Thursday, May 1, 2008
Culture, Chieftaincy, Progress or Chaos I
Culture, Chieftaincy, Progress or Chaos I
By E. Ofori Akyea
I had not planned to return to this subject at this time. Recent events have, however, necessitated the revision of schedules to treat this all important subject in our national life. The events surrounding the enstoolment or otherwise of a new Awoamefia in Anlo have been important elements in having to comment on the situation. The controversy surrounding the nomination and subsequent “enstoolment” of a new chief is nothing new in our local governance procedures.
In Anloga, however, there were danger signs all along. In the course of the last four years several red flags have gone up. Those responsible for dealing with the problem either did not think it was that serious or they just closed their eyes to the danger signals. In the end seven people, including a police officer, were killed. The whole of Anlo is in turmoil. All citizens have had their lives rudely disrupted in one way or the other. Educational and economic activities are suffering as a consequence. A country striving to be a middle income country cannot afford to be spending its time in these kinds of useless and energy sapping controversies. They do not contribute in any way to the development of our nation.
As is usual in these situations accusations keep flying in all directions. The police, however, seem to be the butt of most of the accusations. There are several accusations of police brutality subsequent to the rioting and the imposition of the curfew in the area. Indeed, one person died in police custody in Ho, the Regional capital. Everyone including the government, the contestants, the Regional House of Chiefs, the ordinary people as well as a poor innocent cow being led meekly to be sacrificed, all had their bit of the venom. Several people are in custody for their alleged part in the confusion while the town of
As if the above troubles were not enough this paper reported with accompanying photographs of mayhem in
Instead of us working to improve the quality of our lives we seem hell bent on destroying ourselves by indulging in these destructive chieftaincy disputes. Of the many pending chieftaincy disputes one does not know which one will blow up tomorrow.
Even more disturbing to me is the report that there are some 300 chieftaincy dispute cases pending before the different Regional Houses of Chiefs in the country. The macabre part of the story is that some dead claimants of stools and ex-chiefs are still in mortuaries while the living litigants do battle in court. Part of the problem is that non royals are using their money to muscle their way into occupying royal stools. We shall deal with this and other issues hobbling the chieftaincy institution below.
In the case of the Volta Regional House of Chiefs they are unable to adjudicate on the matter of the Awoamefia and the 33 other cases before them because a court injunction against the officers of the House and the Attorney General to hold new elections. The acting President of the House Togbega Gabusu VI states that the Judicial Committee is unable to work because there has been no lawyer to assist it in its work. Also there are now no substantive officers of the House, he says, to carry out the assignments because of the court injunction placed on the eve of the elections six years ago.
The issue of the legal counsel has since 1st November 2007 been settled. We hope that the pending cases will be disposed of with appreciable speed. Togbega Gabusu VI states that the Regional House could not on its own employ a legal council since it was the government that was to pay the legal council. Now that the issue has been resolved with the appointment of the legal counsel the pending issues will be speedily dealt with.
To use a cliché, everyone agrees with me that chieftaincy is the bedrock of our traditional society. Since time immemorial our societies have been governed through the institution of chieftaincy. Over time, however, the institution has gone under tremendous change. In times past ambitious chiefs led their people to war to add to their territories. Sometimes they succeeded. On other occasions they failed miserably and lost not only land but people. On another continent a man known as Napoleon Bonaparte, in spite of his brilliance in administration and in the art of war, left
Chieftaincy had its greatest test during the slave trade and colonial periods. Some chiefs colluded with the colonialists to either enrich themselves, to gain territory or to enhance their positions. With the backing of the European traders some ambitious individuals managed to become chiefs. Many of them did this by using their western education or plain guile to manipulate the system to their advantage. Suspicion has been that some of the chiefs were ready to sell themselves and for that matter sacrifice their people for a pot pottage.
In our discussion of the role played by our chiefs in our predicament we tend to forget the role played by marauding Arabs in enslaving millions of our ancestors long before the Europeans set foot on our shores. Our castrated ancestors became the trusted staff of their harems and of their personal fighting forces. The other cruelties meted out to our forebears tend to be forgotten under the barrage of the propaganda that the Western, latter day colonialists make us believe that we were and are heading to paradise under their tutelage.
Whatever progress has happened is starring us in the face. Later European colonialism succeeded in bringing us to where we are now. We have been thoroughly indoctrinated into believing that without the Europeans and those we fondly call our development partners, we are consigned to the dustbin of history into being hewers of wood and drawers of water.
It is no accident that with the advent of modern politics chiefs became the butt of attacks from the new politicians. The chiefs were perceived to be facilitating the efforts of the European invaders in plundering their country. Note that the territories that the Europeans were laying claim to belonged to differing and different people. The chiefs they were dealing with did not see anything wrong with helping an outsider to subdue and bring their traditional enemies to heel.
