Are you Akan, Dagomba, Ewe, Gonja or Ghanaian? Or African?

Akan, be proud being Akan!
Dagaaba, be proud being Dagaaba!
Dagomba, be proud being Dagomba!
Ewe, be proud being Ewe!
Ga, be proud being Ga!
Gonja, be proud being Gonja!
Guan, be proud being Guan!
Konkomba, be proud being Konkomba!
Mamprusi, be proud being Mamprusi!
Nanumba, be proud being Nanumba!
Sisala, be proud being Sisala!

Ghanaian, be proud being Ghanaian!
African, be proud being African!



In this essay, I shall attempt to address the issues of traditional association and identity as well as national association and identity, with the aim of showing how both levels of engagement are crucial in getting us beyond (inclusive) traditional and national consciousness to arrive at pan-African consciousness.


NATIONAL IDENTITY

Think about it, what does it mean to be Ghanaian? It means you likely have a legal document such as a birth certificate or a passport. It means that you are subject to the laws of this land. You probably pay some kind of tax if you live in the country. If you break the laws of the land, you can be jailed by the authorities because you have agreed to be subject to the laws of the country upon becoming a citizen, whether you are aware of it or not. As a man you may be drafted into the army in the unfortunate (and hopefully unlikely) event of a war with another country. In exchange you are meant to get protection from the government. You may also get some benefits such as free education up to a point.

The government obtains its legitimacy by (majority) consent of citizens, through the electoral (voting) process. Government structure consists of representatives at the district, parliamentary and judiciary levels as well as various kinds of civil servants. We also have the police and the armed forces. These are some the institutions which represent this idea, this mental construct called the country ‘Ghana’.

Most of what I have just written is obvious, yet how many people stop to think about what it means to be ‘Ghanaian’? Or do some of us take it for granted?

Many people who identify with being Ghanaian were born after 6th March 1957. Ghana, the country, the concept, is less than 60 years old. But who makes ‘Ghana’ real? It is the people who identify with the notion of being Ghanaian, the people who make up the nation now known as Ghana, or are associated with it through their ethnic/traditional groups. Without these people, there will be no Ghana.

Where is all this leading to? It is leading to the point that underneath all the bureaucracy, all the formal organs of state, the real people who make up this country called ‘Ghana’ are the people from the various traditional groups. Most of these people are very much still tied to their traditional roots.

You say you are a Ghanaian? When you go to the office, in formal contexts you probably speak English. Yet when you want to relax at home, you probably speak Ga or Dagbani. When you meet your good friends you probably speak Ewe or Twi. When you go to the chop-bar, you probably speak the above or some other language pertaining to one of the traditional groups, unless of course you have become 'westernized' and can no longer speak your own language.

And that is the main point I am trying to make in this article: The country ‘Ghana’, its people, are made up of Africans who still identify with their traditional cultures. Although this is obvious, it is important to state it, and to think about it, in order to realize what it means. We have Akan, Dagomba, Ewe, Ga, Gonja, Guan, Konkomba, Kusasi, Mamprusi, Nanumba, Sisala and many more. We call ourselves 'Ghanaians', I have nothing against that, because it is true, we are! The history of this region over the last century has made it so. From the legal and political points of view, we are classified as Ghanaians. Socio-economically, we derive our living, we survive by working in Ghanaian institutions and industries. All this helps make the national identity real.

Yet, we also identify with the traditional groups with which we are affiliated. Why is this so?


TRADITIONAL IDENTITY

Let us now consider what it means to be Akan, Dagomba, Ewe, Ga, Gonja, Guan, Konkomba, Kusasi, Mamprusi, Nanumba, Sisala other traditional group within the geopolitical region known as Ghana.

The family unit is the oldest social unit of man since the earliest solitary humans. On top of the family unit is built the extended family, and then the clan. This is the case not only for Africans but for many human groups across the world. Some Asians have clans, Native Indians have clans, Scots have clans, etc.

In traditional Africa the city-state was built upon the clan unit. At each level there are leaders that represent the people, from family elders to village/town leaders to city leaders to the leader of the collective group. Before modern nation-states, subjects of the ruler of a city-state sometimes paid taxes and in times of war men were called to fight for their city-state. There were established systems of government. The situation is different in modern times. Traditional rulers and leaders, although they have a constitutional mandate, function more in a ceremonial role. Their purpose is (or should be) to be a positive influence in helping develop the regions with which they are affiliated.



