Features
Political punches and the Blackman
A live boxing showdown between an Arab champion, Saddam Hussein, and the Western ‘Bazooka,’ George Bush, should be the most spectacular event in boxing and political history.
Most probably, Saddam Hussein will rely more on his thick moustache than his ‘chemical’ upper-cuts. Naturally, the dancing kenkeyweight titlist, George Bush, will turn into a southpaw, floating in the ring, jabbing, ducking and targeting Saddam’s moustache to rip it off once and for all.
Such a boxing show would be one of near equals. But consider for a moment a similar show between the Pride of Pretoria, F. W.de Klerk, and the Hope of South Africa, Oliver Tambo.
Although Tambo is not in the very best of health, he is sure to be a diligent pugilist with all the qualities of a BLACK BOMBER. F. W.de Klerk, the stronger of the two is likely to be cautioned several times for hitting below the belt. Fact is that, de Klerk’s punches are never direct. Perhaps his fists need a binoculars to help target Tambo’s nose.
Oliver Tambo had never been a good friend to South African leaders, especially
Pieter Botha. And for quite some time, Botha has had more than a fair share of Tambo’s political punches till his corner men threw in the towel. Still Botha wanted to fight on although they told him that he needed to be replaced by a clerk-de Klerk.
Today, Oliver Tambo is still fighting on behalf of his people. And gradually, the satanic apartheid regime is crumbling, but piecemeal. I bet, de Klerk’s formula for dismantling apartheid that can be likened to a small ant commissioned to eat a mountain of LOAF. Certainly, it would take a thousand years to complete.
This fact is further underscored when we consider that just recently, leaders of the European Community have agreed to scrap the ban on new investments in South Africa. With this decision, South Africa is going to get some breathing space and the process of disentangling its dreaded stranglehold on the black majority is going to be dead-slow.
The German Foreign Minister, Hans Dietrich Genscher, rationalising the community’s decision, said the lifting of the ban would reward de Klerk for legalising the African National Congress (ANC), freeing its deputy leader, Nelson Mandela, and permitting Oliver Tambo to return to South Africa after thirty years in exile.
In reaction to this, the ANC adopted a resolution calling for sanctions to be maintained, with the stand that the EC’s decision which was against ANC interests. Earlier, during an ANC congress, Oliver Tambo had stated that it was time the ANC reviewed its stand on sanctions against South Africa.
“It is no longer enough to repeat the trite slogans …… we should carefully re-evaluate the advisability of insisting on sanctions given the situation domestically and abroad.”
Apparently, the optimism of the black majority of attaining a wish is gradually becoming tantalising if not illusionary.
As it is now, the European Community’s decision is a pointer to the fact that members of the Community regard the South African whites as their first cousins. And obviously, many Europeans directly or indirectly have commercial interests in South Africa. And how can one punish a brother for so long no matter how recalcitrant he proves to be?
Fact is, covertly or overtly, the apartheid regime is being made to perpetuate till doomsday. No one cares for the black man. The whites will come out openly to condemn the racist regime and go indoors to have plans about how best to strengthen this regime.
Worse atrocities have been visited upon the black man. Since history began chronicling world events, the black man has been at the receiving end of all unpleasantries. He is even cited to have descended from a cursed man called Ham, who according to the Bible derided his father’s nakedness. Quite fallaciously, one child of Ham was said to be black (because of the curse), and became the progenitor of the African race.
It is quite uncertain whether orientals like the Chinese also had some share of the curse to make some of them yellow-skinned.
Anyhow, blacks of the world have suffered a lot, having been made slaves, tortured and abused. In the United States where many blacks became domiciled after the slave trade, they were regarded as second rate citizens. To this very day, they are discriminated against when it comes to job opportunities and prospects for promotion.
AMUSING CONCLUSIONS
They are considered brainless and only fun-loving. In a seemingly very crooked research conducted not far back, the following amusing conclusions were arrived at. Chinese students were said to be studious, European children very ambitious and bright and Negro children were said to like partying and music. Adult Negroes were said to be physically strong with large sexual organs but no brains in their heads.
The Blackman’s culture is described as uncivilised and extremely backward. But let’s come to face it. The white man’s culture teaches him to hate others who are not of his colour. You go to Europe and you would be shocked that some whites would not like to sit in the same bus with you.
When they (Europeans) come to Africa, we are not hostile to them although they’ve once enslaved and brutalised us and continue to discriminate against us. We bear them no grudge. Our culture does not breed hatred for other races. It preaches hospitality and respect for all. Which of these two cultures should be placed higher on the scale of civilisation?
In the US, a white supremacist group named the Ku Klux Klan, have a morbid hatred for blacks and have policies geared towards the elimination of the black race. The neo-Nazis do not like blacks either.
History has it that when Jesse Owens won four Olympic gold medals in Berlin, the Nazi warlord, Adolf Hitler, was gravely embittered.
We are discriminated against in sports, the latest being two dubious penalties awarded against the Indomitable Lions of Cameroun in the match against England in the 1990 World Cup in Italy. Cameroun, as a result, failed to reach the semi-final stage. Africans do not deserve a World Cup.
And quite sadly we allow Caucasians and Anglo Saxons to dictate to us which of our women are beautiful and which are not. We accept their criteria for beauty and allow our women to parade semi naked before them, only to be ridiculed as hairless monkeys, and undeserving of beauty awards.
Year after year, we send our women there to experience the same ordeal and we would never learn to stop that nonsense. Are we not encouraging the whites to go on ridiculing our race?
Caucasians, Orientals and Africans have their own considerations when appraising beauty. Why allow Caucasians to superimpose their idea of beauty on ours.
Shall we always be slaves who never stop to think for a while of their independence?
This article was first published on Saturday, December 22, 1990
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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