Living in primitive times

Living in primitive times
By Kofi Akordor
Many years ago, while I was a student in Ho, there was a football match between Brong Ahafo United, popularly known as the Apostles of Power Soccer, and Volta Juantex at the Ho Sports Stadium. The bus which was to convey the visiting team entered the stadium amid applause from the handful of BA United supporters. Unknown to them, the players were not on the bus. They were rather struggling to scale the high walls of the stadium at another end, the reason being that they had been warned not to use the main gate because what we call ‘juju’ in local parlance, which would cause their defeat, had been planted there.
There were no fast rules then and the only fear was that the players might enter the field of play with broken limbs from the high jumps.
There are similar episodes in football. There have been occasions when visiting and home teams have haggled over who should enter the field first. Others have fought over jerseys when there is a clash of colours. This is because teams are believed to have sent their jerseys to Mallams, shrines, what have you, for purification and fortification before matches and changing that set for another might spell the doom of that team, so they were made to believe.
There is this popular anecdote attributed to Alhaji Karim Grunsah, the Chairman of King Faisal Football Club. In one of his loud lamentations, Alhaji Grunsah was said to have complained to no one in particular that everywhere he went, he was told Abdul Razak, who was then Head Coach of Asante Kotoko Football Club, had already been there. The question Alhaji Grunsah posed was, ‘Is Razak a coach or Mallam?’
The bigger question is, ‘What was Alhaji Grunsah looking for before seeing himself trailing in the shadow of Razak wherever he went?’
In football, there is something called ways and means and some clubs go to the extent of appointing officials whose only responsibility is to chart a ways-and-means path for the success of the club. This means paying large sums of money to soothsayers, clairvoyants and other such people parading in religious garbs operating from the synagogues, temples, mosques or shrines to influence the result of the match in their favour.
There is this sad story of a top Ghanaian club which campaigned in the continental African Cup of Champion Clubs tournament. Instead of concentrating their efforts on training and mapping out the right strategies to defeat their opponents, this team went consulting a ways-and-means guru who told them they would win the match. There was, however, a price to pay — whoever scored the first goal would die. That was an absurdity of the highest order. The team lost the match because no-one was ready to make the supreme sacrifice.
I have so far dwelt on football, where we are at our superstitious best. Football is a game which is developing every day, with scientific dimensions. A lot of us here do not appreciate things this way and want to believe that the gods would play and win football matches for us.
Every culture has its fair share of superstition and supernatural beliefs. However, if yesterday we could not find scientific answers to some events, can we say the situation is the same today? For instance, yesterday we could not comprehend how, at one delivery, a woman could bring forth two or more babies. So in some cultures, these babies were seen as evil and dumped in an evil forest. Today, advancement in medical science has cleared the doubts and given good reasons why a mother could give birth to two or more babies.
Should we still see twins, triplets, quadruplets, etc as evil?
I know that many years ago in some cultures, when motor vehicles were rare, death through motor accidents was a taboo, an abnormal death and victims were not given what could be described as fitting burials and funerals. The bodies were not allowed to enter the towns or villages and there was to be no crying or weeping.
Today, travelling by motor vehicles has become part and parcel of our lives. Ironically, an invention which is supposed to make travelling easier and more comfortable is bringing sorrow to our homes on a daily basis. Who, then, can describe death through a motor accident as a taboo?
It is the same transformational attitude which we need to adopt to address other cultural practices or beliefs which, in today’s context, are obsolete and outmoded. Take widowhood rites, for example. It is true that the loss of a husband was, and still is, a painful experience any wife could endure, especially in those days when the man was the sole breadwinner. It was to soothe the pain and make the widow adapt to her new situation that certain demands were imposed on her, such as confinement and restrictions on her movement.
Today, many wives are economically autonomous and to impose long-term restrictions on their movement means loss of income and a possible dislocation in the family’s economy. Moreover, there are many mothers who are employees in public or private service who cannot afford the luxury of staying away for long periods with the excuse of performing widowhood rites.
Apart from the confinement and restrictions on movement, some aspects of the rites are totally abominable and should not be entertained. Putting pepper in the eyes of women simply because their husbands are dead is, in plain terms, primitive. Why can’t they go smear the pepper in the eyes of the dead man’s father and mother who brought him into this world, in the first place?
