LETS SAVE GHANA MUSIC FROM THE WATERS NOW.

The heart rending email below was sent to me by the president of the Ghana Studies Association(an association of scholars from all over the world who focus on Ghana in their work). It relates the effects on Prof. John Collins(and his decades of painstaking work to preserve,research and document Ghana music) of the recent floods in Accra. Though of British ancestry he is now a full Ghanaian citizen and in his very unassuming and inimitable style he has passionately focused on preserving Ghanaian and indeed indigenous African music. I have read some of John's scholarly work and met him a couple of times. For those with connections to the powers that be(who should be directing resources to such   undertakings)  sending the message will be useful. Lets donate our bits and pieces. I love my Ghana music to bits. I just listened this dusk to Kojo Antwi's magical "Hini me" as I drove past the beach on the beach road at Tema ; there was a certain calming surreality as the African sun dipped and as the sea sprayed those gossamer like mists; crushed upon those rocks with both intensity and a caressing tenderness and Kojo Antwi just crooned away. I WANTED TO STOP AND MAKE THE GULF OF GUINEA MY BED!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

ps: see http://www.discogs.com/artist/John+Collins+(15); 

http://www.ugspalegon.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=7%3Aprofessor-e-john..&limitstart=4;
http://www.discogs.com/Various-Ghana-Special-Modern-Highlife-Afro-Sounds-Ghanaian-Blues-1968-81/master/207675

please send notes to John here:

Phone: 233(0)24­3239488 or 233(0)21­421964

Email: jcollins@ug.edu.gh

Dear GSA members,

Many of our members have been affected by the recent floods in Ghana, including John Collins, who sends the following report on damage to his music studio and archives and an appeal for assistance. Please share with your colleagues. I am willing to collect donations from GSA members to forward to John - simply mail a check to us (with a note indicating it is a donation to Bokoor House) or make a donation (again with a note) via paypal.

All the best,

Dennis Laumann
GSA President

FLOOD DISASTER AT JOHN COLLINS BOKOOR HOUSE ACCRA GHANA AND  PARTIAL DESTRUCTION OF ITS BOKOOR AFRICAN POPULAR MUSIC ARCHIVES FOUNDATION  (BAPMAF)

Dear colleagues, supporters, fans, friends, press and well-wishers  – as you may know I am a musician, musicologist and music lecturer at the University of Ghana - and I  have been operating the BAPMAF music archives in Ghana since  1990. This NGO was set up to preserve and promote Ghanaian and other African popular music and was partly opened at my Bokoor House to the public in 1996 and more fully in 2007. However, devastation struck in the middle of the night of 26th Oct 2011 in the form of a flood. This occurred over many parts of Accra due to an unseasonal and massive rainfall compounded by more and more people building in or blocking water ways - so that rivers could no longer easily run into the sea. In our particular Taifa-Ofankor area this was compounded by the construction of a 3 mile section of the Kumasi highway (from Achimota to Ofankor) without adequate storm gutters - and also saw-millers in my immediate neighbourhood - some of whom have been anti socially been dumping sawdust in rivers and wetlands for the last few years

We residents have complained to both the Ghana National Highways Authority and the Ga District Assembly (Council) over the years to no avail. Indeed the National Highways Authority told us residents that they had to build the road first before constructing the drains and that these 2 projects even fell under 2 different Ministries. Furthermore, the MUUS saw-millers  next to us, who are relative newcomers to  the area, did not allow space on their adjacent land to ours for a gutter. Infact by dumping sawdust on the drainage river (Brenyah River) they re-directed part of this river though my house and garden – which broke my wall – they are even now claiming my garden house and BAPMAF premises is their ‘natural’ gutter.