Of course, as these things were going on other individuals were also plotting their accession to power and glory. These individuals did what all power hungry people do. They were ready to betray their own so long as it suited their scheme. A few succeeded. These created problems for the future for the traditionalists never gave up and sought to correct the mistakes of the past.
So long as the Europeans were pulling the strings all seemed to go well. With the appearance of people like Kwame Nkrumah on the scene the dynamics changed. The chiefs who were working against independence because they thought that with independence their situations will be weakened or indeed, abolished sided with the colonisers. Kwame Nkrumah’s declaration that the chiefs would run away and leave their sandals behind became the code for the chiefs hating him, of his being accused of being against law and order and subsequently of the need to get rid of him.
Our chiefs, on the one hand are a force for progress. I visited a town in our country a few weeks back. As I drove into town I noticed a great deal of excitement around a bridge. The young new chief, I was informed, has instituted a rule that each second Wednesday of the month, the inhabitants were to engage themselves in desisting a drain so as to obviate the possibility of parts of the town being flooded when it rained. If the project was well done the channel would also destroy the breeding grounds of mosquitoes. Need I say more?
These days the problem has mutated. We see people with money trying to muscle their way into chiefdoms. Given the prevailing poverty situation in our societies all one has to do is to pay regular visits to the target area. One makes big donations at church harvests. The person also shows up at funerals and makes sure that the contribution he makes is made known via the public address system. Later the kingmakers are made welcome at his residence for drinks, food and the ubiquitous brown envelopes. Promises are extracted for finding jobs for cousins, nephews and other relations of questionable pedigree.
Come the day of the selection and the kingmakers employ all manner of arguments or none at all to justify why money bag or his lackey is the rightful successor to the stool in question. Outraged citizens are accused of being non progressive and accused of having no real understanding of the history of the stool. These protesters face an uphill task of becoming credible advocates for the right thing to be done. Some of these kingmakers come out with contorted versions of the succession history of the stool. This is when the confusion and its attendant troubles get born and nurtured.
(To be continued)
Culture, Chieftaincy, Progress or Chaos II
Culture, Chieftaincy, Progress or Chaos II
by E. Ofori Akyea
There is no doubt that the institution of Chieftaincy is an important pillar on which our society is built. The veneration that we accord the occupants and to the stools or skins transcend the pedestrian attitude that we accord other institutions that is indigenous in our societies. One would have thought that of all the buffeting that the chieftaincy institution has been subjected to it would by now have vanished or become a shadow of itself. The institution, however, continues to reinvent itself.
Indeed, in some other African societies the colonising powers managed to mangle the institution to such an extent as to either completely destroy it or turn it into an instrument of their own rule. In some places they euphemistically named the system “indirect rule” so that the people would not see the puppeteer’s hands manipulating the chiefs in doing all sorts of unimaginable things to their own kith and kin. It is, therefore not surprising that in many cases it was the chiefs that stood in the way of national independence. In one particular country the colonial government went to the extent of providing uniforms for the chiefs. Sadly, the national government that succeeded the colonial regime has rigidly kept up the practise. They have even “improved” the design of the uniform to make the chiefs look more like the clowns that that they were meant to look like in the first place.
For every rule there is an exception and the exception is said to prove the rule. Many chiefs stood against their colonialists. Such chiefs were imprisoned, exiled or simply done away with. We have a famous example of such a situation in our own country. Nana Prempeh I suffered the ire of the British colonial authorities and was exiled first to
Indeed, the term chief is a problematic one since the colonialists did not see any reason to create an authority that would put the native rulers at par with themselves. Sadly, such defiant and proud rulers like Prempeh were few and far between. The majority of the “rulers” were bootlickers or were nominated by the foreign invaders that a writer calls “predators” and imposed on the people. The foreigners backed up the local upstarts with superior firepower and cowed the local population into submission. These men of low calibre found their way into power over their own people through trickery and deceit.
The chief was and is indeed the ruler of a state. He had lesser chiefs under him and held court like a Head of State. This implied that he had diplomatic relations with neighbouring states. It was in this context that wars were waged. The causes of wars are varied and are well documented but in the end wars were waged to gain advantage, satisfy a royal ego, gain territory or some such reason. With the arrival of the foreigners some chiefs saw an opportunity to gain some advantage over ancient rivals.
The new arrivals also had their own plans which did not coincide with those of the local rulers. Conflicts arose and invariably the foreigners won as a result of the superior firepower that they had and often with the connivance of some of the local people who were doing this for their own selfish reasons.