I cannot talk for others, but if these widowhood rites have survived up to today, it is because women, out of ignorance or fear of the unknown, have allowed them to remain, because in the main it is women who execute these rites with some primitive enthusiasm.
One cultural practice which is prevalent in many parts of the country is trial by ordeal. This is the invocation of a dead person’s spirit, through clairvoyance or other supernatural means, to establish the cause or source of his or her death. In our cultural belief system, every death is attributable to somebody. So these clairvoyants always end up accusing someone in the community, very often a relative of the deceased’s, as the killer of the deceased.
Sometimes, without any consultation with the gods of the underworld, an accusing finger can be pointed at a member of the community for causing the death of someone and this person can be subjected to various inhuman treatments to force confession out of him/her or purify the person and protect him/her against the spirit of the deceased.
Trial by ordeal is also common when there is a theft in the village and an oracle is consulted. The oracles never mention names but give descriptions which will definitely match somebody in the village. Victims of these trials are subjected to various forms of torture, including beatings and the drinking of questionable concoctions which could even be harmful to their lives.
At the receiving end of these trials by ordeal are women who are accused of witchcraft or blamed for causing the death of their husbands. The Daily Graphic of Thursday, January 14, 2010 carried a pathetic story of a 52-year-old woman, Madam Sunkari Ghanyi, from Sokpeyiri, a village in the Wa West District of the Upper West Region, who had been subjected to inhuman treatment by a soothsayer on the grounds that she was a witch and had a hand in the death of a relative of her husband’s.
The said woman, according to the story, was forced to drink a concoction made of the blood of a fowl mixed with water and sand, as well as the chopped legs of a toad. Madam Ghanyi had been accused of causing the death of a woman who died apparently of complications during the childbirth.
This is the 21st century.
As stated earlier, we are no longer in the dark ages and there are scientific explanations for every phenomenon, if only we care to look for them. There are several medical explanations why a pregnant woman could die during childbirth. By the way, did the deceased woman have access to a medical facility for ante-natal observation during pregnancy? Was the delivery handled by a qualified midwife or a trained traditional birth attendant (TBA)? These are but a few questions.
The health professionals will tell you there are several factors that could make a pregnant woman suffer complications or even death at childbirth. The knowledge of these and taking the necessary precautions could have saved the life of that poor woman and that of many others.
Instead of doing what present-day requirements demand, we have decided to continue with the primitive practices of yesterday by blaming poor women for the death of other poor women. How does society progress with such a crude and primitive mentality? It is unfortunate that Madam Ghanyi did not get any help in the embrace of the law. The people who inflicted that physical and psychological pain on her have been set free by a Wa Magistrate Court.
Today, when a drunk or careless driver drives straight into an oncoming vehicle and kills innocent people, we do not address the problem but blame an innocent man or woman sitting somewhere wondering where his or her next meal will come from. The main culprits – drunkenness and carelessness – are ignored, so more people continue to die through accidents.
It is strange that we blame the failure of a pupil to pass his or her examination on the spiritual machinations of others – dead or alive – when the main causes, laziness, lack of parental support or poor educational facilities, could have been addressed by society.
Africans are generally highly religious to superstitious proportions. This has created the fertile ground for some churches which operate more or less like cults to flourish. The truth is, we were not alone in superstitious beliefs in the past. The difference is that others have since become scientific and are able to explain such natural phenomena as day and night, rainfall and drought, floods, earthquake and even death in more scientific terms.
This has helped them to advance from very primitive states to more modern civilisation and they are still advancing. Looking at ourselves, we cannot pretend to be making progress like others. This is because we still give primitive interpretations to events that have scientific explanations.
We must begin to accept the fact that no success comes without effort. If a football team do not train hard and take the advice of their coach seriously, they do not trot to the turf to win because a Mallam somewhere has told them that they are going to win. They will be humiliated.
If, as a student, you do not study and take your lessons seriously, you do not blame an old aunt or a dead grandmother for your failure. In the same way, if you do not cultivate a healthy lifestyle, observe personal hygiene and follow the advice of your doctor, you do not blame your woes on another person who is also struggling to survive.
If someone is drunk but decides to drive or fail to observe traffic regulations, no other person should be blamed for the resultant accident
We must begin to, like others, be scientific in our thinking and responsible for our actions. We must begin to probe and look for answers or forever remain where we are now, while others are planning how to put Man on Mars.
fokofi@yahoo.co.uk
kofiakordor.blogspot.com.