Elizabeth Ohene: Good stories speak for themselves
I recommend the speech made in Oxford last week by President John Mahama at the Sixth Oxford-Africa Conference. It was a well-written speech and I am glad he did not lose any of the pages when it came to delivering it.
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The subject matter is one close to my heart; the African story and who tells it and how it is told. President Mahama made reference to the brilliant speech made by young Nigerian novelist and writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie entitled the ‘Danger of the Single Story’ in the TED Talks series in which she argues persuasively for storytellers not to pick on single issues but try and give a rounded picture.
I have been examining the subject all over again. I have gone back in my mind to the days when we were told that journalists on the continent here should do something called developmental journalism. As the dreaded “western press” was forever peddling only bad news about Africa, the argument was that it was the responsibility of the African journalists to find and report on the “good news”.
Unfortunately, this search for the good news and reluctance to talk about the bad news has been our undoing throughout these past 60 or so years of independence. When we come up with hare-brained schemes about governance or the economy, and there have been quite a few of those, we are encouraged to praise it as a home-grown remedy.
How many people really read Colonel Gaddafi’s Green Book and thought it was the source of all wisdom? And yet, Green Book Study Groups were established all across the country and university lecturers pretended to analyse the deep intellectual ideas hidden in that tract.
The Green Book syndrome is a phenomenon that can be found all across Africa and it flourishes because it is hidden behind the concept of a special mode of telling the African story.
I accept that there is the need to celebrate our heroes and our successes. I accept that our storytellers should not depress the populace by telling only the bad stories. But it is probably more dangerous to seek out and emphasise the “good news” when the overall outlook is grim.
My theory
There might be pockets of good news and there might be homes in Accra that are grander than many homes in London or New York, but we delude ourselves by talking or reporting on such homes. You only have to read the 2010 Census to acknowledge that our overall outlook in housing is grim. Indeed parts of that document reinforce the theory I have always propounded that we live in three different centuries in this country. A few people live in the 21st century, a lot of people live in various stages of the 20th century and quite a substantial number of people are stuck in the 19th century. Sometimes all three specimens exist on the same street.
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Why else is it possible to be born, lead a full lifetime in Ghana and die and be buried and not be known to have existed in any official documentation? Many births are still not registered and many people go through life without any form of official identification and when they die, they are buried without any official documentation. There is nothing to show where such a person was born, where he lived and in many rural areas, even the grave he is buried in cannot be identified within a year because there are no records on the cemetery.
And now even at the Osu cemetery in Accra, you can arrive to visit the grave of a loved one and discover that the remains have been exhumed and the space allocated to a fresh dead body. There are no records to indicate that your beloved was once buried there. What special ways can there be to tell such stories?
There are high-rise apartments going up in Accra and that story deserves to be told; for as long as you keep an eye on the statistics on housing in the census. Some 16 per cent of dwelling houses in the country have earth and mud floors, slightly over three-quarters of houses have cement and concrete floors and less than two per cent of dwelling houses have ceramic/porcelain and granite marble tiles.
When it comes to our sleeping arrangements, the three century differential is even more pronounced; in more than half of all households, everybody sleeps in one room; in a quarter of households, all sleep in two rooms and just under one per cent of households have about nine rooms at their disposal. And when we get up from bed, only 15 per cent of the population have access to flush toilets, another 30 per cent make do with various other types of toilets and the rest of the people have no toilet facilities, in other words their primary toilet is a public toilet or they defaecate, in Ghanaian parlance, “free range”.
It does not matter how many mobile telephones or fancy apps there are in this country --and we have more than the number of our population-- we cannot lay any claim to modernity when half the population does not have toilets. It does not matter that there are homes with seven or eight flush toilets or however many IPhone 6 or Samsung Galaxy S6 there are, our main story is not good.
It does not matter that there are many Rolls Royces or Bentleys or Ferraris in town, the story to tell is the state of our roads and that story is not good.
Someone remonstrated with me last week that I managed to write about the teaching of Mathematics without telling the story that in June 2011, a Ghanaian child in a Ghanaian school received the Top of the World award in IGCSE Mathematics. Indeed, that was a happy occurrence, but it made no difference to our main story that the bulk of our children are underperforming in Mathematics.
Improvement of the general state
We have to work on the main story; improve the general state of our existence, then we would not have to worry about the telling of our story.
There are great communicators who would sell you the shirt on your own back, who would convince you a particular brand of beer would turn you into the most attractive man or woman. Unfortunately, the reality soon emerges.
In the past one week, no amount of sophisticated PR or spinning would have changed the impact of the disaster that befell the New Patriotic Party with the brutal murder of the Upper East Regional Chairman. It is best to accept that there has been a disaster and find a way out of it.
The Africa story, the Ghana story is not a good one yet; let’s keep our heads down, work to improve it and then we shall have something worthwhile to tell.