The resulting flooding on the 26 Oct was unprecedented with almost 6 feet of water entering our land and 4.5 feet into the downstairs house and premises where some of the BAPMAF archival holdings are kept. I was in Mali at the time at an African popular music conference organized by the French Institute in conjunction with and the Malian Ministry of Culture. On returning to Ghana on the 29 Oct I met my family perched upstairs in the BAPMAF exhibition space. They had escaped drowning by 2 minutes due to a timely call from a neighbor upstream who noticed the water build up and got them to leave the house and flee upstairs

Some of the losses are as follows

· Approx 10-20% 0f BAPMAF archival holding lost. Some we are still trying to dry and salvage.

· Loss of all electronic equipment including materials donated a few years ago to the BAPMAF archives by the German Goethe Institute for a digitization project.

· Loss of car, backup generator, various pumps, CD players, DVD players, 4 track recording machines, scanners, printers, record players etc . etc .

· Losses of masses of personal property of myself, my wife and son.

The house and area is now too dangerous for human habitation (i.e. residential purposes at ground level ). All this due to the short sightedness of the civic authorities in not insisting the National Highways Authority build storm gutters alongside the highway they have been constructing for seven years (which incidentally also went under water on the  26 Oct ). And also the civic authorities inability to stop individuals or saw-millers etc from building on or blocking natural water flows.

As this is not likely to be resolved in the near future I have no recourse but to remove myself and my family from the downstairs  house that myself and my father before me have been living since the 1970’s – and to temporarily move upstairs to  the BAPMAF exhibition room and unoccupied shop area - and   later maybe find rented property where we will not be drowned like rats

So my immediate plans are as follows :-

· Find temporary storage space for the BAPMAF archives and temporary accommodation until the government enacts policies that will alleviate the flooding in the Ofankor-Taifa area through the construction of storm gutters and the stopping of sawdust and other obstacles being dumped (or even built) in the natural drainage areas

· Build circa 200 feet of reinforced concrete wall with gravel embankment to immediately  protect the Bokoor/BAPMAF proper from  flooding – so I and the BAPMAF archives can at least operate in the upstairs properties. This wall alone will cost around 7000$

· To replace tens of thousand of dollars of lost equipment, computers, car, scanners, cameras, digital record player, stabilizers, chargers and 12 volt battery backup system, slide projector etc etc

· At some point I will write to various individuals and organizations that donated  books, videos and DVD’s and music materials to BAPMAF to send me , if possible, replacement copies.

Now is a critical time and I would greatly appreciate your suggestions on how I could overcome this catastrophe and move forward. If you have any suggestions as how I could proceed – including any agencies, individuals, organizations who could assist financially in this reconstruction as well as  replacing lost books and music this would be most appreciated. Publicising and circulating this appeal on your networks and  blogs would also be most welcome - as would letters of sympathy.

Yours sincerely John Collins (Prof)

Ps Please send money to support the essential work of rebuilding this unique archive to my UK bank account at follows

NATWEST, Tottenham Court Rd Branch

P.O.BOX 2EA 45 Tottenham Court Rd. London WIT 2EA

Reward Reserve Account of E .J. Collins

Account number 265922a58

Sort Code 56-00-31

Swift code NWBK GB 2L IBAN number GB16 NWBK 56003126 5922 58

COMMUNITY POWER!!!

The ochre building

I was returning from a visit to my loving parents when this ochre building with blue trimmings in the compound of the Accra Teacher Training College struck me. The signage indicated that it was a community library for young people. My interest piqued as I drove on. And I pondered. Libraries nurture young minds and ignite that fiery, incurable life- long passion for books, learning and the unyielding search for knowledge which every society needs to confront its existential challenges. Libraries have impacted my life deeply.

