One day, i drove to my birthplace to see my father.
He was, of course, very glad to see me. But as we talked, he began to bore me by repeating this advice to me: “Let your legs become ‘short legs’ that can bring you here often to see us!”
In fact, he was using proverbial, metaphorical language. He knew that he had donated ‘long legs’ to me at birth, and there was no way I was going to be able to change their shape or form.
Those of my readers who speak the Twi language will more easily grasp what I mean when I quote the original sentence. He said, “Ma wo nan nnye wo ntiantia”!
Now, I realised that he was indirectly accusing me of neglecting to visit him as often as he would like. So I went on the offensive and said, “But father, you do realise that the work I do often takes me out of this country without warning? And that when I do get back, there might be so much work piled up waiting for me that I need time to sort it all out?”
He didn’t buy any of that. He just went for my jugular by revealing my lack of emotional intelligence. He said, “Don’t come opening your eyes wide at me like some child you want to teach a lesson to, ok? You will know what I am talking about when YOUR children do the same thing to you!”
His answer nearly made me cry. He was appealing to me to come as often as possible to provide him with COMPANY, because he was lonely and longed for me to be with him!
And all I could do was to give him a “modern day” excuse, i.e.
“work, work, work!” Well, I would come to meet the same lame excuses in my time!
I remembered our exchanges when he later fell very sick and I got authentic information from his white Roman Catholic priest that he wasn’t just suffering from “old age illnesses” but something rather more serious.
When I got to Asiakwa, he couldn’t recognise me. “I must take him to Accra!” I said to the family. My eldest brother, a minor chief who should have sent me word to arrange for hospital treatment for our father but had failed to do so, now used his position to strongly oppose the idea of hospitalising my father.
“It’s not a hospital type of illness, he insisted. He went on: ‘Someone went and put some bad “medicine” (aduro) in father’s farm and unknowingly, he went and stepped on it. We have gone and made spiritual enquiries about it from a reputable ‘medicine man’ who has given him an antidote.
If you ignore that and take him to a hospital in Accra, he will surely die! I tell you again, Kwadwo, it is not a hospital illness.”
Gee Whizz! What does one do in a situation like that?
If I ignore my elder brother’s opinion, he will spread the notion that (as he suspects the family members think) that I am an ‘arrogant brat’ who thinks he knows everything. When he, who was after all, my father’s firstborn child who dwelt with him at Asiakwa and knew all that was going on in his life, there I was, proposing some high-falutin European type solution to a Ghanaian problem!
I had to apply all the intelligence I possessed or I would lose my father. He would become a victim of the tension that exists between educated Ghanaians and those called “Illiterates”.
Would I be able to sleep at night, if I allowed my father to die due to the superstitious nonsense that ruled the mind of his uneducated eldest son and his supporters? That man would incite every uneducated member of the extended family that would handle my father’s funeral, if he were to die!
I would basically become an “outcast”, if that were to happen!
And yet I would never forgive myself if I allowed a bunch of ignoramuses to – basically – sentence my father to death!
(End of Part 1)