How does the colonial master, the slave master, the capitalist master—because in effect, they are all the same—how does this diabolical man, in his mind: master of the universe, attempt to control the vast masses of people who he deems are the dross of society, the bottom under-shoes of society? His strategy, no doubt, is to kill the woman and save the womb. The woman is after all the mother of the earth, mother of humanity. How else can he wrap his tentacles around all of humanity but to assume her position as guardian of the womb?
But in order to do so, he must unravel all that protective coating around the woman. The cunning man is unhappy with the woman: she is delicate and tender as a summer rose, majestic as a cactus that grows absent much water in the desert. Yet, roses have thorns. For good reason. The prickles of a rose are a crucial line of defense from attacking herbivores. And they also help the rose access much needed resources to survive. The spines of a cactus operate in much the same way, protecting the plant from predatory animals and shielding it from the intensity of the sun. The cunning, diabolical man must de-thorn the very guards that the woman erects to protect and nourish her. He must redefine the woman. He hates the woman.
How does the cunning man overcome the woman and assume her position as guardian of the womb? The cunning man cannot bear the prick resistance: the men in her life—her father and husband, her sons and brothers, her uncles and cousins, her grandfathers and great grandfathers and grandsons. He must find a way to excise the woman from all these important people, from her social shield, such that he can have unfettered access to her womb, and gain the ultimate control over humanity itself.
He proceeds to demystify the womb. He strips away the sacredness and specialness of the womb. He encourages the woman to discard her natural perspicacity and to experiment with her womb and her sexuality. He entices her, when she’s too young to spot the evil, to believe that the womb does not yield the network she needs as roses need their thorns. He disabuses her curious, yet youthful mind against the reality that her network need to be carefully curated. He cajoles her at a very young age to believe that the womb is nothing to cherish. That it is abusive men instead, who cherish the womb, who insist on women to cherish the womb—not women. The cunning man claims the womb is rather an affliction on the woman’s biology, a burden to her freedom, a curse to her career, and a bane to her livelihood. She is too beautiful a specimen to be so burdened by such an organ as a womb. The cunning man even claims that the womb makes a woman weak. She should share her beauty and majesty for the world to see and experience. That this, alone and in particular, is her strength.
However, as cunning as he is, he is well aware that commonality is associated with devaluation and irreverence. The more the woman does whatever she deems fit with her womb, and her sexuality, the more she loses her ability to carefully curate her own network. The result is that the woman’s majesty within her traditional network of people erodes away as fast as running water. Her network thins as she advances in age and wisdom. She loses all mystery surrounding her and she ceases to be sacred.
Once her social shield has vanished, the woman is left without the protection that naturally results from cherishing the womb. She is now at the behest of the colonial master, the slave master, the capitalist master, who has unfettered access to her and her womb. The colonial, capitalist educationalist can now tell her to bring her child to compulsory missionary or liberal school. And she must. The capitalist OBGYN or colonial pediatrician can now insist on injecting the woman’s body and fetus, and the whole baby after birth, with all vaccines known to humanity and unknown to the universe, tested and untested, clinically tried and untried and never proven, emergency authorized and never proven. And she must let the medical complex have their way with her. They harvest her children by liberal persuasion, freeze them inside deep freezers and insist on the preeminence of complicated solutions to simple problems. The medical complex has replaced the father, the husband, the brother, the mother, the sister, the aunty, and worse, the medical complex has replaced the grandmother! The complex decides when she gets pregnant, how she gets pregnant, if she should keep the baby, if she must discard the fetus and donate the body to the complex in the name of the gods of research.
What protection would she have if she does not comply when she’s charged with colonial educational neglect? What defense can she muster when she’s charged by the medical industrial complex with vaccine neglect? There would be no husband or father, or uncle, or cousin, or clan head by her side, no thorns, who would defend the traditional values of her village, her inalienable rights to her baby, against the claims of the exploitative, colonial, slave, capitalist master and their industrial complexes. There would be no village to surround an invasive species, as neoliberal masters come, and protect the woman from the industrial, medical and biological exploitation of the economic complexes of liberalism. She would not have grandfather’s home in the village where the child would reside while husband and father and uncles and cousins shoo off the colonial, slave, capitalist exploiters.
She would not have these thorns of protection because she has already—while she was too young to discern evil—been exploited by the liberal complex. The husband and father and uncles and cousins and grandfather have backed off. She has already insisted that her womb, her sexuality, her majesty is hers to keep and not any of their business. She has already told them that she can make her own decisions about her life and that she does not need their help. She has already imbibed the logic of that diabolical, cunning man who wants nothing more in life but to take over her womb. And by adopting his way of thought, his very strategy to undermine her protection, she has already given in to his wishes. With no village, her womb has been surrendered to the colonial order and to liberal medicine.
