NII AYI: Colonial hangover

by Gideon Nii Ayi


A hangover is the unpleasant physiological effects following heavy drinking of alcohol. Symptoms include headache, nausea, and thirst. Hangovers may last up to two or three days after alcohol was last consumed.

I first heard the term hangover, over (no pun intended) on the BBC. This set me thinking that perhaps Ghana (and Africa in general) is still on hangover.

During colonialism our grand parents and great-grand parents were fed on much harder stuffs, the intoxication of which is still felt today in their great grandchildren.

So what drink did Ghanaians take from the British? Certainly not palm-wine or ‘’akpeteshie’’. An ‘’akpeteshie’’ induced hangover does not last more than 2 days or so –a local ‘’quafite’’ tells me- , so how come that over 50 something years of gaining self rule we are still drunk!.

Have you ever heard or even said any of these variants yourself?
‘’the white man is a wizard’’ or
‘’as for brofo diee’’ so and so’’? ‘’ the Blackman always .....’’ ‘’this be Ghana or .. ...(fill in the blank with any African country)’’

If you have heard any of the above or even uttered yourself, then surely you are also intoxicated. The grandparents have taken the drink and their children are bearing the consequences. The reason for this intoxication is numerous but I offer only 2.

Firstly when the whites first came to our shores they were technologically advanced (and still are) and so we as a people looked up to them (and we still do) for our tech needs. For example we needed muskets and canons from them to fight our local tribal wars. So even before white rule started in Ghana, the Europeans were influencing the geo-political landscape. So if the Akwamus become a threat to the English, then in the event of a war the Akwamus would have to look for an alternate source of arms apart from the English. If the Dutch didn’t like tribe X, they would just supply tribe Y with arms to war tribe X- they thing was that musket were superior weapons and whoever had them was sure to prevail on the battle field. In effect we as Africans started looking outside for the solutions to their numerous problems.

So even at an early age we just accepted the Europeans as our technological benefactors and never made any attempt (if any at all on any significant scale) to be sufficient. This is evident today as we cannot and do not build our own means of transport (ship, rail, or cars)
I do not want to start any comparison and say Brazilians –through Embraer- build their own planes and Koreans have –Hyundai- which builds ships –sorry I already have. But I just want to analyse causes and facts without contrasting.

Secondly Europeans employed Africans to perform manual and other less reflective jobs. Usually not much was expected from an African from such a job and occasionally when we exceeded a low standard of performance set there was surprise and exclamation of ‘’ohh good job done theere…’’(with a slang at the end, or ‘’grrreeaat’’ and other doting remarks which made the poor African fellow proud and glow in his dark skin just for achieving the barest minimum. Today let IMF/World Bank or any less creditable body issue any commendation and it becomes top headlines on both the radio and TV. The thing is sometimes this approvals/citations are given because we managed to just pass the barest/minimum standard which will not hold anywhere else except in Africa but we still have not gotten over our love from commendations given by a foreigner and we earnestly crave for it.

Look within our political and social environment today and you will find a lot of people still intoxicated with the drinks that their grandparents quaffed under colonial rule.

Fact is we have forgotten or overlooked the effects of colonialism and we are going about business as usual.

Our whole outlook as a society has been affected by a clash of different cultures-we have tried Malaysian, Korean, Nordic, Indian, Chinese etc.-in fact anything but our own.

We are unsure of how to proceed.
Do we make our children speak our own language or another?.
Which part of our culture is evil and which part is progressive.**
We do not know which branch to grasp or tree to cut down,
neither the crops to plant in our own land (both literally and figuratively)
We are left groping in the dark in our quest to define ourselves
We are ever copying instead of learning.

I wish I knew the full effects of this hangover and how to reverse it

**(I am not saying all our whole culture is perfect! But no culture is entirely bad))