Curfew’s Children

A memoir about childhood and coming of age in Ghana

PhD Dissertation in Communications University of Canberra Faculty of Arts and Design September 2013

Written by Kabu Okai-Davies

Curfew’s Children

A memoir about childhood and coming of age in Ghana PhD Creative Dissertation & Exegesis: Oral tradition and Auto/Biographical narration in Ghanaian identity.

Doctor of Philosophy in (Creative Writing) Communications

By Kabu Okai-Davies BPhil (Honours), UC; Master of Creative Writing, UC; Master of Studies, ANU

Supervisors: Dr Adam Dickerson Prof. Jen Webb University of Canberra ACT, Australia

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Table of Contents:

Declaration xi Dedication xiii Curfew’s Children, an Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Chronicle of a Curfew Foretold 5 Chapter 2: The Dream within a Womb 21 Chapter 3: The Last of the Professional Polygamists 29 Chapter 4: The Life and Times of the Man called Ezekiel 39 Chapter 5: A Woman called Auntie Teacher – A Tribute to My Mother 49 Chapter 6: The History of the Okai-Davies Family 69 Chapter 7: A Name that Symbolises Money 79 Chapter 8: Second Chance at Love: Enter the Rev. Nii Commey Okai-Tetteh 83 Chapter 9: England in My Dreams 91 Chapter 10: A Place Called St. John’s Preparatory Primary School 107 Chapter 11: Growing up a St. John’s Boy 125 Chapter 12: Auntie Akua and my Kente Cloth 141 Chapter 13: How Art Saved My Life 147 Chapter 14: The Memory Pillow and the Education of a Storyteller 159 Chapter 15: Beyond St. John’s – From Ayalolo to Adabraka 171 Chapter 16: Father Figure to a Forsaken Son 187 Chapter 17: The School that Made Me Who I Am 203

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Exegesis: Exegetical Component - Front Page 209 Introduction 211 Section 1: Structure and overview 217 Section 2: Transcending the Past, Embracing the future: Orality and Literacy in Ghana 223 Section 3: Reading Walter J. Ong: Orality and Literacy in the Ghanaian context 251 Section 4: Categories and forms of Oral Tradition in the Ghanaian context 271 Section 5: Oratory in Ghana 285 Section 6: The Context of Oral Tradition 295 Section 7: Orality and Ghanaian identity 305 Section 8: Writing Curfew’s Children: Transferring the oral into text 317 Section 9: Conclusion: Oral tradition, autobiography and Ghanaian identity 327 Bibliography 349 Interviews 361 Picture Credits – Family History 363 Pictures Credits – Ghana’s History 367 Pictures with captions – Sequence 1- 19 369

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Dedication

To the memory of my Mother, my wife and children, and all my wonderful teachers, mentors and those who have showed me the way.

Acknowledgements

This work is the result of many years of dreaming. However it could not have been completed without the help and support of my teachers at the University of Canberra. I would like to thank Dr Greg Battye for believing in me as a writer from the beginning, Dr Mary Walsh for her unflagging faith in her Honours students, Digby Woolf for his inspirational words of encouragement. I would like to thank John Clancy – for his mentorship - and Joo Inn Chew for their earlier edits and suggestions; to Kiya Murmur for her work as proof reader, Dr Linda Li for her support during her thesis writing workshops and to Katie Poidomani whose final edits were invaluable towards the completion of this thesis.

Finally, thanks to my two supervisors; Dr Adam Dickerson for his scholarly insights, guidance, persistence and well-measured suggestions as my supervisor and Professor Jen Webb, for her patience in carefully going over each page with me, for her understanding of my temperament as a writer and her nurturing spirit as a teacher.

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Curfew’s Children, an Introduction

The narrative of Curfew’s Children was born out of my need to capture in text the chronicle of my growing up during a time of turbulence and upheaval that yet was a time of solitude and deep reflection as well. It is therefore a post-colonial story about coming of age in Ghana and my personal evolution from childhood into boyhood, and then into the early teenage years, set against the background of my family’s and country’s history. This act of narrative positioning of the individual against the larger story of the family and the nation links the past, present and future, and is hence a bridging of the gap between orality and literacy. It is an African story, told with the intent to transpose what is told orally into a textual context, acknowledging the fact that if the story of my family and the mythology of my life are to have relevance for the future, and especially for my children, our collective stories must make the transition from orality to literacy. Hence I write, knowing very well that this is a story that was once told to me and by me orally, and that now I tell by writing.

Since our forefathers did not know the art of writing our knowledge of early Ga –

Ghanaian - history before the Europeans arrived we learnt from oral tradition handed

down in stories from father to son. Like the oral traditions of other areas these stories

are altered and added to in the telling; so historians have to be very careful when using

them to help find out about the past.1

The African narrative in its oral tradition can no longer endure if a collective effort is not made to transpose it into the frame of literacy. The technology of writing

1 John Kofi Fynn, A Junior History of Ghana, Institute of African Studies, Legon, Longman, 1975, P. 22 | Page 1 undergirds the entire corpus of the creation of civil societies and the renaissance of human cultures towards development and social transformation. The idea of African modernity will be less relevant if it is not linked to the collective effort of our societies to capture in text the parables of a continent, those told and those yet to be told. The collective myths, stories and narratives of a people in a post-colonial society can only survive if transposed into text. The writings of individual African writers will not be enough to bridge the gulf of African history, from its traditional pre-colonial realm of oral storytelling to the verbal narration of history and the globalised world to now; when written, visual and electronic media will constitute the new practices of human communication in countries such as Ghana.

The idea of literacy must become embedded within the cultural framework of society in order for it to become relevant for the twenty-first century. I write this story knowing that my story is not just mine, but that of my mother and the many other voices and lives that shaped my perception of myself as I grew up and came of age in Ghana. By writing about my life, I am writing about my family and my country as well.

Ghana is the backdrop for the creation of a family story in which I find myself, both as chronicler and as a central character. My life in this context is my literature.

I chose the title Curfew’s Children as a metaphor of an imposed darkness over Ghana and within African history. It is a figurative device to symbolise the sense of a gap in

Africa’s relationship to the technology of text and the democracy of knowledge as

| Page 2 phenomena for social development and collective self-transformation. This is the underlying reason for the evolution of my creative practice as a writer and, through the study of theories of orality and literacy offered by Walter J. Ong, I am able to embed my work within a larger theoretical context that allows my creative practice to unfold in the dual narrative space of orality and text based storytelling.

In my creative practice I rely extensively on the process of remembering all that I heard from my mother while growing up, and on the visualisation method, recalling what I have observed in my life while coming of age and during recent research trips to Ghana to verify many segments of this narrative. It is an engagement with the past in an effort to forge a new future and continue the existence of both my story and my family.

The creative process of life writing never occurs in a vacuum; neither is it without a point of view. In this case my objective for this narrative is to relive the past through the prism of the blank page and use written words as a link between the distant past, the present and the future. I write this story located from a distance as far as Australia, looking back to the experiences and the lives of people in Ghana, in order to provide the creative sense of objective detachment to tell this story as a metaphor of the larger story of Ghana’s history. Hence my autobiography forms a link with the history of Ghana, not just as part of its oral tradition and how the story of Ghana’s history was told to me as I grew up, but how it unfolded before me as I came of age. So I write this story as a memorial of things past and at the same time as a vision for things yet to come.

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Curfew’s Children is therefore a creative life-writing dissertation about my coming of age in Ghana, with the objective of giving life to the past and to represent the voices that were part of my life, growing up in Ghana.

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Chapter 1: Chronicle of a Curfew Foretold

The curfew came like an unannounced visitor. It was an omen neither the gods nor witch-doctors, neither palm readers nor the oracles could have foretold in the exuberance of the day before its arrival. It was announced by midmorning of New

Year’s Eve 1981. At that particular time of year the weather was usually hot, and the humidity seemed to have had an effect on the traffic. It was as if the whole city of Accra had come to a standstill, waiting for something portentous to happen. The poor and dispossessed among us were happy that the dysfunctional government had been overthrown, but the rest of the nation felt it was a trick of the imagination when the new ruler informed everyone via radio that they had to be in bed by six pm. At first it appeared the new government was joking; then the soldiers got serious and arrested a couple who were so much in love that they decided to defy the edict of the state. The lovers met at the end of the road to kiss and hold hands while gazing at the stars. They were arrested by the militia and thrown into jail for a week. That was when the news spread around the country that the new government was really a revolutionary regime and even lovers, polygamists and adulterers who defied the rules would not be tolerated in these new times. It was a Holy War, the new ruler said.

Who could have foretold the second coming of an insurrectionist? No one could, even though there were rumours, whispers and mass hysteria in the air whenever the word

‘coup-plotter’ was uttered. Our nation disdained the corrupt regime and its henchmen

| Page 5 who were considered the worst of the political gluttons in Ghana’s history, recklessly squandering the nation’s wealth. They were flaunting their ill-gotten wealth before the populace, and everyone wanted them sacked. Secretly, we in the nation prayed that the revolutionaries would return to redeem the country from the disease of corruption, without realising we were talking in our sleep. So when the government was overthrown and the first decree was the imposition of a curfew, the nation was baffled into submission.

Somehow, our nation had to choose between going to sleep against its will or face the consequences of revolutionary action. That same ruler, during his short lived tenure in power, was responsible for the death of the Generals in the army, we thought. Now that he had returned in a second coup, why wouldn’t he massacre anyone who opposed his rule? Word went around that he was determined to rule the country indefinitely, the way most African rulers do. So, many of the men who hadn’t been able to make up their minds about marriage quickly became engaged to their lovers in order to move in together, and avoid meeting at odd hours in the forbidden night.

The polygamists who spent the night visiting their various wives, and the adulterers who thrived as night crawlers visiting the homes of their many mistresses, decided to stay at home and for once were forced to obey the rules of Christian monogamy. Men who were fond of cheating on their wives now had no choice but to stay at home with their families. The whole nation went to bed, and for the first time in the history of the

| Page 6 country, men and women lived by the law of love in a time of fear. They copulated every night to defy the silence, the monotony of night and the omen of tyranny. By the end of the year, the maternity wards were overflowing with babies, and a new generation was born who became known as “Curfew’s Children.”

I was not one of them. I was twenty-one when the Holy War was started. Those of us who lived as the sons and daughters of single parents held onto the night by the glow of candlelight. We told each other stories, long tales and myths that led to the birth of our nation, the founding of our family legacy and the journeys our forefathers had taken that had led us to this point of silence and fear. They were stories of years gone by and hope for a day yet to come when the lights would be switched on to re-awaken the nation. Each night was like a long dream on a somnolent journey to nowhere. The silence of a country that is born out of fear is not the kind that is a sign of consent.

For the fear went both ways. The curfew of African history had no dissidents, but the curfew of the government was a cause for dissent. The new revolutionary regime was afraid of a counter-coup and the country was afraid that the revolutionaries, who were armed as part of the military machinery of the state, would use revenge against those who resented their imposed rule. So Ghanaians chose to walk along the path of silence, and found secret ways to voice their dissent against the regime in the form of stories about how Anansi the spider tricked the crow that had a fish in its mouth by compelling it to sing. The crow sang and the fish fell and the spider took the fish. That is

| Page 7 what we are going to do to this new government, the wise among the people would say. It will drop its guns without knowing it has lost its grip on power and we will trick it back onto the path towards democracy and free elections. We are a people who love politics. We will do anything for the sake of politics. No one will rule us indefinitely, not even the British, not even the founding father of our nation; the politicians in hiding convinced themselves.

At night we listened to our mother sing the songs that the mouse sang after it had betrayed all the animals of the world; this treason is why, ever since the beginning of time, the cat has been on a hunt to catch the mouse. Those who steal from their own people will be hunted down like mice for the rest of their lives. These stories and tales, woven in the garments of proverbs and parables, kept our nights alive and enabled us to re-imagine ourselves in ways that transcended our fear of the regime and the hunger of the moment. We dreamt of the lost world of our forefathers and their fathers before them, stories about the vanished African past that our mothers told us about. It was a world where fishermen came ashore at dawn with their nets full of fish, and drummed their way into the coastal towns, waking up the whole settlement of village societies to announce their arrival. I learnt early that the drum was the central voice of an African language that was coded in the bloodstream of our lives. The drums would speak to the body, the mind would succumb to the whim of its oratory, and the whole town would follow in procession, dancing to the rhythms of the moment to a place of tranquillity and enchantment.

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The African drum has its own lexicon and, at a young age, one is made to understand its nuance and to decode the meaning of a story as it is told by a storyteller at night. A story without a song is a report, and a song without a drum is mournful, but even then, there is the hint of a drum throbbing away with subtle rhythms to accompany the story towards its destination in the heart of the listener; a destination invisible to those who do not understand the language of the drum.

There were cities that had no names and invisible towns without chiefs. Hunters, farmers, traders and customers gathered there from dawn to dusk, to exchange their goods and services and speak in different tongues. They all left to return home before midnight, leaving nothing behind for the ghost of the night to feast on. When you leave your wares in the market, the ghost will feast on them, the oracles said, and by dawn the spirit of trade will be dead and no one will buy from you. So the merchants came at dawn to trade, and before night they all carried their wares home for fear that the ghosts of the night might touch them and curse the next day of business with omens of loss.

Mother told us stories about midnight festivals of the gods, and horrid tales about the burial of tribal chieftains of the hinterlands. Following their death people who disregarded the spirit of mourning and risked walking about at night were decapitated.

Their heads were used as head stones for the dead chief and they acted as ghost servants in the kingdom beyond. Murderous practices of human sacrifice also

| Page 9 continued until the British forced them to stop. There were stories of midnight processions where the dead would awake and parade the streets; night crawlers became cursed by mysterious omens and lives were ruined by the curse of the night. Yet those who were initiated in the mysterious ways of the gods and could commune with the dead would roam the night unscathed by the curses of the spirits. So the fishermen would arrive by midnight with their bounty of fish, after battling with the gods of the sea. They celebrated their victorious return by drumming and dancing into the early hours of the day. The drums sounded with a pulsation that caused the soul of the city to levitate in its sleep. We would cuddle each other in bed, dancing in our minds, our hearts throbbing to the beat as we reoriented our collective consciousness and blood to the pounding of the drum, sleeping soundly in our collective silence, listening to the music and heartbeat of Africa in our sleep.

We fed our minds with stories about rituals of tribal rebirth, bathed in imaginary blood sacrifices, participated in fetish incantations, held superstitious beliefs and witnessed in our minds reincarnation of dead spirits through the resurrection of the dead. They were tales about spiritual possession by fetish priests and diviners that were both destructive and fetish; fearful stories that haunted me at night. Yet I desired to hear more, to capture Africa in an oral capsule and preserve it for humanity for centuries to come.

Time stood still, the silent night formed a canopy over our youthful minds, we were frightened by ghost stories and tales about human sacrifices, the bewitching of families and the power of witches to cast wicked spells on others, people who had the power to

| Page 10 use their senses beyond the realm of our physical world; these told of an Africa that was steeped in the realm of supernatural mysteries of a lost world. Was it this sense of timeless surrealism and inertia which resulted in the collective historic amnesia of the

African mind? The stories evoke a sense of thrilling fear, a foreboding of the spirit to avoid the night and retreat into an inner dark age of frightful wonder and nightmare, a deep and lethargic psychic sleep, from which Africa has yet to awake.

I loved those stories told in a lexicon that was authentic and original in its cadence. It was a rhapsody, and Mother would measure her words in doses that mesmerised the mind of a child. They were words that had colour, tonal brilliance and proverbial authority. They were words about words, rich in texture and drawn out of a vocabulary as ancient as time itself, making each word timeless and treasured. Metaphor and irony were woven through a single sentence that stood like a painted narrative on the landscape of the mind. The onomatopoeic nature of the words gave rich tonal and visual life to each utterance that claimed its linguistic source of infinite richness not from Latin, but from the drum. It was intoxicating, a vocabulary of fermented sound, and we listened to the music of its inner enchantment from its bottomless source. We would drink up all the juicy stories, proverbs, parables, fables and riddles about our past until we were drunk with ecstasy. The more stories we were told the more we wanted. They resonated with a sense of linguistic pride and power and had nuances of their own that could capture the magical past of a vanished world that floated in the realm of the imagination. My awareness of the richness and value of my mother’s

| Page 11 language and the many other native tongues of Ghana dawned on me at a later age, when I was not only living far away from Ghana, but when it was too late to go back to the source to obtain the knowledge I needed to make my utterances as a Ghanaian complete with all its rich vocabulary suffused with ancestral wisdom.

Against my mother’s wishes, I had refused to learn how to read and write in the language of my birth, making her sad because my defiance would make me fail as a chronicler of those tales. ‘How can you tell these stories,’ she would ask me, ‘if you cannot speak and write it in your own mother’s tongue?’ To be honest, I don’t know why I refused to learn how to read and write Ga; probably I was experiencing what I consider to be as my period of cultural and historic displacement. I was more interested in listening to the stories, than in writing them. The evidence of people writing in Ga was not enough to encourage me to learn to write it. The mythology of Africa and the imaginative reality and virtues of its poetic and oral narrative did not resonate with me as a school of original and infinite source of knowledge, the way they do now. And by the time I became a teenager the focus of my imagination had shifted to other things, like girls and African American music. I began to block my mother’s persistent effort to get me to read and write Ga. But I cannot even explain to myself after all these years why I resisted her plea so hard. I failed to comprehend the reality of Africa within a system of thought and learning, beyond its post-colonial turmoil. The stories seemed too superstitious and virulent in their mysterious sequence. I had begun to yearn for something else, something beyond Africa, something overseas, foreign; I believed I was

| Page 12 in search of something better, more rational and explainable. I had begun to surmise that the curfew of all of our history, plus the curfew imposed by the government, blended perfectly in one long drool, caused by the timeless nature of Africa’s vanished past. While we slept in Africa, haunted by the festering culture of tribal corruption plus the tyrannical nature of African leadership, the great nations of the world who came and continue to come, to conquer, exploit and dispossess us of our lands and natural resources, were striving by day and night to master their destinies.

There were the stories about Ghana, about Africa and then about relatives living in other parts of the world, that kept the night alive and forged a bond between my brother, my mother and myself. And when the tales were over, she would read the

Bible and explain the meaning of the parables, and lead us besides still waters in search of psalms to restore our souls. Mother could transform and become Moses leading the

Israelites across the Red Sea, and on another day, Joseph and his brothers would emerge out of the wilderness of the imagination and become as real as the light of day.

And the darkness of the curfew would vanish from our minds. The candle was the bright light that reflected imagined images on the screen of our minds and set us a-sail on a journey with Noah on his ark. Christ would walk on water, turn water into wine and wake up the dead in one sweeping epic that started with Abraham, the Exodus,

Joshua and King Solomon, and went all the way to the crucifixion. These stories were linked to the fate of our country and to the continent. They were metaphoric stories to warn the tyrants of the land of many things yet to come. In my thoughts, Africa was the

| Page 13 lost biblical continent, its leaders not knowing what they were doing or where they were going, yet ruthlessly clinging on to power, while they blamed the people for having lost their way in the wilderness of time.

If we had not been a people of faith, we would have been driven insane by the darkness and silence of the curfew. There would have been a madness which could have plunged the nation into chaos, civil war, tribal mayhem and self–destruction, as it did in other parts of West Africa. But we endured, by the power of love and through the blessing of storytelling, the magic of the imagination and the miracle of prayers. Everyone called on God for healing, peace and solitude. For yea though we walk through the valley of the shadow of death, we fear no evil. The apostolic prayers were sent straight to heaven and the nation endured. The curfew became a familiar part of our national life. We expected it, we became used to it and we sneaked our way through life into the long nights of sleep and wonder. Ghanaians were left alone to unravel the mysteries of the night in our own unique way, knowing that Africa as a dark continent was no more a question of the unbearable darkness of its being, but a bewitched sleep within our hearts which compelled its people to sleepwalk their way through history; making the past more relevant than the future. The state-imposed curfew, joined with the psychic sleep of

Africa, became our way of repositioning the cosmic clock of history and bending it to our somnolent will.

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In those days of curfew and storytelling, I created my own form of defiance, waiting every month for the new moon to appear when I would feed my dreams with images of other climes, of fleeing my country for good in search of light elsewhere. Because, beyond the narratives of despair, my mother also told us stories about imaginary places of human blessing and the benediction of the universe, of human decency and collective prosperity, a biblical place in God’s kingdom of plenty, opulence and joy, where King

Solomon presided over an empire of peace and ruled with the wise hand of justice and fairness in a secure land of freedom. Yet, for more than four years, we were forced to sleep like fowls in the land of eagles.

Ghanaians, who now go around the country parading themselves as chiefs of imaginary empires, submitted like cowards to the humiliating curfew of silence and historic somnolence at night. They were not men enough to call themselves kings the way they do now. But like sleeping snakes, they curled up in the undergrowth of fear, sleeping silently, waking up a decade later to proclaim their support for democracy and the new found freedom from fear.

Somehow, the fear of the counter-coup slowly vanished. The onset of the curfew gradually receded from six pm to eleven pm. The ruler and his henchmen eventually began to feel confident of their tyrannical grip over the soul of the nation, and when they saw no need to force us into sleep, they completely lifted the curfew and no one bothered to notice. The nation was already used to its long nights of silence and bliss.

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And every household could boast of a child born out of that cursed curfew, but those of us born before it had grown wiser, anchored to new dreams by casting our thoughts overseas. Others who had no intentions of leaving the country swore to themselves that; they would find a way to outwit the government, and seduce the rulers towards the path of free and fair elections. They would allow it to win once or twice, and then eventually vote it out of government and force its supporters to remain in opposition forever.

Those long nights were not only a time of dreaming by candlelight, and the creation of new midnight children, but a moment where those who had dreams of some day ruling the country on their own terms, hatched plots that could trick the government as

Anansi the spider had done to the crow.

In retrospect, Ghana’s Independence in 1957 and the overthrow of the First Republic in

1966 became excuses for the current political misconduct in Ghana; national irresponsibility and a collective sense of mayhem which led to a national orgy of corruption, nepotism and embezzlement which become known as Kalabule. These were the national vices which gave the insurrectionists and the coup makers the excuse to seize power and impose their curfew of silence over the nation. However, the curfew gave Ghana time to accept the sobering reality of its history and to redefine the meaning of freedom. It compelled us as a nation to reflect on a new course for our history, readjust to a new social and political order and contemplate the formation of a

| Page 16 paradigm shift in our nation building. Miraculously, the curfew was an act of collective reappraisal, a chance to learn the meaning of independence, freedom, self-government and sovereignty.

Somehow, with all their fear and loathing of the authoritarian regime of the revolutionaries, Ghanaians settled into a new routine in accepting the violent leader at the helm of the revolution. He was driven by a restless and unrelenting spirit to see justice prevail, to eradicate corruption and to see the spirit of the nation cleansed and the rights of the ordinary people respected. In the mind of the new regime, only with an act of rebirth, a ritual cleansing by firing squad of the military culprits of corruption and the restoration of a moral sense of rectitude, plus social and political discipline, can a nation be born again.

The story about the curfew can only be told through a written narrative, steeped in the poetry of orality. Its chronology would be drab, for the monotony of curfew was not only haunting but mind numbing, were it not told through the poetry of a storyteller. It requires the lyrical magic of a literate scribe set against the metaphor of Africa’s haunted darkness and the mystery of African time. It was a dream within a dream, where men and woman copulated in silence for fear that their groaning might disturb the gods and offend the authorities. Silently, a national orgy was happening on the rainy nights of the middle months of the year, giving birth to a new generation to be known as “Curfew’s Children.”

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The intervention of the military, their ruthless revolutionary tactics, uncompromising will to power, their transformation from authoritarian rulers to democratically elected leaders and then their astonishing willingness to let go of their grip on power at the end, convinced the people that Ghana was on the right course, and changed Ghanaian history and the world’s opinion about Ghana for good.

Today as I write this story in 2010, some twenty-nine years after the curfew was first imposed on December 31st 1981, Ghana has become free again from the grip of those who once seized power by force and imposed the curfew. I have lived overseas for twenty-two years since leaving Ghana in 1988, travelling the world on a quest for self- knowledge.

The stories I tell now are the memories of a boy who was born in a golden country, and where the people fell under the spell of a black star. And even though everyone in the world knows that a black star does not shine at night, we are still hoping against hope that our star will someday shine. After all these years, I am still trying to figure out a way to tell a story that could light the imagination of my people and enable them to see the golden stars at night. A black star does not shine; it is only a political metaphor.

Those who believe in the black star are blindfolded on their way into the future. I figured it out during those curfew nights, sitting on the veranda contemplating the universe and the empty streets in front of our house. It is only those who slept in the moment of curfew’s grip who could believe that black stars shine.

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This is a story of my life. A story about how I turned my tears into treasures, my sins into salvation, my pain into power, my transgressions into testimonies and my regrets into redemption. My apprenticeship as a storyteller is still in progress. I still have a lot to learn from the chroniclers who have transformed the imagination of the world – from

East to West and North to South.

The chronicle of my early life is wrapped in a midnight mirage of moonlight rays over the empty streets of Accra, the city I was born in fifty years ago. Today I live in a city of many circles called Canberra. From this distance I hope that I can remember those nights when silence was a refuge from our national sense of fear. Let my story begin where the journey of my long exile ends. By telling my stories, I am resurrecting my mother’s voice and the many voices that told me long winding tales of family and nation, layered with advice and proverbial sayings, shaping my identity as a Ghanaian against the larger canvas of African history. To my children born of another clime, read these words aloud and hear my voice as if I am a traditional storyteller, telling the story of my life, my ancestors, my country and my continent.

Once upon a time there was a little boy who was born out of a dream...

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Chapter 2: The Dream within a Womb

I was born from a womb of dreams, on the day the sun stood directly over the equator in Africa. It was the day that the President announced on national radio the incident of the Sharpeville Massacre in Azania. A year before I was born, my mother had a dream about the reincarnation of an uncle – Uncle Richard – who had gone to Monrovia on his way to America, but died of typhoid fever two years before my birth. Years later, I also realised that, nine years before I was born on that same day, the President was voted into office as Prime Minister to lead the Gold Coast into the Promised Land of

Independence. He had prophesied the founding of a new political kingdom to be called

Ghana, on which all the blessings of the world would be bestowed: the new State of

Ghana. Thirty years after I was born, Namibia also became free and it was only recently that I also realised that one of the Generals and the Head of State of Ghana, who was executed after the June 4th Revolution, was born twenty-three years earlier on the date of my birth.

My late uncle – Uncle Richard – a visionary who had always said to the family, ‘I am not from these parts,’ had set sail to find his dream in America via Liberia. His life was cut short and the dream was deferred until I was born. ‘Would you take care of me, when I return?’ he had asked my mother in her sleep. ‘Of course Richard, I will always take care of you,’ Mother said to him as she dreamt. So the myth of my birth was woven into the folklore of family tales, and when in my youth I coincidentally displayed any of

| Page 21 his characteristics, my aunties and older cousins would yell at me, ‘Richard, stop what you are doing.’

The day before my birth, three aunties also had dreams about the same episode, the

President of Ghana, who had by then earned the title of ‘Osagefo the Redeemer,’ had come to our family house and had walked barefoot. ‘Where are your shoes?’ he was asked. ‘There is a child who will be born in this house,’ he replied, ‘and he shall walk in my shoes, so I have come to give them to him, so that he learns how to walk in my footsteps.’ After I was born, three of my mother’s friends who, by virtue of being women of high education and living the life of single women, had eluded the seduction of child bearing, came to the maternity ward to shed tears of joy and sorrow for me and my mother. ‘You do not belong with us anymore,’ they told my mother. ‘What do you mean by that?’ my mother asked. ‘Because now you are a mother, you have vindicated yourself as a woman. We are still considered barren and without a man in our lives.

How can we prove ourselves to society?’ they wept.

Mother, like her three girlfriends, had waited until her mid thirties hoping to meet the right suitor. They were all graduates of the prestigious Achimota Teacher Training

College and were cultivated in the ways of the Western world. They were heiresses to the British colonial tradition, tastes and sensibilities in all aspects of their manners and education. Their forbearance as women, their colonial sense of elitism, together with their cultural and social refinement; were often considered by possible suitors as

| Page 22 snobbish. They belonged to a class of women who had a sense of worldliness combined with spiritual enlightenment, daughters of rich colonial merchants and successful civil servants, who by their social status, inadvertently scared away and intimidated potential suitors. So my mother and her friends lingered on through the period when the Gold Coast was being transformed into Ghana, pursuing their careers as teachers, civil servants, nurses and as secretaries. While the same class of men of the professions - law, medicine, accounting and dentistry - pursued their careers as well. The women nurtured dreams of one day meeting and marrying a man with a profession, in whose home they would live and enjoy the fruitful years of their lives in opulence and freedom. But that was not how the gods wanted it.

Against this background, out of the shadows of the colonial experience, a man emerged who was professionally and socially adroit at getting what he wanted and had no sense of inhibition and limitation in life. He was Kofi Davies. Ghana was in a state of exuberance, the feeling of freedom was in the air. Tradition and self-control under colonial rule were melting under the high heat of public expectations of freedom and justice. Kofi Davies’s persistence and drive were legendary when it came to pursuing a woman who matched his sense of desire. Even though he had twice married – the first one died in child birth - and had other mistresses, Mother had appeared on his sensual radar and he was not going to let her go. For almost a decade he courted her and sent flowers, chocolates, and bought a new Mercedes Benz to impress her and all the other women he was courting and having affairs with simultaneously. While he waited for

| Page 23

Mother to entertain his advances, he was still having children with his second wife, as well as with other mistresses. ‘Tsotso, your maternity clock is ticking by, how long are you going to remain single?’ my grandfather would ask, calling her by her traditional name. ‘This is what happens to women with too much education, men are afraid to talk to you,’ he quipped.

‘Why don’t you go out with Mr Davies, at least once?’ her sisters would plead with her, encouraged by the gifts of imported chocolates. My mother would protest, to no avail.

‘He already has children with six other women,’ she would say. ‘But there is nothing wrong in going out with a married man, you never know, he might leave his wife and marry you instead. You are fair in complexion; gorgeous legs, educated, Head Teacher, your own source of income. Maybe, who knows, he wants an educated woman like you.’ My aunties who already had their fifth, sixth, or seventh child would argue their case with persistence, out of pity for my mother, who they felt was running out of time for motherhood. In a polygamous culture, people tolerated the conduct of men like Kofi

Davies and saw nothing wrong with a man who was on a mission to have as many children as he wanted with as many women as possible. But women like my mother had started thinking differently.

‘Augusta, for many years, you’ve been waiting for the right man to come. All the men of your generation are already married. Ghana is now free and all the good men are taken. Give Kofi Davies a chance and you never know what the future might bring,’

| Page 24

Mother’s close friends implored her. ‘You can’t continue like this for the rest of your life. No matter how educated you are, how beautiful you look, a woman without her own child will die alone and will be accused of being barren and a witch. The gossipers will say you have traded your womb with the witches, to gain the gift of second sight at night. Go and have a child with Mr Davies to prove your womanhood. We will help you to mother your son.’ The many voices, speaking on behalf of Mr Davies, cajoled her. ‘What if the child is a girl?’ my mother would ask. ‘We will still help you with the child, while you go back to school to teach.’ Eventually, with the coaxing of friends and relatives, mother agreed to an official first date. It was meant to be a one-off, but as

Mother told me in her twilight years, ‘I shouldn’t have allowed him to make me laugh.’

My mother fell under the seductive spell of Kofi Davies. It was like magic on the first date. ‘This is all I wanted to do with you, just go out on a date. What happens after that is in God’s hands,’ Kofi said. ‘How can a man like you talk about God, knowing very well you are married?’ Mother asked. ‘If only you knew how long I have been praying to have this moment with you, then you would understand why I am talking about

God,’ he said. They talked, they laughed and the Mercedes Benz smiled. He wooed, he was charming, he showered her with gifts. Kofi would call on her at noon, at night, on weekends, every day for a whole year. It was a season of celebration, euphoria, ecstasy and expectation in Ghana. So she succumbed and, through the mirage of his spells, the storytelling inspired by whisky and chocolate, Kofi wove magical tales, of his imaginary brushes with destiny, his heroism as a political operator for Nkrumah, his vision for the

| Page 25 future and God’s favour over his life. The courtship was very public in many ways. His wife knew about it, even though he denied it to her. His other mistresses had given up on him. Kofi Davies had been appointed Chief of Protocol by the new government and was determined to amass his fortune by building houses and renting them out to the new embassies now proliferating in the new nation. He borrowed money from his mistresses to buy land and build. ‘He never paid back the money I lent to him. He told me many times he would build a house for our new family,’ Mother later told me.

In the meantime, he invited her to state functions, official dinner parties, receptions and private meetings to show off his new catch, to the envy of some of the Ministers of State who were also on their own private missions to increase the post-independence population of Ghana. Kofi Davies would boast to his associates when introducing mother, ‘I will like to introduce to you Augusta Okai, Headmistress of Methodist Girls

School, she is a product of Achimota.’ To impress his colleagues Kofi would often emphasise my mother’s educational background, compensating for his lack of higher educational experience, though he was considered a self-educated man and was remarkable in giving public presentations and hosting social events or giving a toast.

As a socialite and philanderer he was discreet and could be secretive. But this time, when he was climbing the social ladder very rapidly, he needed an educated woman on his arm. ‘You see the Prime Minister over there?’ Kofi said, while Nkrumah was giving a speech at one of the many state dinner events. ‘If you hang around me, I will personally introduce you to him,’ he boasted.

| Page 26

‘Kofi Davies is up to it again,’ the word went around. He pursued her with the utmost intensity. He made promises, he used the name of God in vain, he prayed, he moved the heavens and called out to the gods as well. And out of the sin in the garden of good and evil, the dream within the womb became flesh. That year of conception, the rains poured unceasingly and Africans were on a crusade for freedom and justice all over the continent. The pillars of colonialism were falling everywhere and nations were marching towards the gates of freedom, inspired by the oratory of Kwame Nkrumah.

Three months after Christmas on the 21st of March, 1960, I arrived screaming into the world. ‘You finally did it, Augusta. You have done well,’ everyone applauded, when my mother came home with a baby boy. Three months later, Ghana became a Republic and the dictatorship of Nkrumah, the first President of Ghana, began.

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Chapter 3: The Last of the Professional Polygamists

‘Your father was an elegant man,’ Mother would tell me as I was growing older. ‘He prided himself on wearing the finest suits, imported from England and if tailored in

Ghana, then the wool had to be English wool. Grandpa liked him because they were both men who measured themselves according to the clothes and houses they had, who counted how many suits they owned and commented with fondness about each other’s shoes. They were both members of the Masonic Lodge, a secret society for the affluent and powerful.

‘Like your grandpa, Kofi Davies liked to stand in front of the mirror and admire himself and his clothes,’ Mother told me. She spoke about my father with a sense of detachment as though he had been a class mate or former employer. ‘“As for me, I am a handsome man, I am a man of great social standing, I can achieve anything if I put my mind to it, no wonder you love me so much,” Kofi would say about himself.’ Mother would imitate him as she demonstrated his mannerisms to me in front of the mirror. ‘Your father would firmly impress it upon himself, as if the image in the mirror was someone else. He would proceed to kiss himself in the mirror and laugh aloud.’ Mother recounted these scenes many times to me throughout my life.

‘“Well, if you don’t want to kiss me, I will kiss myself,” he would say.

‘“You are too vain, that is why I don’t love you,” I would tell him,’ Mother recounted their exchange of words.

‘“Why are you pretending you don’t love me, Augusta?” Kofi would say.

| Page 29

‘”I am just fond of you,” Mother would reply.

‘“Well, whether you love me or not, being fond of me is good enough for me. This is how love grows,” your father would say,’ Mother would continue with this dialogue between herself and my father.

‘”You are too full of yourself,” I would add. He just couldn’t wait to father a child with me. He was always in a hurry as if he was on his way somewhere. Sometimes he would come for brief moments, just to see me to make sure I was home and then off he went,’

Mother told me.

‘Whenever he had time and would come calling on me, he would sit in the living room and talk to Grandpa and update him on the affairs of the government. Grandpa would talk about the rising cost of cement and the difficulty of importing simple items like jam from England. “Those days when we used the English pounds, we could buy a lot with ten pounds,” you could hear Grandpa saying to Kofi Davies, ignoring the fact that he worked for Nkrumah’s government and would speak with nostalgia about the good old days of British rule,’ Mother said.

‘Kofi Davies would extol the virtues of independence, while trying his best to control his frustration over Grandpa’s attachment to the past, keeping his mind on the reason why he was in our house. I would be in the room, dressing up, listening to Grandpa and Kofi Davies exchanging their views about the regime. Grandpa never liked the idea of independence. He would say, “Kwame Nkrumah is possessed by a demon. That man

| Page 30 speaks like he has fire in his mouth. He does not speak English like a gentleman. He studied in America and that is why he is a ruffian. Americans are ruffians.”

Kofi Davies would laugh with his whole body as he swayed left and right with glee. But being the cunning man that he was, he would add amid laughter, as if he were joking,

“Never say this in public or to anyone who is a member of the party. People in the party and Nkrumah’s boys may take serious offence to this.” But Grandpa would reply, “This is my house. I can say whatever I want,”’ Mother would recount to me.

‘“Well, I hope that whatever you say stays in this house,” Kofi would add.’

‘By then I would have finished dressing up. As soon as Kofi saw me coming out of my room, he would hop out of the chair and politely shake Grandpa’s hands. He would brush his suit with his hands to iron out the wrinkles, then briskly walk towards me and escort me out of the house to his Mercedes Benz.’

Years later I realised that our family house – my grandfather’s house - was located one block away from Arena Square, the gathering place for Kwame Nkrumah’s rallies in

Accra. Standing by the window on the second floor, looking out of the house and across the other homes, it was easy to imagine Nkrumah giving his speeches during the pre- independence period, rallying his followers to demand independence, now. As the struggle for independence gathered momentum, Grandpa warned everyone in the family never to attend any of the rallies or parades, but the brave and curious members of the clan would sneak out anyway, to see and hear the voice of freedom, yelling out

| Page 31 loud and calling for change in the Gold Coast. Grandpa saw politics as a doomed profession and a curse on the fortunes of the nation. He had grown up in the Gold

Coast and loved everything British, and wanted to have nothing to do with the

Independence movement. To J.W. Okai, Nkrumah was a trouble maker and should have been kept in prison for life. It was against such a background that my father first met and started courting my mother. Kofi Davies had made a small fortune and fashioned a life for himself, by riding the wave of the Independence Movement and the founding of Ghana.

‘So somehow, I deceived myself that he loved me. That, maybe, he was sincere. I wasn’t worried that he had other women and a wife in his life. If he was the man with whom I was meant to have you, at least I expected him to take responsibility for your upbringing,’ Mother told me, as if she regretted the whole experience. ‘But then, you were born and see how you have grown up into a fine man. You look so much like him,’ she would add.

I never really knew my father to tell the truth. I can say that, in all, I have seen him about five times in my entire life. It is amazing how the memories of early childhood can stay with you. I have very early memories of my father coming to pick me up to go for a ride, but I do not remember how old I was then. In those days, there were no seatbelts, so one of my older cousins was asked to sit in the back and put me on his lap, while my father drove us around the neighbourhood in his Mercedes Benz. I must have

| Page 32 been a baby, because I remember the feeling of him carrying me and placing me on my cousin’s lap, while my mother stood by, watching him to make sure I was safe. My older cousin, Nii Tieko, was a bit older than I was, so he was made to sit in the car while my parents entrusted me in his arms, and I watched my father drive.

Later on Mother told me, ‘Kofi’s visits to the house became infrequent after I got pregnant. He came to look at you almost three days after you were born, and on the week after your birth, he arrived late for your out-dooring ceremony. There was a guilty look on his face, almost as if he was apologising to everyone. He arrived with a young gentleman in his early twenties. “This is my oldest son, Kabu, he has just joined the army and will be going to Russia on the officers training course,” he said.’

‘Some months after the ceremonies for your birth were over and I had some privacy with him, I placed you on his lap and began to query him on his absence in the past few months.’

‘”Is that how our relationship is going to end?” I asked him.

‘“Who said anything about ending this relationship? I was hoping that, when you get better and little Kabu is old enough, we could have a second child. It would be nice to have a girl next time,” he said.

‘”Oh, is that so? Is that what’s on your mind?” I asked him. “What happened to the engagement plans, what about the wedding and all those promises you made? I haven’t seen you for three months, where have you been?”

| Page 33

‘“I told you I was with a delegation with the President to Budapest, India and

Conakry.”

‘“Yes, but during the times we were dating you sent me post cards, from London and where ever you were travelling. Now the President has become your excuse for everything. Is that what you tell your other women?” I asked him.’ Mother said.

‘“Please, don’t compare yourself to the other women. They are below your standard,”

Kofi said.

‘“Now that this child is born, how are we going to support this child?” I asked him”.

‘“But I thought you were a woman of independent means?” he had the audacity to say.

‘“Independent means? Is that what you think of me?” I said to him. I was so incensed. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. “If this is how you look at it, then I don’t want you near this child. I will take care of him myself,” I finally told him.

‘And so that is how our relationship ended. He started crying, there were tears all over his face. I thought he looked funny. They were crocodile tears, I should say. I felt he loved me, but my blindfolds were off and I knew it wouldn’t be worth the trouble having more children with him. He was too selfish to be a father and besides I was very hurt when I discovered he was aware of the day I was in the hospital when I was having you. He never showed up,’ Mother told me. ‘The Priest had to sign your birth certificate on your father’s behalf. When I showed him the birth certificate the week after your birth, I was shocked by his reaction.

| Page 34

‘“Oh, no…,” he said. “I have another son by the name of Edward. You have to change it. ‘Okay,” he said hastily, “there is space on the line before the name Edward. So let us call him William.” Sometime in April, the name William was added in front of Edward and everyone started to call you Willie. “Paa Willie,” they said, calling you after your grand uncle Papa William who was made your Godfather the day of your out-dooring.

“He will one day be a great man,” Papa William said.’ Mother recounted the experience of that morning to me. However, because I was born on Monday, I naturally took on the traditional name of Kojo, the Akan name for a son born on a Monday and Kabu for being my mother’s first son in the Ga-Adangbe tradition. In all I had five names:

William Edward Kabu Kojo Davies.

‘Kofi’s visits after you were born were at long intervals and I slowly began to resign myself to a life that was going to be you and me. You were so delicate and wouldn’t eat.

Almost six months after you were born, Kofi came to visit, to inform me of his promotion in the Foreign Affairs Department and that he was going to be travelling a lot, and that was the end of it. Occasionally he would send me a postcard to remind me how he still loved me and to ask about you. Time passed and your stepfather came from London to ask for my hand in marriage. That is also a whole story by itself.

‘When Kofi heard that I was leaving with you to go to London after my engagement to join your stepfather, he came all the way to see you and held you up. “Never forget that

I am your father, never ever forget. You are the son of a Kofi Davies. Always remember

| Page 35 that, blood is thicker than water. Augusta, always remind him that he has a father.” I just looked at him. I couldn’t feel whether I regretted having you with him or if I should console myself with the fact that he came into my life for the reason of your birth. So I allowed him to hold on to you for a while.

‘“I have to go, Augusta,” he said.

‘“Who is stopping you?” I responded.

‘“At least say something nice,” Kofi whispered.

‘”I have nothing to say,” I responded. I shrugged my shoulders.

‘He gave you back to me and he wanted to kiss me before he left, but I pulled my head away and rolled my eyes with a sense of disapproval. That day marked the end of our relationship.’

Mother would see him a few more times, out of respect and for my sake. Other than that, the chapter of the story between Kofi and Augusta was over. Personally, I would see my father three more times. Whenever my mother recounted these stories and the circumstances surrounding my birth and her brief, blissful, yet bruising experience with my father, I feel as if she was doing it more out of duty to me than from the need for nostalgia about a romantic time of her life now gone. I could see in her face a sense of reconciliation, as she tried to forgive herself ‘for not giving you a father,’ she would say.

As far as I can remember and especially as I grew older, I tried to assure her it was okay, but she never gave up. Right until the last year before dementia set in, she recounted in vivid detail her relationship with my father as if, finally, she was happy

| Page 36 that I had married and now had a son of my own. It was a private narrative that we shared, something she rehearsed with me when we were alone together, telling me about my father and her relationship with him. There are ways in which mothers show their love and I guess that was her way of assuring me that she wanted me to know I was born out of the spirit of love and maybe not entirely for my father, but for myself.

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Chapter 4: The Life and Times of the Man called Ezekiel.

My father was born Ezekiel Kofi Davies, on the twenty- seventh of August, 1920, in a small town in the eastern part of the Ga-Adangbe region of Ghana, called Akuse. His parents, of course, I never knew, but I did come to know more about my father’s side of the family at his funeral, where all the extended family members came to pay their respect. He had dropped the name ‘Ezekiel’ because it sounded too Biblical, but during his last years he began to use it again as if it were an act of atonement for the hedonism and magical journey of his life.

Kofi’s parents were Stephen Theophilus Davies of Somanya, a trading town in the same region and Martha Kutivor Brenya of Akuse. His parents were both prosperous traders,

I was told, but I did not learn much about his childhood. The story goes as follows: Kofi was a truant child and, in order to instil some discipline into him, he was sent to the

Basel Mission Primary School at Akuse upon reaching school age. He went on to attend the Bana Basel Mission Senior School and then was sent to Accra to attend the Accra

High School for secondary education.

Upon graduating from secondary school, he sought and gained employment at SCOA

Motors. By dint of hard work, perseverance and diligence, he quickly rose to the office of Chief Clerk in 1952. I remember being told the story about how Kofi first came into money. In 1948, a group of ex-servicemen marched on Christiansburg Castle, the then

| Page 39 seat of the colonial government, to have their concerns addressed by the Governor. For some reason or other their presence in front of the Castle was seen as a threat. These unarmed men were fired at. Two World War II warriors, proud and brave men, were killed and the spirit of the nation was set ablaze. The call for self-government and independence now fired the imagination of the nation. The masses began looting shops and government buildings, but Kofi, who was then a junior clerk, took it upon himself to rescue all the money and the account books in the safe and secretly take them home for safe-keeping. After almost a week, he quietly told his English boss what he had done and the following day, accompanied by his superiors, he returned all the books and the cash without a penny missing.

This surprising and impressive act of bravery, honesty and accountability won him the trust of the whole firm. His sense of loyalty immediately earned him a promotion and fast-tracked his career. He was compensated for his loyalty and he used some of the bonus to buy his first Mercedes Benz, then upgraded his wardrobe, and started in full measure his climb upwards on the social ladder of life. Spurred on by his youthful yearning spirit of progress and adventure, Kofi entered the real estate business, arriving in the early fifties as one of the early settlers in the newly released lands in North Accra, called Asylum Down.

With the spirit of independence inspiring the imagination of the country, he advanced by resigning from SCOA Motors Company to seek employment with the Agricultural

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Loans Board and, soon after, the Diamond Marketing Board. As if that was not enough,

Kofi saw opportunities ahead as he measured with insight the direction of the then

Prime Minister’s vision for a new Africa. Within a year he transferred and took a position as an officer with the Board of Agricultural and Minerals Department, and this was followed by another successful move which secured him a post in the African

Affairs Secretariat, working directly in the Prime Minister’s office at Flag Staff House.

As the march towards Independence energised the spirit of the new nation, and for that matter Africa and the rest of the world, Kofi travelled with the then Prime Minister on many of his trips overseas. Soon he was working at the Christiansburg Castle (now renamed Osu Castle), and was appointed Chief of State Protocol and Officer for the

Independence Celebration activities.

After the euphoria of the Independence celebrations was over, the political landscape began to shift towards the left. Nkrumah’s political rhetoric became too overwhelming and Kofi knew it was time to move. He had made a small fortune in real estate - by renting out his houses to many of the newly established embassies in Ghana. Now he swiftly moved to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, not only to satisfy his thirst for travel and to become a man of the world, but because also he could sense growing tension and the waning of Nkrumah’s public rating in the country. There were assassination attempts on the President’s life, rumours of coups, and whispers about the President’s midnight consultations with witch doctors to enhance his grip over the country and increase his political fortunes around the world. The new nation was already seething

| Page 41 with unease and turmoil was brewing in oppositional circles whose members wanted to stop Nkrumah’s drive for absolute power, and his Pan-African ambitions at the expense of Ghana. The magic was gone, a personality cult had replaced the charisma, and political superstition had seized the mind of the country. Once a week at dawn, there was the voice of Nkrumah over the national radio, admonishing his enemies and sounding his clarion call for African Unity. Whispers in the night foretold the coming of the secret service to arrest suspected traitors and dissidents. Children were being recruited to join the Youth Brigade and to spy on their parents. The Young Pioneer

Movement and clouds of national insecurity engulfed Ghana while Nkrumah’s image towered to dizzying heights in the mind of the world. However, Kofi knew better: the best place for him to be was not in the Castle and the Flag Staff House but overseas, even if it meant he remained part of the government.

Burnt bridges are of no use to anyone. So while Kofi never officially joined the Party, he attended meetings and rallies throughout the heady days during and after the struggle for Independence. He kept his sense of neutrality both in private and in public. Being overseas on long-term postings was the best place to remain attached to the government, yet stay politically at a distance from all the mayhem in the years after the first Republic was established.

In Foreign Affairs, he represented Ghana at the United Nations, and was part of many delegations with the President and also with subsequent governments, on many of his

| Page 42 travels around the world. He was posted to London briefly and made Head of

Chancellery to Israel and Switzerland before he retired.

At his funeral, many told me, ‘Your father was a shrewd man. He was very close to the

President, yet publicly he was invisible.’ Someone told me. Kofi always presented himself as a civil servant, not a politician or a party member. He sensed very early on that Nkrumah’s power and grip over the country was not going to last indefinitely, so he worked his way to secure a posting overseas.

When the coup happened, Kofi was in Israel and returned two years later as a senior executive of the Department, not as a member of the ex-government. Soon after that, he was posted to Switzerland as Consul-General. ‘We never understood why Kofi kept refusing the post of Ambassador. It was after the Nkrumah and Busia coups that we realised how ingenious that decision was.’ His colleagues admitted to me. Kofi, they said was the smartest amongst his peers. He could always smell opportunity and danger from a distance, and whatever happened he remained unscathed. He maintained his personal friendships with everyone, including the President, ministers, the Prime Minister, chief justices, ambassadors, businessmen and all the important women in town. If I learned some of his ways, they told me, I could rise to the top of my chosen field. I was advised.

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The story of his life came to me from many sources, which I eventually pieced together as I tried to imagine him as people had painted him, compelled by a simple desire to compensate myself for his absence in my life.

Kofi retired in 1975 upon his return from Switzerland. That was when he came to visit me again, for the first time in almost fourteen years. He had accomplished a lot. He looked well. Later, I read in his obituary that he was a member of the International

Toast Masters Association and many august societies and associations. For many years,

Kofi was also a member of the Ancient Free & Accepted Masons, a District Senior

Warden Past Master of the Lodge in Israel and Switzerland.

Soon after Kofi Davies’s return to Ghana, he and his wife re-discovered their old and beloved Adabraka Church and he became one of its most benevolent benefactors. It was expected that Kofi would live much longer and enjoy his well-earned retirement, but his health began to decline as a result of a malignant ailment, which I later discovered was diabetes. And despite all intensive medical care and home nursing, he died peacefully at the Korle-Bu Hospital early on Wednesday morning 17 August 1983.

I was twenty-three years old and had been studying political science, philosophy and literature at the University of Ghana. Ghana was under military rule, the Third

Republic had been suspended and the university was closed down because of our demonstration again the authoritarian nature of the new regime. Although the curfew

| Page 44 was enforced, permits were granted for funerals and bereaved families could ‘keep wake,’ till midnight.

Of all his children, I was told by my oldest brother, Bro Kabu, ‘You are the only one with a university education, so it is very important that you attend the funeral.’ Mother acted as if she had never known the man. She was totally indifferent to his death and all she said and did, was privately remembering her time with him. She kept a mischievous smile on her face, as if she was having the last laugh and his life meant nothing to her. It was simply an affair to be remembered. She shrugged her shoulders when I told her I was going to Asylum Down for the funeral ceremonies.

It was officially reported that Kofi left behind his dear wife, Florence Davies, twelve children and twenty-two grand children. But the unofficial numbers, according to my oldest brother Brother Kabu, who attended with our father almost all the out-dooring ceremonies for our many siblings, said, ‘The number of children were all together seventeen.’ There was one wild card, first rumoured at the funeral, which turned out to be true. The story appeared out of nowhere the day of Kofi’s wake, and it concerned a young girl who had been born in the village of Akuse some years after I was. She looked like the female version of me. Her story is more about shame and disappointment than about the legacy of Kofi Davies. Other children, who were not accounted for, were with women whose backgrounds were not considered socially and publicly acceptable. They were also the women who had had the confidence to openly

| Page 45 challenge Kofi Davies in public and in court to take responsibility for fathering their children.

