What Animal is Called Ghanaian Cultural Values?

Like Pavlov’s dogs, Ghanaians respond to the ringtone of dicey issues with the mouth-watering bark of cultural values. When an issue like the legalization of homosexuality comes up, we cry in unison that the practice is against our cultural values, and seek to foreclose further discussions on the subject. It is as if the expression “cultural values” is the mantra that invokes justice and the ancestral spirits to our side….the silver bullet and the lynchpin for the crystallization of our logic and the concretization of our reasoning.

What people have failed to discuss is, what constitutes the Ghanaian cultural value. As Socrates once said, people talk so much about things without knowing so much about the things they are talking about. If somebody were to challenge somebody to describe the gist of what constitutes the Ghanaian cultural value, nobody in this country will live up to the challenge. It therefore makes sense that we engage the services of some serious professors of sociology to hobnob to do the hard-nosed job of providing a compendium of cultural values. In the meantime, we can only speculate what will be the content in that yet-to-be published book of values. What are we going to discover therein? And what source materials are we going to read? Are we going to find the anthropological accounts of the fetish priest wearing raffia skirt and dancing to the rhythm of the sacred drums while invoking rains from the sky above? Or are we going to find him invoking curses on the lonely widower he has declared as a witch in the drama before the animated crowd? Is he going to force a confession by ordeal or blame her for the misfortune to come or request a sheep or two from her as a sacrifice to avert the impending doom? Or is he going to declare the paucity of the harvest as a consequence of our failure to return his share of the sacrificial bull? Is he going to perform money rituals with human parts to inspire the youth to lazy around town? Or drown the disabled child in the river after declaring him the child of the river God?

And when this cultural value is expressed in the palace of our kings, isn’t it all about cutting off human heads to accompany dead kings? Or burying a lot of gold to enrich him in the land of far beyond? Aren’t human blood used to purify the sacred stools of the ancestors on festive days? And aren’t these vestal virgins asked to bare their breasts in ritual dance upon reaching their prepubescence? And what about the dead king’s widows? Aren’t they asked to bear the scourge of the trial by ordeal to see whether they have not poisoned the dead king and hastened his journey to the land of far-beyond? For aren’t all these the true expression of our cultural values as we know them?: Crinkum-crancum, horcus porcus, witch-hunting, juju money, widowhood rites, rites of passage, rites of marriage, and other panoply of arrant spectacles?

Let’s further examine the treatment of women in this context of so-called Ghanaian cultural values. Aren’t they mistreated for failure to birth a child after marriage? And aren’t they humiliated daily with adultery masquerading as polygamy? Aren’t they beaten and abused regularly and declared as witches daily? And when it comes to the matter of a dead spouse, compare the widowhood rites of the woman and the widowhood rite of the man to see the difference.

Must I continue to describe our cultural values here to you? Then you will also point out to me where is the value and the culture thereto? Nobody in Ghana has described them, and if we task the sociology professors to describe them, they will not know how to perform the task: Whether to begin from their backyard tribe or start from the time of their migration or start from the founding of the old or new Ghana. Because we are a motley crowd of kingdoms cobbled together by the Brits. We are made of a multitudinous pieces of cultural templates straddling from one end of the country to the next: Different food and different wears and different rituals and different languages and different beliefs. So the state of Ghana has no unitary culture which we can call our own. We have been haphazardly cobbled together as one when we were discrete entities, and so how can we talk of any one unitary set of cultural values?

Before we were cobbled together, we were fighting one another, and after we are cobbled together, we still hate each other. We have not agreed on one language to speak and have rather found uniformity in a foreign language. That language is made to depict our intelligence. We have thrown away our own language and revel in speaking another people’s language. We have jettisoned our clothing and dress like the outsider. We have stopped eating our own food. We no longer marry in our own way. We have burned down our gods who we created in our image and transformed them into demons created in our own image. We have substituted them with that of the white gods who we now regard as our Gods. In our image, we now see the lords of demons in our own old gods. We have changed our names for that of the foreigner. We have preferred the foreigners culture and striven to imitate his style…….

So exactly what is there that is so distinctly a cultural value left for us? The truth is we sold out everything to the foreigner ages ago. We now plant his food in substitution of our own food. We pollute our water bodies to produce his gold. We cut our trees to provide his furniture. We strip naked to satiate his libido and create innovative orgiastic styles for his pleasure. Our kings are reduced to cultural artifacts to entertain him.

And of our religion, we read his book and admire his characters who burn sheep and perform human sacrifices. We accept as true the savior he has dangled before us who died for our sins and rose from his sacrifice and became the god that sanctioned his own sacrifice. He is our born savior who is God who committed adultery with a virgin and then birthed himself into godhood and sacrificed himself to pacify himself and gave us a free pass to sin abundantly and be forgiven incessantly.

To worship this God, we must utter rubbish and go into a trance and stop thinking and dance daily and give a lot of money to his ministers to buy Rolls Royce to deflower virgins and to perform fake miracles.

Therefore we are not us: We have been programmed to obey without question, to live without thinking, to commit to the master’s voice and to become indentured slaves to his wishes, whims and caprices; to be bound by his chains, to purchase his toys, to import his shit, to succumb to his fantasies, and to be miserable servants of his economy without any complaints.

And after doing the unthinkable to kowtow to all his wishes and to acquiesce to his whims and caprices, we soulless and spineless Ghanaians, who have sold our souls to the West and been swallowed into its culture….We living dead, depersonalized morons, enablers of white supremacist culture, heavily indebted nation, clowns, raconteurs, mountebanks and brigands, renegades and lobotomized idiots; we have the ire, bravado, effrontery, idiocy and sheer chicanery to pretend and imagine that we have cultural values? We have gotten drunk beyond Rip Van Winkle within the cultural milieu of the outsider and slept for three score year and seven, and now speaking in tongues about “Ghanaian cultural values”?

And it is not on account of any new-found brainwave or talent or serendipity: It is all because the foreigner has another package called LGBTQ++++ for us to swallow. All at once, a people that have sold off their gods, their language, their food, their rivers, , their brains, their dignity and their selfhood have found their voices and discovered their cultural values and sacred unity to bleat in unison that we abhor gay culture because it is against our cultural values.

We are trying to outgod the foreigner’s God by pretending to have something we lost long ago, just for exactly what purpose? Socrates said, man know thyself and that should mean something substantial to us; and the weaklings and copycats we have become. Because if we stand up to this gay juggernaut and invoke an abstract Ghanaian culture as a cover, we will be swatted like houseflies and vanish into the wind.

There is no Ghanaian culture Bras. Just be quiet la. The white man brought his culture and religion which we have accepted. And it is the same white man asking us to accept LGBTQ+++++++. We should just acquiesce as we have always done. Period!

Dr. Samuel Adjei Sarfo, Esq.
Austin, Texas, USA.