Feature: A silent whisper in the land of nobody - 3
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| Image: DevianArt |
The future is always bright depending on where you sat. The sun never rise on a rainy morning until the storm is cleared. Until then, the future is never bright. With time and space, the world gradually unearth a gold in that dark soulmate. That's the problem with taking sides. Civilization has already taken side. Yes! It has. Some say it's copying the life ways of the West. You can even judge before you get to know the facts. And whenever you do that it is called PREJUDICE.
Civilization isn't what someone comes from somewhere to tell you to do. But how you used your own imagination to solve certain fundamental problems of society. Your world might work according to your own whims and caprices. What you called tradition on wheels. It just move from one known destination to another, with little editing and modification. Improvement? Yes. And if there could ever be a word for it, then it's CIVILIZATION.
Civilization has occurred. Even in our own backyard. You remember when we were growing, there was this genteel, comforting, sustaining, and fixated backyard seat behind our house, where we used to sit and relax under the trees which extended their shade to cover the seat like a canopy. It was beautifully and well maintained during your generation, replaced when rotten, pruned the trees when they were over grown, and enticed us to foster good relationship with our elderly ones in and around those seats.
The most extraordinary aspect of this couple comes during the warm seasons and full moon periods. You know how we used to hang around those logy seats like bees and their hive during warm seasons when the wind blows with heat. The storytelling and the storytellers were both magnificent and scintillating. Aha! That reminds me of your constant reeling of the truncation of Maame Dokono's jaw-breaking and oral transmitting historical program dubbed "BY THE FIRESIDE" on GTV. It used to make our Sunday afternoons FANTASTIC.
You even went ahead to question why none of the numerous TV stations in Ghana cannot bring back such a national program to unite a nation yet allowed same to divide a nation on political lines. Yes! That's also true. You once said if Maame Dokono should die, the program will still continue. Now, the adverse has occurred: the program died while Maame is still alive. That's what civilization of the media has brought to us. All the interesting programs like 'CANTATA', 'TAXI-DRIVER', and 'CONCERT-PARTY' has faced out while the Sunday night's 'TALKING-POINT' which we never liked survived through the storm of MODERNIZATION.
You once said nothing meaningful will come from liberalization of the media space. That it will be no where near 1990's experience. I wonder how you people survived the absence of radio stations in the region. Maybe this was what made the seat behind our house an important part of your lives. Especially at night when the full moon glitters. You know at full moon light, it pierced into the piazza of the place, enabled us to play some of the nicest games of our lives while our elderly ones sat on the seat and either watching us or doing their own things.
I could remember vividly, during those periods, whenever I run through the place you used to sit, and you will normally call me and give me meat. I got to realize that you normally reserve the meat and wait for my passing and when you don't see me, you will come into the house and ask whether I wasn't feeling fine and will still handover the meat to me. I will tell you about what that place has become later. All those moments are still fresh in my mind like the smell of fresh yoghurt from a deep freezer.
But my memory is in pain. Yes! It is in pain. The beautiful memory created by those loggy seat behind the house, has been destroyed. Its rubrics can't be traced. The trees are chopped off and replaced with a modern day canopy; wood, iron, and zinc. Our nice seat replaced with metallic benches. There wasn't anyone to fight for those monument. Orphans in modern city. Such a relic. Not even the loud voices of the CLIMATE CHANGE advocates could stopped the destruction. Even this can't be qualified as modernization. They frown on it too. Yet they called it modernization. Modernization has gone into their deep racks called brains.
It has eaten all the traditional worms in their brains. Nobody sits under the shade anymore. They've all ran to places far from the community. Children don't play there any longer, elderly men have abandoned it all together, and the youth jettisoned the place for Facebook rendezvous, WhatsApp Conferences and Instagram Get-togethers. There's even something called TWITTER GOSSIPING CENTER where a lot of rumors ensued. Now you don't have to pull ear-to-mouth or mouth-to-ear in muffled voices cautious of third persons attention. You can't listen from windows or hide to pick information from persons anymore. You can only do that when you have access to their phones.
Now, all what you see is the madness of today. Interestingly, you can see two or more people seated together without hearing a word from them or even for them talking to each other. They aren't fighting oo! Neither are they death and dumb? Nope! They are rather talking to people very far away from them. Don't even ask if they can't talk to each other? They can. But unlike the slavery of your time where human bodies were forceful put into captivity, now, it's a willful submission of our minds to phones. We are enslaved by our phones. Yet a lot of people don't realize that the madness of the day is SLAVERY.
What Nkrumah fought for us was freedom. Yes! Freedom. Freedom to own ourselves. But you can see for yourself that we are no longer free. The west is not done with us. They are still pursuing an agenda. A technological agenda called DIGITALIZATION. What we thought would've freed us has now enslaved us. Not even the enlightened is immune. Maybe we used it wrongly. So we've all fallen. I know we shall rise again. Just like we've rose from Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) where young ladies' love button were chopped off in the name of CIRCUMCISION. Now, this practice has long being stopped in our land before those advocating for its stop even reached our land.
You still remember what caused the stop of this practice in our land? The man who gave us powerful, unadulterated insignias in our bodies, who lived around our community with a famous name 'nagmaayouri' (cutter of penis), did his last circumcision on the last daughter of Mba Salia, Sadia's younger sister, and she bled profusely to the extent that she was sent to the Wa Regional hospital which subsequently led to his arrest and detention. This led to a caveat from community leadership that circumcision of females is no longer countenance. So this practice is as historical as the seat behind our house. However, a new situation has emerged with these young ones.