This was true in my case, as one of Kofi’s children born out of wedlock. My uncle,

Uncle Nii John, who had become a lawyer some time after I was born, encouraged my mother to file a suit against Kofi Davies. Kofi was summoned to court to face charges of child-neglect and to pay outstanding monies for child support and school fees.

However, the charges went nowhere, since the judges were friends of Kofi Davies and the plaintiffs in the case were encouraged to settle out of court.

In all, Kofi Davies had eighteen children with eight women, including of course my mother. Brother Kabu’s mother, who was Kofi’s first wife, died during childbirth, when she was having twins, two years after Brother Kabu was born. The baby boy died with her, but the girl survived, and was called Sister Akweley. Kofi Davies was nineteen at the time and his late wife was eighteen. When I realised that Kofi Davies first became a father when he was seventeen, I just shook my head and couldn’t help laughing.

Kofi had mastered the art of persistence and knew by natural instinct what he could accomplish with perseverance. He applied it in his career advancement and his pursuit of his sexual passions. Everyone told me that Kofi was always well dressed, wore the most elegant suits and preferred a bow tie to a straight tie. He always had a broad smile and was optimistic and forward looking in his attitude to life, seeking out the next

| Page 46 opportunity or scanning a crowd to spot the most attractive woman. Kofi would not hesitate to shake the hand of anyone standing in front of him. However, he never liked public confrontation nor would he seek public attention in the media but preferred to work behind the scenes, knowing that true power and influence lay in the private chambers and corridors of power. ‘Let the public have their way; private power is true power,’ he would say. And he used his private influence over important people to build his small but secure fortune, and advance his position in life. Everyone knew about Kofi

Davies, and yet no one knew who he was as a person. That was the secret of his charm and the magic behind his skill of seducing anyone he wanted to succumb to his will.

People said at home he could be a tyrant but in professional circles he was the most obliging person to work with. I wish I had known him; I wish at least I could have had the opportunity to see more of him. But when you are born out of the womb of a dream, it doesn’t matter who the father is. I’ve been fortunate to have had many good men to mentor me and act as father figures. Following the months after his burial, I would spend many hours at night under the silent gaze of the stars, imagining what kind of a man he was by piecing together the many stories I had heard about his life. I learnt how to console myself for not having a father of my own, and that he had gone too soon, at a time when the curfew was still in full force.

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Chapter 5: A Woman Called Auntie Teacher: A Tribute to My Mother

Memory can sometimes be a mirage. It presents itself as the evidence of things yet to be seen and the manifestation of a dream that could have happened. If I could conjure the past perfectly, I would weave a magical tale of songs, a tapestry of pictures and a vineyard of joy to tell the story of the woman who was my mother, my friend and the fuel that fired my imagination into the ambitions of a man.

I grew up knowing that my mother’s name was ‘Auntie Teacher’. That name made me believe she had access to the divine source of all knowledge and truth, which in a way she did. Her spell over me strengthened as I grew older and travelled the world, taking her with me on the wings of my imagination. In her absence from my life now, I yearn to retrieve every bit of memory about her in order to store it in a vault which I would keep for the sake of her grandchildren. Jeff and I, the only two children she was blessed to have, simply called her ‘Ma’. Everyone else affectionately called her by her other name, Auntie Teacher. She was born and cast from the mould of the Okai family clan, which she saw as a central part of her identity.

Central to her vision of herself was the idea that, life is a journey into the realm of learning, sharing, teaching and practising the principle of loving thy neighbour as thy self. A teacher in every sense of the word, she was also a lifelong student in every way.

Besides being an educationist, Mother was a professional dressmaker, church leader

| Page 49 and counsellor in her service to family and society.

Augusta Okai, my mother, was born on 13 October 1923 to Joseph William Okai of

Asere, who worked in the Customs and Excise Department of the Colonial

Government. Grandmother, Sarah Ohenewa Krapong, came from Akronpong, and was a member of the Akwapim Royal Family. My mother was the sixth of thirteen children of Joseph and Sarah. My grandmother already had a daughter before she married my grandfather.

Our grandmother, Maa as she was called, was already married to a much older man and had had a daughter before she was eighteen. Joseph William or Paa Joe, also known affectionately as JW, was determined to win Maa’s hand in marriage. The details of their courtship are not very clear, but the story goes that Paa Joe started seeing Maa in secret. She was drawn to him by virtue of the fact that he had graduated from school at the age of sixteen and was working as a clerk at the Customs Office before he was seventeen, at the time when the highest level of education in the Gold Coast was the

Standard Seven School Certificate. To avoid the public embarrassment of courting a married woman, JW had to win Maa’s hand in marriage by offering a bigger dowry, so he bought Maa out of unhappy wedlock. The story breaks its chronology and suddenly we are transported to Winneba, where Paa Joe was promoted and transferred to work as a Senior Clerk at the Winneba Customs Depot. However, while they were in

Winneba, the Okai family expanded and soon there were seven children, one boy and

| Page 50 six girls, including my mother. While in Winneba, JW would travel frequently to Accra on duty. During this period, he bought land and started building his first house which he completed and rented out in the late twenties. The family returned to Accra in 1930, as JW was once again promoted to a senior position in the Customs and Excise

Department. In all, JW and Maa would have fourteen children and JW had two more through an affair with another woman.

We the grandchildren grew up with the story that our grandmother, Maa, was born of royal lineage from the traditional house of the Akropong and Akwapim royal family.

Mother would speak about the Akwapin bloodline and how when they were young our grandma and her sister were brought for protection to the Ga Mantse’s palace in Accra.

There was war between the Akwapin and the Ashanti, we were told. To protect his children from being captured by the Ashanti warriors, and to save them from a raging tribal war or some inheritance dispute over land within the Akwapin family at that time, grandma’s father, the chief of the Akwapin traditional area, sent his daughters to the Ga chief in Accra for safekeeping. The two sisters lived with and became part of the

Ga traditional elders’ household before my grandmother was married off, like most women of their age, to a man who could have been her father’s age.

My knowledge of the Akwapim line of the family is scanty, but I remember my mother talking about her distant cousins in Akropong and how they once went to a funeral and stayed for a week in the Akwapim area. Maa Sarah was probably too young to

| Page 51 remember much of her years as a girl in the Akwapim royal household, because she grew up as a Ga and lived the rest of her life in Accra. Even though we grew up with stories about Grandmother as an Akwapim princess, we never thought much about it. It was at my mother’s funeral that a delegation of three women from the Akwapim House of Chiefs was sent to represent that family from that line. That was the evidence which eventually helped me to accept the connection of my grandmother to the Akwapim royal line. Those days were so distant that I could not comprehend the significance of the stories to our lives as grandchildren growing up in the post-independence era in

Accra. It was against such a background that Joseph and Sarah built their house at

Ayalolo and presided over the creation of a clan that had many grandchildren. At the age of 75, Grandpa JW was proud to know that there were 75 grand and great grandchildren altogether, and still counting.

When I was a child, I imagined the Gold Coast in the nineteenth century as an elusive world, dotted with villages, with a multitude of African tribal kingdoms presided over by indigenous royal families and protected by warriors. Each tribe defended its enclave of power in a forest or open landscape with invisible territorial demarcations, linked by footpaths and meandering trade routes, where the night was lit by the moon, under a canopy of stars. So how did Grandma arrive at a young age in Accra from Akronpong,

I always asked myself. Did they walk all the way, or was there a celestial pathway whose secret entrance was protected by the gods of speed? As a child I imagined Africa

| Page 52 in the most mythical form, the form in which it came to me through stories, myths and fables that mesmerised my mind.

I grew up believing, through the many tales about Africa, that there was something foreboding about the past. This was a realm of myths that told of days when ghostly figures, idol worshipers, witches and witchdoctors, fetish priests, medicine men, sorcerers, warriors, midnight dancers and diviners formed the social fabric. There were stories about mysterious journeys across the seas by brave fisherman who waged great battles with the evil gods, and legendary tales about hunters who went into the deep forest and triumphed over the demons of death, caught wild game and came home victorious. These were stories beyond the realm of the ordinary imagination, and they were fed into children’s minds.

Africa was fed to us within the frame of an invisible mirror, focused inward. There was the mysterious appearance of extended family members at night, preparations for funerals, distant cousins marrying each other and layered stories about the lives of distant relatives, delivered as morality tales to warn and to render advice about how one should live life. These were tales that cut through the mask of time, tales that made sense only within the spirit world of the imagination. They were stories that were told within a dark and haunted realm of ominous fear about the ghostly lives of people who lived in a forbidden past; a time of blood sacrifices to ancestral gods, and of worship; ritual sacrifices, conjurations, incantations of spirit gods within the realm of a non-

| Page 53 human world. Here the past was a dreamy canvas on which our parents painted images of tribal legends and myths of a vanished world. The present was haunted by a night of whispers, and the future was an elusive place beyond our grasp, made possible only by leaving Africa and going overseas to be educated in England.

Mother knew of that distant world. It was the cosmic African realm of wonder that existed before the coming of European rule and influence, and before forced settlement disturbed the mythical equilibrium of the landscape. This traditional world was haunted and trapped within a tribal sense of space, defined by superstitious and fetish beliefs, a universe steeped in rituals, animal and human sacrifices, elaborate ceremonies, rites, violent deaths, slave traders, indentured servants, myths, and of course stories about intertribal warfare, bloodshed, burial rites, blood sacrifices for chiefs and high priests and murder. There were no colonial borders then, but the land was united by a fragmented vision of tribes, indigenous truths, powerful spirit forces, festivals, drumming and dance, and an ominous belief in the overarching omnipotence of the spirit of a thousand ancestral gods. Each tribe had a chief, a language or dialect, and a tribal shrine. It was that imaginary world of self-sustaining kingdoms and fiefdoms, clans, tribal confederacies and extended families held together by a glue of indigenous mystery, faith and magic that gave birth to my ideas about my grandmother. ‘She was a princess,’ we, the grandchildren, were reminded over and over again. And Grandpa was her knight who swept her off her feet, the first day he laid eyes on her. Their story of love would be retold to us in many fascinating ways; the

| Page 54 romance of Sarah and William was etched in my mind like an immortal fable that never began and would never end.

My mother’s life really began around the age of six, when Joseph was posted to

Winneba, a small but burgeoning sea-town lodged between Accra, of Ghana the new capital, and Cape Coast, the old capital of the Gold Coast. The British government had set up a colonial outpost, and Grandpa Joseph was on a posting as a customs officer to manage the Customs Office. There, Mother was enrolled in the Winneba Methodist

School. She and her older siblings rapidly learnt to speak Fanti, English and Ga.

Grandpa Joseph completed his transfer, and in 1930 he was posted back to Accra to continue work as a customs officer near James Fort. Upon her return to Accra, mother was enrolled at the Methodist Girls School which was run at that time by Sister Rose

Little, an English educationist who made a name for herself throughout the Gold Coast as a champion for the education of women in Africa.

Mother was very successful in her first attempt at passing the Standard Seven

Certificate Exams. She told me. ‘I was invited through the recommendation of Sister

Rose, with five other brilliant girls in the class, to further our education for a year, by studying for the Ex 7 exams, which I passed with Distinction.’ This was noted with elation in mother’s end of year report, the recognition by Sister Rose who considered

Augusta Okai ‘a very good student with a potential to achieve academic success and the hope of eventually taking up various teaching appointments in the Methodist

| Page 55

Educational School System.’ ‘After I graduated from Ex 7,’ Mother told me, ‘I was recommended for admission to Achimota, but my father thought it was too expensive and that too much education for a woman would block her chances of getting married.

So he refused to pay the difference of the scholarship and the expenses associated with my education. I cried for weeks after my mother told me of my father’s decision. I was so upset I refused to talk. I would do my housework, bath my younger siblings then go into my mother’s room, lock myself up and read. I wouldn’t talk or say a word to anyone in the house. Silence became a means to protest my father’s decision. My mother became worried. Everyone in the family became concerned and the more I refused to talk, the more my father hardened. Almost six months passed and eventually my silence and tears won the day. Papa agreed to send me to Achimota. The following year with my classmates one year ahead of me, I enrolled at the Achimota Teacher

Training College.’ This was the most prestigious college in the Gold Coast at the time, and the training ground for the future leaders of Ghana.

For four years, Mother attended college, studying and reading everything that she could, to prepare herself for a professional life of teaching. In 1942 she graduated and returned to her Alma Mater, the Methodist Girls School, to work under Sister Rose

Little, her mentor and benefactor, the person who instilled in her the intellectual and personal discipline and principles of an educator. It was therefore no surprise that, on the retirement of Sister Rose to the United Kingdom, Mother was appointed Acting

Headmistress of the school. She was twenty-five years old.

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While Mother was in Teacher Training College, WWII raged. She had enrolled in 1938 and told me that some of the children of the British aristocracy were brought to the

Gold Coast to stay away from the war. There were military drills, emergency regulations, and exercises in case the Gold Coast was bombed. North Africa was in the heat of war, and General Rommel’s troops had taken over large parts of the North. The

British colonies were vulnerable and men were being recruited to join the war effort to save the world from the domination of Nazism.

Mother would tell jokes about men who, due to their anti-colonial sentiments, naively wished Hitler would win the war and free the Gold Coast from British rule. This upset the British officials so much that the men who voiced their support for Hitler were put on trial, and defended themselves by saying ‘My mouth is not a gun.’ Mother would narrate it in Pidgin English, imitating the voices of the accused men. ‘My mouth, no be- gun?’ she would always laugh when she told us the story and we would laugh in return, not because of the story but because of the way she was laughing about it. It showed the light-hearted side of her personality which she rarely displayed, as she always maintained a sense of formality. When the war was won, she and her friends and fellow students eagerly joined the parade to celebrate victory for England, and flew the Union Jack around the school. A few years later the process towards self- government began and, in her own way, she played her part in the long march toward full independence from British rule as the first African to head the Methodist Girls

School.

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Once, as a young headmistress, her authority was challenged by some of the longer serving teachers who had worked under Sister Rose. But she stood firm and at a staff meeting she asked them, ‘Would anyone of you who doubts my authority because of my age, stand up?’ No one did. ‘If I was an English woman would you question my authority?’ she asked. ‘If an English girl comes and stands in front of you today you will all submit and obey like cowards. Is it because I am one of you that you refuse to respect me as your head mistress? Sister Rose is gone and I have qualified to take her place, not because of my age or complexion but because I am the best amongst all of you. To disrespect me is to dishonour our own selves. I am one of you and if we are to learn how to run our own country, then we must learn to do so before we start telling the British to leave.’ No one said a word and, from that moment, her presence in school became the personification of law and order, discipline and self-respect. At an early age

I realised for myself the authority Mother commanded before staff and teachers, and at school assemblies.

Because I went to a private boarding school, I began school holidays sometimes a week or two before the students from public schools. So, while on school vacations, I accompanied my mother to her school, wherever she was working as headmistress at the time. I watched with admiration and childlike pride to see how my mother’s presence as headmistress exuded an aura of awe that sent the whole school into silence.

‘Mistress is coming, mistress is coming’, the staff and students whispered while running around tidying and straightening themselves up. As a child I never understood it. Only

| Page 58 later on, and after she had passed on, did I come to appreciate the full impact of my mother’s work as an educator on the lives of the thousands who were schooled under her tutelage.

After two years of working as acting headmistress at Methodist Girls School, in the early to mid fifties, she was transferred to Kumasi, in the Ashanti Region, to be the head mistress at a new school called Mofratrom Methodist Girls School in the Ashanti Region

(Mofratrom meaning – a place where children are educated). She was there for a few months and immediately distinguished herself to the extent that the General Manager of the Methodist School in the Ashanti Region recognised her value. Later on mother was promoted to assume a higher responsibility as the Headmistress of Jauben2 Girls

Methodist Boarding School in 1955. She stayed in Jauben for almost a year and a half.

Mother would talk about her stay in Kumasi with deep fondness and nostalgia. ‘I would have stayed longer if it hadn’t been for the failing health of my mother. So I requested a transfer to Accra in order to return home to be with my mother. She was proud of me, and happy to see me come back. She was worried that I was still not married. A few weeks before Independence was declared, she died. And with her passing the Gold Coast died as well.’ My mother would talk about her mother with such affection, it made me sad that I was born too late to see her or know her. Only the pictures of her that were left behind tell me how warm and gentle a woman she had been. Sarah bore Joseph fourteen children during their long marriage, but one died

2 Also spelt as Dwaben | Page 59 before birth and another daughter died very young. Hardly any mention of that miscarriage or the early death of her sister Ewurasi was made mention of in family folklore, except by my mother who talked about it, because she remembered the incidents clearly, as she was growing up as a teenage girl.

It was a dark period I suppose for Grandma, as it was also known that Grandpa was having an affair and had two sons out of wedlock. In the traditional context having other children outside marriage was considered acceptable; after all it was a polygamous society. Those two sons and their children later came and joined the family during traditional ceremonies, funerals and festivals, after Grandma died.

In the midst of these movements from Accra to Kumasi and back, Kofi Davies had met

Augusta before she moved away to Juaben. But still he persisted in trying to win her love. It took a decade of persistence for his professed claim of ‘love at first sight’ to be consummated. It was too late for Grandma Sarah to know her daughter had given birth to two boys. Grandma’s death created a vacuum in the house and Papa Joe, as he was affectionately called, cried for a year, while the death of Uncle Richard in Liberia made things even worse for him. But according to Mother, it was only when she gave birth to me that the dark cloud of sadness that hung over Grandpa’s head began to lift and the smile on his face returned.

My relationship with my mother was that of friendship between a mother and a son;

| Page 60 she taught me to dream, and I believe I taught her to be brave. My brother Jeff and I were the best students she ever had. In her waning years, she once told me, ‘You and

Jeff are proof that whatever I have taught people throughout my life time, has been worthwhile. See how easily you move between countries as if the whole world is yours.

Australia is too far away, Willie,’ she said at times in her twilight years, when I would come home from America or from Australia to Ghana to find out how she was faring.

I cannot continue without saying that there were many times when she felt disappointed that she was not able to do her best for all those who lived with her and the many students she had taught throughout her teaching career. But during her twilight years, she took comfort in the knowledge that Jeff and I had lived up to her expectations as a mother. It gave her the assurance that, in one way or another, those whose lives she touched and shared had in their own way lived up to her expectations.

She did her best, and that was her consolation. Even during difficult and challenging times - and there were many - she was able to console herself by reading inspirational stories, especially the Longman Series of short biographies, and the Bible, praying and believing that the best is always yet to come. Through it all she was able to smile at each new day and night as she said her prayers before she slept.

Auntie Teacher loved life to the fullest, the life of teaching, sharing, storytelling and encouraging others to strive for their educational goals. Even when she became a full- time seamstress in retirement, she converted her sewing practice into a school, where

| Page 61 she continued to impart her knowledge to more people. Through that experience we, her sons, became blessed with more sisters than we could count. We learnt many values that she held dear to her practice of teaching: punctuality, professionalism, perfection and efficiency.

How will I describe my mother, who was in fact my best friend? She was sweet, yet firm. As a teacher, mother and headmistress, she commanded a deep sense of respect from her students and teachers, while her regal personality naturally compelled students, and even strangers, to conduct themselves properly in her presence and on the streets. She had a elegant beauty about her, which, she confessed to me, was the reason why men of her generation were too intimidated to approach her for a date and as she was fond of joking, ‘that was the reason why it took so long to meet a potential suitor to marry’. But even though she did not realise her lifelong wish to have a family of her own - a traditional home with a husband as head of the family - she made up for it by taking on both roles the best way she could, as mother and father not only to my brother and myself, but to many of her nieces and nephews, the children of distant relatives and the many others who lived with her throughout her life.

We were blessed by her presence, her welcoming smile, her work ethic and leadership in everyday life. She was always giving us advice graced with Biblical and popular quotations. Her knack for giving advice and counsel was legendary. ‘Go and see Auntie

Teacher,’ people would say. ‘She will not disappoint you whenever you come to see her

| Page 62 with your troubles and concerns.’ During her retirement, former students, relatives and the children of her friends would come and go, to receive their share of moral tales and advice to guide their footsteps in life. ‘For some reason, your mother was always allowed to sit amongst the men, they treated her as an equal, she never cried at funerals.

She held her own like a man and gave direction and counsel to everyone who needed it.’ One of my mother’s male cousins remarked. ‘Your mother had the heart of a man,’ an older cousin said at my mother’s funeral. And I remember her once, when we were listening to Dr Busia on radio – the then Prime Minister speaking in his boring soft tone in Parliament – lifting her right forefinger and striking it through the air saying, ‘Ah, if only I had been born a man, I would be Prime Minister,’ and then she would briskly stroll around the living room rattling off a line or two by Churchill or Lincoln:

We will fight them on the beaches,

We will fight them in the sky

We will fight them, everywhere...

Or:

A country divided against itself can never stand...

She would recite the lines, imagining herself as a leader of a nation in a defining moment of history.

She inspired people with encouraging words at every opportunity. She would motivate you, urge you on, insisting that you finish whatever you started. She used the biographies of great historic figures as moral examples to motivate friends, the youth of

| Page 63 the neighbourhood, nieces, nephews and strangers to study, to learn a trade, to believe in their dreams and to aim high in life. ‘Dick Whittington, Lord Mayor of London, arrived in the city as a boy without his shoes and ended up filling the biggest shoes in the city,’ she would say, and follow it with something from the life of Abraham Lincoln or Booker T. Washington. ‘Up from slavery you mighty lot, Abraham Lincoln was born in a log cabin and ended up in the White House.’ And ‘Booker T. Washington was born a slave and became advisor to Presidents and founded his own institute.’

During her retirement years, Mother maintained a small but lucrative sewing and belt- making enterprise as a source of extra income. My brother and I were taught the craft and business of how belts are made. We learnt how to measure, mark and punch the holes after Mother had finished sewing and stitching them, sharing in the pride that her customers felt when they tied their belts around their waist.

A social historian of life in the Gold Coast and modern Ghana, my mother was very proud of her heritage and became the family genealogist, priding herself in knowing the history of the Okai clan from pre-colonial times until the present. She was also a scholar of the British royal family who read and narrated stories about English royal history and personalities to anyone in the family who was willing to listen. She earned the nickname ‘Queen Victoria’. She was a Christian - Methodist - of deep faith, who fervently read and quoted the Bible every day and a revolutionary in the field of women’s education who insisted on attending Achimota College in spite of her own

| Page 64 father’s attitude towards the education of women in those days.

After graduating from Achimota, she became a champion of women’s education in colonial and post-colonial Ghana. A true feminist, she would rather be a single mother than a mistress or a wife in an unhappy relationship. A leader of women in a world dominated by men, she was a headmistress who counselled her teachers how to teach their students and to uphold the values of the curriculum and highest standards of the

British and African educational system. A believer in political, social and personal freedom for Ghana and Africa, and in peace in the world through education, she never ceased hoping that people, nations and countries would find a way to resolve their differences by peaceful means. She had read the biography of Dr Aggrey, the co- founder and first Vice-Principal of Achimota School, and his statement that, ‘to educate a man is to educate an individual, but educate a woman is to educate a nation,’ really impacted her vision of herself. As a romantic, mother read and then re-read Charlotte

Bronte’s Jane Eyre countless times as well as the romantic thrillers of Barbara Cartland.

She would read them before going to sleep and would retell the stories and scenes to us.

I used to tease her about her smiling face while she was reading, but when I caught the reading bug and started reading English romance novels, it was wonderful to be smiling while we both read at night. It became our way of sharing stories, poems and literary ideas with each other as Jeff and I were growing up. We would spend many hours in the evening dreaming about how we would find romance on some distant shore, far away in an imagined country. Well, somehow through her, our romantic

| Page 65 dreams are now real. Jeff is married and lives in London with his wonderful wife and I found love in Australia, having courted my wife from around the world.

I remember my mother as a woman of great intellect who nurtured my dreams to travel, to write and to be an artist. I wouldn't have had any other woman for a mother than the woman everyone called the Great Auntie Teacher. My brother Jeff and I are eternally grateful to her for her love, her faith in our dreams and the hope in her smile.

As she said to me following Jeffrey’s wedding in October 2004, ‘Both of you are now married and that means I have finished what I came to do. The two of you can continue from here on.’

I will say that Auntie Teacher truly believed in the following quotations and lived her life by these sayings: At her funeral service, while I was reading the eulogy, I read the words of Longfellow as tears ran down my cheeks, and all of those who had heard her say those lines many times started reciting along with me. “The heights by which great men reached and kept were not attained by sudden flight, but they while their companions slept were toiling upwards through the night.”

Indeed, my mother was a great man who drank deep from the river of life and out of the many books of knowledge. Through the lives of the many sons and daughters who lived with her, she was able to pour out the waters of her soul as a teacher and mother, in all the memorable moments we were blessed to live with her. She lived to the fullest

| Page 66 and with her passing a major chapter in the history of the Okai clan came to an end. We are happy and blessed that she lived amongst us, we are better off for her life, and through her many people have learnt how to live and to love life to the fullest.

As I grow older, my memory of her becomes clearer in many more ways than I can write about. My relationship with her has matured and I seem to find myself remembering the moments we spent together chatting and dreaming of distant shores and the many wonderful things about life yet to come. My daily thoughts of her have become a self-sustaining source of inspiration and hope for the future. If anyone has influenced me, it is my mother who taught me how to pray and cradled me to sleep as a child. My mother, the woman everyone called Auntie Teacher.

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Chapter 6: The History of the Okai-Davies Family

The name Okai-Davies is my own invention; it was my way of acknowledging my mother’s family and accepting my father’s heritage as well. I grew up as an Okai and yet held on to the spirit of the Davies family as something that was uniquely mine.

In story after story, we were told about a young man, Nii Okai, who by the age of nineteen had started trading and soon became very rich. According to family folklore and the oral history surrounding his life, Nii Okai was a descendant of the great Ga king, Okai Kwei, said to have been one of the greatest leaders of the Ga people around the time of Dutch settlement in Accra. Whether this genealogical link is true or not, the oral history of the Okai family is rich with references that mix fable and facts to enhance the narrative value of storytelling. Okai Kwei is said to have been the best known king of Accra, and under his authoritarian rule and sovereign power the Ga kingdom both reached its height and began its downfall. Okai Kwei is remembered by the Ga in their oral history as a feared king, very fierce and unforgiving, and unrelenting in his grip on power. His mother Dobe Okaibi who ruled the Gas before Okai Kwei ascended the throne was known to have been a wicked woman. Okai Kwei fiercely resisted the encroachment of the Dutch on Accra and any attempts to monopolise trading along the coasts of Accra, as he wanted the Gas to maintain control of trade between the

Europeans and the tribes in the hinterlands.

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Especially during funerals when storytelling became part of the process of keeping awake, I would listen in on all the tales about the history of the Gas and the lives of deceased relatives. The elders of our family would say, ‘Okai Kwei was our ancestor,’ and the name Dobe Okaibi still resonates through the family line. In the time of war between the Ga and the Akwamu people, the name Okai was changed to Acheampong, an Akan name. The Gas adopted Akan names to trick the Akans into believing the Gas were one of them, before they attacked the Ashanti or Akwamu warriors.

However, regardless of the scanty evidence for this narrative that Nii Okai was a direct descendant of Okai Kwei, I believe that the Okai family history is somehow linked with the central history of the Ga people of Accra. The life of its great king Okai Kwei was recorded by Dutch writers in the late seventeenth century and, according to oral history, Nii Okai may as well be one of the many great, great grandsons of Okai Kwei.

Who knows? Genealogy is a science reserved for specialists but storytelling, like blood, runs through the family line. Like religious doctrine, storytelling requires us to believe in its authority and authenticity without questioning the source, especially when the story is told by an elder.

The narrative held that Nii Okai swam out to the British ships off the coast of Accra before the first ports were built, and one could imagine him figuring out how to trade with the British in sign language, as he did not speak English and had never had formal education. But he was intelligent, ambitious and enterprising. He quickly realised that it

| Page 70 would be best to become a trader, exporting food crops and selling the products the

British brought to the Coast to trade. Details about his life are blurred but we are given an impression of him trekking into the hinterlands as far as Kumasi, accompanied by a walking party of indentured men and women who carried the bales of woollen materials and provisions such as sugar, alcoholic drinks and arms, to sell to the Ashanti people. On his way back he brought food products such as palm nuts, fresh groundnuts, bags of cocoa beans, and yams to sell in Accra and trade with the British.

His wealth afforded him the right to marry early, and soon he was marrying and having children every year. Legend has it that by the time of his death at the age of thirty-six, he had thirty-six wives and thirty-eight children. My grandfather Joseph was born soon after Nii Okai died. Many of his other wives went on to remarry, but my great grandmother never remarried, making Grandfather her only child. My mother would tell me these stories about her grandfather, weaving them around the myth of his greatness and how he built the first stone house in Accra – which still stands today.

I have never visited that house, but whenever we drove by it, my uncle and or mother would point it out. It sits across the street from James Fort, facing the sea.

‘He was so rich every mother wanted their daughter to be married to him, but he died too soon even to see all his children grow up,’ Mother said. Her stories about her grandfather’s larger than life personality were linked to his ability to speak many local languages and his bravery as a trader. He would set out early before dawn and venture into the wilderness on foot. Tales were told about how he battled with mythical powers

| Page 71 of the night, fought with spirits, consulted oracles and paid for sacrifices to the chief sorcerer of the Ga people and for blessings on his many journeys.

Later on there were claims that the source of his money was linked to supernatural and fetish powers, which only he knew how to pacify. So, after his death when the spirit of the god of wealth had not been fed, it sought retribution by tarnishing the lives of many of his children. Mother told me that some of her uncles became alcoholics while others died mysteriously. Luckily for me, I rescued the only surviving picture of Nii Okai.

When I look at his face, I wonder what kind of a man he could have been. My knowledge of pre-colonial times is clouded in superstition, mythology, oracles and a spiritual narrative that is made porous by the lack of text-based information. Oral traditions are easily embellished with fiction, and any fact-based knowledge of that period can only be gleaned through the tales that our parents left behind. Those of us who listened to the stories about our ancestors, and made it our duty to chronicle the memories, feel grateful that our immediate forebears told us about their parents and grandparents.

I grew up aware that the lost world our ancestors had inhabited in a pre-colonial past had given way to a colonial culture. By observing the lives of those who lived by the rules and social codes of that immediate past, I learnt how to imagine what it may have been like living in Accra at the dawn of colonial rule. The only bridge to that world is the narrative bridge of memory and story. To this day I walk around bearing images of

| Page 72 a world steeped in the spirit of gods, mythical travellers, tribal crusades, festivals, drumming and dancing, spiced with imaginings of a blissful time that was free from the commercial and political burdens of being African in our age.

Beyond the story of the Okai family the narrative of the Davies family is equally rich in fable and folklore and as important to me as well. The story about my father’s ancestry came to me piece by piece. Some of the stories were imparted through my mother, then through relatives on my father’s side who felt it was their duty to retain the family link.

By the time of my father’s death the story had come full circle. I was able to meet many of my paternal relatives, and even though at my father’s funeral I was less than sober most of the time, my hungry mind was alert for any story or reference linking me to the

Davies lineage.

The story unfolds through the life of an elegant man who, I was told, arrived in West

Africa from America, after the end of slavery, as part of a ship of freed African slaves who chose to return to Africa following the Emancipation Proclamation. Some said they arrived in Sierra Leone, others said the ship arrived in Liberia. In any case, he arrived in

Africa with his parents at a young age; he saw the opportunity of trading, and by the age of twenty-four, he was travelling across the West Coast of Africa as a trader and probably a shipping agent or a clerk.

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‘He always had on a well tailored suit and was tall, fair in complexion with curly hair,’ I often heard. ‘He dressed like Abraham Lincoln, with a tall hat and a long black suit and the women loved him.’ So Mr Davies decided to have children wherever his ship arrived. He had children in Sierra Leone, Liberia, the Gold Coast and Nigeria.

Some said he visited his family in the Gold Coast as often as he could, whenever his ship stopped over. I cannot imagine how he managed to maintain multiple families along the West Coast, visiting whenever he could and, probably, linking all of the families about together with stories about Abraham Lincoln and about of his life in

America and the journey back to Africa.

The evidence of his life story and the other families he maintained in other parts of

Africa was confirmed when I was teaching African cinema at the New School for Social

Research, in New York, in the early1990s. I had a student by the name of Lamide

Davies. Immediately I became curious.

‘How did you get the name Davies?’ I asked.

‘It is a long story,’ she replied with a broad smile.

‘Well, mine too has a long story behind it,’ I replied.

We both laughed suspecting that it was the same story.

‘Well, my father is Nigerian and my mother is English, but I did not get the name

Davies from my mother’s side. My father is called Davies.’

‘Mine too,’ I added.

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‘Anyway, the story as my father told me was that there was this tall man from Sierra

Leone who came from America after the slaves were freed. He arrived with his parents as a teenager and later on worked as a merchant of goods imported from England, trading along the West Coast of Africa. Wherever he went, especially in British West

Africa, he had a family, to whom he told stories about his life in America as a young boy and about Abraham Lincoln.’ As she was narrating this, I broke out into a big laugh.

‘Why are you laughing?’ she asked.

‘Because my story is the same story,’ I replied.

Lamide’s story about our shared ancestry gave me the validity I needed to put flesh on the skeleton sketches of the life of Mr Davies. Between imagination and history, I imagined that the Davies family had migrated back to Africa, probably because there was a living predecessor who went to America as a slave and kept the family memory of Africa alive. Probably they were slaves on the Davies plantation, thus taking on the name. Also, because of his complexion, he could have been fathered by his owner. I imagined that Mr Davies might as a young boy, have experienced the euphoria that came with the declaration of the Emancipation Proclamation. Freed African slaves who chose to return to Africa came with a sense of nostalgia and the dream of freedom to settle and live, free from oppression.

It was through the thread of his stories that he managed to keep his families in West

Africa together. His absence as a father could have been offset with his tales about

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American life, his youthful years in the land of bondage, and the miracle of freedom.

I can speculate how he got the name Davies; he must have had a paternal grandparent who was a Davies of Scottish background, in view of references to his complexion as being fair, curly hair and light-skinned. He may have worked on a plantation with his parents, and experienced the Civil War as a boy growing up in America. Based on the stories that were told about him, I believe he was old enough, when he came back to

Africa with his parents, to have had vivid stories to tell about it and to link the narrative of his later life to his experiences as a teenager in America. He may have seen or heard a lot about Abraham Lincoln and hence modelled his own image on the way Lincoln dressed. If his story lived on through his children and great grandchildren and was handed down to us, it seems that his life as a man, a lady’s man, a father and a sea merchant, made an indelible impression on those he met, loved and had children with.

He must have been a captivating storyteller. I imagine him weaving the narrative of his life, told in the cadences of a Southern accent, colourful in its descriptive nuances which resonated with the echoes of times and places only he had seen. If only a picture of him had survived, it would bring the story to a full circle in my imagination as a descendant of such a legendary character. No one knows how many children he had along the coast of West Africa, but the name has survived and, in all the English speaking states of

West Africa, there is a Davies family somewhere, still telling their children the story about the original Mr Davies.

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For a semester, I built a friendship with Lamide forged around our emotional link to the life of a man whom we never knew but whose genes we both believed ran through us.

She volunteered to be my assistant, and I always looked forward to seeing her in class.

The trail of the story goes cold after that. I lost contact with Lamide and no one knows how Mr Davies died, nor do we know anything about his parents or where or how he ended up. But his story lives on through the many descendants who pride themselves on recounting the tale to whoever is eager enough to listen. Not much is said about his children, nor did I learn much about my father’s own father. But everyone who could tell me what I needed to know about the colourful life of my father did their best to keep the link between Mr Davies, the shipping clerk from America, and Mr Davies my father: I suspect because they were both colourful and enterprising men.

I have sought to find the genetic links to the name Davies by asking other Davies I have met in America, England and Australia if by any chance our name might be linked to a common ancestor. I have met Davies from Liberia, Australia and England who were either Scottish or Welsh. While in secondary school I had a friend by the name of

Odarlie Davies who had relatives in Sierra Leone and knew where my father’s house in

Asylum Down was located, and once walked me there to show me where it was. It was therefore the lives of these two men, my mother’s grandfather, Nii Okai the trader, and my father’s grandfather, Mr Davies the shipping clerk and merchant, whose blood runs through my veins; that inspired me to link the names together and call myself Kabu

Okai-Davies.

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Chapter 7: A Name that Symbolises Money

My awareness of a symbolic name attached to my traditional name came slowly to through a series of references. Sometimes it was said in gentle awe as a way of prophesying that one day, ‘Kabu will become very rich.’ Sometimes the other children in the family took pleasure in teasing me about it.

For a while I was confused about whether to accept it or reject it. Eventually when I grew older enough to understand its symbolic connotations, I secretly revelled in it and what it began to mean to me. What it actually means, and how it is pronounced, is totally different from what its literal translation and colloquial pronunciation imply; it is an appellation which gives symbolic significance to a person’s life.

In my case, it is Kabu Ofetoto. In its traditional meaning, it connotes the idea of developing and having blisters. In its literal translation it means (for lack of a better translation) vaginal explosion. So the kids of my age in the family took turns in laughing at me and enjoying the thrill of saying it over and over to make me feel bad about it.

One day I protested to my mother, insisting that I drop that name. It was then that she decided it was time to tell me the story behind the appellation.

‘No, you cannot drop the appellation to your name.’ She laughed in between her words.

‘Your father chose to bless you with it, so that you will live abundantly for the rest of your life.’

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‘Then why is everyone laughing at me?’

‘Let them laugh. One day you will be the one laughing,’ she assured me.

‘Your father’s people, the Ada and Krobo people, have a story about a man called Kabu, who became so rich that he was the richest man in the whole town; he had money from everywhere. He was a great traveller and a trader, and owned great lands, he had many wives and many children, and farms, cattle, goat and poultry as well. But there were no banks in those days, so he kept all his money under his bed, in the ground. This caused the money to get damp in the trunks and chests in which he kept his jewels, paper money, documents, silver, gold and coins from around the world. His money got so damp it developed blisters from the soggy atmosphere of the ground. So, once a year, he dug up all his treasures with the help of his servants and opened them up for the heat of the sun to get the dampness out of the papers and clean all the coins so that they could be stored again. So your father decided that if there was any spiritual gift he would like to bestow on you, it would be the blessing of infinite wealth and the gift of making and keeping money. You will be the richest in the family and I pray that you share your wealth and prosperity to all with whom you come in contact.’

Her words appealed to me. I spent a while thinking about them and a smile ran across my face. My mother was delighted and I could hear her giggling. ‘Your father could have chosen the symbol of a warrior, a holy symbol, a sea image or a lion or forest beast such as an elephant. But he chose Kabu Ofetoto. You will have so much money it will burst out with blisters and you will flourish beyond measure.’

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After my mother explained this to me, I felt secure about the name. I repeated it to myself many times, and as I began to accept it, I started to ignore the teasing of my cousins. However, suddenly they stopped and the name changed to become a sort of affirmation of power and a term of endearment. It took on its original meaning in my mind and it became a self fulfilling prophecy of its own. My mother would always say,

‘As for you, there is money luck always over you. Whenever I need money to pay your fees or buy something for you, it just comes to me, it just shows up. You are indeed

Kabu Ofetoto.’

There is significance in a name; in some cultures we end up believing in the name and enabling others to believe in our names as well. I have come to accept and to believe in all my names, the history behind them, their symbolism, the implications and the responsibility my names and even nicknames have placed on me. If names are things or the representation of a persona or an experience, then it is our responsibility to give them meaning, and that is the story of my life.

I remember the very early stages of my life soon after my mother and I came back to

Ghana from England. I was still speaking English with my mother and it was a weekend, Saturday I presume, when all the family and the extended Okai clan had assembled to celebrate the Homowo Festival – the Festival of Twins. I was about five years old. One of my cousins, Nii Amah, had taken me to the back of the house in the alley way with the intention of teaching me how to speak Ga.

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He started by explaining the meaning of my name ‘Ofetoto’ and its vulgar connotation.

‘Say it after me,’ he would say, ‘Kabu, Ofetoto. Toto means a woman’s vaginal parts,’ and he demonstrated to me where it was supposedly located. I knew there was something indecent about his intent to teach me words in Ga by starting with obscene words. He rattled off a series of phrases, words and statements which were obviously vulgar and full of curse words. When I eventually came back into the family fold, I went straight to my grandfather, patriarch of the family, and asked him. ‘What do these Ga words mean?’

‘Who taught you these words?’ the old man yelled out, rousing the attention of everyone gathered in the family compound house to prepare for the Homowo festivities. I pointed at Nii Armah, who was about five years older than me.

Immediately he was chased out of the house and Grandpa called Nii Armah’s father,

Uncle Fifi, and admonished him for his son’s behaviour. Soon, Nii Armah was apprehended and brought back. He received a terrible beating for a boy of his age that also made me cry, believing it was my fault. My mother consoled me, the incident was soon forgotten, but it stayed with me for quite some time. It was after this incident that the other boys in the family rallied around, repeating my name, with the girls laughing in tow. However, choosing to accept the meaning my mother gave to my symbolic name gave me faith, knowing that whatever happened, I would have a secret means by which I would always have money and that this power had been bestowed on me by the ancestral spirit of the mythical and legendary Kabu.

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Chapter 8: Second Chance at Love: Enter the Rev. Nii Commey Okai-Tetteh

By the time I was thirteen I could reflect on the early years of my life, which came back to me in flashes as if they were mirages of memory. I remember crying a lot as a little boy, until one day, at the age of seven, I stopped. The idea of innocence vanished at that moment. Was I now free to face life in spite of myself or was it a realisation that I had no choice but to face life for what it is or what it would become? I have often asked myself - what if my stepfather was my natural father; or, what if Kofi Davies had married my mother and lived happily ever after with her? What would it be like to live with him? One never knows these things. However, the questions of life are sometimes answered as revelations only in hindsight. To this day my whole life puzzles me, it eludes me in many ways, and yet, I wonder what would have become of me without the riddles of the past.

My stepfather was a man of predictable ways. Mother knew from the start he was not her type. When Mr Tetteh first saw Augusta, she was on her way from school and the first thing he told her after introducing himself was, ‘I will be leaving for England very soon and I hope that you would come and join me there as my wife.’

‘If you need to go to England to prove to me that you are worthy enough to marry me, then you are not,’ Augusta replied.

‘I am going to London to study my accountancy,’ he said.

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‘Oh, to study accounting, you want to be an accountant.’ She tried to re-phrase the statement, which immediately gave her inkling to what kind of a man he was and his level of education. He walked with her all the way home, ‘sheepishly’ Mother would say, ‘to gain my attention as we walked, but I was not interested in him. I suspected he had been watching me for a while and done his homework to learn my background. He knew exactly where I lived, who my father was and that I went to Achimota. He was in a suit, as if he was on his way to an important engagement. I asked him where was he off to and he told me that was his everyday attire and he was also going to study to be a

Reverend. I just nodded, knowing very well he was dressed up to make an impression on me. I didn’t see him again until the week before he left. He came to our house to inform me he was going to London and I wished him luck.’

Mr Tetteh never experienced what it meant to be a Ghanaian. Although he was born, grew up and shaped by the Gold Coast way of life in the heart of Accra, in his mind it was better to be under British rule than to surrender his fate to an African leader. He saw himself, like many from the colonial era as a British citizen; he had bought into the myth of Empire. In a symbolic way, the coming of independence was a bad omen to him; he knew he had to leave before Ghanaians could destroy all that the British had done for the country. ‘Look at how you Ghanaians have destroyed your country,’ he would say to us when he came to visit in the seventies and eighties. The uncertainty of self-government was, for him more dangerous than leaving the Gold Coast to start life

| Page 84 all over in another country he had never seen. In his mind England was his homeland.

So in 1956 Mr Tetteh left for England to make London his home for the rest of his life.

The story of Mr Tetteh’s life is not complete without mentioning the fact that his father, the Honourable Okyeame3 Commey Tetteh, was a linguist to the Ga Mantse – Chief of the Gas – during his professional years. I met him many times after Jeffrey was born and Mother would visit him occasionally to update him on the relationship and the challenges of their marriage. He would listen with keen interest and respond to Mother in a tone that was rich in texture, even in temper and glazed with words of wisdom and encouragement. He was very subtle in his counselling, and the deliberateness of his speech was evidence of his experience as a linguist at court. He spoke in elegant tones, in the nuance and proverbial adages of the Ga language and would pause after each sentence to allow a moment of reflection on his words before whoever was listening to him. In retirement he served as a mediator of family disputes and a marriage guidance counsellor. There was always a stream of people coming to see him, but he would stop everything he was doing or ask his guest to excuse him whenever Mother with Jeff – who was then a baby - and I arrived to call on him on our way from Church or on

Jeffrey’s birthday or in the new year for Mother to extend her best wishes as a daughter- in-law. Secretly I admired him for the way he cast his soft and gentle gaze towards me and would shake my hands with a firmness to assure me he cared about me too.

He was tall and slim, always had his traditional attire of cloth over his shoulders and held firmly to a walking stick.

3 Okyeame, means linguist, interpreter and public voice of the King at court. | Page 85

A traditionalist and a man of simple means, Okyeame Commey Tettah married women who were industrious. Mr Tetteh’s mother lived across the road and we would also visit her after spending time with Mr Tetteh’s father, the Okyeame. Years later, we were told she was the one from whom Mr Tetteh inherited his temper. She was a woman with a fierce looking face, who was very agile and always busy around the house.

Whenever we arrived she would announce to the household that, ‘Our lady is here, set everything straight and bring her my private stool and a cup with fresh water.’ Her special nickname for Mother was ‘Mammy England.’ Mr Tetteh’s mother would always ask, ‘When are you going back to rejoin my son?’ or ‘When is my son coming back to

Ghana to build me a house? England is a place of no return, it takes away our children and I will die and my own gentleman son will not be here even to bury me,’ she also said. Mother would assure her not to worry, and even make suggestions that one day she would visit England; a thought which aroused great laughter and mutual affection between mother-in-law and daughter-in-law, at least for a moment. Even then at that early age between five and eight, I would watch, with keen interest at everyone and everything going on around me, as if I was instinctively documenting these family encounters, mapping out their structure and intricate interactions and domestic occurrences into a visual library, while knowing very well that I was not a descendant of the Tetteh line, but a Davies. At the end of each of the visits and after an exchange of presents and nice words to assure her of mother’s continued love for her son, Mr

Tetteh’s mother would gift us with a basket of kenke and a bowl of fried fish with stew.

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It was her profession to make and sell kenke – a traditional corn dough which is rolled up into a hand size ball, wrapped in cornhusks and boiled. It is the staple diet of the Ga people of Accra, and is best when eaten with fried or roasted fish and hot chilli sauce called shitor, but goes well with peanut soup with lots of fish and meat in it, or with fish stew. For many years, even to this day, the Tetteh’s house has always been referred to as Kenke House.

After the emotional wounds that followed the disappointing romance with Kofi Davies had healed, Augusta vowed never to get involved with men again. However, the year after I was born, Mr Tetteh came back to Ghana. It could be said he returned with the purpose of fulfilling his promise to Augusta. But he was too late. Kofi Davies had already snatched the virgin moment and left the family wondering why Mr Tetteh hadn’t stayed in touch. Maybe Mother would have waited for him and history would have been written by someone else. In spite of himself and the deep disappointment of a dream wife-to-be, Mr Tetteh forced himself to believe that he was still in love.

Consistent with his personality to prove himself by keeping up appearances, he went on to carry out his promise. He was determined to marry Mother by any means, despite his sense of feeling cheated because Mother had had a relationship while he was away.

This was to be a sour mark on their relationship, even though Mr Tetteh had a son with a woman whose name and identity were never mentioned. In his mind, that was an

| Page 87 accident but Mother’s relationship with Kofi Davies was intentional. Despite the double standards, Mother was willing to give Mr Tetteh a chance, and Mr Tetteh himself had something to prove; maybe he wanted to make up for something he lacked, and perceived that Mother could offer it to him.

Mother’s first precondition for a relationship with Mr Tetteh was as follows.

‘You see this boy sitting on my lap?’ Mother said to him with a stern warning in her eyes. ‘I don’t care what you think. Wherever I go, he comes with me. I will not leave him behind, if I am to come to London and live with you, he is coming with me.’

‘Your child is my child. I will love him like my own flesh and blood,’ Mr Tetteh said.

After my place in the new relationship was established, preparations began for the traditional engagement and marriage of Augusta Okai to Mr Tetteh. Mother and we left for London a few months after the engagement when I was one.

My stepfather was a giant of a man who had a volcanic temper to match his size, but when he was calm he could be docile, meek and ambivalent. He had a smile that revealed a mischievous gap in his front teeth and wore spectacles that made him look like a ruthless dentist. Yet by virtue of his uneducated emotions and his conflicted persona, he begged for affection and attention. In any case as I grew older and realised his temper was a bluff, although it looked scary watching him from a distance, I developed an attitude of indifference and a benign sense of detachment, and viewed him as nothing more than the man who married my mother. He was not worthy of my

| Page 88 affection in any way, even if I had to consider him as my stepfather. In my mind, he was not my stepfather; he was a step – away from being a stranger who visited us once a year or every other year because of Mother and Jeff.

Memory has a way of beckoning, to compel us to revisit the past. Some moments are easy to recollect, others require effort and some we block from the fading screen of the mind, to free ourselves from the tragedy of loss, the pain of sin and the riddles of regret.

Because of him, I believe, I blocked from my memory everything I experienced in

London as a child, except the dreams that came to me after Mother and I returned to

Ghana two and a half years later. Fear, sadness and emotional pain characterised my mother’s stay with him in London. There were awkward attempts at romance and angry displays of affection which ended up in embarrassing experiences Mother told me about when I grew older.

‘Mr Tetteh was surely a simple man, who overdressed to compensate for his lack of education and ‘inferiority complex,’ Mummy would say later. He spent heavily on expensive shoes, well-tailored dark suits and expensive men’s accessories, thinking he could buttress his sense of self-worth with the high price of his clothes.

I never allowed myself to care about him, although after a while, I accepted him as my brother’s father. I don’t know if I could have loved him, but all the same my life story would be incomplete without the larger-than-life role he played in shaping my

| Page 89 emotional identity, my attitude towards marriage and why it took me a long time to marry and become a father. Mother would say to my brother and me, ‘I was never lucky in love. But I hope you two find good women who will love you and share your lives with you.’ Jeff and I were to hear these words over and over, rephrased to mask our mother’s sense of regret for having had us with our respective fathers. Yet she also said it as a way of assuring us that she had already sacrificed her life for us with the hope that we would be fortunate enough to experience the joy and beauty of marriage as she had once dreamt it would be. And indeed she lived long enough to see the two of us married before she passed away.

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Chapter 9: England in My Dreams

My memories have become a magical game of hide and seek between myself as author of my memoirs and as reader of what is written. Am I imagining the past? I do not know whether my past is imagining me or my memoirs are remembering me.

Sometimes I am at a loss for words because the memory through which I glean the past has become blurred by the fear that I may not remember what is buried within the deep recesses of my mind.

I do not remember my days in England, but the feeling of living in a world as a child that was totally different from Ghana resides deep inside me. Without the many pictures of Mother and me in the snow, or in front of Buckingham Palace, Piccadilly

Circus, St. Martins Church, Trafalgar Square, without the wedding pictures and more,

England would have faded from my mind without a trace. Whether I intentionally forgot those years because of Mr Tetteh or whether I was just too young to absorb the experiences of London, I do not know, but I do remember the feeling of excitement that surrounded the announcement that Mother and I were leaving for England. Even at the age of one and a bit I remember the tailor taking my measurements to sew my new suits for the long journey. I remember the bow tie Mother put around my neck and I can still recall the emotion of excitement, glimpses of happiness surrounding the weeks before our departure, flashes of infant joy and the feeling of being special amongst the children in the family, because I was going to England.

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Everything else after that vanishes until I returned to Ghana two and half years later, and by the age of ‘four and a half,’ as Mother always stated, I went to boarding school.

