Spanning 250 pages, ‘’Proudly Ghanaian: Our Gold Still Glitters’’ is a book that has been curated into six sections, yielding 55 delightful short episodes. Check Sectional Titles: Our Fingerprints, Our Nightmares, DC Kwame Kwakye, Travel and See, and Politics (Acheampong Weed). The final section is dubbed Our Black Stars which betrays the author’s own passion for sports.

Prof. Kwesi Yankah’s latest comes after, Pen at Risk: Spilling My Little Beans, which is largely biographical. Before then was Beyond the Political Spider, which is heavy on scholarship in the humanities. ’Proudly Ghanaian’ therefore, can be cited as the least political of Yankah’s recent works. While he takes his foot off the political pedal, lovers of politics will still be satiated with narratives on Kwame Nkrumah, press freedom and the contemporary political situation. Coming out after he has left active office, can we call this new book a precussor to the renaissance of Yankah’s writings?

The book focuses on Ghanaian identity, Ghanaian idiosyncrasies and the Ghanaian pride. From page to page, and irrespective of subject matter, the Kwesi Yankah quintessence is stamped all over, ie. language power, self-denigration, humour and counter-intuitive insight. Erudition is vested in matters high and low. The thing about Yankah is that the banal, the grave, the mundane, the sacred, the sensational, the unspeakable are all given eloquent expression in his choice of themes to confront.

Seamlessly, he juxtaposes the Frivolous by the Serious. Out of the many issues confronting the nation state Ghana, who would have thought  something as frivolous as ‘yemuadie’ would gain attention in the national space? It is because much as it is a local favorite, ofals cost Ghana more than 200 million dollars a year to import. But see how Yankah plays with the packaging of this great meal.   

Hear him: “I finally met my “meeter” last Wednesday: Green soup (abunuabunu) with tender Yemuadie tossed center-stage, and guarded by two Cape Coast crabs. Waiting at the touchline were organic grasscutter spare parts conveyed by express from Mankesim, and a drizzle of Agona mushrooms. In attendance were five bashful snails from Mensakrom almost shivering without their winter coat. Within a sea of abunuabunu soup, the award-winning bowl before me could be labeled as “Yemuadie and Friends Ltd.”

Then Kwesi Yankah waxes analytical, technical even: “Yemuadie” is a bowl of assorted livestock entrails: liver, bladder, kidney, gizzard, lungs, etc. But these are often standalones and less appealing until collectively wrapped in a perforated stomach wall, known in Ghana as “towel.” A little strip of small intestines is carefully wound around the loose pack, terminating in a diminutive knot. Firm and secure, the Yemuadie wrap is now sealed and stamped, ready for the market.”

In ’Proudly Ghanaian,’’ the author’s ability to link the ordinary personal story to the national agenda is admirable. At a state event held in 1993, he met a broken woman, Asantewa, who was injured during an assassination attempt on Kwame Nkrumah in 1963.  This is how he concludes his account: ‘’Asantewa wept and tottered her way towards the Tema Station. She was hobbling towards the 4th Republic. To those fighting over Nkrumah’s heritage: Asantewa’s plight is something to be scrambled for.”

May I  now turn to the temporal scope of this new book. The chapters cover issues as current as galamsey, past-studentism and the emerging dominance of the female gender in leadership and enrolment across Ghana’s universities. Ace Ankomah’s domestic brood of lawyers receives inspiring mention, so does former IGP  Dampare’s roadside exploits with roasted plantains.

What caught me gulping and yearning for more were themes that encapsulate past years. It is one thing hearing about a national episode from afar; and another thing getting a ringside account. For such articles, ‘Proudly Ghanaian’ is such an eye-opener! Covering articles written over a span of 40 years, from 1980s till 2023, the reader is given invaluable access to past and contemporary issues, enabling comparative perspectives.  

Such issues include public blurts by the famous DC Kwame Kwakye, Kwame Nkrumah’s celebrated district commissioner whose peculiar English affirmed his grassroots image as a verandah boy, and facilitated access to infrastructure resources in his district. Also significant were innovative uniforms for JSS students introduced by Madam Aanaa Enin, in charge of education under the PNDC. But one cannot leave out the Pork Show event (1986) and local reactions to the killing of Burkina Faso’s Capt Thomas Sankara, a great pal of Ghana’s leader JJ Rawlings.

In the article, Do You Miss Ghana?, the writer cleverly performs a double entendre on the title to also refer to a decades-old crisis facing the nation’s beauty contests. The piece explores the vexatious issue of - s3bi taflatse - the body quality of our ladies who have participated in beauty pageants since the nation gained independence. I identify the thesis statement of that article as follows: ‘’Take a close look at Miss Ghana in the past 8 or so years, and juxtapose them with the portrait of Miss Monica Amekoafia of 1957, and see how far we have travelled the road of independence; from buxom bodies to lean and hungry contours.’’

This article was written in 1997, at the height of the Embassy Double Do Series. My curiosity then led to the following  research question. At what point in our Republic, did the supposed decline in natural beauty of our contestants start? Here again, I consulted the scriptures according to Kwesi Yankah. The author does not provide field data but rather enriches scholarship with anecdotal evidence to advance a theory.  

‘’No wonder the late General Afrifa of the ruling National Liberation Council (then a Brigadier) remarked in 1967 after the Miss Ghana contest, that if he had known of the low quality of beauties to be paraded that year, he would have brought along his grandmother”

TO BE CONTINUED

kyankah@ashesi.edu.gh