Of course, times have changed. We live in countries whose borders transcend those of the traditional rulers. Our allegiances are of a different order. We need to think and indeed do think of ourselves as belonging to multicultural entities. These relationships are built upon those of ancient times and they keep evolving. It is, therefore, not true that before the coming of the white man our states did not have relations one with another. The history of migrations tells of many of these relations. Asantes had relations with Gonjas and Mamprusis, for example, as the Ewes have with the Ga people.
Even among the same larger groups there are interrelations that inform and define important behaviour. Again there are significant relations between the Ga Mashie and the La people because the chiefs are from the same families. We need, therefore, to be extremely careful when talking of exclusivity in superior narrow terms.
Be it as it may we are left with a vibrant evolving institution that some latter day troublemakers wish to turn to their advantage. People who have neither rights nor ancestral jurisdiction aspire to be called chiefs either because they have made money or their egos need massaging. Let me give a seemingly insignificant but important example of this. Traditionally only a chief wears certain beads on his right hand as a bracelet. These days one sees some young men sporting the beads as statements of their having arrived! Such behaviour cheapens our sacred traditions.
We have arrived at a point where we need to seriously streamline the succession to the chieftancy institution. Every traditional area in this country has rules about which families have a right to ascend to a stool or skin. There are also clearly laid out systems of succession. There are “gates” and clear rotation systems in place.
The kingmakers are the gatekeepers of the system. Once they are corrupted the system begins to totter. My experience of the system tells me that the temptations are many. You have a collection of old men who hardly have enough to eat every day. There comes along a character that dispenses his largess with reckless abandon. Each time he is in town it is party time. No one questions his source of wealth. Everyone whispers about his business dealings but who cares. Let the good time roll.
Add to this brew the modern day politician who is a specialist in promising the world in his or her quest for power. So long as we have the underdeveloped and the poor as those that decide the destiny of our traditional political system we shall continue to have problems. The local people need to be empowered to take care of their lives.
As part of the solution the development of our local government needs to be carefully calibrated. Some District Executive Officers (DCEs) seem to be wishing to have the chiefs toe their political lines. Chiefs as agents of local development are powerful agents. The chief by his position is supposed to be a neutral political agent. Also the people over whom he rules are an amalgam of all shades of the political opinions of his populace. The moment a group feels that he is leading them in a direction that they are not inclined to move the chief’s authority begins to be eroded. The erosion can also take place if the people perceive that the political authority is pressuring their chief to his or her tendency. The result is that there is non cooperation. Institutions become inoperative and dysfunctional and so underdevelopment persists.
It will be too easy to say that DCEs should keep their distance from the chief and his elders. There should be constructive engagement. The higher interests of the people should be paramount and not be sacrificed on the altar of sectional political interest or of an egoistical grandstanding.
My point is that the institution of chieftaincy continues to be important in our scheme of things. There is enormous emotional attachment to it. If it were not so it would not have continued to evince so much debate and interest. People continue to be ready to lay down their lives for it. We have a duty to look after it with all the seriousness and reverence that is required. In order to do this I have some suggestions to make.
First of all the much talked about register of chiefs need to be established as soon as possible. Like most things in this area it requires the political will to have it done. It should take less than six months to have the register in place. The other day I heard someone give an opinion that I consider most cynical dysfunctional. He gave examples of chiefs whose nominations and installations have raised controversies. He insisted that such initial controversies went with the territory and that with time they died down. We must avoid such situations at all costs.
The second thing to be done is to document the mode of succession of each chieftaincy. This action should include the gates or houses or clans or whatever nomenclature that they are known that have access to the stool or skin.
The third thing is that there should be spelled out some of the qualities and moral requirements that a chief should have. It is clear that a felon may not be a chief but should you exclude a circumcised person as is required by certain ethnic groups?
A fourth suggestion is that the role of the Queenmothers have to be redefined where they are applicable.
Additionally, in order to forestall possible underhand dealings a time limit ought to be set for the nomination and installation of chiefs. Usually when there is a time lag it creates the opportunity for some character to sneak in.
Above all politicians should see chiefs as agents of development and not as cheerleaders or recruitment agents into their political tendencies. The occupiers of the stools and skins should also preserve the dignity that their office requires. They are the embodiment of the best that our communities and people aspire to be.
Culture, Chieftaincy, Progress or Chaos I
Culture, Chieftaincy, Progress or Chaos I
By E. Ofori Akyea
I had not planned to return to this subject at this time. Recent events have, however, necessitated the revision of schedules to treat this all important subject in our national life. The events surrounding the enstoolment or otherwise of a new Awoamefia in Anlo have been important elements in having to comment on the situation. The controversy surrounding the nomination and subsequent “enstoolment” of a new chief is nothing new in our local governance procedures.