My memories of England are based on the stories Mother told me as I grew older and began to ask her questions about our years living in England and with the man I had called Daddy. At night, I had dreams of England: the snow falling, leaves changing colour, the long pavements, the sound of church bells, cars, voices of English speaking people, train stations, the red buses, the red post boxes, the rains, the songs of

Christmas, the feeling of endless seas, the round holes of ships’ windows and that feeling of drowning. Mother said that on our way back to Ghana, I climbed over the rails of the ship, almost falling over and nearly losing myself to the waves. A man grabbed me and saved my life. Mother was so terrified she always recalled it with a deep sense of dread. She recalls the man telling her, ‘Take care of this boy, he is really determined to climb high.’

England continued to hold sway over our imaginations for a long time. Daddy, who was now a British citizen, wrote to Mother very often, scribbling angry letters and carrying on long drawn-out arguments by mail. We talked about London a lot, and

Mother would remember her days in England with Daddy, how she would drop me off at my nanny’s and head on to sewing school by train and bus. While in England she could not find employment as a teacher so she decided to study dressmaking, knitting

| Page 92 and crochet. Sometimes she would go window-shopping or visit Sister Beryl who was now in London studying banking on a scholarship from the Bank of Ghana.

Sister Beryl was Mother’s adopted daughter who had lived most of her life with Mother as she grew up, becoming in a way Mother’s first daughter. Sister Beryl has won a scholarship to stay Banking in London and her presence in London at the time was like a miracle that counted so much when we all there together. For some reason, Mr Tetteh had begun to feel uncomfortable about Mother’s presence in his life. She made him feel inadequate, and his limited education heightened his sense of failure as a man. Mother recounted the whole experience to me so many times over, as if to remind me of the connection and bond we had together as mother and son when we were living together in England.

‘We left early in the morning for Takoradi from Accra by boat,’ she would start the story, ‘on our way to board the ship for England. For two months we sailed through night and day, only stopping at Las Palmas, until we got to Liverpool. And there he stood, lanky and pale, in a grey suit, waiting by the deck when we arrived. He helped me with our luggage and I felt very awkward. Here we were, meeting Mr Tetteh, whom

I didn’t really know very well, except for what he had told me about himself and what others had told me about him. It dawned on me in Liverpool that I had come to

England not because of him, but because through him God had brought me to the UK to fulfil my dream to be in England. We hardly spoke much on the long train ride from

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Liverpool to London and I kept assuring myself, “God is with me, God will take care of everything.” It was dark, and the weather was blowing its chilly winds across my brow,’ Mother said. “This is autumn, you wait and see, the real winter will come, you will cry even without trying to,” Mr Tetteh replied. What a way to welcome me,

Mummy thought. ‘Is this a sign of things yet to come?’

‘A few days after we had arrived in London, Mr Tetteh decided to show off the number of suits he owned. He started emptying his wardrobe, laying on the bed all the suits he had. For almost thirty minutes he displayed the shirts, suits, jackets, trousers and shoes all over and around the bed. He kept rearranging them in different patterns and hanging them around the bedpost in awkward places. I ventured to ask him, “Nii, have you misplaced something?” I was wondering if he was missing something in particular and if I could help him to find it. “I want you to see how many suits I have. I am not one of those men who borrow suits and come to Ghana to show off. I have my own wardrobe. How many men in Ghana today can say they have as many suits as I have?”

Mr Tetteh remarked.

‘“You mean you wanted me to see the suits you have?”’ Mother asked.

‘“Can’t you see for yourself?” Mr Tetteh responded.

‘“J. W. Okai has fifty-two suits. After all, he is a merchant of woollen materials. I have seen men in suits all my life. If after all these years that you have been in London, I had come to meet you as a man who had completed his education and qualified as an accountant, you would have made a better impression on me than displaying your

| Page 94 clothes before me.”’ Mother remarked. ‘Those were the words that sealed the fate of the marriage.’

‘For two months Mr Tetteh did not speak to me. He would bang the door on his way out, come home late, push you out of his way, wouldn’t give me pocket money, so I had to write home asking Grandpa to send me remittances for my daily expenses. He completely changed and life became a miserable experience from that day on. I had destroyed his sense of self-worth which was defined by the material things he had acquired, and he never forgave me for it. He would leave very, very early for Anglican

Mass and since it was a one bedroom flat, he wouldn’t mind that I was asleep and would noisily dress and wouldn’t bother to tell me he was leaving. I felt trapped and at his mercy. London ceased to be home for me. All I was thinking about was how to go back to Ghana. Mr Tetteh had my passport, supposedly for safe-keeping. You were too young to know what was going on and you would throw tantrums, cry or refuse to sleep, which made matters worse. You were going through your terrible twos and threes, that didn’t help the situation. Every time Daddy picked you up from day care, you would come home crying. When I was late coming home during the Christmas season of high sales, when we had to work extra hours sewing, I would sometimes realise that you had cried yourself to sleep.

‘Months went by and I had learnt my way around London by bus and tube,’ Mother would say. ‘I made friends and tried to have a life outside of home. There were days when Daddy and I would never talk or exchange glances. I brooded and soon the glow

| Page 95 on my face waned into a deep sense of sadness and regret. It was a loveless life. I tried my best to be cheerful when I could, and you were my only companion and confidant. I would speak to you and tell you stories and children’s rhymes and would help you learn your recitations. Daddy saved enough money and bought a T.V. set for Christmas.

I hoped that life would change at home and maybe we could live together as a family.

Soon you knew all the commercials and would say them while you were having a bath.

Sometimes I would ask him permission to go and see Sister Beryl or visit Brother David, who was then working with the Ghana High Commission.’

Uncle David was Mother’s older brother. He had eloped with another woman to

London soon after Independence, leaving behind his wife and two daughters. He was in a de facto relationship with an ‘illiterate’ woman who had ‘bewitched’ him with alcohol and turned him into a drunkard, the family chroniclers said. She could not even pronounce Uncle David’s name correctly. She called him ‘Lafity’. Uncle David’s story is a saga which ended in a tragic death through liver failure in the early eighties.

However, while he was in London, he was the life of the Ghanaian party scene and would drink whisky and gin as if they were beer. Mother would visit him on the weekends and they would lament their lot as children of JW Okai, who by some mystery of life now found themselves in England living with spouses whom they never would have imagined for themselves. Uncle David’s wife used alcohol to control him, and Daddy used fear, intimidation and physical domination to control Mother’s life.

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Years later, Mother would show Jeff and me her passport pictures, as she reflected on her years in England. ‘This is how I looked when I was leaving for London. I was happy, beautiful and full of hope. Now see how I looked when I was leaving London. I looked sad, depressed and afraid. The light in my eyes had gone out. If I had known what I know now, maybe I would have managed to live with him. He was a man who needed a woman to prop up his ego and indulge his whims. I was too intelligent for that. And I paid very dearly for not realising what kind of man he was.’

‘Did he ever hit you?’ I once asked. ‘No he never did,’ Mother responded. ‘But he was a bully. He would threaten me and throw fits, sometimes in public, and cause a scene or raise his voice at me at the bus stop or in shops. There were times when he would call me names or make fun of me in order to embarrass me in front of company. He would show off in front of other Ghanaian women hoping to make me jealous and I would just ignore him. In less than six months after arriving in London, I began to plot how to leave him. I began to turn inward and I froze. I became silent and it made him so uncomfortable. Eventually I told him if he wouldn’t learn how to treat you like his own son and love me as his wife, then I would have to leave and go back to Ghana.

Not long after that, he proposed marriage, not in the romantic way you might imagine, and without waiting for me to say yes, he informed me of the date of the wedding and the church where it would take place. What could I say? According to tradition I was already his wife anyway.

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‘The wedding was lavish and almost all the Ghanaian community in London heard about it and many were invited. I wasn’t happy, you kept crying and that irritated

Daddy. So I gave you to Brother David who held you, and his wife comforted you throughout the day. We said our vows and the audience applauded. I put myself into a trance, to get myself to carry on with the ceremony. Sister Beryl looked beautiful and was one of the bridesmaids. Our honeymoon was in London of course. The following week we tried to be a couple and to act as a family. He took us out on a long day of sight-seeing. That was when he took pictures of us in front of Buckingham Palace,

Trafalgar Square and Piccadilly Circus. By the end of the day you were very tired and we carried you home. That was the last time I could remember having smiled at him, hoping it would lead our relationship to a place of joy, but it didn’t. Soon after he did something so hurtful, if there was any love left in me it vanished that day.’

‘What did he do Mummy?’ I asked. ‘Well, I guess you are a man now and I might as well tell you.’ She vividly remembered the day and the exact moment. She paused and continued her story with measured words. “Daddy and I were in an intimate way, doing what married couples do in bed. You woke up and came into our room to ask for milk. I thought he was going to take you to the kitchen and give you milk. But no, he rather accused you of being a naughty boy and smacked you in the head.’

“‘Go and sleep, you naughty boy,” he screamed at you.’

“‘Nii, he is only a baby boy for Christ’s sake!” I yelled back at him. I was so furious at him that night and if there was any emotion of desire for him left, it froze at that

| Page 98 moment. I got up and took you away from him and spent the rest of the night with you.

“You can go ahead and marry your son,” he insinuated. I ignored his remark and from then on, I only shared his bed with him because I was his wife, not because I loved him.

‘The tension continued. Life descended into a long drawn out routine. We lived, we went to work, I took you to your nanny and he brought you home. Mr Tetteh and I lived our lives as if we were total strangers. I never asked him where he was going and when he would return. We lived in silence and hardly said anything meaningful to each other. I did the cooking, he gulped it down, washed the dishes and off he went, sometimes to his next job or to a Ghanaian party or to church. I never asked him about his studies again. When he felt like it, he would bring me a gift, or give me pocket money. He did the food shopping when I gave him a list of things to buy. On the weekend he washed his clothes and I ironed them for him. He would accuse me of using my humming as a crafty and devious way of insulting him while ironing his clothes. So I stopped.

‘Once I saw a bag of clothes with a painter’s outfit in them, as if they were his work clothes and shoes. I suspected he worked as a painter in a hospital even though he told me he worked in the hospital as a medical assistant, implying to me that one day he would become a doctor, which I ignored. Occasionally I would have tea with my

English friends from sewing school or go visit Beryl or David. Secretly, I was trying to plot my way out of the marriage. Before mid-1963 I realised I was with child again. Jeff

| Page 99 had been conceived. I knew that if I was not happy, it might affect the child, so I gathered the courage to tell Mr Tetteh, that it would be good for me to go back to Ghana and have the child. He agreed as if it was a relief. We were completely at the opposite ends of the relationship. After two and a half years in England, you and I left for Ghana with Jeff almost four months old in the womb. I had lost weight and any resemblance to my former self. I looked more like a widow than a bride.

‘There were times when I thought I should have moved out of his flat and stayed with

Sister Beryl, until I could find my way around England and start life all over again on my own. Maybe the story would now be different. But if I had any home, it was in

Ghana. I missed my father, I missed teaching and I didn’t have the courage to believe I could survive on my own as a single parent with you as a child and Jeff on the way, in cold England. Going back home was my best option, and for the last six months I thought about nothing but home. I first told Beryl and David of my intention. They were supportive and that allowed me to face up to Mr Tetteh and tell him I wanted to go home. Of course, he knew the marriage was not working. We were two different people. He always said that I looked down on him, I was snobbish, I was too educated, always reading to make him feel bad about not being able to study and thinking that I was better than him. It didn’t matter how many times I tried to assure him that all I wanted was his respect and kindness. But it was too late. I had to leave him before my inner sadness and fear could hurt my new baby. Grandpa sent us the money and we

| Page 100 booked our passage. Soon we were on our way back to Liverpool to board the ship to

Ghana.

‘Looking back to those days, knowing what I know now, if I had just indulged him, praised him, made him feel secure about his shortcomings and maybe treated him as someone who needed me to guide him, if I had shown him how to grow up emotionally and intellectually, then maybe I could have salvaged the marriage. He wasn’t a wicked man, he was petty minded and used his mean ways to assert himself. Even in his rage, when I stood up to him and looked at him in the eye, he would immediately withdraw and turn around. But I grew tired of it. I lost faith in him and maybe I failed to realise that he wanted me to stand up to him and assert myself. By the time I figured it out it was too late. Leaving him gave me back my sense of freedom. As women, we were brought up to succumb to the will of our husbands. I grew up dreaming of marrying a man in my own intellectual circles, probably a judge or a lawyer. I spent most of my money buying house wares and preparing for the day I would marry and make a beautiful home. I could have made Mr Tetteh into the man he wanted to be, but how could I have done it when he was emotionally so cruel to me? Maybe I should have been born a little later. Educated women these days have more freedom to assert themselves. My being meek, dependent and submissive to him and showing vulnerability in London allowed him to act like a bully. My silence isolated and annoyed him. Seeing me reading all the time reminded him of what he should have been doing with his life, but couldn’t. He had dropped out of school and here I was

| Page 101 graduating with my Professional Certificate in Design and Dressmaking. He felt bad, but I didn’t care. He came to the graduation with you, and everyone one kept telling him how good a student and a person I was and that upset him, so we sat on the train going home, silent and detached.’

‘Mother, don’t feel guilty. You don’t have to blame yourself for not having a good man in your life,’ I would tell her. But I knew it bothered her. She would reminisce about the past with a feeling of regret. ‘Never hurt the feelings of the women you marry. Treat them with respect, honour and take responsibility for your actions at all times.’ Mother drummed it into our heads for years, almost to the point of making us emotionally guilty for what our fathers had done to her.

Mother would compare her life to the story told about a very beautiful princess who refused her hand in marriage to all the men in her village. Then one day a stranger came and seduced her with his charm and showered her with gifts. So she agreed to marry him. After the wedding, he took her to the forest in the mountains. He transformed himself and became a cruel man, treating the princess as a slave. She cried and prayed to be rescued. When the news came back to the town about what the princess was going through, the king dispatched his best men to rescue her.

‘That was my life,’ Mother went on. ‘Maybe I should have married one of the many men who expressed interest in me when I was younger. There were merchants,

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Lebanese men, a man from Sierra Leone, a pharmacist and one man in Kumasi who expressed his affection from the way he looked at me, his courteousness and dignified manners around me. When I told him I was leaving Jauben to return to Accra, he organised the whole school to sing for me and he gave me yams, plantain and other food items for my journey back to Accra. I never thought much about his generous gestures until later on when I realised he wanted to gain my attention and possibly my affection. Your fathers were not bad men; they were just men of their upbringing and their time. I couldn’t help that. Without them I wouldn’t have given birth to the two of you,’ Mother would add in a reconciliatory tone.

Jeff was born following our return to Ghana. He arrived in a leap year, on the last day of February 1964. My mother never dated another man. She did cultivate male friendships with some of her colleagues and cousins, surviving as a single parent till Jeff and I were ready to leave home as men. She was fond of saying, ‘I have two boys in my life, who will one day become men. On their own, they will form a battalion against any army in the world. Who would dare to stop them from achieving their dreams?’

After we returned from England, Mother did not lose her love for the United Kingdom.

She steeped herself in English history, literature and fables. She read all about the Royal family history and especially about Winston Churchill, quoting him frequently in her own speeches at school and spicing her words with many of his great lines. England remained a part of our youthful world. Mother would talk about our lives in Fulham

| Page 103 and her lonely days walking up and down Oxford Street window-shopping, passing the time away, before coming home to where we lived on 12 Broomhouse Road. She memorised all the tube and train stations, the names of the streets and addresses as well. She would re-imagine her travel routes around London, always mentioning

Euston Station where she would get off to take another train to school and back home.

She would tell us stories about her experiences on the buses. She talked about the

Jamaicans, the Indians, the Nigerians and the Ghanaians who were now making

England their new home. Those private moments were special, and in our own secret way she was able to transport me back to our time in London, helping me to believe what could have happened if only Mr Tetteh had been a good man.

We returned to Ghana very different from how we had left it. Just as Ghana had changed, so too had I and my mother. I was easily frightened by all the different noises and sounds; the ground was too hot and although I tried to walk without my shoes like the other kids, it was hard at first; and the language of Ga was not meaningful to me.

Mother on the other hand would spend hours in silence in our room, upstairs near

Grandpa’s living room. She would complain of having lost everything she left in

Ghana. All her cutlery, clothes, books, and cooking utensils had gone. Family members had assumed she wouldn’t come back to Ghana, so they took advantage of her absence and did as they pleased. This really disappointed Mother and shook her sense of trust in her family. There were whispers around the neighbourhood and amongst her colleagues about the changed look on Mother’s face, ‘Oh, Ms Okai looks terrible, what

| Page 104 happened to her in London? Oh, we thought England was such a wonderful and happy place, is it because of Mr Tetteh?’ Word went around. But in her defence our relatives said, ‘No, she is just pregnant and wanted to come back to Ghana and have the baby.

Besides England was too cold and it affected her health.’ ‘Oh, okay,’ people replied, feeling assured and happy that Ms Okai, now Mrs Tetteh, had come back home with a blessing after all.

During this period, there were whispers of detentions, children spying on their parents, and families losing their sons and daughters to Nkrumah’s Young Pioneers. Teachers did not have the right to question a child who left class to go to a Party rally during school hours. One of my cousins was a Young Pioneer and carried the baton in front of the marching band, and the young zealots of Nkrumah’s youth vanguard would parade on the streets to the delight of the whole town. I remember being carried by one of my cousins to the main street near the arena to watch our cousin leading the band. Grandpa forbade the family from going out, for fear there might be a bomb explosion. Kwame

Nkrumah’s life was under threat of assassination and Grandpa feared his children and grandchildren would be at the wrong place at the wrong time. But the excitement outweighed the risk, and almost all the children went out to see the parade anyway.

The aura of England stayed with Mother and me throughout my childhood in Ghana.

For a while, I can remember how the idea of England coloured almost every conversation around the house. Everyone made references to ‘when Willie and his

| Page 105 mother were in England. And England this, London that, and when they were in the

UK…’ On and on, they would talk about England late into the night and Mummy would tell them about Uncle David, about snow, and how the colours of the leaves changed in autumn, and the cold weather in the middle of winter. The idea of England was both as metaphor of a colonial past and an imagined place where every Ghanaian wished they could make their home in the distant future beyond the sea. If Africans are so enthralled by England and Europe why did we ask the British to leave Africa? I thought to myself as a boy, listening to the adults, whenever the conversation about

England, colonial times and Independence came up.

I lived my childhood knowing that there was something special about me because I went to England as a child. I held on to it. It was my private badge of personal joy and pride. I would spend hours trying to imagine England, but only in my dreams did my mind allow me to return to that past. I had managed to store very safely within the secret vault of my being the emotional memory of having lived in England. With the aid of pictures, Mother’s stories and my nocturnal dreams I was able to reconstruct a vision of myself as a child living in England. If the time we spent in England had been wonderful, happy and sweet, as Mother had wished we would have lived in England and made it our permanent home.

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Chapter 10: A Place Called St. John’s Preparatory Primary School

Mummy never explained to me why I ended up in St. John’s Preparatory Primary

School. I guess it was what she felt she had to do at the time. It took me until almost twenty years after I left St. John’s to forgive my mother for sending me there. It wasn’t that there was anything particularly wrong with the school; it was more a question of trying to find out why my mother decided to send me there for almost a decade, starting a few months after we came back from England. It took me a while to adjust and accept the experiences at St. John’s as mine. For a long time I kept trying to convince myself that I was only imagining myself in St. John’s. Everything that was happening was a malfunction of my imagination, and my memory of it was just a dream sequence.

It was a private school for boys and girls, founded by a visionary educator by the name of Mr Mensah. There was something disturbing about him; he always looked angry and desperate. He would drive to school in a big American car and his arrival put everyone into a panic. He was the emperor and we were the subjects of his empire in the back woods of Accra. Mr Mensah would give a quick flash of a smile to the children when we froze in his presence. It was his way of saying he was not upset with us. I remember him running his hands over my head and saying my name. That was reassuring. I always remember my mother saying, ‘St. John’s is eleven miles away from Accra and if you keep going, you will get to Nsawam where Kwame Nkrumah has a prison for those

| Page 107 who do not like him.’ I took Mr Mensah’s angry and sweaty look as a warning to all of us that, if he did not like you, he might send you to Nsawam too.

Some of Mr Mensah’s children were in England we were told, and the rest attended school with us, I was in class with Mercy Mensah. I came to realise that other students were paying about 100 cedis school fees but my cousins and I were paying only 25 cedis.4 I didn’t understood it until one day, during school holidays, Mr Mensah came to visit Grandpa JW Okai and that is when I heard through a whisper that he had come to borrow money. Apparently Grandpa was a benefactor and sponsor of Mr Mensah’s visionary idea of starting a private school, and later on I came to understand that it was a Ghanaian version of the British Eton. Grandpa invested in the vision of the school and that was why we paid only a fraction of the school fees. After Grandpa died and I was going through his pictures, I saw plans and early pictures of the building sites when St.

John’s was being built. That sealed the truth of Grandpa’s involvement in the school.

But I never liked it. I felt stripped of all the comforts of maternal love and care. As a boy four and a half, just back from England, the harsh reality of feeling lonely, abandoned by my mother and bullied by the older boys evoked the feeling of an orphanage, rather than my imagined idea of life at school. I cried all the time when the bus came to pick us up early in the morning. Later that year, we heard that the bus had broken down and it would be better if the children came and lived in boarding school. Mr Mensah

4 In the 60s before the cedi lost its value, it was worth 5 cedis to a UK pound, and currently, it is worth 2 cedis to a US dollar. | Page 108 encouraged parents to enrol their children into the boarding school, and obviously the grandchildren of J W Okai were amongst the first to be recruited.

I was assured by everyone how amazing it would be and how many friends I would make. So, one Sunday, mother took me to school and registered me to stay in the dormitories. I do not know what my mother said to Mr Mensah, but I remember her waving, after saying her goodbyes and walking away into the distance. I cried so much as I watched my mother leaving in a taxi, while there I was, with my suitcase heading towards the dormitory. Mother was gone and for the first time in my life I had to learn how to live without her affection and protection.

After Mother left, I was sent crying to the children’s room, where the beds were lined up side by side. We had our own blankets, sleeping clothes and pillows, and Mother had woven my initials on all my clothes and other belongings so that they would not be mixed up with those of the other children.

I still wish I could speak to my mother again to ask her why she sent me to St. John’s

Preparatory Primary School. The many times I did ask her, she never gave a satisfactory answer. I have managed to forgive her because of the price she paid to mother a son like me. However, if I could retrieve my mother’s memories, from the celestial archives of heaven, I would read them to find out why she sent me to a boarding school at the

| Page 109 tender age of four and a half, regardless of Grandpa’s involvement in the school. I was too young.

There are times when I feel that the little boy in me is still crying. During such moments

I would remember that first day Mother took me to enrol at the boarding school. I was standing between her thighs and she had her hands around me. There were other children and parents present in a very large room, signing papers, counting money and some kind of registration was going on. Mother filled out some paperwork and next thing I knew she was saying goodbye. ‘Don’t cry, I will come and visit you every

Sunday,’ I clearly remember her saying. Tears rolled down my cheeks as if from a broken valve, and I wept and wept as she left that day.

The river of my life creates a meandering path in my memory. When we die where do our memories go? Do they vanish into a celestial realm and merge into the mind of

God, or does God retrieve them at the moment of transit between life and death and store it in heavenly archives? I have wondered about the magic of imagination, the mystery of the mind’s existence and its place after death. Growing up in Ghana was like floating on a mirage in time. The myth of truth and the miracle of each day blended into one long fable about memory, which blurred the margins between what was real and what was imagined. St. John’s was built beyond the very edges of Accra, further way from Achimota and a few miles away from the University of Ghana. It was surrounded by bushes, mangroves, forests and a mountain that stood prominently beyond the

| Page 110 horizon and the sunset. There was one long road that ran in front, which was called the

Accra – Kumasi road, also known as the Nsawam Road.

At night, you could hear deafening silence, punctuated by the sound of crickets and an orchestra of toads after it rained. Within that realm of deep stillness, the imagination of a child filled the night with fantastic images. There were ghosts and dwarfs too, who visited us bearing gifts from the ancestral realm to stir up our imaginations and frighten us to sleep. We children invented stories about medicine men and their oracular powers over the night, witch doctors and powerful shrines that possessed ominous powers to give or take life. We conjured up mermaids – Mammy water5 – in our stories and learnt how to count the stars, embracing the meaning of life through the celestial kingdom.

There were nights when we spent hours gazing at the stars and imagining ourselves as fallen angels whose human parents had abandoned us in an orphanage boarding school called St. John’s. But the stories about warriors and hunters who travelled the night in search of the pathway to a mountain of invisible game provided us with a mythical sense of wonder which kept us at peace with ourselves. In our imagination, the night hunters drifted through the bushes like sacred figures on a quest to a distant realm beyond our reach. We would be able to see them at a distance, if only we could imagine it hard enough. We were warned not to point at them for it would bring forth ominous outcomes later on in life. The witches, fetish priests and night watch men, who understood the language of the gods, were part of a real and imagined life which formed the framework of our universe growing up at that school.

5 Mammy water – Which means mother of the waters i.e Mermaid | Page 111

On weekends when we had time to ourselves, we would go on lizard hunts, and some of the more cruel boys would trap and eventually kill the poor reptiles. We would also go after grasshoppers, beetles, birds’ nests and especially frogs, toads and tadpoles after the heavy rains ceased. We imagined ourselves as great hunters, on a quest to catch big game, but reconciled ourselves to the fact that the best we could catch was a huge toad.

At times a big snake would be found hiding or trapped in a corner of one of the buildings or in the gutters. Then an alarm would go around the school and bedlam would break loose. Using stones and long sticks, and with the help of the school attendants, the bravest boys would drag the wounded snake out of its corner and bring it into the open where everyone would take turns stoning it.

St. John’s was a place of constant activity. Between the regimented routine of living in a

Catholic school and the wonder of living on a campus surrounded by bushes, swamps and extensive grasslands that receded into woods and forestlands beyond, there was the daily intrigue amongst the children and the gender games of boys falling in love and girls caught in compromising situations. It was fun and frightening at the same time; and it left an indelible mark on my mind for many years to come.

Once in a while, on a Friday when the weather permitted, a projector would be brought to the school and a movie screened, to the delight of all the children. There was one particular movie I remember called The Boy. It was an American Midwestern movie that

| Page 112 chronicled the life and coming of age story of a farm boy. We could all identify with it.

The movie would be screened until it was bedtime, then the projector would slowly fade and the announcement made, ‘To be continued.’ In the meantime, we would console ourselves by making up imaginary movies about thieves and bandits, Ali Baba and the forty thieves, Aladdin and the magic lamp or stories about cowboys and

Indians, drifting across the open landscape of the Wild West. All the boys wanted to be the cowboys because you could possess a gun. The Indians died and the cowboys lived.

That was the favourite game we played on Friday nights and we alternated our roles to give everyone the chance to experience the joy of holding the imaginary or make-shift gun or to die a great Indian hero defending your tribe.

One morning we woke up to the mayhem of fear. Fright gripped the spirit of the school when a woman with a witchlike appearance manifested out of the mysterious realm of the occult world. She appeared out of the misty distance on a morning when fog had enveloped the school. The dew drops on that strange morning were unusually wet. It had drizzled the night before and cast a soft blanket of wet film over the earth, making it difficult for our infant feet to walk along the footpaths or on the patches of grass in front of our dormitories. This particular morning was not just wet, it was also eerie. The woman had appeared on our compound like an apparition from a nightmare, casting an ominous sense of dread. The braver boys began to yell at her, she was stoned, hooted at and spat upon by the older students, but stood with stoic defiance. The look in her eye was so fearful that she cast a spell of fear on anyone who dared to look at her. The

| Page 113 reaction of the students and the dreadful look in her eyes sent chills through my small body as I stood there, watching the mayhem unfolding before my eyes.

‘Go away you witch, you mad devil from the spirit world,’ the older students said in a dozen languages and dialects. ‘Go back to where you came from and leave us alone.’

‘She is cursed,’ was murmured around the school. ‘Stop looking into her eyes, she will bewitch you,’ we were warned. Yet I stood there in utter amazement, wondering if she was a messenger from the world beyond, disguised in the garment of human madness.

After a while of watching this standoff between the woman and the students, the brave night watchman came out grabbed her by the arm and led her back into the woods. For days we stood expectantly, waiting for her to emerge again from the forest to tell us why she had come that morning to spread fear in our minds. However, her appearance foreshadowed the coming of a series of events that haunted the imagination of the school for many years to come.

After the incident I could not get the image of the woman out of my mind. Her appearance had spawned a series of fantastic stories. There were whispers of midnight stories about dwarves coming to the school in search of children to kidnap. These fantastic stories spread among us, causing some older boys to claim sightings of scavenger dogs with fire dripping out of their voracious mouths; of men who were taller than the buildings in which we lived and could touch the sky; and even though I was at boarding school from the age of four and a half to thirteen, somehow I attributed

| Page 114 any bad occurrence at St. John’s to the appearance of the bewitched woman on that morning.

Over the next few years, things did happen. Mr Ademu, the night watchman, drowned in the underground septic tank. Apparently he was draining out the tank and the bucket was too heavy for him to draw out. He stood on the edge of the tank, and slipped in. Some whispered that he was drunk, but no one was there to rescue him.

Men with tribal marks just like his, chewing cola nuts and spitting out the red saliva, came as a group to pull him out as we stood in solemn silence, watching a dead man laid down on the ground. Buckets of water were poured over him and right there and then they wrapped him up in the white burial fabric of the Northerners, and carried him away.

Then there was the news from London that our Assistant Headmistress’s son, a flashy handsome young man who used to ride motorbikes to school before he left for England, had also died. He had gone to a party and come back to his flat drunk. He had put on his gas stove to heat up water, and had then fallen asleep. He inhaled too much gas and passed away in his sleep. We remembered him so clearly, he had a swagger and a style about him that made him look worldly. He was a free spirit as he was able to come and go from the school as he pleased, while we couldn’t. His passing affected everyone since we saw him as our older brother who came every day to visit his mother and to play with us. He sometimes came with beautiful girls dressed in colourful slacks, riding

| Page 115 behind him. His motor bike created a dusty wind as he sped away. He was our version of a movie star.

Another accident has stayed with me. One Sunday afternoon after a heavy storm, the thunder and lightning had created such devastation that trees had fallen, smashing windows and dislodging electric poles. There were numerous accidents on the highway, and some people were severely wounded. But it wasn’t the accidents in front of the school that bothered me, because the Accra – Nsawam Road was notorious for fatal accidents, most of which occurred within viewing distance from our school. On this day, it was the electrocution of Abotsie that shocked me the most. That day the boys were playing soccer on the open playground while I was drawing in the sand.

When it started raining we ran into our dormitories. As soon as the storm was over, we returned into the open to continue with what we were doing. Abotsie decided to go into the field to pick up the ball that was left behind in the rain. Unfortunately, one of the electrical wires had snapped and was live with electrical current. He must have grabbed the wire to clear his way towards the ball and I remember watching him from a distance where I was squatting in the sand. The live wire swung him around a couple of times and while he held on to the wire for dear life, he screamed the most painful shrill cry.

Then the current flung him into the open grass, leaving him palpitating and crying as if possessed by the evil spirits of fire. Those who saw it immediately rushed toward him while I stood there dumbfounded, too young to react or respond. I could feel a burning sensation in my mind as I watched a group of older boys carrying him towards the road

| Page 116 to fetch a taxi to take him to the hospital. The school master on site joined in the emergency and he was transported with haste to Achimota hospital. We did not see him for almost a month but everyday someone went to visit him at the hospital and brought us news of his speedy recovery. His parents from the Volta Region come to visit him and eventually brought him back to school. He had recovered remarkably, but was scarred with a deep wound in his right palm. It eventually healed and occasionally his friends would take turns examining the scar as if to share his pain and to express our gratitude to God for letting him live.

Later that year another accident occurred when some boys went on an adventure and one of them did not come back. There was a place called Mountain Top, the highest peak in the chain of mountains that stood majestically in the distance away from the school. It was the dumping ground for industrial and commercial waste, a place where only the bravest students would go. It was a long walk through the woods and bushes to get there, but contained treasures of great value to kids our age. Going there was a grievous crime, punishable by expulsion, but boys will be boys, and at least once every school term, a few daring ones would risk all to get to the mountaintop.

One Saturday morning, a team of boys went on such an adventure. By evening assembly when the roll call was made, four boys were missing. The following day, three of them were found, but one was still missing. The word went around that the lost boy had been kidnapped by dwarves, and would be sacrificed to the gods. The thought of it

| Page 117 horrified me so much that for many nights I lay awake, frightened to my bones. I would fall asleep only to wake up, having wet myself. I blamed this on the witches and dwarves who had frightened me so much that I was not willing to get up to use the urinary bucket, placed outside the dormitory for night use.

St. John’s Preparatory Primary School was not just a place for the schooling of children, it was also a world hidden from the rest of the country where the offspring of the middle class and the rich were brought every year, in the hope that they might receive an education that would make them better than the generation before them. We grew up knowing that we were not just students in an Academy where the speaking and writing of English was compulsory; we were also left to our own moral devices at night when little demons in the mind had the power to take hold of the imagination of the whole school. As we grew older we told stories about girls, we imagined life beyond the immediate world, engaged in naked wrestling to test our strength, explored our sexuality and some of the older boys whispered of a smoke inhalant that was referred to by many names. It was alleged that it had the hallucinating power to transport the smoker into an astral world of pure bliss. We learnt how to draw images in the sand, recited the Lord’s Prayer, said our Hail Marys, sang and prayed every morning and night; risked punishment if caught speaking vernacular, and mastered the art of avoiding or facing up to bullies every moment of our lives. It was a world of lost children and lonely hearts, devoid of love and family, empty of meaning, yet full of wonder and fear. It crafted a life that left a permanent mark on our minds.

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Time passed, but I remember being afraid every night as I listened to the hooting of the owls and the sounds the crickets made. Some of the kids were more accepting of their new life and made friends easily but I never really felt at home. I felt abandoned, betrayed and lost. I remember sitting down and staring at everything and wondering why I was there. The thought that my mother didn’t love me any more hurt more than the fear of living among strangers.

Each dormitory had beds for twenty-five to fifty children, depending on their age. The younger children slept on the lower level of the double bunk beds and the older ones slept on the top. There was a matron for each dormitory and my first matron was called

‘Madam’. She was from Elmina, a product of the mixed relationships between the

European traders and the Fantis of the South of Ghana. She was very fair in complexion and had very long and beautiful black hair which rolled over her shoulders onto her back. At night she would remove her scarf and brush her long hair as we watched in awe, pretending to be asleep. She was strict but could be very affectionate and caring.

Her smallish body emanated energy, respect and a calm presence that always assured us we were safe.

A normal day began with early morning assembly. The bell would ring and we would all wake up and slowly trek to the main yard by the school field, where we prayed and recited Hail Mary full of grace, the Lord is with thee, then sang Catholic hymns before listening to a short sermon. Morning mass happened every day, without fail. Then we

| Page 119 would be dismissed to go for our morning bath and prepare for the day. We would follow our matron to the open-air bathroom where the younger children took very cold baths or showers, depending how the water was flowing through the taps. The older boys and girls had their separate bathrooms and each waited in line to have their turn under the shower. All the children lined up and bathed one at a time with assembly-line speed, then were dispatched to the next matron who would hand us our towels. The very young ones were helped to dry off their shivering bodies and dusted down with powder. Pomade was then administered to the hair to soften it before combing it backwards and parting it on the side. The children who had thick woolly hair cried when it came to their turn to have their hair combed. After this process was over, we would run back up to the dormitory with our towels around our waists and then hurry to put on our clothes and get ready for breakfast. Before breakfast there would be another school assembly in front of the dining hall and the teachers would announce the important items of the day. Within a week of arriving children were expected to know the routine, so the lazy and stubborn were left behind and they would miss breakfast as well. We learned the school bells, what each meant and why it rang. The ringing of the bells was an invisible clock and we depended on them to provide us with a sense of routine, rhythm of life and normalcy, within the timelessness of school life.

Some time in my second year of school, the school bells rang before lunch. This was unusual. Everyone came out of their classes in response to the alarming sound of the bell. We were asked to assemble in front of the dining hall. Some of the teachers were absent from school that morning. The teachers who had come that day did not teach;

| Page 120 rather they stood in the corridors, murmuring and listening to the radio, while some of the senior students who understood what was going on seemed to be either delighted or confused. So we all gathered in front of the dining hall with great expectation.

Something earth-shaking must have happened. All the matrons were present, the cooks, cleaners, labourers and administrative staff members as well. In fact everyone who worked within the large compound and around the school had a reason to be present.

For a child just about to turn six, it was scary and troubling.

‘Fellow Ghanaians, students of St. John’s Preparatory School, I am not here to show my sadness or to tell you about my joy,’ the Principal started. ‘I am here to confirm the news that the government of Osagefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah, after more than ten years of his rule, has been overthrown in a military coup. There is a new military government in power, led by General Ankrah.’ Some of the older students were jubilant and others started arguing amongst themselves. There was a sense of sadness and ambivalence as well. But I felt a mysterious giant figure had suddenly vanished from my life. ‘The father of the nation is no more,’ the principal added. Was he dead? I thought. Has he been expelled from the realm of infinite power and cast out into a sea of no return?

What did the word coup mean? All I understood at that time was that, the nation was not obligated to him anymore, he was gone, and soon words like young pioneers, exile, regime, overthrow & CPP entered our vocabulary. Every night for almost a year, the names of Kwame Nkrumah and the men who were part of his government became the familiar topic of conversation among the teachers, and trickled down to we children in

| Page 121 the form of stories, anecdotes and exaggerated tales of mythical proportions. Some even tried to explain the significance of what had happened in Biblical terms, drawing parallels between Nkrumah’s exile and the story of Moses going to the mountain top, but the Israelites said he had gone for too long, so they wanted another leader and new idols. That made sense to me. The Biblical story adds that, from then on, the Israelites would be lost in the wilderness for years. The explanation stuck with me, and I linked it to my mother’s version of the story of the Israelites betraying Moses and disobeying

God, and thus they were punished, compelled to roam in the wilderness and to suffer from starvation, pestilence, death, war and famine. Some of the teachers and the principal were happy because, as I heard someone say, ‘If Nkrumah hadn’t been overthrown all of you would have ended up as young pioneers.’

In my young mind I compared Kwame Nkrumah to the father I never knew. The stories about how he imprisoned people and left them to die in the Nsawam prison, and practised witchcraft and other dark religions – all scared me. Yet the heroic tales of how he led the country into independence, kicked out the British and set free the whole of

Africa, intrigued me. His speeches were recited and his famous words quoted. So why were people also happy when he was overthrown?

For a while I wondered, and tried to imagine what it meant; and many of us clamoured to understand what was happening in the adult world through the pictures in the newspapers, cartoons and the contradictory tales about Nkrumah and his regime. I

| Page 122 think this was the period in Ghana when we were losing our innocence and coming to terms with the fact that we were fatherless, and now had to take responsibility for our own lives. St. John’s was my universe and I was quickly learning how to accept it, live within its walls and map my way around like all the other children there. A month after that memorable assembly, I turned six.

After two years with Madam as caretaker, surrogate mother and matron, I was moved to another dormitory under the guardianship of Auntie Akua. She was tall, skinny, wicked, stingy and spiteful. She had her favourite children and I was definitely not one of them. Word went around that the parents of the children she favoured gave her gifts and secret money. My mother didn’t.

That year I remember coming to school at the beginning of the term and after my mother had left, I stood next to my cousin Michael, sobbing.

‘How long will it be before we go back home on vacation?’ I asked him.

‘Just before Christmas,’ he said, his eyes fixed on the sunset, contemplating the distance and the time left to stay in the wilderness of the boarding school. His answer was more of an indication towards a fate that was sealed rather than an assurance of any expectation of Christmas yet to come. The look in his eyes confirmed to me the inescapable fact of our lives. It was the cold truth, yet he was sincere and strong and that was what I needed to know in order to make the first memorable decision in my life as a child. Stop crying, it will not change anything, a voice within me said. That was

| Page 123 what I probably needed to make me realise I was at St. John’s to stay. This sober awareness of my situation compelled me to stop sobbing. I held my breath and dried my tears. He was pleased and put his arm around my shoulders as the bell rang for dinner. It was the beginning of my third year at St. John’s and my life would never be the same again.

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Chapter 11: Growing up a St. John’s Boy

With the passage of time, I accepted my life as a student of St. John’s. The days became weeks and then the months turned into seasons. The rains came, then the Easter sun scorched the earth and the dry hamattan from the North blew the dusty winds into our dreams as the heart beat of time ticked away. Childhood passed away quite quickly. By my third year I had transformed from a child into a young boy. I had figured out a way to make myself happy and to accept the reality that my world would, from now on, revolve around life in St. John’s. I made some friends; I became fascinated with and very conscious of girls. I discovered I could draw very well. I began to distinguish between the many dialects and languages and realised that I had a very imaginative mind. Speaking English had its advantages, but there was also a dark side to it. The new children who could not speak English well enough and were caught speaking vernacular were punished during evening assembly by severe lashings. Speak English,

No Vernacular was the rule and there were those who made a point of reporting those who broke the rule. I began to pretend I couldn’t speak English to avoid being considered a traitor and I suffered as I began to force myself to speak Ga, learn Fanti and understand Twi at the same time. There would be students hiding so they could speak in their traditional languages but when I came around they would stop, because they knew I had once lived in England and could speak fluent English. Drawing became my emotional outlet and it forced me to learn how to observe, watch and escape into my inner world of daydreams and imagination.

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I began looking for friends among some of the older kids and that was when I made friends with Anthony Sackey who lived, ate and slept drawing. He was always drawing on anything and anywhere. He would draw in the sand with a wooden broomstick, stolen pencils, crayons and charcoals or anything that could be used. I followed him everywhere, and we became close. He was much older than I was but we shared a passion for drawing, and I became like a pet following its master everywhere he went.

However, there was another side to Anthony that made everyone despise our friendship. Anthony hated to bath, he stank, so everyone avoided him except me.

Anthony would be forced to have a shower and sometimes he was captured and dragged to the bath where three strong older boys would hold him down and give him a heavy soapy scrub. He would come out looking groomed and neat, only to end up in the sandy grounds drawing and etching images until the last light of day.

When I was about eight, Anthony’s parents come to the school one day to collect him and his older brother. ‘Where are you going?’ I asked him. ‘London,’ he said. ‘My parents are moving back to London.’ His parents had lived in England and he and his older brother were born there, but they moved to Ghana some time after Independence.

As a child I could not understand why they were leaving. He left that night and I never saw him again.

For a while I missed him, but very soon I made other acquaintances. Some were talkative and others were mean-spirited. No one really caught my deep attention. They

| Page 126 were friends for convenience; some lasted for a month, or a term, then we drifted away to other more suitable mates. There were children whose parents were once in the

Nkrumah government, or in the current military regime or had ties to overseas relatives, and they would talk about their parents and who they were. But there was one young boy my age who was Ugandan. He would sing songs about Obote the

President of Uganda, which of course I never understood. The lyrical sweetness of his voice and the trancelike feeling I got listening to him drew me closer to him. He was a sad boy in some ways, which I understood, since we shared a melancholic streak. He said his father was the Ambassador to Ghana and they decided to send him to St. John’s because it was the best boarding school in Ghana. I have forgotten his name but I still remember with fondness the impression he left on me. He had such a tender tone in his voice and his gentle manner made everyone friendly towards him.

In the beginning I did very well in class. I could write, draw and spell well. Then one day, Mother came to the school during school time and I saw her talking to the teacher in the corridor. Obviously it was about me. The next thing I knew I was being promoted to Stage 2 in the middle of the term. The kids there were older and more aware of worldly matters than I was and they were learning things a bit beyond my age. I started getting confused, my grades began to drop and I felt intimidated by everything. My teachers later on realised their mistake, but it was too late. My self-confidence as a student was already damaged. My new classmates went on to Stage 3 and I had to

| Page 127 repeat Stage 2; while those whom I left behind in Stage 1 came to catch up with me in

Stage 2.

My pride was wounded. My former mates were now in Stage 3 and all my peers knew that I was the one who was left behind. ‘He has repeated,’ many of my previous classmates would tease me. And those who caught up with me would laugh,

‘Ahhh…he thought he knew more than us, so he got promoted. Now look at him, he has repeated.’ The other kids would mock me and laugh. I stuck to myself, and drowned myself in my drawing, which was excelling at the expense of my other subjects. My spelling suffered, I hesitated when I was reading and I began to lose interest in English and Maths. I would daydream for long periods and be drawing in my exercise book while the teacher was teaching.

‘William Davies, stop daydreaming,’ Mr Oquaye would call at me. I was so lost in my imagination I would not realise that my teacher had directed a question to me. While the class would be waiting for me to respond, I would be lost within my imagination on a journey to places whose destination only I knew. I would wake from my trance and every one would be laughing at me. This experience of being lost in thought happened many times and I knew that I was at St. John’s against my will. I was too young to try to run away as some tried to do. They were caught in the next town, driven back to school and brought in front of the assembly and hooted at. ‘Run away boy, shame,’ we were made to scream at the culprits. We heard in whispers about students who hatched

| Page 128 elaborate plans to run away, but were caught before they could execute their plans.

Such acts of disobedience were punishable by a lashing in front of the school.

I endured the pain by praying and sometimes I would cry myself to sleep at night. I learnt how to count the days, waiting for a vacation or for when my mother could come to visit me. These moments of tortured silence forced me to learn how to map out in my mind a personal line of resilience. I always maintained a sense of myself as someone on an invisible path to a place where I could be by myself, in order that I could feel protected from the vicissitudes of life. I would wander around the school parks, avoiding those who were not friendly or who exuded a sense of treachery or malice.

They were boys who revelled in the art of bullying and had a sadistic desire to hurt and abuse vulnerable children. I developed a steely aura of silence within myself that guided my thoughts and movements, wherever I went around the school. I had to learn how to survive and to find joy within myself. I took refuge in the realm of my imagination.

Then one Saturday, when we were out playing ball behind the dormitory near the marshlands, one of the kids hit the ball into the distance and it ended up in the swamp.

Everyone called me, ‘William Davies, you go get the ball.’ So I went looking for it, forcing my way through the tall bushes and into the muddy waters, near the swampy area. I saw the ball floating on the watery surface in between tall blades of grass. I ventured forward to grab it when I suddenly felt my feet stuck in the mud. It began to

| Page 129 feel very thick beneath my feet and as I tried to pull myself upward, my body began to sink downwards. I panicked and looked back, wondering if I should go back without the ball and face the teasing faces of the other kids or swim and grab the ball, risking the possibility of drowning.

I could feel my knees within the heaviness of the mud and my legs couldn’t move. I screamed and heard myself saying ‘Jesus, help me God’. I flung myself at the ball and somehow, I pulled myself upward with all my strength, escaping. An invisible hand pulled me out and I fell on my face, muddied and in tears. But the other kids laughed when they saw the mud on my face. No one realised I had almost drowned. They took the ball from me and continued playing. But I knew that I had felt the touch of life’s sacred force. It had rescued me from the grip of death.

I had come face to face with the terror of dying. At that young age I had reckoned with the fact that I had gone to the brink of life and back. What would my mother have said if I had died? I thought to myself. I was about six years of age and I made up my mind never to play ball again or play soccer as the other kids did. I decided to stick to drawing and figure out ways to entertain myself without the need to get involved with the other kids and risk my life again for the sake of a ball.

Many things hurt me as a child. I was highly aware of myself and developed a keen sense of self-protection. I learnt to remember people’s faces from first glance, though

| Page 130 names were not important to me. It was the face that mattered to me, to retain the knowledge about a person’s look; seeking signs of whether they would be a friend or a foe. I withdrew inward and at times would stay there for days, living within the inner security of an imaginary paradise and space of love.

Being such a young boy in a boarding school, living with so many other children who could be as much as ten or twelve years older had its moments of deep fright. There were experiences that were shameful, humiliating, abusive and sad. Time had a way of freezing, and no matter how many times I tried to convince myself that the day would come when I could go home; the reality of living away from home sometimes overwhelmed me so much that, when I went for my long lonely walks loitering around the deserted pathways behind the buildings, and the feeling of being an orphan took over my thoughts, I would cry inconsolably.

There were weeks when we all suffered from fevers; everyone would be inoculated and on Sundays after breakfast we would take malaria tablets. Sometimes ringworm would spread among the children and it itched very badly. One day I got up with severe rashes all over me; chicken pox had spread, and we took turns infecting each other. I also experienced high fevers three times in the nine years I was there, resulting in hallucinations, dizzy spells and fainting.

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Once I had to be rushed home at night. A message was sent to my mother that I was very, very sick and she had to come. I was shivering in bed when she came to fetch me.

Mr Sackey, who was my auntie’s husband, had come back from England from a Foreign

Service posting and had a car. I was driven home and stayed for almost two weeks until

I recovered. The second time it happened, one of the teachers accompanied me home.

The last time I remember having a fever, I was given a lift halfway to Kwame Nkrumah

Circle - the main roundabout in Accra - and I walked the rest of the way home, in the heat. I was sweating and felt feverish. The heat and the strain of walking such a distance at my age made the walk home feel like it was a whole day. My legs were wobbly and the journey to walk from Circle to Adabraka, seem to take hours. The dizzy feeling in my head made me feel as though the world around me was all a mirage and I was in a dream state. I was almost ten years old and felt the weight of the world on my shoulders. I arrived feeling weak and looking very frail.

Despite these experiences, and although I always told my mother I did not like the school, she had made the decision that St. John’s was the school for me and there was nothing either of us could do about it. If she pulled me out, it would embarrass

Grandpa, given his involvement in the business of the school. So my cousins and I who were attending the school avoided each other but maintained eye contact as a way of acknowledging to each other, our love and family ties. Otherwise Michael had his friends and Josephine had her friends. They were much older than me, but we tried in our own ways to fit into the life of the boarding school as best as we could.

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Later on, after Michael and Josephine had gone to secondary school, Felix, Felicia and their younger sister Agnes came to join me. Felix and Felicia – twins – were born eight months after me, and Felix and I formed a brotherly bond with each other for the mutual benefit of our needs as boys. My niece Peggy couldn’t stay. She was very miserable after two terms. She ran after her mother crying after Sister Emma visited us one Sunday. Sister Emma couldn’t bear the sight of her daughter’s uncontrollable tears, so without even informing the authorities, she packed Peggy’s belongings and left that day, leaving me behind to wonder why my mother couldn’t do the same.

We were starved of love, food, attention and the warm arms of a caring mother; things that could not be provided by strange nannies, or in an environment where hundreds of children were longing for the same things. The nanny was not our mother, the teachers were not there as our relatives, and the bushes and trees that surrounded the campus could not hear our cries at night.

The story of my life in boarding school cannot be fully told without remembering what

I today refer to as the chemistry of food and the alchemy of hunger. When a child is very hungry it cries but, knowing very well that food manifesting out of thin air is as impossible as mirage turning into water, it learns how to meditate on the mystery of hunger. It wasn’t the fact that we did not have food at St. John’s but that there were so many mouths to feed. So what was given at breakfast, lunch and dinner was at times

| Page 133 very scanty, and our not getting enough intensified the famished feeling of inner emptiness.

At the beginning of each term, we came to school with our provisions which were placed under the control of our nannies and matrons. And our relationship with the nanny or matron – or for those who knew someone in the kitchen – was reflected in our food ration or access to provisions. Breakfast was not just about breaking the fast from a long night of hunger; rather it was the way by which to break the famished feeling that hung over our imagination throughout the night, and it allowed us to suspend our deep longing for real food for a while. Breakfast consisted of sugarless porridge or rice water, and the matron would go around with a can of milk, measuring it in teaspoons for each student; when she was in a generous mood, she would make a milky circle over the porridge but straighten the can quickly as she poured, in order not to pour too much for one child. At times we had roasted corn cereal and corn bread, a popular combination that was known for numbing the mind; it put students to sleep in class. A normal portion of bread was small. It came in the form of twelve small baked buns, which we carefully shared to make sure no one got more than the other. Occasionally fights would flare up over someone taking a bigger one.

After breakfast, the day would drag on and those who had pocket money and during break time could afford it would buy baked snacks such as roasted peanuts, hot roasted plantains, fresh bananas and oranges or homemade sweets. Some of the senior students

| Page 134 would gravitate towards the visiting caterer who brought rice and meat or fish stew to sell during the day. But we young children, with no access to money, would solicit the senior students to be generous with their portion of food or snacks and if you had an older brother or a senior who liked you, you might be lucky. Those who did not have money would stand around staring at the food seller, yearning for food to materialise in their mouths. As the bell rang for us to return to class, the feeling of having been teased worsened; for hours I dreamt of food while my teacher kept teaching. Sometimes I quenched my hunger by drinking water and sometimes my older cousins shared whatever they had with me.

