My beef with scholars, con men and dance music
Our culture of living a lie and putting up appearances threatens to saddle Ghana with future generations of popcorn personalities pretending to be what they are not.
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If we insist on living this big, fat lie, other nations which are nursing citizenries of creative and innovative minds in order to continually break new grounds in discovery, invention and original thinking; will stay ahead of us all the time.
It may earn us loads of resentment and even insults, but we have a patriotic duty to stop them dead in their tracks before it is too late, those gate-crashers in the world of hard-won accomplishment, whose pretence threatens to dilute the quality and integrity of our human resource capital and drop the bar of excellence lower than the soles of our feet.
Titles and descriptions
In Ghana today, many people bearing titles and descriptions such as “businessman”, “Dr”, “CEO”, “Prophet”, “Managing Director”, “celebrity”, “expert”, “bishop” and so on, are anything but any of these.
Traditional highlife is doing just fine in Ghana, and so is some of the hip life music on offer, but the same cannot be said of other emerging genres which many radio stations and disc jockeys in the country seem to be rather unduly obsessed with.
What is supposed to be rap music is usually an uninspiring concoction of vulgar pidgin, Akan and some English of sorts, delivered in a rather forced baritone. The beat tends to be “one-way”, the lyrics rhythmically uninspiring and often rendered totally meaningless by the use of ill-fitting words at the end of lines to make them rhyme “by force.”
The vigorous and erratic kangaroo–like hopping and prancing about, the obscene thrusting of near-naked torsos, the gyrating hips and heaving, trembling bums , the wild thrashing about of the limbs like agitated octopuses and the side to side swinging of heads like praying mantises in their element, don’t constitute my idea of dancing, old chap.
Azonto
The last time I advanced my opinion about the state of our dance and music, some very smart fellow run off and invented a dance called Azonto and made sure it got some mention in the international media as a great dance from Ghana which is taking the globe by storm. I recall wondering whether Ghanaians really believed that!
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The media and arts and entertainment critics in particular might consider beginning to challenge the present generation of Ghanaian stage artistes to raise the bar of excellence just a bit higher.
Someone fancies public recognition as a scholar and an intellectual, but neglects to take the painful but necessary and ultimately rewarding path that leads to scholarship. All the same, he is a scholar and an intellectual in one swell swoop because he says so and who is to contradict him?
If people who are so inclined investigated the rigorous personal discipline and extended years of extremely hard work and gruelling academic study that lead to a PhD in the best universities, they might think twice about monkeying around with the meaning of scholarship.
Quoting Western scholars
Knowledge is universal of course, and that means aspiring African scholars will have to continue to study, cite and quote Western scholars if their work is to be accepted as true work of scholarship for the award of degrees and for publication.
It is a fact of history that now appears to have intellectually enslaved African scholars to the point where we fear to question long-held and existing philosophical and academic arguments and assumptions espoused by Western scholars over the centuries
Read newspapers, books and magazines from across Africa and you will notice how African writers and scholars are always copiously quoting Western thinkers, philosophers and scholars to impress others about their own outstanding scholarship.
There appears to be an acute shortage of Africans ever worthy of quote, except perhaps for occasional references to Africans such as Mandela and Westerners of African decent such as Martin Luther King, Marcus Garvey and a few others.
If African scholars, real or only self-perceived, keep quoting only Western scholars and thinkers as frequently and as copiously as they do, without generating creative ideas of their own which can add to universal knowledge, who is to take responsibility for generating new perspectives on the ideas they keep quoting?
Someone wants to be an evangelist, a truly holy man of the hallowed pulpit and what does he do? Does he do a triple check to establish that he does indeed have a divine calling? Does he then set out to go through the many years of pastoral training that every true minister of the gospel must undergo?
Not on your life. He just jumps into some clerical robes brandishing an obese Bible and hey presto, he is a bishop straightaway. The media immediately substitute the honourable title of bishop for the words “swindling pervert” and report his activities in headlines that do great injustice to the integrity of Ghana’s clergy.
Originality in the various creative pursuits of our society is all but dead, if it ever lived at all. There is total obsession with imitating and copying everything with a Western label on it: The football club in Ghana today that does not bear the name of an English League club instead of a Ghanaian name, is perhaps the exception.
Ghanaian and Nigerian movies pack so much pornography, violence and other features of Western movies. To make Africa’s propensity for imitation and copying of all and everything complete, the industry in Nigeria has to be Nollywood and that in Ghana Ghalleywood. You cannot help asking what embarrassing nonsense all this is.
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On and off stage, from earrings, sunglasses, singing voice mode, hand gestures, almost every young musician in Ghana is trying to look and sound every bit like the gangster rapper from the Bronx.