Ghana

On 6 March, Ghana declared independence from the United Kingdom in 1957: for a little over 80 years prior to this Ghana was a crown colony of Britain. Until Ghana’s Independence Day the country was known to much of the world as “The Gold Coast”—when the Portuguese made contact with Ghana in the 15th century they found so much gold in the region between the Ankobra and Volta rivers that they named the place Mina (Mine), and later “The Gold Coast” was adopted by the English colonists. From the 16th to the 18th centuries more than thirty forts and castles were built by Dutch, British and Danish merchants: during this period there was trade in gold, ivory and slaves.

Since independence Ghana has, like many nations in the period immediately following the establishment of independent nationhood, experienced political upheavals. Following independence, Kwame Nkrumah acted as prime minister—and when in 1960 Ghana was declared a republic, he was proclaimed “president for life.” In 1966 he was overthrown in a military coup. Since then Ghana has been governed by a number of regimes.

More than a hundred dialects are spoken in Ghana, but English is the official language, care of the British Empire. And odd fact is that the former child star Shirley Temple Black was the American ambassador to Ghana from 1974 to 1976.

Today's poem, by the Ghanaian poet Kofi Awoonor, is "The Weaver Bird" - I found it online here. After completing a degree in Ghana, and teaching African literature, he studied literature in London. In the early 1970s he spent time in the United States, also studying and teaching—after he returned to Ghana in 1975, he was arrested and spent ten months in prison without trial. After this he was found guilty of assisting a soldier tied to a plot to overthrow the government, and released (yes, it seems a bit backwards to me too). After this Awoonor turned largely to writing nonfiction and political activism—including, in the early 1990s, acting as head of the UN committee against apartheid.



The Weaver Bird

The weaver bird built in our house
And laid its eggs on our only tree
We did not want to send it away
We watched the building of the nest
And supervised the egg-laying.
And the weaver returned in the guise of the owner
Preaching salvation to us that owned the house
They say it came from the west
Where the storms at sea had felled the gulls
And the fishers dried their nets by lantern light
Its sermon is the divination of ourselves
And our new horizons limit as its nest.
But we cannot join the prayers and answers of the communicants
We look for new homes every day,
For new altars we strive to re-build
The old shrines defiled from the weaver’s excrement.

— Kofi Awoonor