By the time the bell rang for lunch, I would be so hungry it was as if the bells of the heavens were ringing. We would rush towards the dining hall to take our seats at the allotted table, and patiently wait for our food to be served. It did not take me long after arriving at St. John’s to realise that if you did not eat all of your food, someone would grab it and finish it for you. So I had to eat all that was on my plate and at times I would use my forefinger to clean the plate, so as not to waste any of the food.

Between lunch and dinner, the day would drag on with a mysterious slowness that tested the feeble will of a child. By the middle of the term our provisions would have run out, according to the matrons. However, we children kept a mental account of our provisions in our chop boxes. I knew how many canned sardines and tins of milk I had at the beginning of the term, including whatever Mother brought to replenish my stock,

| Page 135 but we were powerless when our matron informed us that we had depleted our provisions. This always came as a surprise, since I knew that my mother had stuffed my box with a lot of food. Word went around that some of the matrons took the food and sent it to their families.

So we resorted to finding ways of making up for the unceasing longing for food, by mixing gari – a ground cassava cereal - with sugar but without milk, or gari with hot pepper – shito - without sardines. Occasionally, the senior boys who were daring would go and raid a nearby farm for corn, which they boiled in the backyard of the senior house. The fortunate kids would partake of the booty and whenever that happened, it was a treat to see everyone happy to be chewing on the cod. Sometimes there were mango expeditions, where boys would go into the woods and return with sacks of mangoes, some still green to be kept for a week or two. The very ripe or halfway rotten mangoes were consumed immediately. The leaders of the expedition would have the best ones and we, the less fortunate, were pleased to have either the green but fresh mangoes or to accept a half rotten piece, washing away the mouldy side and feasting on the other juicy parts. These special moments of collective feasting, similar to hunter gathering behaviour created bonds of brotherhood and a rare spirit of affection, support and friendship that lasted into our teens. And when we could afford it, we contributed in our own way to a large party of gari, milk and sugar; each with his spoon, scooping out of a communal bowl, dripping food over our hungry faces and onto the floor.

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Such group eating sessions were called ‘saliva parties.’ They occurred in different ways. At times two friends would hide away, and have their own saliva party, or brothers, cousins, close friends would share a special treat of soaked gari, sardines and hot spicy pepper sour Shito. This normally occurred on the weekends in between meals, especially at the beginning of the term when everyone could boast of having enough provisions to go around. But as the term progressed and the provisions ran out, each student hung on to the little they had left and nibbled at it alone, hiding away from other hungry faces.

When the country had experienced a bumper harvest and the school could afford it, dinner could be a treat. There would be boiled kenkey6 and fish with spicy stew, plantain and spinach stew, rice and gravy or yams and thick peanut soup with meat or fish in it. But regardless of the menu the food was never enough for the famished body of growing children. So in order to make up the difference, many of the kids would stream towards the kitchen to scavenge for leftover food. It was best to go as a gang to ward off threats from the bullies, who would also go out on their nightly food quests.

One of the delicacies of this after dinner food hunt was to lay our hands on the burnt part of the rice from the large cooking pots. The burnt layer would have turned into a crusty biscuit which could be shared. Each gang of boys would descend on the big pot before the cooks and kitchen cleaners washed the bowls.

6 Kenkey is a mashed maize or corn dough that is rolled up into balls and boiled in the corn husk and eaten. It is the staple diet of the Ga people of Ghana. | Page 137

When we were successful in securing large portions of the crusty rice, we would spend the rest of the night chewing over the burnt rice like happy children munching the most delicious dessert. Food was central to our imagination and we waited for it, imagined it, discussed it, fought each other for it; and yet it was the glue that held us together as children. Besides our morning assemblies, it was in the dining hall that we gathered, sharing our meals and chatting away while we ate, especially when it was something delicious and more than we had expected.

One day something happened that changed my attitude towards seeking food after dinner. Normally the children would clamour around the entrance of the dining hall in the evenings while the students from the Senior Grammar School were having their late dinner. At the time, there was the St. John’s Preparatory Primary School and St. John’s

Grammar School, for much older students. I remember one older student who made a lot of noise about being the best commerce student. What that meant, I didn’t have the slightest clue, but the word stuck with me. Commerce, it must mean something very important, I thought at that age seven. We, the youngest kids, would wait at the entrance and when the senior students had finished their meals, we would rush into the dining room to scavenge their leftovers. However on that particular day, one of the students decided to make a mockery of our hunger, so while we were waiting he threw some food at us, as if he was throwing it to dogs. A few of the boys clamoured for it, picked up the food off the floor and starting to eat it. While the children were scrambling for the food, he started laughing. Then he did it again and we all rushed,

| Page 138 scuffling for the food on the floor while he enjoyed watching us. Then one of the seniors, who normally liked my childlike face and would occasionally invite me in and give me portions of his food, lost his temper watching how his mate took delight in feeding us his leftovers on the ground. He slammed the table, said some furious words, took his plate from him and shoved it into his face. ‘How could you do something like that?’ he asked in anger. The other student struck back and the next thing they were shoving each other. We kids were amazed at the commotion our presence had caused.

They were separated, yelling at us to get out. I saw the fury in the eyes of the senior student who favoured me and that stuck with me. I couldn’t connect the dots, but I knew our presence there, and what his friend had done, upset him terribly. I never went back there again in search of food. I began to learn to master my hunger with self discipline, realising that the bell would ring again, there would be breakfast in the morning, lunch would be around the corner and dinner would not be far away.

Day by day, I grew to accept whatever was my share in the dining hall, seeking no more than I was given and learning to eat whatever portion of my provisions our matron allowed me to have. I would console myself with the hope that at least once a month my mother would visit me with homemade rice and stew, fried fish and bread, some canned milk, cheese and chocolate. Children adapt and survive, but when hunger makes its imprint on your mind, years later even as an adult, you remember it. I know very well that throwing away food, as my own children do these days, brings back memories of the days when I had to master the alchemy of hunger.

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Only in our adult lives can we hope to find meaning in the choices our parents made for us as children, and hopefully learn to understand them. Maybe I should have written about St. John’s for my mother to read before she died. But that would have hurt her, I suppose. It was only after she passed away that I began to face up to the wounds of my childhood: the abuse, the shame and the self-destructive vices that went into shaping my life for a long time.

Through my childhood, I learnt the art of survival, to live in spite of my fears and to face my failures, mistakes and challenges with a disciplined and steely will-power that sometimes amazes me in my adult years. In retrospect, I realise that I had to heal myself. I had to forgive my mother and to forgive myself too. That little four and half year old boy has stopped crying within me. He is now happy and plays in the paradise in my mind. The little boy who cried when he was leaving his mother to go to boarding school is now a world traveller, an African dreamer with a fierce sense of justice for the voiceless, a passion for individual freedom and an overwhelming desire to inspire others to defend their civil rights.

After almost forty-four years, the little boy grew up and now has a son who is four and a half. Loving my son has healed me of the past and I hope that by writing about the early years of my life, I have freed myself of the burden of memories of who I was and what happened to me when I was a little boy growing up in Ghana.

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Chapter12: Auntie Akua and my Kente Cloth

In Ghana, Kente cloth symbolises the essence of Ghanaian pride in its political, social and cultural sense. It represents a symbol of royalty and prestige and a means by which

Ghanaians define their class and personal worth. It is the national fabric, woven by hand with its origins from the Ashanti people. It used to be expensive, coveted by those who were not able to afford a piece; however, now it is commercially available around the world.

As I was a little boy, I had the good fortune of having a mother who could afford to give her son a Kente to use as a sleeping cloth. Mother had a special collection of her own which she acquired while teaching in the Ashanti Region in the fifties, and she kept buying more from traders who came to the house to sell them especially to her. My

Kente was warm, and the silky feeling of having it around my body at night made all the difference between having nightmares and dreams. But because I occasionally wet my bed, like most of the other kids, Auntie Akua used the fact that I was sleeping with

Kente as an excuse to accuse me of insulting and disrespecting the value of the cloth.

‘You are a disgrace.’ She hit me on the head and pushed me in the face. ‘Take him out and teach him a lesson.’ That was the signal to all the kids, including the much older boys, to pounce on me as if I had committed the most abominable and heinous crime in history. I was dragged out of my bed, which was close to the entrance door to the

| Page 141 dormitory, beaten, kicked, punched and hooted at by all the boys in the dormitory. The bullies used it as their excuse to push me in the head, hit me in the face and drag me across the campus like a traitor or thief. My mattress and blanket were placed on my head and my wet Kente cloth wrapped around me. The boys followed me calling my names, singing and chanting, announcing to the whole school that I had wet my bed.

This humiliating incident happened three times. The first time it was spontaneous. The second time it was orchestrated to have the maximum impact. Auntie Akua deliberately asked me to sit on my bed and wait for her, while she went with all the other kids for their morning shower. After all the boys were ready to go out for breakfast, she gave the signal for the hooting and beating to commence. Before the whole school, I was paraded and shouted at. I saw her laughing with malicious glee and while the rest of the boys in the other dormitories looked on in astonishment. Later, Michael consoled me and I saw Josephine standing on the rails upstairs at the girls’ dormitory looking on with helpless eyes.

The third time it happened by surprise. After the second experience, I decided not to drink water after six in the evening. Some of my sympathetic friends made sure that I went to the urinal before going to bed. There were those who made it a sport to be the first to come to my bedside to find out if I had wet the bed, to raise the alarm for Auntie

Akua. For almost a month, I slept and woke up dry. Then one day I had an accident. I

| Page 142 remember waking up and turning my mattress upside down and folding my Kente cloth and putting it under my pillow.

I rushed to the bathhouse in spite of the fact that it was dark outside and rushed back. I stayed up for the rest of the night, hoping that my bed and pants would dry out before everyone awoke. But my plan had failed. Everyone’s bed was dressed in neat white bed sheets except mine. Auntie Akwa came to conduct her regular inspection. I was caught for hiding my wet Kente clothe under my pillow. Immediately I was surrounded and she shouted abusive and insulting words at me. I put my hands around my head in case anyone tried to hit at me. A few tried but I pushed them back and then Auntie Akua held my hands and pushed me out of the dormitory, pulled out my bed sheet, blanket and mattress and threw them at me outside. I collected my beddings and everyone watched in silence as I headed to the laundry house across the schoolyard. It was a

Saturday, and many kids were playing around the school.

Strangely, that day no one followed me and after the humiliating encounter with Auntie

Akua and the attempt by the boys to hit me ended, there was a sudden stillness in the air. Every one withdrew and just stood there. I walked out with my bedding over my head feeling very ashamed of myself. In hindsight, I suspect they realised the injustice of the whole experience. ‘Why was he isolated for humiliation when there were other boys who also had accidents in bed as well?’ I guess it suddenly dawned on them. I bravely walked out of the dormitory and ventured across the school compound all the

| Page 143 way to wash my bed sheets. Those who noticed what was going on stared at me, astonished by the treatment. Peggy, my niece, was sitting at the end of the corridor of the girls’ house, looked at me with sadness in her eyes.

A few days later, I overheard the other matrons talking to Auntie Akua about me. And she was adamant about her position.

‘He has no right to sleep and wet his Kente cloth.’

‘But he is a little boy, all the boys wet their beds occasionally, why do you have to isolate him and disgrace him before the whole school?’ One of the other matrons by the name of Auntie Hello responded.

‘If Mister Mensah hears about this or the school Principal finds out we shall all be in trouble. Did you know his grandfather is a big supporter of the school and Mr Mensah is indebted to him? His mother is a headmistress and principal of many schools in

Accra. You will get us all into trouble.’

‘Come here, Willie, come,’ Auntie Hello called. She looked me straight in the eye and said. ‘We are so sorry. What happened to you was terribly wrong. We have told Auntie

Akua not to do that again.’ And then she said, ‘I remember when you used to speak

English like a little English boy and we enjoyed hearing you speak. Now see what we have done to you, your voice has become rusty.’ I was too ashamed of myself to bother about what she meant.

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Later on I was informed Mr Mensah had heard about the incident and came to the dormitory and violently warned Auntie Akua that he would fire her if he ever heard of such an incident again. And that was it. I stayed in Auntie Akua’s dormitory for the rest of the year. She totally ignored me and I lived independently of her, without caring what she thought of me anymore. The following year I was transferred to the independent boys’ room when we moved to the new site a mile away from the old boarding school.

For weeks after this series of incidents, I kept to myself. Many of the other boys who had escaped what I was subjected to – even though they also occasionally wet their bed in sleep – would try to be friends or show their sympathy. But the frozen look in my eyes and silent feeling of deep humiliation and shame that hung over me were too strong. I could not open up to others. Soon they drifted away from me and I went out of my way to seek refuge in the empty classrooms, where I would go looking for blank note books and spend the rest of the day drawing images, conjuring out of my imagination onto their pages.

This feeling of shame lasted for weeks, and even though I joined my friends again in the children’s activities and invented games that we played, the bedwetting experience and the hazing that followed cast a dark shadow over my persona. I dreaded going to sleep and waking up the following day with the possibility of having had an accident in bed.

The thought of it terrified me and the sight of Auntie Akua sent shivers down my spine.

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I looked at her from a distance and was very careful how I approached her if I needed any form of help or access to my suitcase or chop box.

In the end, leaving Auntie Akua’s dormitory was a big relief, even though it did not leave me feeling happy, because, after all, I was still in St. John’s Preparatory Primary

School and the reality of my life was still the same. I was now nine years old.

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Chapter 13: How Art Saved My life.

At an early age, I discovered I could draw and I fell in love with the idea of images on stage and screen. I was someone who comprehended reality through visual impressions. If what I was learning in class did not make visual sense to me, I switched off. During the afternoons when I was drifting around the school alone or sought to be secluded, I came across an artist who was painting a huge canvas of a village scene in the school dining hall. I have forgotten his name, but he was very good, he captured my imagination immediately.

The first time I saw him painting the village scene I was too shy to go into the hall to watch him close up. So I stood by the window and kept a careful distance from him to avoid disturbing him or catch his attention. But he knew I was there, and when he turned around and looked at me I knew it was an invitation to come in to see what he was doing. I ventured closer, though still at a distance and watched him draw the outline. Over the next weeks I came to witness the transformation of the images into a beautifully painted scene of traditional huts, coconut and palm trees, and people on the footpaths, rich foliage of trees and grass and dogs in the open fields. There were mountains in the distance, birds in the blue sky and beautiful white and grey clouds hung majestically over the African landscape, capturing an idyllic moment. It was a depiction of tranquillity and a sanguine sense of romantic joy in a village in Ghana, a throwback to an imaginary time of African innocence, communal peace and

| Page 147 harmonious village life. The colours, the artistic detail and the rich realism captured life like a tapestry that represented everything about traditional life in Africa in the pre- colonial past. It was a glimpse into a life that resonated with a sense of idealism that was the Africa we were told about before the coming of the West.

It was then that I knew I had to do more than just draw. I had to be an artist. I have to learn how to do that, I thought to myself. My childlike mind was captivated by the process and the magic of how a bare canvas took on a life of its own.

The painted village became the backdrop for the school play at the end of each year, when a group had to perform a play or participate in a singing performance. I was selected to be in a play and to sing a song, and we rehearsed after classes. We had to sing a song –

Who killed cock robin?

I said the sparrow with my bow and arrow,

I killed cock robin,

All the birds of the air fell a sighing and a sobbing

All the birds did cry for poor cock robin,

All the birds of the earth, cried for poor cock robin...

We recited poems and played music,

Oooh, we can play on the big bass drum

And this is the way we do it, boom, boom, boom

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Says the big bass drum and this is the way we do it.

Oh we can play on a triangle and this is the way we do it...

Tin, tin, tin, says the triangle and this is the way we do it...

I was assigned to play the triangle. The older kids played bass drums and the flutes.

After a term of preparations and rehearsals, the performance day arrived and all the parents and patrons attended. Even at our young age, we noticed whose parents were important or rich and who drove expensive cars. When the play was over, students were awarded prizes for best student for this or that course and best student for sports and so on. I got two prizes. I was awarded best-dressed student in my class since I still wore clothes I brought back from England and Daddy still sent Jeff and me clothes from

London as well. I was also awarded a prize for best art student in my class. I believe I was in stage two at the time.

After all the performances, the prizes were awarded. I remember hearing the announcement and Mother urging me to go forward, every one applauding and the cheers and smiles on all the faces in the assembly. Mother was very proud and urged me on to go on stage when my name was mentioned the second time. I was elated and couldn’t feel my feet as I walked up to the stage. But I knew I was special and for that moment, all my fears vanished. I floated in my own pride.

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A few days after the play, we were invited to go to the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation to perform our play for television. I remember the lights and as we performed and sang, the lights were so bright that we found ourselves crying with joy until we become used to the brightness of the lights. Later on Mother told me she and the family members watched the performance on TV in Mr Ayettey’s living room downstairs in our house.

He was a tenant in our house and also worked at the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation and he was probably the only one in our neighbourhood at the time who had a T.V. set.

Throughout my life in St. John’s, art became my rescue and my friend. I had convinced myself that I had an angel who watched over me, stood beside and helped me to draw.

If my mother was not around, I believed the angels took care of me. The angels held my hand while I was drawing and guided me on a secure path, away from the eyes of bullies and wicked boys. I drew almost everything, and it had a magical impact on me.

I would wake up and start drawing or would be drawing on my pillow and fall asleep.

My ability to draw won me friends, especially among some of the older boys who made it their duty to protect me from danger and trouble. ‘Leave him alone, he knows how to draw,’ a friendly voice would say, in order to protect me from the wicked boys who went around the school on their usual mission of threatening frightened kids. They took your break time money, confiscated your food or just had fun hitting you in the head or pushing others out of their way.

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One day, however, my art got me into trouble. I was in Stage Three. It was a weekend, and whiles all the kids were out playing soccer, involved in hide and seek, or attending to weekend chores, I had gone to the classroom looking for notebooks. I found the teacher’s notebook and drew in it for the day. But that wasn’t the problem; the trouble was that, when I was in the classroom, a gang of older boys come and saw me drawing by myself in class on a weekend. They were a small but formidable gang, who specialised in vandalism, rummaged through the desks of people who they did not like and extorted money from vulnerable kids. When I saw them, I panicked. I knew I was in trouble.

‘What are you doing in the classroom by yourself?’ one of them asked.

‘Please, I am just drawing,’ I answered.

‘Well, if you are drawing then let me see if you can draw this.’ The head of the pack responded. They had an adult magazine with pictures that illustrated sexual positions.

Apparently someone had smuggled it into school.

‘Draw this on the blackboard,’ he insisted. He handed me a chalk and to avoid being bullied, I started drawing. I filled the board with images of male and female genital parts, men and women in compromising positions and some unbelievable images. The boys were very impressed and kept urging me on to draw more, patting me on the shoulder and cheering my skill. During the process, some older girls who were walking by saw what was going on. We turned around and saw the stunned look on their faces, and then one of them screamed. We all ran, leaving the images on the blackboard and the teacher’s note book as well. I forgot to come back and clean the board and on

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Monday, the word had gone around that there were filthy drawings on the blackboard in the Stage Four class.

‘Who did this?’ asked Mr Eben – who taught History in Stage Five and Civics in Stage

Four - and someone said, ‘This is a drawing by William Davies.’ I was called in to report to Mr Eben and I came to the classroom to face up to my art on the board. My former classmates, who had left me behind when I was in stage two, were laughing and the girls were giggling beyond control. After I owned up to it, one of the taller students was instructed to clean the board immediately. However, Mr Eben was also looking at his note book and couldn’t decide whether to punish me for drawing in his book or for the filthy art on the board.

In his notebook I had drawn such amazing replica images of the drawings from the history textbook, he couldn’t believe it. They were the faces of David Livingstone,

Robert Louis Stevenson, Marco Polo, James Watt, Dr Albert Schweitzer, Louis Pasteur,

Stanley the American explore in Africa, Cecil Rhodes and other British historic figures and colonial Governors of the Gold Coast including Commander Hill, George Maclean,

Gordon Guggisbery and others like Sir Arden Clarke, whose lives we had to study in school. I memorised their faces instead of reading their life stories and, by doing so, I was able to match their names and the stories about their lives as it was narrated to us in class by our teacher. By drawing their faces, I was able to link their lives with their faces, and that enabled me to write about these men in the exam. Mr Eben made a

| Page 152 decision which would stamp my reputation as the school artist for the rest of my time at school. ‘From now on, you will draw everything in class for the school lessons,’ he said.

From that day, I had to draw the diagrams for each class from Stage two to Stage six.

I was assigned the task of drawing the human body for Biology lessons, maps and topography for Geography and leaves, trees, flowers, plants, animals, frogs, lizards, and insects for Nature Study. I would go from class to class, drawing these diagrams after school, while the rest of the students were out playing. I would name and label the parts, and my drawings would stay on the board for weeks. Sometimes the girls would ask me to draw their diagrams for them in their note books, which thrilled me. My drawing brought me some prestige and security.

This was a turning point in my life at St. John’s. My studies began to improve and I made more friends and the girls also liked me. One friend in particular, Philip Hagan, became very close because he wanted to draw like me. Philip was left-handed, brilliant and a highly intelligent student, and like me had mature hand writing for that age. He and his older brother had enrolled in St. John’s some time after the 1966 coup. From the beginning Philip was always either first or second in class. Also competing for first place was a girl who was very good in all other subjects except art. Philip figured out that by learning how to draw, he would be able to get extra marks and that was how he beat her in the end. He got first place in class for the last two years of our time in school.

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Philip’s father was the former Regional Commissioner of Cape Coast during the

Nkrumah regime and he talked with heroic flair about Nkrumah as if he knew him personally. He told us about the day the police came to their house in Cape Coast after the 1966 coup, arrested his father and sent him to jail. Philip narrated these events so dramatically that he transported his friends back to the moment it happened. But we were all children and a good story always evoked a great imaginative feeling of joy.

By the time I got to Stage Six, I was helping my teachers mark art exams at the end of each school term. My attachment to Philip was like that to a brother and we remained good friends for the rest of my time in St. John’s. Art was the bond that kept our friendship together. Philip was brave, bold and had a tough fighting streak in him. He knew how to muscle his way around and backed it up by being first in class as well.

When we got to Stage Six, he was made School Prefect and because he was my closest friend we shared the privilege and responsibilities together. I began to enjoy these later days of my life at St. John’s, using art and my ability to organise to present entertainment programs in class and at Saturday night student gatherings. I realised that I could organise people, encouraging them to participate and select those with talent to perform on stage. I become the unofficial entertainment prefect, organising school recitals and entertainment night events during the weekends. Even though there were other popular boys who were highly admired for their skill as soccer players and others who were known for their relationships and connections to the adult world,

Philip and I became the popular figures within the social setting of the school. We

| Page 154 would spend special moments on the weekends with girls, chatting away and making up stories about our lives at home with imaginary wealthy parents and relatives who lived in London. I spoke about my life in England as I could imagine it based on what my mother had told me at that time. I proposed to Olivia Ofosu and she accepted to be my girlfriend. I was in heaven.

However, one day something happened which took me almost forty years to understand. Philip, I and another boy were with my girlfriend by my side and the other girls who formed part of our exclusive ensemble of friends. Rita Ankrah was in Stage

Five but was mature enough and probably of our age group to mix with us, even though we were one year ahead of her. She was the granddaughter of General Ankrah who was made the Chairman of the National Liberation Council that overthrew

Nkrumah. Philip was fond of bullying her and hitting her occasionally when no one was looking. I never understood it, but I didn’t say anything. I figured it was Philip’s misplaced way of showing his affection as some boys did, when they were attracted to girls; by deliberately bumping into the girls, or pushing them for no reason.

One afternoon, as we were enjoying one of those special moments with our girlfriends,

Philip started picking on Rita. It started as a joke, then it got serious. Suddenly Rita felt hurt and I could see in her eyes that Philip had hit her harder than usual, so she started running and Philip chased after her. As she was running Philip tripped her and Rita fell hard, she was bruised all over her legs and around the feet. She had fallen on a concrete

| Page 155 floor. Philip walked back with a feeling of accomplishment and a gleeful look on his face, but we were all shocked. No one said anything, because we knew he was the toughest of the lot, brilliant and was school Prefect. Rita limped back and we all felt awkward about what had just happened.

‘This is exactly what your grandfather did to my father,’ Phillip said. ‘And this one is for Nkrumah,’ he added. It felt like his words were stabbing us in the chest but we said nothing and that was the end of it. I consoled Rita and the experience stayed with me for a long time and Rita and I became better friends. It was only recently that I concluded that the meaning of that incident was linked to Phillip’s own way of taking revenge on Rita for Ankrah’s involvement as Chairman of the National Liberation

Council after the overthrow of Kwame Nkrumah.

My friendship with Philip survived that incident, but my trust had fractured, making me cautious of him from then on. We visited each other’s homes and I once met his father who had an impressive moustache; we took pictures together and stayed in touch for awhile after St. John’s. We sustained our friendship through our mutual love for art and we were both successful in passing the Common Entrance Exam making my nine years at the school all worthwhile.

I went to St. Augustine’s Secondary School and Philip went to Ghana National

Secondary School, which was first founded by Kwame Nkrumah. With our departure,

| Page 156 our lives as children came to an end. We would both grow up in our separate ways in secondary schools far away from St. John’s in Cape Coast, the former capital of the Gold

Coast. I remember going to Ghana National for some social event and met Philip briefly. He would see me as an athlete, representing St. Augustine’s during the inter-

College sports competition. He was surprised. Our paths would cross again at the

University of Ghana, Philip was studying Medicine and I was studying Political Science and Philosophy. However, whatever bond we had when we were young, was gone.

We were now two entirely different people, though the memories of our youthful years stayed on within our hearts. I will always remember Philip as one of my best friends in

St. John’s, who was my anchor in more ways than I thought. He was strong, learned and bright, and his presence in my life made up for my being frail, imaginative and prone to feelings of inner sadness. Through him I would become confident, determined and brave, knowing very well that Philip would be there to make up for what I lacked, growing up as a boy in St. John’s Preparatory Primary School.

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Chapter 14: The Memory Pillow and the Education of a Storyteller

‘William Davies, stop drawing the words,’ I remember Mr Oquaye, my teacher telling me in class. I was probably about seven then, trying to memorise what was on the board by drawing it into the book. ‘This is not lettering or calligraphy,’ he added.

I had already won Mr Oquaye’s favour as an art student and he usually allowed me to draw on the board and spend the after school hours standing on a chair to write some of the headings for Geography notes and to draw maps for the class.

But when it came to memorising history, maths, and other nature study notes, I couldn’t remember the numbers, dates and the names or definitions. So I would draw them into my book as if the words were images that I needed to be etched onto the screen of my brain, so as to remember them during the weekly class test or quiz.

I was still finding it difficult to memorise history notes and spelling, and it occurred to me to change my strategy. One night, as I was lulling myself to sleep, I noticed one of the other students, Charles Osafo, who read incessantly. ‘Why are you always reading?’

I whispered loudly to him, as it was lights out and after hours and kids were punished for talking at night.

‘Why are you always drawing?’ he whispered back. He was reading using the light from the corridor and I was, as usual, going over images in my mind and inventing stories in my imagination. Then it suddenly occurred to me that, if I could draw on my

| Page 159 pillow and then sleep on it, the information would enter my brain, sticking there forever. I believed that I had stumbled upon a technique only known to me, and I would use it as my secret method to study, and probably be first in class one day.

That strategy set off a pattern that lasted from Stage three to Stage five, until I realised it wasn’t working. But while it lasted, it was a secret habit to use my memory game, which I nurtured and to this day, I still write the stories in my mind in visual pictures.

Weeks before exams, I used to draw the map of Ghana, the names of the regional cities,

Accra, Kumasi, Tamela, Koforidua, Takoradi, Ho, Suyani, Bolgatanga, Cape Coast and

Wa. I drew rivers, the Volta Lake, River Pra, Afram, Ankobra and the Ofin and wrote out the names of the countries flanking Ghana.

By the time I got to Stage three, we were learning about David Livingstone who was born in Yorkshire.7 His biography was written on the left side of the blackboard and I memorised it by rewriting it on my pillow hoping that I would not forget. The word

‘Yorkshire’ meant a lot to me. I convinced myself that when I was in England, my mother and I had visited there. I imagined that because it was an English town I had a special connection to it. I was the only one in the class who had been to England, until the following year when Effi Sam, a girl from my class, went there on holidays.

7 David Livingston was actually born in Blantyre, South Lanarkshire; Scotland. But for whatever reason, as a child I memorised it as Yorkshire. | Page 160

By the time I was about eleven, writing on my pillow had taken on mythical significance. I was now in Mr Eben’s class and he was a brilliant history teacher and an orator of sorts. Word went around that he was studying to gain admission to university and was teaching us the same things as he was studying. He taught African history with the flair of a storyteller. He captured the imagination of the class, and in my case, transported me to the imaginary realms of the past. I felt I was part of the chronicles of the ancient Ghana Empire, Mali, Songhai, the Kingdom of Benin; that I was witness to the Almoravid Movement, the Moslem Crusades and Islamic Imperialism and slavery; that I participated in the story of the founding of the Fulani States, Hausa lands and that

I experienced the life story of Osman Dan Fodio.8 He told us the story about the founding of the Ashanti Kingdom by the legendary Osei Tutu and his sorcerer who was responsible for the conjuration of the Golden Stool; the symbol that united the multitude of Akan clans into a formidable state, poised to conquer West Africa, if

European colonisation hadn’t arrested their expansionist ambitions.

I could imagine the Ga people sailing the turbulent seas from Ibo land, until they arrived on the shores of Accra and founded new settlements that would eventually form into the state of the Ga people, with their capital in Accra. Mr Eben would link these tales to the formation of the Fanti Confederacy and the inception of the Akim

Kingdom and their wars with the Ashanti for tribal hegemony over the land of pre- colonial Gold Coast. This was happening at the same time as the Europeans were

8 Osman Dan Fodio, born 1754 – died 1817; Shaibu Usman Bii Foduye and was the founder of the Sokoto Caliphate –Northern Nigeria - in 1809 a religious teacher, writer, and Islamic Promoter. | Page 161 arriving on the shores of West Africa. The Dutch, and then the Portuguese, arrived in

West Africa, followed by the slave trade and the Christians in the form of the British and the French, before we lost our freedom completely to Europe.

Mr Eben had a way of telling history stories as if we were witnessing them unfolding before our eyes. He would stride across the room, gesturing with his hands, or step forward or backward to emphasis his point. He gave life to his narratives and enlivened our imaginations with his words. Even though he held a book in his hand, he wasn’t reading it. He had memorised every word and brought it alive by phrase and name, giving a sense of relevance that blurred the lines between past and present. We were swept into a world of wonder, mystery and African magnificence.

There were great battles, magical encounters, intrigues for power and position, eloquent speeches, great migrations of goods, magnificent displays of cultures that resonated with opulence and lavish exhibition of kingship, chieftaincy and African sovereignty.

He did not only inspire in us the pride of being African, but also stirred in me a deep desire to return to that time of African wonder and enchantment. His storytelling was poetic, rhetorical and impressive.

I would retell the stories of these characters from the history books. I travelled into an ethereal past of magic, mystery, oracles and storytellers. I spoke to them, imagined their faces, the way they lived, the houses they built, how Africa used to be and the

| Page 162 mysterious languages they spoke. I took this journey always with the aid of my pillow, writing on it and holding my face into the imagined depths of the past. It was the inner luxury I gave myself every night. My pillow became a haven into which I entrusted all my dreams. It listened to me, it did not judge me, it consoled me during days when I felt homesick and suffered humiliation. As long as my trust in my pillow lasted, it became the landscape on which I drew all of my pictures and wrote of the great memories of Africa. I memorised the names of the great historic figures, chronicled the dates, the cities and the narratives that formed the magical world of that era. Ibn Batuta,

Sundiata, Sonni Ali, Askia Mohammed-the Great, Mansa Musa, Osman Dan Fodi;:

‘these men were empire builders, conquerors, travellers, who lived in a time when

Africa was independent and free, when nations stretched from one end of Africa to the other. It was a time of great learning in a city called Timbuktu, and Mansa Musa dazzled the world with his opulence and riches when he travelled to Mecca on a pilgrimage.’ Mr Eben’s oratorical tone inspired me to study harder.

As a spellbound student, I could imagine Mansa Musa and his caravan of gold travelling across the desert on his way through Egypt to Mecca, and the great rulers of old, sitting on their thrones in an imagined kingdom of opulence, splendour and ancient glory. ‘Scholars came from around the world, historians, astronomers, scientists and traders travelled from distant shores and other kingdoms to visit Timbuktu and hold court with the great emperors of Africa,’ Mr Eben would tell us, and we would all be frozen by his oratory. We became familiar with the names of great African cities of

| Page 163 the past, Sankori, Djenne, Saleh, Gao and Kano, Juba, Benin, Ife and Oyo, those ancient centres of trade, learning, crafts and worship, the metropolitan capitals of lost empires and kingdoms.

After one of our journeys through the history of ancient Africa, Mr Eben gave us hints about the follow-up story, or made cursory remarks about other kingdoms, the Fulani people, Ethiopians, Askum, Sudanese, Zimbabwean, Egypt, Moroccan, Dahomey and

Cameroon and all the other achievements of Africa that he wished he could tell us about if only he had the time. Then the school bell would ring for change of class. And we all came crashing back from our ride on the horses that roamed historic Africa in the times when the continent was free.

By the end of the semester we had learnt about the formation of the Ashanti Empire and of Osei Tutu’s bravery and leadership. How with the counsel of his great sorcerer,

Okomfo Anokye, he had conjured the golden stool, a mythical and mystical symbol of

Ashanti unity. Through their partnership they were able to bring the fragmented tribes together to form a union based on a spirit of understanding, to fight their enemies and conquer other tribes. The hegemony of the Ashanti kingdom lasted until they were subdued by the British. The Fanti people also signed a bond with the British, later to be popularly known in Ghana as the Bond of 1844. This Bond gave the British control of many coastal parts of Ghana and symbolically marked the beginning of full colonial

| Page 164 control of the Gold Coast. For more than a hundred years the Gold Coast would live under colonial rule.

As the term was drawing to a close, we rushed through the history of the colonial era as a period of subjugation, exploitation and shame. Names like George Maclean,

Governor Hill, Sir Gordon Guggisburg, and Alden Clarke would stay with me and I derived great delight in drawing their portraits from the book on Civic Education. Mr

Eben moved quickly through the story about the Denkyera, Akwamu and Akwapim,

Fanti and Ga-Adange people and the struggle for territory, trade and power between the Ashanti and the coastal peoples of Ghana, before British colonial rule.

The story about the rise of the Ashanti people and the romance between Osei Tutu and the sister of the King of Denkyera was most captivating. But the anti-climax came when

Mr Eben described how the British burnt down Kumasi after many unsuccessful attempts to subdue the Ashanti Kingdom. The British eventually captured and deported the Asantehene Prempeh – Paramount Chief of the Ashanti – first to Elmina

Castle, then to Sierra Leone before sending him to the Seychelles Islands where he would remain for a long time. I listened with rapt attention to the story of how the

British made demands on the Ashanti, demanding the surrender of the Golden Stool – symbol of unity and power - with deep disappointment. Even though the story of the warrior queen, Yaa Asantewaa and her revolt against British domination was heroic, I couldn’t be consoled. I imagined how it felt for Prempeh, to be sailing away as a

| Page 165 destooled and captured chief living in exile, only to return to Ghana in his old age, robbed of all his royal personage and power.

Years later, still thinking about the deportation of Prempeh, I came to the conclusion that, if slavery hadn’t been abolished by then, the British could have easily sent him to

America as a slave, stripping him of all evidence of royalty, honour and pride.

While my thoughts dwelt on the tragic fall of the Ashanti to the muskets of the British, aided by the support of the other tribes who feared and disdained Ashanti supremacy,

Mr Eben snapped us back to reality by telling us about the formation of the Fanti

Kingdom and the signing of a treaty by the Fanti Confederacy with the British for protection from Ashanti invaders. More treaties were signed in separate arrangements with other tribes along the coast for British protection and trading rights, making the

Gold Coast one more subject territory in the vast expanse of the British Empire. These historic factors that defined the narrative of Africa’s history made me aware at an early age that Africans are always made vulnerable by the nature of our fragmented outlook on life, making even the strongest among us weak in the face of foreign powers that come and conquer the continent and still continue to serve their own ends.

As the story of Ghana’s history came closer to home and the struggle for Independence began, the narrative lost its magic. It became a lesson about dates and the names of the historic figures, the colonial African clergy and scholars like Dr Aggrey and Casley

Hayford, plus a list of colonial Governors that we had to memorise. Slowly I stopped

| Page 166 writing on my pillow and by the time I got to stage six, I realised that it was not my memory pillow that had allowed me to remember; it was the magic of the storyteller.

Suddenly, the canopy of history lifted and the veil of Africa’s past was completely removed. We were once again assembled and informed that, early that morning, there had been a bloodless coup. Ghana now had a new ruler by the name of Col. I.K.

Acheampong, and the Prime Minister, Dr Busia would remain in exile indefinitely.

There were rumours that Nkrumah was behind the coup and that he would be returning home soon, because Acheampong had trained in Nkrumah’s ideological school in Winneba. Such rumours didn’t materialise and life continued at the same old pace. The difference was that we started learning the meaning attached to military ranks. To be important in our new society you needed to be a Captain, Major,

Lieutenant Colonel, Colonel or Brigadier. In fact African history had dramatically shifted again, military intervention was now transforming our existence in radical ways. The generation that fought for independence was now supplanted by a new regime of military rulers whose conception of power would not only scare the continent, but would also interrupt the narrative pattern of our perception of ourselves in more ways than we in Africa could have ever imagined.

They were a new breed of men, totally different from anything Mr Eben made us believe. They were neither heroes nor villains. They were brigands who robbed us of our freedom and paralysed the masculinity of the civilian populations they ruled. They

| Page 167 ruled African nations impetuously, ruthlessly and uncompromising, confiscating the assets of the state for their own personal gain; doing with impunity the same corrupt things, of which they had accused the civilian politicians of in justifying their claim to power. The difference was that theirs was more organised in its scale and destructive power, crippling the economy of the state, ruining the post-colonial state without any sense of guilt or repentance; setting a new pattern for power in Africa. With them the story of Africa has become a narrative about insanity. How do you tell a story about mayhem and dysfunction when the story is about your own people? It’s difficult.

I believe the desire to be a storyteller was planted in me at that age in my life, strengthened by the stories that my mother told us during the months I spent at home during school holidays. By telling myself stories and imagining different worlds, I was able to experience freedom and to escape the harsh realities of my fate as a child. In my stories, I was able to endow myself with magical powers of flight, gifts of creativity, confidence, oratory, leadership and the power to punish bullies. I would imagine

Mohammed Ali as my father, fighting my battles with the bigger boys, who were always on the prowl for vulnerable kids. I would wage a crusade against the infidels and lash the wicked school teachers, cast out the mean matrons, kiss the beautiful girls and roll in the grass with them in my dreams. The girls would come and sit by me as I drew some of the most beautiful pictures and told them how I had dined with Mansa

Musa and met Okomfo Anokye, the great sorcerer, in my dreams. In the world of stories there were no limits, the world of storytelling had no beginning or end. I was the

| Page 168 prince who was kidnapped and sent to a boarding school by a wicked witch who bewitched my mother and took me away from her. One day I would be free, one day my mother would come to her senses and take me away from these lonely parts and return me to my princely throne.

Through the magic of these tales, I was able to survive, live and grow, knowing deep in my heart that I had magical secrets that were mine and only mine. Nothing and no one could take them away from me. In my mind at that age, I allowed myself the privilege to imagine and believe I was the son of Askia the Great, the nephew of Mansa Musa, and one day in an imaginary kingdom in my mind, I believed I would be heir to a golden throne in a magical world; I would speak with the same oratorical skill as Mr

Eben to inspire my people, mobilise the imagination of the chiefs to unite Ghana, like

Osei Tutu did to unite the Asantes, and galvanise the spirit of the masses like Nkrumah, to unite and change the destiny of Africa.

All of this will happen with my pillow as my most trusted friend and my drawing pen as my magic wand to draw a new future of hope and new dreams for my people. These stories provided me with the confidence I needed and helped me endure feelings of loneliness and the uncertainties that accompanied the daily routine of living in a boarding school like St. John’s Preparatory Primary School.

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Chapter 15: Beyond St. John’s – From Ayalolo to Adabraka

Accra, rather than Cape Coast, was chosen by the British to be the capital of Gold Coast.

It rapidly grew into a metropolitan city, and by the end of the Second World War it had become the hot bed of the Independence movement that eventually led to the many changes that now define the recent history of Ghana. Ayalolo was one of the early suburbs and people at one time considered it the furthest place from the heart of Accra.

Ayalolo, (pronounced: Ayorlo) in its literal translation means, ‘we are still going.’ It can also mean the idea of an onward journey or in its poetic or metaphoric sense it could mean an odyssey. Its name indicated that the city was growing and there were clearly visions of the city expanding. So it was called Ayalolo, the starting point of the onward movement of Accra into the hinterlands.

My mother’s father was one of Ayalolo’s earliest settlers. Family folklore tells us that my grandfather – Joseph William Okai affectionately known as Paa Joe or JW - had seen our grandmother walk across the street from where he lived with his mother and he told his mother that he had seen the women he would marry. After their marriage,

Ayalolo became the family home, where the rest of the children of Joseph and Sarah were born. There were miscarriages and early deaths. But in 1960, thirty years after JW and Sarah moved from Winneba to Accra, I was born in that same house. Grandma

Sarah had died of diabetes and was buried about three months before Independence, and JW would mourn her for a decade.

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In the forties and fifties, Grandpa flourished as a Customs officer, retiring early to use his connections to go into business for himself. He imported the finest wool from

England and trading in porcelain and cooking utensils, he became wealthy and invested his earnings in real estate. After the house was built he extended it, and built another house in Adabraka, buying and selling land in the new developing towns in Accra, and building three more houses in Lartebiokorshi. He supervised the construction of houses for other relatives, including one for his younger brother Papa William in Asylum

Down.

Ayalolo was a point of convergence before Independence. It was in Ayalolo’s Arena that Nkrumah was to give many of his popular speeches at rallies in Accra, calling on the British government to grant the Gold Coast its independence. I grew up constantly being reminded that one could see Nkrumah speaking to his followers from the window, where Mother was fond of sitting and listening, as Nkrumah’s voice echoed in the house. Ayalolo was also where city parades and annual festivities ended. From

Ayalolo, the urban sprawl of Accra began in earnest. It was the last town for the procession on the festivities for the Festival of Twins.

The history of this festival for twins has always been linked with a narrative about the

Ga people. We grew up knowing that it was part of the annual tradition that marked the beginning of harvest. It was a season of fishing in abundance, the harvest of corn and the plentiful flow of palm oil. The story begins with the triumph of the Gas in war

| Page 172 against an insurgent tribe in the east. The Chief of the Gas - the Ga Mantse – took his twin children into hiding for fear that they would be captured in battle. Heirs to the traditional stool of the Ga, the Mantse wanted his children to be safe and sent them for protection to the friendly Akwapim tribes in the mountains. Following the triumph of the Gas over their enemies from the East, the twins were brought home, marking the beginning of a new era of prosperity. Henceforth, every year the high priest of the land

– the Wolome – in consultation with diviners and spirit gods, declares the day for a celebration of the Festival of Twins. All twins are embalmed in white mud clay, showered with herbs and paraded through the streets in celebration of the harvest season.

In the first year after we returned from England I witnessed my twin cousins, Felix and

Felicia, being taken away at dawn on Friday, while the family prepared the festival dish of yam pudding in palm oil, with boiled eggs, known as otor. Everyone would partake of the ceremonial otor food, taking small portions, except those who professed to be of the Christian faith and refused to partake of ritual or traditional ceremonial dishes.

Mother participated in sharing the dish as a way of acknowledging the significance of the occasion, and encouraged me to have some as well. In late afternoon the twins were carried home on the shoulders of strong men in a procession accompanied by a celebratory chant. This happened the day before the Festivities on Saturday.

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This processional parade of the twins around the city of Accra was a carnival of sorts, infused with all the fetish ritual dances and the ritual process of bodily cleansing.

Leading each procession would be a young girl or woman, carrying a bowl filled to the brim with scented water, herbs, twigs, money offerings and all kinds of potions which were supposed to possess magical powers to protect the twins from harm and to consecrate the homes of the families where the twins were born. While the woman who carried the bowl drifted forward, possessed by spirits and in a trance, the twins were carried behind them and the rest of the society of celebrants followed. The celebrants would dance with hysterical excitement, chanting and singing war songs in the spirit of collective exhilaration, which turned into a public display of elation bordering on a sort of mass mayhem, yet exciting to watch from a distance. The women who carried the bowl would be leading each procession, drifting in various directions as someone guided her forward, because it was believed that she was possessed by the gods. This ceremonial chanting and public dance by masses of people was what my Uncle

Atukwei Okai, the poet, described as the Ayalolo Concerto movement of people.

This was the concerto point of a collective tribal feeling of ecstasy through the beating of drums, the dance of the masquerades, the native songs of celebration reverberating through the bodies of the possessed women who stamped their feet to the processional drummers, drunk with the excitement of tribal joy, sweating, spitting, chanting and singing traditional vulgar songs to celebrate the Festival of the Twins. The procession, which started from the Ga Mantse’s Palace, would meander its way through Accra and

| Page 174 end at Ayalolo, at the tributary point of the Korle Lagoon, where the women carrying the bowls of herbs would go and, with the help of their guides, empty the bowl to free themselves of the possession of the spirits. Once the bowl was emptied the women would transform and reappear from their entranced state, looking relieved of the spirit.

The children of the streets would clamour for the coins well-wishers had put in the bowl as part of the ritual of asking for blessings from the gods. The celebrations would continue into the late hours, marked by heavy drinking, dancing and an orgy of souls in a communal dance of public ecstasy, freedom, joy and delight of being alive as a Ga.

I listened to the drumming late into the night, imagining how it felt to be a twin.

The following day the cooking would start at dawn and the open air stove of firewood was set alight. The day started when a goat or sheep was slaughtered in open sight. The women within the family would collectively dress the sheep after the hired man had slaughtered the sheep and scraped off the burnt hide. Before the sheep was slaughtered, we the boys took special delight in finding out who was the bravest by touching the sheep just before it met its tragic fate. The day began with an early wakeup call to announce the arrival of the butcher. By the time I found my way downstairs the man would be ready, sharpening his knife on a round rock shaped by years of use. He would test its sharpness on the edge of his thumb, sending shivers through my body.

Then swiftly, he would pull the poor animal, seize it by the throat and drag it towards the ground near his feet, while reciting incantations to the gods by uttering words to invisible spirits and naming ancestors. Without hesitation, he would slide the knife

| Page 175 along its throat and the blood would gush out, then spill into a big bowl. The dying sheep would fidget, then slowly shiver until it became stiff, held from behind, by one of the older brave cousins. The experience always caused me to think about the terror of dying, the way the sheep was slaughtered and blood dripped onto the ground. I would try to express my fear to my mother, but she would assure me that the way the sheep was slaughtered has always been the way it is done, since Biblical times, so that I would stop thinking about it.

The oozing blood would be used later as a special blood dish, after the bowl of blood was first placed at the feet of the twins, a symbolic act of cleansing in celebration of their spiritual triumph over the forces of evil and the obstacles of life. After the slaughter the man was paid, and he washed his knife, arms and face in a ritual cleansing before heading off to his next assignment. Each household that could afford a sheep would be busy with the slaughter that morning. Those who could not afford a sheep celebrated with a fowl. I learnt which household could not afford a sheep or a goat by listening to the whispers of our mothers and aunties talking and to the bleating of goat or sheep in our neighbourhood. Grandpa was wealthy enough to afford a sheep, plus we had chickens and fish. By midday the younger girls, older female cousins and aunties would be busy, preparing for a whole day’s work of cooking. We children would watch them peeling the tomatoes, cutting the onions, stirring the pot, and cutting the yam, cassava and plantain to be boiled and pounded by noon into fufu.

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By noon two dishes would be almost ready. There was the traditional Ga Festival dish called Kepkele, a corn based dish made of freshly grounded corn, steamed and mixed with palm oil as a sign of prosperity and abundant harvest during the season of corn. It was prepared with palm nut soup and heavily fortified with fish and meat. This was considered a ceremonial dish which was consumed before the main feast. At the same time light soup would be boiling, in a family size big bowl, the fufu being pounded in earnest, chicken soup and gravy on the side on coal pots, and rice and yams in smaller pots. By midafternoon members of the extended family started calling in.

Uncle Quist, my mother’s cousin, was usually the first to arrive, Uncle Atutwei my grandfather’s cousin, Papa William my grandfather’s youngest brother, Judge Okai, my mother’s cousin who studied in Scotland, and Grandpa’s two sons from his other wife would also show up. Other close and distant cousins, relatives and uncles from the extended Okai family tree, would arrive, all sharing similar names, Atukweifio,

Atukwei – Poet, Nii Okai, Okaifio and so on. My uncle, Uncle Nii John, would also invite his professional associates, prominent clients and colleagues. The husbands and boyfriends of our older family and their sisters and younger cousins would also show up. By announcement of their names as they entered the compound, the narrative about their place in the family tree and hierarchy in the extended clan would be explained.

Those of us with a keen ear for family folklore would listen and allow the words to imprint themselves on our memory, linking each person to a story about love,

| Page 177 profession, adopted children, distant cousins, children born out of wedlock, the descendants and members of the other Okai clan and their place in the family hierarchy.

It was the mid sixties and Grandpa was at the height of his wealth, family prestige and accomplishments. I remember when it was announced that he was seventy- five years old and I thought, ‘My goodness, he is old?’ Libations were poured by an appointed elder of the clan. Before the festivities started, the traditional host of the clan and

Okyeame – the speaker of the occasion – would sprinkle portions of the kepkele to the gods and to the four winds. The names of ancestors would be mentioned, the recently deceased remembered and Grandma Sarah would be called upon as if she were still upstairs nursing her diabetic wounds. Some would break into sudden wailing, while children committed themselves to follow the path of their forefathers to a place of prosperity, hope and freedom from shame, slavery and infamy. The family’s symbolic names were mentioned, and the Christian God Jehovah was also called upon.

In an act of blending and balancing cosmic forces the ritual of the Israelite Passover, when Moses marked the homes of the Jews with blood to spare them from the pestilence that befell Egypt, became linked with the local traditions, and followed the blessing of our ancestors and gods. With the acknowledgement of the various gods out of the way, the festivities would begin and family would partake in the biggest feast of the year. I quickly learned to eat fufu with my fingers by watching how everyone did it, gathering up balls and putting them straight into their mouths, washing them down

| Page 178 with soup. The soup dripped along my arm as my mother helped me to master the art of eating fufu with soup almost a year after we came back from England. My younger brother Jeff was by her side looking on as a baby, I suppose wondering what the feasting was about.

For years after my first experience of the Festival of the Twins, and also the New Year’s day celebrations, the members of the Okai family clan gathered and the evening and night were spent in storytelling, a memorial process of handing over the archive of family history to the next generation. Grandpa and Papa William acted as references to verify the authenticity of each narrative and the older aunties and uncles provided supporting evidence. My mother played her role as the encyclopaedic resource of the family to confirm birthdays, deaths and burials, the age at death of this auntie or that uncle, why someone died, who married whom and where they moved and whether the marriage had born fruit or the couple was barren.

The family narrative and the chronicle of the Okai clan were retold and recast in a new light annually and grandchildren were counted. There were seventy five by the time grandpa was eighty years old. The journey from Winneba to Ayalolo, Accra, would be retold, the romance of Paa Joe and Ma Sarah would be re-enacted. The story of the death of Uncle Richard in Liberia and the other children who died young from illness and coughing were repeated. Stories about Grandpa’s oldest brother who left and went to Liberia to start a new Okai family in Monrovia, and how Grandpa started working at

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Customs and rapidly became wealthy, formed part of a long oral chronicle, spiced with songs, proverbs, appellation and the pouring of water or gin libations. This formed part of a traditional education which I would have missed, had mother’s marriage to my stepfather been successful and we had stayed in England.

As I grew older some of these stories were told as premonitions. They were stories about alcoholism that secretly ran through certain parts of the family tree, told to warn those who were drowning their sorrows and frustrations in illicit liquor. There were stories about women having affairs with married men, and ghosts that visited the shrine to cast spells on those who broke the moral codes of society and took a course of life contrary to the values set by our forefathers. Those in the family who were guilty of such sins would begin to whisper insinuations and when the fortunes of the family began to change and Grandpa was ill, these stories became the trigger point for huge quarrels; cursing and finger pointing, bringing down the spirit of unity that had once held the family together. Before Grandpa died, quarrels over inheritance had begun and splinter groups had begun to form amongst the aunties and the cousins.

