Sun, 25 Oct 2026 Feature Article

Part 9 - The Unfinished Flag: Reclaiming Ghana, From The Gold Coast to Self-Reliance

The Mindset Problem

A Test You Can Take Without Leaving Your Chair

I promised you a small test, so here it is. Start wide, on a busy market on an ordinary morning. Move in past the traders and the noise until the camera finds a single table.

On it sit three objects: a bag of rice, a school exercise book, and a product with a label you read before you read its name.

Don’t answer yet. I want you to notice something first. Before you decided anything about each object, a small voice in you already had an opinion. That voice is the subject of this part.

What I Mean by “Mindset”

In Part 1, I called the colonial mindset a habit of the mind — the reflex that says the real thing, the good thing and the serious thing come from somewhere else.

Let me make it less abstract. We have already met it in this series.

It was in Governor Hodgson’s question about the Golden Stool, when he treated a nation’s soul as a seat he was entitled to. It was in the Bond of 1844, where local custom was to be shaped to fit another people’s law. Neither was only a policy. Each was an assumption about whose way of seeing the world counts.

The crucial thing is this: a mindset is not a character flaw. It is what centuries of being told “not yours, not good enough, not serious” leave behind, and it can survive long after the person who said it has left. You do not need to be ashamed of having it. You do need to notice it.

Test One: The Language

Look at the exercise book. For generations, English has been the key to opportunity in Ghana’s classrooms. That is exactly what is being reconsidered now. In late 2025, the Education Minister directed the Ghana Education Service to make mother‑tongue instruction mandatory in basic schools. Officials framed the move partly as cultural empowerment, saying English was a colonial inheritance and it was time to reconnect education with identity.

The picture is more nuanced than the headlines suggested. Social media posts claimed English had been abolished as a language of instruction, and fact‑checkers called that false. The policy directive is confined to Kindergarten up to Primary 3. The Ministry later spelled out the details: Ghanaian languages would be the main medium of instruction from Kindergarten to Primary Three, with both Ghanaian languages and English used from Primary Four to Six — a bilingual approach meant to support a smooth transition to higher levels where English plays a larger role.

The challenge is practical. Ghana has more than 70 languages, about 11 of them officially recognised for education and broadcasting, and most textbooks are written in English. Success depends on teacher training, learning materials and political will.

I will not tell you the policy is right or wrong. People who care deeply about Ghanaian children disagree about it. What I will tell you is that the debate itself is the mindset question in the open. For the first time in a long while, we are asking out loud: in which language should a child be allowed to understand?

Micro‑Story: The Right Answer in the Wrong Language

The scene below is reconstructed. The child is invented, but the situation will feel familiar to many readers.

Picture a girl in a classroom, about eight years old, with her hand halfway up.

She knows the answer, and she knows it properly. She worked it out at home, explaining it to her little brother in the language they speak at the dinner table.

But the question was asked in English, and she is not sure of the word for the thing she wants to say. She holds her hand there, in between, and watches the moment pass. The teacher calls on someone else.

She puts her hand down. She does not decide I am not clever. She decides something quieter and more dangerous: what I know does not count until it sounds like theirs.

That small decision, repeated thousands of times, is how a mindset gets built.

Test Two: The Rice

Now look at the bag of rice, because this one is where I changed my own mind.

The numbers are plain. At the end of 2024, Ghana’s rice demand was estimated at 1.5 million tonnes, while local production hovered around 650,000 tonnes. Ghana spent more than GH¢36.5 billion importing food in 2025, according to the Ghana Statistical Service, with rice, sugar, frozen chicken and cereals among the leading items.

It would be easy to say: We prefer foreign rice because of a colonial mindset. I wanted to write that sentence. Then I read the price list.

As of early 2025, a 25kg bag of Thai fragrant rice averaged GH¢690, Vietnamese rice sold at GH¢490, and local long‑grain rice at GH¢535. The same report points to reasons beyond preference: quality concerns, irregular supply and distribution challenges continue to undermine local rice competitiveness.

Think about what that means. A mother choosing between bags is not performing a colonial reflex. She is doing arithmetic and trying to feed a family. Sometimes the imported bag is cheaper, sometimes it is cleaner, and sometimes it is simply there when the local one is not.

This is the most important correction I can offer in this whole series: do not mistake a market problem for a mindset problem. If we blame a shopper’s psychology for what is really a failure of irrigation, milling and distribution, we insult the shopper and let the real problem off the hook.

What Is Being Tried

There are public efforts to close this gap, and I will describe them without grading them.