THE TRADITIONAL SYSTEM VERSUS THE MODERN POLITICAL ONE

What we have in Ghana today is a parallel system: the first one is the traditional system that was the main system until the end of colonization, and the second one which is the modern political system, which is the main one we function under today.

There is a very important difference between the legal-political identification at the nation-state level (i.e. being a 'Ghanaian citizen') and the ethnic identification at the traditional-cultural level (i.e. belonging to the Dagomba or Guan traditional groups, as examples). To for instance say you are Sisala or Konkomba, means that you identify with a very large 'family' of people, which is differentiated into various clans, in which are found extended families, nuclear families and individuals. This is an identification with tradition and culture, based on memory/history and blood/genetics. It is very real. The nation-state identification (calling yourself 'Ghanaian') is also real, but it is (currently) built upon the more basic traditional level.

To say that you are 'Ghanaian' has certain historical, legal, political and socio-economic implications, but no family-blood implications. To say that you are Guan or Nzema among other things has family-blood implications. This distinction is a major difference between the two identities.



FAILURE OF THE FAMILY UNIT IN THE WEST

The psychosis of western societies is in part due to the weakening and in some cases, the breakdown of the family unit. This was done to encourage citizens to become more dependent on 'the state', to produce for 'the state' and to exist to serve 'the state'. This is why children are 'worshipped' over the elderly, in western society. The child is a potential worker for the state, the old person has already served the 'social machine' and is on the way out. They have served their purpose, the nursing home awaits.

When social catastrophes (wars, massive natural disasters etc) occur in western societies, because of the weaker family unit in these countries, people fall back to 'the state' to provide for them. In Africa the traditional structures serve as a back-up to the functions of the state. Africans may be able to fall back on family, clan and traditional units in times of adversity.

In his book Brave New World, Aldous Huxley describes a (futuristic) scenario in the London of AD 2540, where the family unit is totally annihilated, where children are born out of test tubes in an almost factory-like manner and where each individual in that society exists only to serve 'the system'. Everyone is classified in terms of mental ability into five castes, from alphas to epsilons. Based on your (mental) ability you as a citizen were given a particular job to do. Questions about the meaning of life were discouraged, passion was discouraged, with the exception of taking a hallucinogenic drug called 'soma' used to pacify the mind and emotions, so as not to ask too many difficult questions that challenge the system. Indiscriminate 'male-female pairings' was highly encouraged as a way to rid the mind of all troubles, and contraceptives were in great abundance. The most serious crime was to question the system. When it was time to die, one went to the ‘termination unit’.

One can almost see western society moving toward this direction. Africans on the other hand should be weary of hastily getting rid of the family, extended family and clan systems which have provided support for African people for millennia.



EVOLVING OUR TRADITIONAL INSTITUTIONS

Naa Professor John Nabila (retired UG professor of Geography), the chairman of the National House of Chiefs, is not only an intellectual, he is also among other things a family man as well as a traditional ruler. He is the first born, with many, many siblings. He not only has his nuclear family and his extended family to be responsible for, he has to look out for all of his people. How many politicians can genuinely live up that level of responsibility (both in speech and deed) by seeing all of their people as part of ‘one big family’? I think it will be great if African leaders had an attitude like this.

We need to evolve our traditional institutions. There is so much possibility here. Traditional leaders should be accountable to the people they represent. They should be accountable to their elders and advisers (the same should be said for presidents and for other political leaders who should be accountable to the people who they represent in office). What we need to do is to figure out how for instance the National House of Chiefs can be used in the most effective way to help in the development of the country. This is a body that has a customary as well as a constitutional mandate. We should not 'toss the baby out with the bathwater', as that expression (paraphrased) goes. Our traditional institutions are one key to reaching African unity, I think it cannot be done only on the political level, because it will have little meaning. For Africans to truly unite, it will have to include the deeper level of the traditional structures (although I hold the view that traditional leaders should avoid politics, the two streams of leadership should be kept separate). If you have not thought about this one before, please take a moment to do so in order to realize the ramifications of what I am suggesting here, before you disagree with me.