There were those who felt favoured by Grandpa because they had cared for him ever since Grandma passed away. Their claim to a portion of the inheritance was based on being responsible for cleaning Grandpa’s chamber pot, ironing his suits, washing his underwear and cooking his meals ever since Grandma died. Then there were those who believed they had served the family well as older siblings and, even if they were

| Page 180 widowed early in life, or never had the opportunity to go to school, they believed they should not be denied their fair share.

Every sense of family idealism by which we were brought up had begun to disintegrate.

Some women were having affairs and more children were being born out of wedlock, and the spirit of education and discipline that defined the culture within the family slackened. News broke out that the family treasure trove and money chest in Grandpa’s room had been raided through a plot hatched from within. The incident devastated

Grandpa and that turned out the light in his hurt heart. According to the family narrative, it was the reason for his illness in the first place. Some believed that Grandpa had cursed the family for this act of betrayal.

Grandpa died with a sense of deep disappointment and sorrow that his own family would steal from him. Mother tried to encourage him to forgive, but in hindsight, I don’t think he did. He died knowing that the family he spent all his life building was falling apart before he died. Those who were believed to be responsible for raiding

Grandpa’s private chest of drawers while he was having a shower downstairs, never recovered from the feelings of guilt. Names do not need to be mentioned but the memory of how and why Grandpa died still haunts.

After JW’s death, the quarrels and internal hatred destroyed the Okai family, creating factions and splinter groups. Individuals consulted with occult and fetish priests to cast

| Page 181 spells of punishment against each other and then accused one another of using witchcraft and meddling with the dark arts. Dangerous and self-destructive practices like these have blinded the mind of Africa for centuries. These family quarrels revealed a dark side of human nature that astonished me. To this day, I have not managed to reconcile how our family fell apart.

Brothers and sisters, cousins, nephews and nieces who grew up eating out of the same bowl, went out together holding hands on their way to church, exchanged cloths, bathed together, drank out of the same cup, braided each others’ hair while exchanging the narrative of their love lives, sat together to have their pictures taken and slept in the same bed or on the same mat, would one day grow up to cast evil spells of hate on each other and point accusatory figures, spewing curses out of deep jealousy for one another.

To cast off the fear of supposed curses from close relatives, different factions within the family joined various Apostolic or Holy Spirit charismatic churches that sprung up all over Accra at the time. This in itself intensified the spirit of rancour amongst our relatives, causing some to refuse any participation in the festivities of Homowo, as it was considered by some to be a fetish festival. In the ensuing quarrels that followed each festivity after Grandpa died, they would pitch their God against each other, each claiming to have direct access to divine intervention against those who were accused of worshipping false gods, and to ward off any curse against them. Their arguments would be spiced with Biblical quotations, ‘Any weapon formed against me shall never prosper,’ was the most favourite of the quotes from the Bible.

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My family, and Africa in my mind, have been torn apart by religion and the superstitious thoughts that have ruined many and maimed the spirit of the race.

Perhaps these family disputes created the thousands of tribes before the coming of slavery and colonialism. So we continue to see each other as foreigners, strangers and as enemies on a continent which, if we had the imagination to perceive it, could be our common happy home.

Mother did her best throughout her life to warn her relatives of the tragic consequences of quarrelling and cursing family members. Words about death, disease, poverty and dispossession would be uttered in the passionate moments of anger. These were words intended to poison the womb of a sister who was despised by a brother, the curses of blindness, infertility and the omens of hatred; fingers were pointed that ultimately destroyed the wounded spirit of the family. Once proud and prosperous, the Okai family began to flounder, the children lost their way, marriages fell apart, the women died in childbirth, the young and bright stars died, the best and the brightest became blind, and those who believed in the superstition lost their minds. Others died after being bedridden for almost a decade, and some also died crying, still bitter against the past and with life.

Some of my family left Ghana and went overseas, never to return even to visit. If they did, they stayed away from the clan, not announcing whether they were in town or not, for fear they might be infected by the bad luck which still haunts the family. Others

| Page 183 went to Liberia following the path of Uncle Richard, like my cousin who flourished for a while until the civil war broke out. He was mentally wounded after witnessing the carnage on the streets and walked back from Monrovia to Accra, a refugee. Months later he lost his mind. Some claim he was cursed for having an affair with a married woman when he returned from Liberia. Regardless of how it happened, he has since been interned in a room, waiting for the day time ceases and his breath stops.

This and many more stories represent the narrative of Ayalolo to me as I grew up in

Ghana. Their richness and foreboding shaped and expanded my imagination. I nurtured visions of myself inherited from several sources: my mother, the gospel of love, the power of prayer, the imagination to conjure up images of beauty, opulence, affluence, global mobility, individual enterprise and leadership; and the spirit of refinement that came with disciplined erudition.

I have spent my life collecting photographs and listening to stories. I visited my mother’s cousins in my youth, milked all the tales about our family history from my aunties from every side of the family. As part of the process of reinventing and developing the family narrative, I have visited all the relatives around the world, regardless of what was said in the past. This has helped me to link our stories, connecting the dots so I could relive the narratives in my mind, helping me to plot my way through life as I grew older and travelled around the world.

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Dreams of reconciliation, the return of festivities, the rebirth of love and the moment of tears to cleanse the heart of all the pain that has wounded a family that was once happy to live together in the same house that Joseph William Okai built; these blessings are yet to be fulfilled. However, I believe I have been blessed by being an Okai-Davies, a name

I invented as a way to reinvent myself, to live a richer life, to be fortunate in marriage and in my dealings with society.

This name was born out of the spirit of the men who once were warriors of commerce and saw the world through pre-colonial African eyes. My African utopia was a rhapsody with a history of joy, hope and possibility. Yet, even though freedom and

Independence had their rewards, there was a terrible price to pay, and family members or people of the same nationality hurt each other. Africa’s misfortunes are born, out of the curse of tribalism and the filthy logic of self-importance defined by the spirit of a tribal superiority complex. It is the logic that underlies Africa’s sense of poverty. These bad habits of the mind bred the illiterate and narrow minded thinking of tribal and clannish ideologies, denying the continent its true potential and promise.

Jeff, my mother and I moved from Ayalolo into the house in Adabraka that Grandpa had built, the year after Mother and I came back from England. I remember the day clearly. My grandfather had decided that his daughter deserved to live in a better suburb. She had returned from England and she now had two boys and was Principal

Headmistress of Independence Girls School, behind the old Parliament House.

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Sister Emma, the first of the grandchildren had graduated from the University of Cape

Coast, and was the first woman in the family to earn a university degree while my

Uncle Nii John had successfully passed the Bar and was now a lawyer. He was given one of the houses in Lartebiokorshi and used the first floor of our house in Adabraka as his legal chambers. I grew up in Adabraka from around the age of five until I was twenty- six when I left Ghana to explore the wider world.

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Chapter 16: Father Figure to a Forsaken Son

Beyond the image of my father and the overpowering presence of my stepfather whenever he came to Ghana to visit, there were many father figures whom my mother cultivated to compensate for the absence of Kofi Davies in my life.

From the beginning there was my Uncle Nii John. I grew up knowing my uncle as a lawyer who always wore a black suit. My earliest memory was when my mother entrusted me to him the night we were moving from Ayalolo to Adabraka. We sat together in the front seat of the lorry and my mother’s entire belongings were packed into the big lorry popularly known as a ‘mummy truck,’ or colloquially as tro-tro, on our way to our new home. Mother stayed behind to supervise the moving, and arrived later with Jeffrey in a taxi. At that moment, as a little boy, I became aware that I had an uncle and my mother trusted him enough to let me go away with him. From that day his presence in my life would be linked to the paradox of a love and hate relationship that I will spend the rest of my life trying to reconcile.

Uncle Nii John was strict, and proud of the fact that he had colonial training and had grown up under an English school master who was a disciplinarian. As a boy he was sent away to live with a school teacher and he constantly reminded us of the discipline that was instilled into him which ‘today has made me a lawyer’ he would say.

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He went to St. Augustine’s College in Cape Coast, and after graduation he became a school teacher in Accra. However, sometime in his late twenties, he concluded that being a teacher in the new Ghana would not lead to the career prospects that he imagined for himself. So he decided on further study to become a doctor or a lawyer, the two most prestigious professions at the time. He studied and took both the medical and the law exams and passed, but decided to become a lawyer on the advice of his father. He gained admission to the University of Ghana to train as a lawyer.

According to Mother’s stories about her relationship with Uncle Nii John, she practically took care of him when he was growing up. ‘I bathed him, brushed his hair and fed him. Our mother was still having babies then and so we the older sisters took turns in caring for the younger ones. And I took care of Uncle Nii John and Uncle

Richard. All throughout the years he went to school and to college I nurtured him and supported his dream to make something out of himself. When he went to college, I helped him to study and eventually to gain admission into the university. He is my brother, what can I say?’ Mother would add when we complained about Uncle Nii

John’s disciplinarian approach in dealing with his nieces and nephews.

After we moved to Adabraka, Uncle Nii John set up his Law Chambers on the first floor of the house while we lived upstairs. I would watch his clients coming and going and while we won the affection of his law partners - like Lawyer Fletcher a staunch anti-

Nkrumahist, or Lawyer Newman who worked as the Director of the Ghana Cocoa

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Board and now the Chief of Staff to President Atta-Mills - Uncle Nii John maintained his detached demeanour toward his sisters’ and brothers’ children at all times.

However, he saw me as heir to his legacy as a lawyer and did whatever he could to get me interested in the profession.

The more he tried, the more I resisted, and disliked his pestering me to be studious. He started by helping me with my reading and writing lessons when I came on holidays from St. John’s, by reading to me and showing me how to hold a pen and write well. He taught me how to write cursively and to evolve a mature writing style. But the process was not entertaining and I was not inspired to study under his strict disciplinarian methods. He introduced me to Latin very early, hoping that it would improve my poor spelling. But my spelling didn’t improve, neither did I respond to his austere adherence to grammar and punctuation. And even though he was a good storyteller whenever he allowed himself to let go of his stern persona, I maintained a childlike suspicion towards him and never trusted the stories he told. I started to avoid him, escaping from the house to play with my friends in the evening around the time I knew he would be coming upstairs. And when Mother got me to sit down to study under the supervision of Uncle Nii John, I would inwardly shut him off, drawing on the edges of the note book, blocking him out of my mind. I was on vacation, why should I be studying, why couldn’t I play with my friends? My attitude frustrated him immensely. ‘Do you want to be useless like your other cousins?’ he would rant.

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‘Why are you standing outside on the streets wasting your life away? You should be studying by now, reading, doing your maths and science. I am trying to teach you but you are so stubborn. I can’t believe that you want to waste your life. There are so many examples I can give you of men who refused to study and today their lives are wasted. I always studied and had the choice to study medicine, but I decided to study law. What do you think? You think you can make a living as an artist? You need a profession. If you humble yourself, I will teach you Latin and Greek mythology and that will build the foundation of all your studies in English and the legal profession. It is all up to you,

Willie, whether you want to study and become somebody or waste your life and be like the rest of the men in the neighbourhood who are up to nothing.’ He was good at admonishing me for being lazy and a good for nothing son of his sister, and my wayward behaviour and poor grades from school gave him reasons to be concerned.

However his reprimanding tone drove a further wedge between us. ‘You disappoint your uncle a lot. He has all these dreams for you and wants to support you, help you and teach you everything he knows. Why don’t you want to learn from him? He is very brilliant and was one of the best teachers, when he was a teacher.” I would listen to my mother and just shrug my shoulders and would not respond. Besides my uncle, Mother hired a full-time tutor to help me with my Maths and other exam related subjects for the

Common Entrance. This was Mr Lartey, whom I forced myself to pay attention to because he was gentle and kind. There were also two art tutors who won me over from the start, and my drawing and painting improved remarkably. But my grades in Maths and multiple choice related subjects which formed the core of the Common Entrance

| Page 190 tests, were not getting better. Mother once again sent me away, supposedly for my own good, to live with Uncle Nii John. So between the ages of about eleven to fourteen, I would spend my Easter, Christmas and long vacation holidays at Uncle Nii John’s house until I went from St. John’s to St. Augustine’s.

Living with Uncle Nii John was like living under house arrest where the full force of his strict and authoritarian personality held sway and a fearful silence hung over the family. A few of my older cousins had tried to live with him, but couldn’t last for a single vacation. Everyone hoped that he would succeed in making me a model example of his method of raising children. Life was regimented with house duties, our studies and chores, and television time was regulated to Sunday evenings only. We could watch the religious Ghanaian comic dramas – Osofo Dadzie - a Ghanaian sitcom in Twi whose protagonist was a priest, and we were allowed to watch Mr Mensah, another comic drama series in Ga on the weekends. Besides that and occasionally the news when there was a major event or the Head of State was giving a speech, we hardly watched television. We were never allowed to go out of the house. We stayed indoors and played around the compound when he was not around.

During the week Uncle Nii John left early to go to court, dressed in his black suit, a very clean white shirt and black tie. He was a generation behind the fashion and that earned him the nickname ‘Colo’, which meant colonial in attitude and style. But his confidence, conviction and forthrightness compensated for his old fashioned style of dress. People

| Page 191 assessed him on his good manners, his handsome smile and his dignified appearance and saw an old fashioned lawyer. He spoke excellent English and was articulate with a sophisticated vocabulary: a man of erudition. He always wore a suit and tie and, even on weekends, he wore a casual sports jacket over his shirts.

Uncle Nii John was impressive. He could tell traditional tales, morals and mythical stories. When he was in a happy mood he would trade stories with Mother and reminisce about colonial times and their years growing up. They recounted long winding tales about their parents and it was a wonderful feeling to be allowed into the conversation to listen and share the memories. They gave me access to the lost world of our parents and their parents before them.

There were stories about the days when having electric light was a luxury and so those who had to study at night would gather around a street lamp and go over their school assignments. They studied at home with kerosene lamps and managed to pass their school certificate exams. ‘And your generation have light at home and none of you want to study?’ Uncle Nii John would complain.

There were stories about class mates who came from poor households, started school late and went to school barefoot, examples of which were still apparent when I was growing up. Those were the days when the people of the Gold Coast were mastering

English, unravelling the mysteries of Westernisation and shifting from an oral culture to

| Page 192 a written one. It was also the language of time, counting and measuring. Those who mastered English and complied with the discipline of time and the arithmetic of the civil service were given access to jobs in the Public Service or the professions or could become teachers or nurses. Positions were beginning to define the new social hierarchy.

Hence it became the goal of my grandfather to make sure that all his sons became educated in the ways of the British system. Uncle David, my mother’s older brother, was forced to study Shakespeare and family legend has it that by the age of fifteen he could recite Hamlet and Macbeth from beginning to end, changing his voice to suit different characters. ‘Uncle David was brilliant,’ Uncle Nii John would say, ‘He was listed to become a Supreme Court Judge and was responsible for helping many of the lawyers of his generation to pass the Bar. He could recite the Legal statutes, the proceedings and the case studies from memory. Without him Ollennu wouldn’t have passed his exam. Today look at Nii Amaa Ollennu, he is Chief Justice and head of government.’ Mother and Uncle Nii John would lament the tragedy of Uncle David’s brilliance. ‘He eloped to London just after Independence with a woman of no learning, an illiterate, who uses alcohol to control our brother,’ they said.

What was said about Uncle David was a story of regret for lost moments of love and longing. Mother wished she had been a man to achieve the things that men achieved and Uncle Nii John wished he had received the same love from his father, as had

Grandpa Joe’s first son, David. Eventually when Uncle David come to visit Ghana in the

| Page 193 mid eighties - the only time he managed to visit Ghana during his life in England - he would drink his whisky and schnapps and by midnight those of us, his nephews, who were interested in knowing him beyond the myth of his extraordinary brilliance, would gather around. He would emerge from his drunken stupor, becoming a figure of light, a sage who could illuminate the night with his brilliance. He would recite passages from

Shakespeare, the poetry of Alexander Pope, the opening chapters of English Law cases, verses from the Bible, speeches by Greek and Roman orators and long passages from

Plutarch’s Lives. He also listed a series of Greek scholars of antiquity, quoted a speech by Alexander the Great to his soldiers and recited Latin verses and the poetry of

Longfellow.

Uncle David had studied the Classics, Latin and English at the secondary school,

Mfantipim College, and under the tutelage of Grandpa he had mastered poetry and read extensively. He was a boy growing up as the only son among five girls before

Uncle Fifi was born, just before the family moved back from Winneba. Grandpa had more sons: Uncle Richard, Uncle Fifi, Uncle Nii John and Uncle Alexander were born to

Grandma Sarah, not to count the two sons Grandpa had with another woman out of wedlock. Uncle David remembered his years growing up, his upbringing by an authoritarian father and how he first got hooked on the bottle. When he was spent, he broke down in tears and wept like a child, blaming his father for breaking his will, for making him study so hard at too young an age, and for his overbearing ways. He accused his father of forcing him beyond his will to be a good student and in the end he

| Page 194 rebelled, costing him his career. ‘I could have easily passed the Bar, but I hated the fact that I was doing it to please my father. Now it is too late. He is dead, now look at me, just look at me, if only I had studied for myself, I would have been the best of them all.

All the judges of Ghana were at my beck and call. David, David, David Okai, everyone would call me, do you remember this? Do you recall this case, tell me about it. Without me, none of them would have passed their exams. Why I failed is beyond me now,’ he would cry out.

When he lost the spirit of light around him, he became small, sad, petty and sadistic. He cursed the world, accused his father, insulted his wife and damned himself, blaming his misfortunes on everyone including the imaginary witches in the family. When he was done he would struggle to get up and stagger away to bed, sweating and dispossessed of all his manners. Mother watched him, lost in thought and bereft of joy, looking at the brother whom she had once so admired and looked up to; now drunk and deprived of all his senses. When Uncle David went back to England, those who went to clean his room were shocked. They found empty bottles, bottles of whisky, gin, schnapps, brandy and a whole collection of small brands, all empty under his bed. ‘Oh, David,’ mother wailed. Years later Mother would remind me of Uncle David and link it to the tragic consequences of alcoholism.

When I went back to England in 1986, I visited him in a tiny flat in Shepherd’s Bush. He reminded me of my childhood days in England, told me stories about my mother and

| Page 195 stepfather’s life together. I saw a man fading out of life. He would doze off and suddenly wake up, sip his drink, wobble his way in and out of the toilet and then back into his chair. I left feeling sad. When I returned to Ghana and told my mother about him, she could only listen and turn her head, as if trying to imagine him. Not long after that, Uncle David died and was buried in England.

Uncle David was one of the reasons Uncle Nii John prided himself on being disciplined.

He did not smoke; neither did he drink with the intent to get drunk. He was noted for putting a lot of ice in his beer and would sip it slowly so as never to get drunk. He approached life with a mathematical mind, everything in its place and a place for everything. He was clear that what was wrong was wrong and there were no compromises, even to the point where he made a personal decision not to take on criminal cases or get involved in politics. Real estate law and land disputes, family law and wills were his speciality and he was very good at it with clients who included chiefs, linguists, other lawyers, businessmen and a host of wealthy Ga families, fighting each other over colonial inheritances, land rights and family property.

His love for studying extended to his work. He would stay in his office for hours studying cases and rewriting his legal documents and briefs. Occasionally, I was asked to go and empty the waste paper basket in his office and, out of curiosity, I would read over his many revisions and study his clean and nice cursive hand writing, which was one of his distinctive marks as a scholar. ‘Uncle Nii John has a fine way with the pen,’

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Mother would often say, encouraging me to emulate his sharp cursive style and his steady hand when he held a pen. However, his rigid and disciplinarian personality was often unbearable, especially when I was living in the same house with him. He used a litigious tone in his questioning of everything going on in the house and each night before we went to bed, he would test us on everything we had studied during the day. I became bored and secretly started plotting how to escape the yoke of my uncle.

Then one day in the late morning when no one was watching, I opened the bookcase, which had a special glass drinks chest at the bottom, where Uncle Nii John kept his finest drinks for his rich and influential guests. I was alone in the living room and pretended I was looking for a book, but what I was actually doing was pouring alcoholic drinks into a spoon from each of the bottles which were already opened, so that whatever I was pouring out would be too insignificant to be noticed. I took my time like a chemist would, to pour measured tablespoons of brandy, wine, whiskey, gin,

Campari, CinZano and any of the drinks at the bottom of the book case until in the end,

I had enough to fill a glass.

I did it a couple of times and it became my way of dealing with the drab life at Uncle

Nii John’s. I hid in the back of the house to sip my drinks, imagining myself living a life free from the grip of Uncle Nii John. I would get tipsy and slowly go back to bed to sleep the afternoon away. By fourteen, I had mastered the courage to face Uncle, and when I came home from St. Augustine’s after completing my first year I defied my

| Page 197 mother and refused to go to his house; I was then tall, and big enough to resist any attempt to force me to do something against my will.

That night, Uncle Nii John, Uncle Quist – my mother’s older cousin – Sister Emma and the rest of the household were astonished at my defiance. On the other hand my other cousins were rather impressed by my courage to stand up to Uncle Nii John, who had become the head of the clan by virtue of being a lawyer. Grandpa had entrusted him in his will, the family estate; hence since Grandpa had passed away, Uncle Nii John had taken on the official position as head of the Okai clan. All sides of the family pleaded with me to live with my uncle, hoping that my potential would be fulfilled under his disciplined tutelage. But the truth was that I had tasted freedom since entering St.

Augustine’s, begun to enjoy the company of girls and was curious about life beyond boarding school. I couldn’t go back to Lartebiokorshie, to what I considered to be a form of house arrest.

Uncle Nii John was shocked by my defiance, which he considered an act of insolence and insubordination. That night he had come upstairs from his Chambers expecting to fetch me to go to his home as he had always done, but I refused to go. He felt as if he had lost a son, Mother told me later. I didn’t realise he cared for me that much, considering how intensely he reprimanded me for what, at the time I considered minor transgressions. For him my behaviour as a teenager was nothing short of a growing waywardness which would eventually lead to failure. From that day onward, he

| Page 198 predicted that the way I was going with my studies, I would fail my O level exams. And when I did fail to qualify for sixth form four years later, he saw it as vindication and laughed at me in a sarcastic tone that he had known what was right for me all along.

Ever since then I’ve been striving to live my life to prove him wrong. My relationship with my uncle continued – as it continues – as a mixture of love, mutual admiration and disgust, ignoring him and yet depending on him for everything a son needs from a father. He determined what secondary school I went to because he also went to St.

Augustine’s. He was responsible for preparing the legal documents for my name change; his law partners – Lawyer Mantey Newman or Lawyer Fletcher - signed my passport pictures and acted as witnesses on my affidavits for legal name change. He acted as the legal guardian for my brother and me in all matters of importance, at home and even when we lived overseas.

When my mother couldn’t stay any longer at Adabraka by herself – Jeff and I now living overseas - Uncle Nii John moved her to the new and bigger house he had built near to his old house in Lartebiokorshie. Thus whenever my brother and I visited

Ghana from England, America or Australia, we were obliged to live in his house again, in order to be close to our mother. He presided over my brother’s wedding and was responsible for all my mother’s finances in her old age. And even though I am now a man of the world, he still can’t help instructing me on my conduct whenever I am in

Ghana for a visit.

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I had developed the reputation of being the only one in the family with the courage to challenge or confront him when his overbearing ways got in the way of reason. I clashed with him over the slow pace he managed the family estate and the way my mother’s funeral was organised. Yet, despite the explosive moments in our relationship, there were times, whenever I came to Ghana to visit from America, when he served me tea, cut the cake and we had breakfast together. He would pay particular attention to my needs, talk to me with a sense of affection and deference, acknowledging that I had turned out alright after all. Until this day, he would find the time to write to me and sends Christmas cards to express his best wishes and regards to my wife and children as if they were his own grandchildren.

Like Uncle David to Grandpa, Uncle Nii John had only one son out of his six daughters from his two marriages. He also rebelled, left Ghana and now lives in England. He left after a major confrontation, and until recently he never wrote or spoke to his dad. So

Jeff and I seem to have become his only sons, by virtue of his role in our lives. Uncle Nii

John is now eighty years old, the last of seventeen children of Joseph William Okai and

Sarah Kwapong Okai. Joseph had two children out of wedlock during a moment of crisis in their marriage, and Sarah came into the marriage with a daughter, Auntie

Nanaa, who would substitute as my grandmother when I was growing up.

Uncle Nii John’s life represents a bridge, a crossing from an era that can only be captured through the oral poetry of memory. He was born at a time when what was once considered authentically African had begun to lose its validity to a new colonial

| Page 200 narrative of law and order, freedom and justice, authority and sovereignty, education and social legitimacy. His life was a personal triumph over the oddities of being born to an old father, and who no longer had interested in his children. He mastered his emotions, developed an iron will and forced himself to triumph over personal disadvantage and feelings of neglect. He was studious, ruthlessly disciplined, prudent and steadfast, but paid the price by alienating his children, his wife from his first marriage and the love of his nieces and nephews. He was seen as mean spirited, selfish and wicked. Yet behind the mask of his strictness walked a funny, caring, affectionate man, who knew that without discipline nothing could be accomplished. He knew that to live a life worth living, we had to study every day. This insight was what I have inherited from him and the older I get the more I appreciate him. It has taken me half a century to understand my uncle, wondering to myself: if he had taught me to be studious about life at an earlier age, what would my life be like now? Would I be practicing law in Ghana by now? Kabu Okai-Davies a lawyer? I have often thought about it, but I am happy I defied my mother and uncle that day and paid my own price for it. The path I chose has also chosen me. It has been a path of creativity and the political redefinition of my life. Today, as I write about the lives of my uncles, who in their own way substituted as father figures to me, I can understand what they taught me and exposed me to as I was growing up and coming of age in Ghana.

In retrospect I can say that the storyteller in me has always wanted his freedom; the freedom to travel, to dream and to educate myself by my own methods. I have paid the

| Page 201 price for seizing freedom when I saw it at the age of fourteen. But I cannot dismiss the fact that my uncle, just like my mother, holds a prominent place in my mind as one of the people who shaped and moulded my view of the world. Whatever becomes of me, I will always remember him as the man who became the father to a forsaken son.

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Chapter 17: The School That Made Me Who I am

My experiences at St. John’s Preparatory Primary School stayed with me after I graduated and went on to St. Augustine’s Secondary School in Cape Coast. For almost a decade there were times when the bad experiences flashed back into my mind, and it made me sad. However, looking back now, I see that it is not the bad experiences that bothered me the most, but my mother’s attitude. I couldn’t tell her exactly how I felt or what was going on, so could not make her aware of my emotional pain.

By the time I was ten, and during the last two years at boarding school, I had been transformed from being the ugly duckling to the artistic and cultural swan of the school. I did not play soccer nor was I athletic; however by virtue of being an artist and the entertainment organiser for the school, I had gained the affection and respect of many of my peers. I had gained self-assurance and self-confidence which enabled me to interact with everyone, and especially to win the respect and trust of my teachers. I was not in the top ten but earned decent grades in most subjects and I continued to be the top student in art and gain high marks for geography and nature study.

I had fallen in love and proposed to Olivia Ofosu who became my girlfriend in my final year at St. John’s. We spent secret moments together saying nothing, but enjoying the feeling of being in love. I would hold her hands and look into her eyes hoping to read what was going on in her mind, and we would smile and giggle to each other without

| Page 203 knowing what to say. She was shy while I pretended to be a man, with every intention to marry her someday. But with the passage of time and going away to secondary school, distance forced me to allow such dreams to fade away. I saw Olivia three more times, after we left St. John’s to follow our separate paths to adulthood and into the wider world of different dreams.

There are certain experiences in everyone’s life which are better left in the silent realm of memory, rather than spoken or written about. My life has always been an enigma to me and the sense of seeing my life as a riddle still lives with me until this day. If I had lived with my mother and attended a local school like most of the children in our neighbourhood when we were growing up, what kind of a man would I be by now? Jeff went to a private day school in the suburbs of Accra, Morning Star Primary and

Preparatory School and grew up very different from me. He is today my emotional anchor, and regardless of where ever I go around the world, I always make sure I end up in London to spend time with him. He is not the travelling type, but plants his roots deep into a place and stays. I became the flying bird who keeps travelling and living around the world. Today he is an accountant, married and living happily with his wife in their suburban home in Slough. He had three daughters from his previous marriage.

If the poetic statement ‘the child is the father of the man’ is true, then that child who was sent to the boarding house at four and half, who experienced so much in such a short a time, defines who I am today. I have grown up learning how to survive and to

| Page 204 use art as a medium for self-transformation and self-actualisation. My observation skills for reading character have never failed me. At a young age, I learnt how to deal with my disappointments and to understand how to handle the vicissitudes of life with a stoic sense of calm. I learnt to appreciate the value of having one truly devoted friend at every stage of my life, rather than having many companions and acquaintances.

My story of my life is not about the past or even the present; it is more about the future.

Self-redefinition is a process of self- reclamation and self-reconstruction. To create the self is to construct our lives. I want to use my memories to construct a new self that is free from the pain and loneliness of childhood, the regrets of my adolescent and teenage years and the flaws of early adult life. If there is any responsibility on me as a writer, it is an obligation to find the meaning of my own life.

I really miss my mother and if I could, I would tell her now, but she is gone. All that remains is memory. I remember when I was about ten at home on a long summer vacation, I got upset with my mother and in the fit of anger swore at her and yelled.

‘When you grow up and become an old lady, I will send you so far away to the end of the world, all the way to Australia. It will be so far from anywhere in the world, no one will come and visit you. The same way you have sent me so far away to St. John’s and never come and visit me. You will cry and suffer just like me.’

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She was astonished, everyone around was baffled but I was trying to tell her what I felt.

As children, it is hard to understand the agonies of our parents, the price they have had to pay to give birth and to us. Especially since she was a single parent with many mouths to feed including her two boys, I now feel sad that I allowed my childhood pain to cloud my vision of my mother. She paid dearly caring for Jeff and me. Our fathers were selfish men. I grew knowing that Mother bore her pain in silence and held on to her personal fidelity to make something good for us. I shouldn’t have held on to my childhood pain for so long without having made a stronger effort to tell her the truth before she passed away. Maybe I could have forgiven her sooner?

Today, here I am living in Australia, after living and travelling around the world, writing about what happened to me more than forty years ago. Australia provided me with the distance to look back with forgiveness, to write about my mother, my father, my childhood and my years of growing up in Ghana. By finding the courage to forgive her and to heal myself, Australia has turned out to be the best blessing of my life in a way that only my mother would have understood.

After I moved to Australia from America, I returned to Ghana in mid July 2006 to visit my mother for the last time. She was very frail and on her death bed. Her only memorable statement was a sad reminder to me of what I once said to her.

‘You have been all over the world, but where you have gone now is so far away,’ she said, reminding me of the emotional and physical distance that has always existed

| Page 206 between us. I kissed her on the forehead and she put her hands on my cheek. At night I sat with her and watched her fade in and out of sleep, waking up intermittently to assure me she was still there.

Today, I have finally found home in Australia and settled with my family in one of the idyllic suburbs of Canberra, enjoying the luxuries of life and the beauty of having a garden. But I still think about my mother every day. I have a picture of her in my wallet and a beautiful portrait on the bookshelf in the living room, so that she is with me everywhere I go. Her influence in my life grows every day and I am thankful that she sent me to St. John’s, where I learnt all that a child needed to know to live and to hold on to my own inner faith in myself.

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Exegetical Component of Dissertation:

Oral Tradition and Auto/Biographical Narration in Ghanaian Identity

Curfew’s Children

A memoir about childhood and coming of age in Ghana PhD Creative Dissertation

Doctor of Philosophy in (Creative Writing) Communications

By Kabu Okai-Davies

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Introduction

The function of this exegesis is to discuss the theoretical framework underpinning the creative component of the dissertation, Curfew’s Children. Additionally, it will discuss the evolution of the exegetical component as a series of meditations aimed at understanding my work as a Ghanaian writer on the themes of orality, writing, autobiographical memory, and the concept of Ghanaian identity and voice. The exegesis aims to follow and provide support for Walter J. Ong’s theoretical account of the characteristics of orality. Thus the exegesis adopts a ‘formulaic’ approach which may at various points appear redundant or copious, traditionalist, close to the human life world of Ghanaian culture, empathetic and participatory rather than objectively distanced.9

The structure of the exegesis mimics in part features of oral memorization,10 rather than employing a strictly linear or an analytical model or reasoning, which relies on traditional ‘argumentative’ and deductive logic for its force. The reason for this is the fact that, as Ong conceptualises it, orality is essentially homeostatic: “oral societies live very much in a present which keeps itself in equilibrium.” In other words, “homeostasis can be sensed by reflection on the condition of words in a primary oral setting.”11

Consequently, the exegesis functions via a meditative and discursive approach to the

9 Walter J. Ong, ‘Characteristics of Orally Based Thought and Expression’, Orality and Literacy, Routledge, New York, first published 1982, second edition, 2007, pp. 36-57. 10 Ibid., p. 57. 11 Ibid., p. 46. | Page 211 debate on orality and literacy in order to understand and explicate the creative process and Ghanaian cultural background from which the writing of Curfew’s Children was born.

It is from this Ongian position of the characteristics of orality—which will later be discussed in detail—that the exegesis seeks to illuminate these themes from multiple angles within the context of Ghanaian culture, identity and voice. In this regard, the exegesis, like orality itself, will not have a single argument but rather a series of interpretative approaches or essays in understanding how orality and literacy functions within Ghanaian culture in the formulation of identity and voice through autobiographical narration and story.

Curfew’s Children serves as an ‘oral text’ of a post-colonial Ghanaian story: the exegesis functions in line with non-literate formulas, contrasting with the 'literate’ models of a single linear line of thought, approaching and re-approaching the central topic from a variety of directions. According to Ong, “the oral mind is not interested in definitions,” and the meaning of words are “situational,” which are used through “real-life situations.”12 Ong explains that orality, due to its closeness to the human life world, is absent of “elaborate analytic categories that depend on writing to structure knowledge at a distance from lived experience.”13 Therefore:

12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., p. 42. | Page 212

Oral culture must conceptualize and verbalize all knowledge with more or less close

reference to the human life world, assimilating the alien objective world to the more

immediate, familiar interaction of human beings. A chirographic (writing) culture and

even more a typographic (print) culture can distance and in a way denature even the

human, itemizing such things as the names of leaders and political divisions in an

abstract, neutral list entirely devoid of a human action context. An oral culture has no

vehicle as neutral as a list.14

In this case the exegesis adopts a non-structured, non-analytical approach, as explained by

Ong as a feature of orality itself, and thus seeks to discuss orality and auto/biography and how they serve as the underlying factors in the creative process of writing Curfew’s

Children.

It is therefore important to understand how orality functions in Ghana and to investigate how the Ghanaian concept of identity evolved through a seminal auto/biographical text,15 which reflects the oral and autobiographical heritage of

Ghanaians. This is also because Curfew’s Children as a work of creative dissertation falls within the genre of autobiography, life-writing and memoir. It is a creative work born out of the oral narratives that I inherited growing up and coming of age in Ghana, and how these have shaped my identity as a Ghanaian writer.

14 Ibid. 15 Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah, Thomas Nelson & Sons, Edinburgh, 1957, passim. | Page 213

The central focus of this exegesis is oral tradition as a means of communication in pre- literate societies and in their transition to literacy, and how the thesis examines oral tradition and autobiography (written or oral) to contribute to the understandings of

Ghanaian identity. This topic is important because of the impact of colonial and post- colonial (literate) forms of communication on traditional cultures such as Ghana.

Orality (oral tradition, oral heritage or oral literature) in this context serves as a means for the examination of Ghanaian identity as it moves toward decolonisation and nationalism. Accordingly, this exegesis is a discussion about the nature of Ghanaian culture, based on oral/literate forms of communication.

The exegesis draws on auto/biographical texts; memorial narratives; conversations with oral traditionalists, elders and Ghanaian scholars; field work; analysis of oral/literary poetry and proverbs; traditional festivals; and funeral orations. This includes an assessment of what Ghanaians’ think of themselves as a people through an analysis of their oral literatures and what this reveals about the Ghanaian concept of identity. In Ghana, orality is clearly expressed within the cultural practices of funeral oration, festivals, puberty ceremonies, child birth and ritual ceremonies. Orality serves as an expressive medium and “words acquire their meaning only from their always insistent actual habitat.”16 Oral cultures are largely devoid of the use of dictionaries and therefore insist on the use of “gestures, vocal inflections, facial expression and the entire human existential setting in which the real, spoken word always occurs.”17 However,

16 Ong, Orality and Literacy, p. 46. 17 Ibid., p. 47. | Page 214 for the purposes of this exegesis, the arguments or discussions around orality will be based on the oral expressive nature of funeral orations and other references similar to

Ghanaian oral heritages embedded in proverbs, oratory and oral biographies.

Funerals form a central feature of Ghanaian cultural and social life. They demonstrate the nature of traditional Ghanaian culture in view of the concept of ancestral worship which permeates the political, social and cultural fabric of Ghanaian life.18 The funeral ceremony acts as a social cohesive mechanism to bring together people of different ethnic groups, constructing group identities and status, religious or political backgrounds in the process of eulogising the dead.

Due to the cultural and social significance of funerals Ghanaians practice the most elaborate funeral ceremonies to memorialise the dead in Africa.19 Evidence of this is based on a discussion of funeral orations, in particular those for leading Ghanaian figures such as President Nkrumah, founder of Ghana; and Chief Adobor, Paramount

Chief, Volta Region, Vice President of the National House of Chiefs and President of the

Council of State.20 These funeral orations will act as examples to analyse and demonstrate how such eulogies create a sense of national identity and unity during times of transition and mourning.

18 Sjaak van der Geest, ‘Funerals for the Living: Conversations with Elderly People in Kwahu’, African Studies Review, 43/3, 2000, pp. 103-129. 19 Carola Lentz, ‘Constructing Ethnicity: Elite Biographies and Funerals in Ghana’, Gabriele Rosenthal and Artur Bogner (eds.), Ethnicity, Belonging and Biography, Transaction Publishers, Piscataway, 2009, pp. 181-93 20 The burial ceremony of the late President John Atta-Mills (1944-2012) is another example of how funerals unite Ghanaians more than any other fact of life in history. Funerals of relatives serve a similar function in uniting a local community. | Page 215

Research Questions

The main research questions that inform this exegesis include the following: What is oral tradition in the Ghanaian context? What role does auto/biographical narration play within the context of Ghanaian identity? How does orality define Ghanaian identity as it is constructed through Ghanaian funeral orations? And, how do Ghanaian funeral orations show a connection to an oral tradition?

The exegesis discusses orality, autobiography and Ghanaian identity within the context of cultural formation, political construct, social communication and group personage.

This is analysed within the framework of cultural representations such as funerals, proverbs, sayings, stories and the collective appreciation of the traditional and national oral language of politics which defines Ghana today, and which influenced the creative process of writing Curfew’s Children.

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Section 1: Structure and Overview

The structure of this exegesis is designed and intended to serve as a supplementary work to the main dissertation of Curfew’s Children. It is an exegetical addition to the dissertation, designed to provide the literary, cultural, historic and intellectual insights and sources that influenced the writing of Curfew’s Children. It is written within the framework by which the structure of orality functions in Ghana and how the oral sources shaped the writing of the memoir.

This chapter is structured as a six-part essay based on the oral narrative and discursive style to show and explain my sources of inspiration, understand my creative heritage as a Ghanaian writer, and show how these creative and cultural influences shaped the writing of the memoir: Curfew’s Children.

First, there is an introductory outline detailing the aims and objectives of the research work, followed by a review of the literature that delves into various definitions of orality and the prevailing arguments on orality and oral tradition studies. This is followed by a discussion and development of the theoretical framework and its application to the exegesis. The work of Walter J. Ong provides the theoretical framework21 and I draw on his work in the discussion of the nature of orality and oral

‘texts’ in the Ghanaian context. This includes the way orality is used to create identity in group culture and how auto/biographical texts construct identities via oral narratives.

21 Walter J. Ong, Orality and Literacy, Routledge, New York, first published 1982, second edition, 2007. | Page 217

The objective is to reflect critically on Ong’s theories and their relation to the Ghanaian context, and draw on relevant literature—Havelock, Yankah, Finnegan, Vansina and others—to discuss how concepts of orality and auto/biographical life narration work within an oral tradition (as opposed to a literate tradition) in shaping Ghanaian identity.

Next, I explore the research methodology from which the theories, analysis, discussions, and arguments are drawn. This includes primary and secondary texts, field work, travels, teaching in Ghana, and writing the exegesis and the creative component.

The exegesis also discusses the findings, results and analysis of the research work.

Particularly, the exegesis analyses the nature of funeral culture in Ghana to identify the extent to which their origins are rooted in an oral tradition, and how this is linked to the construction and commemoration of narrative identity of the people. The objective is to show what is distinctive about the construction of identity in a culture that is close to the oral-literate transition and to examine oration as a form of oral life-writing.

Finally, an interpretative discussion of oral tradition based on examples of proverbs, sayings and riddles, and autobiographical exemplars is used to discuss how orality functions in Ghana. The exegesis concludes with a discussion of the implications of, and provides recommendations for, the future of orality and literacy in Ghana. The exegesis ends with a commentary on the role of oral narratives, including festivals, funeral oration, and the oral transmission of stories in the composition of Curfew's Children.

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There is a significant body of scholarly work on orature as a mode of knowledge creation and communication in the African context.22 However, my research into orality, and how it is linked to auto/biographical narration, reveals the evidence of a contested understanding in the scholarship regarding how orality is used in traditional cultures to chronicle the life-stories of the living and the dead.

Orality or oral literature in this context means non-written verbal testimony or message transmission through narration, storytelling, folklore, myths, proverbial sayings and oration, or through songs when used as a means for the communication of historical information, or cultural knowledge, moral guidance, and values.23 This system of communication does not include any form of writing. Oral literature forms the narrative means of communication in Ghana and it comprises “riddles, puns, tongue-twisters, proverbs, recitations, chants, and songs.”24

Orality or ‘oral tradition’ in a wider field of research includes oral narration as history, mythology and “applies both to a process and its products”25 of intergenerational messages; it includes news, eyewitness accounts, hearsay, rumours, group accounts of past events, group evangelical prayers, visions, and dreams that shape the collective consciousness of non-literate cultures. In the case of Ghana, this includes libations, incantations, funeral orations, insults, insinuations, commentaries, and eulogies.

22 Isidore Okpewho, African Oral Literature: Backgrounds, Character and Continuity, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1992, pp. 3-4. 23 Ruth H. Finnegan, Oral Tradition and the Verbal Arts – A guide to research practice, Routledge, London, 1992, pp. 5-6. 24 Okpewho, African Oral Literature, p. 4. 25 Jan Vansina, Oral tradition as History, James Currey Ltd., Woodbridge, 1985, pp. 6-13. | Page 219

Research Methodology

My research method included primary research through a wide variety of interviews and reading in order to test my ideas and to aid in the construction of my autobiographical story of Curfew’s Children. This took the form of two visits to Accra, followed by a fourteen-month stay in Ghana teaching and conducting research work with communication students acting as research assistants at the African University

College of Communications.

During this period as a participant-observer I attended family funerals, listened to conversations, reconfirmed aspects of my narrative with relatives and also visited my brother in London to go over stories about our mother and my stepfather. I also held meetings and conversations with community and family elders, local chiefs and interviewed traditional and community elders. I had continuous engagement with traditional priests and conducted frequent radio and television interviews with commentators, writers, poets, scholars, and participants in Ghana’s democratic culture.

This kind of research methodology of engagement in research field work was necessary, because, as Vansina points out, it enables research work in orality studies to merit a certain amount of credence within certain limits.26 This is because of the difficulty in verifying oral traditional knowledge in the same context as text based information and knowledge.

26 Jan Vansina, Oral Tradition – A Study in Historical Methodology, Aldine Transaction, New Brunswick, 2006, pp. 1-10. | Page 220

My research included scholarly works on the theories on oral tradition, auto/biographical narration and on the use of life-writing in the formulation of national identity in Ghana. This involves exploring how oral traditions are used to translate and to codify life-stories as part of the construction of the collective histories of a people and group identity. Central to this is a critical discussion of an autobiographical exemplar linked to the evolution of Ghana’s national identity (post-colonial) and the various traditional oral devices used by Nkrumah in his oratory and autobiographical work.27

Nkrumah’s writing is a literary work that serves to bridge the gap between orality and literacy and claims to define Ghana’s identity in the lead up to independence. As Philip

Holden pointed out, the idea of autobiographical narration became inextricably linked to the idea of state-formation, modernity and the masculine identity of leaders in the decolonisation process. Nationhood in post-colonial Africa tended to be inextricably linked to the persona of the leaders or founders of the state. The effect is that the life narrative of the leader became linked to the narrative of the collective identity of a people.28 In this way, Ghana’s Nkrumah and Nkrumah’s Ghana became two sides of the same coin—indeed Nkrumah’s personality still defines and shapes the narrative of

Ghana’s history.29

27 Nkrumah, Ghana, passim. 28 Philip Holden, Autobiography and Decolonization, University of Wisconsin Press, Wisconsin, 2008, pp. 15-38. 29 There are other books written by and about Ghanaian leaders, but none share the same level of literary and historic relevance as the autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah. | Page 221

I offer a different model for autobiographical narration and identity in the work of

Curfew’s Children. This autobiography is based on my childhood experiences of oral narratives and I hope that Curfew’s Children will serve as a means to share a unique

Ghanaian life story with the wider world and continue the tradition of transferring oral narratives into text, as an act of preserving the stories about Ghana and my family.

Through this exegesis I seek to argue that orality and literacy must function in tandem in a country like Ghana. Orality works as a necessary function of communication and a defining feature for the shaping of Ghanaian identity. However, I suggest that the best way to preserve oral tradition and culture is through the use of literary devices that can serve as enablers for countries like Ghana in the process of transitioning from orality to literacy.

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Section 2: Transcending the Past, Embracing the Future:

Orality and Literacy in Ghana

There are various definitions of orality, including: “oral literature,” “oral tradition,”

“oral narrative,” and “oral testimony.” Oral literature as communication is the prevailing device by which cultural and historic knowledge, as well as information, are transmitted in non-literate or “preliterate” societies.30 Ghana is a society in which orality is very much alive in all aspects of social, traditional and cultural communication.

Orality has played a significant role in shaping my own identity and intellectual consciousness as a Ghanaian writer.

Finnegan offers a dictionary definition of orality as an utterance in “spoken words”, though she includes variations such as “oral tradition”, “oral literature”, “oral testimony,” or “oral narrative.” She points out that these descriptive terminologies, though contentious, do not dismiss the reference to oral tradition as something that is not written, as differentiated from text “Because oral is thus sometimes contentiously opposed both to ‘written/literate’ and to ‘non-verbal’, its meaning has become an ambiguous concept to define.”31 Finnegan explains that “oral tradition” means any kind of unwritten tradition.

30 Ong, Orality and Literacy, pp. 10-15. 31 Ruth Finnegan, Oral Tradition in Africa, Open Book Publishers, Cambridge, 2012, p. 5. | Page 223

The scholarly interest in orality has evolved over the past century and now influences academic work in literary studies, text based literature, communications and media platforms of human understanding of language, text, social sciences and cultural studies. However, because orality is a non-text based form of communication predicated on the oral transmission of information and knowledge from one generation to the next, it is not easily verified and scholars continue to hold contesting positions on the topic.

Vansina links oral tradition to oral lore as material that is transmitted from one generation to the next.32 In this context, oral tradition signifies the messages or testimonies that are transmitted verbally in the form of speech or song that take on the characteristics of folktales, sayings, ballads, or chants.33 Ghanaian culture has managed to sustain and transmit oral history, oral knowledge, values, customs, laws, narratives, sayings, and proverbs without the use of a writing system. Thus theorists, anthropologists and ethnographers such as Havelock, Ong, Finnegan, Parry and others see the value of orality as worthy of study in understanding group and ethnic cultures in pre-literate societies or societies in transition to literacy.

Other orality theorists—like Henige— emphasise the common language of oral tradition, referring to material that is transferred orally from generation to generation,

32 Vansina, Oral Tradition as History, pp. 27-8. 33 Ibid. | Page 224 but distinguishable from oral history or oral testimony.34 Henige argues that oral tradition is a genre that involves the transmission of cultural artefacts over several generations and that is to some extent the common property of a group of people.35 Its key component is the telling of stories, folktales or folklore, or memorialised narratives of history and songs. Oral tradition, Rosenberg argues, “is the transmission of cultural items from one member to another. Those items are heard, stored in memory, and, when appropriate, recalled at the moment of subsequent transmission.”36

Within the broader field of the academy the methodology of orality studies varies. The study of oral tradition and orality has its origins in scholarly work of the Homeric tradition, and the Judeo-Christian scholarship on the origins of the Bible. However, because my focus is on oral tradition in Ghana, “oral tradition theory,” “oral-formulaic composition” or the Parry-Lord theory (named after Milman Parry and Albert Lord)37 will not form part of this discussion.

The purpose of this exegesis is the study of tradition: the non-text based communication of stories, folklore and testimonies through oral delivery. Ong distinguishes the study of oral tradition from orality, defining thought and its verbal expression in societies where the technology of the word or literacy—writing and print—is unfamiliar to the

34 David Henige, ‘Oral, but Oral What? The Nomenclatures of Orality and Their Implications’, Oral Tradition, 3/1, 1988, pp. 229-38. In this article Henige refers to Vansina’s work on orality. 35 Henige referenced in Deepak Aryal, ‘Oral Tradition and Communication’, Bodhi, 3/1, 2009, pp. 61-68. 36 Bruce Rosenberg, The complexity of oral tradition, Oral Tradition, 2/1, 1987, pp.73-90. 37 Alan Dundes, Editor’s Introduction to the Theory of Oral Composition, John Miles Foley, Bloomington, 1988, pp. ix-xii. | Page 225 society or group.38 In this context, oral tradition is a verbal and memory based mechanism by which a people, group or nation communicate its history, values, norms and culture devoid of any form of text based materials or instruments or any of the apparatus of writing.

However, there are in existence text based narratives, diagrams and etchings, print literature and a highly developed literate and well-educated English speaking and writing class of people in Ghana. Clearly, Ghana is not a country that is ‘pre-literate,’ in that there are many people in Ghana with a modern Western education. Consequently,

Ghana is home to modern universities and communication systems that function alongside pre-colonial and colonial traditions and practices. English is used as the principal medium of communication at the primary, secondary, and tertiary levels of education and academic skills development.39 These communication and educational institutions are concentrated in regional capitals and are in need of modernisation and improvement. However, their presence continues to prove that Ghanaians are using both literate and oral systems of communication and education that straddles the period from pre-colonial to post-colonial times.40

In order to understand the position of orality vis-a-vis literacy in Ghana—and indeed in many African nations—it is necessary to explain something of the history of literacy

38 Ong, Orality and Literacy, pp. 10-15. 39 Joseph B.A. Afful, ‘Academic Literacy and Communication Skills in the Ghanaian University: A Proposal’, Nebula, 4/3, 2007, pp. 141-154. 40 Kwame S.T. Boafo, ‘Democratizing Media Systems in African Societies: The Case of Ghana’, African Media Review, 2/1, 1987, pp. 24-37. | Page 226 and the role of oral tradition and oral culture on the continent. The idea of literacy can best be discussed in the context of the ancient African kingdoms of Mali, Songhai and

Ghana. Recent evidence, stories and the expanding scholarly works about Timbuktu demonstrate that literacy is not a recent phenomenon in African history. Additionally, there are clear examples of pre-colonial literacy in Africa, such as the Hausa and Borno

Chronicles. However, scholars continue to rely on the oral testimonies where there is no written text about the ancient kings and leaders of empires, whose stories continue to be told today in both oral narratives and Arabic text based sources.41 References to Africa as an oral culture are derived from the fact that literacy in ancient Africa was linked to the spread of both Islamic influence and Christianity; hence literacy was part of the

Arab Islamic influence and the Western colonisation projects.

