Features
Matters of the heart
Perhaps Indians are the greatest lovers. The fact is that they have got time for love just as they have time for work and sleep. An Indian male who is head over heels in love with a damsel can spend three hours every day singing love songs and dancing just to express his love. And the girl, if she is not convinced, will just sit down looking at him wondering if he is not out of his mind.
So the boy will need a lot of stamina to do three hours a day just expressing and portraying love. When the girl finally agrees to be in love, she also has to join and do three hours. Just watch Indian films and you’ll realise that matters of the heart cannot be toyed with in that country.
I guess the incidence of broken hearts there will also be very high because when love between two people becomes too intense, the relationship crumbles sooner than anyone would expect.
It is also possible that half the cases of broken hearts in India end up at the mental hospitals because of the way they handle love.
“What actually is disturbing you?” the psychiatrist would ask a new victim.
“Sir, I fell in love with a young woman and she jilted me. Later, I saw her in the arms of an ugly man, and so I’ve decided to grow mad until further notice.”
Yes, love is one of the greatest forces we have in the world. That is why when a man with a cutlass in hand catches another man on top of his wife, he’ll instantly become a butcher specialising in human bare-backs and legs. He would hack the man to pieces before realising that butchering is not his profession.
And when he is charged in court for manslaughter, he’ll explain matters to the judge.
“Your honour, the man whom I butchered to death really deserved it. He is not fit to live because he reaps where he has not sown. Your honour, I had to borrow large sums of money to enable me marry this woman. I buy her Valentine cards every year, and spend a great deal furnishing her with cloths and jelly-curl kits. In fact I love her like gari and shito.
“When I travelled and returned earlier than planned, I came to meet this man with a barrel chest and a slim but active waist enjoying my wife to the fullest. So your honour, it was out of extreme provocation that I quickly decided to be a butcher on the occasion, and I think I did a good job of it.
“Your honour, I never knew I was such a good butcher till I worked on the man. But if you say it is not good, then I hold your foot. Next time, I won’t kill the person. I’ll only hack off his legs and tell him not to be silly next time.”
In cases of this nature, the judge is normally sympathetic because he (the judge) might have done worse things if he had found a macho-man dancing top of his flexible wife.
“You should have exercised restraint. You don’t kill someone just because you’ve found him sleeping with your wife?” the judge would say just short of adding that he would have castrated the man if he were the accused. “So you’ll go in for eight months.”
If he had his own way, he would have concluded. “Next time you catch an idiot on top of your wife, don’t kill him, maim him! You get the point? “
Yes love, just like hatred is a real force to reckon with. For this reason, Valentine’s Day is well observed in most countries especially the advanced countries where people are accustomed to certain romantic gimmicks. It is a day for lovers and it has a short but varying history behind it.
In Africa, most people do not care about Valentine because they are preoccupied with seeking the kingdom of the stomach. If you remind someone of Valentine’s Day, he’ll ask you, “ibi Valentine you go chop?”
Last Sunday was Valentine’s Day and some people celebrated it, I don’t know how properly the people celebrated it. I don’t know how properly the celebration was done in each respective case. People sent out cards; someone probably expected card from me that she never got, and I didn’t get a card myself, but life continues all the same, and love perpetuates.
In retrospect, I think the type of love we experienced when we were schoolboys and girls, was far more exciting than anything happening on Valentine’s Day. It was devoid of intimacy but fully of abstract values and imaginings about a loved one you regarded not as a mortal, but a celestial being.
Most often you had to write a love letter to the girl in decent handwriting and of course you didn’t expect a reply. But the thrill of having sent your lover something to read which probably ended in poem you composed yourself was more satisfying.
But immediately you delivered the letter through a friend, you started praying that the girl should never send the letter to the class teacher for redress. And any time the teacher called you, you were startled, thinking the girl had delivered the contraband. If she did, then trouble awaited you.
I wrote one of such letters with a poem at the tail end but never found the courage to send it to my dream lover. I hid it in my science note-book for weeks debating in my mind whether or not the girl would report me if I dared send it to her.
One day, the girl told me she had received the letter. Which letter? Of course the one I wrote. I looked puzzled.
“Didn’t you write me any letter,” she asked. “I did, but…”
I needed to check my notebook to see if the letter was intact. I looked for it for almost two hours to my dismay that someone had rather delivered the letter on my behalf.
I went back to the girl, and asked her who gave her the letter. Of course, it was a close friend of mine who found it in my notebook and who realising that I was apprehensive about sending it, mischievously did so on my behalf. I was lucky it didn’t wind up on the table of the class teacher.
Love goes beyond affection for the opposite sex or love for another human being, like motherly love, brotherly love, etc. There is one important thing which is called LOVE FOR ONE’S COUNTRY. When it is excessive, it is called JINGOISM.
Yes, it is necessary that everybody should have a fair amount of a love for his or her country. Ghanaians love their country so much, and that is why they support their national teams whenever they are on any assignment that would bring in national honours.
Those who do not love their country are those who do not want sustained progress and development. They include corrupt officials, embezzlers of state funds and of course those who incite and promote violence. They want to destroy Sikaman just because they have not found the means to personal aggrandizement.
They should not pretend they love the country because they do not wish the country any good.
Let us show love for our country and maintain the peace that we have always enjoyed. For, the love for one’s country supersedes all.
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
Join our WhatsApp Channel now!
https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VbBElzjInlqHhl1aTU27
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’
Join our WhatsApp Channel now!
https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VbBElzjInlqHhl1aTU27
