Hypocrisy and Branded Mental Diarrhoea: An Incurable African Disease

By

Nana Arhin Tsiwah

I have throughout time (possibly after countless realisations), always found that “traditional” religion, and its parentheses, is something worth defining to the offspring of truth, although many are the basis of taunts attributed to the practices of this religion.

This shredded and peaking ignoramus outlook of the whole enterprise and its tagging as “barbaric”, “demonic”, an “evil practice”, etc, of all crude tags has revealed how paralysed our society has become. In a country where the media has become just a blunt pair of polluted lips, the result is the daily acts of jokes, derision and mockery that most locally produced movies advocate.

Movie makers who depict the superiority of Christianity over “Traditionality” for me aren’t just acts of damnation, but a droned, wiped-out brainstorming, cantankerous activity. We as a people have become the players of the piper’s tunes. From the total rejection of what holds us spiritually to the taunting of what binds us uniquely has not only become worrisome, but a categorised illness which would never become a contagion as it actually heals.

A day never passes without someone, somewhere in his own self-pooling thoughts, tagging me an outright “atheist”. Inasmuch as I would agree with such miscalculated assumed “tuberculosis”, I would state emphatically that such an assumption is but a facade of derivative African spiritual lackings. Why would you believe a pure village African like me to be an atheist? That I call a “turmoil of carcasses”!

In the arena of desperation, neutralisation and equalisation of the “traditional” religious practices in Ghana by the Churchism fraternity, the result is the deeming of the seemingly atheistic African. I have read with keen eyes into countless situations where the likes of many “traditional” African propagationists on social media and outside of this hoodom are regarded as that. Is it not very damming to lose control of what has held peoples’ conscience to mere surprise because dynamism is a spectacled notion?

The mentality of us Africans towards “traditional” religion is heartbreaking, bringing tears to the eyes. I am not in any way justifying that the Christian world has nothing good, but my juxtaposed arrest stems from the fact that we have lost sight of our core foundation as a people. We have irreligiously implanted in our mental argumentum evil echoes for our traditional practices, faced now with the true reality it is an evil utopia that must not be entertained at all; thus, a culmination into not reading and researching to find out the truth of the keel over syndrome.

All our beliefs of what “traditional” religion means are upheld and justified by an illusory garment worn by the Church’s dogma or media’s taxonomic showcase. We hear on the radio, read in electronic and print media and watch television programmes of pastoral cohorts back-lashing hard on traditional practices as if they have even the most basic knowledge when it comes to its relevance to our birth. This canal of washing our ignorance in public is not only a headache but a helpless warfare of anxiety that the younger generation have been exposed to.

You might learn in theology and obtain all the needed ingredients in theological euphemism; you may acquire a university Masters, PhD or even Professorship, but your mere prejudice of “traditional” practices and their variations would make you deeply ignorant of its realities and the extent to which its content has been exposed to distortion and malice.

A lot of people (Christians) go to the extent of muddling witchcraft and its associated practices with “traditional” practices. Witchcraft and its associated relatives do not make a wholistic horizon. Even the concept of such practices is an aberration to tradition, some of these basics even exposing one to folly. It runs from all facets, from drummings and exorcism to calling grandparents gods and witches; the course of your problems?

The very mention of Onyankopon, Nyame, Twedeampon, Oludumare, Mawu èt al in African Christian churches and songs is such a christening of ignorance, the situation where justification could be made to say, “its in our local language” is decrying in itself! Nyankopon, Onyame (Nyame), Twedeampon, Oludumare, Mawu ét al are not the symbolic meaning for “God”. Do all the research work in the world and you would realise how such pronouncements are deemed not to be the “white-God” or the “God in the bible” even by the “whiteman” themselves.

Abosom (gods), and Abosomwaa (goddesses) are the direct spiritual ascendants of Onyame (the wise spider). So where people go calling for the discarding and phasing out of traditional religion and practices, while on the other hand raising their voices like a trumpet shouting “Onyame eeh”! “Twedeampon eeh”!! in a church is just unfortunate and ridiculous. That is why the whole universal corn-mill is locked in a dire hypocrisy!

I have had many verbal confrontations with people who said I needed to receive salvation and become a Christian. Initially, I tried playing by the papers of conscience and reasoning, but realised it is just one decadence which has eaten almost everyone up. The mere mentioning of “gods, shrine, okomfo (priest)” in a conversation puts you in the shoes of the mythological humidity surrounding satan. The painful aspect of it all is that such people would not even be pitied to find out your assertion of why you are already saved.

I have seen how this branded mental diarrhoea has surged, dilapidating the mental faculties of the African. Where there is clear evidence of rots and ills in the Christian world, these brutal hooligans would never admit as such, instead continuing to heap theoretical theological vexatious through letters of the apostles from right-center-left. If we could have made it sufficiently appellative for us to no more tag our “traditional” practices with the catchy malicious phrase “outmoded practices”, more people would have been saved from the tolling death from this disease.

The mere mentioning of “outmoded practices” puts one in a shadow-box of not finding a cure to this abhorrent ailment. As long as we stay glued to this episode and epistle (logical) framework of the whiteman’s cultural heritage, this disease filed in our mental faculties will never be cured.

Nana Arhin Tsiwah is an undergraduate student from Cape Coast, Ghana; a disciple of Pan-African consciousness, a cultural ideologist, an awensemist (poet) of different shade but tells of a hunter’s trails for Akanism. He is an orator and a village servant in a poetry movement dubbed; ‘The Village Thinkers‘.