Timbuktu served as both destination and distribution point in the trans-Saharan merchandise and book trade associated with the conquest of North Africa and the spread of Islam in Africa.42 Stories about Timbuktu as a centre of learning, which served as the cultural and intellectual capital of the three kingdoms, continue to make reference to Sundjata Keita, Old Mali, and the griot tradition. 43

41 Ghislaine Lydon and Graziano Kratle, (eds.), Trans-Sahara Book Trade – Manuscript Culture, Arab Literacy and Intellectual History in Muslim Africa, Brill, Hotei Publishing, Leiden, 2011, passim. 42 Ibid., pp. 10-34. 43 The World of the Mande: History, Art and Ritual In the Mande Culture, http://www.fandm.edu/departments/Anthropology/Bastian/ANT269/man.html. Online. Anthropology/Africana Studies 269 and Anthropology/Africana Studies 267 (Prof. Mandy Bastian, Anthropology Dept., Franklin and Marshall College, Lancaster, PA). Retrieved April 25, 2012. | Page 227

Stories of this nature are still relevant to national identities in countries such as Ghana,

Mali—both of which adopted the names of the ancient empires after independence— and Senegal. This is because of the ambiguous nature of the relationship between literate culture and colonialism. Ghanaian oral and text based historians continue to

“claim a historical connection with the ancient Kingdom of Ghana or Khana.”44 The idea of ancient empires as oral references to the past thus informs the identities of post- colonial states and still resonates with African historians, leaders and Afrocentric scholars. Scholarly and oral narratives, including genealogies, recounted in the Ganda and Myoro king lists45 acknowledge the existence of the great empires of West Africa in the pre-colonial period. These narratives served as reference points in the post-colonial history of many countries in Africa. Many oral storytellers drew inspiration from “the great oral epic tradition of the griots or professional bards, keepers of tradition and history, trusted and powerful advisors of kings and clans.”46

The narratives take as their source of authority the tradition of oral artists who are specialists of the spoken/sung word and considered to be custodians of oral knowledge, bestowed with the gift of memory and narrative skills by a greater power called Nyama among the Mende.47 They may belong to special castes (Nyamakalaw: handlers of nyama) and/or inherit their calling through generations of the same family;

44 David Kimble, A Political History of Ghana – The Rise of Gold Coast Nationalism, 1850-1928, Oxford at the Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1963, pp. xii – xviii. 45 Ong, Orality and Literacy, p. 48. 46 The World of the Mande: History, Art and Ritual In the Mande Culture, retrieved April 23, 2012. 47 Finnegan, Oral Tradition in Africa, passim. Finnegan conducted extensive discussions on oral tradition in Africa and has done groundbreaking work on the Mende people of Sierra Leone. | Page 228 for example, in Mende (or Mandinka) people in West African cultures or the Okyeame, in Ghana.48

Ghanaian oral and religious scholar Professor Kofi Asare Opoku explained to me that though these ancient African Kingdoms actually used African and Arabic systems of writing and thus they could be classified as literate cultures, the fact remains that these

African cultures were dominated by the use of oral communication because the authority and authenticity of the writing depended on their oral sources.49

The influence of Arabic writing is portrayed in the “telltale scribes of Timbuktu.”50

Other pre-colonial cultures such as Benin, Cameroon and the Ashanti Kingdoms also used oral narratives to preserve historic knowledge, but used symbolic forms of writing, such as the Ashanti Adinkra system of writing to record thoughts, sayings and proverbs. These symbolic writings serve to refute accepted beliefs of African societies as being preliterate prior to the continent’s contact with Europe.51 Additionally, they provide evidence of literacy before formal Western pedagogy was introduced and “they served as a means for the encapsulation of ideas, briefs and values.”52

A crucial notion in these African oral cultures is the idea of authenticity and its link to the source of knowledge. As we will see in the following essay (which discusses the

48 Ong, Orality and Literacy, pp. 46-9. 49 Kofi Asare Opoku, Interview, April 2012. 50 Peter Gwin, ‘The Telltale Scribes of Timbuktu’, National Geographic, Vol. 219, No.1. January, 2011, pp. 85-103. 51 Boatema Boateng, The Copyright Thing Doesn’t Work Here: Adinkra and Kente and Intellectual Property in Ghana, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 2011, passim. 52 Kofi Asare Opoku, Interview, April 2012. | Page 229 work of Walter Ong) the direct link to oral culture between knowledge and speaker (in that the speaker is present to his or her words) is of great importance. But Asare Opoku argues that, in the traditional context, “what is written does not necessarily make it sacred. It is the source of the knowledge that matters.”53 Essentially, this source is authentic tradition based on the ancestral faith that runs deep within oral cultures.

Literacy, according to Asare Opoku, is meaningless if it is not linked to an appreciation of ancestral knowledge. The coded forms of symbolic writings and proverbs that were used mostly by the elite members of society and in traditional courts represent the appreciation of traditional ways of knowing, which are essentially oral.54

Unfortunately, many of these systems of symbolic writing go unrecognised because they do not measure up to what renowned theorists, such as Ong and DeFrancis, define as “real” or “true” scripts, which they tend to see as alphabetic.55 Newell engages with, yet postpones any conclusions on, this argument but acknowledges that the introduction of reading and writing into African culture served as a bridge between

“print and voice,” which she argues was introduced into the study of orality in the

1980s by scholars such as Jack Goody and Walter J. Ong. According to Newell, Goody

53 Ibid. 54 Ibid. 55 Jasmine Danzy, Adinkra Symbols: An Ideological Writing System, Graduate Thesis, University of Stony Brook, New York, 2009. Accessed 24 March 2013. | Page 230 and Ong hold a position that “what is written becomes somehow fixed and what is oral remains forever fluid.”56

In this respect, it is interesting that new developments in Ghana show that modern mediums of mass communication that combines literacy and orality—i.e. “secondary orality” as explained by Org and named as electracy57—have now become widespread.

Africa has been steeped in a heritage that relies on oral forms of communication.

Although there were various forms of writing used in pre-colonial times, African societies are primarily based around oral tradition.

One reason for the continued importance of the oral tradition in Africa is the continent’s sheer linguistic diversity, and the resulting fact that many people’s native tongue exist largely in ‘oral’ form alone.

Writing systems exist for only about half the languages in Africa and in certain tongues

the only written literature is a translation of some portion of the New Testament. Except

for Arabic and certain languages of Ethiopia, the alphabets of most African languages

are based on adaptations of the Roman alphabets which were introduced by European

missionaries in an attempt to decipher the oral meaning of spoken African languages. A

few tribes, notably the Vai of Liberia and the Bamum in Cameroon, have developed

their own syllabic writing systems.58

56 Stephanie Newell, Literary Culture in Colonial Ghana, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2002, p. 4. 57 Ong, Orality and Literacy, pp. 3, 133. 58 Leon Bram and Norma H. Dickey, (eds.) ‘African Languages’, New Encyclopedia, Volume 1, Funk & Wagnalls Publishers, New York, 1971-1981, p. 222. | Page 231

Ethnographers have listed over a thousand languages in Africa alone and each language is linked to additional spoken dialect groups.59 Ghana alone has thirty-six linguistic groups, and each group has about twelve sub-languages, dialects and sub- linkages that are defined by accent and inflection of words to represent class, the meaning of words and their interpretation according to social status and hierarchy. This ensemble of languages accounts for over seventy-five languages in total, with Akan

(Fanti, Twi, Akwapim), Ga (Ga-Adangbe), Ewe, Hausa, Dagomba, Nzema, Hausa, and

Frafra forming the main branches of the tree of languages in Ghana. The use of idioms, familiarity with proverbs, evocation of ancestral sayings, and mastery over inflection serve as traditional social markers that determine a person’s level of erudition and the depth of the utterer’s understanding and appreciation of the language.60 In other words, orality does not exist in a vacuum. It is a function of social structure,61 the codification of traditional epistemologies, the documentation of cultural practices and a way of being defined by heritage, lineage, festivals, puberty rites, naming ceremonies, and tribal or family affiliation.

Other factors such as migration patterns, family tree, acculturation, religious beliefs, festivities and social or political orientation are all embedded within oral codes of communication.62 They form an overall encyclopaedia of knowledge based on tradition,

59. Ibid., p. 221. 60 Frank Amewugah, English Lecturer and Ghanaian Morphologist, African University College of Communication – Interview, April 2012. 61 Kwesi Yankah, ‘Free Speech in Traditional Society’ (1997) in Helen Lauer and Kofi Anyidoho (eds.) Reclaiming the Human Sciences and Humanities through African Perspectives, Vol. II, Sub-Saharan Publishers, Accra, 2012, pp. 1067-95. 62 Kofi Asare Opoku, Interview, April 2012. | Page 232 belief systems and worship. Language in this regard represents the collective identity of an ethnic group that identifies itself through the use of a specific language. It embodies every aspect of the communicative canon of life: social, political, religious and cultural.63 Africa is yet to develop cultures around “the technology of writing”64 and the printed word in a widespread manner. African cultures continue to reflect the strong and continued presence of their rich oral traditions. In Ghana, this is reinforced by high illiteracy levels. This point is significant because, while from a ‘Western’ perspective the

‘literature of a people’ consists of a body of written works, in an African context this restriction makes less sense. African literature is cast as non-written oral traditions or as oral heritage steeped in orality. Most of the ‘texts’ of Africa still exist as an unwritten oral tradition by which Africans transmit history, cultures, values, duties, and life- stories from one generation to the next.

The term ‘oral literature’ is used here to mean the verbal art of an essentially non- literate community composed in the presence of a traditional audience for its entertainment and edification.65 However, this use of the term ‘literature’ has been contested in recent years and there have been major debate amongst scholars of African literature as to whether the term ‘literature’ should be used to define the oral traditions of Africa on the grounds that it assimilated the oral closely to the presuppositions of

63 Ibid. 64 Ong, Orality and Literacy, p. 1. 65 Clement A. Okafor, ‘Oral Tradition and Civil Education in Africa’, International Education Journal, 5/ 3, 2004, p. 410. | Page 233 writing-based cultures. Hence, compromise with the term ‘orature’ has since emerged to refer to the oral tradition in its own terms.66

One of the problems underlying this question of whether oral tradition is a ‘literature,’ is the historical context. For it must be noted that the literary form as it is known today in Ghana is a colonial construct. The Western concept of literacy was introduced as an extension of the imperial Christianising process of educating the African to become part of the colonial project,67 notwithstanding the influence of Arabic literate culture in northern parts of West Africa, and the existence of traditional symbolic writing amongst the Ashanti and Hausa. Based on this logic, literacy in Ghana equates to Westernised

(British) modes of education and the literary transference of knowledge and information, which Larbi Korang referred to as the “interventionist colonial enterprise”.68

At a recent conference at the University of Glasgow—Literacy in oral cultures: conflict, compromise and complications held on 24–25 November 2010—the challenges facing

Africa in the transition from orality to literacy were given central consideration. The indications were that scholars are becoming increasingly aware of this division between literacy and orality. This divide is not only historic, but also cultural and political, with serious implications for economic, social and political development:

66 Abiyi R. Ford, ‘Literature of Africa’, The New Book of Knowledge, Scholastic Library Publishing, Danbury, 2004, p. 76a. 67 Newell, Literary Culture in Colonial Ghana, pp. 6-7. 68 Kwaku Larbi Korang, Writing Ghana, Imagining Africa, University of Rochester Press, New York, 2004, p. 160. | Page 234

Before Western colonial intervention, the culture and bureaucracy of sub-Saharan Africa

was predominantly transmitted orally through ritual, storytelling, music, etc. For many

years, the literate western colonial bureaucracy laboured to transform Africa and the

evidence of the interaction between these two cultures is documented and preserved in

the national archives of almost all African countries. But this is an incomplete record of

bureaucratic process and ownership; the voices of Africans are largely silent in the

official record.69

Africans, like almost all colonised peoples around the world, were active participants in the process of translating the oral into written text with the aid of the colonising agent.

However, it is a complicated relationship. As Kruger points out in his studies on writing, literacy and oral cultures in South Africa, historical patterns of writing and literacy in South Africa neither destroyed orality nor achieved complete literacy,70 because:

Talking about literacy in South Africa we have to keep in mind that although literacy

was introduced in the 17th century by European missionaries, the transformation of

African languages into standard or literary languages was a joint project, from the very

beginning. It was highly dependent on African informants and experts. The introduction

of both script and scripture through missionaries was so strongly connected that African

communities in the Cape regarded the progress of the mission as “progress of the

word.”71

Historically speaking, it is a well-documented fact that the colonial missionaries maintained exclusive control over the progress of literacy across the board in Ghana,

69 University of Glasgow, Literacy in Oral Cultures, Conference Abstract, 24-25th November 2010. 70 Gesin Kruger, ‘Historical Patterns of Writing and Literacy in South Africa’, Comparative Studies in Society and History, 33/2, 1991, p. 225. 71 Ibid., p. 225. | Page 235 and were responsible for education designed to advance the colonising process. Newell supports this claim by showing that Ghana had a literate class of people who patronised book clubs and Christian book depots under the Methodists and Anglicans, and this flourished in the 1920s and 1930s, before the war.72 Professor Asare Opoku also confirms the German influence in the translation of the Bible into Ghanaian languages as a real attempt to make the transition from orality to literacy.73 While the Dutch recorded history, the German Lutherans were interested in theology, but it was the

British missionaries whose influence became prominent in the areas of pedagogy and in the civil service. This also supports the claim that, because the missions were

“responsible for black education, they were in charge of the vast majority of African schools and institutions of higher education from the 18th century – until the 1950s.”74

Consequently, this complicated the relationship between oral authority and literary status in the colonial setting. Attending school became a means to gain access to the literate world; and it became a standard practice for chiefs, who were unable to write and read, to use the services of the children of their servants to mediate between the colonial literate world and the traditional oral cultures. In addition, as Kruger points out:

Chiefs, who were unable to write and read used missionaries as secretaries and sent

their dependents to school. Sometimes, chiefs even employed literate secretaries to

72 Newell, Literary Culture in Colonial Ghana, pp.13-17 ; John MacBeath, Living with the Colonial Legacy, Centre for Commonwealth Education, Report No. 3, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, 2010. 73 Kofi Asare Opoku, interview April 2012, also see: Newell, Literary Culture in Colonial Ghana, pp. 1-6. 74 Kruger, ‘Historical Patterns of Writing and Literacy in South Africa’, p. 225. | Page 236

control European correspondence. (As we know from the example of Haile Selassie, not

to read and write can also be a manifestation of status and power.)75

In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries a new colonial elite of clergymen, writers, scribes, civil servants, and intellectual class emerged who acted as intermediaries between the colonial system and the traditional cultures of Ghana. This constituted a new segment of society able to articulate in writing a whole new narrative either for or against colonial rule. Their contesting voices were documented during the colonial period through what researchers are now calling the “tin trunk”76 literatures. The relevance of these “dramatic hidden histories” discovered by scholars in Ghana as “tin trunk diaries, journals, or memoirs found after their authors had died,” showed a hidden literature and sub-culture that was completely hidden from the mainstream.

“Such works consist of journalism, letters and diaries produced, for the most part, by non-elites and either never published at all or circulated briefly and ephemerally.” This is demonstrated especially in colonial reading communities “developed in Ghana,

South Africa” and other Anglophone colonial states, “with an emphasis on social promotion and skills deployed in political life than in literary production.”77

What this indicates is that writing did not replace orality as the medium of self- expression, but as Austen observes, was profoundly instrumental as a symbol of elite status. These “tin trunk” writings reveal more about the idea of Ghanaian self-identity during the colonial period, than the nature of colonialism itself (and that identity was political, aimed at the process of decolonisation.) Hence, scholarly attention must be

75 Ibid., p. 225. 76 Ralph A. Austen, ‘Book Review’ of Karen Barber (ed.) Africa’s Hidden Histories: Everyday Literacy and Making the Self. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 2006, 49/1 March 2008, pp. 143-4. 77 All quotations from Ibid., p. 145. | Page 237 paid to the dual practices of orality and literacy during the colonial period. The argument in this discussion is how, and to what extent, the introduction of literacy affected and “influenced so-called oral or traditional societies regarding modernisation and secularisation” in Africa.78

Africans adopted their awakened self-consciousness to direct their literary engagement with the coloniser toward the evolution and redefining of new identities. This occurred within the:

…context in which they were produced and (along with imported literature) consumed,

but the common cultural thread here is literacy as a critical vehicle for self and group

advancement even amongst Africans of quite low socioeconomic status.79

Through such literary productions African values became a contesting force against colonialism and towards nationalism.80

Nevertheless, it has to be noted that “colonialism reshaped existing structures of human knowledge” in Africa. “No branch of learning—traditional or otherwise—was left untouched by the colonial experience. A crucial aspect of this process was the gathering and ordering of information about the lands and peoples visited by, and later subject to, the colonial powers.”81

78 Kruger, ‘Historical Patterns of Writing and Literacy in South Africa’, p. 225. 79Austen, ‘Book Review’ (Barber, Africa’s Hidden Histories), p. 145. 80 Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Post-colonialism, Routledge, London, 2005, p. 53. 81 Ibid. | Page 238

Oral cultures, myths, music, dance, rituals, and superstitions were equally affected by the colonial project. Since decolonisation, literacy has come under serious pressure creating another challenge for Ghana to face since independence. Poverty, mass illiteracy, an expanding population, and difficult socio-economic conditions have seriously affected efforts to complete the process of the transition from orality to literacy. However, with writing came severe criticism once African writers and intellectuals turned their gaze on the contradictions within the post-colonial authoritarian regimes.82

African writers became suspects in the aftermath of independence, and the creators of text were silenced by imprisonment, exile and persecution.83 African authoritarian rulers found it convenient to give voice to the silent majority, who functioned within the non-literate world which accepted African authority, by suppressing all literate communication and therefore reversing the tide: towards orality instead of towards literacy.

It is encouraging to note that there is a growing and expanding effort to take oral tradition seriously through the written word in reconstructing African history and the culture of its people.84 This new development since the post-colonial era in the 1960s and 1970s acknowledges that the “oral” remains a vibrant aspect of African culture and

82 Ibid. 83 See for example, Wole Soyinka, The Man Died: The Prison Notes of Wole Soyinka, Random House, New York, 1972. Passim. 84 Finnegan, Oral Tradition and the Verbal Arts, pp. 1-6. Also see: Finnegan, Oral Literature in Africa, 2012, Introduction. | Page 239 history, as African societies are still rural in nature. It is important that scholarly discussion takes orality into consideration as an authentic source of African knowledge creation, and develops research methodologies “from function to meaning” to help understand what Ruth Finnegan refers to as the “verbal formulations” and “oral art” of

African cultures.85

Africa is still a continent that attaches great importance to the role of “traditionalists or oral specialists” and their role in society.86 As Hampate Ba, the late Malian writer, scholar and ethnographer of African folklore and traditional culture pointed out in his many works on African oral cultures, the vibrancy of oral tradition and culture is passed through a highly productive narrative of folk stories, myths, genealogies, clan and tribal histories, epic tales, and social, economic and political charters, all of which can be subjected to scholarly analysis and ethnographic discourse.

There is a huge archive and varied scholarly work on orality studies in Africa.

Nevertheless, due to the nature of oral culture itself, any discussion of orality and literacy in Africa places researchers in an ambiguous position. As Amadou Hampate Ba famously remarked at the UNESCO conference in Paris concerning the long term fate of oral tradition in Africa, “In Africa, when an old person dies, it’s a library that burns down.”87 The remark brings home the urgent question of the long term viability of

85 Finnegan, Oral Literature in Africa, pp. 17-27. 86 Amadou Hampate Ba, Aspects of African Civilization (Person, culture, Religion). Originally written in French and translated by Susan B. Hunt, in 1981. Présence Africaine, 1972, p.140 -1. 87 Statement by Hampete Ba, Amadou, at UNESCO Conference, 1960. | Page 240 orality in the post-colonial context. Orality’s dependency on memorialisation makes it unreliable as a source of authentic data collection. Hampate Ba’s graphic aphorism is an urgent call to collect the oral traditions of the various African communities and cultures before urbanisation overtakes the continent, and the human walking libraries die, along with their wealth of traditional knowledge. This reflects the reasons behind the need I felt to memorialise all the stories my mother told me about Ghana, Africa and our family history, as expressed in Curfew’s Children.88

Many of the traditional elders in Ghana lament the lack of interest amongst the youth in learning the oral narratives of history, culture, and tradition, and the traditional rites of passage.89 Professor Asare Opoku observed that “the youth are refusing to carry on the legacy of our ancestors.”90 This is the reason for the existing knowledge gaps pertaining to orality, oral auto/biography, oral history and ethnographic social sciences in Africa.

The past is subject to reinvention or oral reinterpretation and whatever traditional oral narrators can tell us today about African history and knowledge is subject to embellishment. Any attempt to retrieve African history can therefore best be achieved through the process of listening to and appreciation of the elders, participating in the rituals of cultural ceremonies, engaging with the elders and “sitting at the foot of our

88 Students of African Philosophy at the African University College of Communication participated in a class project that required them to interview, document and record the lives of prominent Ghanaians, chiefs, sages, and people with a wealth of experience in national biography to memorialise their knowledge of history and society, before it is too late. 89 Interviews with traditionalist in Osu, Accra, Adabraka, and James Town and with Professor Kofi Asare Opoku at the African University College of Communication form part of the basis of this research. 90 Kofi Asare Opoku, author’s interview, 2012. | Page 241 forefathers to hear the stories of and about our ancestors.”91 Asare Opoku points out that without such appreciation, the continuation of the tradition will be virtually impossible.

African scholars, in a quest to authenticate African’s past, can and should also rely on the documents, manuscripts and photographs within African libraries around the continent, and in archives around the world, in order to reference a new narrative about the past in an objective way.92 Such work is being done by African philosophers and renowned scholars like Asante and Yankah.

This available literature typically comes from non-African writers: Arabs from the East and Europeans from the North, whose publications reflect the prejudices, lack of local knowledge, and different ways of interpreting the stories they received from oral narrators.93 But despite the limited objectivity of the pre-colonial and colonial authors, contemporary researchers have no choice but to use their work, supplemented by oral history, to forge an objective synthesis and build a contemporary frame of reference for

African history.

91 Ibid. 92 Cora Agatucci, Chronicles of African History: www.cora/agatucci/africanhistory/index/hmtl. Accessed: 15 April 2012. Agatucci’s work provides researchers with a well-documented research platform for source materials on African history, oratures, literature and proverbs. 93 Kimble, A Political History of Ghana, p. xvi. | Page 242

It is within this same context that Asare Opoku reminds us of a Yoruba proverb “the hand that wrote with the pencil is the same hand that uses the eraser.”94 This implies that what is written cannot be trusted, because the same hand that wrote it has the power to edit the truth and make up its references according to the dictates and prejudices of the moment. This fact underscores a traditional scepticism toward all things Western in the African context.95

However, it is very important to be reminded at the insistence of Asante and Asare-

Opoku that there is a need to appreciate the duality in which African scholars find themselves. African orature, according to Asante, is linked to heliographic, symbolic and sign writing traditions that have existed on the African continent since ancient

Egyptian times. So though Africans are oral peoples and African ‘orature’ is orally composed and transmitted, and often created to be verbally and communally performed as an integral part of dance and music, there is the need to see beyond a simple duality of oral/written ‘literature.’

Nevertheless, oral arts and traditions of Africa are rich and varied, developing with the beginnings of African cultures, and continuing to flourish today.96 The oral tradition continues to exist as a functional entity in African tradition: the spoken/performed word animating the creative process is considered to have special powers to evoke spiritual and communal forces and ferment inner life. African oral arts often combine

94 Yoruba proverb, quoted by Professor Kofi Asare Opoku, author’s interview, June 2012. 95 Ibid. 96 Cora Agatucci, Chronicles of African History. | Page 243 religious, artistic and social functions: e.g. to convey wisdom; teach ethics and social codes of conduct; teach religious beliefs and communal values; celebrate cultural heroes and revered ancestors, and explain the origins, history, and development of states, clans, and other important social organisations. Mutere calls African oral arts, "art for life’s sake."97

In a wide variety of oral references, such as the art of giving names or titles, orality provides us with the social significance of culture. In Ghanaian tradition names are records of history and provide society with ideas about life; they demarcate the days of the week and show the nature of social or family hierarchy according to birth and circumstances of birth, lineage and tribe. Names contain the interpretation of proverbs as representations of encoded meanings based in appellations and provide meaning to a person’s life. In my case, as explained in the narrative of Curfew’s Children, my own name Kabu is the name of the first son, Ofetoto represents “an ancestral name associated with making money” and Kojo means I was born on Monday. Names are representations of social title, hierarchy, rank or indications of whether a person is a twin, or from which tribe or clan in relation to day of birth, status and lineage. These are all linked to days of the week, historic events, memorialisation, and birth rites.98

97 Dr Mutere's "African Culture and Aesthetics": Accessed 22 April 2012, http://artsedge.kennedy- center.org/aoi/history/ao-guide.html 98 Kofi Asare Opoku, interview and conversations, January to June 2012. | Page 244

For Onyeozlli and Asante99 orality is rendered alongside drumming and dancing, giving it its proverbial value. This is linked to the social enhancement of life.100 If oral culture loses its entertainment value it becomes merely didactic; but the value of oral literature is specifically based on its instructive value, whether through metaphor, irony, riddles, proverbs or entertainment.101 African auto/biography adopts this mediation, and therefore serves as a moral guide for future generations whether in oral or written form, and as a frame for the reflection of national identity and the continuation of family or personal legacy.102

In researching the oral heritage of Ghana, I came to realise that the literate reader who reads about the life of a national hero or a leader, or a child listening to a life story told by an oral narrator, are both effectively listening to the oral narrators. Both writer and reader of a story must translate what is read into what must be heard. My research leads me to the conclusion that orality and literacy will continue to maintain an uneasy and ambiguous relationship in Ghana, simply because the heritage and legacy of

Ghanaians are coded within an oral system of knowing, teaching, transmission and delivery and the traditional custodians of the ‘spoken word’ are very influential in

Ghana.

99 Emmanuel Onyeozlli, ‘The Value of Oral Tradition in Africa’, Paper Presented at the Third International Conference on African Languages, University of Maryland Eastern Shore, April 4-6, 2002. 100 Ibid. 101 Kofi Asare Opoku, author’s interview, April, 2012. 102 Nkrumah, Ghana, passim. | Page 245

This role persists because literacy is viewed by many traditionalists as an encroachment on their way of life, belief systems and culture. In discussions with traditional elders in the Ga traditional area I was told “Western education robs our children of their culture and steals away from them their indigenous appreciation of their ancestral traditional values, oral histories and beliefs.”103

This is acknowledged by Ong who, in discussing orality in Nigeria and Ghana, states that:

Persons whose world view has been formed by high literacy need to remind themselves

that in functionally oral cultures the past is not felt as an itemized terrain, peppered with

verifiable and disputed ‘facts’ or bits of information. It is the dominion of the ancestors,

a resonant source for renewing awareness of present existence, which itself is not an

itemized terrain either. Orality knows no list or charts, or figures.104

For that matter, orality does not rely on references, citation or footnotes. It is a matter of voice against print, where voice takes its authority from the ancestors and print takes it reference from text.

This was the conflict I faced in conducting research in Ghana; many of the custodians of traditional—oral—African heritage are referred to as ‘walking libraries’ who act as a

103 This point was made clear to me in discussions with traditional elders who insisted on why they prefer to learn about life the traditional way and not to become literate. Literary to them was a foreign experience and that is why as a doctoral candidate I needed to see them to reclaim my traditional knowledge of Ghana. They considered me as a lost African returning home to find the source of true knowledge, which to them is oral knowledge, which is inherited from ancestral insight and wisdom. 104 Ong, Orality and Literacy, pp. 95-8. | Page 246 repository of the collective memory of the nation. Yet none of their experiences, ideas and philosophies of life are recorded or documented. Therefore:

To know what I know, or if you want to know what I know, you must seek permission

from the gods. Sit before my feet, and I will tell you the tale of my ancestors and bless

you with the proverbs that I have collected in a life time. I may not know what is in a

book, but look at me, I have seen it all and all the books in the world will not make a

difference before I die.105

This implies a deep sense of connection between the oral and the ancestral gods. The older non-literate generation are adamant about preserving knowledge in its oral context. For it is believed that the gift of communication has divine significance, and therefore to possess the power of oratory and verbal divination are gifts bestowed by powers beyond man.106 How will we maintain our contact with our ancestors and gods if we lose our gift of speech to the written word? I was asked this question while researching the subject of orality amongst the traditional people of Osu in Accra, which confirmed to me a deep sense of belief amongst the Ga traditional community in Osu, in their connection to their ancestors through their ability to communicate with ancestral deities and the dead. Orality was more than the spoken word: it was a means by which the living and the dead communicated. After all, the dead cannot read but at every funeral you can see people talking to the dead. Ordinary speech is common to all humanity, but the art of conjuring proverbs, sayings and having the ear to hear the ancestors and communicate with ancestral gods cannot be taught. It is bestowed

105 This quote came from an older woman in Osu, Accra, who considers herself as the custodian of the traditional history of the Ga people. 106 Kofi Asare Opoku, author’s interview, April 2012. | Page 247 through an oracle and as a blessing. Therefore only those who possess such gifts can represent the gods, not those who have a Western education.107

It is this difficult relationship that drives the focus of this dissertation, to bring to bear the need for this heritage to be saved, documented, written and preserved through text, audio/visual and other electronic means.108 This can be possible if the process of preservation of oral literature is done as a social, political and historic task of writing down the memory of the nation, before it is lost to the graveyard of history. This therefore becomes the process of bridging the gap between the textual and the oral and resolving the contradictions that exist between what is written and what is verbalised.

In writing Curfew’s Children I use my own life story to memorialise my mother, my family and country by ‘writing down’ and transforming into text, a culture and experience that are largely defined by the oral. Orality and literacy in Ghana function in a contested cultural environment, both mediums of communication seek to find an acceptable balance between the traditional and modern mediums of literacy. This has been the task of writing Curfew’s Children: to find a synthesis between the two.

It is because of the urgency of this situation that Professor Nana Aserifi Conduah, a seventy-six-year-old Ghanaian oral historian, broadcaster and scholar advises that

Ghanaians should “rush to capture all the oral narratives, starting with the Ga-

107 Even though there are many chiefs and linguists who have formal education, they defer all reference to oral sources of knowledge, when it comes to matters of tradition and Ghanaian culture. 108 Ong, Orality and Literacy, p. 133 | Page 248

Adangbe, to bridge the knowledge gaps between oral and literal cultures.”109 He acknowledges that the task of writing is daunting, and that children need to be taught how to learn within both mediums to be made aware of themselves as Ghanaians.

In conclusion, what literacy claims to accomplish through text, orality does through the oral mechanism of names, proverbs, wise sayings, social rituals, libation, title, folklores, stories, and oral histories. However, because of urbanisation, post-colonial factors, the mass introduction of electronic communication devices into African cultural spaces, orality as a cultural concept of being and identity and the means for understanding

African reality is severely threatened. Because the children of post-colonial Africa are refusing to embrace the traditional systems by which knowledge is transferred, and embracing different ways of knowing which are alien to African culture, it is important that the transition from orality to literacy be hastened. This will preserve traditional ways of knowing in documented forms that can stand the test of electronic based systems of knowing and information transfer in post-colonial Africa. In essence, this is what Curfew’s Children represents; it is an attempt to capture life-stories into text, which were originally transmitted through the medium of oral communication.

109 Nana, Aseifi Conduah, interview June 2012. | Page 249

Section 3: Reading Walter J. Ong: Orality and Literacy in the Ghanaian Context

Walter Ong emerges as the leading scholar of orality theories relating to societies in transition to literacy and concepts on the “technology of the word”. His work stands as a representation of the foundation on which contemporary theories on orality and literacy are discussed. In examining his work “we see that Ong’s typical approach to a topic involves careful observation and then the presentation and arrangement of evidence with a cultivated and well crafted persuasive voice—an emphasis on method rather than system.”110 Ong’s theories on orality were therefore the best method by which to discuss orality within the context of Ghana’s experience and consider how it informed the creative process of writing Curfew’s Children.

Walter Ong’s works has helped to advance theories on the notion of the “genealogy of the concept of orality” and though they are rooted within the “Christian spiritualist tradition,”111 his work serves as a relevant method to understand indigenous traditional concepts on orality as a whole. Ong probably has the most elaborately worked out theory of orality. He is also currently the most globally influential writer on orality. His

Orality and Literacy (1982) is probably the most widely read, cited, and translated conceptualisation of orality over the last thirty years. Because he offers a detailed and intellectually developed theory of sound as presence, Ong is an essential figure in

110 Paul S.J. Soukup, ‘Looking Is Not Enough: Reflections on Walter J. Ong and Media Ecology’, Proceedings of the Media Ecology Association, vol. 6, 2005, p. 1. 111 Jonathan Sterne, ‘The Theology of Sound: A Critique of Orality’, Canadian Journal of Communication, 36/2, 2011, p. 208. | Page 251 twentieth century thought. His work brings together many muted and otherwise submerged lines of inquiry about sound.112

Ong’s background in Christian spirituality provided him with a rare insight into the world of this double consciousness—that of the oral and the literal—to decipher meanings in ways that other professional academics hardly realised. Oral knowledge can only be accessed through group membership and oral participation and Ong is

“amongst the first to treat so-called ‘primitive’ societies as complex organizations with sophisticated oral modes of culture. He charted the role of language in oral, manuscript, and print culture, and formulated as the key trait of print and electronic culture a

‘secondary orality’ or illusion of speech.”113

Ong was able to give academic validation to what can be described as the “marked shift in culture from Revelation to Manifestation. From Milton to cyber-culture, from African tribal communication to e-mail”114 He points out that:

Many of the features we have taken for granted in thought and expression in literature,

philosophy and science, and even in oral discourses among literates, are not directly

native to human existence as such but have come into being because of the resources

which the technology of writing makes available to human consciousness.115

112 Ibid. 113 Sara van den Berg, ‘The Living Legacy of Walter J. Ong’, Proceedings of the Media Ecology Association, Volume 6, 2005, passim. 114 Ibid., p. 2. 115 Ong, Orality and Literacy, p. 1. | Page 252

Ong successfully managed through a long academic career to juxtapose oral tradition and the literate culture of writing. Through his work we are able to map the scholarly terrain that separates, yet bridges the gap between oral tradition and chirographic cultures as a whole. He is able to synchronise both cultures, and the contradictions between the narrative tradition of oral culture and text based cultures of literate societies, by making researchers aware of the new synthesis that modern technology has enabled. Ong refers to this new stage of development as “second orality”, a combination of orality and literacy in the field of electronic communication.

This new phase in orality blends Western text-based scripting and the traditional system of orality in the dissemination of information through the current mediums of television, radio, Internet, social media, and mobile phones. The digitalisation of communication enables us to incorporate the chirographic mode of communication with the oral transmission of information and knowledge to usher in a new age of chirographic-orality. This is a blending of the oral tapestry with the written symbolism of words on the page to create a new culture of communication.

Within the theorisation of the orality of language, Ong explored a wide variety of scholarly works, including the works of Milman Parry and Eric Havelock on the characteristics of oral cultures and the differences between orality and literacy. Ong defines orality as a verbal system of communication that excludes any reference to writing. This draws attention to the fact that despite the existence of written cultures,

| Page 253 the oral form of knowledge creation and transference has always been the case throughout human history. Thousands of languages around the world are oral based, and only about seventy-eight have a literature.116

He also rejects the phrase ‘oral literature,’ arguing that writing-based societies fail to comprehend the inherent value of orality and the use of this phrase “reveals the inability” of literate societies “to represent in our minds a heritage of verbally organized material except as some variant of writing, even when they are having nothing to write with at all.”117 Drawing on Milman Parry’s research on the tradition of the oral epic,

Ong argues that “the Homeric poems valued and somehow made capital of what later readers had been trained in principle to devalue, namely the set phrase, the formula, the expected qualifier—to put it more bluntly, the cliché.”118 The Homeric tradition was based on mnemonic techniques, which “relied on the formulaic use of language to aid in the retention” and analysis of knowledge.119 Consequently, Ong observes that without the writing of such oral epics such as Homer’s Iliad and other stories, fables, thoughts and ideas that enable humans to record knowledge in easily remembered forms, many of the narratives would be lost with time.120

116 Ibid., p. 7. 117 Ibid., p. 11. 118 Ibid., p. 23. 119 Bingham, Art, Review of Walter J. Ong’s Orality and Literacy www. Engl.niu.edu/wac/ong_rvw.html. accessed: March 2011. 120 Ong, Orality and Literacy, passim. | Page 254

Ong points out “in an oral culture, restriction of words to sound determines not only modes of expression but also thought processes.”121 Thoughts express themselves through the oral narrative devices and linguistic strategies that are adopted to sustain retention of story, experience, and historic narration from generation to generation.

Ong observes that expression is additive rather than subordinative,122 aggregative rather than an analytical process, and that it tends to be redundant or “copious” in nature.123

Since in a primarily oral culture conceptualized knowledge that is not repeated aloud

soon vanishes, oral societies must invest great energy in saying over and over again

what has been learned arduously over the ages. This need establishes a highly

traditionalist or conservative set of mind that with good reason inhibits intellectual

experimentation. Knowledge is hard to come by and precious, and society regards

highly those wise old men and women who specialize in conserving it, who know and

can tell the stories of the days of old. By storing knowledge outside the mind, writing

and, even more, print downgrade the figures of the wise old man and wise old woman,

repeaters of the past, in favour of younger discoverers of something new.124

This extensive quotation was chosen from Ong’s book to illustrate the truism about the nature of oral cultures. Though in its practice it might make sense to the traditionalist, it creates the condition of the repetitive nature of conversation and the retelling of everything that is already known as a means for re-enforcement. Orality needs the repetitive nature of conversation to reinforce itself as a communicative device.

121 Ibid., p. 33. 122 Ibid., p. 37. 123 Ibid., pp. 36-45. Also see: Alberto de Mingo Kaminouchi, ‘But It Is Not So Amongst You’ – Echoes of Power in Mark 10.32-45, T&T Clark International, New York, 2003, p. 54. 124 Ong, Orality and Literacy, p. 41. | Page 255

This is particularly true in Ghana. It is interesting to observe how two people can talk about the same thing over and over, re-explaining it, re-interpreting it and re-enforcing it in different ways to make a particular point which has already been made. This continuous use of ‘ands’—in Ga, it is ‘ne’ and in Akan or Twi, it is ‘na’—provides us with the confirmation of the additive rather than the subordinative nature of orality.

Within the context of an oral based culture, the idea of re-enforcement, regurgitation and re-enactment through body language, facial expression, head movements and the continuous use of additives—and in Ghana, drum and dance—make sense.125

In a literate culture, the transfer and cataloguing of knowledge and information is based on the externalisation of thought through text. This provides for continuity not possible in oral tradition. However, Asare Opoku affirms that orality functions by adopting strategies that provide it with a sense of continuity: symbolism in words, the use of proverbial statements, additive reaffirmations of statements, and the evocation of the authority of the gods. In contrast to Ong’s position on the technology of writing, for

Opoku “the sacredness of words arises from sacred authority not script, hence what is sacred to me derives from ancestral authority.”126 This, he argues, compensates for the absence of writing in oral cultures.

125 Research conclusions based on characteristics of oral communicators. Case study in Accra, Ghana, 2012. 126 Kofi Asare Opoku, interviewed June 2012. | Page 256

It is not only the sacred, however, but also references to the human life world. Because of the absence of an elaborate analytical system of categorising thought which depends on writing, “oral cultures must conceptualize and verbalize all their knowledge with more or less close reference to the human life world.”127

This is evident in Ghanaian societies, which rely on the conversational nature of communication and which find expression through cultural activities such as funerals, out-doorings, festivals, proverbs, and ceremonial occasions. Studying Ghanaians as a

Ghanaian with a literacy-based consciousness, it is interesting to analyse how communities gather together to chat, talk, interpret riddles, exchange stories, spread rumours, discuss politics, quarrel, and memorialise ancestors. These long drawn-out conversations and talking fests are in themselves educational. It is within these oral- based activities, as perceived within the context of oral cultures, that Ong’s theory of conservatism and traditionalism makes sense. My research into orality in Ghana confirms the multi-layered nature of oral cultures that define the Ghanaian character and social norms of Ghanaian culture, as encoded in the traditional languages. These norms and value structures are best delivered through conversation and traditional forms of instruction—through the medium of orality. In this regard, the conservative nature of orality requires the custodians of inherited knowledge to maintain traditions with a conservative set of verbal principles in order to ensure linguistic purity and authenticity.128 Hence the use of appellations, incantations and proverbs feature

127 Ong, Orality and Literacy, p. 42. 128 Atukwei Okai, Interview 2012. | Page 257 significantly in the process of conservation of language, knowledge and traditional wisdom.

What is also evident is the antagonistic nature of oral culture.129 Ong argues that

“writing fosters abstractions that disengage knowledge from the arena where human beings struggle with one another. Writing separates the knower from the known. On the other hand, by keeping knowledge embedded in the human life world, orality situates knowledge within the context of struggle.”130 Indeed in Ghana such ‘struggle’ may reveal a disturbing aspect of orality. Huge public displays of argument, taxi drivers insulting each other and blowing their horns, the making of provocative insinuations, market women arguing amongst each other, customers haggling over prices, politicians engaging in the exchange of insults on national radio and TV, all of these form part of the oral discourse in public and cultural life.

But Ong also notes the empathetic and participatory nature of orality—as in ‘call and response’ in oral African traditions—whereby the distance between subject and object is diminished.131 Again, this is illustrated by observing Ghanaians having a conversation; the participants talk across each other and respond aloud to the storyteller as an indication that they are listening and understanding. Talking begets talking as a way of listening: it is participatory, and a way of showing empathy. Audiences in the theatre talk back to the characters on stage, taking sides and parroting the words of the

129 Ong, Orality and Literacy, p. 43. 130 Ibid., pp. 43-4. 131 Ibid., p. 42. | Page 258 characters; and this is evident through many of the plays I produced in Accra. Ghanaian culture does not separate the performer from the audience. Ong explains that such interactions are an expression of identification, because “for oral culture, learning or knowing means achieving close, empathetic, communal identification with the known.”132 It is an expressive means of communal reaction, a way of engaging with the

‘soul’ of the communicator. Writing on the other hand, separates the knower from the known or the writer from the reader and thus sets up conditions for ‘objectivity’, for personal disengagement or distancing.

Orality is therefore homeostatic and situational rather than abstract. In this instance it is interesting to watch people in Ghana communicating: the hand movements, the dramatisation, the sense of repetition and gesticulation give the words emotive relevance. Speech is not just about the utterance of words; it is the objectification of the word through the medium of the body.

These characteristics of oral expression in traditional societies undergird and contribute to our understanding and appreciation of the saliency of orality, and therefore a disciplined discussion of these unique strengths would enhance the memorability of an utterance. This, Ong explains, is important for those engaged in the process of memorising. Societies that rely heavily on writing have the luxury of referring back to

132 Ibid., p. 45. | Page 259 the written text, but those who rely on memory must leave an impression on the listener in order to facilitate recollection.133

Following this line of argument, Ong is able to develop the theory that the shift from orality to literacy enables human consciousness of time and space, history and text to become restructured, and hence distances the originator of a thought from the receiver.134 For Ong, the critical turning points in Western civilisation occurred when classical Greek authors transformed philosophical thought into text, and when Latin scholars authored Roman ideas on rhetoric, creating two major developments in the

West which beautifully illustrate the constant interaction of writing and orality: the development of the complex art of rhetoric and the learned text.

The advent of writing and the subsequent invention of print literature in Western societies transformed words into things; and as Bingham pointed out, with the introduction of a literate culture in the West, things were no longer written in order to be read aloud (as for example in medieval scholarly circles) but rather, words in print became ‘embedded’ as objects in space.135

Through print, words become things that can be arranged on a page as they are indexes,

tables or content, lists and labels (an extreme example being the arrangement of words

in the poetry of e.e. cummings).136

133 Bingham, Review of Walter J. Ong’s Orality and Literacy, p. 1. 134 Ong, Orality and Literacy, p. 4 135 Ibid, p. 123. 136 Bingham, Review of Walter J. Ong’s Orality and Literacy, p. 1. | Page 260

This brings me to the impact of electronic media or ‘secondary orality’, which at the time Ong authored his book was still in its infancy. Primary and secondary orality, though different in nature, are similar in form: both mediums have the fundamental need in human society to foster a strong sense of group membership.137 However, secondary forms of orality are essentially more deliberate and self-conscious; they are based on writing and print, as well as oral and visual media. The group identities formed and forged produce a larger effect and reach a wider audience than any produced by primary orality.138

The challenge of primary orality is deeply rooted within the temporality of knowledge because knowledge of a thing or an experience shifts with time and space. Stories are retold and reinterpreted by every generation, which robs the historical narrative of its empirical truth. But Ong is not biased towards oral or literal communication. He is deeply aware of the limitations of both mediums and offers us an understanding of the genres and of how the shift from orality to literacy affects the culture of human narrative practices as a whole.139

My education as a literate storyteller provides me with insights into both worlds. In the context of Ong’s insights into oral narration and the inability to manage knowledge in

137 Ong, Orality and Literacy, pp. 133-5. 138 Ibid., p. 136. 139 Bingham, Art, Review, Ong’s Orality and Literacy, p. 1. | Page 261 an elaborate and structured manner,140 my role as a Ghanaian writer of stories becomes even more crucial. I have come to appreciate the value of writing what is remembered and storing it in text. In my research work and in my experience, oral tradition is an insufficient means for the storage of knowledge and the storehouse of history. In writing Curfew’s Children I adopt a literary style and device that affords me, as a writer, the benefits of the oral narrator. This is the privilege of “rhapsodizing and linking together, historic episodes and storylines, with little regard to a linear plot structure, the use of flat characters, and focusing on interaction with the audience help to foreground the elements of an oral narrative and make them easier to remember.”141

My experience of growing up in Ghana, and being the literate writer of stories suggests to me that orality has its advantages and yet literacy is very significant in the process of preserving that which is oral. Oral narratives have important qualities: imaginative expansiveness to bring characters alive that could be considered ‘flat,’ and the provision of emotional ingredients that capture the immediate attention of an audience. Oral narratives, unlike written narratives, need not follow a linear plot line; and unlike written narratives, they do not erect a detached relationship between narrator and audience.142

140 Bruce E. Gronbeck, (ed.), Media, Consciousness, and Culture: Exploration of Walter Ong’s Thought, Sage Publishing, London, 1991, passim. 141 Bingham, Review of Walter J. Ong’s Orality and Literacy, p. 1. Also see Ong, Orality and Literacy, 1982, pp. 137-52. 142 Ong, Orality and Literacy, pp. 133-5. | Page 262

However, the prevailing scholarship on orality and literacy perhaps strives too hard to point out the differences, missing the fact that these two genres are interconnected, even in highly literate and electronic-literate cultures. Fortunately, media studies theorists are connecting the dots to make us aware of the indispensability of one genre to the other. Shakespeare’s plays, the Greek classics, Dickens’ rendition of his stories by verbalising them on stage, Mark Twain’s storytelling and reading of his works in public, the Beat Generation poets reading their poetry aloud, the radio readings of

Dylan Thomas, and the rendering into voice the poetry of African American authors all provide us with the knowledge that orality and literacy are inseparable in communicating the human story to the world. It is interesting and instructive to note that rap music, though essentially an oral medium, is usually first scripted, however rudimentary, in its written form. Rap artists are griots in the traditional African sense: storytellers, historians and custodians of the narrative cultures of urban societies.

Ong’s work therefore provides us with concepts and the theoretical outline in order to build knowledge about oral narrative culture. His work has provided theorists with the intellectual space for theorising on orality and literacy.

The critical point in this discussion, as it relates to Africa and especially to Ghana, is the ambivalence towards oral cultures. Yankah, a leading Ghanaian linguist and African oral theorist, posits that “scholars like Walter Ong have associated proverb use with non-literate societies, based on the argument that the mind cannot engage in analytical

| Page 263 organization of thought without writing.”143 Certainly in Ong’s early work on Petrus

Ramus, he discussed the important differences between Aristotelian logic, oral rhetoric, and the arts of memory, and showed how Ramistic thought and print culture produced a new organisation of knowledge; hence Ong argued “writing restructures consciousness.”144 This can be taken to suggest that non-literate cultures were incapable of engaging in abstract conceptions of truth, and/or formulating a coherent system of thought. Yankah rejects this Western frame of reference showing that the encoding of knowledge to a large extent is captured in mythology, proverbs, stories, and songs.145

Despite the contested discourse on orality it is important to appreciate that Ong was not only working within the circumstance of the current scholarly environment of his time, but also strove to find a convincing synthesis between oral traditions and writing cultures.

Along with other theorists on orality—Ruth Finnegan, Maurice Bloch and Hermann

Baumann—Ong’s work gives voice to the ambivalent and sometimes paradoxical scholarly work on oral literatures in traditional African societies. Finnegan especially had a significant influence on Yankah, whom one could safely describe as the Walter

Ong of Ghana, and her work was frequently cited by both Ong and Yankah. Ong points out in Orality and Literacy that:

143 Kwesi Yankah, ‘Proverbs: The Aesthetics of Traditional Communication’, Research in African Literatures, 20/3, 1989, p. 325. 144 Berg, ‘The Living Legacy of Walter J. Ong’, p. 2. 145 Yankah, ‘Proverbs: The Aesthetics of Traditional Communication’, p. 325. | Page 264

Despite oral roots of all verbalization, the scientific and literary study of language and

literature has for centuries, until quite recent years, shied away from orality. Texts have

clamoured for attention so peremptorily that oral creations have tended to be regarded

generally as variant of written productions or if not this, as beneath serious scholarly

attention. Only relatively recently have we become impatient with our obtuseness

here.146

He draws here on the groundbreaking work of Ruth Finnegan, English social anthropologist, and particularly her work The Oral and Beyond: doing things with words in

Africa, which set a new standard in the discussion of oral cultures in Africa. Her work responds to the cross-currents of discussion of orality and orature and brings together a lifetime of fieldwork in Africa; as she writes in the preface: “this book grew from my experience of reflecting on how the study of oral forms in Africa has changed since nearly half a century ago”.147 Finnegan charts the changes in the study and practice of

African verbal arts and in the ways scholars have discussed orality, language and performance in Africa over the past fifty years. Her work addresses wider comparative issues concerning orality, bridging the gap between oral and popular cultures of which she includes praise singers on TV, Nigerian video production, the carving of proverbs in figurines and masks, poetry on video and the Internet, pop groups, rap bands, trade union songs, praises at football games and graduation ceremonies, and AIDS-related performances.

146 Ong, Orality and Literacy, p. 8. 147 Ruth Finnegan, The Oral and Beyond: doing things with words in Africa. University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2007, p. xi. | Page 265

Finnegan acknowledges the work of orality scholars such as Paulme, Gorog-Karady,

Seydou and others, but her focus is the larger narrative on African languages, including the broad study of orality in both scholarly reflection and daily practice, cognisant of the way people interact with words to “formulate and interpret the world”148 through the old and new, rural and urban orality.

Finnegan surveys the emergence and development of orality studies starting with her work on the Limba people of Sierra Leone.149 She discusses the importance of the various terminology used to describe oral literatures such as: oral-orality, oral cultures, the verbal arts, orature, auriture, oraliture, oralcy, oraurality, and oral language as a form of action, of art and of reflection, and concludes that “there is no good reason to deny the title of literature to African forms just because they happen to be oral.” 150 Finnegan’s accomplishment is in her critical engagement with stereotypes and her tackling of the accepted boundaries between genres and disciplines in the scholarly discussion on orality.

Yankah’s discussion on oral mythology refers to this work; he states that scholarship on myth in Africa “displays equivocation on the question of its presence or absence”, and both bring to the fore and refute assumptions such as that by Baumann who wrote that

“the Negro is devoid of the gift of myth-making.”151 In contrast, Finnegan argues that

148 Ibid., p. 3. 149 Ibid., pp. 190-6. 150 Ibid., p. 95. 151 Yankah, ‘Proverbs: The Aesthetics of Traditional Communication’, p. 1. | Page 266 scholars of African oral myths who find difficulty in sourcing contextual information of

African folklore, myths and oral narratives can easily overlook its significance and therefore make the assumption that African oral literatures are difficult to classify and may be a product of “artistically underdeveloped formulations.”152

Finnegan has researched the performance aspect of orality, revealing in her work the potential of tonality in native languages, and the use of drumming as supportive agency in communication. She argues that this includes timing, the introduction of musical themes, interludes, and contributions from audience, and demonstrates that there are

“no clear boundaries between composer, performer and audience, between analyst and artist, between the local exponent, the inscriber and the interpreter of texts”.153

Finnegan notes that, “to understand what have in the past been regarded as ‘oral texts’, we have to go beyond just the ‘words’ and just the evanescent moment, into a host of multiplicities”.154 Denouncing ethnocentric world-views, she encourages scholars to revisit oral composition, narratives and new and emerging genres. She continually invites them to relocate “outside Western academics and networks,”155 to be able to challenge compartmentalisation and widen their vision for a more rewarding study of

African genres, a point illustrated with a long discussion of African epics.156 Her first book, she notes, was written “to make a point of countering that prevailing mind-set”

152 Finnegan, Oral Literature in Africa, p. 1 153 Finnegan, The Oral and Beyond, p. 3. 154 Ibid., p. 72. 155 Ibid., p. 72. 156 Ibid., pp. 150-3. | Page 267 and make oral literature “more visible as a scholarly subject.”157 Finnegan’s research was driven by a passion to share her interest in African cultures and to increase “the visibility and worth of African literary forms on equal terms with those from anywhere else.”158 Finally, Finnegan views orality not only within the theoretical but also the empirical framework of study researching the living context of African culture.

