By Banji Ojewale
It’s a Sunday morning in May 2024 in downtown Accra, capital of Ghana. I’m in a Church auditorium. Strangely for an African Pentecostal assembly, there are subdued acoustics. The preacher’s message is electronically transmitted. But it is solemnly controlled to stay indoors.
Later, I find myself in the city’s busy streets.
I’m challenged by very long, snaky metallic lines glistening under the sun.
Motorists appear horn-shy. I can only hear creaking bursts of engines
responding to traffic lights. There are even no flights of tempers or accidents
to scuttle the scorching silence everywhere.
Would dusk make a difference?
It doesn’t, as I learn on Monday night. It’s
eerie evening at Daakuman and Bubuashi, swarming city settlements. For a
metropolis known over the generations for its boisterous akpeteshi (ogogoro)
joints and beer parlors, there’s an uncommon harrowing hush in the air. I look
around. There are customers, alright. However, they have no makeshift kpanlogo
implements to knock together to produce something to sway you. Nor is there
heavy jukebox music to lift them from their seats. The DJs are not at work,
either, their clamorous tools outlawed and idle. The zones’ red bulbs are alive
to signal business is on. Soundless and inactive business.
What’s it like at Bukom Square, cradle of some
of the best of Ghana’s soccer stars and boxing greats? I can’t make it there.
But it would be ineffable funereal quiescence there, and at Swalaba, Salaga
Market and James Town (Mantse Agbonaa), all aboriginal neighbouring communities.
These are diehard custodians of culture. It has been claimed that their
traditional songs and drumming during festivals stir unborn babies to gyrations
in the womb. So, as they step into the world as neonates, they are already
conversant with the right dance steps. Now, for one month what’s norm between
society, pregnant women and the living beings in their bumps, there’s a lid on music…
Welcome to Accra, where for the whole month of
May 2024, through to early June 2024, the authorities have decreed that the city
must be in the grim grip of graveyard silence. There should be noise abatement.
The Accra Metropolitan Assembly, AMA, released a statement announcing the ‘’ban
on drumming and noise-making in Accra…from May 6th to June 6th
2024.’’ The Assembly outlined specific guidelines ‘’aimed at maintaining peace,
harmony, and national security during the ban period, noting that religious
houses are required to conduct their activities solely within their premises,’’
without placement of loudspeakers outside their buildings. “Additionally,’’ AMA
says, ‘’roadside evangelism activities are to be suspended during this period,
while the Ga Traditional Council, (GTC), has imposed a ban on funeral rites and
related activities.’’
A task force of AMA’s personnel, Ghana Police Service and representatives from
the city’s Traditional Councils has been equipped to enforce Accra’s clatter
closure.
The ban is said to be in preparation for the
annual Homowo festival of the Ga people, the natives of the capital. They need
the intervention of the gods of the land over the ebbing fortunes of the
natives.
Ga, their language, is going into extinction. It
has been boxed into a minority in its own territory. Twi has become the
dominant communicative tool in Accra. Even the Gas have learned to conduct
business in Makola, Accra’s commercial hub, in Twi. Transactions there are in
the Akan dialect of Twi. Most traders at Makola are Ashanti of Kumasi, Ghana’s
second biggest city. The churches have more congregants in the Twi class than Ga.
Radio-TV stations based in Accra, home of the Ga nation, run chiefly Twi programmes.
In nearly a week of my stay in the Ghanaian capital, I searched in vain for a
feature in the local language on the airwaves.
There were only a precious few I could
communicate with in the language. Where I stayed in a hotel at McCarthy Hill in
the heart of Accra, only one member of the staff warmed my heart with Ga. I ran
into a professor in another hotel, also in Accra. I opened a discussion on Ghana’s
politics with him in Ga. He told me he doesn’t speak the language. He is of the
Ewe stock in the Volta Region of Ghana. He has lived in Accra for years, and
risen to a ranking academic position. But he’s fluent in Twi, which I don’t
speak. In my days as a student at Wesley Grammar School, Odorkor, Accra,
decades back, Ga was the ruling tongue. With my Akan friends, Ga came first
before theirs. We spoke it in tro-tro buses during regular commute. In other
public places and in the homes of Akan schoolmates, it was Ga all through.
So, what’s gone wrong? The prof traces it to
economic power. He told me that over the years the Gas allowed themselves to be
overwhelmed by the influx of migrants who ensured good education for their
offspring, who in turn rose to take over political and economic levers. They
then preyed on their hosts. They seized choice areas of Accra to install
controlling businesses and confined the indigenes to such underdeveloped areas
as Bukom, Swalaba, James Town etc.
Ga language has been sorely affected, faced with
a bleak future. This is fatal, as it is hitting the foundation of the people’s
culture. The next stage is a withering away of the people’s humanity. The
experts say ‘’Language is what makes us human… Language is a vital part of
human connection… Language allows us to share our ideas, thoughts and feelings
with others. It has the power to build societies, but also to tear them down…’’
You lose it, you lose your essence.
Ghana’s founding leader, Osagyefo Dr. Kwame
Nkrumah understood these dynamics. He tied the citizens’ development to their
cultural and educational emancipation. Starting with free education for all,
irrespective of your nationality, class or gender, including instituting
Workers’ College, he sparked a revolution towards freeing Ghana from ignorance
and internal economic serfdom. Unfortunately, local capitalist lords and
military conspirators allowed themselves to be suborned by their foreign principals
to overthrow Nkrumah and stop his noble work for Ghana and Africa. None of
those who came after him in office has attempted taking after him. The
charismatic Jerry John Rawlings didn’t go the whole length. He should have
rehabilitated Nkrumah’s Convention Peoples Party, CPP, and followed the
founding president’s ideological path, instead of his ill-fated romance with National
Democratic Congress, NDC.
This year Ghana is going to the poll again. What
the electoral body calls ‘limited’ voters’ registration exercise was on when I
visited. There’s a noisy preparation for the election on December 7, 2024. I
watched TV brickbats of spokesmen for the two dominant parties. There’s no
serious talk on how to stop the assault on a nation’s linguistic identity. The
only engagement is a local council’s forlorn and feeble fetish asking for a culture
of silence to appease deities who have remained silent while those who worship
them are dying silently.
*Ojewale, an author and
journalist, has just returned from Accra, Ghana.
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