Recently I visited Ghanaian friend. A new acquaintance who had spent time in Nigeria in the 1970s – 1980s before the civilian government of the day heaped the blame for all the country’s woes on the Ghanaian diaspora in Nigeria and sent them packing. Ghana-must-go bags, widely used today by Nigerian politicians to steal and store raw cash, have become the most intriguing legacy of that collective demonization of Ghanaians, as well as Nigeria’s most colourful contribution to the lexicon of corruption.

I had also spent time in Ghana – in Accra and Ho – in the early 1990s. Our experience of each other’s respective countries provided sufficient ground for loud African conversation, aided by Ghanaian delicacies and generous quantities of the abomination we call bottled palm wine here in North America. I recalled my time in Ghana: good roads, stable electricity, water, efficient public service delivery at all levels, courtesy in government offices, security of life and property, and, above all, ridiculous levels of corruption. I recalled the level of noise Ghanaians made if a politician was so much as suspected to have misappropriated, say, fifty thousand dollars! In Nigeria, a politician who steals as little as fifty thousand dollars could be found guilty not of stealing but of embarrassing the Nigerian State with the amount involved. Politicians in the deluded “giant of Africa” steal “giantly” in hundreds of millions. And theft is denominated in dollars. In Nigeria, no self-respecting politician steals in Naira. When Nuhu Ribadu, the anti-corruption czar began to take his job too seriously, fighting corruption – albeit very selectively - rather than making the appropriate body movements to convince the international community that we are indeed fighting corruption, he was promptly shoved aside. My Ghanaian friend offered the familiar feel-good, consolation comments other embarrassed African brothers always make when Nigerians lament the fate of their country in the hands of visionless leaders: these things happen everywhere you know. Even here in North America. It is not peculiar to Nigeria. Things were even worse in Ghana but we came out of the woods. Don’t be fooled by the Ghana you experienced in the 1990s. We were in the doldrums before then. If Ghana can do it, Nigeria can do it…

Our discussion moved to football – the real football, not the hand-and-leg ball they call football in North America – and we almost brought down the roof as is customary when Africans discuss football, the continent’s religion. The African cup of nations was around the corner and I assured my friend that President Kuffour would be pleased to deliver the cup to the Nigerian captain, Kanu Nwankwo, at the end of the competition. My friend dismissed me as a typical Nigerian loudmouth.  We were about to place bets when his eight-year-old son stormed out of his bedroom screaming: “dad, turn on the Tee Vee!” My friend reached for the remote control and flicked on the television. Wendy’s new commercial was on. The lad asked: “Dad, why do the tribesmen want to eat that innocent man?” A hush fell on us. The palm wine turned stale in my mouth. My friend looked at me in exasperation. Oro p’esi je! The answers one could have given the boy were smothered instantly by his questions. How do you explain the discursive politics of Wendy’s commercial to an eight-year old?

I had noticed that commercial when it went on air last year and dismissed it as one of those irritating Western figurations of the Other, just like the cave men in the Geiko commercial. Wendy’s, the fast food chain that’s so desperate to become a household name like McDonalds and Burger King, has dug into the deepest recesses of Western imagination to produce the commercial. What’s the gist? Roll tape: we are in the jungle. A bunch of cannibals appear with a prized prey, a Caucasian man that they have ostensibly captured for dinner. He is attached to a pole slung over the shoulders of some of the cannibals. They are hurrying home to a good dinner. The cannibals look fearful. They remind you of Chinua Achebe’s description of masquerades in Things Fall Apart. They certainly remind me of Ojigindo, the fearful ancestral masquerade in my hometown, whose annual carnavalesque outing succumbed to the interloping antics Roman Catholic priests when I was in elementary school. I now only have vague memories of Ojigindo, etched erroneously in my imagination as paganism until I encountered the historical remedy of Négritude philosophy when Francophone Africa and France became my areas of scholarly specialization. Wendy’s cannibals are covered in chalk-white powder from head to toe. Only skirts of reed cover their nakedness. They carry primitive hunting instruments. The Caucasian man pleads for his life in American English: “please don’t eat me! I’m not delicious! I don’t taste good”. He has a clear, definite American identity. The cannibals do not get any such treatment. They are not that lucky. They remain an open, vicious signified. They could be Africans, Native Americans, Maoris, or Aborigenes. In short, anything but Western and modern.

