem or attack black immigrants to gratify their racial madness
When these same people come here we accept them even more hospitably than our own kin. They enter without visas, overstay, impregnate our women and run away.
About half of foreigners in this country do not have valid resident permits and was not a bother until recently when fire was put under the buttocks of the Immigration Service
In fact, until recently I never knew Sikaman had an Immigration Service. The problem is that although their staff look resplendent in their green outfit, you never really see them anywhere. You’d think they are hidden from the public eye.
The first time I saw a group of them walking somewhere, I nearly mistook them for some sixth-form going to the library. Their ladies are pretty though.
So after all, Sikaman has an Immigration Service which I hear is now alert 24 hours a day tracking down illegal aliens and making sure they bound the exit via Kotoka International. A pat on their shoulder.
I am glad the Interior Ministry has also realised that the country has been too slack about who goes out or comes into Sikaman.
Now the Ministry has warned foreigners not to take the country’s commitment to its obligations under the various conditions as a sign of weakness or a source for the abuse of her hospitality.
“Ghana will not tolerate any such abuse,” Nii Okaija Adamafio, the Interior Minister said, baring his teeth and twitching his little moustache. He was inaugurating the Ghana Refugee and Immigration Service Boards.
He said some foreigners come in as tourists, investors, consultants, skilled workers or refugees. Others come as ‘charlatans, adventurers or plain criminals. “
Yes, there are many criminals among them. Our courts have tried a good number of them for fraud and misconduct.
It is time we welcome only those who would come and invest or tour and go back peacefully and not those whose criminal intentions are well-hidden but get exposed in due course of time.
This article was first published on Saturday March 14, 1998
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Features
Decisions have consequences
In this world, it is always important to recognise that every action or decision taken, has consequences.
It can result in something good or bad, depending on the quality of the decision, that is, the factors that were taken into account in the decision making.
The problem with a bad decision is that, in some instances, there is no opportunity to correct the result even though you have regretted the decision, which resulted in the unpleasant outcome.
This is what a friend of mine refers to as having regretted an unregretable regret. After church last Sunday, I was watching a programme on TV and a young lady was sharing with the host, how a bad decision she took, had affected her life immensely and adversely.
She narrated how she met a Caucasian and she got married to him. The white man arranged for her to join him after the marriage and processes were initiated for her to join her husband in UK. It took a while for the requisite documentation to be procured and during this period, she took a decision that has haunted her till date.
According to her narration, she met a man, a Ghanaian, who she started dating, even though she was a married woman.
After a while her documents were ready and so she left to join her husband abroad without breaking off the unholy relationship with the man from Ghana.
After she got to UK, this man from Ghana, kept pressuring her to leave the white man and return to him in Ghana. The white man at some point became a bit suspicious and asked about who she has been talking on the phone with for long spells, and she lied to him that it was her cousin.
Then comes the shocker. After the man from Ghana had sweet talked her continuously for a while, she decided to leave her husband and return to Ghana after only three weeks abroad.
She said, she asked the guy to swear to her that he would take care of both her and her mother and the guy swore to take good care of her and her mother as well as rent a 3-bedroom flat for her. She then took the decision to leave her husband and return to Ghana.
She told her mum that she was returning to Ghana to marry the guy in Ghana. According to her, her mother vigorously disagreed with her decision and wept.
She further added that her mum told her brother and they told her that they were going to tell her husband about her intentions.
According to her, she threatened that if they called her husband to inform him, then she would commit suicide, an idea given to her by the boyfriend in Ghana.
Her mum and brother afraid of what she might do, agreed not to tell her husband. She then told her husband that she was returning to Ghana to attend her Grandmother’s funeral.
The husband could not understand why she wanted to go back to Ghana after only three weeks stay so she had to lie that in their tradition, grandchildren are required to be present when the grandmother dies and is to be buried.
She returned to Ghana; the flat turns into a chamber and hall accommodation, the promise to take care of her mother does not materialise and generally she ends up furnishing the accommodation herself. All the promises given her by her boyfriend, turned out to be just mere words.
A phone the husband gave her, she left behind in UK out of guilty conscience knowing she was never coming back to UK.
Through that phone and social media, the husband found out about his boyfriend and that was the end of her marriage.
Meanwhile, things have gone awry here in Ghana and she had regretted and at a point in her narration, was trying desperately to hold back tears. Decisions indeed have consequences.
NB: ‘CHANGE KOTOKA INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT TO KOFI BAAKO INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT’
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