What the Volta Region Means to Me

About five years ago, I met a middle-aged African-American woman who had adopted the township and people of the Nkwanta district of the Volta Region of Ghana as her kin. We had met at the Schomburg Library for Research in Black Culture, billed as housing the single largest collection of literature and artifacts on African people across the globe. The library, a branch of the behemoth New York Public Library (NYPL) system, is located in New York City's Harlem quarter. Harlem was also once described as having the largest urban concentration of African people outside of either Ibadan or Lagos, Nigeria. The latter description may well be an exaggeration; however, cast in terms of America's race-conscious society and the politics of numbers vis-à-vis sectional empowerment, the pride subtending its import cannot be taken lightly.

Anyway, I was at the Schomburg Library in search of material for my book “Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana” (iUniverse.com, 2005). The aforementioned African-American woman had overheard me in a conversation with a check-in desk orderly doubling as a security guard that I was of Ghanaian birth and origin. And beaming with palpable and infectious pride, she introduced herself to me as a Nana…. I forget the name by which she had been inducted into Nkwanta society as a queenmother. She also told me of her American birth name. I was particularly amused when she told me that she had adopted Nkwanta as her home, with even hopes of permanently relocating to Ghana and settling among the people of Nkwanta in the very near future. I was amused because anybody with Akan heritage or familiar with Akan culture knows fully well that the noun/place name of “Nkwanta” simply means “Junction,” and there are, of course, innumerable Nkwantas all over the country. Even more to the point: I was amused precisely because this African-American woman presumed Nkwanta to possess the same unmistakable cache as either Accra or Kumasi, or even Kyebi, where I come from. I, therefore, had to patiently explain to her that unless she could cast the name Nkwanta within a geographical context, she was not likely to encounter very many Ghanaians who would be familiar with the place she was talking about. Then, she tersely and almost bashfully noted that Nkwanta was somewhere in the central part of the Volta Region.

In retrospect, and in the wake of Ghana's most recent general election, I realize now that the reason for my amusement partly had to do with the fact that the stereotypically traditionally introverted political attitude of most of the people of the Volta Region had often prompted me to regard the erstwhile Trans-Volta Togoland as the veritable outhouse of the postcolonial Republic of Ghana. And on the latter score, I mean “outhouse” not in terms of the pejorative or fecal, but decidedly in terms of the self-segregating and near-neurotic, clinically speaking. For whether one agrees with this writer or not, the Volta Region is a veritable sore-thumb in Ghana's political culture. What is tragic about the latter observation is the fact that the rest of the country seems to have resigned itself to a virtual acceptance of pathological Anlo-Ewe nationalism. So much such that writing recently, for instance, under the rather presumptuous title of “Seriously, Why is the NPP Insulting Ghanaians?” (Ghanaweb.com 12/11/08) an impudent Ewe nationalist by the name of Dela Bishop had the temerity to question why the people of Ghana's heartland of the Asante Region had massively voted for the presidential candidate of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP), in much the same manner that the people of the Volta Region had equally massively and shamelessly and almost exclusively voted for the perennial presidential candidate of the Anlo-Ewe-dominated National Democratic Congress (NDC). In other words, for Mr. Dela Bishop (I presume a masculine identity for the writer, although he could well be a woman), it is absolutely normal and only to be expected that ethnic Ewes would vote for one of their own but, somehow, it is rather insolent and outright preposterous for the Akan people of Ghana to politically look keenly towards their collective interests and security within a multi-ethnic Ghanaian polity.

In any case, in the just-concluded Ghanaian general election, it was the people of Nkwanta who maturely and sensibly demonstrated to the rest of the people of the Volta Region that politics is essentially about the greater good of our country at large. For looking at the traditional voting pattern of the Ewe of Ghana, one would think that other than their arch-political kingpin and Mary-Jane-chomping Butcher of Dzelukope, no other Ghanaian leader or political party has done anything worthwhile on the eastern bank of the Volta. This quite curious spectacle may well have informed Mr. Victor Owusu's timeless and incontrovertible observation that the Ewe are an incurably “inward-looking people.” Indeed, the British scholar and literary critic Robert Fraser was to make the same observation regarding the poetry of the two leading neo-oral Ewe practitioners of the trade, namely, Professors Kofi Awoonor and Kofi Anyidoho.

According to Mr. Fraser, both Awoonor and Anyidoho write with such a parochial literary canvass that it is almost as if these poets want their readers believe that the geopolitical landscape of Ghana were too large to be organically articulated in their several volumes of poetry. In other words, according to Mr. Fraser, the Volta Ewe and their strip-mall of a province exclusively constitutes the entire worldview of these otherwise fairly fine poets.

Anyway, recently, a Canadian professor in the process of putting together a literary compendium of some sort e-mailed me with a quite tempting request that I contribute a summative essay on the life and literature of Professor Kofi Awoonor, my late father's old friend. I had to promptly decline the request without any reservations whatsoever. I did not even bother to e-mail back my refusal; I strongly felt that it was not both worth the time and polite effort entailed.

Maybe the people of Nkwanta-South would take a creative and constructive electoral cue from their Nkwanta-North relatives by voting massively for the presidential candidate of the ruling New Patriotic Party, Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, whose governing party has indisputably done far more for the people of the Volta Region than the latter's own mafia kingpin, Dzelukope Jato, did in two decades.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is the author of “Ghanaian Politics Today” (Atumpan Publications/lulu.com, 2008) and “Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana” (iUniverse.com, 2005). E-mail: [email protected].