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Quashigah: Appetite for bold thinking
By Kofi Akosah-Sarpong
For some time, Ghana’s former Agriculture and Health Minister,
Courage Emmanuel Kobla Quashigah, a retired major from the Ghana
Armed Forces who died in an Israeli hospital on January 5 at 62,
have been in the forefront of the emerging Ghanaian/African
enlightenment project. The project, largely undertaken by its
advocates pro bono, seeks to appropriate Africa’s traditional
values for progress by simultaneously exploiting the enabling
parts for policy making and exposing the inhibiting aspects for
refinement.
Quashigah reflects the simple, wisdom orientated aspects of the
budding African enlightenment project. In Quashigah, Africa’s
traditional values have to be understood and carefully weaved
into Africa’s progress as a matter of practicality. In doing
this, Quashigah believed that much of Africa’s psychological
scars that have come from the trans-Atlantic slave trade and
colonialism will be healed. Still, it will correct the fact that
Africa is the only region in the world where its development
paradigms are dominated by foreign development paradigms to the
detriment of its rich and tested traditional values. This
situation reveals African elites as weak and lack holistic
thinking in their societies’ progress.
Quashigah was convinced that, it is not just factoring in the
African culture in the development process just for factoring in
sake but rather that while appropriating the enabling aspects
for policy making, at the same time the inhibiting parts, too,
should be considered and attempts made to refine them through
democracy, human rights and freedoms. This also demonstrates
Quashigah’s transformation as key part of a military junta under
Jerry Rawlings into a democrat and the need to use democratic
tenets to help enlighten Africa’s progress by taking on the
inhibiting parts such as human sacrifice, Pull Him Down, and
witchcraft.
Quashigah led a courageous life, a key ingredient that he
brought into the enlightenment mission, taking on complicated
subjects no matter the consequences such as how African
traditional food is healthier than Western ones. In some sort of
transformative way, Quashigah tackled one of the most pressing
challenges facing Ghana and Africa – how to skillfully
appropriate the suppressed Ghanaian/African traditional values
in its progress so that they can be opened decisively for
development. In this regard, a few weeks before he died, he
wrote a brilliant article about the on-going decentralization
review, arguing for traditional institutions are factored in.
Still, Quashigah demonstrated a well developed mind that has
good holistic grasp of Africa, its prospects and its challenges
– more from the challenges emanating from its cultural values.
The challenge is not only to appropriate Ghanaian cultural
values openly in its progress, the challenges are also how to
refine the inhibitions within the culture in the development
game. In Quashigah’s native Volta region, trade and investment
experts confirmed recently what some of the enlightenment
thinkers have been saying by advising that certain negative
cultural practices (such as the fearsome juju and human
sacrifices) drive away investors, hence the region’s abysmal
progress.
In Quashigah, this will be done by skillful policy making driven
by research owned by Ghanaians/Africans through their
traditional norms. Such challenges have occurred because either
the extremely long-running colonial rule, which concealed
African values, or post-independence African elites' weak grasp
of Africa's traditional values in its progress, certain parts of
Africa's traditional values deemed unconstructive have not seen
conscious attempts to distill them for greater progress. The
thinking here is that there is the disastrous interdependence
between the enabling aspects of African traditional values and
the inhibiting parts such as the immense influence of juju-marabout
spiritualists on African elites and progress.
No doubt, Quashigah argued that “no country could develop if it
relegates its culture to the background and concentrated on
Western values that were of little relevance to its people.” By
this Quashigah wasn’t saying Western values aren’t relevant to
Africa but that Africa’s values and that of the West should be
mixed as a matter of confidence and psychology.
For Quashigah, African elites, as directors of progress, should
“harness the human resources of the country, taking into account
their cultural beliefs and accepting only good foreign
cultures.” The test is how Ghanaian/African thinkers with
supposedly thorough grasp of their traditional values would be
able to play with their native values and the dominant
neo-liberal ones currently running Ghana for greater progress.
In the long term, as Quashigah asserted, it will demand
“complete overhaul of the education curriculum in line with the
people's beliefs and practices.”
That means African traditional values will be accorded as much
prominence as the Western ones in the content of education
curriculum in preparing the minds of the African youth for
progress. This is expected to have two-fold effects: raise the
level of confidence among Africans, more the elites, in regard
to African traditional values and help develop a new generation
of elites who can think holistically from the foundations of
their traditional cultural values up to the global level.
Like Southeast Asians, Quashigah's famed bravery drove him into
this feared territory of thinking and believed that this will
help midwife the new African enlightenment thinking in a society
that fears change, that is entangled by some destructive parts
of its culture, and that do not consider its traditional values
as good as that of any other in the world. Quashigah did this
through sustained advocacy and public education that primarily
aimed to influence policy making that are needed to appropriate
suppressed African traditional values for progress.
Though not an academic, with strings of degrees and writings,
Quashigah’s simple thinking and wisdom, of the need to consider
African traditional values in the continent’s progress, were
more or less a reflection of George Ayittey, part of the new
African enlightenment thinkers, of the American University in
Washington DC and named one of the top 100 thinkers in 2009 and
author of “Indigenous African Institutions” (2004), “Africa
Betrayed” (1992), “Africa in Chaos” (1998), and “Africa
Unchained: The Blueprint for Development” (2004).
In Quashigah, the task is how the supposedly refurbished
Ghanaian/African thinkers will be able to work with
Ghanaian/African traditional values in the context of the
“problems facing the country (Africa) and come out with workable
measures to address them,” as journalist Kwesi Pratt Jr, has
argued elsewhere. As part of Quashigah’s enlightening legacy,
the test is how Ghanaian/African thinkers will demonstrate the
ability to communicate these new ideas and influence debate
outside of it. It is when this serious ground work is done that
Ghanaians/Africans will be able to reconcile their traditional
values with the global ones for sustainable progress.
Kofi
Akosah-Sarpong, January 10, 2010
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