By undermining her thorny protection, the cunning man has killed the woman. He can now have his way with her womb. What happens to a cactus without its spines or a rose without its prickles?
This is a wonderful essay that strikes at the core of yet another liberalism: The claim that Healthcare is a fundamental Human Right. No it is not! Healthcare Choice is the fundamental Human Right. Freedom to choose is the human right! The woman’s humanity is undermined if the decisions she makes about her womb are influenced by neo-liberals and worse, if the decisions about her child are subject to external pressures of the private interests of the medical industrial complex that are in bed with the government.
The words matter. Their narratives have real consequences. It is about time we started engaging and confronting the lies and cunning of the man. Amara captures the machinations of the cunning man in vivid terms. Hopefully, essays like this expand our views on the nice words that the liberals bring to Africa to confuse people into blindly following their recipes. Indeed, what is a rose without its prickles? It is venerable and the dogs abuse it. The cunning man is a dog.
There’s a strange liberal agenda creeping into Africa from the financiers of the west that Heathcare is a fundamental human right. It is not! There’s no right that needs to be provided by somebody else. That is a privilege. The ruse is clear: by making Healthcare a fundamental right, it implies that when the individual cannot provide it for himself or for her child, the government must provide it. And where does the government get the money to provide this healthcare? From the same individual who could not provide it to herself?
And so the government must tax other people or borrow the money, which is another way to say the government must collect the money from other people or from future generations. How is a right guaranteed by the pockets of other people? Yet, this is the entire plan. In comes the financiers and banksters of the west. The government borrows from the IMF, the World Bank and or accepts gifts (drugs and vaccines) from the Bill Gates Foundation in order to provide the individual and her child the so-called Human Right.
How strange. She could in theory, if she was older than 18 years old, refuse the healthcare being provided to her by the government now owned, through debt, by the IMF. But she cannot refuse the healthcare being provided by the government to her child. Why?
The result is simple. She would be criminalized and her child will be taken from her and put away in a foster home being paid for again through taxes and or loans! She will be charged with medical neglect and thrown into a jail that will be provided for by taxes or by loans from the IMF! The government digs deeper into debt and the tax burden on the citizens expands. The government turns more and more to the IMF and the World Bank to satisfy liberal initiatives like Healthcare for All. This way the government falls deeper and deeper into the hands of the liberal financiers from the west with all their shiny moralizing about healthcare.
This is key to understanding the language of liberalism. Rather, what we must advocate for and insist upon is that human beings have the inalienable right to (healthcare) choice. Not healthcare. That means that the individual can also refuse any healthcare that is being provided to her. More, we must also insist on the right of the mother to choose freely for her child(ren). This is also the vital point. Else, Gates and his ilk, will be licking their lips with the kind of medical financialization and industrialization that they hope to bring to Africa to destroy Her.
Narmer. What’s your understanding of fundermental human rights? Putting health care as a right, are you fighting for the government or the people?
Kwabena Owusu I thought I made myself clear. It is obvious I am for the people. Choice is the human right. Nothing else. If you provide really good healthcare I can choose to access yours. Or not! If you provide healthcare and you claim it is a human right for my child to access your healthcare, I would say Daabi, you don’t get to force anyone to access anything, if it is a right! No! The parents (particularly the mother) have the fundamental human right to choose what type of care, type of healthcare, what type of medical care, if at all, their child(ren) should access. Not any state or privater institution.
Narmer Amenuti I understand your point of view. Making health care a human right concerns doesn’t constitute enforcement or mandatory health care. It rather makes more room for accessibility of health care. For example, someone cannot be denied of medical care just because they don’t have insurance, money or they are migrants. Health care as Human rights will rather focus on “life saving first” measures before anything else. My thoughts..
Kwabena Owusu Thank you for bringing that part up. The only way that “someone cannot be denied of medical care just because they don’t have insurance, money or they are migrants” is if healthcare is defined as a right. That is the dangerous idea I am trying to bring to your attention. Who pays for that healthcare? The uninsured? The migrant? Or does that cost become part of our collective tax burden? Why do I have to pay for something that is your human right? That is a contradiction. I don’t have to pay for you to be free. You are free! I don’t have to pay for you to eat. You can find your own food. I don’t have to pay for you to marry. You can find your own sweetheart! If I have to pay for your Healthcare as a right, it makes healthcare a privilege and not a right. Worse, it gives the government power to enforce healthcare law as human rights. Who makes these laws? Which means they decide what vaccines our children take. More, we all have to pay for these drugs. That is ridiculous especially when we all have be forced to go to a private clinic (a for profit institution) and be forced to pay them for their services. Why?