The government launched the Feed Ghana Programme in April 2025, aimed at increasing food production, promoting modern farming and improving infrastructure. At the launch, the President said Ghana imports nearly $400 million worth of chicken every year. By October 2026, an official reported progress: maize production had exceeded national consumption, rice sufficiency had risen from 42 to 56 percent, and poultry sufficiency from five to 21 percent over the past 17 months. Those are government figures, and independent verification matters.

The Agriculture Minister was candid about the limits. He said Ghana was not yet in a position to ban rice imports because local production still fell well short of demand, and that the programme aims for rice self‑sufficiency by 2028. One poultry farmer quoted in coverage of the plan voiced cautious hope, noting that Ghanaians had heard grand plans before. I think she is right to wait for results, and the results will be what settles it.

Test Three: The Label

The third object on our table is the product with the label.

I have no statistics for this one, and I will not invent any. I will only ask you a question to answer privately: when two things are equal in price and quality, which do you trust first — the one with a foreign name or the one made down the road? Then ask yourself why.

If your answer is “the foreign one,” do not feel guilty. Ask where the instinct came from. Ask who taught you, and what they gained.

The Other Side of the Same Disease

Here is the twist I owe you, because a one‑sided argument would betray this series.

The opposite reflex is just as unhealthy. If we reject something only because it is foreign, we have not freed our minds. We have only reversed the arrow. A person who refuses good medicine because it was developed abroad, or good ideas because they arrived in English, is still letting colonialism decide.

Real reclamation is not a boycott. It is choice. It is being able to take what serves us from anywhere, and to keep what is ours without apology — because we decided, not because someone told us what to think.

My Own Confession

I have been avoiding this one. I have written nine parts of this series in English. I have leaned on archives compiled by the same administrations I am criticising. When I reached for a dramatic word, it came to me in a colonial language first.

I do not say that to look humble. I say it because it is true, and because it shows how deep this goes. If a writer who has spent months thinking about the colonial mindset still catches it in his own sentences, then none of us is outside it.

That is not a reason for despair. It is a reason for patience — with ourselves and with each other. A habit that took centuries to form will not vanish in a speech or a hashtag.

What This Teaches Us

Notice before you judge. The first step is simply catching the reflex: the flinch before the foreign label, the apology before the local name.

Separate mindset from market. Many choices that look like prejudice are really about price, quality and supply. Fix the system and the habit often follows.

Choose, don’t reject. The aim is not a country that refuses everything foreign. It is a country confident enough to choose.

Next Time

For nine parts, I have asked you to look backward and inward. I have asked questions more than I have offered answers.

I promised you something different for the end: a blueprint, practical and unglamorous, with steps a student, a farmer, a teacher or a minister could actually take.

And I promised that a certain date would come back one last time.

In Part 10: The Blueprint of Reclamation, we finish what the Bond of 1844 started.

A Note on Sources and Method

Dates and events in this series come from the historical record. Contemporary policy figures, such as those on education and food production, come from government statements and news reports and are attributed where relevant. This series takes no side between political parties. Scenes marked as reconstructed, such as the girl in the classroom, are written to carry feeling, not to claim documentation. Corrections from readers are welcome.

Sources and further reading:

Ghanaian Times / AllAfrica, “French, Arabic and Chinese remain optional subjects, Education Ministry clarifies” (August 2026)
Dubawa Ghana and GhanaFact, fact‑checks on the mother‑tongue instruction policy (2025 and 2026)
Ghana Statistical Service, Annual International Merchandise Trade Statistics Report, as reported by Graphic Online (2026)
USDA Grain and Feed Annual 2025, as reported by Citi Newsroom
Ghana News Agency, “Feed Ghana Programme cuts food import dependence” (October 2026)
Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Decolonising the Mind (1986)
Kwame Nkrumah, Consciencism (1964)
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (1952)

Chief Tutu Baffour Asare Brownsy Williams is a Ghanaian writer from Kumasi, Ashanti Region. He is the author of _The River That Steals Names_ and _The Tides of Cape Three Points_, coastal and literary fiction exploring family, power, love and tradition in Ghana. Founder of Brownsy Silva Company, he . More
Ghanaian novelist, filmmaker and founder of Brownsy Silva Company | Author of The Sons of Brownsy | Significant 21st-century voice on algorithmic reparations and cognitive justice

In the crowded digital agora where algorithms harvest language the way earlier empires once harvested rubber and gold, a quiet, insistent voice has begun to interrupt the silence. Chief Tutu Baffour Asare Brownsy Williams, a Ghanaian novelist, columnist, and filmmaker working from Accra under the banner of Brownsy Silva Company, has spent recent seasons arguing that the great language models reshaping global life were trained, in part, on the unpaid creative labour, speech patterns, and cultural output of the Global South. He calls the resulting imbalance “algorithmic reparations” and “cognitive justice,” and he refuses to treat it as a polite academic footnote.

