Review: Beyond Polished Boots: One Spouse’s Experience of Marriage with a Security Service Officer
In a world filled with challenges and opportunities, human beings constantly walk the complex tightrope of liminality.
Thus, every generation must inevitably produce its own Plato’s philosopher-kings and W.E.B. Du Bois’ talented tenth. Moreover, because human beings are rational, agentic creatures, we must continually exert ourselves intellectually to ensure that the fault lines of human agency and rationality do not undermine our collective quest for meaning and conviviality.
Yet, in the modern world—where the boundaries between professional life and marriage are increasingly blurred—rationality and moral affection often collide in ways that threaten the sacramentality of the family as society’s primary unit of subsidiarity.
Focusing these reflections on the marriage between a senior police officer—whose duty is to foster law and order—and a journalist—whose mandate is to inform the public—one begins to appreciate the complexities inherent in conflating the public and the private. Societies are never free of criminality, requiring security personnel to remain vigilant almost constantly. At the same time, information serves as the valve around which public life revolves, making the work of journalists indispensable to democratic accountability. The police, wearing their proverbial polished boots, are expected to signal virtue in the execution of their duties.
But what happens when the ghosts of the police’s historical antecedents refuse to be buried—when past perceptions of the police as a colonial instrument of repression resurface to befog contemporary public trust? And what are the implications when virtue-signalling meets the power of information within the intimacy of a conjugal union? Such philosophical “why” questions demand extraordinary intellectual exertion to illuminate. It is for this reason that I—and indeed encourage others to—celebrate Dzifa Tetteh’s remarkable book, Beyond Polished Boots: One Spouse’s Experience of Marriage with a Security Service Officer. Written in an auto-ethnographic style, Dzifa Tetteh—popularly known as Daavi Dzifa—assembles everyday stories to underscore the need for deeper reforms within the Ghana Police Service, identifying these reforms as essential for fortifying the family as a bulwark against oppositional deviance.
Demonstrating peerless wit that elevates sages above saints, Daavi Dzifa employs accessible English to articulate the complex consequences of blurring the lines between the private and the public within marriage. The book bristles with wisdom, logical expression, thoughtful remedial proposals, and a masterful blend of transcendental insight and rational critique—all culminating in didactic lessons vital for ensuring that the marriage between a police officer and a journalist thrives in a world perpetually “between and betwixt.”
To further contextualize this review, it is important to affirm that for adherents of transcendental religions, marriage is not merely cultural—it is sacred. For Christians in particular, marriage is a divine-cultural mandate (sacrament) instituted for pro-creation and re-creation. Axiomatically, at the heart of social ordering and the pursuit of law and order lies the family, for the public sphere is often a world of strangeness, conflict, and competition, animated by struggles for power and resources.
In such a tense environment, marriage provides a roadmap for re-curating life away from the banality of competition toward moral affection as a conditio sine qua non. Concomitantly, marriage is celebrated as a sociogenic activity, anchored in joy and serenity. Nevertheless, because the pursuit of self-interest can undermine the social and moral conviviality that marriage requires, couples exchange vows to commit themselves to mutual sacrifice and fidelity.
Yet marriage is not without its challenges. For various reasons, couples can drift away from the sacred vows they once made, allowing self-interest to overshadow the communal essence of marriage. Where professional and marital life intersect without careful boundaries, these challenges intensify, threatening the stability of marriage as an institution.
Dzifa Tetteh’s Beyond Polished Boots therefore offers a timely auto-ethnographic lens into such tensions, illuminating the consequences of unmeasured intersections between professional obligations and family life. As an author, Daavi Dzifa—an award-winning journalist—deploys her narrative skill to expose fractures in public perceptions and expectations of the Ghana Police Service, and the cascading effects these have on marriages involving both security personnel and civilians.
From the colonial origins of what was once known as the Captain Glover Gold Coast Constabulary in the nineteenth century to the contemporary Ghana Police Service, the institution has struggled to transcend its historical burdens. Despite numerous reforms aimed at promoting community-centered policing, public perceptions of the service as incorrigibly corrupt remain stubbornly persistent. Throughout the book, therefore, Dzifa weaves lived experiences into a compelling metanarrative that captures the complex, concentric relationship among the state, the police, and the public.
Across its eighteen chapters, Beyond Polished Boots reveals how seemingly ordinary issues—such as a police officer keeping communication channels active at all hours to track crime, or the expectation that officers perform miracles despite limited resources—can strain the delicate social ecology of marriage and family life. Written in clear, engaging, and digestible English, the book possesses a magnetic appeal that keeps readers captivated from beginning to end. It pulsates with brilliance, sagacity, wit, and a logical deployment of language that expertly threads together complex themes.
It is my fervent hope and prayer that many will secure a copy of this book, read it, and draw from its wellspring of didactic lessons—lessons essential for healing our increasingly fractious world.
Charles Prempeh, PhD
Research Fellow, Centre for Cultural and African Studies, KNUST