The small library at Morning Star  Preparatory School in the 1980s was my kingdom; this was a veritable treasure trove of information. There I read about Kwaku Ananse(the Ghanaian sage anti-hero), Loki the perennial trouble causer god of Norse mythology and of course the Iliad(when I confronted it as a Classics student at the University of Ghana, Legon it was familiar terrain); in that library I circumnavigated the world a zillion times in my mental interstices before I ever leaped bodily across the oceans into other climes. In my high school years the Ghana Library Board facility (then obviously losing its verve but still very useful) in down town Accra near the Ghana Supreme Court buildings was a regular haunt. By my twenties I had visited every library(

Children doing their thing!

joined  where possible and borrowed books) in Accra. I noticed in the last few years the demise of those libraries I was familiar with in our capital. The British Council Library suffered a meltdown and has morphed into a confounding temple for profits (which should not be a bad thing except that the profit motive incinerated the library). The Martin Luther King ,Jr, Library began to unravel after the George Bush, Jr., led cuts on such facilities and has relocated to the fortification that is the American Embassy(too many guns and war like infrastructure in sight to attract an unarmed potential reader and too way out of town!!). The W.E.B Dubois Library is struggling while the George Padmore Research Library on African Affairs is just soldiering on. Today as a society we seem enamored of actively building malls, stalls, stores and drinking spots not thinking spaces like libraries in our communities and that is how we have choked off the circuitry for  fresh imaginings, deep self reflection and the sheer  pleasure of mental exercise.

The Nima Learning Centre

To return to the ochre building it turns out that Nima Community Library(and its adjoining Learning Centre) where I shared some thoughts on leadership last Friday was part of a chain(I engaged with staff from this chain of libraries in Ghana) painstakingly and determinedly put up by Kathy Knowles(a Canadian) and her Ghanaian collaborators. I love the Learning centre outfitted with a stage for in-house theatrical productions and the spacious reading room above it. My area Sakumono and the Manets of this world definitely need this   kind of space. The Africa themed décor of both the library and Learning Centre connect its young patrons to who they are (the children’s story books which depict the children’s everyday realities and produced in-house as well further reinforce this). I was extremely happy that the Republic of Ghana through the Accra Metropolitan Assembly was picking the tabs for utilities and the staff. This is what creative governance should be about; this to my mind is the meaning of local government where concerned citizens engage a sensible, agile, considerate government and her assigns in tackling the everyday challenges of all of us unencumbered by domineering, seducing ideas of social and economic organization from elsewhere. One can espy Nima lying placidly below from the balcony of the Learning Centre with her dizzying patchwork of brown roofs; what other heights can’t Nima and indeed our Republic reach with community power?


ps: all pixes taken from the Osu Children Library Fund website.          

OIL JUANDICE

I shared this piece on my g-mail thread this morning; Enjoy!!!


Nana Nketia as usual lays it unvarnished:http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/artikel.php?ID=224074.

Sekondi-Takoradi(my birthplace) and surrounding areas already feeling the social fall out of this oil praised to the high heavens by our ever scheming and intellectually indolent politicos; sex trade flourishing like the gushing oil deeps at Cape Three Point!!! Amos Anyimadu provides some perspective@  https://www.facebook.com/Africatalks/posts/262933097092810. Some of us saw it coming; as one Senegalese griot insightfully ululated: "if you want to see a country's future look at its history!!!!" I have credible information from my sources that the accounting for oil receipts have been turned into a Prof. Diago magic act laced with phantom figures and ghost paper trails. Our politicos and elites will feed fat on this oil it seems until they and their progeny become juandice yellow physiologically and anatomically with this stuff whereupon oil rigs will be needed to drain them up!!!!    

ASEM DA YENSO!!!!!

3SNAPSHOTS!!!

So the way we live now, what draws our spirits forward, if our souls are not energized by the urge to attain projections of our own best selves?

                                                                - Ayi Kwei Armah in The Eloquence of the Scribes

A must read for any serious African thinker!!!

