Despite the advances in science, technology and human reasoning, some people in Bibiani, a town in Ghana’s Ashanti Region, credulously believe that a hunchback’s hump can be ritualistically cut off to bring about success.
While such fatal rituals are part of the ancient Ghanaian/African culture, some few people, normally moved by either desperation or envy of somebody’s wealth or success engage wrong-headed traditional spiritualists or bad-hearted juju-marabou mediums for such rituals.
Hunchback or humpback, a deformity of the back called kyphosis, is an abnormal backward curve of the vertebral column. Some Ghanaians believe that hunchbacks are evil, freaks of nature and therefore can be killed ritualistically for varied reasons. As part of the ritual, part of the hump is cut off and the victim left to bleed to death. In the Bibiani case, the hunchback was tied to a rope like a dog, part of his hump cut off, and left to bleed to death.
As Ghana is increasingly being modernized, its dark cultural practices are receiving intellectual attention. Nana Akufo-Addo (December 2008 presidential candidate for the ruling National Patriotic Party) talks of modernizing the Ghanaian society. Part of this, I understand, is refining the inhibitions within the culture that have been stifling progress. While some call for further modernization of the country's education system to incorporate all aspects of culture, others question what Ft. Lt. Jerry Rawlings and his horde of revolutionaries were doing during their almost 20 years in power in the face of all these cultural inhibitions.
In Volta, Rawlings’ own home region, certain dark cultural practices such as juju are partly responsible for the area being one of the poorest in Ghana. Not surprising, the Volta Physically Challenge Independent Group, an association of disabled people, has urged “the public to help the Police to fight the inclinations towards the murder of physically challenged persons for superstitious reasons.”
You need not be a historian or psychologist to understand that this isn’t the larger Ghanaian character, but some very few wrong-headed individuals who are prone to evil deeds. What Hannah Arendt might call the “banality of evil” may provoke surprising predictability of explanations but in the final analysis, 99 percent of Ghanaians are even afraid to dabble in the cutting off a hunchback’s hump for rituals. Yet, the few, with their juju-marabou medium accomplices, are a threat to the larger Ghanaian society.
It is impossible to think about Ghanaian civilization without confronting the culture’s dark aspects. Despite such thoughts circling in the Ghanaian brain, none of the governments Ghanaians have had for the past 51 years have thought that the easiest way to solve Ghana’s problems is to engage in the dark parts of culture by either undertaking mass human sacrifices or assembling enmass juju-marabou spiritualists to ritualize to end poverty or cure diseases or make Ghana a First World country.
Despite its amorphous, intellectually unmanageable nature, Ghanaians believe there is evil, as their cosmology and other spiritual practices say, and some spend a lot of time vainly contemplating about. The abduction and ritually cutting off of the Bibiani hunchback’s hump is one of them, regardless of its primitive bewilderment.
Nana Akufo-Addo and his like-minded modernization folks have a lot of work before them in helping to refine the dark aspects of the Ghanaian culture for progress. For, despite Jean Baudrillard arguing in The Transparency of Evil that all freedom has been accomplished in the post-orgiastic age, all inhibitions erased, all limits eliminated, all barricades torn down, in Ghana certain components of its culture are barriers, limiting, inhibiting, and stifling progress.
From: African Executive:http://www.africanexecutive.com/modules/magazine/articles.php?article=3480&magazine=191#By Kofi Akosah-Sarpong
Expo Times Independent Sierra Leone Journalist
You need to be a member of TheBlackList Pub to add comments!
https://theblacklist.net/
Replies