In Anloga, however, there were danger signs all along. In the course of the last four years several red flags have gone up. Those responsible for dealing with the problem either did not think it was that serious or they just closed their eyes to the danger signals. In the end seven people, including a police officer, were killed. The whole of Anlo is in turmoil. All citizens have had their lives rudely disrupted in one way or the other. Educational and economic activities are suffering as a consequence. A country striving to be a middle income country cannot afford to be spending its time in these kinds of useless and energy sapping controversies. They do not contribute in any way to the development of our nation.
As is usual in these situations accusations keep flying in all directions. The police, however, seem to be the butt of most of the accusations. There are several accusations of police brutality subsequent to the rioting and the imposition of the curfew in the area. Indeed, one person died in police custody in Ho, the Regional capital. Everyone including the government, the contestants, the Regional House of Chiefs, the ordinary people as well as a poor innocent cow being led meekly to be sacrificed, all had their bit of the venom. Several people are in custody for their alleged part in the confusion while the town of
As if the above troubles were not enough this paper reported with accompanying photographs of mayhem in
Instead of us working to improve the quality of our lives we seem hell bent on destroying ourselves by indulging in these destructive chieftaincy disputes. Of the many pending chieftaincy disputes one does not know which one will blow up tomorrow.
Even more disturbing to me is the report that there are some 300 chieftaincy dispute cases pending before the different Regional Houses of Chiefs in the country. The macabre part of the story is that some dead claimants of stools and ex-chiefs are still in mortuaries while the living litigants do battle in court. Part of the problem is that non royals are using their money to muscle their way into occupying royal stools. We shall deal with this and other issues hobbling the chieftaincy institution below.
In the case of the Volta Regional House of Chiefs they are unable to adjudicate on the matter of the Awoamefia and the 33 other cases before them because a court injunction against the officers of the House and the Attorney General to hold new elections. The acting President of the House Togbega Gabusu VI states that the Judicial Committee is unable to work because there has been no lawyer to assist it in its work. Also there are now no substantive officers of the House, he says, to carry out the assignments because of the court injunction placed on the eve of the elections six years ago.
The issue of the legal counsel has since 1st November 2007 been settled. We hope that the pending cases will be disposed of with appreciable speed. Togbega Gabusu VI states that the Regional House could not on its own employ a legal council since it was the government that was to pay the legal council. Now that the issue has been resolved with the appointment of the legal counsel the pending issues will be speedily dealt with.
To use a cliché, everyone agrees with me that chieftaincy is the bedrock of our traditional society. Since time immemorial our societies have been governed through the institution of chieftaincy. Over time, however, the institution has gone under tremendous change. In times past ambitious chiefs led their people to war to add to their territories. Sometimes they succeeded. On other occasions they failed miserably and lost not only land but people. On another continent a man known as Napoleon Bonaparte, in spite of his brilliance in administration and in the art of war, left
Chieftaincy had its greatest test during the slave trade and colonial periods. Some chiefs colluded with the colonialists to either enrich themselves, to gain territory or to enhance their positions. With the backing of the European traders some ambitious individuals managed to become chiefs. Many of them did this by using their western education or plain guile to manipulate the system to their advantage. Suspicion has been that some of the chiefs were ready to sell themselves and for that matter sacrifice their people for a pot pottage.
In our discussion of the role played by our chiefs in our predicament we tend to forget the role played by marauding Arabs in enslaving millions of our ancestors long before the Europeans set foot on our shores. Our castrated ancestors became the trusted staff of their harems and of their personal fighting forces. The other cruelties meted out to our forebears tend to be forgotten under the barrage of the propaganda that the Western, latter day colonialists make us believe that we were and are heading to paradise under their tutelage.
Whatever progress has happened is starring us in the face. Later European colonialism succeeded in bringing us to where we are now. We have been thoroughly indoctrinated into believing that without the Europeans and those we fondly call our development partners, we are consigned to the dustbin of history into being hewers of wood and drawers of water.
It is no accident that with the advent of modern politics chiefs became the butt of attacks from the new politicians. The chiefs were perceived to be facilitating the efforts of the European invaders in plundering their country. Note that the territories that the Europeans were laying claim to belonged to differing and different people. The chiefs they were dealing with did not see anything wrong with helping an outsider to subdue and bring their traditional enemies to heel.
Of course, as these things were going on other individuals were also plotting their accession to power and glory. These individuals did what all power hungry people do. They were ready to betray their own so long as it suited their scheme. A few succeeded. These created problems for the future for the traditionalists never gave up and sought to correct the mistakes of the past.
So long as the Europeans were pulling the strings all seemed to go well. With the appearance of people like Kwame Nkrumah on the scene the dynamics changed. The chiefs who were working against independence because they thought that with independence their situations will be weakened or indeed, abolished sided with the colonisers. Kwame Nkrumah’s declaration that the chiefs would run away and leave their sandals behind became the code for the chiefs hating him, of his being accused of being against law and order and subsequently of the need to get rid of him.