I have been inspired reading Ayi Kwei Armah’s rivetingly cerebral yet very programmatic book The Eloquence of the Scribes. This expository prose shines with blinding light on each of the 346pages; the kind of light African universities have not too actively provided their students yet. Armah is the kind of genius our Republic should honour with the Order of the Volta not some of the carpetbaggers who do their political masters’ bidding and literally cadge for such national awards. And I thank my very good friend Dr. Kwadwo Osei-Nyame, Jr, for carrying such a gem of wisdom of a book across the Mediterranean for me as promised. My frantic search for this classic in some of Ghana’s major bookshops had proved futile; a sobering reminder of how we have somehow short circuited the vital sustained flow of pertinent, useable, society changing information while we strain at the phantasmagoric game of beggary. I learnt one thing reading this book: the centrality of the scribe to fresh imaginings and more in the midst of chaos in society has been part of Black Africa’s intellectual tradition and history since ancient Egypt. Citi Fm was re-enacting this millennia charge in the age of the bits and bytes when it focused (aided by the biting wit and no punches pulling bravado of Ben Avle and his team) on our ailing health sector last week. Our health workers seemed to have taken the majority of criticisms as I monitored that programme but let us do some image work to arrive at some useful conjecture on this matter and frame the problem properly. I employ poetic license as I sketch the reality of real people I know below:

Snapshot 1: Her vestments are white like the innocence she carried from college into the real world. Now it is work life in Ghana. Without a car she wakes up at 3:00 a.m. for a new day. The bus she takes after an earlier weary day is an assemblage of rust and contorted metal refusing to be hidden by the paint peeling here and there in a grotesque mural on wheels. She takes four of such contraptions before she gets to work. At the hospital the air is fetid reinforced by an overwhelming pong rushing like a mighty wind from the loo; taps do not run. Inside there is a certain darkness; the nets on the windows are clogged with dust competing with sun light. To get to her “office” she must walk like a drunk to avoid patients strewn all over. And then that birth; she must “cut” the umbilical cord with a syringe needle because blades for the purpose have not been supplied. Then there is that emergency Caesarian. Woman came unprepared. She needs to shaved. She has no shaving sticks. Our lady in white must go to the corridor and scream at the top of her voice if anyone has shaving sticks; all in a day’s work. It is lunch time. Our lady in white must eat. She must walk some distance to get her lunch; there is no organized canteen for her. The routine continues in this hell hole until perspiring and tired she returns home. She looks forward to a bath to soothe the strain and her comely curves. She strips and gets into the shower. She turns on the tap. The tap literally farts and does so in quick succession as if imitating Ghanaian hip-life star Sarkodie’s rapid fire delivery. No water. She turns to get to her towel. Lights go off.                 

Snapshot 2:  Freshly minted M.B., Ch.B.  He took his Hippocratic Oath seriously. He decides to stay home to heal his compatriots. His misery has begun already. His days start very early. His consulting room at the nation’s premier hospital is misery’s handiwork. The air-conditioner roars like a hungry lion but manages to blow only hot air. Talking to his patients has become a shouting match. The sphygmomanometer he uses is the Mosaic one with the air filled ball attached; in the age of digital ones. The bed in the corner seems a century old with a blood stained green bed sheet thrown over it by someone wanting to take a piss than dress a bed for a potential patient. He sees patients in droves and often times has to skip his lunch if emergencies pop up. And then he is on call 24/7 occasionally. At such moments what he dreads most is becoming a patient himself on account of driving in the Accra night along roads with no street lights and gaping craters. At such moments he has to curtail romance sessions postponed several times already with the new missus at the height of passion. His love life is rotten; the tools for his trade are not cutting edge; his salary is yet to be single spined; he has seen too many patients die needlessly; some patients think he is Hitler incarnate when tired and haggard he cannot see them.

