The Dearth and Death of the Detribalised Ghanaian

Have we become more insulting of each other based on our tribes? Or have we become hypersensitive? Or is that who or what we have been all along? "Touch not our tribes and do our ethnicity no harm."

 What the deputy minister said was wrong and hurtful. You can't speak about a whole people in such terms. I would have thought that a good dressing down, public shame, eating crow meat in humble pie, and then we are done. Lessons learned, hopefully. But I was wrong. He had to fall in his own ugly sword.  

Two things happened. First I heard whispers of an impending resignation. Around the same time, an Asante brother with whom I banter and swap jokes (clean) sent me a picture which I think had been photoshopped, of a minivan with an inscription where an R had been used instead of an L. The number plate started with "AS." You get the drift. We laughed at ourselves in private. Or so I thought. Me koraa I have that problem of mixing L and R sometimes. Plenty school and law and even exorcism cannot hide that or cast it out. 

I decided to put a theory of mine to the test: that Asantes are the most tolerant people I know when it comes to jokes and laughing at each other. There are tolerated jokes about Asantes' L and R, which would not be tolerated if made of other tribes. Or so I thought. 

So I decided to up the ante. I posted the minivan picture on FB, highlighting the misspelled word "reveration" and the "AS" number plate. I added a second one I received from elsewhere, "Crap for Jesus". The vast majority of the comments were funny, like asking me to resign. I dunno what from. But some were bitter and angry and insulting. Now you know I can and do give as much as I take, if not more, right? I love a good fight and can pick one in an empty room. So I enjoyed dishing it right back and banning people from the page.

In my excitement, I had missed one comment. So when someone drew my attention to a comment of a mutual friend, I said it wasn't possible. But I looked and there it was! Now I know it was more jokes but how could anyone but he and I know? Yes, the very Asante brother who sent me the picture in the first place had cussed on my wall: "Damn you, Ace." Straight up. No smiley. I know, I know, I know, ok, I believe that the cussing was part of the joke. So I replied "Awesome compliment. Right back at you." But people reading wouldn't know that he had sent the picture to me in the first place and I thought he had laughed with me. All they will see is that he cussed. All they will see is that someone they know to be my buddy was so irked that he had cussed the picture when posted. 

What was even more curious was that several of my non-Akan friends who had expressed righteous outrage and indignation at the deputy minister's comments and were busily demanding his political head on a platter, were at the same time 'forwarding back' to me, the same picture I had posted with the highlights, and having a good laugh. They didn't know it was "my" picture. 

Now, I am so ethnically impure that I laugh when people purport to tell me which tribe they think I belong to. I love to go through my 'exotic' lineage. The predominance of my mother's Akyem Abuakwa with names like Baawa and Sakyiwaa? But can we ignore the historic intermarriages with the nearby Agonas hence names like Nuakoaa that has evolved into Niakoaa? Or my father's Fante (Nkusukum) of Biriwa and Akyemfo with names like Aduboaba, Adoma and Amoaa and with Biriwamanhen Nana Kwao Bonko IV, chief celebrant of the Odambea as my uncle? Or my maternal great grandfather, the prince Boateng the Asante, the itinerant merchant, son of King Prempeh (I or II) and whose mother was from Bampenase, pronounced Mampenase? For which reason my maternal grandmother was a kid in Kumasi at the start of the Yaa Asantewa War and was smuggled away to Akyem where she spent the rest of her life? She told me stories about "those days when we used knives to chew sugarcane." It will take only an Asante to understand that. Or the whispers that Boateng's real 'father' was from Dagbon? Or my maternal grandfather Darko Koranteng whose people migrated to Akyem from Larteh? Or the progenitor who came from Mali ?? to serve but whose arrival brought such prosperity that he married into the family and had children? Genetically, either he or the Dagbon root is the source of the rare "C" sickle cell (I read that that's the effect of the Savannah) that runs through the family and which I carry, so that I hardly have malaria? Or weirder still, the paternal great great grandfather from Portugal ??, possibly the source of that strange, small patch of straight hair behind our heads? I am easily the 'United Nations', a study in personal conflict of laws under the Courts Act. Ghana Legal Systems 101. 

So here I was, thinking I that we were moving towards the de-tribalised Ghanaian. I was wrong. We have become more tribalised than we were last year. Was it the election? I am not sure. But if the Scot, Welsh and Irish feel those identities before they feel British, and the Catalan feels Catalan before Spanish, then maybe we can also feel our tribal roots before Ghanaian. 

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Yet today, I fear for next year. Because me too I am going to get very angry if anyone says anything about my tribe, eh - ei, but which of them? Then I have plenty angrys coming up paaaah o! And if Ghana, Mali and Portugal are placed in the same group in a World Cup,… 

Did I say "detribalised"? Spell me "retribalised"!

1. You know the deal. Blame a certain Nana Awere Damoah for typos.

 

Dedicated to Hon Rodney Nkrumah-Boateng and Marc 'Mystic' Baffoe-Bonnie. You two are something else.

 

TheAceman