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Opinions of Sunday, 27 April 2014

Columnist: Kwarteng, Francis

I regret It!

Once upon a time, an epicene God, otherwise called the Great Kweku Ananse, preferably a “he,” woke up from a three-storied magic mat of mental ennui and threw a quick blanket glance at the vast expanse of emptiness about him. This monstrous multi-universe appeared simultaneously Dark, Yellow, and White. For one, the Great Kweku Ananse, after belching volcanic gas of emotional discomfort, romantically took a peep at the chromatographic immiscibility of The Colors dancing so effusively, so nonchalantly, yet so consciously. “What do you think you are doing?” asked the Great Kweku Ananse.

“Thinking!” the three replied in unison.

“What sort of thinking is this dance?”

Silence. Laughter. Silence. Giggle! Then, the Great Kweku Ananse and the Three Colors stood quiet, attention, frozen in the leprotic arm of archaic time, wrapped up in an ocean of rhetorical separateness, for what seemed like an infinitesimally long continuum of future time across a monstrous compass of seeming nothingness. In no time there was saltation of a quantum of a creative thought from the lower consciousness to the highest consciousness of the Great Kweku Ananse.

Yet, the thought possessed neither the emotional properties of levity or gravity of human thoughtfulness, at least from the standpoint of human comprehension! It was an atom of conceptualization only carried in amniotic sacs, neural compartments carefully hidden in the thinking faculties of modish deities, of which the Great Kweku Ananse occupied the seat of paramountcy, far away from the prying eyes of the Three Colors.

But the Great Kweku Ananse was a mirror, a plain mirror! What sort of mirror? A plain mirror! How plain? Simple plain! Simply plain! As plain as White, Dark, or Yellow? What? As plain as the physics of relativity and as un-plain as human thinking! What an overt paradox! And then, out of the blue, The Colors, all three of them, Yellow, White, and Dark, broke through the concrete wall of silence with an effusion of wiggly suspensions of dance moves, scattered helter-skelter much like a confetti of gesticulations, a feat realizable only via a torrent of one-way telepathic thinking, as the plain mirror stood frigidly static gasping for a stream of fresh air, of emotional reciprocity. Silence. Laughter. Silence. Giggle!

“I want to remake you in my image!” said the Great Kweku Ananse.

“Plain mirror?” said the Three Colors in a happy chorus of rhetorical confidence. “How?

A strung-out silence usurped the motionless authority of the spatial yet close vastness between the Great Kweku Ananse and the Three Colors. Yet, to say the least, the Three Colors and the Great Kweku Ananse looked uncomfortably identical to each other, Siamese-like, save a seemingly unbridgeable differential in mental mechanics. Even so, strangely, there existed an operational flatness within the personality crevice occupied by the psychological mechanics of the Color Dark and the Great Kweku Ananse. Putting this critical observation aside, the Great Kweku Ananse then said to the Trinitarian siblings: “I want to elevate your psychologies to a higher rung of thinking operationalizability.”

There was a swift deathly passage of cemeterial silence, even as cottony asteroids of massive clouds matched through and beneath a panorama of yet-to-be-born skies, belatedly looking so grandfatherly and grandmotherly upon the fruitful but juvenile earth. “But, the Great Kweku Ananse, we have our separate yet interactive compartments of thinking already,” said Color Dark.

The Great Kweku Ananse threw Color Dark a piercing look of helpless bitterness. “All your thinking is about dancing.” Silence. Laughter. Silence. Giggle!

In the meantime, the Color Dark, looking overtly dejected, steered his shimmied shame toward the celestial horizon of emotional comfort. Unfortunately, there was no gesture of warm reciprocity emanating from the celestial horizon of emotional comfort. Only another look of helpless bitterness. Consequently, the Three Colors put their heads together, after which they spoke through a vocal gridlock of contrition, saying: “We are deeply sorry, the Great Kweku Ananse. We apologize on the Color Dark’s behalf.”

Instantaneously, the Great Kweku Ananse fired off thunderous ripples of guffaws at the cringed Colors, all of them. “You are pardoned hence!” he said, adding: “But that misbehavior should never repeat itself.” Next he inched closer to The Colors and pumped gases of spoken words into their pineal eyes. “Go into the World of Emptiness!” he commanded, adding: “And make it the World of Fullness, of Abundance! You are henceforth barred from being entangled in your Trinitarian dragnet of physical inseparability. You shall go into the World of Emptiness as individuals, and your return journey to rejoin me, Sankofa, shall be contingent upon how you put your individual minds to good use. Let me assure you that none of the new brains each of you have is greater than the other in terms of neural or operational potentiality. Equality or flatness of operational potentiality is the expression. Go! Go! Go!”