Therefore, even though she did not begin her career like most British researchers into the field of orality studies, believing that literature and language lay in written text,

Finnegan came to recognise that any structured and functional understanding of

African oral literatures must include the multi-sensory approach, multi-vocal aspect of performance literature and participatory nature of orality.159 It is from this context that

African scholars like Yankah and Samuel Oteng are developing new theoretical frameworks to support claims about the relevance and validation of oral traditions.

Yankah, in particular, argues that in the relative absence of writing and modes of electromagnetic communication, speaking constitutes the single most important mode of interaction.160

Throughout earlier dynastic periods of African history south of the Sahara, writing has been scant, and therefore despite all the efforts on the part of post-colonial Africans to write, ‘orature’ still serves as the central medium for the communication of social, religious and educational purposes. Storytelling, proverbs, riddles and folklore facilitate

157 Ibid., p. 140. 158 Ibid., p. 145. 159 Finnegan, The Oral and beyond, pp. 78, 115, 219. 160 Yankah, ‘Proverbs: The Aesthetics of Traditional Communication’, passim. | Page 268 the encoding of historical information, cultural discourse, mythological narratives and normative values. All of these devices of communication exist in narrative patterns that can enable its utterer to remember and transfer knowledge from one generation to another:

The performer or storyteller relies on common experience and shared tradition. As he

tells the story to his audience, he also acts out the narrative by means of gestures, facial

expressions, body movement, mime, voice modulation, song and dance. The members

of the audience understand according to their ages and social circumstance. A story may

mean one thing to the other, another to the adults, and still another to the children.

Everyone learns something from the performance. A good storyteller makes certain that

learning takes place by punctuating his performance with proverbs that underscore the

social value of the story.161

Ong advises researchers to be cognisant of the fact that our quest for illumination:

…does not come easily. Understanding the relationship of orality and literacy

and the implications of the relations is not a matter of instant psychohistory or

instant phenomenology. It calls for wide, even vast, learning, painstaking

thought and careful statement. Not only are the issues deep and complex, but

they also engage our own biases.162

The emerging areas of orality and electracy in Africa deserve deeper understanding in order to gain an appreciation into the difficulties associated with the transition from orality to literacy. Many theorists continue to shed light on a wide variety of subjects associated with oral tradition. My work as a creative writer is an attempt to understand

161 Ford, ‘Literature of Africa’, p. 76a. 162 Ong, Orality and Literacy, p. 2. | Page 269 how orality informs the concept of identity in Ghana, and how it has shaped the process of transforming my memoir into text.

| Page 270

Section 4: Categories and Forms of Oral Tradition in the Ghanaian Context: Research Findings, Analysis of Orality and Results

In this section I situate orality within the Ghanaian context and show how it functions in regards to shaping my consciousness as a writer. The centuries of African reliance on oral forms of communication as a means for transmitting knowledge and information in the traditional sense means that a great deal of African literature has not been written down. Much scholarly work has emerged in recent years, though it is equivocal on what oral tradition means, and its significance, in defining ethnic and national identities.163

Ong’s research was primarily on the nature of consciousness in cultures that are situated with an oral context. Oral cultures constitute the vast majority of languages that have existed in human history, and most of these remain unwritten. The spoken word can be seen as an art form used to celebrate life through the cycle of birth, puberty, marriage, and death. Orality is a shared experience of communal communication, which changes according to who is telling the story or communicating its proverbial value. Through inherited narrative devices the story is repeated and though cadences may differ the ancestral wisdom still remains the same and is hardly lost in the changing variation of the tale.

163 Yankah, ‘Proverbs: The Aesthetics of Traditional Communication’, pp. 2-3.

| Page 271

The central feature of the oral narrative process is the call and response device of storytelling. It is an active participatory mode of storytelling with audience participation as a consistent feature of the process. Inter-generational participation in storytelling acts as a link between the past, present and future in one harmonious linkage in the expression of culture and collective duty.164

In researching orality in Ghana I relied on extensive literature, interviews of local scholars and practitioners, texts, digital repositories, and personal recollections of growing up and recent visits to stay and teach in Ghana. It is vital to the craft of storytelling to appreciate and understand the power of proverbs and riddles through which a narrator transmits knowledge and information in oral tradition. The form takes on the structure of verbal intensity and precision. It is a test of wit to convey a specific or universal truth through a proverb and this approach is prevalent amongst the Akans,

Ewes and Gas of Ghana, where adepts are judged by their encyclopaedic knowledge and memory of the proverbs, adages and riddles by which they introduce or punctuate their stories.165

Proverbs play an important role in the language, story and even public policy formulation in Ghanaian social life. They derive their meaning from carefully analysed observations of social events, the life experiences of people and the behaviour of animals. They are linked to occupations such as farming, fishing, and hunting and

164 Ford, ‘Literature of Africa’, p. 76a. 165 Discussions on orality with Professor Kofi Asare Opoku, January – June 2012. | Page 272 woven around moral tales relating to human relations, good and evil, poverty and riches, joy and sorrow, births and funerals.166

The functional value of proverbs in Ghanaian speech is the way a proverb “adorns the speech and makes it rich and beautiful,”167 capturing an audience’s attention and becoming a means for the clarification of thought, and for the communication of morals and traditional pedagogy. Proverbial sayings have evolved in society for different reasons and under a variety of circumstances, yet the same proverb can be used to represent different things, depending on the circumstance.

When uttering a proverb the utterer intends to give the listener a clue as to what is to follow. This is done under the presumption that the listener will have an inkling of the meaning of the proverb itself. It is a common saying in Ghanaian society that “we speak to the wise in proverbs, not in plain language.”168 This means that the wise person is able to understand proverbial language in daily communication practices.169 As

Professor Asare Opoku confirmed with the use of another proverb, “only a fool needs an interpretation of a proverb.”170

Riddles also serve to set the mood or tone of a story, especially in fables for children.

While children and the youth are encouraged to use them in daily communication

166 Source ‘What Proverbs are and their significance in Ghanaian Languages’, GhanaNation.com (2009) http://content.ghananation.com/print-article, accessed 12 April 11. 167 Ibid. 168 Ibid. 169 Ibid. 170 Asare Opoku, interview April 2012. | Page 273 practices, the older generation also use riddles to test the wits of the youth. Riddles are usually short poetic statements steeped in metaphor or simile, uttered with an indirect intent to trick the mind of the listener. African riddles rely heavily on “subtleties of sound, rhythm, and tone,”171 as mechanisms for conveying a communal ethos to establish the credibility of the utterer, before a storyteller begins a story. Within the

Ghanaian context, riddles have a strong pedagogical value in the upbringing and tutelage of the young in society. There is also a playful quality associated with riddles, which encourages group participation. Riddles and puzzles are used as tests to find out a person’s knowledge of the environment, the history of the clan, politics, genealogy, stories, and about human nature.

Sample Akan proverbs and their meanings:

• A child breaks the shell of the snail but not that of a tortoise. (Do

not attempt what is beyond your strength or do not be

overambitious.)

• The old woman cares for the chicken and the chicken cares for the

old woman. (When someone cares for you, you are also expected to

care for that person when he is in need.)

• The wandering child does not see the body of his dead mother

before burial. (A person who does not keep in touch with his home

usually misses important occasions, e.g. burial of a close relative.)

171 Ford, ‘Literature of Africa’, p. 76b. | Page 274

• You cannot crack two palm nuts in the mouth at the same time.

(Do one thing at a time.)172

Sample riddles and their answers:

• What talks a lot when going, but is silent when coming back?

Meaning: Water gourds. Empty gourds rattle together—‘talk’—on

the way to be filled. Full gourds do not rattle.173

• My father built me a house full of windows.

Meaning: A net.

• My mother built me a house with no windows, or, I live in a house

with no windows.

Meaning: An egg / my mother’s womb.174

There are introductory call and response features to every riddle in Ghanaian oral tradition. These riddles were frequently used to illustrate the depth of a person’s dexterity with the language, as I remember them growing up. They are designed to gain the attention of a group. Amongst the Ga, for example, the leader of a riddle contest will begin by saying the “Adzemi loo” (this is akin to a call to announce that a riddle is about to be uttered) and the audience or group would respond by saying “Adzemi ba;”(a response that we are ready to hear your riddle). Then the leader would ask “Meniji?”

(What is?), and follow with the riddle.175 This goes on into the wee hours of the night, until all have had a chance to utter a riddle in the contest and are satisfied that they

172 ‘What Proverbs are and their significance in Ghanaian Languages’, p. 1. 173 Ford, ‘Literature of Africa’, p. 76b. 174 ‘What Proverbs are and their significance in Ghanaian Languages’, pp. 6-7. 175 Ibid, pp. 6-7. | Page 275 have proven their level of knowledge and gained knowledge as well. It is a social mechanism for creating group cohesion and family integration and imparting cultural values.

Many Ghanaians grow up conversant with the popular proverbs and riddles that define the social and cultural ethos of the country. These popular sayings transcend ethnicity and can be appreciated by the average Ghanaian. Most of the time, these sayings are encoded within the public language of communication, which includes advertisements on trucks, buses, kiosks and on buildings. All are designed to communicate social values, beliefs, principles, and in some cases, political ideals and public policy. A current example is the popularity of the proverb “Dzi wo fie asem.” The previous president of Ghana, the late John Atta Mills, used the Fante proverb; “Dzi wo fie asem,” to show his sense of wit to mean that “Mind your own business” or it could literally be translated as “Mind matters in your own home.” This was his response to a question regarding the political stalemate in Ivory Coast. The president made this statement at a forum where he was interacting with senior Ghanaian editors and journalists at the Osu

Castle to mark his second year in office.176

Similarly, when John Kuffour was president of Ghana he responded to the problem of the Ivory Coast by saying, “When your neighbour’s house is on fire you find water,”177 that is, you find water to help put out the fire because the fire can spread and your

176 ‘BBC’s and David Amanor’s trouble with proverbs’, The New Ghanaian, Online edition, accessed 14 April 2011. 177 Ibid. | Page 276 house can catch fire too. The use of proverbs to undergird national or public statements is prevalent in Ghanaian private and public speech.

Another feature of oral tradition is a medium of using folktales or myths to communicate a moral value in a traditional story. Folktales form an essential part of the canon of oral narratives and are designed to convey the teaching of moral values and lessons about life. Despite the contested nature of the scholarship pertaining to the question of the “presence or absence”178 of folklore in Africa, recent discourses on orality have acknowledged the power and influence of folklore and its significance in the narrative tradition in Africa. Folklore forms an indispensable part of African oral narratives and acts as a medium for the maintenance of traditional ontology which is steeped in story and ceremony.179

Hence, as Yankah writes, “it takes more than content analysis on paper to tell a myth from other types of narrative. In this regard, it is important to include not only the method and style of delivery, but also the intent of the narrator as part of the ingredients necessary for genre categorization.”180 The fact that African myths and folktales were not written down does not necessarily invalidate their status or authenticity.

178 Kwesi Yankah, ‘Akan Trickster Cycle: Myth or Folktale?’, unpublished paper, African Studies Program, Indiana University, 1983, p. 1. 179 Philip M. Peek, and Kwesi Yankah, (eds.) Introduction to African Folklore, An Encyclopaedia, Routledge, New York, 2003, pp. viii-section on the Study of African Folklore. 180 Yankah, ‘Akan Trickster Cycle: Myth or Folktale?’ p. 2. | Page 277

Folktales are essentially character-driven, as both Yankah and Finnegan explain, and in them the moral conduct of the characters is put under rigorous scrutiny. In some cases the tales expose tricksters, hypocrisy and fraud. In other cases they provide examples of heroic behaviour, loyalty, trust, and honesty. Traditional fables and folktales are part of the paradoxical nature of life, within the context of a moral dilemma. They are intended to challenge the listener to make a moral choice between two or more convincing arguments, or points of view. Some storytellers create fictional stories as a way to capture the imagination of the listeners; others draw their stories from real life situations. The classic folktale character in Ghanaian oral tradition is Kweku Anansi, the popular spider. Anansi is the personification of the trickster, a wise guy and wit. As a character in Ghanaian orature Anansi is a small and feeble spider, yet he is endowed with cunning, cleverness, ambition, and resourcefulness. Anansi uses his enormous intellectual resources to outwit his adversaries. Essentially, Anansi is a controversial character. The analysis of folklore and orature raises questions of character: is it Anansi who is motivated by avarice and selfishness, or is it his adversaries the crow, mouse, lion, crocodile or fox who are the tricksters? Is it his ability to outwit them that exonerates him from being considered a flawed character? But in the popular Ghanaian imagination Anansi is seen as a survivor, a heroic figure, a man of justice who has been bestowed with the attributes of a redeemer of the oppressed.181

181 Peggy Appiah, Anansi the Spider, Tales from an Ashanti Village, Random House Children’s Books, New York, 1966. | Page 278

Anansi continues to be a central figure in all Ghanaian folklore and the narrative of his exploits is told in oral and written stories. Proverbs attributed to him and stories about his experiences permeate every aspect of Ghanaian oral literature and by this narrative

Ghanaians are able to forge a common story about their history and national identity.

Poetry is another highly developed linguistic pattern of communication in African

(Ghanaian) oral tradition. It falls within the category of song and is one of the oldest, most highly developed, and widespread of African oral traditions.182 There are various forms of poetic expression, which find their outlet in sacred practices and in the more secular purposes of birth and marriage ceremonial occasions. The genre can be classified into subgenres of lyrical poetry, political poetry, satirical poetry, and drum poetry. Beyond these formal classifications Salm and Folola have also identified aspects of oral poetry that include “dirges, praise poetry and abuse poetry.”183

Oral poetry in Ghana is linked to various cultural practices that are associated with occupations such as fishing, hunting and/or farming, or with warrior groups known amongst the Fantis as the asafo companies:

Poetry is used to praise gods and ancestors. Like proverbs, poetry sometimes uses drum

sounds as a medium of communication or to emphasize the message. Poems can be

performed by professionals, semi-professionals, or amateurs. All Ghanaian societies use

182 Ford, ‘Literature of Africa’, p. 76b. 183 Steven J. Salm and Toyin Falola, Culture and Customs of Ghana, Greenwood Press, Westport, 2002, pp. 61-63. | Page 279

various forms of poetry, ranging from informal lyrics and songs sung by friends, to

complex court and praise poetry.184

In today’s Ghana, despite the growing mass appeal of poetry in the traditional sense,185 the contemporary uses of poetry on a national stage are best represented in the works of

Atukwei Okai, Kofi Anyidoho and Kofi Awoonor, three poets with completely different styles of rendering their poetry. Anyidoho is widely published and reads with a soft baritone voice that almost sounds like a slow song. Atukwei Okai uses poetic dramatisation to render his passionate allegorical verses that are suffused with metaphors, simile and onomatopoetic phrases. On the other hand, it was the poetry of

Kofi Awooner that gave voice to the post-colonial sentiments after independence and was also influential in setting the tone of Ghana’s post-colonial response to the imperial project of African education.

Even though current poetry in Ghana continues to maintain links with oral tradition, members of an elite group of writers are blending English poetic styles with oral traditional dirges, and praise songs with political undertones, to reflect the spirit of the times. Kofi Ayidoho represents the school of poetic tradition that combines oral narrative style and poetry in a very simple but rich verse style that retains all of its

African essence of orality when read aloud.186

184 Ibid., p. 61. 185 The popularity of poetry is evident during funerals, social occasions and during national events where poets are invited to give a poetic eulogy, ancestral invocation and memorial to pure libation during anniversaries and sermons to remember the lives of the deceased. The Ghana Association of Writers and the Pan-African Writers Association organized frequent poetry performances throughout the year. 186 Kofi Anyidoho, Ghanaian poet and academic, comes from a family tradition of Ewe poets and oral artists and was my lecturer in African Literature at the University of Ghana. | Page 280

Since the 1970s, Atukwei Okai has spurred new developments in Ghanaian poetry with attempts at dramatisation of his verse. His performance based poetry read in an oratorical tone integrates audiences into his poetic songs, narratives and chants. Efforts are being made to record his works and make them available on audio discs and on electronic media for a wider audience.187

It must be noted that since 1957—and the publication of three volumes of transcribed traditional poetry, and some patriotic poetry produced by Michael Dei-Anang that is used as a standard work in Ghanaian schools—there has not been another anthology that has brought contemporary Ghanaian poetry and traditional verse to the reading public.188 Nevertheless, Ghanaian traditional court houses have resident professional poets, especially amongst the Akan, Guan and Ga-Adangbe. Though the role of such poets may have diminished since independence and is less formal than it was in the royal court, they are becoming increasingly important as traditional orators in the larger social and political context. Their role as orators for hire, to render eulogies or funeral oration has gained greater significance since post-colonial times. These orators also perform panegyric and libation poetry to praise ancestors, recite genealogy of a clan, and praise the deeds of ancestors and past rulers during state or traditional functions.

With the accompaniment of drums or professional mourners they facilitate the pouring of libations, recite elegiac poetry, read the obituary of the deceased, or render blessings

187 Atukwei Okai happens to be my uncle, under whom I served as General Secretary of the Ghana Association of Writers in the 1980s, and he also was one of the chief mourners following my mother’s funeral. 188 Salm and Falola, Culture and Customs of Ghana, p. 66. | Page 281 for a child at out-dooring ceremonies,189 festivals and marriages. All of these forms require formal training in traditional elocution, history, culture, musicology, and ritual rites of group identity to become a court poet, linguist (Okyeame) or oral mediator and storyteller.190 Poets are essentially performers and storytellers within the bard tradition of the West as well as in Africa:

Performers of poetry are usually identified with a specific social group. In Mali, these

performers are called djeli; in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo, they are called

karisi. The Zulu of South Africa call the imbongi. The bards, or heroic singers, of

Cameroon and Gabon bear the same name as the instrument they play and the type of

tale they recite: mvet. In Ethiopia, storytellers are called amina.191

The epic genre in oral tradition is one of the mechanisms for the memorialisation of history, myth and the oracular in African culture. It has evolved over the centuries to embody the heritage of a whole group of people, represented through story, proverbs, life-stories and imaginative narratives to capture the epic traditions that define African cultures.192

Ford continues the discussion on African oral tradition by describing the epic tradition mostly found in western and central parts of Africa. Epics are long narratives about the heroic and fantastic deeds of legendary heroes. The epic is a narrative that weaves the ideals and traditions of a people into the telling of a tale, with the accompanying

189 Out-doorings are ceremonial events that take place one week after a child is born. It means bringing out the child, by which a baby is brought out to be introduced to the extended family and a naming ceremony takes place. 190 Kwesi and Yankah, Speaking for the Chief: Okyeame and the Politics of Akan Royal Oratory, Indiana University Press, 1995, passim. Also see: Hubert, Knoblauch, and Helga, Kotthoff, (eds.), Verbal Art across Cultures: The Aesthetics and Proto-aesthetics of Communications, Gunter Narr Verlag, Tubingen, 2001, pp. 103-105. 191 Ford, ‘Literature of Africa’, p. 76b. 192 Ibid., p. 76c. | Page 282 element of music.193 For instance, the epic story of Sundiata, the founder of the ancient

Mali Empire, resonates throughout epic orature of the Malinke people of Mali. It is recited to honour his accomplishments and heroic deeds as a warrior king and empire builder. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo the fabulous story of the spear king

Lianja and the mythical tale of Liyongo permeates the oral traditions of the people in eastern and central parts of Africa.194

In Ghana, the epic narrative is linked to the story of the founding of the Ashanti state and the conjuration of the golden stool by Okonfo Anorkye as a symbol of Ashanti unity.195 Stories about the migration of the Ga-Adangbe from Nigeria to the central plains of Accra are all handed down from generation to generation, in the tradition of epic storytelling, chronicles and life-narratives. Contemporary Ghanaian historians like the late Adu Boahen, rely extensively on the oral traditional sources to support documented and archaeological and linguistic evidence for research work to support text based narratives on the history of Ghana.196

From this discussion it can be seen that the oral tradition (the cultural formulations of

Ghanaian orality) have significantly influenced the writing of Curfew’s Children.

Storytelling and autobiographical narration make frequent use of proverbs, folklore,

193 Ibid. 194 Kitula King’ei, “Historical and Folkloric Elements in Fumo Liyongo’s Epic,” Folklore, Vol. 16, 2001, pp. 79-85. 195 Popular epic tale about the founding of the Asanti kingdom. See references: Kwame Dwoben Poku Afriyie, The Legendary Komfo Anokye of the Asante Kingdom, Oriental Bookshop Agency, Legon, 2005 and W. E. F. Ward, A History of Ghana, London, George Allen and Unwin, 2nd ed., 1958 196 Cameron Duodu, “How Adu Boahen unlocked Ghana’s History,” http:/www.modernghana.com/news, October 2006, accessed July, 2012. | Page 283 riddles, mythology, legends, and memorialisation of ancestral history that inform the narrative process.

For me as a Ghanaian writer, these narrative forms not only serve as a means to enrich the vocabulary of the story but also they shape the atmosphere within which the story is recounted. Transforming a story that was originally delivered orally into text requires what Ong referred to as the restructuring of consciousness.197 It involves an act of translation: in my case, a deliberate and conscious effort to transform the narrative of my childhood and coming of age story from its original oral form into a literature that is written.

197 Ong, Orality and Literacy, p. 77.

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Section 5: Oratory in Ghana

As discussed in earlier comments on Ong, one of the distinguishing features of orality is its link to the physical presence of the speaker with the purpose of to achieve close and communal identification with a known story.198 Oral traditions accord great importance to the speaker, orality serves as a cultural linkage between what is uttered by a speaker of a word and the listener. The relationship reflects the importance of embodiment, involving both the orator and the group identity of a people. Hence, any discussion of oratory within the Ghanaian context must take into consideration the fact that orature, oration, and oral tradition are embodied within the persona of the okyeame or akyeame

(the court orator and interpreter) who is usually a male figure. The significance of oratory and formal speaking in Ghanaian traditional courts is linked to the fact of maintaining reverence for the Chief, the deities, ancestors, those in assembly, the community, and of course the gods. The role of the okyeame is also linked to the symbolic and political relevance of the presence of a mediator in Ghanaian royal courts.199

In formal situations, a chief or king in several cultures does not directly speak to an

audience in his presence. He speaks through an intermediary, known in several parts of

Ghana as okyeame, who relays or reports his words to the audience present, whose

words to the chief must also be channeled through the intermediary. Communication in

198 Ong, Orality and Literacy, p. 45. 199 Kwesi Yankah, Power of the Circuit of Formal Talk, Journal of Folklore Research, 28/1, 1991, pp. 1-22. | Page 285

the royal realm, or within formal interaction, is thus mediated by a political functionary

who coordinates the interaction to ward off face-threatening acts.200

The role of the orator and the exercise of rhetoric in Africa is a position of immense social and political importance; and therefore to be a court orator, the orator must learn to embody both the perils and privileges that come with public speaking. The exercise of rhetoric in Africa may be delegated by dignitaries to surrogates and other speaking agents. Professional orators, in several cultures in Africa, speak on behalf of patrons, who may be chiefs or other important personages. This is common, particularly in West

Africa among the Akan, Kru, Ga, Ewe, and several other ethnic groups in northern

Ghana, Burkina Faso, Benin, and Cote d’Ivoire.201

This is why in Ghana there is something called the ‘linguist staff.’ It is a symbolic stick with golden ornamentation that acts as a symbol of authority and authenticity. This means that the holder of the staff has ancestral authority and represents the authentic voice of the chief and the elders of the community. Therefore, the linguist has the authority to speak on behalf of the stool of state.202

In his research into Ghanaian formal speaking Yankah provides an exemplary study of the role of the ‘linguist’ as court orator. He provides insights into the various stylistic and rhetorical strategies adapted to mitigate threats in formal interactions with the chief. He shows too how the craft of oratory deployed on behalf of the chief is replete

200 Ibid., p. 2 201 Ibid., p. 2-5. 202 Ibid., p. 7. | Page 286 with honorific, proverbial, metaphoric and ornate expressions designed as mechanisms of control through the power of speech. This is because this method of speaking, though very eloquent, becomes a mechanism by which the linguist, speaking on behalf of the chief, reinforces the existing social and political order. 203

According to Yankah, an even more prominent communication functionary who has survived modern governance is the okyeame, the chief’s orator and counsellor, often referred to as the linguist, alongside his mace or staff of authority. The staff and related items have been icons of diplomacy within traditional states in West Africa since they were first founded. Linguists serve as ambassadors on behalf of the chief and carry symbols of authority in order to comport themselves as men of dignity as they represent their respective chiefs. Generally, okyeame in pre-colonial West Africa carried credentials or badges of office in such forms as a cane, baton, sword, or special clothing like caps or ties (as the Fantes had), to ensure free passage everywhere.204

In everyday life, those endowed with the power of effective speech are held in high social esteem due to the facility with which they bring stressful situations under control through persuasion. Despite the importance of good speaking in Africa, most cultures do not organise formal training in the art, since it comes naturally with exposure to

203 Yankah, Speaking for the Chief, pp. 11-12. 204 Yankah, Free Speech in Traditional Society, pp. 1-10. | Page 287 traditional speech. Children often attend forums for debate and acquire speaking skills, customary lore, and genealogies by listening to elders.205

Skills in oratory also come with certain social and political positions. Several traditional

offices require forensic skills in the exercise of duties. Positions like chieftaincy, headship

of lineages, and membership of juries require considerable rhetorical skills in conflict

management. Chiefs, prior to their installation, go into several weeks of seclusion where

their attention is drawn to certain formal norms of communication. Even so, most chiefs

and elders acquire rhetorical abilities on the job. In Ghana, there are occasional instances

of chiefs who have been dethroned on account of oratorical incompetence.206

The significance of this role is best expressed when, in the period leading up to decolonisation and until the overthrow of Nkrumah, a literary magazine by the same name (Okyeame) became the expressive voice for both scholarly and literary works in

Ghana. Poetry, short stories, oral works transcribed into written literature, research papers, short plays, novellas and more, found their way into the pages of the

Okyeame.207

Thus it can be concluded that the ability to speak persuasively in the Ghanaian public domain requires more than eloquence. There are also the central features of Aristotle’s rhetorical requirements for good oratory: an appeal to the authority or honesty of the speaker (ethos), an appeal to the audience’s emotion (pathos) and an appeal to facts which support the speaker’s argument (logos). The challenges are enormous, as the

205 Yankah, Oratory: An Introduction, pp. 1-10. 206 Ibid. 207 Salm and Falola, Culture and Customs of Ghana, pp. 66-70. | Page 288 speaker has to deal with audiences within the hierarchy of social command, and audiences of various ethnic communities and of high and low political standing.

In its mythical origins, speech in Ghana is considered an aspect of the expressive nature of human freedom.208 The Akan tradition of Anansi the trickster spider is an important source of cultural phenomena and understanding in Ghanaian society, because, despite his greed and selfishness he did not make speech the monopoly of one man, but was generous enough to bestow it to all the animals and creatures of the earth. Yankah informs us that the Dogon people of Mali trace the origin of speech to the fox; while for the Fang of Gabon it is the parrot that first brought man the capacity to speak.209

Within the mythology of the Akan lineage of Ghana the parrot also stands supreme as the mythical orator of all creatures, surpassing even Anansi, the ‘sweet talker’ of all

God’s creatures.210 Oral tradition maintains that the eloquence associated with one of the eight lineages of Ghana follows from their having been saved long ago by a timely speech by the parrot which saved the lineage from extinction. The image of the parrot, as represented in the emblem of the traditional insignia, depicts the essence of eloquence. The Akan say, “the mouth is used to protect the head.” Speech, judiciously used, can save lives. But as Yankah discusses, according to the Yoruba of Nigeria,

208 Yankah, Speaking for the Chief, p. 1. 209 Kwesi, Yankah, “Proverbs: The Aesthetics of Traditional Communication,” p. 326 210 Ibid. | Page 289

“Speech is an egg: when dropped it shatters” and the Akan of Ghana say: “When the mouth slips, it is more suicidal than the foot.”211

The importance of oratory in African oral tradition as an instructive agency in pre- literate cultures range from the Yoruba in Nigeria to the Tutsi in Burundi; where the power of the spoken word is highly regarded as a mechanism to aid the communication of values, ritual practices and mores. The Yoruba, for instance, see speech within a poetic and musical context as the embodiment of acoustic energy.212

Oratorical skills in this instance requires formal instruction, hence the ideal orator in court is expected to avail themselves of the formalities of speech making at an early age.

The content of the instructive process includes impromptu speeches, formulas for petitioning, funeral oration, self-defensive rhetoric, and persuasive argumentation.213

Beyond various reasons for oratory, each occasion requires its own nuances and cadences. The use of oratory ranges from the need to use persuasive skills for litigation in court to the need for speech making at clan meetings, or on festive occasions such as festivals. There are also socio-political and cultural implications of the role of the linguist, which range from pre-colonial to post-colonial times.214

211 Ibid. 212 Ibid. 213 Finnegan, Oral Literature in Africa, p. 449. 214 Yankah, Free Speech in Traditional Society, passim. | Page 290

This section of the exegesis has attempted to provide a general overview of the various forms of orality. In this case I am reminded by Finnegan and Yankah to bear in mind that the long-term consideration of oral cultures in all its forms and genres requires a holistic approach. As Yankah points out, “Ruth Finnegan bemoans the omission of the consideration of style, context, and attitude in applying the myth label in Africa.”215

It emerges that in trying to distinguish different categories of African oral tradition, in

particular, potential myths, it may be more fruitful to look not primarily at subject

matter but at context. Questions about circumstances in which a narrative took place,

their purpose and tone, the type of narrator and audience, the publicity or secrecy of the

event, and finally, even the style of narration, may be more crucial than questions about

content and character. Unfortunately, it is precisely about these former factors that we

are less often informed.216

This point is very significant because in the overall corpus of African oral literatures, myths, proverbs, story, folklore, customary law, life-narrative, orations, oracles, and orature are all interwoven in one epic narrative. Scholars of African oral studies are better off if we pay heed to Finnegan’s work and views, for it would aid scholars in making the shift from the “world of blind theoretical formulation to the illuminate hearth of field activity.”217 Yankah concludes that in the scholarly world of oral discourses this has been the missing factor.

215 Yankah, ‘Akan Trickster Cycle: Myth or Folktale?’, p. 2. 216 Finnegan, Oral Literature in Africa, p. 366. 217 Yankah, ‘Akan Trickster Cycle: Myth or Folktale?’, p. 2. | Page 291

Orality studies have now become part of an interdisciplinary curriculum of academic work in anthropology, sociology, cultural studies, African studies, and literary studies.

Recent works by H. Porter Abbott on Narrative and Ania Loomba’s Colonialism and

Postcolonialism,218 acknowledge references in research work and incorporate findings from interviews and oral narratives in coming to their conclusions regarding an understanding of scholarship on African history and society. Hence the proliferation of modern technology in aiding the process of recording, documenting and writing these oral narratives must encourage African scholars to capture as much as possible of all the existing traditional stories, ancestral myths and contemporary narratives before urbanisation, modernity, and social and political changes in Africa overtake the past.

Africa is rapidly changing and with such changes come the shift that would either inspire researchers to archive what is left of Africa’s vanishing past, or allow the currents of the modern age of electronic and digital communication to bury this heritage of rich oral tradition.

This chapter has sought to bring together the varying elements that define the role of the orator as communicator, interpreter, mediator, counsellor and custodian of oral heritage and story. In this context, the post-colonial African writer serves in the same capacity as many writers have sought to do in transmitting African stories, experiences and narratives into text. In essence, this is what I strive to achieve in Curfew’s Children.

To cast my narrative within the symbolic role of an interpreter of my family’s and

218 H. Porter Abbott, The Cambridge Introduction to Narrative, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2008, and Ania Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, Routledge, Oxford, 2006. | Page 292

Ghana’s history through the narrative of my own life story as a writer. Fundamentally, I become an okyeame in the textual sense so that through the act of writing Curfew’s

Children my work “establishes in the text a line of continuity outside the mind, “and the framework of orality in an age of the technology of the word and mass media communication.

In this regard, the okyeame of today is not just an orator or oral narrator but a writer of stories seeking to preserve the lineage, heritage and history of a group and its identity as a whole. It is interesting to note that there is a blog called Okyeame, wherein

Ghanaians of the Diaspora, including myself – as a subscriber and contributor – have a forum to discuss ongoing matters relating to the economy, politics, culture, genealogy, and history of Ghana. By such means orality therefore has moved into the realm of literacy into electracy, in the digital age of mass communications.

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Section 6: The Context of Oral Tradition

Based upon the conclusions of the previous chapter, it would be useful to place this discussion within the context of orality as it functions within a traditional society such as Ghana. In researching the categories of orality in Ghana it is important to recognise the fact that it has been and remains the most affordable medium of social and public communication. Orality affords Africans a group forum in which to engage in the discursive practices of communicating social values, norms, and mores through story, song, proverbs, folklore, and life-narratives. The participatory nature of oral tradition lends itself to the process of the democratisation of knowledge and information at the local and traditional level of African social and cultural life.

Oral tradition in Ghana fits within the framework of African epistemology, it is one in which the “protection and perpetuation of indigenous knowledge is steeped in secrecy and spiritual possession, attributes that trouble the modern concept of archiving.”219

Hence modern documentation in Africa is poorly managed and this provides reason for the highly contested grounds for oral based knowledge creation, but also “poses grave threats to indigenous knowledge bases.”220

219 Munhamu Ivan Murambiwa, Abstract: “Archiving Orality in Zimbabwe: What impact on the indigenous knowledge base?”, paper presented at the University of Glasgow Conference, Literacy in Oral Cultures, 24-25 November, 2010, http.’projects.beyondtext.ac.uk/research_workshop, Accessed: June 2011. 220 Ibid. | Page 295

Murambiwa reminds us that within the indigenous context, “invariably any discussion on archiving orality opens itself up to debates on the efficacy of documenting indigenous knowledge, given its rootedness in local culture, on the practicality of documentation.” 221 Similarly Onyeozlli points out that:

In early and some traditional—African—societies where there is a paucity of written

scholarly literature, stories preserved through oral transmission by traditional narrator

constitute the only form of contact between the past and the present. However, for oral

tradition to be a reliable and effective source of archival repository, the stories had to be

learned and recited with complete and unfailing accuracy, with no room for variations.

It is in this way that stories varied little over great periods of time and were well known

by everyone within the polity.222

As a narrative dualist who believes in the relevance of both the oral and the text, I am suspicious of the idea of ‘accuracy’ in oral narration. However I still subscribe to the notion that oral tradition can rely on text, and vice versa, to transcend the limitations of both mediums. Orality and literacy can complement each other in a post-modern world.

As Ong pointed out:

In the past few decades the scholarly world has newly awakened to the oral character of

language and to some of the deeper implications of the contrasts between orality and

writing.223

Ong goes on to refer to the pioneering work of Ferdinand de Saussure, the father of modern linguistics, who called the attention of the world “to the primacy of oral speech,

221 Ibid. 222 Onyeozlli, The Value of Oral Tradition in Africa, p. 193. 223 Ong, Orality and Literacy, p. 5. | Page 296 which underpins all verbal communication.”224 Ong points out the difficulty of the literate world thinkers to appreciate the universal value of orality, “We—readers of books as this—are so literate that it is very difficult for us to conceive of an oral universe of communication or thought except as a variant of a literate universe.”225 Building on this I suggest that orality is a means of translating written text into the oral space by reading text to the non-literate: returning it to the oral form, interpreting it, in effect, as verbal communication.

The African literate reader therefore becomes ‘bi-lingual’ in both written and oral text.

African advocates and oral theorists, such as Kenyan writer Ngugi wa Thiongo, have concluded that orality comes with its own form of literacy, cadences, nuances, and code of communication. This does not mean that oral narration is an accurate mode of knowledge transference, but rather its adaptability to change through the uses of metaphor and embellishment in the contemporary context allows it to provide fresh imaginative meaning to the static nature of text. This is why Shakespearian text is continuously given fresh interpretation by the verbalisation of dramatic text within the contemporary context in which it is rendered.

Oral tradition is a form of dramatisation of the past, within the present stage of its enactment, and therefore we need to be reminded that indigenous as well as modern

224 Ibid. 225 Ibid., p. 2. | Page 297 languages are in themselves an “oral phenomenon.”226 It is a dance of the mind, using words as a means for the deconstructing of reality and the truth. It relies on the use of metaphor, paradox and irony to bridge time and space, memory and fact in order to give relevance to the narrative within the present. It is a linguistic arena for those who are versed in the art of orality, conversation and oratory. In Ghana and other indigenous cultures oral traditions are used to eulogise the dead and as a means for prophecy for the living, hence the oral takes on its historical and auto/biographical relevance in society.

In Ghanaian oral tradition “the dead do no wrong”; in analysing their lives, the critical evidence is suspended in order to give the living the invented belief that the dead have transcended the flawed reality of earthly existence. All eulogy or funeral orations are best rendered within the poetic or proverbial context of praise, reconciliation and appeasement. For instance, in a funeral eulogy someone who was considered an alcoholic in life could suddenly be described as a person “who drank the waters of life to the fullest,” exonerating the deceased from any evidence of a blemished life. The oral allows for the embellishment of fact, suspension of truth, spicing of the imaginative and extolling of the virtues, not only of the dead but also those who hold the hierarchical structure of society together. In fact, it is the glue by which non-literate societies hold their diverse ethnic values together, without which there would be perpetual conflict.

Hence, indigenous cultures rely on orality as a means for “historical reconstruction,”227

226 Ibid., p. 6. 227 Onyeozlli, The Value of Oral Tradition in Africa, pp. 193-4. | Page 298 pedagogy, and as a means of maintaining social cohesion, social control, dissemination of information, and entertainment through an emphasis of proverbial reliability of accounts of past occurrences in ancestral lives, life-storytelling, folk wisdom, respect for authority and historic conscious of self within the traditional context.228 The oral has its own form of literacy. To be a linguist, a town-crier, a soothsayer, traditional storyteller, or griot 229 requires literacy that is coded within the framework of memorialisation and erudition in traditional proverbs, folk wisdom and knowledge of ancestral values. The ability to memorise gives the oralist the authority to verbalise truth, narrate the past and prophesy the future. Hence, reason is suspended and what is considered rational is given justification through the use of the oral to give imaginative meaning to the past, present and future. Therefore, even though the oral may lack textual evidence of documenting the human experience in time and space, it can be surmised that oral tradition manages to capture time through the measurement of memory and gives the past its relevance in the present.

Those who are able to use memory to bridge the gap between the past and the present, and use memory as a means of foretelling the future, earn the privilege to be storytellers, narrators and fortune tellers in societies that do not have other means of communication. In African tradition, old age is generally considered to be a marker of wisdom, the elderly are accorded responsibility as custodians of truth and as natural

228 Ibid., Onyeozlli’s refers to the use of oral tradition in the works of African writers such as Achebe, Ngugi and Soyinka are examples. 229 Traditional African storyteller and historian. | Page 299 tutors in the “conveyance of wisdom/test of probability–Through direct and indirect skilful choice of words, African elders convey wisdom to the youth.”230

Oral tradition is the valued means by which indigenous societies communicate and pass on information from generation to generation.

In Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart” the ekwe (wooden gong) was used to announce the death

of the great warrior Ezeudu. It is through oral traditional knowledge that the meanings

were inferred from the esoteric messages the gong transmitted.231

Onyeozlli concludes that Africans believe that because the past is held within the vault of human memory, oral tradition “has the uncanny way of staying alive more than written histories which evaporates as soon as the manuscript is lost.”232 The reliability of the written word depends on the objectivity of the author, and therefore all texts are marked by the subjective view point of the author.

In spite of the immense contributions of archaeology in the recovery of Africa’s past

history, the reliance on oral tradition for reconstruction of ancient histories of Africa has

come full circle. In fact oral tradition has become the gateway to the African past, and

scholars of history are being encouraged to embrace it in the quest for the missing links

in African cultural heritage.233

Despite these encouraging words, my research tells me there is more ground to cover in bridging the gap between orality and literacy. Reading and writing have not sunk

230 Onyeozlli, ‘The Value of Oral Tradition in Africa’, p. 196. 231 Ibid. 232 Ibid.

233 Ibid.

| Page 300 deeper into the collective psyche of the nation. Though there are numerous Internet cafes in Accra and virtually everyone in the urban areas has a mobile phone, these instruments of modern communication are not being used to further the course of literacy. Rather they have become modern ‘alien’ tools for the entrenchment of oral cultures that encourage Africans to carry on conversations.

If there is to be any attempt to bridge the orality and literacy gap in developing countries such as Ghana, then a deeper understanding and appreciation of both the written and the spoken word must function simultaneously. The advantage of the written word is empirical documentation, the mass transference of knowledge through the miracle of text. Africa’s knowledge gap and deep fissures in technological knowhow are essentially a result of the absence of a culture that is based on textual transference of knowledge.

Asare Opoku was emphatic in stating that when it comes to the issue of the preservation and continuity of oral traditions, “children will be better off knowing our native languages as well as English and French.”234 He advises that the next generation must “learn about culture through language development, in order to become knowledgeable about traditional languages and world cultures at the same time.” This, he adds, is because of the “uniqueness of African languages which can be used in

234 Kofi Asare Opoku, Interview, June 2012. | Page 301 writing and making movies and stories to let the world know of our uniqueness as a people. Poetry and dance can be an easy way to begin.”235

Orality as a cultural practice, despite its communal enriching aspects, gives too much room for embellishment and exaggeration. It is assumed that it is a means to bridge the gap between intergenerational narratives that connects the past to the present. If the autobiography of Nkrumah or any of these early fathers of African nationalism had not been written when they were, their life stories would by now be clouded in mythology and the empirical facts about their lives would have been lost.

There is a need for a balanced approach to orality and literacy in Africa in an age of urbanisation and mass communication. A new pedagogical awareness of the value of text based communication must be inculcated within the culture of African countries.

The act of reading and writing is not only a temporary exercise to attain academic qualification, but rather is a life-affirming activity that brings the added discipline necessary for the collective enlightenment of indigenous cultures in a post-modernist world. Ancestral knowledge, even if narrated orally, deserves to be written as well, at least for the sake of the children of Africans both within the Diaspora and still in Africa.

The developed world is a literate world and if orality as a form of communication within indigenous communities is to survive than these oral narratives that bind the communities together must be written, lest we lose our ancestral stories to the winds of time.

235 Ibid. | Page 302

That is why it is the central theme of this creative dissertation to use the process in my own life-writing about my childhood years and coming of age in Ghana—Curfew’s

Children—as a literary re-telling of my life as a child, as a way to bridge this narrative gap. My life-writing is intensely influenced by stories my mother told me about family history, set against the national story of Ghana as I was growing up and re-told during the time period of national curfew.

Poetry, storytelling, fables, obituaries, newspaper narratives, oral memoirs of local actors, creative life-writing, literary and scholarly works have all formed part of the process and the resource of this research. In this regard I believe this work has contributed to the discourse on the paradoxes that inform the two traditions, and how they communicate to the reader and listener. Orality and literacy together represent the collective cultures of both traditional and technologically advanced societies. However, they are presented as opposed to each other, and therefore the latter may be seen as superior to the former. This creates a false dichotomy between two modes of communication that can be complementary.

In researching the relevance of orality in Ghanaian society, including the experience of remembering what it meant to listen to stories while growing up in Ghana, I came to the following conclusion: Ghanaians live within communities of storytellers and story creators. Through annual festivals, ceremonies, funeral eulogies and naming

| Page 303 ceremonies, oral traditions formed the medium of knowledge transference and the memorial storage of family history. By the act of re-telling stories and proverbs, traditional and contemporary history is continually re-written and made fresh with every rendition of an experience. It is a process of co-sharing stories, fables, family narratives and oral memoirs that defines the cultural reality of the society. It was in the act of listening to the individual and collective stories of the clan, the tribe or the family that my research in Ghana and visiting family members in England that the writing of

Curfew’s Children was made possible. It is the fabric of orality that enables communities both at home and in the Diaspora to engage with each other and create the collective trust to maintain social cohesion, shared understanding and tolerance.

Curfew’s Children (as well as subsequent narratives) serves in this capacity as a memorial document, to capture stories about Ghana and my family for which I see myself as the self-appointed narrator and custodian of the legacy of our family history, which I inherited from my mother and my extended family.

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Section 7: Orality and Ghanaian Identity:

Eulogising the Dead, Celebrating the Living Through Orature

In this chapter I discuss the elegiac tradition in Ghanaian culture and how in writing

Curfew’s Children I use the project of the dissertation in part, as a process of memorialisation of family and national history. One key place and source of family history where lives are memorialised within Ghanaian culture is at funerals. Funeral conversations, memorial services and orations are a source of information about family history and group identification with clan, tribe and country. The elegiac tradition in

Ghana has deep resonance in Ghanaian cultural practices. This feature of orature in

Ghanaian culture has found expression throughout pre-colonial and post-colonial cultures simply because, at the core of Ghanaian cosmology is the idea of ancestral worship and the relationship of the living to the dead.236 Asare Opoku noted that “God is regarded by most West African peoples as Grand Ancestor or the First Grand

Ancestor, a fact which makes Him an integral part of society.” God in this case is vested with all the “highest attributes of wisdom, grace and justice.”237 Accordingly, Asare

Opoku explains that “all those who may be accorded the status of ancestors stand in line with Him, as do our kings and chiefs and heads of the various lineages. For they all form the hierarchical structure at the top of which is the First Grand Ancestor.”238

236 Kofi Asare Opoku, West African Traditional Religion, Accra, 1978, pp. 38-39. 237 Ibid. 238 Ibid., p. 38. | Page 305

This fact is manifest in the reverence Ghanaians place on funerals and is linked to the national belief in ancestors.239 Ghanaian traditions cross ethnic or tribal lines and even

Ghanaian Muslims believe that “without the proper ceremony, the soul of the deceased cannot become an ancestral spirit.”240 The dead are considered as intermediaries and intercessors between the living and the gods. Despite the strong influence of

Christianity, and in some cases Islam, on the religious culture of Ghanaians, traditional religion and ancestor worship underlies the ethno-religious practices in Ghanaian society.

There is a connection between the Christian idea of resurrection and the traditional theology of the dead being reborn in the afterlife to become ancestral deities. Christian funeral practices have not displaced traditional funeral rites but rather found a harmonious synthesis to meet the cultural and religious needs of both creeds.241 Hence

Christianity and traditionalism blend to create a new post-colonial heritage that defines

Ghanaian identity.

There seems to be no sense of contradiction in adorning the dead with all the ceremonial pageantry and elegiac oratory befitting a god, within the cultural space of

Ghanaian oral and literary traditions. Social considerations require specific funeral rites for chiefs, musicians, hunters, fishermen or farmers. In this study the chief’s funeral is a point of focus. Chiefs in Ghanaian tradition are buried with all the ornamentation,

239 Salm and Falola, Culture and Customs of Ghana, p. 43. 240 Ibid., p. 43. 241 Ibid., p. 50. | Page 306 regalia, pomp, traditional pageantry and oration that are associated with the passing of a person whose life is a representation and custodian of the heritage, tradition and history of a people. Great social, cultural and political significance is attached to the

“final rite of passage”242 from human existence to the ancestral life beyond. Death marks not the end of life, but a transition into the realm of ancestral life into eternity.

My experience in Ghana and additional research confirmed the fact that proper care must be taken to prepare the dead for the afterlife and words play a significant part through the mechanism of oration, so that even if the deceased was poor in life, utterances of praise, atonement, forgiveness and reconciliation are required in preparing the dead for the next life. What was wrong in an earthly life can be made right in the afterlife.243

No expense is spared in preparing a funeral. Families that profess the Christian faith and still maintain communal attachment to traditional beliefs engage the presence of a priest who gives a sermon in church replete with the Biblical verses befitting the social status of the deceased, as well as hymns, speeches, promises of a greater and better life in the world beyond. Traditional orators or linguists are also invited to give the traditional funeral oration.244 Here oratory is at its best, because on such occasion the whole tribe or clan is assembled and speech becomes a means to display erudition in traditional knowledge, philosophy and verse, especially in the case of the burial of a

242Asare Opoku, Interview, 2012. 243 Ibid. 244 Salm and Falola, Culture and Customs of Ghana, p. 134. | Page 307 chief. If the death was tragic or premature, then the oration assumes the solemnity of the occasion.245

It is against this background that this discussion on orality extends to the life and death of a key figure in recent Ghanaian history: Osei Togbe Adja-Tekpor VI. In researching his life, I relied on notes from his obituary, including extensive discussions with family members and interviews with his children, and the viewing of audio-visual recordings of his funeral procession and the speeches and oration that followed his funeral.

Togbe’s life was cast in the colourful rendition of words to represent his personage as a great figure, to vindicate his life and to create a colourful occasion to give relevance to the rites of departure for this spectacular agent of tradition, cultural continuity and change.246

According to funeral tradition, the narrative of Osei’s life is rendered to the clan, the dignitaries and the people assembled through the speaker of the occasion; and the appointed voice of oration for his funeral will follow all traditional protocols. Togbe

Adja-Tekpor, the late Osei of Avatime; traditional title: Osei Togbe Adza-Tekpor VI, was known in private life as Samuel Kwami Adobor. At the peak of his career, he was

President of the Volta Region House of Chiefs and Chairman of the Standing

Committees of the Volta Region House of Chiefs and the Ghana National House of

Chiefs. He was elected as President of the National House of Chiefs from 1989 to 1992.

245 Ibid., pp. 134-5. 246 It has to be noted here that my access to this information is related to the fact that Samual Abobor (Togbe Adja- Tekpor VI) was my father- in-law. I had first hand access to source materials and interviews of my in-laws. | Page 308

Togbe Adja-Tekpor IV’s relationship with the National Association of House of Chiefs culminated in his participation on the committee that drafted the Chieftaincy Bill, the source document for the enactment of the Chieftaincy Act 1971 (Act 370). Indeed he was a founding member of the National House of Chiefs in 1971. Meanwhile, in the midst of these unfolding events Togbe was appointed to the Council of State from 1970 to 1972 during the Second Republic under the Busia regime, and under President Rawlings during the Fourth Republic 1992–2000 he became President of the Council of State. He served in the same capacity as a member on the Consultative Assembly that made recommendations for the promulgation of the Fourth Republican Constitution. He was also an advisor to presidents and heads of states of Ghana.

In this context, it is difficult for non-Ghanaians to understand the significance of funerals to the culture of the nation. According to Asare Opoku “funerals play a central feature in Ghanaian social, cultural and spiritual life because of the belief in ancestral deities and worship systems.”247 In rendering a funeral oration for a Chief of Togbe’s stature, it is important to have a thorough understanding of the cultural, ceremonial and ritualistic context within which Ghanaians approach the process of burial rites and passage of the dead into the afterlife. Oration at the grandest form, pertaining to the head of the House of Chiefs requires the presence of all the chiefs, former and current presidents and a whole entourage of clans, tribes, social groups, ministers and regional groups who are required to participate in burying a chief.

247 Asare Opoku, interview 2012. | Page 309

In his article ‘Funerals for the Living’, the Dutch cultural and medical anthropologist van der Geest 248 confirms what most Ghanaians take for granted: the political and group identity status associated with funerals. Even though this exegesis is not directly concerned with the funeral practices of Ghanaians, it is consistent with the theme of defining Ghanaian identity to give reference to and discussion of funerals in the

Ghanaian context.

Observers of the Akan tradition and researchers of Ghanaian custom have laid emphasis on the importance of funerals in Ghanaian society. Starting with observations by Dutch traveler Willem Bosman who, in 1705; linked the importance of funeral ceremonies in Ghana with traditional group honour, collective identity and reputation.