Secondly, healthcare does not have to be a Human Right for the state to fund healthcare for the uninsured. What has human rights got to do with a state deciding to be nice to its own citizens? Why mix one with the other. In the village, there’s no such law as food is a fundamental human right, yet we feed ourselves, we feed our families, and we feed even strangers! You don’t need a law that claims that healthcare is a fundamental human right for the state to provide healthcare for poor migrants.
Narmer Amenuti You have a point and I respect your perspectives. Question: In reference to financial burden on the State as you have raised to boycott addresing health care as human right, are you of the view that health care should only be accessibile to those who can afford it?
Should healthcare be accessible to the poor? I believe so. Still, that is a state by state, village by village decision. It requires providing resources to the poor who cannot afford it. It requires someone else paying for it. This someone else cannot be forced to do things against their will else their human rights come under threat. You see? Just because your friend is richer than you does not mean he should be responsible for you. The state needs to be clear on how it wishes to provide free services to the public. Still, providing services to the public to allow for a more dignified life for people does not entail making healthcare a human right. That is legalese. Which is dangerous. In the same way that we entreat the village to feed the poor, it does not make food/chop the human right of the poor. The poor still need to work to buy their own food. The poor need to work to buy even water! The poor need to work to obtain their own electricity.
No one is talking about water or food as a human right, yet for some reason health care should be a human right? The legalese is the problem, because the implications are not what they claim that they are. It is not about helping the poor when they say healthcare is a human right. Far from it. My claim is that it is exactly about legally exploiting the poor, the rich, the haves and the have-nots.
Take the last attempted but failed example of the legalese of healthcare as a human right. The medical industrial complex nearly forced every human being on the planet to take their emergency authorized, unproven “vaccines.” Their enforcement was boosted by the legal claim that healthcare (injecting people with poison) is a human right. Rich people, poor people, educated, not educated, migrants, citizens, lost their jobs simply because they preferred something else. But, it is a human right so we are going to the village to force your children and your grandmothers to take it. It is “healthcare”.
You see how this works? That is the danger of healthcare as a human right. Because the government/state makes the claim that since it is a human right, it MUST provide it, whether we like it or not. It is a legal structure that is being advocated and built for further exploitation. Again, you can help people, but no one should force you to help. When someone is trying to force you to help others, there’s something amiss. No human rights legal structures are needed to provide free healthcare, the government can do it today, without the danger of the legal bind of making healthcare a human right.
Once healthcare is made a human right, legally speaking, the government/state can be held accountable by outside organizations for human rights abuses. That is, if the imperial powers deem it necessary to cause trouble in Ghana, their charge of human rights abuses in Ghana will be yet another way to indict our nation, or villages, and put us on the sanctions list. You see how dangerous this is already becoming? Making healthcare a human right is just another tool in the toolbox of imperialists and capitalists. It serves no one but them!
Lastly, a nation that is not forcing its citizens to take some chemical industries’ concoction, pandemic and all, is not abusing the human rights of its citizens. A nation that grants healthcare freedom to its citizens is actually engaging in safeguarding the human rights of its citizens, not the other way around.
Narmer Amenuti We have voting rights, does that mean we are mandated to vote? What about religious rights, does that mean we are mandated to join a religion? I’m still of the view that right to health care has nothing to with mandatory health care. …. The poor should work as you said” does the system provide equal economic opportunities for everyone?
What about the disable population, the aged, and people with chronic illnesses who can’t even work to earn money to afford their medical expenses?
Before we make health care a responsibility instead of right, why can’t we address systemic issues that hinder individuals from affording their own medical care.? Example unemployment, disability, unequal pay, etc
Kwabena Owusu A right is not the same as a Human Right. I think you are confusing yourself. There’s a gulf of misunderstanding that you are giving to the subject. I will say a few words to direct you to read more on this. Voting rights are not a human right. Religious rights are not a human right. You don’t need to vote to survive. You don’t need a religion to survive. Furthermore, the right to healthcare is not the same as healthcare as a human right. The two are not only different phrases but totally different ideas. The right to healthcare means that if you are ill and you wish to access a healthcare facility, so long as you can pay and obey the rules of that facility, that they cannot turn you away. You don’t walk into a clinic without money. You will be kicked out with your right to that healthcare.
However, the idea of healthcare as a fundamental human right does not work so. Somehow the attempt by proponents like yourself is to force that clinic to take you and then bill the government. Why don’t you just walk into any kenkey sellers store without money, eat as much as you wish, and have them bill the government? While you are at it, walk into an apartment complex at Cantonments without any money, get yourself a nice condo and let them bill the government. Goodness, before you get there don’t forget to walk through the clothing shop in East Legon and pick up some nice shoes, pants and underwear. Let them bill the government too. Since, according to you, your understanding of rights or human rights, or whatever that is now confusing to identify, is that it MUST be provided to everyone who cannot afford it, the poor, to the disabled and to those with chronic illnesses. Right? Food, Shelter and Clothing are all fundamental human rights now. Not needs. But rights! Right? Just like how you want your healthcare. Not a need. But a right! Correct?
