‘The Boyle Phenomenon: Why We Need To Punch-Past Our Collective Hypocrisy’

By now, some 36 million people may have viewed the phenomenal rendition of a popular song by Susan Boyle, the 47 year old Briton who has suddenly become the toast of the world. She didn’t exactly fit the bill when she presented her drab-middle-age-crisis persona before an expectant audience. The show was ‘Britain’s Got Talent, the British version of American Idol, and people come to cheer talent, especially if it is presented in a sexy, youthful way. Then she delivered the first line of the song. The feeling was almost spontaneous: ‘Oh My God.’ An electrified audience, surprised at her brilliant voice, roared excitedly, betraying their collective hypocrisy in the process. Nobody expected her to do well, because talent, in an age of Viagra and botox, seems to have so much to do with appearance than the inner quality. We could only imagine how she got onto the show in the first place. She doesn’t cut the cool look we are used to. But this was a talent show, and Susan showed that what lies inside is more important than the façade the eye beholds. Remember the old trotro driver’s consolation dictum? ‘Don’t mind the body, mind the engine.’ Well, often the engine was as bad as the body.

Not Susan’s. Suddenly, inner beauty seems to have a buzz. Since when did we think past sex and designer perfumes? The clip is doing the rounds on the internet, with friends eagerly forwarding it to anybody who has lost hope in life. There, also, we are caught in the tracks of our hypocrisy. Susan Boyle wasn’t on the show to prove anybody wrong; she was there to show her talent. The friend who forwarded the UTube video to me attached a message: “Everybody must have hope in life. It is not over until it is over.” Instead of ticking the boxes, as we usually do when we see a brilliant performance, Susan’s excellent performance only goes as far as providing a therapeutic relief.

I wasn’t exactly going to write on Susan Boyle this week; but I was going to discuss talent all the same. So the title of this issue should have read: ‘Ghana is all talent, but hardly a skill’. I had been reading an inspirational book by Marcus Buckingham and Donald Clifton. The title of the work is ‘Now, Discover Your Strength’, a sequel to an earlier one. Look at Susan, and all you think is that she is bound to fail. And that is because she doesn’t look like she could win. Our fixation with faults and failures is the bane of the woes of our generation. You are not strong in something because you have a weakness in another thing; strengths have their own patterns. We don’t need to juxtapose our weaknesses with our strengths in order to decide on where we may have a gift. Bad is bad not only because we have an idea of what good things taste like. The most revealing thing the book discusses is the flawed assumption that “each person can learn to become competent in almost anything, and that each person’s greatest room for growth is in his or her areas of greatest weakness.” It goes on to recommend a strength-finder test, where readers can find out whether they are as consistent as Tiger Woods is with his irons and long games, or as inconsistent as he is when he has to chip out of a bunker.

Quite a good read. I decided to shelve the discussion when I read the authors’ definition of what a talent is: ‘naturally reoccurring patterns of thought, feeling or behaviour.’ And that talent, knowledge, and skill combine to form your strength. As has happened to most people who have read the book, I asked myself after flipping a few pages: “So, what are my strengths? Do I have any talents at all? Have I perfected this talent with skill and knowledge, so I can call that thing my strength? How do we know if we have any talent in us? Well, it starts by knowing who we really are and what interests us. If you go to bed thinking of a headline to a story, and you wake up with a lead/nose already constructed, and you feel a certain compulsion to write it down quickly, lest it evaporates from your head, then chances are that you could be a writer. It doesn’t end there. When the compulsion is so strong that you cannot help but do a full story, complete with quotations from people you have interviewed, then, we are about spotting a journalistic talent somewhere. You could develop that talent into your strength by researching thoroughly before you write, so you don’t have to write retractions. When finally your by-line becomes noticeable and people start writing to tell you how great you are, then we are in business. You would not say you have talent for prostitution because you went to bed thinking of sex and woke up with a dirty idea. Most people do. Go to church instead.

Talent may not be about what you studied; it is about what you can do. And it is not just your ability to do it; it is about doing it very well, naturally, like what Susan Boyle did, so that folks will exclaim ‘Oh My God’ anytime you do it. I didn’t want to research celebrities, because they are always painted as geniuses even though they may be buffoons through and through. I have been digging the history books to see whose talent is universally recognised as fantastic. Is it Adolf Hitler’s public speaking prowess or Idi Amin’s diplomatic skills? Oh yes, Martin Luther King. www.alluc.org hosts some important documentaries about many of these figures. You would be amazed to know how Hitler became a good speaker. I Have A Dream? Well, we understand that was plagiarised, but at least, King’s powerful rendition is what sent it down into history as a classic. Or, maybe, Marilyn Monroe! In that case, JFK is worth studying all the time.

