I had almost forgotten that there was a recorder (red-button) part of the tape (cassette tape player) and Walkman, which could be used to record sounds (voice and music) in the 1990s when I was growing up.
I don’t know whether desktop computers/laptops are much easier to produce than cassette tapes/cassettes.
But what I do know is that producing heat energy (for cooking mainly) from firewood is simple. Heat through firewood is simpler, easier and readily available in most instances.
Additionally, firewood is easier to handle, particularly when transporting it and using it to produce heat, compared to the heat from Liquefied Petroleum Gas (LPG), which is heavier to carry, requiring macho men or women or those with a great physique to carry.
Back in the 1990s and early 2000s at the Republic Hall of the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology (KNUST), Kumasi, we could afford to use electric stoves to cook with challenges.
My experience with my grandmother, Cecilia Quayson, roasting corn with firewood at an early age, taught me that there is or are unpleasant sides to the use of firewood; one might get hurt in the process of using it and there are hazards with the smoke that firewood emits.
In all these complexities between the novel versus the obsolete, the sophisticated versus archaic, the most crucial question that confronts mankind is that should there be a global natural disaster along the magnitude of Noah’s Ark, which of these materials and technologies can humanity quickly fall on to survive; firewood or LPG?
In any case, the Deoxyribonucleic Acid (DNA) is semi-conservative for a good reason. Though the reason is elusive, the lesson from it –maintaining some of the old– is glaring.
Frank Seth Johnson,
Former lecturer, UDS Tamale (Nyankpala Campus);
E-mail: patrickhenrymensah918@gmail.com
