Kofidele Kudom

Feet. Many feet. Tens of thousands of big and small feet simulating our eternal march towards the total liberation of humanity as they stamped their way towards Ghana’s Independence Square . Kofi Frempong, (my brother and friend) and I also beat a steady rhythm on the ground beneath our feet.

Colors, many colors, but all bowing to the supremacy of the red, gold, green bands on every single person. From every corner of the nation they came. Along with their kindred spirits from every corner of the earth…along with former enemies, old friends and other wanderers. Black people, white people, green people and all the other accidents of human diversity. From everywhere they came to celebrate the 50th anniversary of our independence. They came with eyes misty with hopes for the coming years and fragments of memories of unfulfilled dreams that litter all the crossroads in our history.

Cars, long lines of luxurious cars wove in and out of the independence square like serpents crawling on their bellies, bellies filled with those politicians and leaders who have fed fat on the squashed dreams of the teeming throngs of humanity over whom they lord their porcine appetites. The cars that snaked through the forest of people were also busy digesting those who continue to scrape our wounds with their vain promises of a honey- laced future.

Mozambicans, Malians, Egyptians, Nigerians and Libyans, Togolese, South Africans, Americans, Brutish, German, Ivoirians, Jamaicans and the representatives of many other countries. I saw a four wheeled drive approaching. It had a sticker with the word LIBYA emblazoned on it…anger welled up in my heart as I remembered thousands of Ghanaians maltreated, beaten, clobbered and jailed in Libya. I tried not to think of those who are dead. I tried. But I just could not help it…their ghosts rose up in front of me amidst the teeming throng mouthing “don’t miss the moment, say something” Anguish was etched on their faces and sadness was smeared on their souls like shea butter on a festooning wound…

One of the ghosts came up to me and throttled the words out of my throat…” Stop killing Ghanaians in LIBYA” I screamed at the fragment of LIBYA sitting squat in the government-acquired four wheel drive like an overfed bullfrog. “Abua!, enjoying my tax money in Ghana but killing us in LIBYA’’ . He turned his beady eyes towards me and tried to shut his window but my words could not be stopped. Not when they where echoed by the unheard voices of the beckoning souls around.

I saw his royal ugliness dismiss me with a backward wave of his hand. In my heart I wished him a sudden attack of leprosy on that hand as well as a lash of Sango’s thunder-whip. He wound up his window and the land cruiser, a white morsel in the distance, was swallowed by the crowd.

Twenty meters away I saw an irreverent white boy …mid twenties , six foot tall…he was muddying a freshly whitewashed wall with his sneakers as he struggled to climb the short wall around the independence arch ”Get off the wall” I yelled at him... ”it was painted with my tax money, fool!”.... The faces around me turned to look at me with first, surprise and then more surprise… some giggled as they drank in the sight of a black boy telling off a white man. ‘Hey they stopped being our bosses 50 years ago’, I wanted to scream at them but the thought became stillborn in my mind because just then the Presidential motorcade glided past us... to my shock they were all in three piece suits…the President of Ghana, his entourage and his fawning aides. All in suits. Have they really stopped being our bosses? I wondered.

The white boy looked at me as I jumped over the wall without making contact with it…”its because you are more nimble than I am ..’’ he said as he struggled to do the same…. “only in the mind” I retorted…I guess he just didn’t get it.

Kofi and I…almost overwhelmed by the sights, the sounds and the solid press of human flesh, we sought a passage into the independence square , the eye of the celebratory storm.

As we sliced a winding path through the crowd, I looked into the faces around me…smiles, bright eyes, white teeth, and beautiful, beautiful shades of BLACK. Hugs, handshakes, waves and preening necks, pockets of dancing boys and girls in sixes and sevens moving to the rhythms of highlife and hiplife music. In the ecstatic sway of their hips I could see the varying degrees of awareness of the reasons for the celebrations. In my bones I still feel waves of left-over euphoria from the first independence celebrations fifty years ago smashing into the upwelling of hope and expectations of what the next fifty years has in store for us.

