“Uneducated” Chinese supervise Ghanaian Engineers

*By Akadu Ntiriwa Mensema, Ph. D.

** I recently spent about two months in Ghana, and the next series of poems will
recount my observations and experiences. Stay tuned!

Chinese invasion
Silent like hawks
Soaring with grace
Poised for action
Ah! Ghanaians
Like cultural nomads
Roam aimlessly, lost
In the land of our birth
Foreigners invoke all
They summon us all
To cradles of insults
To cradles of racism
To cradles of depravity
To cradles of poverty

See Chinese supervisors
At road-building sites
Stocky like Chinese rice
Foaming with imperiousness
Hands drawn like a sword
Aimed at timid Ghanaians
See Chinese supervisors
Supervising local engineers
Ah! See KWASI AMPONSEM
Decorated with a KNUST BSc
First Class Honors, KNUST
Bachelor’s in Civil Engineering
Oh! He is on his knees
Ghanaians on their knees
Kneeling on their degrees
Well-educated Ghanaians
Taking instructions from Chinese
We prostrate before all others
Chinese, Indians, Syrians, Whites
Less-educated, schooled Chinese
Chinese with limited vocabularies
Stretching China-made English
Supervising KWASI AMPONSEM
Chachzi [KWASI] you goes
Chachzi you comes
Chachzi you moves
Chachzi you stands, sits
Chachzi you stones, sands
Chachzi you monkey fools
Chachzi me love small girls
Chachzi me love Ghana woman

Chinese invasion
For our oil
For our gold
For our timber
For our market
Our elites look on
The elitist thieves
The pen-robbers
Look on like buffoons
Foraging for bribes
For Chinese perfumed rice
For Chinese toothpicks
For Chinese hair-pieces
For Chinese coffins

Our troubling signs
Self-fulfilling all
Of inferior “blackness”
Of packaged inferiority
Of fawning dependency
Of giving in to “whiteness”
Any semblances of “white”
The Euro-Americans
The Syrians, Lebanese
Today Chinese-Whites
Our “white” diviners
Throwing rice at us
Me Buroni Syndrome
Our “white” superiors
Ah! The nursery rhyme
The Best is from the West

Chinese invasion
Silent like hawks
Soaring with grace
With claws poised
For our oil
For our gold
For our timber
For our market
Our elites look on
The elitist thieves
The pen-robbers
Look on like buffoons
Foraging for bribes
For Chinese rice
For Chinese toothpicks
For Chinese hair-pieces
Our archives of inferiority
Our geopolitics of greed
Our mummified dependency

*Akadu N. Mensema, Ph. D., is a nationalist Denkyira beauty. She is a trained oral
historian cum sociologist and Professor in the USA. She lives in Pennsylvania with
her great mentor and teaches Africa-area studies at a college in Maryland. In her
pastime, she writes what critics have called “populist hyperbolic, satirical”
poetry. She can be reached at [email protected]