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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!
I have often been saddened by the condition of Sikaman musicians. Of course, some are not musicians. They are jokers who think anybody who can sing a hymn is a musician. And why wouldn’t they think so when people think that every man wearing a rasta hair is a reggae musician?
Well, these days, almost everybody is dreaming of becoming a musician, even some ministers and parliamentarians. And it is never too late for them to begin learning the solfas and composing songs like “If You Do Good You Do For Yourself,” after all, life begins at 60 these days. If you die three years later, that’s your luck.
For the jobless, becoming a musical star is an everyday dream. They think when you are a music maker, you automatically break alliance with poverty. They are often mistaken.
I know people who claim they are musicians but are always fasting not because they are devout moslems or are on a hunger strike, but because even one square meal a day is a perpetual wahala. And the only drink they can afford is the poor man’s holy whisky which has a thousand names including ‘Nyame Bekyere’.
Even most of the popular musicians we see in town claiming they are foreign-based stars are more of hustlers than musicians. When they tell you they are going on tour abroad, it is a careful way of saying they are going overseas to scrub the whiteman’s toilet or pick tomato or apples to save their neck from musical poverty.
When they are back to Sikaman, they appear quite flamboyant with chains hanging all over them. They change the few dollars they have scraped, spread it around and promptly get broke. Then they can organise another ‘tour’. In between tours, they struggle to release an album and that levels them up a bit on the financial balance.
It all points to the fact that the life of the average musician isn’t quite organised. He has no calendar, no programme and no concentration on the job. He has to wash plates, become a waiter, janitor and toilet scrubber while finding time to make music. No musician succeeds in life that way.
One musician I’ll always respect, who thinks deeper than the ordinary Sikaman musicians is Carlos Sakyi. He is not like the Kokoase guitar musicians who see the world just in terms of bitters, a willing girlfriend, constant supply of kokonte and jot.
Carlos, often loved for his percussive overtones in gospel music, and once a gospel-rock star, has studied the life of Sikaman musicians and has evolved a blue-print for a great improvement in their lives work, finances and comfort.
In short, he has simulated a Motown-style environment for musicians and his formula is working with accuracy with the five musicians he has started with. The blue-print is what has brought MEGASTAR into being. It was launched on September 15, 1995 at the National Theatre.
When it got launched, many probably thought Carlos was “too know or was dreaming more than he should and won’t think about himself. Anyhow, the MEGASTAR is now an institution musicians can look up to, a big phenomenon with lots of promise for struggling musicians.
Music business in the developed world is not the way we regard it cheaply here. A musician is never distracted by how his finances go; his contracts are entered, his engagements made, his interviews arranged, his personal security guaranteed.
Music is his business and that is where his mind is and his attention focuses. Other aspects of his life are programmed for him by his managers. They hire who has to light his cigarettes, massage him, drive his car and the one who will say “Good Luck” when he sneezes.
A bodyguard whose face is exactly like that of the devil is hired to scare off muggers, psychopaths and criminals in general. Sometimes his girls are organised for him.
So the only thing the musician does apart from sleeping and snoring is to concentrate on making music, and true to it, no one can succeed in any venture when he is distracted.
This is how the Michael Jacksons, Lionel Richies, Dolly Patons and Whitney Houstons have made it with dollars packed and over-flowing. They aren’t any better than Sikaman musicians. The only difference is that they know how to organise their lives.
I managed to corner Carlos Sakyi and asked him to tell me how MEGASTAR was doing. He is the Managing Director of Megastar Limited, a music company that has a board of directors and a chairman. Carlos Sakyi shares the proprietorship with a partner. Carlos himself was one great musician who played for a band that beat Eddy Grant on the charts.
“Megastar is in fact a concept born out of the idea that the future security of the Ghanaian musician which has always been in jeopardy can now be guaranteed. Artistes spend too much of their time doing things on their own, chasing money and not concentrating on music. So their full potential is never realised. Some are in fact producing at quarter-rate. That is why they aren’t making much headway,” he told me.