I had a chance encounter with OBI an African American broadcast journalist who had appropriated Ibo heritage for himself….”would you like to interview me?” I asked enthusiastically “why not?” He motioned for his camera crew and he asked me ‘what is happening here?’ “Good morning everyone in California, what we are witnessing is the independence celebrations of Ghana, the first country south of the Sahara to throw off the shackles of colonial domination. It is a crystallization of the dreams of the thousands, in fact, millions throughout the black experience who have laid down their lives for the struggle for human freedom. It is also a huge watershed in our ongoing recovery from the ravages of our immediate past. That is why we are happy, that is why we are here. ”

I taught him a few words of Ibo as we exchanged information and acknowledged the possibility of future collaborations. Kofi and I kept wondering how we would feel in fifty years when the centenary celebration comes around. I knew the last phase of the war in which Ghana’s independence was only one of many battles had just kicked in. The struggle against enemies within and outside the black family continues. The struggles would continue until the horizon of freedom envelopes the whole of humanity in its life affirming embrace.

All around us, there was noise, drumming, honking, shouts, music blaring from loudspeakers. Flags on faces, hands, butts, cars, homes, business places. Everywhere. Overnight. Choreography by school kids. Synchronized aerial displays, and marching soldiers, horses and marching pupils. Spontaneous parties and celebration. The crowd shouted with every major event in the program. They went crazy each time the aeroplanes flew overhead, spreading the national flag in the air in the form of red, gold and green smoke.

The crowd was getting what it wanted. Almost like the Romans and Greeks many centuries ago, they have allowed their euphoria to bury their concerns about the true state of their nation and indeed the world. We have succeeded in distracting our people with pomp, and pageantry. It does not matter that there was no electricity the previous night, the fact that some were hungry was not to big a deal any more, it did not matter that many did not know where their next meal would come from…yes all that mattered was that we were living the hope and the dream of our forbears. To the extent that we could.

But still, not all the questions can remain in the ground. What about education, food, transportation, infrastructure, health and other issues of national concern ? Are we pretending all is well? Why don’t we spend twenty million dollars on our teachers or use the money to solve our energy crises? Anyway which achievements are we celebrating? How can we raise monuments about our achievements over the last 50 years when most of them are tainted by the ugly film of mediocrity that filled the crater that Osagyefo left in his wake? The questions kept rearing their heads like uninvited dignitaries @ Ghana @ 50.

As these questions continued chasing themselves around and around in my head, we kept walking around, trying to find the most vantage point from which to view the proceedings…Not for us the VIP stands filled with people starched stiff with their over-bloated sense of self-importance. They seemed trapped in their seats and all they could do was to crane their necks like caged xmas chicken every time something interesting happened. As I braced myself for all the jostling in the crowded arena…I heard something and my spirit stirred. I turned to see and hear five or six apparitions…no they were musicians all the way from Yorubaland. They were drumming, beating their gongons and speaking to the universe with the rhythms of our ancestors…my soul listened, my heart quickened and my feet just could not help themselves. The crowd ceased to exist as some residual fire from my childhood fanned through my soul. I danced. I danced the dance of one whose spirit was dripping with a nostalgia so hot that it burnt a passage through time. I danced and danced and danced until my spirit was sated. And then I danced some more. I swirled, I wriggled, I dipped and shook my rump with the joy of the free. The sun just kept smiling on every inch of my skin as sweat made little waterfalls and rivulets off my face. Jeez!! Where the hell are the tourists…I heard they like waterfalls! Ghana @ 50 was supposed to bring them in droves, right? At least that is what Obetsebi Lamptey and Tarzan keep telling us.

Kofi my friend was just standing a few meters away, watching me with the astonishment of one who was witnessing a very private ritual in a very public place. The crowd was no different. None of them existed anyway. It was just me, Kofi Kudom and the sea behind the independence square. Yes I danced with the sea as waves of emotion came crashing on the shores of my reality. “Ghana, your beloved country is Free forever!”. I knew my spirit would continue to dance long after my feet had become still.

The atmosphere was saturated with symbolism. Images. Incidents. As if to re-enact the deaths of those who dared to lay down their lives for the freedom we both celebrate and desecrate in the same breath, a few members of the march past collapsed every few minutes. This kept stretchers and medics running back and forth as if to demonstrate the speed at which we have to work in order to rise above the historical quagmire that still befuddles both our children and our elders.

