It is no news that some top public officials of the United States of America (US) respect no other country, not even its own allies in the North Atlantic Treaty Organisation (NATO). Yet the fact that the US is one of the two most powerful nations in the world, alongside Russia, should not bar other nations from speaking out when those in the employ of the US insults her.
And the US has insulted Ghana, yet again. That observation is appropriate in the light of the statement issued on June 23, 2017 by the US Embassy of the USA State Department in Accra on travels from Ghana to the US, which statement says about Ghana’s former presidents and current Members of Parliament and royals things the Ghana Embassy of the Foreign Affairs of the Republic of Ghana in Washington DC will not say about US’s current Members of Parliament and former presidents.
In other words, what the US embassy refers to as “not a new policy” is a bad decision which constitutes an international, diplomatic insult to Ghana (and any other country it is hitting, if any,) and the way we take it – i.e., respond or not – does have implications and consequences for the relationship between the two sides. In the broader context of time, our Akan Elders say: “W’ankasa wo tiri ho a, yeyi wo ayi bone” – If you do not speak about your head (hair), they (people) give you a bad haircut. The seed of that proverb or be (pronounced ber) – as Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, Kwame Gyekye, tells us – is a philosophy. And that philosophy is simple and yet profound: If you do not speak out about how people are treating you, you are going to end up not liking the outcome. Indeed, it is one of the principles for earning self-respect in inter-relationships, whether personal or international.
Interestingly, on June 26, 2017 (or thereabout), the US embassy issued a statement saying Ghana’s former presidents will not queue for visas, but that is neither the issue nor right response.
The US has a history of its officials in Accra and even some personality or president disrespecting Ghana. And Ghana national administration officials also have a history of always allowing such insults to pass without public comment. Few examples will do.
Over a decade ago, during the John Agyekum Kufuor administration, the first US Trade Secretary of the George W. Bush administration came here on a visit. At the reception, held at the La Palm Royal Beach Hotel, La, the US Embassy put journalists behind a rope cordon. It was like saying they did not trust African journalists to behave appropriately, and so they must put us behind a barrier. It was an insult and Ti-Kelenkelen, at that time with The Independent newspaper, did not spare the embassy for the insult.
Another insult, this time by a US president himself, happened right here in Accra. Bush visited Kufuor, and at a press conference a journalist asked Bush a discomforting question. In his response, and in the presence of Kufuor, Bush used the socially-unpalatable word “baloney.” (In the US it is one of “curse words” serious parents try to teach their children to avoid using.) It is the job of journalists to ask legitimate questions, no matter how discomforting, and the president even if irked by the question should have had adequate presence of mind to remind himself not to use on Ghanaians, in the presence of our president, a word he will not use when talking to his own citizens back home. This writer did not write anything about it then, and watched in horror and shame when no one else did (or appeared to do). Shockingly, sometime later, he even saw and heard a Ghanaian – sitting on television – use that bad word as an ejaculation to portray his disgust at what someone else has said.
There are instances when a US top personality or president is reported to have thrown an insult at Ghanaians even from the US. During the Rawlings dictatorship years, President Ronald Reagan is reported to have described Ghana as, serbe, 14 million hungry people led by a Scottish bastard. Leaving aside the fact that “Scottish bastard” also means an irresponsible Scot of a man, let us look at the matter closely. Sometime in the 1990s estimates put the number of homeless people in the US at 10 million (so, permit Ti-Kelenkelen to use a 1990 census figure for the US to make the next point.) Can anyone take that homeless statistic, generalise it and then apply it to say Reagan’s US was, serbe, 250 million homeless people led by an Irish liar and pretender to smartness?
Whatever Rawlings was, he was and is our own, and it is we, the people of Ghana alone, who reserve the right to insult him, of course, on policy and programme issues. Interestingly, unknown to Reagan and non-Africans, there are no bastards or illegitimate children on this continent because, properly speaking, a child belongs to the African (larger) family or clan – the abusua (Akan), weku (Ga), fome (Ewe), etc., – and not to individuals or even the parents. (There is inherent in the fore-going philosophically-explained sociological fact an implication a Western-minded person could readily misinterpret, but it is not material for newspaper pages.)
To fast-forward, there is also in the public domain reports that then US Presidential Candidate, Donald Trump, tweeted an insult about black people. He is reported to have tweeted that all blacks think about or do is having sex. If he actually tweeted that, then it is an unfortunate statement, because it can only come from someone who is supposed to know better and yet is utterly ignorant of the obvious history of his own country.
Trump was ignorant of the fact that it is a black man, George Washington Carver, who discovered and created over 300 secondary products with groundnuts or peanuts in the late 1800s, and thereby single-handedly saved the economy of the entire south of the US from total collapse. That economy was virtually dependent on cotton agriculture and all that the exported cotton brought back into the US. Over several years, unfortunately, the unstoppable plague of the boll weevil destroyed cotton plantations throughout the southern states of the US, and virtually collapsed its agriculture, major export and (in a sense) its general economy. Then a black botanist, researcher and inventor, George Washington Carver, came to the rescue. Because of the groundnuts products Carver discovered, southern US farmers turned to groundnuts cultivation and in few years they were back on their feet.
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