As Kumawood as Ghanaians!
I am not quite a fan of movies. Yes, I am not. I watch a few, especially those from Kumawood. No kidding. Not Hollywood… but Kumawood! I am probably patronising made-in-Ghana products in my own ‘small’ way.
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Tell you what, if you want to know how a people think, look at the kind of movies they make. Observe the content of movies of a particular people, and it won’t be hard to tell their thought patterns.
I’ll tell you how the ‘common’ Ghanaian thinks and how Kumawood makes such revelations so bare.
Uncomfortable, we can’t live beyond how far we think. Until we begin to think beyond the ‘common Ghanaian’, there’s not much we can do as a people.
Thank God for witches and juju!
I am yet to watch a typical Kumawood movie whose story wasn’t aided by witches or voodoo. Someway somewhat, witches or voodoos almost always find their way there. Hard fact is, as Kumawood thinks, so does the ‘common’ Ghanaian.
The ‘common’ Ghanaian blames his woes on some unseen forces when he, indeed, is the cause of them. We are quick to blame either God or the devil for what we calculatedly brought upon ourselves.
I was not surprised the least when the recent Kintampo tragedy was blamed on some undone rituals and what have you; the recent past June 3 disaster too.
Witches seem to be behind all our disasters. Like really!?
Do witches steal money that belongs to the state?
Maybe they do. Do witches rip the state off at the expense of children dying in the name of schooling under some shade-less trees? Maybe they do, too. If witches do, why can’t they have a field day in the Western world? Is voodoo only found in Africa? Do witches only exist in this part of our world?
We are, fortunately or unfortunately, stuck in our tracks because of such petty thoughts… and Kumawood gives us out so easily. We can play all day. After all, no matter what happens, the witches are to blame. Thank God for witches!
Little is much!
There’s no such thing as mediocrity when it comes to Kumawood. After all, there’s no such thing as a standard either. As long as it would fetch whoever is investing into it money, everything else can go to hell!
I love to watch Kumawood movies, especially those with subtitles. My goodness! Aside the needless transliteration, the grammatical errors alone can rip your lungs apart. Chai! Does anyone care even? Not at all. Little is indeed much.
We, as a people, are not any less mediocre. After all, in the abundance of nothing, little is much. We praise our politicians unendingly for giving us what we deserve as though we never deserved them in the first place.
Little is much. How on Earth can building a KVIP be such an honour in this Gold Coast of ours!? How can we buy votes for as ‘much’ as GH50? How did we get here?
Mediocrity reigns in all we do. Excellence and perfection are too far from us; too high for us to even think of. Almost all systems in this nation are not up to task because little is much. We keep tossing our education system back and forth because little is enough. We keep selling our conscience to our politicians for a day’s meal because little is enough!
Thank God for mediocrity. We have bought, paid for it and successfully made it our hallmark.
In our poverty is our complacency!
Let me humbly submit to you how complacent Kumawood producers/film makers are. I have succinctly illustrated how mediocre that industry is… and how they are content with it anyway. When one becomes content with their mediocrity, sooner or later, they become complacent.
I have always maintained that if some of us had ‘mistakenly’ found ourselves in the shoes of Bill Gates, we couldn’t have sustained that wealth for more than a week. Yes. Why? We get too complacent easily! The typical Kumawood producer, for instance, is content with how much he makes per sales, thus, becomes complacent. Whatever happened to improving quality, I can’t tell!
Titles get into the bellies of our heads so easily. Being once the hub of all cocoa is not enough. Being the first to attain independence wherever is not enough. Past glories! Titles are not enough!
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A whopping 59 years after independence, what can we boast of apart from the ‘first-independence-whatever’ title? When others are galloping, as far as development is concerned, we are not even trotting. We are stuck; fighting the same circle of challenges in a cycle! Our problems miraculously never get solved.
We battle cholera and floods every rainy season and try to swerve meningitis when the rains are away. We try painstakingly to cheat death on our overly dangerous roads while sharing our water bodies with not only animals but ‘galamsey’ operators, too.
Same old problems! In Ghana, one is likely to die from a preventable death more than a natural one! Most of our deaths are utterly needless.