The News in Ghana

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What agony to listen to the news in Ghana 

What torment to hear the uneducated literates babble! 

Televised news turns food into ash in my mouth. 

Prejudiced narratives that only show the north, 

As a people most incomprehensible;

Skeletal mothers with drooping dry breasts, 

Babies strapped with tattered rags to aching backs, 

The distended bellies of bony orphans, 

The starved faces of scruffy toddlers, 

Desperate youth trooping out to survive, 

People slaughtered in senseless wars, 

Forests razed to the ground,

Poverty, hunger, disease, death. 

So has the West defined and cursed Africa:

One country, one people, one story

And so we do to ourselves now.


Have you Read: Village Boy Impressions - The Joys of Mother Africa


 Ghana, are you so gullible?

To be so bogged down

With such naivety,  

Such thoughtless generalizations,

Such vulgar labelling,

Such single stories;

That the whole north is but a village,

Is too hot and far away,

That ‘northerner’ must be a tribe,

Unable to speak for themselves,

Every so-called northerner a Muslim,

Is fleeing hunger and conflict,

Can only be a kayayei or truck pusher,

Are only good as assistants and deputies,

And so different their blood must be green?

 

Read Here: Village Boy Impressions - The Seasons at Home

I refuse to be labeled ‘northerner’

Though I call it home

And by God, I love my home,

And I love my root,

But I reserve the right to name myself

And to insist to be called by my own name.

If my neighbour suffers from myopia,

And my elected and appointed rulers,

Greedy for crumbs, squander my destiny,

And the newsreader doesn't know better,

I must insist that I am not a northerner,

Because I am a Ghanaian, 

A Bulsa or better still a Buloa[1]

From Sandem[2]

of the lineage of Atuga

And my blood is red like yours!


John A. Agandin

May 2016

Have you Read: The Song of Atuga?

[1] A Bulsa (singular)

[2] This is the original name of the town of Sandema.




Comments

  1. Bagoni Robert Wejegedam1:55 pm, May 20, 2020

    God bless the land of Sandema and beyond

    ReplyDelete
  2. Aduedem5:35 pm, May 20, 2020

    You have said it all big bro. It is time for us to be allowed to introduce ourselves. We have allowed them to introduce us for so long, and funny enough, if they introduce us wrongly, most of us do not care about insisting on the right thing.
    Your writeup is a wake-up call on each one of us. Congratulations

    ReplyDelete

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