Even as we struggled to find a good spot from which to observe the ceremony, I stopped to ask my folks what the celebrations meant. Most were only too happy explain what the occasion was. A few were actually annoyed that an adult like me could be so ignorant about my own country. Their righteous anger was justified. To others it was an opportunity to make money. Everything from national flags, to coconuts to event planning and hospitality was booming. For the first time, it cost me more to drink pure water at 500 cedis.. than it cost me to urinate (usually pure water costs 300 cedis, whilst one had to pay 400 cedis to urinate in a public urinal).

Overnight, Ghana had become a brand that guaranteed merchandise sale ….Ghana water, Ghana bread, Ghana kenkey, Ghana kelewele, Ghana waakye, Ghana at 50 Coconuts! Everything was branded with solid Ghanaian pride…both by business executives with MBAs in marketing as well illiterate owners of small business or trades. The unity was everywhere, even in the dust that enveloped the rich and poor, young and old, government and opposition as well as Ghanaians and non-Ghanaians. The excitement was so electrifying you could lit a cigarette just by sticking it in the air.

Tired from standing in the heat of a Ghanaian sun that was so bent on frying the egg it had mistaken the earth for, Kofi and I looked for a place to rest and maybe to eat. As we walked around vetting all the food items on sale…my hypochondria kept on growing more and more heads even as soon as I chopped them off. The best I could do was to rank the food on display in an ascending order of wholesomeness. Waakye, rice, fufuo, abetie and other food items. Trust me, I would still feel the same way even if I was at Frankies our local MacDonald’s. We kept walking from one food seller to another and nodding at each food item on display like the common man’s version of the Presidential inspection which had only just begun in the independence square. One stand actually caught our attention as the scents of various soups enveloped us and dragged us by the nose towards a fairly crowded makeshift food joint. The vendor was a very huge woman, eyeballs the size of discusses, starring at us and waiting for our order. Her stretch marks were displayed on her shoulders like medals of honor from life’s many battles. Just then it began to rain…no it was not rain …what had dropped on my skin were droplets of brown liquid dripping from the popular stand above our heads. The liquid was dripping into several bowls of mouth watering soups, each drop becoming anonymous and invisible as soon as it hit the surface of the soup…abenkwan, nkati nkwan, aponkye krakra….I was alarmed!!!

’Oh madam, something is dropping into the soup!” I pointed out,
The discus eyes bored holes into my forehead, they seemed ready to leap off her face and strike me down…
”Its nothing’ she said hastily “its just a chocolate drink that must have been dropped by a spectator”
To her it was normal. The more I tried to explain to the woman the more irritated she became. No attempt was made to cover the food or shift it from the dripping dirt above. Even more abnormal was the nonchalance of the waiting customers. I wondered if their dogged insistence on eating the most Ghanaian food in sight, in spite of whatever else they might be getting in their soups was not a misplaced display of national solidarity. HHHMMM. All in the spirit of Ghana @ 50. We had to walk away.

Even as I write this up in Kofi’s room, my spirit shudders at the pain and struggle of our kindred spirits around the world. Particularly the Shagosians, islanders who were evicted from their birthplace near Mauritius by the Brutish empire during the 1960s. They were unceremoniously evicted in the deep of the night, their dogs and cats were killed and the whole population was forcibly evacuated because the eyes of the world did not extend to the back of its head. The more remote the area, the more secret the crime and the greater the sense of impunity.

The Island was stolen by the Brutish and leased to the Americans who have planted their military base on the Shagos islands. The Islanders have not been allowed to return ever since. I know if they could, they would do this in Ghana too (… my eternal gratitude to the hard fighting, deep biting West African Mosquitoes even if they are still savoring the bites they had off me last night…) but cowards as they are, they would only do that to poor defenseless people somewhere in the Indian Ocean. The remorseless racism of the British government has ensured that this population of people has lived in exile for almost 50 years…Thus even as we were throwing away our shackles in the 50s and 60s, others were being forced to wear them around their necks. This is only a fragment of the story…I know in 50 years time the world would still not be free from this epidemic. I only hope it would be closer to tasting a bigger mouthful of the freedom, even if partly illusory, that we are celebrating here in Ghana today.

KOFIDELE
Accra, 6th March, 2007