Narmer Amenuti Narmer paaa, you worry yourself oh. 😆😆
Dade Afre Akufu I am taking my time with him because I also need to understand the mindset informing this form of liberalism. I know why the thing is very attractive. It is shiny, very shiny after all. But the unique assumptions about rights, human rights and such are instructive.
Narmer Amenuti If you assert voting rights and religious rights are not human rights, I will refer you to read more into UN Universal Declaration of Fundermental Human Rights ( Resolution 1948 & 1965) which all the 54 African countries are signatory to the resolutions. Those subjects are not confusing identity as you assume.😊
You are also inferring another subject “Needs”, which are not the same as human rights. Needs are subjective requirements for survival, whilst human rights are the frame works coded in laws that protects one’s needs. Food, clothing, shelter etc you mentioned are all protected under Human Right articles such as Economic rights, rights to life, etc.
So, to answer your question, in addressing health care as human rights, we are only protecting your need for health care.
Example; If you find yourself in a different country and in need of medical care, do you expect the country to decline you medical treatment because you are not a legal resident or because you don’t pay taxes.?
Treating health care as Human rights is not about being poor or rich, it’s about a point of vulnerability and protection of one’s needs.
The UN! My God!
Narmer Amenuti The gentleman is doing a lot of google and chatgtp research this evening. 😂😂😂😂
Narmer Amenuti in all these ask me if after this so called education I was given a chance to work nope
I had to find and create my own means of earning a living amidst all the hurdles and hunger for so many years
So yes I have learnt my lesson and will apply my own chosen path at all levels my son will choose his own way of education and be sufficient and have independence in thinking and works
Brave woman. Not many like you. You are correct. Another one of their ruses, which you have mentioned, is that Education is a fundamental Human Right. Where? No! Education choice is a human right. It all ends up with choice. A human being can only live in dignity if she’s free to choose. She must make her own choices. Why is this such a radical idea of our common humanity? How is education a human right if someone else has to pay for it when she cannot afford it?
It’s all a ruse. At first the liberals claimed she wasn’t choosing who to marry in Africa. Africa listened, and we watched. Then they said she was not free to have her own babies in the exact way that she wanted to. We listened and we obliged them and we watched on.
Only now, she can’t have the baby the way she wants to unless it is in a hospital!?? Riddle me that! Instead of the woman having all the wonderful choice over her body and child, they are attempting to separate the child from the mother. And that’s where tradition stepped in and said enough is enough. Enough of your medical industrial orgasm. The mother has the ultimate right to how she wants to have the baby, and over her baby’s well-being. Not any institution outside of her. Not the school, not the ministry of education, not the hospital, not the ministry of health, not the president and certainly not even GOD! The mother is the God of her child(ren). The father, grandparents, cousins and nephews are the other gods. Not state of private institutions.
After all, liberalism insists she can abort and even donate the fetus to a science laboratory in Germany, from all the way in Africa. Well, if she can do all that, why is her ultimate right over the baby now in question? This is the contradiction of liberalism. It points to nothing but the fact that they have and have always had this agenda all along. All their nice words and good intentions are underscored by their agenda to own the baby making process and to own the totality of the child’s education and training. This is clandestine.
Narmer Amenuti in all these ask me if after this so called education I was given a chance to work nope
I had to find and create my own means of earning a living amidst all the hurdles and hunger for so many years
So yes I have learnt my lesson and will apply my own chosen path at all levels my son will choose his own way of education and be sufficient and have independence in thinking and works
You see????? Education is a fundamental human right, but a JOB is not? 😂😂😂😂😂
Mabena The same with healthcare. So healthcare is a fundamental human right, but treating myself and treating my own children the best way I know how is not?
It is only a fundamental human right in the liberal’s mind if they can charge you and in debt you for it.
My heart hurt when I read this article about the subjugation of African people to American ideology. Your article is so true and the proof of it is the trouble the nation of American finds itself in now. It has followed its own path into a ditch as the scriptures says of the blind leading the blind. If I could reach back in time and tell our African American mothers not to make the mistake of taking on American ways for their families, I would surely do it. Perhaps this is the closest I can come to it by acknowledging that American ideology is flawed and deadly because they have little understanding of the destiny of mankind simply because they have little understanding of the Creator. They have taken the best of all things and brought them toa place of demise. They now look to others for a lifeline to extend their existence. Ways of education, health, social cohesion and family are all important tenets for life, but whose to say that their ways are better? I think not. Westerners are now searching out your ways for natural cures, herbs, minerals, gardening, and bodily care. You are right to look at America’s present crises and end results to choose the better path, which started in your land.