Observers have confirmed that Ghanaians place considerable importance to funeral rites, which are linked to every aspect of social and cultural life. In 1812, one hundred years after Bosman, another visitor to the Gold Coast wrote: “There is great attention shown in this country to the dead, and in proportion to rank, family, or the situation the person was in. The body is exposed to public view, decorated with the riches and ornaments of the country…”249

In 1853, Cruickshank, one of the earliest observers of Akan funerals, noted that it was:

A point of honor to make a great show at their funeral customs, and they vie with each

other in performing these expensive burials. Even the poorest will pawn and enslave

248 Sjaak van der Geest, ‘Funerals for the Living: Conversations with Elderly People in Kwahu, Ghana’, African Studies Review, 43/3, 2000, pp. 102-129. 249 van der Geest, ‘Funerals for the Living’, p. 104. | Page 310

themselves to obtain the means of burying a relation decently, according to the ideas of

country.250

Other Ghanaian writers on the subject of funerals such as Danquah, Nketia251 and other

European researchers like Christensen, Mends or Lystad identified certain rituals associated with funerals in Ghana, such as the shooting of guns, the presentation of elaborate meals to the deceased, fasting and shaving of the hair of close relatives, harsh treatment of the widow, ‘carrying the corpse’ or the coffin through the public, and the practices associated with searching for the imaginary witch responsible for the death.

These practices have been legally outlawed, yet in its symbolic essence they still persist as a way of pacifying the deceased.

In the case of a paramount chief like Togbe, there were the gun shots, the expensive funerals rites, and the fasting and isolation of his widow who was his last wife before he died. Though it is illegal to bury the dead in the house as was once the practice, chiefs like Togbe Aja-Tekpor are still being buried in the house, under secret adherence to custom and tradition, only witnessed by the initiated and the warrior class of men who partake in the ritual of sacred burial.

The funeral oration at the moment of interment is uttered under circumstances of deep spiritual reverence—a call to ancestral deities, myths, recitation of family lineage, the

250 Ibid. 251J. H. Nketia, Funeral Dirges of the Akan People, University of the Gold Coast, Achimota, 1955, and J. B. Danquah, Akan Laws and Customs and the Akim Abuakwa Constitution, Routledge, London, 1928. | Page 311 narrative history of the clan that are interwoven with ritual worshipping of the dead chief as an act of consecration—before burial takes place.

What is known about such secret ceremonies is not written but handed down orally, through generations of warrior fellowships and traditional priests, spiritualists and orators who are associated with the stool of the clan or tribe. After the funeral, there is a celebration as a sign of the successful departure of the deceased into the world of the ancestors. The funeral occasion always calls for oratory, as funerals are and will always be the main social and cultural event in Ghanaian life.

To understand the grandness and emotion of Ghanaian funerals we need to look at the

living rather than the deceased; we should think less of religion and more of politics,

particularly the politics of reputation. Funerals are first and foremost occasions for the

family to affirm its prestige and to celebrate its excellence. When thinking about their

own funeral, the elderly are ambivalent. On the one hand, they criticize the

overemphasis on funerals at the expense of proper care during their lives. On the other

hand, they would certainly not want to turn the tables. For them, too, a poor funeral

would be an unbearable disgrace.252

In this regard, because “funerals provide the occasion to demonstrate the social, political and economic excellence,”253 it becomes necessary that the orator at a funeral use the occasion to affirm the social and political prestige of the family, clan or national figure. This orator and the oration must embody the sense of ethos, pathos and logos as representations of legitimacy, authenticity and identity consistent with the lineage,

252 van der Geest, Abstract: ‘Funerals for the Living’, p. 103. 253 Ibid., p. 107. | Page 312 heritage and cultural essence of the audience at the funeral. Without this the funeral is bereft of its prestige and value. Funeral orations must therefore extol all the virtues of the deceased, the real or perceived virtues, and acknowledge the bereaved through the language of consolation, honour and praise. If the deceased had any flaws of character the funeral occasions are not the place to mention such things. Therefore the orator is expected to be circumspect in the oration of the life-narrative of the deceased. The orator is obliged to be worthy of his work as a way to ingratiate him or herself to the family, whose patronage he is there to acknowledge.254

Given the context in which funeral orations are presented, the significant contribution to the collective knowledge of a people, an oration provides the family history, life- story, traditional myths, and heritage that define the group or national identity of the people of Ghana. Beyond all the cultural events in Ghana, such as festivals, marriage ceremonies, and puberty rites of passage, or at such high functions as the enstoolment of a chief, none provide as appropriate a stage for oral knowledge transfer as do funeral settings. There is great social and cultural ornamentation associated with funerals. As van der Geest notes, “considerable sums of money and gifts were presented during funerals, including food that was mostly consumed on the spot.” He adds that “much of this description sounds more or less similar to today’s funerals. The corpse is washed and laid in state in his or her best clothes. There is drumming, dancing, singing,

254 See Yankah, Speaking for the Chief, p.10. Also see. Aborampah, Osei-Mensah, Women’s Roles in the Mourning Rituals of the Akan of Ghana, Ethnology, 38/3, 1999, pp. 257-271 | Page 313 weeping,”255 feasting, flamboyant dressing, display of elaborate items, decorated funeral parlors, public display of the corpse and mass celebration after the burial. This moment of grief is translated to a transcendental period of celebratory comradeship and group bonding.

All the traditional ritual and ceremonial rites are performed, libation is poured, and ancestral spirits are invoked and invited into the family to partake of the feast of self- renewal and cleansing. While all of this is going on, oracular sayings and proverbs are uttered, epic stories, folklores, and everyday stories are told to support the genealogical narrative recited.

This is the occasion for calling up the ancestors in remembrance of “those who came before us.”256 Within this context the younger generations are reminded of their identity, collective sense of responsibility, loyalty to the group and commitment to the values of the tribe as it has been passed on through the generations and for years to come.257 It is during the night of vigil for the deceased that all the family narratives and life-stories of former lineage are told and that ancestors of legendary significance are remembered and spoken about in the present tense. For the youth who are inclined to imbibe the rich history of the clan or the tribe, it is at such funeral occasions that all the lessons of life are told and transmitted. In this regard, funerals are not only about the preparation of the dead for the afterlife, but are also for the living who must learn the

255 van der Geest, ‘Funerals for the Living’, pp. 105-6. 256 A familiar saying in Ghanaian oral tradition that is usually said in reference to ancestors. 257 Kofi Asare Opoku, interview April 2012. | Page 314 values that will enable them to live responsible lives in the process of shaping their individual and collective identities within a family, clan, tribe and the larger narrative of the nation.258

Tobge’s funeral was attended by two presidents: the then President J. A. Kuffour and the ex-president Jerry John Rawlings. Regional chiefs and delegations from around the country and Togoland were present at his funeral, and he was laid in state for public viewing. Togbe was accorded all the ceremonial burial rights befitting a traditional

Chief of Ghana, and each clan, tribe or president gave an oration in commemoration of his life and contribution to the history and life of Ghana. In life he was a link between the past and the present; in death he bridged the chasm between the present and the future where the ancestors still remain guarding the lives of the living.

258 Ibid. | Page 315

Section 8: Writing Curfew’s Children – Transferring the Oral into Text

In writing Curfew’s Children I rely on oral tradition, autobiographical narration and a broad range of literary influences in composing my coming of age story set against the background of family and the national history in Ghana. It is a product of memory, relying on the oral devices of storytelling which I learnt while listening to the family stories told to me by my mother and my relatives. The story is a form of personal odyssey through my early life, set against the background of family and Ghanaian history. It serves as a creative and literary project designed to remember my mother, my family and my ancestors from whose lineage and story I derive my identity as a storyteller; first in the oral tradition and secondly as a writer in the literacy context.

The literary influences that shaped the writing of Curfew’s Children are diverse. I drew upon a wide range of literary resources which served as points of reference in the construction of the narrative and the telling of my coming of age memoir. Beyond the primary sources of inherited oral stories from Ghana, I relied on the poetry, autobiographical/memoir writings and literary fiction of writers from around the world. Through their various narrative styles I sought to create an original style to give voice to my own story.

Many of the stories about my family were transmitted to me orally, but my writing style and my approach to this story are informed by two main sources. First is the influence

| Page 317 of a mother who exposed me to the literatures of the wider world. At a very early age she read to me Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist. She bought and read to my brother and me the classic abridged Longman Book series for children: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels and Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. My mother also read us the tales of Leo Tolstoy, and Bible stories retold for children. She was the first influence on me as a storyteller.

Her voice permeates every aspect of my writing style, my creative process, imaginative musing and authorial voice.

The second key source was my own reading of authors such as the Latin American novelist Gabriel Garcia Marquez; African writers Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Ngugi

WaThiongo and Ben Okri; and African American authors including Toni Morrison,

Richard Wright and James Baldwin. I also learned from the narrative styles of Irish writers James Joyce and Frank McCourt, and Russian novelist Maxim Gorgy.

Poetry also played an important part in my development as a writer. I read many of the post-colonial Ghanaian and African poets, such as Kofi Awoonor, Atukwei Okai,

Christopher Okigbo and Wole Soyinka. The poets of the Harlem Renaissance, such as

Langston Hughes, Claude McKay and Countee Cullen and later works by Black

Nationalist writers like Amiri Baraka were influential. These, along with poets from the

English and American canons, shaped my prose style as a writer, and poetry has been a conduit into the realm of autobiographical memory.

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Perhaps most important to me were first Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Chinua Achebe, and later Wole Soyinka and Frank McCourt. I fell under the spell of the magical narrative of Marquez’s style of storytelling, and Hundred Years of Solitude transformed my vision and set the tone of my creative imaginative thinking. Subsequent readings into the collected works of Marquez’s novels, autobiographies and short stories have shaped my ideas about how to use language as a means to capture the metaphor of life in Ghana, and became an imaginative and creative narrative arch around which

Curfew’s Children was written.

Chinua Achebe, considered the father of post-colonial African literature, was mandatory reading for all literature students in secondary school. His works, especially

Things Fall Apart, provided me with insights into the pre-colonial, colonial and post- colonial narrative structures of African storytelling within the context of both orality and text-based literacy. Wole Soyinka was influential in providing insights into how a coming of age story can be written within the framework of the African experience. His poetic narrative style relies heavily on the density of language and uses English in a masterly fashion to express complex African experiences and ideas rooted in myth.

Soyinka also uses dramatic dialogue to advance the use of political and autobiographical narration for the purposes of storytelling.

Frank McCourt, the Irish writer, became a strong influence in my adult years after I migrated to Australia and read Angela’s Ashes and then later Teacher Man. His narrative

| Page 319 style is suffused with anecdotes of compassion, reconciliation and love in the face of suffering and existential agony. McCourt’s writing maintains a narrative tone that is sentimental and yet distanced; this makes the narrative tone of his work unfold gracefully and enhances his ability to tell a painful family tale free of remorse, blame or guilt.

The interesting aspect was that my early introduction to literature was both within an oral and literary context, and this has continued throughout my life, even as I became more involved with written texts. Curfew’s Children is therefore a product of these multiple strands of oral literatures—oral storytelling, folklore, mythology, proverbs and sayings—which by virtue of my literary education as a Ghanaian writer, have found a second life in text as a work of autobiographical narration. This autobiographical story is written as a way to bridge the gap between orality and literacy, and to resolve within myself the creative and imaginative contradictions of being an African writer living in the diaspora.

Additionally, in writing Curfew’s Children I used the metaphor of the curfew, which acts as a backdrop for the story. The concept of the curfew provided a creative space in which the oral is best rendered. The idea of the curfew defines the identity of a whole generation who were born during that period of Ghana’s history, when the military regime imposed a curfew on the country for almost four years. It is significant to link the metaphor of the curfew to the story because in traditional societies, the night comes

| Page 320 alive in the proverbial fireside chat, where families congregate to listen to tales, stories and memories of the elders. This was very prevalent during the actual curfew in Ghana, and in my case my mother assumed the role as the elder storyteller, the traditional family historian, and oral transmitter of knowledge, wisdom, proverbs, and riddles; and also became the griot of family folklore and history. Mother used her role to dispense her wisdom of the past and knowledge of the present. Today her stories have become the source from which to transcribe what she told me into text, thus bridging the gap between the oral and the written mediums of storytelling.

Each chapter encapsulates a particular thread in the trajectory of the story which links the various strands of the autobiographical narrative together. By relying on my memory of the past, I am able to undertake the process of re-telling my life story. I have kept a journal or diary since I was around seventeen, written long letters, and made recorded notes about my daily experiences. I was very comfortable functioning within the two mediums, learning English as an oral language and later mastering the discipline of writing as an extension of its oral construct. In retrospect, I could fairly say that I was lucky to have spoken English as my first verbal language, due to my stay in

England as a child, and I returned to Ghana early enough to adopt Ga as my native tongue, and later learnt how to communicate in Akan from hearing my mother speak and from my mates in school.

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The writing of my life story became important with the passing of my mother, which meant that the oral heritage of my lineage was now gone. I needed to do this because raising children in a Western writing culture, I would otherwise have cut off that oral linkage to the past. Our children are avid readers and also addicted to television,

Internet and video games, paying no attention whatsoever to the stories that my wife and I grew up with in Ghana.

Thus the authenticity of African literature as text is given legitimacy because the story was handed down from the past as an oral truth. This means that whether the story is fiction or non-fiction, biography or autobiography, poetry or drama, the language of

African storytelling is inextricably linked to the narrative nuances of the oral, out of which a story derives its authenticity and legitimacy. Curfew’s Children therefore adopts the oral device as a means to enhance the text within the framework of the story.

By using the medium of imagination I am able to weave together a thread that runs through the story as a creative device to bring the past alive and render it readable for the contemporary reader. The heavy use of imagery that is prevalent throughout the story serves to bend the English language to the phonetic structures of the oral medium through which the stories were passed on to me.

Ben Okri, the Nigerian novelist, uses the device of imagery and orality very extensively in his fiction, especially with the Booker Prize winning novel The Famished Road (1991) where Okri transports the reader into an imaginative world that is essentially African.

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He successfully adopts the English language to the cadences of his story. The storyteller uses the English words as if they were originally African. Soyinka too extends himself in this regard; in his novel The Interpreters and his prison diaries The Man Died (1971).

His essays and non-fiction works overwhelm the reader because his intricate vocabulary and elaborate narratives fuse English academic vocabulary and mythological Yoruba consciousness into one. Ngugi, an expert in using memory through orality, creates a narrative structure that masterly uses flashbacks to bring home the past within a contemporary context in Petals of Blood (1977). Okai evokes a sense of linguistic transparency by infusing his poetry—which was written with the sole purpose of reading it as oral text—with African words, and conjoining English syntax, as if in an orchestration of words to delight both the reader and the audience in his collection of poems Oath of the Fonton-from and Other Poems (1971). Finally, Ayi Kwei

Armah’s use of a metaphysical and prophetic language to capture a vanished historicised past in Two Thousand Seasons (1973) places him squarely within the tradition of the griot, dispensing ancestral wisdom and a prophetic sense of foreboding in order to bring attention to things past and things yet to come.

Contemporary African writers like myself are collectively redefining this tradition and forging new narrative structures to bridge the gap between orality and African efforts to bend European written languages to suit their particular needs as storytellers. It is an effort to capture African cultures, stories and lives within the European medium of

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“chirographic (i.e. writing) cultures that coexist at a given period and time.”259

Consequently, as an African writer, educated in both mediums—African orality and

English literacy—I am continuously seeking ways to find a creative synthesis in order to preserve the oral within the context of the written.

Curfew’s Children tries to achieve the fusion of orality with my literary consciousness. It is also an attempt at translating into English what was told to me in Ga, and to use an

English lexicon to capture an African experience and reality. This reality is rooted in

Africa, but global in its experience.

Curfew’s Children is essentially a Ghanaian story, written in English. Through this medium the narrative tries to capture the metaphorical essence, comic overtures and the sensory realism that informs the Ghanaian landscape, language and cultural milieu in which the story takes place. Probably it is also a reflection of the nature of the gap between what is written and what is told. Orality not only functions within the framework of voice and oral-biography, but of sight, sound, touch and a complete engagement with the entire senses of the listener. This is why African storytelling must seek to create a new paradigm whereby the practices of oral tradition become linked to the discipline of collective literary awareness of the need to capture all stories for the benefit of future generations. Many Ghanaian stories, and their authentic narrative plot lines and morals, are lost to a generation who seem to have lost its consciousness of traditional fables as a means for the formulation of national identity. Hence, I use

259 Ong, Orality and Literacy, p. 2. | Page 324

Curfew’s Children as a means to remind myself of the stories, tales and fables my mother told me and to reclaim my identity as a Ghanaian who has spent more than half of my life away from Ghana. Writing therefore becomes an act of negotiating between the past and the future, to understand the meaning of my inheritance of oral stories as a

Ghanaian writer and seek to redefine myself within a global literary space that has already made a transition to full literacy.

Curfew’s Children derives its narrative strengths from its attempt to transcend the limitations of orality as a Ghanaian writer. It is a way to give oral tradition a sense of literary validity and identity through a narrative voice. I wrote Curfew’s Children as a creative thesis and a scholarly exercise in oral literature. It served as a means of hearing my mother’s voice again, telling me many stories; to re-listen, to re-engage and re- imagine her through my own life story. It was a means of conjuration, doing through the literary process what orality did for me as a listener, hearing my mother narrate and bring alive the past. Each word gives voice to my mother’s earnest effort to implant in me the treasured history of family folklore. In fact, without orality I would not have known or gained access to my father’s life and his grandparent’s life. Writing becomes a means to evoke the inner vocabulary of the past and link it to the future of my children.

In conclusion, Curfew’s Children is a story situated within the time/space narrative of

Ghana’s history, a work of creative life-writing seeking to place the lives of its characters within the larger story of Ghana’s story from ancestral times to the present,

| Page 325 where family ties, individual experiences, mythology, riddles, proverbs and sayings are all linked together through the festival of words. It is a tale about the life of a boy coming of age in Ghana. The pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial story blends itself as portrayed in the lives of the people who populate the narrative. If Curfew’s Children has any significance beyond this dissertation it would be a document to be handed over to my children, a legacy by which the heritage of the odyssey from Ayallolo would continue into the global space of the Ghanaian diaspora.

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Section 9: Conclusion: Oral Tradition, Auto/Biography and Ghanaian Identity

In concluding this exegesis, I like to remind myself—and the reader—that Curfew’s

Children is only a small part of the larger story of the history of my family and that of

Ghana. It is a dissertation into the process of my self-discovery as a Ghanaian writer, a personal quest for self-definition and the formulation of an individual identity through autobiographical narration set against the larger narrative of Ghana’s history. It is a stream into a river of a thousand tales and therefore any search for national “metaphors of self-definition and self-renewal are often a historic process whose origin and logic trail off into mythic time.”260 When it comes to Ghana, the question of identity has always led historians back to the realm of ancestral memory, “Ancestral memory itself becomes a privileged zone of awareness/consciousness accessible only to those who have mastered the ability to dream the future through the re/fracturing prism/prison of the past.”261

In the quest to provide meaning to the idea of Ghanaian self-identity Anyidoho, a

Ghanaian poet and academic, advises us that:

Any critical encounter with the past is never a simple or even a safe entry point into any

knowledge of how a people, a group of people, come into being. The full story of the

modern neo-colonial state of Ghana is neither in the official archival records nor in

library acquisitions of formal historical studies. The precise moment of the making of

260 Kofi Anyidoho, ‘National Identity and the Language of Metaphor’ (2000) in Lauer and Anyidoho (eds.) Reclaiming the Human Sciences and Humanities Through African Perspectives, p. 1153. 261 Ibid. | Page 327

this nation-state is neither the frequently cited Bond of 1844 nor the ecstatic hour of the

birth of the nation, at a second past midnight on March 6, 1957, the magic moment so

much like countless others we were to witness across the continent of Africa.262

In his book on the history of Ghana, Roger S. Gocking presents us with the dilemma that contemporary historians face in authenticating historical data, especially when that history is coded through the means of orality. Gocking argues that “there have been many hypotheses to explain the origins of the people of Ghana,” and the sources of such hypotheses are as divergent as the many tribes that form the post-colonial state of

Ghana.263

British anthropologist Eve Meyerowitz and the Ghanaian nationalist Dr J. B. Danquah support the thesis that present day Ghanaians—especially of the Akan lineage— migrated from the ancient empire of Ghana, hence the renaming of the British Gold

Coast as Ghana following the granting of independence by the British in 1957. Other scholars such as Dr Carl C. Reindorf, the nineteenth century Ghanaian historian, have put forward the theory that Ghanaians of the south central regions mostly the Gas, came to Ghana from Benin. Other theorists again have put the notion that the Gas come from modern day Togo and Dahomey or possibly Yoruba land or Ibo land in Nigeria, and others have even gone to the extent to claim that the Gas come from “the Biblical land of Canaan as points of origin.”264

262 Ibid. 263 Roger S. Gocking, The History of Ghana, Greenwood Press, London, 2005, pp. 17-18. 264 Ibid. | Page 328

The problem with these hypotheses directly reflects the problem with oral tradition.

If the history of Ghana had been written over a period of five centuries earlier or documented evidence existed to provide text based reference to support the oral narratives about the origins of Ghana, contemporary historians would have the means to provide valid references for the story of Ghana’s history, and the collective identity of the country would not be based on speculation. However, it is this same history that is woven through mythology, fables and memorialisation of history and in the voice of traditional linguists and storytellers that we find the cultural ingredients for the formation of Ghanaian cultural identity, which galvanised the imaginations of

Ghanaians in their struggle for independence.

David Kimble’s The Political History of Ghana – The Rise of Gold Coast Nationalism, 1850-

1928 traces the history of how the name Ghana came into being, and reminds us of Rev.

Anaman’s Gold Coast Guide and Rev. W. T. Balmer’s The History of the Akan People. He draws connections between a book written by the wife of the colonialist Lord Lugard,

Lady Lugard’s A Tropical Dependency, and W. D. Cooley’s The Negroland of the Arabs

Examined and Explained (London, 1841).265

These books were popular in the Gold Coast curriculum in the 1920s as history text books which included stories about ancient Ghana, Melle (Mali) and Songhai. Before his death Dr Aggrey was working on a historical thesis and his notes showed that he wanted “to prove that a number of the Negroes, pure Negroes, who inhabit say the

265 Kimble, A Political History of Ghana, pp. xv-xviii. | Page 329

Gold Coast, are a conquering race who trace their lineage to Songhay, to Melle, to

Ghana, to Egypt, to Meroe of the Ethiopians.”266 According to Kimble, it was Balmer’s book that brought the whole narrative together and which proved very influential, arousing the “interest of the young J.B. Danquah who realized the political possibilities of the idea.”267 Despite conflicting narratives, speculations and controversial circumstances surrounding how the name ‘Ghana’ came into use after Gold Coast gained its independence; it was Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first prime minister who announced: “we take pride in the name, not out of romanticism but as an inspiration for the future.”268 This is significant because it tells us that the founding fathers did not liberate Ghana to allow it to wallow in the sleeping past of history, but to forge ahead, ever forward into the uncharted waters of the future.269

It can reasonably be surmised, then, that it was this sense of historic awareness of the void in the documentary evidence of Ghana’s past which motivated Nkrumah to dictate his life story. Through his autobiography he attempted to forge a new narrative practice and therefore create a new identity for the nation of Ghana, which was reborn in 1957.

The nationalist intention was openly expressed in his autobiographical narrative. As

Kimble argues, nationalism was synonymous with the articulation of political rights and responsibilities, the factors of Ghanaian identity which included “the consciousness of belonging to a particular African nation (actual or potential), to Africa in general, or

266 Ibid. 267 Ibid., pp. xv-xviii. 268Ibid., p. xviii. 269 Ibid. | Page 330 to the Negro race; pride in the nation’s culture, traditions, institutions and achievements.”270

It is against this background that autobiography and national identity converge in the exegesis. While autobiography is one of the central themes of this discussion, the exegesis has aimed to focus on the relationship between orality and autobiography and how its relation, in turn, to national identity. Benita Parry and Neil Lazarus Ania advance a critical position in stating that the argument for nationalism and collective identities in post-colonial societies required national leaders to link their personal stories to the national story. These stories created inclusive discourses for change by claiming to include all the people, the ordinary folk, to celebrate ethnic diversity and speak for an entire imagined community within the post-colonial state. In this regard the notion of nationalism, its power and its practice and “its continuing appeal, lies precisely in its ability to speak successfully on behalf of all the people.”271 It is significant that many nationalist leaders offer their life stories as emblematic of their nation’s birth,272 by using their autobiographical narrative to reflect on a cultural past, redefine national identity towards the formulation of the post-colonial nation-state and mobilise national imagination toward liberation. Jawaharlal Nehru’s An Autobiography and Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana: The Autobiography, used their autobiographies to reclaim a “national narrative interrupted by colonialism.”273

270 Ibid., p. xiv. 271 Loomba, Colonialism/Postcolonialism, p. 165. 272 Ibid. 273 Holden, Autobiography and Decolonization, pp. 58-9. | Page 331

Kwame Nkrumah, the founding father of the modern Republic of Ghana, partly wrote and also dictated certain parts of his autobiography, Ghana, to his secretary who authored the book on his behalf. Nkrumah thus resorts to the classic method by which

Africans take ownership of a story that is verbalised, regardless of who is the writer—in this case Erica Powell—placing the idea of authorship in a paradoxical position of being invisible.274

Hence the oral narrator becomes the visible author, while the scribe becomes the shadow of the voice, and the ownership of the story is placed within the collective space of society, within the context of oral tradition. Nkrumah’s life-story is therefore read by those who were educated and orally disseminated as a national story, forming the basis by which stories are distributed regardless of who wrote it. In interviewing Ghanaians who were of age around the time of independence, I found that they generally felt that

Nkrumah’s life story was transformed into the autobiography of the nation and shared through the many voices who claimed ownership of his story, regardless of who conceived it or wrote it.

Collectively the people of Ghana took ownership of Nkrumah’s life-story, telling and retelling it at functions, public gatherings and around dinner tables.275 Though his political critics would say that Ghanaians were required to read Nkrumah’s biography, it cannot be denied that generation after generation have managed to translate the text

274 Ibid, p. 10. 275 Atukwei Okai, interview 2012. | Page 332 into Ghana’s multiple languages through the medium of oral narration. Nkrumah’s life- story is still on the lips of every Ghanaian during national day celebrations of independence, and many who see themselves as storytellers, and who transmit the story of Nkrumah’s life, have not read the text of his autobiography.

Within the literary context, this might present an intellectual conundrum: who is the author of a story when it is oralised and then documented in a manuscript by a different scribe? Within the framework of oral tradition the storyteller takes ownership of the story through the narrative voice, and takes liberties in telling the story. In the world of the text based narrative, it is the writer of the story who becomes the author and any citing of the story requires acknowledgement.276

In an attempt to reverse this conundrum, African writers are not only making claim to authorship in both spectrums of the tradition, but also are seeking a new methodology to make the oral literate, and the literate oral. Kwame Nkrumah was a man of both the oral tradition and the written word.277 In the former tradition, Nkrumah was a preacher and an orator who could move the imagination of a mass audience with his oratory and storytelling skills. Both were vigorously used to advance the course of the decolonisation of Ghana and hence Africa. But he also authored over nine books, and was one of the most prolific published authors of any African leader of his generation.

276 Nana Asrifie Conduah, interview 2012. 277 Atukwei Okai, interview 2012. | Page 333

The challenge for all Africans trained in the Western methodology of text based narration of story and documentation, or the transformation of thought into text, is to start building a bridge between the two traditions. How, for example, do you reference the source of a story that was told to you by a family elder who is now deceased? This posed a great dilemma in oral research work. For anyone who grew up in a culture that functioned on the basis of transferring inter-generational knowledge and instruction through oral means, it is difficult to bridge the gap between truth and imagination.

What was once narrated must be rendered into an authentic text in order for it to become a source of creative authentic knowledge.

Contemporary Ghanaians, such as myself, grew up on stories of the life of Kwame

Nkrumah, Dr Aggrey and Caseley Hayford. These men represented the national ethos during our quest for independence and self-government. In the same way the oral narrative about the life of Jerry John Rawlings defined Ghana’s quest for revolution and change during a time of national decadence and military repression. Nkrumah titled his autobiography Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah and thus he was able to link his personal story to the national story of independence, forging for the new nation an identity through his personal image and life story, which became known as part of his philosophy as the “African personality.”278

In his quest for freedom and justice for Ghana and Africa, Nkrumah proclaimed the concept of “African personality.” This concept places emphasis on the dignity of the

278 Samuel Obeng (ed.), Selected Speeches of Kwame Nkrumah, Vol. 1, Afram Publications, Accra, 1997, p. 95 | Page 334

African person, culture, and traditional values similar to “African renaissance” proclaimed by African leaders today.279

Nkrumah used his autobiography as a point of departure from a colonial identity of a people to a new imaginary place of independence and self-government. He reconstructed his life in the image of the new body politic of Ghana as a vehicle for national identity and transformation. In discussing Nkrumah’s life in Autobiography and

Decolonization, Philip Holden continuously makes the reader aware of Nkrumah’s attempt through his narrative “to talk back to colonialism, to provide a textual clearing of the ground upon which the nation is to be built.”280 Hence Nkrumah forges a new national imaginary space where both he and the new nation of Ghana are able to move beyond colonialism. Ghanaians therefore cast their identity within the image of

Nkrumah, whether they were against him or in support of his personal agency as a historic or national figure.

At the height of his prestige and power, Nkrumah’s personality and identity became linked to the national identity of Ghana:

…his followers built him up as a god and showered him with idolatrous appellations

and attributes. He became, almost overnight, an intellectual, a philosopher, a redeemer.

Among the titles Nkrumah acquired or arrogated on him were: Osagyefo (victorious in

war), Kantamanto (one never guilty, one who never goes back on his word) ... Star of

279 Robert Yaw Owusu, Kwame Nkrumah’s Liberation Thought: A Paradigm for Religious Advocacy in contemporary Ghana, Africa World Press, Trenton, 2006, p. 6. 280 Holden, Autobiography and Decolonization, p. 121. | Page 335

Africa ... the Messiah. Nkrumah not only encouraged the blasphemies of his followers,

but came to believe them himself.281

Though this may seem a criticism of Nkrumah, it has to be discussed within the context of Ghanaian oral culture. These appellations are, in Ghanaian culture, typical examples of how chiefs are referred to and a form of entitlement used by linguists at court to refer to a chieftain on the throne of power. Nkrumah adopts these oral references as a marker to ensure his national authority and in order to override the divergent and divisive traditional structures of tribalism. It is within this context that oral tradition becomes a mechanism for the forging of national identities in Africa, and in this case Ghana.

Other contesting voices such as the writings and voices of Dr Busia or Dr J. B. Danquah of the opposition parties, as well as other literary works that contradicted the narrative of Kwame Nkrumah’s life, were either suppressed or denied to the public until the overthrow of Nkrumah in 1966.282 The children of post-colonial Ghana inherited

Nkrumah’s larger than life story as a fact of national identity through the oral narratives retold by their parents. It is a story that infuses the national with the personal, and the path towards self-development with that of national independence. Today, the identity of Ghana as a nation would be meaningless unless defined through the identity of the country inherited from Kwame Nkrumah.

281 T. Peter Omari, quoted in Peter Schwab, Designing West Africa, Palgrave MacMillan, New York, 2004, p. 105. 282 Salm and Falola, Culture and Customs of Ghana, p. 67. | Page 336

Nkrumah’s dictation of his life story begins the narrative that becomes the story most

Ghanaians hear from their elders while growing up. His life became a national story and a discursive point of reference in our attempt to understand the meaning of independence, self-government and freedom. Narratives of this nature fail to represent the collective voice of a people as a whole. However, ironically they both have a tendency to be seen as representing the national story. Oppositional voices are silenced in order to give the status of hegemony to the life of Nkrumah as the central agent of history, much as is seen in the life stories of figures such as of Gandhi, Nehru, Churchill,

Nehru, Mao Zedong or Lenin. 283

Even though there have been other auto/biographies written by and about other nationalist figures and presidents in Ghana, including J.B. Danquah, Dr Busia, Jerry

John Rawlings or John Kuffour and recently John Mahama, Nkrumah’s autobiography still forms the central corpus of the autobiographical narrative that defines the political identity of Ghanaians. Storytelling within the frame of orality continues to form the central medium in Ghanaian culture and history, and life-writing and biographical narration as a practice is more devoted to the practice of eulogising the deceased through their obituaries. Text as a cultural item is yet to become a social tool for development, despite the high levels of tertiary education. Beyond the text book method of transmitting knowledge in schools to the university level, Ghanaians tell each other the history of Ghana through oral narration.284

283 David Rooney, Kwame Nkrumah: Vision and Tragedy, Sub-Saharan Publishers, Accra, 1988, pp. 11, 52, 211. 284 Salm and Falola, Culture and Customs of Ghana, pp. 59-81. | Page 337

My recent research visits to Ghana show that orality still forms the fundamental part of the medium of knowledge transmission and codification. The story of the founding of the Ashanti pre-colonial kingdom, the narrative of the migration of the Ga people from

Iboland, the story of colonial Gold Coast and the struggle for independence as well pages from the life-story of Ghana’s historic figures are typically transmitted through the oral culture, narrating the story through an oralised system of memorialisation of the past.285

Despite the evidence to this prevailing condition, the shaping of national identity through text still holds promise. Ghanaians are by far more literate than people in many other African countries. The introduction of electronic forms of literacy has high levels of public participation in the urban centres, partly due to the need for Ghanaians at home to communicate with Ghanaians in the diaspora. There exists a strong urban culture of reading of newspapers, emailing, blogging, letter writing, television, and movies. Local authors are recognised and at times nationally acknowledged, and small book shops are thriving, especially those devoted to the promotion of Biblical knowledge and scripture.286

285 Ibid., pp. 59-81. 286 Ibid. | Page 338

Various forms of communication have emerged in what Ong describes as “secondary orality”287 such as mobile phones, radio, television, and Skype, which have taken root in

Ghana since independence. Literary education has been seen as a national priority since the First Republic and is even enshrined in the constitution;288 yet orality within

Ghanaian cultures and ethnic groups in the country and rural areas still fosters strong group identity and membership.

An important reason that the national narrative of Ghanaian history is transmitted through oral means is because the indigenous languages are essentially oral languages.

English as a literate based (writing) language comes at a cost: the cost of education, or the cost of participating in an inscriptive culture (i.e. pen, pencil, notebooks, computers, buying of newspapers or books etc.) It is easier for a developing society like Ghana to rely on primary and secondary orality as a means of national communication.

Salm and Falola argue that there are “few formal or informal occasions which do not incorporate various aspects of the literary tradition.” 289 This includes all aspects of

Ghanaian oral heritage and some written literature. Performance literatures that are defined by dramatisation and traditional oratory are incorporated into the elements of

287 Ong, Orality and Literacy, p. 3. 288 Section 25 Educational Rights, Republic of Ghana: Constitution of the Republic of Ghana 1992, Ministry of Justice, 2005, p. 24. 289 Salm and Falola, Culture and Customs of Ghana, p. 61. | Page 339 public, official and social life.290 The oral format of presentation alongside the written mode of presentation now effectively defines communication in Ghanaian society.

Interestingly, the oral and the literate are not considered “distinct genres” because

“written literatures and drama incorporate elements from oral tradition.”291 In Ghana, the various genres such as poetry, proverbial sayings, narratives, the re-telling of novelistic stories, folklore, funeral eulogies, the language of the drums, traditional rites of passage, ceremony and public speaking all have their roots within the tradition of orality. All of this forms part of the communicative devices by which Ghanaians—and of course most African communities—have managed to transmit, preserve and “shape the history and worldview of Ghanaian communities.”292

Various ethnographic studies have even included the use of masks, dance, body painting and ritual as part of the process of conveying messages within a traditional oral setting. Salm and Falola assert that “these are by far the oldest of the literature forms,” that convey the proverbs, complex moral codes, traditional poetry, ritualised messages, and religious values both at court and within ethnic cultures. These value carriers “are used to communicate complex messages or simple morals, to praise or criticize others, and to tell stories about the creation of the world, describe the nature of divine power,”293 and for the recollection of historical family, clan or tribal events.

290 Ibid. 291 Ibid. 292 Ibid. 293 Ibid., p. 62. | Page 340

Overall, the value of oral tradition is embedded within its communal force as a medium for creating group cohesion and a publicly acceptable means for voicing social criticism.

It also provides a means for public commentary and creates consensus despite the introduction of Western communicative systems.

Earlier I discussed the Okyeame, the court linguist. In the wider context of post-colonial

Ghanaian culture “these orators perform panegyric and libation poetry praising ancestors, including poets and musicians. Both, however, perform a similar function, praising the deeds of past rulers at all important state occasions,”294 such as state funerals, installation of a chief, national festival, inauguration of a president or prime minister or the opening of parliament. Nkrumah formalised this role in his government, and the redefining of the role of the traditional orator has been linked to what Yankah refers to as “the existence of a cultural grammar rhetoric.”295 This concept is based on the role of the public orator in the national context, which is meant to “guide public oratory even within the domain of modern governance.”296 In this case:

Regardless of the public forum involved, be it Parliament, consultative, municipal,

district assembly or chief’s palace; and regardless of the operative medium of

expression, custodians of the lore expect public speech style to reflect indigenous norms

and aesthetics. Claiming a politician ‘does not know how to speak in public’ may only

mean his style of presentation is not in strict conformity with cultural mores. But it also

means when confronted with competing norms, the modern nation state faces a choice

294 Ibid., pp. 61. 295 Kwesi Yankah, ‘Free Speech in Traditional Society’ 1997, pp. 1073-4. 296 Ibid. | Page 341

between the wholesale adoption of modern institutions and media with all their

associated norms of expression, and operating foreign institutions within a cultural

frame of reference.297

This engagement of culture within Ghanaian society with traditional oratory is always accompanied by drumming (talking drum), known as ‘drum poetry,’ an important complementary part of oral tradition. In certain traditions such as the Akan, Ga, Hausa, and Ewe cultures the drum has such significance that it forms a repertoire of linguistic sounds, and ethnographers have accorded it the status of a language in its own right.

“In drum poetry, the drum sounds represent the words of the orator, the linguist, translator and the announcer in the form of a poem, producing language tones and patterns that are recognizable. Drum poetry can incorporate riddles and proverbs” to signify the importance of the occasion.298

The dynamism of oral poetry was appropriated by politicians and especially Nkrumah, who incorporated oral poetry into his rhetoric to give recognition to the traditional circumstance:

Nkrumah had a traditional poet attached to him just as the Asante court poets served

Asante royalty. His job was to perform praise poetry before Nkrumah gave a speech in

public, on the radio, or in parliament. The poet recited praise songs to enhance

Nkrumah’s national mystique and to promote the idea of a Ghanaian nation. Most

panegyric poems to Nkrumah included appellations such as “Shaker of the brave,

Shaker of the mighty, Shaker of the brace, Kwame, the Ever-Ready All Embracing

297 Ibid., p. 1073 298 Salm and Falola, Culture and Customs of Ghana, p. 62. | Page 342

Protective Hyde.” Nkrumah’s opponents also use poems to criticize his government,

without publicly naming anyone or identifying specific problems.299

The function of orality is best expressed through the elegiac poetry or dirge, combining all the elements of orature, storytelling, song and drum, as well as traditional musical instruments. Funerals form a central part of the Ghanaian cultural ethos, and one of the greatest funerals to date was that of Kwame Nkrumah which called for the display of all the elegiac rites and rituals.300 Under the military junta of General Acheampong all the political differences amongst Ghanaians were put aside and the ceremonial regalia of Ghanaian funerary rites, oratory and the recitation of all of Nkrumah’s traditional and perceived titles were uttered in honour of the Osagyefo, the Redeemer. He was laid in state, and the nation was united in mourning him as the founder of the Republic of

Ghana.

This kind of grand funeral processional occasion is accorded to paramount chiefs and important members of society as well. However, the death of the founding father of

Ghana brought out the best of the funeral orators, drummers, traditional professional mourners, players of flutes and xylophones from the North of Ghana, traditional rulers, linguists, and traditional priests. Also in attendance were members of opposition parties and other African Heads of State came and showed their final respects to the late leader.301

299 Ibid., p. 63. 300 This was only recently surpassed by the funeral of the late President John Atta-Mills, July 2012. 301 Kabudi Wanga Wanzala, Ghanaman, Xlibris Corporation, Bloomington, USA, 2012, p. 663. | Page 343

Nkrumah, as an African leader received funeral rites in two countries: in Guinea where he died in exile and in Ghana where his remains were brought to be buried.302 In

Ghana, Nkrumah was first buried in Nkroful at his birthplace and then later reburied in

Accra where he now rests in a mausoleum. Stories about his life and death, accomplishments, achievements, heroic deeds, travels, and sayings were on everyone’s lips in the years following Nkrumah’s death. Hardly did a day pass without someone saying something about Nkrumah on the radio or in the news, nor was a newspaper article written without mention of his name. The identity of Ghana became and continues to be linked with the life and identity of Nkrumah. This process of memorialising his life through oral tradition and literary documentation serves as a bridging point between orality and literacy.

The tradition of reciting elegiac poems or dirges is a common part of everyday

Ghanaian funerals. Women in many traditions are also expected to participate in the highly ritualised and creative ceremonial mourning and wailing process of bereavement. This requires the development of the unique skill of voice accompaniment for which the required training and nuance must be gained to qualify as a traditional wailer during funerals. As Professor Nketia, Ghanaian ethnomusicologist and composer, pointed out in his seminal work Funeral dirges of the Akan People, she who wails “must wail in words, in coherent and expressive utterances provided by tradition.”303

302 June Milne, Kwame Nkrumah: Biography, 2002, Panaf Books, London, 2002, pp. 263-270. 303 J. H. Nketia, Funeral Dirges of the Akan People, (1955) Negro Universities Press, New York, 1969, p. 101. | Page 344

The performance of a dirge is best rendered as a solo performance, without musical accompaniment, designed to evoke the solemnity of the moment in the oratorical form of a praise song in remembrance of ancestors, the biography of the deceased, their social position and role within the life of the village or in the community or country. The social and cultural history is given oral rendition on such occasions and includes heroic deeds, intercession with ancestral spirits or the relaying of oracular messages or the meaning of the life of the dead. All of this requires the performer to be a wordsmith, in the traditional lexicon: “to rely on voice tones, expressions, emotional releases, and body movements to improve their performance”304 through creative improvisation and through the use of traditional voice rhythms and composition.

The Watson Commission Report into the activities of Nkrumah described him as “a mass orator among Africans of no mean attainment.”305 Certainly, oratory became the mechanism by which Nkrumah was able to mobilise Ghanaians towards independence.

Using the elements of “processions, picnics, dances, rallies, songs, and plays,” adopting the oral devices of call and response, gospel and biblical oriented rhetoric, ceremony and public flamboyance, his party was able to employ all the traditional formulae to set a course for independence.306 Nkrumah used rhetorical tropes suffused with classical oratorical devices and African American Pentecost and gospel utterances that speak of the prophetic, conversational, call and response, and the declaratory style of the

304 Salm and Falola, Culture and Customs of Ghana, p. 62. 305 Quoted in Nkrumah, Ghana: An Autobiography, p. 86. 306 Dennis Austin, Politics in Ghana, 1946-1960, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1964, pp. 127-128. | Page 345 influences he inherited from his days in America and from his readings into European political leaders. Nkrumah’s famous statement, “seek ye first the political kingdom and all other things shall be added unto you,”307 is akin to the Biblical reference of seeking first the kingdom of heaven.308 Nkrumah himself acknowledges the influence of his involvement with African American churches in America and listening to public speakers in Harlem while a student.309 It is also significant to note that in the preface to his autobiography Nkrumah notes that he “devoted much energy to the study of revolutionaries and their methods.”310 He also mentions other influences including

Hannibal, Cromwell, Napoleon, Lenin, Mazzini, Gandhi, Mussolini, and Hitler.

This is significant considering that Nkrumah was to become such an impassioned speaker and orator; one is compelled to conclude that Nkrumah might have studied

Mussolini and Hitler, not for their ideologies—as he was a Pan-African Socialist—but for an appreciation of their oratorical skills and their ability to attract mass appeal, a characteristic which, to his critics, displayed of all the elements of demagogy and his hunger for power.311

Yankah demonstrates how Nkrumah adopted and adapted traditional formulas, rhetorical and expressive devices to talk about colonial and post-colonial conditions and

307 Ebenezer Obrir Addo, Kwame Nkrumah: A Case Study of Religion and Politics in Ghana, Universities Press of America, Lanham, 1997, p. 82 308 Robert W. Strayer, Ways of the World: A Brief Global History, Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2009, p. 703. 309 Nkrumah, Ghana:The Autobiography, pp. 23-47. 310 Ibid., p. xiii 311 Kofi Buenor Hadjor, Nkrumah and Ghana: The Dilemma of Post-Colonial Power, Kegan Paul International Limited, London, 1988. p. 104 | Page 346 events to advance the course of nationalism. Nkrumah also used traditional speakers to grace presidential functions with appellations meant to boost his image as founder of

Ghana, as did traditional chiefs to elicit public authority, force acknowledgment of his leadership and to intimidate his opponents.312

Oral literature continues to define, preserve and shape the history and world view of the Ghanaian community. It is by far the oldest of the literary forms of expression and communication. Through the medium of proverbs, poetry, songs, narratives, and the use of complex traditional communicative devices, Ghanaians have used oral tradition to embody a sense of collective identity as a culture and as a people. The national identity of Ghanaians as a people of various ethnic groupings can be captured through the medium of oral communication.

Through this tradition Ghanaians share a common story, which forms an important part of the social cohesiveness in its socio-political and cultural appreciation of themselves as a collective. Through traditional and communal forms of communication,

Ghanaians have managed to develop what one would call an oral form of democracy to voice opinions, share traditional and democratic values and participate in a discursive politics that is tolerant of contesting voices within the public arena of national life, hence creating a new identity for Ghana as one of Africa’s shining examples of democratic culture in the twenty-first century.

312 Salm and Falola, Culture and Customs of Ghana, p. 63 | Page 347

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Interviews:

Atukwei Okai, Ghanaian author, poet, lecturer and oral historian – series of

interviews between: October 2011–June 2012.

Frank Amewugah, English Lecturer and Ghanaian Morphologist, African University

College of Communication – Interview, April 2012.

Kofi Asare Opoku, Oral historian, Ghanaian philosopher, scholar in African religious

studies and traditionalist. Vice-President, African University College of

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Nana, Aseifi Conduah, Ghanaian Oral Historian, Broadcaster and Author, Lecturer,

African University College of Communications: Interview June 2012.

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Picture Credits and captions: Picture Sources: Family Photo Archives and Albums – Picture Arrangements: Follow the sequence according to the layout on each page.

1st Page. Great grandfathers – Left - right. • Grandma Sarah’s Father – Akwapim Chief, late 1890’s to early 1920’s. • Nii Okai – Grandpa’s father, Ga Merchant – Accra, Gold Coast, 1890’s 2nd Page. Grand father and Grandmother and Okai family picture – Left – right. • JW Okai (standing) 1970. • Grandmother, Sarah (seating) 1925. • Okai family group picture 1930. Taken after family returned from Winneba. Mother standing in between Grandpa and Grandma, age 5. 3rd Page. Uncle Richard Okai. Pictures of author and his brother Jeff at various stages -

Left - right. • Richard Nii Teiko Okai – Portrait Picture – 1950. • Author (Kabu Okai-Davies, seated) 1965. • Brother Jeff and Author, Top left. 1972. Top Right 1969. • Brother Jeff and Author, Bottom Left, October 2010. Jeffrey’s wedding day, 2005. • Brother Jeff and Author, Bottom Right, 1970. 4th Page. Augusta Okai at various stages of her life – Left - right • Augusta Okai 1960, a few months after the author was born. • August Okai and son, 1962 in London, Trafalgar Square, Buckingham Palace and the parts of London, a week after the wedding. • Augusta Okai far right, 1950, 1958, 1972. • August Okai, bottom insert. 1960. • August Okai, in group picture, just before departing for London, late 1960. • August Okai, in London 1962. • August Okai, in color, standing, 1980. • August Okai, sitting late 40’s. • August Okai, right insert, 2005. 5th Page. Augusta Okai left - right. • Augusta Okai with staff and students, before leaving for London 1960, seated in front row, wearing a dress, others in traditional cloth. • Augusta Okai with staff of Methodist Girls School, late 50’s. • Augusta Okai, with peers, 1957. • Augusta Okai, on wedding day, 1962. 6th Page. Kofi Davies, author’s father and Lawyer John Okai (Uncle Nii John). • Ezekiel Kofi Davies, mid 80’s; dressed in Freemason outfit; photo sourced from his obituary notice. • Lawyer Okai, 1980. Author’s Uncle. | Page 363

7th Page. Augusta Okai at Achimota College and as Head Mistress in Juaben. • Augusta Okai and friend as college students in tradition attire, 1940’s. • Augusta Okai, seating as a student at Achimota, early 40’s. • Augusta Okai, as new Headmistress of Juaben School, early 50’s. 8th Page. Portrait pictures, Joseph William Okai and Sarah Kwapon Okai. Grandpa and Grandma, left to right, pictures taken early 1930’s. 9th Page. Pictures of Mr. Tetteh and August Okai, left to right. • Mr. Tetteh, portrait picture, mid 1950’s. • Mr. & Mrs. Tetteh on wedding day, August 1962. • Mr. Tetteh, posing for a portrait picture with pipe, August 1962. • Mr. & Mrs. Tetteh, on wedding day, August 1962. 10th Page. Augusta Okai first year at Achimota and first year as a teacher. • Augusta Okai with class mates, early 1940s. Seated front row far right. • Augusta Okai, with teaching colleagues at Methodist Girls School, Sister Rose, seated in the middle. Augusta Okai, standing back row, far right, late 1940’s. 11th Page. Author, during childhood years from left - right. • Kabu as a baby, late 1960. • Kabu on tricycle, London, 1963. • Kabu back in Ghana, 1965. • Kabu standing in a pose, 1966. • Inserted picture, standing in front of school bus, Jeff standing left front row and Kabu standing, second from right, back row. 12th Page. Pictures of David Okai, (Uncle David) Left to right. • David Okai escorting August (Okai) Tetteh, soon after wedding ceremony in London, August 1962. • David Okai and friends, London, late 1970’s. • Inserted picture, Uncle David and wife, carrying crying author, on wedding day, August 1962. 13th Page. Funeral Pictures of Adja Tekpor V1, left - right. • Top left, picture of Adja Tekphor, with funeral artifacts around the picture, November 2005. • Top right, picture of Traditional drummers, drumming for funeral procession, November 2005. • Bottom left, funeral procession of women mourners, 2005. • Bottom right, Adja Tekpor pictured in full traditional regalia, decorated as a funeral on display. 2005.

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14th Page. Funeral occasion of AdjaTekpor VI. Left - right. • Public Funeral notice on billboard on display in central part of Aveteme, Volta Region, November 2005. • Top right, Flt. Lt. J.J. Rawlings former President of Ghana, paying his respects to the late Adja Tekpor VI. November 2005. • Bottom right, Rawlings joining the funeral procession, November 2005.

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Pictures documenting different stages in Ghana’s History. Picture Source, Picture Library, Ghana Embassy in Australia, Canberra.

15th Page. Political History of Ghana in pictures, first Republic. • Top left, Kwame Nkrumah declaring Ghana’s independence, 6th March 1957. • Top right, Kwame Nkrumah and his ministers, 1965. • Bottom left, Kwame and Fathia Nkrumah, coming out of Parliament, 1965. • Bottom right, Jubilant crowds holding placards after the overthrow of Nkrumah, February 1966. 16th Page. Pictures of new coup leaders, post Nkrumah. Left - right. • Lt. General Ankrah, Chairman of the National Liberation Council, 1966. • Lt. General Afrifa, who succeed General Ankrah in 1969, standing for the state parade, 1968. • Members of the National Liberation Council, 1966. 17th Page. Dr. Kofi Busia, second Prime Minister of the Republic of Ghana, 2nd Republic. • Left picture, Prime Minister Busia after inauguration ceremony, 1969. • Right picture, Prime Minister Busia during inauguration ceremony, 1969. 18th Page. General Acheampong, first year after overthrowing the government of Busia. • Top left, preparing to present press conference, 1972. • Bottom left, official photo of General Acheampong as Head of State, 1972. • Inserted picture, right. General Acheampong, then a Colonel, upon assuming power, with members of National Redemption Council, 1972. 19th Page. Pictures of Flt. Lt. Rawlings as Chairman of Armed Forces Revolutionary Council (AFRC) Left - right. • Top right, Rawlings address the Commission, 1978. • Top left, Rawlings inspecting the guard of honor, 1978. • Bottom left, Rawlings at a meeting with members of AFRC, 1978. • Bottom right, Rawlings, at his maiden press conference, 1978.

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