Snapshot 3: The most tasking work he ever did was to move from one media house to another with one sided arguments which no amount of reason however sophisticated could counter. And then he would appear at rallies festooned like a lamppost with his party’s colours with an awkward Texan hat atop his bare pate. Around party honchos he will grin and salivate in equal measure and call their opponents Lucifer’s disciples. Now he has the political post. Very easy work for 5 four wheel drives in the driveway; a five bedroom bungalow at Roman Ridge with generators when the lights go off; perks he cannot keep track of; a salary those who voted for his party cannot even contemplate after a hundred reincarnations and the friendship of embassy staff who fleece off him national secrets while the Hennessey waters his still greedy throat. He has six mobile phones and an iPad to boot and is NEVER on call. He gets to work when he likes or not all. He freezes in his car of choice for the week as the mists from the air conditioner screens off the wretched masses stupid enough to consider him savior. At best he has made a mastery of talking about problems in seminars, conferences and workshops without deigning to solve them. He eats at the plushest restaurant with foreign investors who are happy to have a buffoon to do business with. Christmas is around the corner: the hampers will overwhelm him. And sated and overweight and sick from his gluttony we will send him abroad for treatment (while the hospitals at home keep receiving newborns on cold concrete floors). And if he dies we will give him a state funeral.

Now reader please make your judgement !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!   

KƆKƆSAKYI

Our kɔkɔsakyi!!!

For a thirteen year old he was simply larger than life. And he had this aura around him; a certain bespoke majesty which was further accentuated by his strapping height and flecks of grey. He tended to stroll from his bungalow on the path that cut through that lovely green field that hosted a zillion teenage feet wild at play year after year. I used to catch a glimpse of him through the Form 1 A window. Sam Parry. In his black trench coat silhouetted against the mists crafted by the harmattan and the restless ocean fairly close by. He was not just our headmaster; he inspired us. Mondays were special at Apam Secondary School under his watch. His charisma ensured that the assembly hall was uncharacteristically packed beyond its limits. On that stage his was indeed a command performance peppered with tales of wisdom and admonitions. The school choir would have set the tone. One song I remember rendered so touchingly by this choir was about kɔkɔsakyi the vulture. The song berated the vulture for its failure to make a nest and the pathetic fate that befell it whenever it rained. Our ancestors were clear in their minds about long term strategic thinking; hedging against the imponderables of life and existence. Kɔkɔsakyi’s ways were not worth emulating.

The rains Accra experienced recently showed our  kɔkɔsakyian ways. Our topmost city leaked so badly after just 10 hours (not even continuous) of rain. It was not just the marauding water that maimed, killed and destroyed but crucially the stuff it easily marshaled along with it: electricity poles, walls, garbage etc. Sure signs of urban blight, disrepair and utter neglect. I have been pondering this ever since: could Accra have survived even for a week the chain of strafing infernos of death that NATO unleashed on Tripoli? If this is what rains can do to us what about cluster bombs tele-guided by fresh faced youths (considered patriots by their puppet masters) for whom mass killing(morphed by some linguistic chicanery into a harmless term ‘sorties’) unleashes a certain techno-porn high?

How long Accra and other cities can survive the most severe blitzkrieg and march on for the next millennia? Is that not how our leaders are supposed to think?  Wuhan University my beloved alma mater in China has secret locations where the faculty can be kept safely in case of a catastrophe human or natural. The urbanscape in many ways betrays for me the architectural construct of the thinking of its elites; whether or not they are thinking in millennia or simply one rain after the other terms. And this brings me to some of the arguments brought forward to rationalize our nakedness after the rains. A typical convoluted one was that citizens who had built on waterways were the culprits to be excoriated. Sloppy thinking!!!! One needs a permit to build and other arcane, serpentine, labyrinthine processes. Who offers that? The authorities of course!!! So who should hold the can? Those who run the bureaucracies and their political masters. Not the citizens who have to deal with decapitating rents(frontloaded into advance payments); landlords who play God and rotten infrastructure(water, power, roads etc.).

Let us return to our kɔkɔsakyi. If the idea of the unity of opposites is anything to go by  this bird can teach our leaders a useful lesson after all. As a scavenger it is extremely diligent. If only we could even do that well Accra will be on to something.