Are The Beautyful Ones Still Not Yet Born?

Dear Ayi Kwei Armah,

I’m gasping for breath. My legs are wobbling, and my hands can’t even write well. My mind is refusing to let the ideas flow on the paper that’s why my hands are shaking. But I have to gather all the courage and the momentum and my last breath to write all this important letter to you.

Sorry, let me pause here to take a cup of my green tea. It’s not Ghanaian made. It’s a foreign tea brand. Since the time the baton was handed over to the leaders after your generation, they have not added anything to the raw materials. We continue to export our raw materials and we sit with our arms in between our legs waiting for the “white man” to turn it into a finished product and sell it back to us at an exorbitant price. We don’t have any bargaining power over the cocoa that Tetteh Quarshie brought to us from Fernando Po. Although we are the second producer of cocoa, we can’t even give our farmers decent money for their sweat. They’re sobbing. The majority of the extension officers Ghana trained, I learnt, have also left for China. China! Yes. You read right. Anyway, I have just finished drinking the cup of my green tea.

Back to the substantive subject of my letter.

You wrote your jaw-dropping, all-important novel just after Ghana attained the so-called political freedom, what most people call “independence”, but I think we are not. Just camouflage. Anyway, you addressed so many urgent questions in your novel that was stylistically and aptly written metaphorically. I never dropped it down until I consumed every page of your book.

You addressed how Ghana had denigrated into a den of corrupt country and everyone wanted to have his share of the national pie through dubious means. I’m sorry to report to you that the menace you wrote about more than four decades ago has quadrupled if not more than that. We do not care for each other anymore. We now even embezzle the country’s funds in broad daylight. Hmmm. Accountability has broken down.

You wrote about how the wife of the “man” who hurled invectives at him when he refused to take “the brown envelope”. As you stated that his wife rather than highly praising him sarcastically refers to him as a “Chichidodo”, a bird that hates excrement but feeds on maggots. But another man in the same office takes it. Well, I’m sad to also inform you that not only do the wives engage in corrupt behaviours but they have even surpassed the men in making sure that they are in the “real business” of engaging in bribery and corruption itself. As our elders say, in the chest of a woman, is meekness, soberness, uprightness and a feeble heart. However, the modern-day chest of a woman is brooding vipers and spewing venom. The aphorism that “what a man can do, the woman can even do better”. I can safely say that what a corrupt man can do, the corrupt woman can do even better.

Prof Ayi Kwei Armah, I hope you’re still here to witness the deteriorating nature of our society. Whatever your contemporaries warned us about are been done today.

Our culture! Hmmm… It’s nothing good to also write home about. The values our ancestors held in high esteem have been muddied. There is no respect for the elderly anymore. Oh, let me remind you that we now have what we call social media. There wasn’t social media when you wrote your novel in the 1960s. While others are making it to advance their economies, we have turned it into a hub of insults and mockery, though few Ghanaians are using it to promote some social interventions.

At the end of your book, you hoped that things will get better, although you confessed that there is no indication of any present efforts to help prepare for a better future for independent Africans. It seems you were a prophet, actually, there is no indication sixty years on.

I hope this letter gets to you as soon as possible.

Concerned Citizen,

Kwaku Agyei.