Features
Is Black Power dead?
Not all Blacks on the planet are African, though the greater majority claim African descent. The Aborigines of Australia are black, so are the indigenous people of far-flung areas like Papua and the Fijian Islands. I am told some of them lay claim to African origins. Er, all Blacks see Africa as the Motherland or Mother Continent.
I am a Pan Africanist. I believe in my people and the values that stand us apart from other peoples as handed down the ages by our forebears. Africans are naturalists, very religious and very spiritual. Then the advent of the Europeans changed all that. Slavery changed all that. The Europeans came with the Bible, took our forebears, our gold and other natural resources and all we have today are more Bibles on the African continent than anywhere else on the globe; and we are the poorest.
I turned five when Ghana became independent of colonial rule. I recollect the euphoria that greeted this occasion on the streets of Koforidua and even at Keta later in the fall of that year when I joined my grandparents. But I had no understanding of what was going on around me. I was just enjoying being a child, what else? I enjoyed going to school, in spite of my initial protestations. I hated rhymes, and still do. “Bah bah black sheep have you any wool” made no sense to me. “One two, buckle my shoe” when I wore no shoes to school made very little sense, if any at all.
Till date, I do not know any rhymes and, as a result, did not teach rhymes when I came out of training as a teacher. Now, I am extremely glad I did not like this colonial legacy.
History and the independence stories began to intrigue me and open my consciousness to who the African was. Oral accounts of the Slave Trade as I heard them from the coastal areas got me to appreciate the bravery of the Black Man. I heard the story of Kundo who was so spiritually endowed that when the Europeans put him on the steamer, the ship would not move an inch. No matter how hard the Europeans tried, the ship would not budge so long as they had Kundo on board. In the end, Kundo said if it was his destiny he would go along with them. Then the steamer moved. There is an Ewe dirge in memory of Kundo.
Nkrumah symbolised hope for the Ghanaian, the African and the Black Man. As a child I heard these from the narratives of my grandparents, especially my grandfather. The Osagyefo was all the people needed to take their collective destiny into their own hands. Ablorde (freedom) was the refrain among my people. The people loved Komla Agbeli Gbedema equally; very likely because he came from my hometown of Anyako. To them, he was a hero.
There was a heavy rainstorm in the dawn of February 24, 1966, while I was a teenager at Anyako and I overheard my grandmother say the storm was no ordinary one; she suspected it had a tinge of foreboding to it. Just a little later my grandfather had his small transistor radio to his ear and announced that Nkrumah had been overthrown. A pall of despondency swept over everyone in the compound. Later news that the coup was led by Colonel E. K. Kotoka from nearby Fiaxor, assisted by J.W.K Harlley, a native of Anyako whose elder sister was married to my father’s elder brother, did not assuage the worry of our people.
My maternal uncle, E. S. Fia Demanya, an Astrologer, Psychic and Diviner, had warned Nkrumah that if he traveled to Hanoi he was unlikely to return to Ghana ever again. Nkrumah ignored him. Later events revealed that the American CIA was behind the overthrow of the Nkrumah administration. The initiator of the African personality, the prime mover of the emancipation of the African continent was seen as a thorn in the side of the white man and had to be removed. It was, and still remains, a dark day in the history of the Black Man.
Our independence is meaningless because the slave mentality lives with us in spite of the abolition of that infamy. Mental slavery is a more lingering phenomenon than the physical scars wrought by the slave traders. The white women did not quite understand why their men were getting the Negro slave women pregnant. They later discovered that the kinky African hair gave the Black woman a certain distinct beauty and sensuality their masters could not resist. Either plaited or woven, the African hair was a thing of beauty and elegance about it.
The white mistresses had to resort to getting the slave women clean shaven to forestall the lecherous activities of their men. Fast forward to the sixties and the Black Power Movement in the United States; in vogue was what was known as the ‘Afro Hair’ where Blacks let their hair grow into bushy groves. Added to the Black Power salute with a clenched fist high up in the air, the Afro became a symbol of Black beauty and Black resistance.
There was this militant young black lady called Angela Davies. She was the face of the Black Resistance Movement in the sixties who was branded communist by the US government. She was harassed, arrested many times but she kept the fight. Did she fight the cause in vain?
My research revealed that the Afro hair put the fear of the devil in the white folks. Some of the Blacks were said to have hidden combs, pairs of scissors and other ‘weapons’ in their hair from which they stabbed the white ‘enemies’. So, the white folks got to work and developed hair relaxers in their chemical laboratories. One after the others the African-American, as they are known now, have become enslaved again; only this time by relaxers to take their distinct identity from them.
One can hardly see an African-American with Afro hair today. Skinhead is in vogue, thanks to the ingenuity of the slave master. Back in the day, white skinheads were the renegades affiliated to criminal gangs in the ghettos. It is considered uncultured to sport an Afro hair in the United States today. Whose culture, one may ask? How come the Orientals in the US have kept their culture in spite of being well integrated in the society? China Town in all major US cities attests to this. Is it because they were not enslaved?
