26 July 2001, 823 words
In April this year, I went to Ghana to judge the 2001 Commonwealth Writers Prize. This was the second and last of two years serving as a regional judge. Last year, the judging had been held in New Delhi, and I thought it fortuitous that, in the two years I served, I was able to visit Trinidad's two main ancestral continents.
Accra was more difficult to get a sense of than New Delhi, although the latter city is far bigger and more complex. This had nothing to do with my being of Indian descent and so having some "instinctive" connection with Indians: as I wrote last year, visiting India only confirmed for me that I was not Indian. But I was able to get some insight into that society simply because the Indians had been far more forthcoming, and more curious, than the Ghanaians. The latter, though amiable, are quite formal people. India also had more and better newspapers.
The main barrier, however, was that I wasn't able to observe how Ghanaian men and women interacted. If you're going to be in a country for only a short time, this is a good way to get some insight into the society's culture. But, in Accra, I hardly saw any couples out in public. The men walked in their own groups, and the women walked alone or in twosomes.
Later, when I asked one of the local hosts, a literature professor and poet, why this was, he laughed as though he didn't quite understand my question. But he admitted that going out was not a regular habit, partly because it was expensive. Couples generally preferred to stay at home, he said. Perhaps so, but it was clear that women have little or no formal power in Ghana.
At the opening ceremony for the Prize, the Education Minister, a woman, was the only one at the head table who did not give a speech. The Ghanaian women I spoke to were all very reserved and hardly even looked me in the face. (Indian women, by contrast, had flirted with me shamelessly.) Even the few prostitutes in the Golden Tulip hotel ignored me.
Just observing the prostitutes was, however, instructive. Most of them were in their late 20s, early 30s - old for that profession - and not especially attractive. This implied that the young and good-looking females in Ghana have no problem getting men to take care of them. Certainly, for well-off men at least, having wife and girlfriend(s) seemed to be a normal practice.
Later that week, I read a report in a local newspaper about the perennial problem of male teachers having sex with their female students. The head of the Ghanaian teaching association described this as "embarrassing", which I found an interesting choice of adjective. (Other teaching problems listed were laziness, absenteeism and drunkenness.) The only area in which women seemed to be prominent were on local TV magazine shows, where the hosts, news presenters and fitness instructors were nearly all female.
Economists have long noted a strong correlation between a country's economic development and the status of its women. So the traditional attitude towards females is a key stumbling-block to Africa's advancement. In Ghana, women have made some progress mostly because of the legacy of the former colonial rulers. The British set up an all-girls' college on the Cape Coast which still produces most of the country's top female scholars. They also built the University of Ghana.
But intellectual life in Ghana, though intense, is limited. At various functions arranged by the Commonwealth Foundation, where the winning authors did readings, the members of the local writers association inserted themselves into the program, to read mostly poetry. Their poems, with few exceptions, were extraordinarily bad. Africa had had the lowest number of entries for the 2001 Commonwealth Prize: 19, as compared to 70-100 each from Eurasia, Caribbean/Canada, and South East Asia/South Pacific. And nearly all 19 entries were from South Africa, which is just about the only African nation with its own publishing firms.
At the G-8 summit last week, the industrialised nations accepted the Millennium Action Plan for African recovery. The main points of this plan, the brainchild of South African president Thabo Mbeki, are deepening democracy, respecting human rights, investing in health and education, implementing free trade and boosting new technologies. The plan, endorsed by the Organisation of African Unity, suggests that African leaders are finally beginning to realise that the formula suggested by their former rulers was, to quote The Economist, "not so much neo-colonial bullying as the rules of a globalised economy".
Unfortunately, there are still many Africans who, rather than taking responsibility for their countries' backward condition, prefer to demand compensation from the developed world for past wrongs. Reparations will, in fact, be the subject of the Emancipation Support Committee's feature lecture next week. What a surprise.
Copyright ©2002 Kevin Baldeosingh