Who Gets to Define the Ghanaian Family?

When I was younger, my mother told me that my father’s brother was my father too. That her sister was my mother and I needed to address them as such.

My grandmother always differentiated between my mothers by saying “Call your mummy Spintex” or “call your mummy, Tamale”. The distinction was always by location. My mother also told me that the idea of “auntie” “uncle” was abstract. There were also no neat categories, no careful distinctions. No nuclear or extended family. Just family.

So when I went to school and learned words like cousin, nephew, and niece, I was confused. The concepts felt distant, almost foreign. I remember coming home to ask my mother to explain them and she struggled. Not because she didn’t understand relationships, but because our tongue lacked language for these exact words. It would take me until senior high school to fully understand what a cousin was, or what it meant to be a niece or nephew.

My mother, even now, still does not quite understand those words because her tongue was never shaped to name them.

There are many things I would later learn as an adult that felt completely different from what I knew growing up. That I was an individual first, untethered, self-contained. That my neighbour was a stranger. That this was a modern family, imposed by colonialism and the individualistic concept shaped and enforced by neo liberal and capitalist structures. I saw how older people fought to maintain what they knew and had inherited on what a family was.

Today, I find it almost laughable that we, as a nation and continent in extension, are complicit in the colonial rhetoric of “proper family values”. A group of white people have fully sponsored a conference that the Parliament of Ghana is hosting on 6th June 2026 to help us define what “proper family values” are and also tell us how to protect these “values”.

There is nothing wrong with us – as a nation and continent – sitting down to reflect on what our family values are, to preserve them, to name them, and protect them from erasure. What is wrong is white people telling us what those values should be. Clearly their definition of family is different from ours. White people leave their kids to take out loans to pay their college education once they are older, we as Ghanaians and Africans do the opposite. We take out loans to pay our children’s school fees to the highest level of education they can attain. A whole village is responsible for a child in our culture and tradition but it is the opposite in western nations.

Clearly our values and understanding of family are different. Why then are we allowing them to tell us what values are proper and what values aren’t.

Why must we always be instructed? What happened to independence not just as a political project, but as a cultural and intellectual one?

Because identity is not only in flags or country names. It lives in our language, our traditions, our ways of relating to each other. It lives in how we define family and our ability to defend them.

The last time we allowed outsiders to define us, we were told that our ways of worship were evil. We were told that family meant only father, mother, and children.

We were told that our languages were primitive, that intelligence was measured by how well we spoke and wrote their language.

We lost parts of ourselves in the process.
And now, they have returned to tell us what “proper” family values are. As though whatever we have known, whatever we have lived, whatever has sustained us, is somehow not proper enough.

–
Nara Mbabe is a writer and HIV advocate

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