The big man and the small small, Accra 2016 – III

(The first two posts on my recent Accra visit are here and here.)

Kwame Nkrumah was the nationalist leader who led Ghana to independence in 1957 and went on to serve as prime minister and president until he was ousted in a military coup in 1966. That was fifty years ago. I tried to bring him up in a few conversations, and the one that sticks out is one in which the great leader – and Nkrumah is the Ghanaian archetype – is extolled over ordinary people, for what do people want except to “eat and sleep!” (quoted by a Ghanaian colleague who also proclaimed, “one great man is worth a thousand ordinary people.”)

I couldn’t disagree more.

I tried to bring in Eduardo Galeano‘s words to counter this elitist search for a saviour, but to no avail. Here is Galeano on the topic:
“You and I are educated and we know the world. We are in many ways what they call the leaders. And leaders must serve their people. No matter how tough our lives are, we are not victims. Those who are suffering are the robbed, poor, uneducated people. They have to decide whether and when to take up arms and go: they, not we. If and when they decide to fight, we have to obey and lead them. Whether they will fight or not is not up to us to decide.”

May 23

To say again the all; the singe
Of song; to cry again the wary
Wail and the army's ail; the
Bemoaned are the joyous, but
They will not carve out an 
Evolutionary niche in the
Political economy of a tired
Literature and burnt poetry.

Poetics of dissent

Sloughing off inner form,
          The grammar of dissent accedes
          To the howl in the vowel
          But only so much.

Tending to the tender build
          Up of an umptious velocity
          Of will, the preposition
          Proposes the act

Of severing the shill, the
          Bond of a trembling fever
          Of anxious relief; the
          Cymbals can sound 

Out now, the empire stands
          Naked. O root of the
          Predicate, take barbs
          At the conjugal noun!

“Empire follows art and not vice versa” – William Blake