Back home, we have become more Catholic than the Pope. Our women shy away from the plaited or combed hair. They spend more time in the hair salon than they do in their own kitchen. Both our men and women dress more European than the white man. We put on suit in the sweltering African heat under the guise of being civilized. Kaba for women has been christened ‘Friday Wear’. We are quick to defend this with the excuse that the Western attires give us ease of movement. This is as laughable as the fact that we don’t feel impeded in our movements on Fridays in Kaba. A great majority of Nigerians are proud to be in their African apparel at all times.
When I introduce myself as Akofa Segbefia, the immediate response is, “Don’t you have a Christian name?” as if I am supposed to be a Christian at all cost.
I visited an uncle. When a call came through from the head office of the company he worked for, he got up with the receiver in one hand and the other hand behind his back as he identified the caller to be the European boss. Would the white man see this supplication through the telephone line, I asked myself. Of course, it is good manners to show respect to your boss, but we carry the mental slavery to rather bizarre heights.
China has learnt a lot from the West, but the Chinese have developed without sacrificing their culture or identity. By Western standards China is still regarded as a developing country even though China is the second largest economy in the world. Today, China is said to grant more loans to the developing countries than all the Western economies put together.
Our African leaders wear Western clothes to their meetings, except a few. There are suit wearing leaders asking us to patronize made-in-here goods, stifling local entrepreneurships in favour of foreign investors whose avowed aim is to milk us dry and repatriate their earnings to their countries. We have leaders who kowtow to the whims and caprices of the white man. Those countries force their cultures and beliefs down our throats and would not accept ours; and we sheepishly acquiesce.
The words of my friend Jerry John Rawlings keeps reverberating in my ears: “Christianise me if you may, but don’t Europeanise me.” Have we as yet understood want Rawlings meant? Where is the Black Power?
By Dr. Akofa K. Segbefia
Writer’s email address
akofa45@yahoo.com
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Features
Farmers, fund and the mafia
The notion some people have about the Sikaman farmer can be amusing. It is the belief of some that immediately a struggling farmer manages to grab a loan, the first thing he does is to invite his abusua (kith and kin) home and abroad.
He organises a mini-festival using palm wine mixed with Guinness as the first course. There and then he announces that he is no longer a poor man; in effect he has ceased to be the close buddy of Mr John Poverty.
The ceremony will be consummated with singing and breakdance, a brief church service, drama and poetry recitals.
At least three bearded goats complete with moustache and four cockerels would be sacrificed in various recipes to celebrate the farmer’s broken alliance with poverty. Some would end up as fufu and light soup, grilled chicken, toasted mutton and smiling goat-head pepper soup. In short, the loan was well taken and well utilised.
The farmer’s prosperity begins right from the stomach. His idea is that if you don’t prosper in the stomach, there is no way you can prosper outside it.
Some farmer are ‘wiser’ though. When they get the loan, they promptly look for new wives. They can no longer continue enjoying one soup everyday like that. Variety is the spice of life! A new wife would bring new zest, new hope and heavenly glary into the farmer’s life. Most importantly the new wife would bring more action into his waist.
So the loan goes indirectly into promoting physical exercise for the human waist instead of the expansion of the farm, purchase of new equipment and improved seeds. Farmers of this nature are jokers, not farmers.
Is it probably because of these whimsical reasons that the banks are reluctant to grant loans to farmers? Obviously with the celebration of mini festivals and the installation of new wives, it is unlikely bank loans can ever be repaid. Of course, farmers who are more concerned about their libido can only be experts in re-scheduling loan payments and not in paying back loans.
Banks are very much concerned about getting their monies back with interest whenever they give out loans. So they demand collateral security as a requirement for the granting of loans. Some farmers actually don’t have anything they can put up as collateral except their hoes, cutlasses and wives. So they struggle through life, not going and not coming.
I do not blame the banks for not granting loans to those who cannot put up collateral. But what about those who are very serious farmers and can put up collateral. Should they also be denied?
Farming is seasonal and a farmer may need a loan only within a certain period to grow crops or breed birds. When the period elapses before the loans are granted, farmers are tempted to misapply the money because it lies idle. In fact, with idle money lying around, the farmer may be tempted to ‘purchase’ a new wife.
It goes without saying that farmers need money but for specific periods when the banks apparently do not take into consideration. Within three months in a year (main cropping season), a crop farmer must plant, nurture, harvest and sell. He applies for a loan and takes nine months or is not even granted. Meanwhile the money lies under his bed waiting to be enjoyed. Not all farmers are angels.
Now, If the government has seen and acknowledged the importance of farmers in national development and has instituted a Farmers’ Day which is a public holiday during which farmers are awarded, then government might as well also do something about funding for our serious farmers, at least the award winning ones to expand and grow since bank loans are not readily available.
Lama of Site 21, Tema, a man of great learning and of vision, has just been telling me that when a farmer gets an award, it means he knows his way about his job, is serious and diligent. According to him, most likely that such a person would also be investment-conscious and judicious in the use of his resources, and not interested in enstooling a new wife.
If government can set up a fund to assist, not with cash but by way of inputs, most of our farmers who have not had any assistance to propel themselves above sea level would be most thankful.