Our chiefs, on the one hand are a force for progress. I visited a town in our country a few weeks back. As I drove into town I noticed a great deal of excitement around a bridge. The young new chief, I was informed, has instituted a rule that each second Wednesday of the month, the inhabitants were to engage themselves in desisting a drain so as to obviate the possibility of parts of the town being flooded when it rained. If the project was well done the channel would also destroy the breeding grounds of mosquitoes. Need I say more?
These days the problem has mutated. We see people with money trying to muscle their way into chiefdoms. Given the prevailing poverty situation in our societies all one has to do is to pay regular visits to the target area. One makes big donations at church harvests. The person also shows up at funerals and makes sure that the contribution he makes is made known via the public address system. Later the kingmakers are made welcome at his residence for drinks, food and the ubiquitous brown envelopes. Promises are extracted for finding jobs for cousins, nephews and other relations of questionable pedigree.
Come the day of the selection and the kingmakers employ all manner of arguments or none at all to justify why money bag or his lackey is the rightful successor to the stool in question. Outraged citizens are accused of being non progressive and accused of having no real understanding of the history of the stool. These protesters face an uphill task of becoming credible advocates for the right thing to be done. Some of these kingmakers come out with contorted versions of the succession history of the stool. This is when the confusion and its attendant troubles get born and nurtured.
(To be continued)
OUR YOUNG PEOPLE- OUR FUTURE
Our Young People – Our Future
By E. Ofori Akyea
There is an area in
Now, the women come, as I said, to celebrate Easter. For the week or so that they are in town they carry out a continuous fashion show. For two or three times in a day they change their dresses and parade through the town decked in all the finery that they can make their bodies carry. They spend time at “Spots” amid the slapping of thighs and to loud music with smatterings of the language of the place from which they came to show everyone that they are on top of the world. Money, of course, is splashed around and they are the toast of the town.
Come the time to leave, they are accompanied by a contingent of young girls who also hope to come back next year to show off too. The sad part of the story is that these poor girls who abandon their schooling leave with the blessing of their parents. The mothers look forward to receiving money and pieces of cloth from their daughters who have joined the sad trade of prostitution.
The stories of these poor girls are often harrowing ones. Once they leave the shelter of home they are tossed literally on a most tempestuous sea of uncertainty, cruelty, and sheer misery. Some of them are sent to women who run local restaurants known as “chop bars”. They do all the menial jobs that they are assigned to. The problem is that they are neither paid nor have regular hours of work. Their pay goes to the women who brought them over. They claim to be saving the money on their behalf. Come the time to sleep most of them curl up in any corner and in the shacks that serve as eating rooms and a general purpose area without any privacy. In certain cases they eat the crumps that are left by the clients.
Since they have no money and they are hungry these 14 or so years old girls are easy prey to the men who visit the “chop bars”. Generally these men are also strangers struggling to make ends meet in the big city. They could also be lecherous men out for a thrill. In search of companionship these individuals drift together. Both the man and woman enter into the relationship for different reasons. The man needs sexual satisfaction. The girl thinks she has found an emotional anchor. No one has ever mentioned contraception to the couple. They give in to their instincts and the inevitable like sexually transmitted disease including or pregnancy may result. It is known that when the girl becomes pregnant one of two things happens. The owner of the joint begins to beat the hell out of the poor girl for being a bad girl to become pregnant.
The most frightening aspect of the situation is that the poor girl might have contracted the HIV virus. Since the woman she works for has no intention of taking care of the girl and her pregnancy she proceeds to make life as unpleasant as possible for her. The man who impregnated her has no fixed address. She does not even know his name apart from the nickname “London Boy”. He manages to vanish into thin air. The girl is then left to be on her own in this great wide world. She goes through her pregnancy without ever visiting any Health facility.
The desperate girl tries to abort the foetus. In comes the horde of medical advisers – her friends and acquaintances who begin suggesting all manner of ways and things to use in order to terminate a pregnancy. More often than not the bizarre treatments could end up killing the poor girl. She may also end up developing full blown AIDS and die a slow painful death far away from her home and alone.
Those of her friends who were sent directly to the brothels would fare no better. The Madams waste no time. Thy have virile young men around or their pimps who they call husbands. It is the task of these men to break the neophyte in to what she would be facing during her tenure. She is provided with a bucket, a hard bed in a small room and a piece of cloth that she may cover her midriff with. Soon after being set up her clients start arriving. The majority of these are men who have migrated from neighbouring countries and the hinterland to seek their fortunes in the city. They are men in their prime who end up doing menial work and being labourers in town. There are also sexual deviants and thrill seekers who come along.