Young girls no longer play around there. Now, they play in rooms. Young boys and girls enjoy one another, sucking and squeezing each other like yoghurt. Sex is no longer a myth. It's everywhere. Very common. More rampant than the air we breathe these days. Whenever I think of this and their plight, then I suddenly missed the seat. It was a place where good values were fostered, young ones were cultured and history taught through oral narrations and beautiful games. Generations of Sadia and Aisha didn't get the opportunity like us. They don't even know how to play Ampe, or 'filling-the-bottle', or Oware. So traditional values haven't gain the freedom to visit their heads, hence they become Slay Queens.
Been a slay queen alone is not a problem at all. Nothing to worry if she decides to show only her body. But it included the inner most parts which were more difficult to be seen in your time than gold. But it is not so. There is more to it. Some Slay Queens sleeps with anything that resembles a phalange colored in money. This is how they get their monies. More like the 'ashawos' at your time, but a bit modernized and complexly sophisticated in marketing their services making it difficult to link them to ASHAWO.
I mentioned your daughter Aisha earlier. She is a full grown up now. Times have change. Now, children don't have to go through that stunted growing anymore like your time where you have spend two to three decades before you become a man or woman. Thanks to the chemicals in our food. Food is no longer as natural as it was at your time. A monster, called Genetic Modified Organism (GMO), has surfaced in Nkrumahland. It is tearing the people up. Some say it is good. Others say it's bad. And as you know of them and their divisions; we're divided as usual, each depending on the side they stood. What the 'Abrofo' called POLARIZATION.
But to tell you the truth, the GMO is a complete monster without reservation. The one who brought it even said, the human beings in Nkrumahland are plenty--HIGH FERTILITY RATE, and they have to prune them using this monster like how cashew trees are pruned with cutlass. Even this issue was contested in the law court between One Rasta Man, supported by Nkrumah's daughter and other good people who also see it consequences from where I stood, against the Minister of Farming in Ghana. And do you know what the judge say? He had finished the matter. He also saw it our way. It's not good for human beings in Ghana.
Soon, I will tell you about Sadia's 'sexcapade' but let me fill you in with Nnaa Hamida first. Do you know Nnaa Hamida's copout was caused by an unknown sickness? She might be busy as usual, cracking unstoppable jokes, as we all know her, for you people to laugh and forgetting to tell you the suffering she went through with her breast sickness. The breast was full to capacity. Yes! I mean full like balloon. It also have multicolors of black, brown and red painted on the breast. A nurse who was posted to the one-room-village-hospital say it's BREAST CANCER.
Nobody knows what was inside. Even the local medicine doctors couldn't handle her case. There was even one of them at the nearby village where Sadia's grandmother came from who tried severally and she got a little soothing but it bounced back stronger. He said it was either blood or water or air or something. Whatever it was, wasn't the value the same? It still caused pain. He was also the local doctor who pierced it when her pain was unbearable.
Those who saw it said it was morsels of blood first, followed by uncontrolled flow of water and a fizzing sound of air. Whatever that it was, as the people who looked into our food warned as that it could be the effect of this monster. Not only that, GMO also makes our children grow faster than their years. As I said earlier, your daughter Aisha is a full grown woman now. She is even bigger than her mother, your abandoned lover. But she didn't grow up good. They say she has grown past her actual age. Her seniors say she's like the rainy season grass that has been over fed with water. But it's not only her. Those who found themselves in this category are called INDOMIE GENERATION.
Yes! She didn't grow up good. She has been following Sadia. And Sadia has introduced her into Slay Queening. And she isn't as lucky as Sadia. She's taking up baby in her womb severally, and severally has she removed it. It was the doctor around Wa Doctoryiri who has been removing it for her; the one you never liked, the one who was removing babies from wombs of girls as young as thirteen, is still removing babies from their wombs--ABORTION. More worrying is, he is still doing it to young ladies like Aisha who are qualified to be his own daughters if he wasn't that 'useless' to have allowed his wife to leave him early before the male fowl could crow at dawn because of DOMESTIC ABUSE.
You know what? This time, Aisha couldn't pay in cash. So she paid with three months sex. Yes! Sex for abortion. Imagine that? But Aisha has not learnt her lessons. As I'm writing, her latest picture is still on Facebook telling the unscrupulous boys, she is ready again. Indeed, she is ready. Her bodily accoutrement has become more pronounced than it was when she was fourteen years. More developed than her age. At fourteen, she looks more thirty-two. She's become more stunning, more beautiful and more voluptuous. You wouldn't even believe she's just added another year. This shape she has recently developed is what the young boys called COCA-COLA BOTTLE SHAPE.
One problem I have with her, which I believe you will also have with her, is her incessant cause of wear and tear to her deep dark skin. She's now become white. Very white. Even one can say extremely white as compared to Sadia who is naturally fair colored in complexion. The patrons decorated it with a nice name called SKIN-TONING. How can fading of ones color from black to white be called Toning? Such a wonderful name. Very nice name for a not-too-good activity. Yet the truth stares at us so ugly. It is not different from what we've known since; its still BLEACHING.
I think I've told you enough. So permit me to bring this epistle to an end. It's understandable clear that I will be coming your way anytime soon with what your younger brother, Obuasi man and his family are doing. And before that, I will tell you something about the death of a great Ghanaian man you used to eulogize "JJ do something before you die; JJ do something before you die." I think he's done something. Yes. I think so. Because he's dead now.
But before then, I will also tell you how Sadia open a commercial sex company and started selling used condoms to clients. She did it too. Imagine what Civilization has brought. Don't say hmm! Our world is getting more crazier in each passing second. Let me attend to some of the crazier stuff before the sunset on me.
continues..
By Al Latif Kambo-Naa.
Read Also: A silent whisper in the land of nobody - 2
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