What about Bill Gates? What makes him tick? What about the young owners of Google, who built a multimillion business empire from a garage? Sometimes, we ask ourselves the same question Willy Loman asks: ‘How did you do it?’ This is where Talent comes in. So at 35, when all was almost lost, with no clear definition of where his life was heading towards or a profession he could boldly call his own, Og Mandino, the bestselling author of The Greatest Salesman in the World, the book which is said to have sold more than any other written material, would begin a tortuous journey of self discovery. Once he found his talent, he became so good at the writing business that he went on to write more bestselling books, including The Greatest Miracle in the World and The Greatest Secret in the World. Or, perhaps, Naomi Campbell, who as a young school girl, was spotted eating ice cream on the streets of London. The talent was in her legs. Now, she is so hot that she makes millions by just walking on a stage. We have a lot more: David Beckham, George Clooney and even Britney Spears, the diva who married and divorced in about two seconds. Next she pays off somebody’s wife, buys her a house and marries her husband. Soon, she is fighting over custody of her children after a divorce.

We are not particularly used to these foreign talents; they all seem to have some problems. Let’s get closer home. Who is our finest talent in Ghana? Well, that is too broad a question. Let’s limit ourselves to a particular field, say the media. I wrote a story under a pseudonym and submitted it for publication on the website of a gem many Ghanaians would consider our most talented journalist. Some say he is a better writer than a speaker. Others think he is greater at the microphone than he is on the writing pad. Still, many maintain that he is brilliant at both. He has won prestigious awards in the two areas, including the most coveted, which he has won twice. We believe in him. We know what he can do, especially his trademark introduction of the guests on his show. On the website, I found a very interesting article on another phenomenal BBC journalist. The writer had told the story of how a gentleman called Kwabena Dwomo, proper name Komla Dumor, threw away his stethoscope and settled for the radio business. Would he have been brilliant at medicine the way he is at the console? The theory we are working with is that not everybody excels at a particular activity. It may well be that Komla would have been a terrible doctor if he had held on to the stethoscope. And that is because we often do not excel at things that do not interest us. Or, perhaps, he could have combined the two, performing dodgy abortions for university students and presenting a health show on radio. That would have been nice, but we would never have had a Boos player.

Well, not that he is the most fantastic talent we have ever had; Komla had in his sights good old David Ampofo and Who wants to be a Millionaire Host, Chris Tarrant. They were his inspiration. But Dumor makes an interesting case study because we all saw how he catapulted himself onto the heights of radio broadcasting: from monitoring the traffic on his scooter to the air-conditioned rooms at Joy FM studios, where he presented the Super Morning Show for years. At University of Ghana, I pitied him, because he was not a Vandal. You normally would not expect Legon Hall to produce a gem. Perhaps the only way his Hall of residence may have helped his cause is that he married up. Vandals often marry down, preferring the secretarial institutions to Volta Hall, where a gentleman’s first impression only waited to be outdone by a better gentleman. He had been an ordinary student, unlike a one time SRC Presidential hopeful who threw away his electoral success on the wings of ‘extraordinary’ words. So, the lesson we learn from Dumor is how he identified his talent, diverted all his energies from other pursuits to his area of interest, and developed his strengths through learning and reading. Yet, when the GJA crowned him the Fiawo ge fia of journalism in 2003, some hypocrites would not shout wazaaa with him. Okay, propose a better person, and there was silence.

If Komla’s was by design, my sister’s discovery of her talents was by default. She had not been a brilliant girl at senior secondary school. How do we solve a problem like Aba, my mum would ask? She should stop painting her face with red powder, I would suggest. It takes more than make-up; the girl needs to get a future. Then we began observing her closely at home. She likes order, and always wants to lead. She gathers children and teaches them how to sing. Okay, let’s send her to a music school. Where, in Ghana? Then an idea struck: a computer college. There, she composed an anthem for the college and led a group of students to render a Susan Boyle type sensation of the anthem at an official ceremony. A university professor, the guest of honour, is awed and decides to nurse her talent with a sponsorship package. That was her Susan Boyle moment. Yet, we had written her off. Me? You would be amazed to know how many kisses this weekly crap has brought onto my cheeks. Imagine what we would get if we manage to cut the mess and straighten our winding sentences. That would be a Boyle. Wouldn’t you say?

Benjamin Tawiah lives in Ottawa, Canada. He is a journalist.

Email: btawiah@hotmail.com, quesiquesi@hotmail.co.uk

PS: For displaying rare talent to win an international communications award, Nana Kwadwo Duah, CEO of Oxygen, deserves some commendation. Those who enjoyed his talent at STB McCann Accra saw this coming. Alexandra Akoto Duah of blessed memory must be proud of A Son. We are proud, too.