The men come to relieve themselves of their sexual tensions. For a small sum they can have a session lasting between ten and fifteen minutes with the underage girl. Extra time has to be paid for. The money is collected at the entrance by the madam. The girl has no other option but to submit. After each session she sits on the bucket to wipe off. She is then ready to receive the next client. The time of day does not matter. She is on call for twenty four hours.
The standards of hygiene being so low the girls become infected in no time. It is at this point that the lucky ones find their way to the Ghana Embassy. On many occasions they have to be carried to the Embassy. They often arrive wearing nothing but a wrap around cloth and exuding unbearable odour seeking assistance in order to be repatriated home. These girls have spent not quite six months in the place and their lives are destroyed for ever.
Now we turn our attention to the young men who are determined to seek their fortunes anywhere but at home in
The media is full of stories of the harrowing experiences of our young men and now women who go through the
The route they take are mind numbing. Some of them go north to
Others go as stowaways and no one knows what becomes of them. The rule is that any stowaway is handed over to the judicial authorities at the next port of call. The rules keep on becoming stricter and stricter so many ship Captains find other solutions. The real desperate ones have been found dead in the wells of aircraft undercarriages. Someone who deals with some of these problems told the story of a twenty one year old who managed to stow away to an European port. He was discovered and handed over to the police who promptly deported him back to
It is clear from the above that many parents are not fulfilling their parental roles. They talk of poverty as being the driving force that leads them to treat their children as chattel that one can use to one’s advantage. I watched a documentary the other night where mothers were giving away their children to child traffickers for money. The women got themselves in to debt through spending money on funerals. The most terrible part of the documentary was the fact that the community knew what was going on but everyone kept silent.
The youth, on the other hand see no future before them. Is it the life spent on chasing cars in traffic to sell handkerchiefs or shoes or whatever that they should be aspiring to? One day while sitting in traffic between
As a nation we need to come together to find a solution to this problem. The more we who are supposed to lead keep on finding ways of scoring points against one another the more the destiny of our motherland will remain one of points scored with nothing tangible to show for it. Is this the legacy we are leaving for the next generation? Let us think again.
Psychiatric Illness in Ghana
Psychiatric Illness in
by E. Ofori Akyea
The Medical Director of the
A lot more needs to be done to bring patients and their treatment to acceptable levels. The real impact of their plight hits me each time I drive around
The impact of the gravity of the problem hits me when I recall the slogan that “the mind is a terrible thing to waste” or words to that effect. At the time that we need all hands on deck, so to speak, we sit by to see a significant group of our own citizenry wasting away.
Dr. Osei mentioned that about 10 per cent of the total population of any country suffered from schizophrenia. We need to take account of the other manifestations of mental illness such as depression. Our country needs to tackle with urgency and vigour a problem involving significant numbers of our compatriots and by extension almost all of us. The manifestation of the illness in a family inevitably takes in large numbers of the population.
Schizophrenia, according to Webster’s Dictionary, refers to a major mental disorder of unknown cause typically characterized by a separation between the thought processes and the emotions, a distortion of reality accompanied by delusions and hallucination frequently characterized by a fragmentation of the personality, motor disturbances, bizarre behaviour and so on often with no loss of basic intellectual functions.
The causes of some other mental illnesses like drug and alcohol abuse are known. Researchers are making a lot of progress in identifying the causes and treatment for depression, for example. We learn that large majority of the inmates of the Psychiatric hospital are women with marital problems
In this piece we shall concentrate on the popular or cultural attitudes that are hampering the effective treatment of mental patients
Culturally, a family feels stigmatized when a member is said to be a mental case. Every effort is made to keep the ill person out of sight. However, when the person is sent to the Psychiatric Hospital the family visits. It is when they are discharged that families do not take them in as Dr. Asare points out in his comments
One has the feeling that the community is unforgiving in their attitude towards those who fall outside the circle. This why the promotion of community based treatment, although an uphill task, is to be encouraged.
In a society where people do not marry necessarily for love but arranged as a liaison between families one of the key questions asked about the prospective bride or groom is to find out if someone has had mental problems in either family. The confirmation of the fact in either family could lead to the immediate termination of all negotiations.
In these days when love plays a large part in the marriage of partners it is not uncommon for a man or a woman to be called aside by the mother or an elder to ask if he or she has determined if there are no insane person in the partner’s family. The belief is that insanity, like criminal behaviour, run in families. One is, therefore, to make sure that no negative trait is introduced into the family.