Interestingly, billows of fetor smoke oozed linearly and perpendicularly, crisscrossing the crowded space of mathematical topology as it relates to human thinking of today, from the crater of universal mouth the Great Kweku Ananse openly carried on his obese behind. The Three Colors disappeared through the physical thinness of intellectual emptiness. Fortunately, they landed on a planet of Three Continents, Africa, Asia, and Europe. The Color Yellow went to Asia, the Color Dark went to Africa, and the Color White went to Europe. In no time, the Color Dark had transformed his part of the World of Emptiness into the Garden of Eden, what the Great Kweku Ananse referred to as the World of Fullness, of Abundance. Soon, the Color Yellow and the Color White, the Color Dark’s siblings, came looking for clues. Understandably, the Color Dark was generous in dishing out innovative ideas to them. Indeed there was no emotional constipation on his part! No emotional regret, that is.

“Thanks,” said the Color Yellow and the Color White.

“Don’t mention it!”

Soon after, the Color Yellow and the Color White ran along, going in their separate ways. It did not take long for them to translate the Color Dark’s ideas into their innovate components of development. Asia and Europe glowed. However, they could not outperform the Color Dark by way of creativity, political boldness, mastery of nature, and intelligence. Jealousy soon seeps into the gutter of their warped thinking. But they faced a major social encumbrance, which was what exactly to do to overcome their jealousies? They contemplated fratricide! The other social problematic confronting them was that, Darwinian natural selection had completely transformed them to such an extent that they appeared in radically different ethnic configurations, further making the Color Dark more intelligent and more politically powerful than the other two, the Color White and the Color Yellow.

Before long, the Color Yellow and the Color White had descended into another pit of emotional drive, weighing which of the alternative theories they had conceived would be best suited to eliminating their sibling for good. Luckily, a good idea popped up from nowhere. Meanwhile, the Color White and the Color Yellow, both males, agreed to turn one into a female. The Color Yellow agreed to be feminized, following which the Color White had canal knowledge of her. The product of their sexual Machiavellism they christened, quite aptly, Coup D’état, an extraordinarily beautiful female of godly anatomic proportions. But the Color White and the Color Yellow endowed her with a special gift, an incorporation of a corrupt brain. And as soon as she, that is, Coup D’état, came of age, her Machiavellian Siamese parents, betrothed her to the Color Dark. The marriage was a relatively stable one, the first of its kind in the World of Fullness, of Abundance.

Then the deceptively unthinkable happened. One day, Coup D’état heavily overdosed the Color Dark on Hitlerite Eurocentrism, after a lunch of mountainous fufu and Red Sea of palm-nut soup, in which an assortment of fish, octopus, hippopotamus, elephant, whale, dinosaur, and mammoth, apparently from nowhere, swam with unrestrained elation. Sadly, the Color Dark, with the Machiavellian plot unbeknownst to him ate the poisoned food with ravished celerity, passed on in the process and Coup D’état, his wife, got the opportunity to squeeze out his mammoth brain which the Color White and the Color Yellow were so badly after. She quickly repackaged it and rushed it to her diabolical parents. Her parents, in turn, took it to the Great Kweku Ananse, leaving her behind to wallow in her forced stupidity. “What is this?” asked the Great Kweku Ananse.

“The brain power of the Color Dark,” murmured the Color Yellow.

The Great Kweku Ananse, however, looked at them in feigned stupefaction. Still not knowing what to say next, the Great Kweku Ananse quickly turned to the Color White and asked: “What do you make of this?”

“It means the Color Dark will no longer have a brain to develop Africa.”

The Great Kweku Ananse asked: “But how do we keep the Color Dark from getting wind of this?”

“He’s already dead as we speak,” the Color White replied.

“Is that what you did with your brains?” asked the Great Kweku Ananse.

The Color Yellow and the Color White looked at each other in arrant confusion. “Yes,” both replied simultaneously.

“What do we do with Coup D’état then?” asked the Great Kweku Ananse. “At least she is in on this; she knows the secret.”

The Color White and the Color Yellow stared at each as though they did not know what to do. “Give us one week to think about this,” the Color White said almost as an afterthought. On the other hand, the Color Yellow stood still with faint traces of laughter radiating from the triangular corners of his thick-lipped mouth, with the triangular corners soaked in the blood of white goops. The Great Kweku Ananse caught the Color Yellow’s facial antics but said nothing about them. “Go and do what you think is appropriate in the circumstance,” he told them. They walked away without looking back. The next day they assassinated Coup D’état and cannibalized her flesh.

