Features
Witches and family revolutions
It is now quite fashionable to collapse your own business and blame witches. You only have to sharpen a cutlass and chase your grandmother out of the house and everyone blames her for the financial virus that has infected you.
It is not quite certain, however, whether Satan should be held responsible for every misdeed of man. A pastor rapes an eight-year old girl and quickly blames Satan to save his neck, knowing that Mr Lucifer would not be around to defend himself.
A man deliberately takes four powerful quarters of local gin and goes directly to his mother-in-law to slap her on the eye. At the Sanhedrin, he blames Satan. “The devil made me do it, he’d grin like an idiot.
I think one of these days, Satan would have to appear on the scene in person with a horrifying face and declare: “As for this one, I don’t know anything about it. I am tired of being blamed for every bad thing. Henceforth, I’ll appear to defend myself. If possible I’ll bring along a demon who has a Master’s degree in Law, to act as my defence lawyer.”
We all know that the devil is not a straight-forward individual. At best he is as crooked as a snake suffering from diarrhoea. According to the Bible he was someone of noble birth until he misinterpreted, misquoted and misrepresented the heavenly motto “ORDER IS THE FIRST LAW IN HEAVEN”.
The devil in fact changed it to mean “CONFUSION IS THE FIRST LAW IN HEAVEN”. This was tantamount to staging a coup d’etat.
Although the devil pleaded not guilty, the trial was swift. There was no ‘I put it to you’ business, and a ready conviction saw the descent of the evil one from heaven to earth. Since then, he was supposed to be the cause of every bad thing on earth.
If there is a lorry accident as a result of wrongful overtaking, he is blamed for it. When a man is jilted by his girlfriend, the devil made her do it.
A man suffers from constipation and the devil is surely responsible for it. The devil must have put a “road block” in his rectum and cemented it.
I guess the day Jimmy Satan would be brought physically to a court or tribunal, the charges against him will be uncountable.
He knows it, so he won’t dare appear in the dock to listen to constipation charges. Even if he’d enjoy free legal aid, he won’t.
But let’s come down to this devil-blaming matter. Satan is surely destructive and red-eyed demons can cause havoc of unimaginable proportions.
However, is it reasonable for a man to blame the devil for his own carelessness or senselessness as in the case of a reckless driver getting maimed in an accident?
The reason why most people do not progress in life is that they are quick to blame their failures on others. A man who mismanages his business and the enterprise collapses on his head has no justification going to blame his grandmother for it. Not when he spent half the capital on women, and the profits on booze and takeaways.
As it were, some of our beliefs and superstitions are not helping us. When a typical Caucasian’s business is collapsing, he takes pen and paper and honestly lists the possible causes of his failing endeavours. If he can’t do it himself, he hires the services of a consultant. The business is, therefore, examined in all its forms through crevice, from all facets an angles.
It has nothing to do with witches flying at night, and at the end of it, the business rises up again. This is because the businessman has done some introspection and has got to know that he may have been misapplying his capital on a lousy woman. So he’s got to choose between saving his business or keeping the woman. The choice is entirely his and his grandmother has nothing to do with it.
A superstitious African would look at it differently. First, he doesn’t want to blame himself for his failings. Second, he has been indoctrinated to Revolutions doctrinated to believe that witches and demons can make and unmake.
Third, that old relatives are friendly in person but dangerous in spirit especially at night. And four, that there is a common witch behind the fall of every business, behind every incidence of poverty and behind every daily constipation.
So when he is not managing his business properly and is losing money, he begins imagining things. Instead of sitting down and calculating how much he has been milked by the waist-swinging lady in his extra-marital life, he’d start frowning at the old lady at home.
When she greets him, he’d growl, “Leave me alone, you witch! At night you won’t sleep. You’ll be flying from North to South. You’ll see!”
This is a prelude to the sharpening of cutlasses to launch a family revolution.
The papers report it every day. Young men are butchering their mothers, grandmothers, mothers-in-law, sisters-in-law for their poverty, their illnesses, whatever.
Witches can cause some of these things, but it would be fallacious to assume that they are responsible for all our woes when in eight out of 10 cases we should be blaming ourselves.
In any case, if you believe a witch is making you poor, why not go to Jesus instead of butchering your old lady? The battle against the devil is not a physical one.
It is not a heavyweight contest or a kenkey-weight brawl. Neither is it a cutlass palaver. It has to do with prayer and nothing else. So go to Jesus The Christ.
If you are a Muslim go to Allah. And surely go to Budha if you are a Buddhist. Whatever it is, stop butchering the old ladies!
This article was published
on Saturday, October 19, 1996
Merari Alomele’s
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