The other reason that the community is unforgiving of mental patients is that the only reason that brings about mental illness is that the person who is ill or some one in the family must have committed a heinous crime. The family against whom the crime was committed would invoke the help of a powerful shrine to punish the perpetrator of the crime. Either there would be lots of people dying or becoming insane in the offending family. These punishments or the prospect of being so harshly dealt with become powerful instruments of social control.
In traditional societies mental illness is the result of spiritual forces. The traditional society is regulated by powerful unseen forces. If the society and its members follow diligently the precepts of the protective deity everything would be fine. No one understands why a perfectly sane person wakes up one day and starts behaving in a most irrational manner. Nothing, however, happens without a reason. There are mediums who can find answers to all manner of problems.
Let us consider the following fictional situation. Why is my headache still persisting in spite of all the medications that I have been taking? Could it be that after the argument about seniority that I had with that colleague he went to see that powerful spiritualist to put a curse on me? And just about that time that the headaches begun my girlfriend walked out on me. I also received a message that my mother was ill in our hometown. I wonder what’s going on. I need to look into this matter with some care. I shall go to see my uncle next weekend. He would certainly know who can handle this matter. And so the questions that have spiralled out of control take one on to some strange paths and leading to a psychosomatic situation.
And this is where the Prayer Camps come in. Being part of a group where the traditional belief is that mental illness is the result of a curse the prayer camp operators attribute mental illness to demons and to sin. In the Gospels, as indeed, in the Bible there are many references to the attribution of madness to the presence of demons. In one spectacular instance the demons beg Jesus not to destroy them when he cast them out of the two violent madmen. He then orders them to enter into a herd of swine. The herd is eventually drowned in the lake. It is interesting to note that the Jews regard pigs as unclean.
The prayer camp spiritualists see their task as working to cast out the devil from taking possession of the patient. In doing this they often resort to extreme methods bordering on torture. The poor ill persons are shackled and chained to tree stumps. The ways they are restrained make it almost impossible to stand, lie or sleep comfortably. They are left to the elements. Their feeding is most irregular and inadequate. A lot of the treatment consists of long spells of fasting and prayer interspersed with anointing sessions. This kind of treatment leaves the patient weak and disoriented. On occasion this state is interpreted as progress in the cure
The above treatment is not limited to Prayer Camps. There are Traditional Medicine men who specialize in the cure of mentally ill patients. In the traditional camps there is the use of herbs to carry the cure along. Since the problem of the mental illness lies in the head most of the herbs are administered through the nose. To prevent the patient from escaping they are most of the time restrained much like in the Prayer Camps.
In traditional treatment and I find that this happens also in the Prayer Camps, a major cause of mental sickness is attributed to witchcraft. We are surrounded by a host of witches. We do not know exactly who our enemies are. This is why some people hide their wealth so as not to attract the attention of witches and wizards. These creatures are up to no good. Small or large mishaps are of their doing. Once you are targeted by them you require the services of a powerful specialist to rescue you from their clutches.
In a short article like this one cannot explore in detail the many causes of mental illness in our society. Suffice it to say that the society has many norms that one has to understand and live by. Any infraction, however minor, exacts dire consequences. Short of dying one becomes deranged. The precept seems to be that to survive one has to do good to all manner of persons both seen and unseen in order to survive being sane.
In a changing society such as ours there is a phenomenon that must engage our attention. We should be disturbed by the daily stories of drugs and alcohol that fill columns of our press. Apart from corrupting our society these two items are actually destroying our youth. According to the World Health Organization and our specialist psychiatrists more and more of our young people are falling under the spell of alcohol and drugs. We seem not to care. We read about them, we see them in the streets and we seem to say out of sight out of mind. When last did you talk about these problems with a young person or persons that you know even slightly?
I am continually amazed when my nephews and their friends tell me of some of their friends who are in psychiatric hospitals with advanced mental health problems. The numbers are going up. We can no longer look the other way. If we do nothing now it will, like someone says, be like offering our heads with which to crack a coconut. We should not be surprised if we do not live to eat the fruit of the coconut.
My Town I
My Town I
by E. Ofori Akyea
About a year ago my wife and I made the decision to settle in this little town on the Accra-Hohoe road. Our friends were at first surprised at our decision to leave
The town has 36 schools including a Seminary that is shortly going to become the religious faculty of the EP Church University. There is a
The town has a lot of churches. This should not be news in
One of the churches is behind a much patronized Drinking Spot. Across the street from this drinking spot there are two churches. A curious sign has lately caught my eye. It says “Science of Spirituality”. There are meeting days indicated but I have not yet gathered the desire or courage to go there to find out what the whole thing is about.
In fact, the town is the first place that the Basel Missionaries came to in the then Trans-Volta Region which is now known simply as the Volta Region. The chapel there is about 250 years old and is full every Sunday with local worshippers. I go there once in a while to contemplate history. The first coeducational boarding school was started behind the church. The school is still in existence although no more as a boarding school.