Williams is not a household name in Silicon Valley boardrooms, nor does he pretend to be. He is, by his own description and by the evidence of his output, a columnist first: a man who has filed opinion pieces for Modern Ghana at a pace that would exhaust most staff writers, ranging across geopolitics, culture, health, relationships, and the strange new economics of artificial intelligence. Beneath the journalism sits a larger architectural project. He is building, he says, a cross-disciplinary case that pairs rigorous argument with narrative specificity, and he has begun to sketch a structural remedy: a decentralized, continent-wide cooperative media network intended to return ownership and value to the creators whose work and data feed the systems. The proposal is deliberately ambitious. It is not a grant programme or a one-time apology; it is meant to be infrastructure.

Born and raised in Ghana, Williams came to storytelling early. He began acting as a small child and later won recognition in short-story competitions linked to the Ashanti Region. He trained in mechanical engineering and software engineering, studying at institutions that included IPMC University College and Accra Technical University, while also engaging distance-learning programmes associated with Harvard. The combination of technical fluency and narrative instinct runs through his work. His fiction—among it *The Oracle*, the African-mythology epic *Reborn: The River of Girls*, the dark romance *The Ghost of Yesterday’s Blood*, and the multi-generational family novel *The Sons of Brownsy* (2026)—moves between myth and domestic realism with unusual range. *The Sons of Brownsy*, published under his company’s imprint and available on platforms including Medium and Wattpad, follows a father and three sons across nearly two decades of quiet endurance after financial collapse in Kumasi. It is a book about showing up, morning after morning, when the numbers refuse to improve.

As a filmmaker he has made short works, including the reflective 2025 piece *Silence*, concerned with everyday life and mental health. Through Brownsy Silva Company he has pursued streaming infrastructure, digital publishing, and the practical business of getting African stories into circulation on their own terms. Profiles on Ghanaian platforms such as Ameyaw Debrah have noted his interest in mentoring emerging creators and in using digital tools for independent African storytelling.

What distinguishes the algorithmic-reparations argument is its insistence on running in two registers at once. Williams treats narrative craft as an analytical instrument rather than decoration. Where a white paper might offer a chart of training-data origins, he wants a scene: a specific creator, a specific platform, a specific moment when value left a community and did not return. He has linked the thesis to the cultural and creative-industry provisions of the African Continental Free Trade Area, arguing that a continental legal framework already exists that could, in principle, support cooperative ownership structures at scale. Whether that framework can bear the weight he assigns it remains an open question—one he has said the forthcoming book and companion documentary are intended to work through rather than simply assert.

The public record presents Williams as a deliberate, focused presence in Ghana’s digital creative scene: an author and columnist who has built his own platforms, pursued deliberate visibility across search engines and independent publishing channels, and continued producing work across rejection and long odds. Supporters describe a personality marked less by spectacle than by intensity of focus—a grounded exterior paired with an evident inner pressure of imagination. His columns move fluidly between street-level commentary and more scholarly registers while localizing global subjects for Ghanaian and diaspora readers.

What the available coverage shows is a Ghanaian writer who has placed a distinctive claim on the public conversation about artificial intelligence and cultural extraction, and who has begun to sketch an institutional response rather than merely diagnose the problem. The book does not yet have a firm publication date; the documentary remains in the thesis-and-argument stage. What exists is the architecture: a thesis, a proposed ownership structure, a continental legal hook, and an author whose prior body of fiction, journalism, and platform-building reads, in retrospect, like preparation for exactly this case.

Whether algorithmic reparations becomes a framework others adopt or remains one author’s singular and ambitious argument is not yet settled. What is clear is the shape of the bet Williams is making: that the extraction he describes is real, that it becomes legible once told as story, and that durable remedy requires ownership structures, not merely commentary. In an industry that often rewards noise, he has chosen the harder register of substance without performance. The ledger, he insists, remains open.Column: Tutu Baffour Brownsy Williams

Disclaimer: "The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect ModernGhana official position. ModernGhana will not be responsible or liable for any inaccurate or incorrect statements in the contributions or columns here." Follow our WhatsApp channel for meaningful stories picked for your day.

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