“Megastar is now giving them the chance of the lives. We handle the interviews of Megastar artiste, their press releases, costume, engagements and everything they hitherto used to do themselves. We get them exposed on M-Net and we have contacted BB to get on their programmes. We handle their finances pay them salaries and bonuses, so they only have to concentrate on music
“Most importantly,” he continued, “we do not make all the decisions. Management always meet with the musicians to take the decisions that affect them.”
But who are the Megastar musicians? One is the great Amakye Dede, a star from birth delivered onto the earth with music on his lips; he is the man who feeds hungry ears with musical salad and harmonic sausages. He is the recipient of many national awards.
Next is Naana Frimpong, a latter-day Carlos-groomed songbird with the voice of an angel. She sings to kill. Her beauty has charmed her audience and they stare and stare at her.
The sensational and fantalising Tagoe Sisters are the next. The twin music machine is one that has produced the cream, arguably the very best, of gospel music all these years. I hear they are inseparable; not even their better-halves can keep them apart. Are they Siamese? They dance, and when on stage, they move the crowd.
Then comes Reverend Yawson who is a known songwriter. He is imbued with the Holy Spirit, speaks in tongues and of course sings in tongues. He is God’s representative on the group.
What about my good friend and super-heavyweight, Jewel Ackah? He is a star figure. His appearance is awe-inspiring, his voice golden. A great delight to be-hold when at his best in stage-craftsmanship, he has beaten his contemporaries to it both on land and on sea.
They are the pioneers of the Motown idea. They are all releasing new albums this year. Let’s see how it all goes.
In recent years, the term “female rage” has gained significant traction, symbolising a collective shift in how women’s emotions are perceived and addressed.
This phenomenon is not merely a fleeting trend but a profound movement rooted in centuries of systemic injustices, personal betrayals, and societal expectations.
As women increasingly reclaim their anger, it is imperative to understand the multifaceted nature of female rage, its causes, and its implications for individuals and society at large.
The historical context of female anger
Historically, women’s emotions have been subject to dismissal, ridicule, and pathologisation. The term “hysteria,” originating from the Greek word for uterus, was used to describe women’s emotional states as irrational and uncontrollable.
This legacy of silencing and shaming has contributed to a culture where women’s anger is often suppressed or stigmatised.
However, with the rise of feminist movements, women are challenging these narratives, asserting their right to express anger and demand change.
The anatomy of female rage
Female rage is not a monolith; it is a complex and multifaceted emotion driven by various factors, including:
1. Societal expectations: The pressure to conform to traditional roles of passivity, politeness, and emotional labour.
2. Gender inequality and pay gaps: Frustration stemming from systemic discrimination in the workplace and beyond.
3. Sexual harassment and abuse: Trauma and anger resulting from pervasive violence and objectification.
4. Emotional labour and burnout: The unsustainable burden of managing emotions and responsibilities in personal and professional spheres.
5. Hormonal fluctuations: The impact of hormonal changes on emotional states, often overlooked or dismissed.
The power of anger: Reclaiming female rage
Far from being a destructive force, female rage can be a catalyst for change. When acknowledged and channelled constructively, anger can drive advocacy, policy reform, and resistance against inequality.
The #MeToo movement, women’s marches, and increased representation in politics are testaments to the power of collective female anger.
Addressing the Stigma: Towards a more inclusive dialogue
To fully harness the potential of female rage, society must address the stigma surrounding women’s anger. This involves:
1. Validation and recognition: Acknowledging women’s emotions as legitimate and worthy of attention.
2. Creating safe spaces: Providing platforms for women to express anger without fear of backlash.
3. Education and awareness: Challenging stereotypes and promoting understanding of women’s experiences.
4. Support systems: Offering resources and support for women dealing with trauma and systemic injustices.
Conclusion
The age of female rage is a moment of profound transformation, where women’s anger is no longer silenced but celebrated as a force for justice.
By understanding the roots of female rage and addressing the societal structures that fuel it, we can move towards a more equitable and compassionate world.
The journey is complex, but the destination-a society where women’s emotions are respected and their voices are heard is worth the struggle.
References:
[1] Chemudupati, P. (2022). _The Rage of Women: A Historical Perspective_.
[2] Traister, R. (2018). _Good and Mad:
By Robert Ekow Grimond-Thompson