The town is also the birthplace and the resting place of perhaps the greatest musician and culturalist that the country has ever produced. He is buried in the yard in front of his house, with his wife beside him. He died at the grand old age of 96. His house is to be opened shortly as a museum. There is a yearly lecture and concert series dedicated to him. The man who composed “Yen ara asase ni” in Ewe in 1929 and translated it himself into Twi two years later played Beethoven every morning on the piano for an hour or so to gather inspiration.
He revolutionalized choral and church music first in the Presbyterian Church and in the society generally. He invented a flute made from bamboo. The man who was thrown out of the church and the Training college for his uncompromising stand in wearing native attire became the pillar of the same church in his later years. In fact, at the time of his death he had become an icon and his country had heaped all sorts of honour on him.
This same town also saw the birth of the first modern woman entrepreneur and gender activist of
The town also boasts a medium sized hospital which has been designated as the
Despite its reach there is only one resident doctor for the facility. He works hard and still is at his surgery late into the evening. The hospital serves the population from Anum all the way to Kpeve which is about more than 100,000 people. It is not, therefore, unusual to find the facility quite crowded but orderly at all times.
The town is connected to the national grid. Electricity is generally regular. Water supply is seldom cut if at all. Like everywhere else everyone has a water tank to store water, just in case. The utility personnel are quite friendly. I am still to experience or hear of the hostility with which the workers are known for in certain parts of the country.
The town has no petrol filling station. There are, however, two “Gao” petrol and diesel stations that sell their stuff from drums. It is quite a sight to see the men in charge pumping the fuel up the glass measure. The set up brings back to me my childhood in the mountains in Akuapem. I grew up selling petrol and kerosene in my father’s store. I was always awakened at dawn by the blaring of the horns of impatient drivers who were ready to leave with their passengers in their trucks to Koforidua, Suhum, Mangoase and the little towns in between and beyond.
We found out also that if we needed LPG gas we had to go sixty miles to Kpandu or go beyond the Kpeve mountains to Ho, the regional capital. When recently there was a general shortage we had to come to
I have counted five Guest Houses in the town. One of them even has a web site. It means one can book a room from anywhere. In any case, there is no internet connectivity here in this town.
Ghana Telecoms (GT) is not present here. Each time I ask why we do not have GT services around here the officials and experts go into a long and convoluted reasoning why we are not able to be part of the national circuit. I get more upset when I read of the millions of cedis that are being sunk into ensuring that the National Football League or some such “enterprise” is promoted. Last year GT spent billions of cedis to support the Black Star effort at the World Cup in
Right here I yearn to get on the IT superhighway. I know it is the way to the future. In my former life I used to coordinate the work of an international committee whose members resided in more than a dozen countries. I did this with my lap top. Here my family in
We have MTN and TIGo represented here. For almost a month now I have had problems remaining connected. Either my number does not exist or the number I am calling is out of coverage area even if the person is sitting opposite me. I wish they could use some of their profits that are being used to give “fantastic” and expensive prizes to improve the services to my neck of the wood and by extension to throughout the country.
I am right now sitting in front of my television set trying to follow what is going on in the country and in the world. I also wish to be entertained some and also to be educated by the same television on how to appear, at my age in baggy trousers, slouching along, talking in an incomprehensible lingo and generally making a fool of myself.
All I can see on the screen are a lot of lines and a simulation of rain. The screen is supposed to produce colour. There are only black and white grains running across the screen and with screeches and an annoying beep from time to time to remind me that I am participation in the great show of the century courtesy of GTV. In this part of
We in this valley can tune in to GTV only. I am told that there is a transmitter at Amedzofe that is supposed to send the signals to the whole of our Region. Since I came here the signal seems to be more temperamental than anything else. It comes on at around 6 am and then there is the parade of religious programmes. The educational segment in Ghanaian languages is misplaced. Do the programmers really want or wish people who are going to the farm, to work and to school, for example, to sit through the programme to be followed by the German version of the world? We also are treated to a view of strange cuisines and lifestyles that bear little or no resemblance to our lives and culture. Why show me a restaurant in
We know what time of year it is by what the women are roasting or cooking by the roadside. Right now there is corn – roasted, cooked, grilled and in whatever form is all over. There are also groundnuts all over the place. It is nice to eat groundnuts in whatever form with corn. There are quite a few corn mills in town. They mill corn out of which kenkey and other produce are made. The size of the kenkey depicts also the season. For example, when there is the harvest of corn kenkey sizes go up slightly.
It was such a town that we came to live in. Of course, there is a Bank here but we quickly found out that there was no corporate entity in town. The only big institutions in town were the
Next week I shall continue to introduce you to my Town
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