What is "Foreign Consciousness"?

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

Talk is cheap, as the saying goes; and this is precisely the kind of otiose and regressive maelstrom that most of postcolonial Africa continues to suffer: Cheap talk, woefully unmatched by progressive and constructive deeds. Thus in Zimbabwe, for example, we have 84-year-old President Robert Mugabe luridly entrenched in the seat of power, exactly the same way and manner that such impenitent racists and colonialists as Prime Minister Ian Smith did in the erstwhile Rhodesia until just some 30 years ago. In the process, Africans are fast coming to realize the fact that fundamentally speaking, there is absolutely no difference between a bad African politician and an equally depraved European (or in our particular context, Western) politician.

Likewise, no fundamental disparity, whatsoever, exists between a foresighted African statesman like Dr. J. B. Danquah, the putative Doyen of Gold Coast and Ghanaian politics, and the latter’s non-African counterparts.

And so it was not quite clear to me when, during the most recent anniversary celebration of the African Union Day (or AU Day), the Ghana News Agency reported the Omanhene of the Essikado Traditional Area of the Western Region of Ghana to be urging his fellow Africans to “get rid of the foreign consciousness that had imprisoned them and come together to build a unified continent [that is] free of adulteration” (Ghanaweb.com 5/26/08).

Now, it is not clear to this writer exactly what Nana Kobena Nketsia V meant by “adulteration,” other than the equally rhetorically ambiguous suggestion of the possible existence of an “unadulterated” or a “purified” continental African consciousness. Either way, the Omanhene’s trend of thought, at least in regard to the preceding, is suggestive of the certain contingency (or possibility) of Africans creating a “cognitive autarky,” or the quite unrealistic kind of intellectual (or liminal) independence which does not allow for even the salutary percolation of enriching non-African-generated modes of thinking.

And on the foregoing score, one is promptly inclined to discount cognitive and cultural autarkies to have factored into the imagination of Nana Kobena Nketsia at the moment and time that the Omanhene registered the observations attributed to him by the Ghana News Agency (GNA). More so because, as a history professor himself, the Essikado overlord is readily expected to be poignantly aware of the fluxional nature of both discrete cultural formations (and/or identities) and even the genetic constitution of the people who fashion and practice such cultural values and identities.

And it is, likewise, for the foregoing observations that we find it rather difficult, if not outright impossible, to concur with Nana Kobena Nketsia’s inordinately blanket assertion, at least as reported by the GNA, that “the whole of Africa’s educational system [is] full of foreign ideas which succeeding governments [have] done nothing to change.” Needless to say, it would have been far more accurate for Nana Kobena Nketsia to have duly recognized the woeful inadequacy of structural and curricular changes effected in our educational system.

For instance, while attending St. Peter’s Secondary School, at Okwawu-Nkwatia, in the mid-1970s and early 1980s, those of us who majored in Literature (written in the English language) studied the pioneering works of such remarkable African writers as Wole Soyinka, Ama Ata Aidoo, Efua Sutherland, Flora Nwapa, Kofi Awoonor, Cyprian Ekwensi, Ayi Kwei Armah, Chinua Achebe, Ngugi wa Thiong’O and Peter Abrahams. The same case, however, could not be made for such elite secondary institutions as Achimota, for just one ready example. Indeed at the latter institution, for instance, while PERSCOVITES grappled with continental African Poetry (i.e. A Selection of African Poetry, edited by Kojo Senanu and Theo Vincent), Achimotans were very busy (likely for nothing) lucubrating over the ponderous and culturally alien poetry of Oliver Goldsmith. The pity of it all inhered in the fact that the culturally alienated students of Achimota had been woefully misled into believing that it was they, not the “Bush Boys of Persco,” who were actually and fruitfully engaged in the noble study of the kind of Literature that mattered. To be certain, the same situation prevailed at the Osu Presbyterian Secondary School (SENDO), where this author taught English, History and Literature to forms 4 and 5 students.

In brief, the irony of the above narrative inheres squarely in the fact that while the headmaster of St. Peter’s Secondary School, Father Josef Glatzel, was a white Roman Catholic cleric, both headmasters of Achimota and SENDO were bona fide Ghanaian nationals.

And so I guess our argument here is that intellectual and cultural alienation do not necessarily correlate with either the nationality or ethnicity of the personalities appointed to manage our most significant institutions of higher learning. And, in fact, those who had made a privileged acquaintanceship with Father Josef Glatzel, including the Catholic Archbishop of Accra, Bishop Palmer-Buckle, would readily attest to the undeniable fact of Father Glatzel having been far more Afrocentric than most of his Ghanaian (and African) counterparts, rampantly negative remarks about his purported arrogance and anti-African temperament, notwithstanding.

It is also quite easy for the Essikado ’Manhene to “urge professionals to desist from traveling abroad and [instead, stay home and] use their expertise to help solve (Africa’s peculiar) problems,” while also simultaneously and blatantly ignoring such inescapable motivating factors as overpaid and luridly overfed politicians who seem to have absolutely no sense of sacrificial leadership. In sum, it would have been equally enlightening if Nana Kobena Nketsia had also explained why so many Fourth-Republican Ghanaian parliamentarians, including a remarkable number of cabinet appointees, both present and former, continue to lose their seats with hurricane rapidity in heated primaries, throughout the country, in the lead-up to Election 2008.

Bad leadership, in sum, is what motivates the proverbial brain-drain, almost invariably. And such bad leadership often manifests itself in the form of woeful devaluation and/or under-appreciation of those best qualified, as well as best prepared, to assist in the rapid and radical transformation of Ghana.

In the end, our simple contention regards the imperative need for African leaders – local, national, regional and continental – to match their stentorian Pan-Africanist rhetoric with conviction, rather than merely indulging in the unsavory politics of rhetoric for the sake of rhetoric. For instance, how does any conscientious Pan-Africanist leader square up such pontifical rhetoric with the recent regressive, albeit apparently informal, South African, open-season policy African-on-African mayhem? In sum, if care born of political maturity is not taken, those wild-eyed, sophomoric and loudmouthed “smokers” of the Pan-Africanist ganja may soon find the seats of their pants – if they have any – set alight.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing. He is the author of 17 books, including “Ghanaian Politics Today” and “Selected Political Writings” (Atumpan Publications/lulu.com, 2008).
E-mail: [email protected].

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