COLONIZATION, GLOBALIZATION AND THE WEST

Ghana today is at a crossroads. The people who make up this country are socio-cultural hybrids. Running parallel to each other, are our African systems and the European systems we inherited from colonization. We inherited educational (scientific), ethical (judiciary), economic (capitalism), political (western style democracy) and religious (Christian and Islamic Semitic religions) from the Europeans, as a result of colonization (Islam had a different route of entry). Juxtaposed to these are our traditional linguistic, culinary and other social functions such as markets, naming ceremonies, funerals and festivals, all of which derive from traditional culture.


FROM TRADTIONAL & NATIONAL TO AFRICAN IDENTITY

Do not be tricked! Globalization results from the dominant spread of Euro-American (Western) culture and thinking. 'Globalization' is 'Euro-Americanization' in action. I am not saying fight it, I am saying be aware of it. In Ghana we seem to be operating on both African and European ideas. Some black people who become aware of this take up the opposite polarity of 'Afrocentrism' in an attempt to protect their identity.

So, what is your personal African to European ratio in terms of your attitudes and mindset? 50%: 50%? 70%: 30%? 15%: 85%? Or more like 10%: 90%? Are you in a big hurry to diminish the African part?

I propose that instead of fighting amongst ourselves let us rather change our attitudes to find a way to move forward. It is not just about other Ewe people or Akan people, it is about all Africans within Ghana and beyond, it is about the survival of the identity and well-being of a race. It is about eventually realizing our African identity and looking at ourselves as members of one very big family.

We do not need to have our future generations become like some conscious black people in the Diaspora who are searching for their roots, and who invariably see that it is in the memory of traditional culture that their true identity is embedded. Each generation is responsible for educating the following one. It is up to us to make sure that this happens.

As a people, as Africans, it can be said that we are struggling to figure out which societal level to identify with. This should not be so. We should embrace our traditional, national as well as our continental identities. There have been calls to “end tribalism” in the nation-state called Ghana 'because we are all Ghanaians'. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language defines tribalism as “A strong feeling of identity with and loyalty to one's tribe or group”. In contrast to this, the term 'ethnic group' has several definitions which all pertain to the following: “belonging/pertaining to or deriving from the cultural, racial, religious or linguistic traditions of a people.”

'The term 'tribalism' can only be loosely applied to the various traditional groups in Ghana, which are probably better referred to as 'ethnic groups'. Now, here is the kicker: the definition given above for 'tribalism' is not in and of itself negative, yet it can be turned into a negative attitude when an overemphasis on tribal loyalty leads to “ethnic myopia”. The term “ethnic myopia” is perhaps more appropriate to use than the term “tribalism”. “Ethnic myopia” is a term that has been used by some Nigerian intellectuals when studying their particular cases of the phenomenon. Obviously Ghana and Nigeria have different social, political and cultural circumstances, yet I think the term is a useful one for us to reflect on.

These are all just terms. Simply put, as a people we need to change our attitudes of mistrust and dislike toward each other, in order to move forward as a people.


SUMMARY AND CONCLUSION

Many African peoples migrated to their current locations from elsewhere. The family and clan systems served the role of maintaining cohesion among Africans. Now we have all settled down into various locations on the African continent. The period of large scale ethnic migration is over. Colonization by Europeans occurred and (the physical part of it) was overcome. Now here we are, living together as a mix of various ethnic groups. Where do we go from here?

As I indicated in an article I wrote last year entitled “Ghana on the verge of unprecedented greatness (parts 1 & 2)”, I say let us wise up, accept our current situation and start playing strategically. We should start at home, by still maintaining aspects of our traditional culture but realizing that we need to move forward as a people, as one African people. We should work on safeguarding, maintaining and evolving the positive attributes of all that we identify with in our traditions. For instance, how can we evolve the role of traditional leadership to include a greater role in fostering development? How can we evolve our spoken traditional languages, creating new words and concepts, and how will this be taught to new generations? Basically, how can we ensure that our culture continues to grow and evolve, given the challenges of an increasingly “globalized” world?

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Nana Kwame Danquah