The “they want to harm us” mantra of George Bush’s ‘ war ron terra’ can very easily become “ they want to eat us” in the field of cultural production…

Eventually, one of the cannibals shows himself capable of reasoning and worthy of preliminary admission into Western modernity. Thankfully, the commercial endows him and his kinsmen the gift of native-speak, the sort of incomprehensible native babble you find in Conrad and Sir Rider Haggard. “He is right, you know”, our cannibal pronounces in cannibal-speak, modernized and rendered in English as Wendy’s subtitles flicker onto the screen. He then advises his fellow cannibals to dump the human prey and opt for any of the items on Wendy’s delicious menu.

This was what caught the attention of my Ghanaian friend’s son. The boy from Ghana naturally identified with the Caucasian victim and was horrified by the fact that the tribesmen almost ate an innocent man but for Wendy’s felicitous and humanitarian intervention. I sympathized with my friend as he wrestled with what to tell the inquisitive boy. Do you tell an eight-year-old that in the imagination of those who conceptualized that ad for Wendy’s and the larger society in which he lives, he is only an improved version of those cannibals by virtue of the accident of his birth in Canada? Do you explain to an eight-year-old that in all the great tomes of this society, those cannibals figure as his ancestors, his kinsmen? How do you handle the fact that the word “tribesmen”, complete with the entire gamut of its baggage in the West, has somehow crept into the vocabulary of your eight-year-old son and you didn’t even realize it? The boy from Ghana was so disgusted when he uttered the word “tribesmen” and that was particularly worrisome.

“Can’t you see I’m busy with our guest? Go back to your room and we’ll talk about this later”. The boy left, sulking. “That’s a temporary escape for you”, I told my friend, “This boy obviously thinks himself Canadian. For now he is still too young to realize that a tree trunk may spend twenty years in the river, it will never become a crocodile. There will always be the artillery of the West’s stubborn image of the Other to remind him of his “savage” origins. You’re lucky he still doesn’t realize his kinship with Wendy’s cannibals”. “Pius, it’s easy for you to sermonize now. Your daughter is only three months old. Wait until you reach this bridge. All African parents here in the West face this problem”.

“Has your son ever been to Ghana”, I asked my friend. He replied in the negative but told me he was making plans to take him home soon. That’s part of the problem, I told him. Those of us here have two options. Our first option is to raise children who are going to be completely deluded that they are Canadians or Americans, that they are not like “those Cannibals and tribesmen” whereas the imagery of Otherness and its economies of meaning will follow them their entire lives, never mind that they “speak English with no accent!” Obama is a good example. From time to time, they remind him… a photo of him dressed as a Somali elder, a trip by CNN to meet his grandmother, little hints here and there. They don’t want him to have any illusions. Our second option, therefore, is to raise hybrid subjects who have no illusions about who they really are deep down, a secure inner core, beneath the monochromatic surface of hybridity and métissage, even if their passports and their accents tell other stories, other supposed narratives of modernity.

“How do you do that when the cards are so thoroughly dealt against us”, my friend ventured. He continued: “We don’t even have the pedagogical resources to counter Wendy’s narrative at age-appropriate levels. Take the case of your countryman, Chinua Achebe. Things Fall Apart is a great material. Do we have abridged, Children’s versions of that great African book? If my son had encountered masquerades in age-appropriate abridged versions of Things Fall Apart, perhaps his question today would have been: Dad, why is Wendy’s making those masquerades look bad?”

Now, that was a brilliant point I hadn’t even thought about. “Well there is always a start”, I exclaimed. “Subscribe to Setanta sports. Make sure he watches the nations cup with you. Let him add Stephen Appiah, Samuel Eto’o, Didier Drogba, and Kanu Nwankwo to his list of heroes composed exclusively for now of names from Canadian ice hockey and American football and basketball!” We laughed and returned to our football talk but something had changed about the evening. On my way home, I thought about my three-month-old daughter and what my friend had said about getting to that bridge. How will I react when she is old enough to go to school and returns one day to ask me, innocently, about disgusting cannibals and tribesmen from Africa?

Robot  Villager

# 1 Recently I visited Ghanaian friend. A new acquaintance who had spent time in Nigeria in the 1...Read the full article. Posted by Robot| 18.03.2008 08:28

Ofunwa Villager  Villager

# 2 Beautiful article Pius, I have always called you great and great you are. Posted by Ofunwa Villager| 19.03.2008 08:40