Nonetheless, the Color Yellow and the Color White failed to realize one important thing! They had failed to realize that the Color Dark, being as smart and prescient as he was, had anticipated the eventual thievery of his well-endowed brains, “brains” because he had more than one in his skull, and, therefore, replaced them with a heavy ball of soaked sawdust. His actual brains he had carved up, had put them in sarcophagi, and had them placed in libraries all over the world for posterity. This implied he never actually died! His powerful brains and foresight still live on! However, the questions posterity is forced to ask are: Who was the Color Yellow? The Color White? The Great Kweku Ananse, the plain mirror?

Posterity, namely, Ghana and Africa have been drowning in the comatose ocean of indirection for far too long, to the point where they have failed to rediscover the sarcophagi of innovative ideas. What have Ghana and Africa been dreaming of in their seemingly unending comatose of indirection? Is it about the Color White? Is it about the Color Yellow? Is it about the Great Kweku Ananse? In fact, these should not be problems at all. The Color White represents KA Busia and JB Danquah. The Color Yellow represents Akwasi Afrifa and Emmanuel Kotoka. Yet, somewhat paradoxically, Coup D’état also represented the conniving handiwork of Busia, Danquah, and Afrifa, the Trinitarian apostles of terrorism, as they slaughtered her via a hired assassin and buried her mangled body in an unmarked spot in the terrorist graveyard of the National Liberation Movement (NLM), Baffour Akoto’s, Danquah’s, and Busia’s brainchild! And who is the Great Kweku Ananse? The white man, Kwesi Broni. Europe. Eurocentrism. The West!

Knock. Knock. Knock. Indistinct noise from behind the door of intellectual quietude crashed through the collective psychological dislocation of Ghana and Africa, jolting them from their slumber of technological, scientific, economic, cultural, and political doldrums. “Wake up and live!” came the authoritative voice of Bob Marley. “Life is one big road with lots of signs. So when you riding through the ruts, don’t you complicate your mind. Flee from hate, mischief and jealousy. Don’t bury your thoughts; put your vision to reality…Wake up and live…Rise ye mighty people. There is work to be done, so let’s do it little by little. Rise from your sleepless slumber!”

Ghana and African were soon up from bed, on their feet. Thinking hard! Moreover, the powerful lyrics and rhythm woke up Nkrumah to the enlightened, soothing voice of Bob Marley, then he scanned the maudlin face of the African world and saw his rich legacy swimming in a lifeless limbo of political and economic cluelessness. He began to weep profusely. He saw Bob Marley weeping too in the corner of his right eye.

“Why am I weeping?” Bob Marley asked himself. Yet the question equally applied to Kwame Nkrumah as well. It turned out that Nkrumah was silently asking himself the same question. Then he thought of the Great Kweku Ananse, the plain mirror! Was the plain mirror playing hide-and-seek with him and Bob Marley? In fact, was the plain mirror playing tricks on his great mind, an educational Halloween-inspired track the Rap trio “Geto Boys” called “My Mind Playing Tricks On Me”?

But an articulated train of laugher caught his attention. He looked around. There was no Bob Marley. Only him. And the voice of laughter was a collective, not a singular, one. The articulated train of laughter sped by him again. The second time he recognized the texture of the collective laughter. It came from the Machiavellian harmonies of JB Danquah’s, KA Busia’s, Akwasi Afrifa’s, and Emmanuel Kotoka’s diabolical, unforgiveable heavy metal music of national and continental betrayal. Ironically, it was not even laughter after all. It was a pseudobulbar effect! “Why are you weeping, the Great Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah?’ they asked.

Nkrumah looked at the contorted countenance of the African world again and replied in a hushed tone: “I regret it!”

The four men looked away in shame! In a related news, the epicene God, the Great Kweku Ananse, sat at dinosaurian table feasting on the brainy sawdust. Oh Africa! The sawdust, it turned out, was the plain mirror of white supremacy! And white supremacy, it also turned out, was the three-storied magic mat of mental ennui, which, invariably, represents the intellectual laziness of African leadership. The monstrous multi-universe represents levels of racial, religious, cultural, and ethnic disharmonies in today’s world of utter confusion! Volcanic gas symbolizes the IMF/World Bank, Apartheid, racism, colonialism, slavery, imperialism, Jim Crowism…

What of one-way telepathic think? It means the white man knows the ins and outs of the black man’s thinking though the black man consistently refuses to make any serious attempts at comprehending White psychology! Therein lies the trap of his enslavement!

“I regret it!”