By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

But for my name that originally appeared as the byline of his "voices-hearing" guff, I wouldn't have stooped so low as to speak the language he best understands by painstakingly explaining to the editors of the Modernghana.com website why it was next to the downright impossible for yours truly to have authored the kind of linguistic vitriol and crudity initially attributed to me, of which I was to be shortly and apologetically vindicated by the editors of Modernghana.com as a purely inadvertent technical glitch. On the question of descending into the gutter in order to duke it out with me, the fact of the matter is that you were delivered in the gutter. And so I don't know why you would return to your own moorings looking for me. "My friend," I intend to be your most horrific nightmare and so you had better watch out!

Indeed, perusing the fractious captions of his intemperate and boorish tirades against the Asantehene, Otumfuo Osei-Tutu II, my traditional grandfather via the Akyem-Asiakwa royal stool, the farthest thing from my mind would have been to have guessed that the authorial troglodyte was a sexagenarian or even a septuagenarian. I had always thought that his desultory effusions were the veritable anal matter of an overgrown teenager trying to feel his manhood; and rather brazenly and savagely, electing His Majesty, the Asantehene, as his prime target of abuse. Perhaps that way his tentative literary skills would then be afforded the desperately needed attention and significance.

You see, as our Akan elders and sages have said, "When the king was being delivered, there were adults in the royal family." In sum, mere age or existential longevity does not a wiseman make. Then also, the quizzical notion that, somehow, I am in the unsavory habit of suffering fools so gladly as to crave the retraction of whatever I place on permanent record in cyberspace is rather pathetic. Besides, I couldn't care less who may be pitting whom against another. The fact of the matter is that I am a man of conviction and forthrightness and make absolutely no apologies about the same.

Then also, even long before I was to "serendipitously" cross swords with this self-styled Kumawu street toughie, he had made it patently clear that he was intransigently an anti-intellectual waif on the lookout for some "Ph.D.s" to sink his rotten Aduana canine's teeth into. But guess what, dear reader, I am as Aduana as they come. An Aduana of ancient Adansi and Akwamu stock raised by Ayokos and Biretuos - we don't come any stronger, braver and smarter than that.

You know, I cannot call you "unintelligent" and "undiscerning" and then invite you to join hands with me in fighting some common enemy who largely resides in your own delirious imagination. Now, that is rank stupidity, you punk! No retraction here, you drooling son of a bitch! The battle is joined; the Rubicon has been crossed. And as I remarked a short while ago, in the the glorious annals of Akanmanmu, Osei-Tutu precedes Tweneboa Kodua. There, also, ought to be a darn good reason for the political survival of the Kum tree in one place and its effective demise in another. Asuru Akwafo!

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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
Feb. 3, 2014
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
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