Like many Social Media users, I often receive interesting and eye-popping video clips on significant and some morally disturbing events and activities going on all over the world. But the ones that this author takes especial interest in viewing and possibly penning and publishing one writeup or two, depending on the extent and the magnitude of the subject of coverage, are almost invariably those that verge on issues of our national security and the quality-of-life matters of great and utmost concern to both Africans, in particular, and citizens and residents of the United States of America, where Yours Truly has been domiciled for some four decades now, both, initially as a Pre-Documented Permanent Resident and, presently, as a bona fide Naturalized American Citizen.
Until I voluntarily took an early retirement from the State University of New York (SUNY) Community College, where I taught for a little over 26 years, I used to joke to my American-born students, and my two boys or sons as well, that I was the real and the original American Citizen because my choice and my selection of American Citizenship was not a sheer act of happenstance or pure and complete accident but, rather, a very rational and morally righteous decision that I had taken primarily on the basis of Postcolonial and Post-Slavery America’s global and pontifical declaration and official beckoning as a cornucopia of inexhaustible opportunities, largely dependent on how hard one was willing to work to achieve one’s aims, goals and aspirations.
But, of course, I learned nearly four decades ago from my American-born professor and mentor, while I was an undergraduate at the City College of New York, of the City University of New York (CCNY of CUNY), that the much ballyhooed Promise of the American Dream was decidedly sheer poppycock for even the descendants of the European immigrants who arrived in the United States of America via the globally famous and legendary Statue of Liberty at Ellis Island. My late mentor and benevolent avuncular friend, Professor Leonard “Leo” Hamalian’s parents had emigrated from Turkey as victims of the Kemal Ataturk Anti-Jewish Pogrom of 1915, a trauma that the First Dean of the California College of the Arts bore throughout his life.
Like my late maternal grandfather, The Reverend T H Sintim(-Aboagye) of the Presbyterian Church of Ghana, Professor Hamalian transitioned into eternity and “The Ages,” as former President Barack H Obama remarked at the funeral and the globally televised and attended memorial service of the immortalized former President Nelson R. Mandela, at 86 years old. The life expectancy marker of 86 years old is one that has become almost indelible among the adult members of the Asante-Juaben Royal Family Clan-descended agnatic lineage of my maternal grandfather, although my own mother transitioned into “The Ages” at the relatively young age of 63. Which also has some geopolitical and philosophical significance for this author, being that Ghana’s first postcolonial leader, President Kwame Nkrumah, transitioned into virtual immortality at the age of 63, as was also the fate of Ghana’s third democratically elected postcolonial leader, President Hilla “Babini” Limann.
In the wake of the President Donald J. Trump-led MAGA Crusade, that aims to thoroughly and effectively Aryanize Contemporary United States of America, as well as effectively erase the Continental African Base of American Civilization, an inescapable phenomenon that was “undesirably” recognized by European racist social scientists like Carl Gustav Jung and Sigmund Freud, for only the two most obvious examples,, over the past half-millennium, the fluidity and the artificiality of the largely geopolitical and the geocultural concept of citizenship is one that has almost become a sheer matter of blasphemous “Executive Pronouncement of Preemptive Proscription” reminiscent of the Judeo-Christian and Islamic Mythology.
And it is the tentativeness of this emergent American Faux-Ideology of Citizenship by Executive Declaration that came to mind when I began viewing the Multimedia or JoyNews-produced video clip about the Forest-Reserve Township of “Aberewa-Nni-Nkran,” whose meaning loosely translates from the Akan-language original as “No Superannuated Old Woman Lives in Accra” or, better yet, “The Hustle-and-Bustle of Accra Has No Use for Hags.” For those of our readers who may not know it, Accra is Ghana’s official capital and has been since the erstwhile British colonial regime’s administrators relocated the then Gold Coast’s capital from the globally infamous township – presently municipality – of Cape Coast to Accra in 1876 or thereabouts.
But, of course, the real and the main subject and focus of our present discourse or national conversation regards how it came about that an estimated 10,000 people, the overwhelming majority of whom, we are reliably informed, lack any readily identifiable affiliation or geopolitical and cultural provenance in any one of the officially recognized ethnic polities in the country, got to acquire a vast tract of mineral-rich land for the establishment of a municipal-size township, by Ghanaian standards, in a Forest Reserve which these officially classified “Aliens” from other neighboring West African countries have been “prosperously” operating for some two decades now, at least according to Mr. Daniel “Dan” Kwasi Prince, the host of a Multimedia or JoyNews-produced current affairs program called “Daily View – Ghana.”
We are also informed by Mr. Kwasi Prince that the aforementioned township, which is fully equipped with almost all the requisite amenities and sociocultural incentives readily available in any modern township or city, is located somewhere in-between the vicinity of Samreboi and Subri, in Ghana’s Western Region, an area that is not very far from Ghana’s border with the Ivory Coast or La Côte d’Ivoire, as it is called these days. The City or the Municipality of Abrewa-Nni-Nkran poses a veritable national security risk because we are also reliably informed that it is an incubator or a hot bed of petty arms trading and the commercial sex industry or prostitution and human trafficking.
Now, what the preceding inescapably means is that the entire nation of Ghana may very well be sitting on a volatile keg of civil strife and the spread of deadly communicable and sexually transmitted diseases. As of this writing, there was also a report about the government or some local authorities in the area having dispatched some well-armed Ghanaian soldiers and police officers expressly charged with thoroughly dismantling and totally destroying the township. Which means that Ghana’s Ministers of Defense and The Interior and, perhaps even Foreign Minister, may very well have become reasonably well aware of this festing menace.
If the preceding observation and analysis have validity, then it also well appears that what is urgently required here is a meticulous study of the problem and the prompt devising of a more progressive and civically constructive remedy for the same. You see, merely burning down the City or the Township of Abrewa-Nni-Nkran is highly unlikely to effectively resolve the complex concatenation of the unsavory set of factors that precipitated the creation of the township – obviously a combination of both social and economic factors as well as, of course, the geopolitical factor of an abject lack or the neglect of responsible and accountable leadership. Whatever be the case or cases, it is clearly and definitely a problem that demands an intergovernmental approach by ECOWAS leaders.
By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
April 22, 2025
E-mail: [email protected]
