Our Obsession with Etiological Mythology

I have refrained from making any critical comments or observations in the wake of the widely reported and putatively untimely death of Mr. Kwadwo Asare Baffuor Acheampong (alias KABA) because, generally speaking, Ghanaians have this pathologically infantile, morally regressive and emotionally morbid urge to outdo one another with a profusion of vacuous, albeit deafening, self-serving tributes and expressions of nauseatingly rehearsed commiseration anytime that the passing of the rich and famous is announced. Generally, we love the dead in ways that scandalize the living.

I have refrained from making any public comments, other than the brief remark that I made on the Atlanta-based Klasik Radio a week ago, when the host our political-talk program, hosted by Mr. Quaison (aka Dady Kay), brought the passing of KABA to my attention on-air. Other than the onetime early morning tune-in by my wife on her I-Phone, I never listened to the program reportedly hosted by the deceased broadcast journalist. And though it was quite memorable, I don’t recall any particular details of the contents of the program on this day, except for my remark that the host’s accent sounded like a cross between Ga and Akuapem-Twi.

Anyway, we witnessed the same scandalous fit of “funerary dramaturgy” in the wake of the passing of the former Multimedia/Joy-Fm’s “Super Morning Show” who, at the time of his equally remarked untimely passing, was a big-time BBC-World Service’s news anchor, Mr. Komla Dumor, a Legon- and Harvard-educated graduate of sociology and government, respectively, several years ago. At the time, I wrote and published a couple of opinion pieces about Mr. Dumor, one of which was picked up by a BBC website, because I had gotten to know the former Super Morning Show host through an E-mail spat that we had, largely provoked by Mr. Dumor in response to a matter-of-factly criticism that I had made about his appreciation of the objective intent of the bestselling essay collection authored by Mr. Thomas L. Friedman, the New York Times’s columnist, titled Flat World.

Mr. Dumor would caustically and vitriolically attack me, a “nobody” community college instructor, for presuming to impugn the impeccable integrity of his Ivy-League persona and temperament. I, being an avid lover of a good fight, had not hesitated to return this favor of vitriol. It was a spat that I wish had not occurred; but it was also one that I have never regretted, if also because I was firmly convinced that Mr. Dumor was imperiously using a wrongful interpretation of Mr. Friedman’s “Flat World” as a handy cudgel to unfairly attack Ghanaian and other Third-World leaders and entrepreneurs.

Not surprisingly, since the tragic passing of Mr. Acheampong, at the youthful age of 37, I have not heard a single mention of the name of Mr. Dumor, whose memory appears to have been effectively immortalized by an award established by the management of BBC-World Service in his name for promising young African journalists on the continent. At any rate, it clearly looks as if Ghanaians are uniquely afflicted with the bug of “funerary bingeing.” We weep our hearts and eyes out until our tears and snot begin to turn into blood, and then we quickly move on to the next “tragic” and “untimely” death.

Yesterday, it was the turn of Komla Dumor. Today, it is the turn of KABA. And tomorrow…. Well, as the great English metaphysical poet Mr. John Donne once wrote: “Do not ask for whom the bell tolls.” We are, indeed, a funny lot as Ghanaians. When Mr. Dumor died, some among us were quick to blame the dead man’s passing on his “slave-master bosses” at Bush House, the old BBC-World Service headquarters. And now, in the wake of the passing of KABA, two female primetime hosts and/or anchors of the Multimedia stables, we have just learned, have been summarily fired by corporate executives for unprofessionally insinuating that their very popular colleague and longtime host of the late afternoon political-talk program “Ekosii Sen?” (roughly translated as “How Did It Go?”) had been voodoo-/juju-jinxed by one of his own colleagues, an unnamed woman.

That it is a couple of women, publicly identified as Ms. Afia Pokuaa and Ms. Ohemaa Woyoje (See “Multimedia Sacks Afia Pokuaa, Ohemaa Woyeje”¹ GhanaCrusader.com / Ghanaweb.com 11/24/17), who are tripping in the wake of a death that has reportedly been authoritatively confirmed to have been brought on or caused by a diabetic insulin imbalance, is all the more to be pitied. As a people, we seem too psychologically retarded for comfort.

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs

1 Just as I was finishing up this article, another headline news item appeared on Ghanaweb.com denying the firing of Ms. Afia Pokuaa (See “I Haven’t Been Sacked from Multimedia – Afia Pokuaa” Ghanaweb.com 11/25/17).

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
November 24, 2017
E-mail: [email protected]