Interview a few award-winning farmers and they would tell you their palaver. The Overall Tema Municipal Farmer Mr Ellis Aferi and his wife Mrs Rosemary Aferi, began their Soka Farms Complex with ten fowls. The pig (a sow), was sent to a farm on a cart to be serviced and brought back breeding.
His piggery is now a real model of inspiration. “We started right from the scratch without any bank loan or financial assistance from any quarter. We placed our trust in labour, hard work and the advice of extension officers. Today we have a large piggery, poultry breeding house, mushroom and snail quarters, fishpond and beehives aside the rabbits we breed. All these without a penny from anywhere,” Mr Aferi told me just last week.
However, he bemoaned the current situation farmers are facing “We have exploited our creativity, our imagination and our muscles. There is a limit to productivity using only human labour and ingenuity. We now want to grow bigger but without funding there is little we can achieve in our bid to grow and develop.”
Mr Aferi like, his colleagues, uses about one ton of wheat bran to prepare feed for his birds, pigs, snails and fishes every week. When Food Complex was in operation, they had their wheat bran without problem. Today, there are mafia connections in the wheat bran trade.
According to all the livestock farmers I’ve spoken to, it is hard to get wheat bran from GAFCO or Irani Brothers directly. They allege that the companies prefer to sell to some wealthy women and top business-men who can buy wheat bran on conditional basis (that is together with flour and other products of the companies), than to farmers.
Then these women and businessmen through their agents resell the bran to the poor farmers at cut-throat prices. I don’t think the system is being fair to farmers. It is indeed a tragedy for the farmers who through their sweat and blood the nation is fed.
“We protest heart and soul,” one farmer yelled at me as if I was responsible for their plight. “How can I feed my birds and pigs satisfactorily if I cannot get wheat bran at the factory price? We disagree that because we are poor, things should be made difficult for us. The rich must not be allowed to exploit us like that.”
The proprietor of Soka Farms, Mr Aferi, for instance has risen from the discomfort of the dust and hardness of the earth to such an enviable height to be an award winner who now holds seminars for farmers, students and officials of organisations on his farm near the Ashiaman-Michel Camp barrier. He must be propped up, even if not with money with inputs on credit basis.
The government must think about setting up a special fund for such individual farmers to grow, while preventing them from cheats and those in the cloak of the mafia.
This article was first published on Saturday, September 21, 1996
Features
Mystery surrounding figure five
There seems to be something mysterious about the figure five or numbers ending in five. A few days ago I realised it was June 3, so I called my brother-in-law, to talk about his narrow escape from the disaster which occurred at circle in 2015.
It is a date that reminds the family each year of the goodness of the Lord every year since the incident. My brother-in-law had been standing and chatting with some friends at one of the shops that got burnt less than an hour before the incident happened.
Therefore for us as a family, we celebrate that day as a day of deliverance of one of us even as we sympathise with those who lost loved ones in that fire disaster. Later on after I finished talking to my brother-in-law and was reflecting on the incident and issues around it, another incident early on in that same year, came to mind.
The incident had to do with an air disaster in Europe and I began wondering if the number five in the figure 2015, had something to do with it.
Reports came through that a Lufthansa flight from Barcelona in Spain, flying to Germany, had disappeared from the radar around the Swiss Alps and that a search was being organised to try and locate it.
The result of the search established that the aircraft had crashed. What is even sad about this incident are the issues that led to its occurrence. Investigations conducted after the crash revealed that, it was deliberately caused.
It was revealed that, the pilot steeped out of the cockpit to go to the washroom. The co-pilot locked the door so no one could enter the cockpit without him opening it.
He then proceeded to set the aircraft on autopilot to crash the plane. When the Pilot realised that there was something wrong with the plane he rushed towards the cockpit, only to realise that it was locked.
He banged on the door to no avail. They tried contacting the co-pilot but he would not answer. Nothing in this world will be more painful than to see death coming and being helpless to prevent it. They could do nothing until the plane crashed.
A former girlfriend of the co-pilot revealed later to the investigators that he once told her that one day, he would do something that the world will forever remember his name. It came out later also, that he was told by his Doctor not to fly a plane again until his medical condition improves.
Apparently he had a mental problem but he kept it to himself and his employer never knew anything about his condition and he sadly killed high school students, about 60 from the same school, returning home from an educational tour in Spain.
This is one thing I have been praying against and I can imagine the grief of the parents of these students who tragically lost their lives.
In 2005, there was Hurricane Katrina which brought in its wake such a huge devastation in the United States. In that same year, an earthquake occurred in Kashmir resulting in over 86,000 people losing their lives, again note the last digit of the figure 2005.
I am therefore inclined to believe that we need to intensify prayer this year, 2025 to avert disaster. History has a way of repeating itself. Until I grew up, especially at the secondary school level, I wondered why we should study history and that apart from it being a reminder of dates on which certain events occurred, there was really no use for it.
I now know better that it is the basis for forecasting future events. Our teachers did not help us by not telling us the importance of history, maybe I would have become the National
By Laud Kissi-Mensah
