Tell Me About It, My Brother!

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

Today, I have decided to delightfully and shamelessly plagiarize the quite common intejective expression that forms the caption of this article from my good, old Nigerian friend, Dr. Joshua Satty Oyekake, a cutting-edge genius of a cyber-scientist and fellow poet resident in the State of New Jersey, Chris Christie country. Josh was the first person from whom I heard the expression used in the English language. Of course, in Ghana, I had fairly often heard the expression "Tell me and tell me again about it," or some such strikingly similar expression.

And from time to time, I have attempted to use it but have not quite gotten to learn exactly when to rhythmically punctuate a hearty and emotionally fraught conversation with it, until just this morning I came across an article captioned "Merry Xmas and Happy New Year to Whom?" (See Ghanaweb.com 12/29/13). The latter article is sourced to The Mirror, Ghana's weekend weekly of choice; at least that was the standing and reputation of The Mirror, nearly twenty-nine years ago, when I ecstatically shipped out of the country and into the United States.

Anyway, it appears that my chronic and perennial inability to seasonably, or rhythmically, use the expression which constitutes the title of this article is largely due to the fact that anytime that I attempt to use it, a striking image of Josh instantaneously interposes, almost like a surreal MacBethian apparition or wraith. Of course, Josh is hale and hearty in his county of residence, though we haven't had the chance to phone-chat, as we used to when he lived, first, in Manhattan - actually Harlem - before moving up-north to the Bronx, and then on to New Jersey, where he and his then-fiancee, now-wife, Rita, bought a posh townhouse.

Awhile back ago, Rita got upset with me, because I had failed to visit with them and their four children, nearly twenty years after they had decamped to Bergen County, New Jersey. The children were embryonically well into the future then. But Josh had fathered a daughter, earlier on, by a Kenyan woman he never married. For awhile his daughter, whose name I cannot readily recall, was in the U.S. Army. I remember often joking with Josh that when his daughter came of age, I would do the exact same thing to him that he had done to his Kenyan woman.

"Don't you even think about it!" Josh had warned with a sinister smile on his egg-like face. And I knew he meant every stress in that imperative sentence. Josh was a Tae-Kwon-Do black-belt holder. Once, he had a heated argument with Rita and ended up with catty scratches all over his neck. The next day, after we broke from Professor Evans' Philosophy 101 class, in the afternoon, Josh beckoned me to come along with him to the lavatory, where he removed his flying tie, unbuttoned the neck of his button-down shirt and let me in on his painful little secret. I guffawed so hard, I almost burst my lungs.

So badly had Rita pummeled Josh that he had to invite the neighborhood police. Being a Tae-Kwon-Do black-belt holder, he had been afraid of being riled to the point of possibly doing irreparable damage to his soon-to-be wife. Back then, being married to Josh was the last thing on Rita's mind. I had been called in precisely because Rita had threatened to call it quits. She had overheard my good friend tell a mutual acquaintace of theirs on the phone that "Rita is not my fiancee. She is only my roommate."

Bam! Bam! Josh felt a tingling sensation on both cheeks. And for a moment, he thought he was about to pass out.

"You bastard! You sleep with me! I cook for you! I clean house and wash your dirty clothes; and then you tell somebody on the phone that 'Rita is not my fiancee, she's just my roommate.' Eh?"

Well, I really don't know what Justice Atuguba would have thought about this one, but I felt wickedly caught between the proverbial rock and a hard place.

Anyway, reading William A. Asiedu's Mirror article, despondently describing stark-naked head-porter women bathing in the open air near the Tema Lorry Station, in Accra, I couldn't help but feel a tired sense of deja-vu about the entire scenario. I briefly grew up in that neighborhood, near the Olympics Park and the old Drama Studio, across the street from the former Ambassador Hotel. And the writer aptly puts his fingers on our lackluster 56-year-old leadership problem. Stentorian and self-righteous pontification on Pan-Africanism, Afrocentrism, Nationalism and all, it clearly appears that our leaders have literally been dead-asleep at the wheel.

Then also, Asiedu's article reminded me of last year's bitterly fought presidential campaign, especially the rhetoric around the question of proper housing for the Kayaye between Messrs. Akufo-Addo and Dramani Mahama.

"Hey, hey.... Hands off my northern sisters!" Little Dramani was loudly and defensively heard to say. "Just shove that snooty Abomosu elf off my back and see whether I wouldn't build five-star Hiltons all over this country, for the Salamatus and Aishetus scattered all over the alleyways of marketplaces across the country. Cosa Nostra!"

Well, the latest fiscal budgetary reading presented to Parliament by Mr. Tekper - I suppose that is what they call Little Dramani's Charge-de-L'Argent - (See, I haven't forgotten my high school French one bit!) - does not contain a single line of reference to the dignified rehabilitation of the Kayaye. Dear brother, tell me about it!

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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
Dec. 29, 2013
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum
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