Happy Birthday, Ghana
At this serene evening hour
A poet shares with our people our story
An African freedom epic
Abounding with optimism, and adventure
A near delirium of delight that fills this poet
Arises not from a boast, nor a perch on a post
Elated, he’s heeding the solemn call
That to our ancestors, piety we must accord
If for nothing, they lent us life, left us art
A wealth of wit and wisdom, myths and acts
Only the poor fool begrudges the dead
So demurs so shirks a duty held sacred
Our elders say:
The arc of a story must always bend
Towards a moral
Ours begins at the end
Of the beginning of an episode lain
In our treasure trove of folklore
Once upon a time,
Imperial conquest corralled distinct, diverse peoples,
Stringing strands of traits and scores of tastes
Into a trophy colony
Assorted peoples hemmed into one people
In the contrived design,
Our names overlain with names at the whim
Of the conqueror
We know why we name the names
Of places and persons, yet an ancient people,
Now, a curious mix of names:
Heathen, aborigine, indigenous, native, tribe,
Ethnic; today, emerging
Don’t our elders say
“Your character reflects the name after you named?”
Enthralled, a race would crave
The allure of the colonial
A tongue to master,
A mellifluous name to assume
Many a tradition, the proselytizer would forswear as heathen
But to the received shibboleth,
Folks would swear fealty
Soon though, the riveting irony:
Ranks of the lettered few swelled
To offer a soothing antidote
To the swelling imperial carbuncle
Upon a diminished people at a diminished pride
At history’s crossroads,
Chance and choice crisscrossed
A veteran soldier’s unprepossessing
March for a just recompense,
A lethal gun ready at the trigger:
Adjetey, Odartey, and Atipoe
Fallen, as it were,
Not in a battle in the rice paddies of Burma
Felled they were promenading a castled beach
Yet reparations to their memory
Extracted neither in gold nor in silver
Nor in cannonading that castled beach
But in the glory of a freedom fighter’s apt moment for outlawry
The Bond of 1844
A deed of a people’s grave error of surrender
Now a lightning rod to stoke the embers
Of muted discontent into a raging flame
Of unquenchable rebellion
The martyr would shed blood
So that within freedom’s fortress,
A people could life’s battles prosecute
Men of valor such as would be persecuted
Such as would with unbroken of spirit endure
The agony of the Usher Fort
So that at the trodden Old Polo Park,
At the voice of freedom’s herald,
A downtrodden folk could frolic!
Our founding fathers’ foresight
A perfect vision in hindsight
Theirs the seeds of prescience
Ours the harvest of freedom’s profits
For they trawled upriver to the watershed
Of our motherland’s story
Reckoning what that she had been before:
Ghana, Mali, Songhai Empire
Beholding what she had become
Amid the twists and turns of time:
See, deflowered she was
At the onset of a dark,
Orgiastic trade; the hulking remnants
Lay prostrate, pointing heavenward,
Perhaps penitent, on the beachhead
At Osu, Cape Coast, Elmina and beyond
Still, she cuddled precious stones
In her ample bosom
Unbowed and radiant,
She bathed in the sun-drenched,
Restorative tidal waters
Of the Atlantic realm
At Elubo, Anomabo and Keta
She was the sacred summit of Afadjato
The beckoning Akwapim range,
Easing into the bucolic savannah
Of grain and game, of the vast, rustic North
She was the lush millennial forest of
An interior sodden with the living waters
Of Asuo Afram, Ankobra, Birim,
Otadee Bosomtwe, Densu, Offin, Oti, Pra,
Tano; Black Volta and White Volta
Then and there on the cusp of history
They saw ahead what she could become:
From that Gold Coast colony:
Servile, an unadorned beauty
Shorn of wealth and self-worth
To a renascent Ghana: free, unmolested,
Bejeweled, wealthy and worthy
Kwame Nkrumah, Kyeretwie Boakye Danquah,
Ako-Adjei, Obestebi-Lamptey, Akufo-Addo
And Ofori-Atta were the storied Big Six
Pioneers whose was a bequest of heroic deeds
We, we are a memorial in full bloom
Befitting their seminal toil!
And such as she was,
Such would a young nation brazenly answer
The clarion call to liberation:
A few million-folk; un-readied
Yet ready for a venture in adventure
She would parlay statecraft
Into breaching her scrawny African frontiers
A David in stature yet with an epic temerity,
To confront the bemused Goliaths of an era
A Prometheus at the mid-20th century,
The virtue of a reconfigured continent
She would proclaim such as
To tackle the Herculean task ahead
To that odyssey would she lend
A pioneering spirit and verve!
She would wage many a noble war
Against dire human privations:
Saplings of education in blissful bloom over
Meadow, hill and vale
To inoculate the folk against the malady of want
To loosen the shackles of ignorance
Such would be her evocative enterprise
She would tame game, subdue land
To yield harvest for her granaries
A phoenix of a harbor would realize along
Her Atlantic shorelines
A fleet of her flag-flown vessels would
Venture out to sea and the distant shore
Braving trade winds and hurricanes
Announcing the spirit of amity
Coaxing commerce from among the comity of nations
She would raise a lake across a gorge,
An nkonson nkonson bo
To lift Akosombo on a grid
A light of hope to cast a radiant glow on
A new dawn of boundless possibilities
And into the arm of the infant nation,
The artist would inject such as to induce
The nation with an adrenal rush
And a romantic rendezvous
Ephraim Amu: Extolling our forbear’s
Sacrifice; the ethos of the patriot
Theodosia Okoh: Exuding inventive
Genius in a freedom’s flag that flutters at mast
In an anthem,
Philip Gbeho; Exhorting a nation to bravery and dignity
Agya Koo Nimo: Waxing lyrical in nostalgic
Folksongs of an endearingly, enduring troubadour
And our exultant poets –
Efua Sutherland, Kwesi Brew,
Ama Ata-Aidoo and Atukwei Okai:
Soothing our yearning for triumph
With streams of staves
Strewn with sweet songs
Such as so elated,
Such as she would ooze
With a contagion of hope
Such as so inspired,
Such as she would
Set her Elysian sights on new heights
Oh Ghana!
Jubilant!
Confident!
Bon vivant!
Even Bohemian!
This Ghana!
Now, an artfully knitted quilt
A rich tapestry
In hue and in habit;e
In trait and in taste;
In tenet and in testament
This Ghana
Like a long colorful yarn
On the loom and lap
Of the ambidextrous
Bonwire kente craftsman!
This Ghana,
Our beloved land of destiny,
But now a benighted sovereign,
Summons our generation to a Pax Africana:
To a Newtonian age of reason
Such as nurtures nature,
Her teeming treasure-store to unleash
For progress yet to be heralded
For poetry yet to be heard
While our mood is euphoric
May this new journey be re-begun!
From this glorious independence anniversary day!
Happy birthday, Ghana!