To be dishonorable presupposes some acquaintance with honor. A person must understand the rule before choosing to step around it. Dishonor, therefore, carries at least the burden of awareness. Stupidity is a different creature altogether. It requires no such understanding. It proceeds comfortably in ignorance until events accumulate into nuisance, and from nuisance into tragedy.
Tragedy may be the proper word for what is unfolding in certain corners of Ghana’s food culture. In a widely circulated video, a woman calmly narrates the process by which plastic is introduced into the industrial cooking oil used to fry plantain chips. The public response to the practice has been one of alarm; the narrator, however, presents it as a demonstration. She invites viewers to observe that the plastic does not entirely dissolve in the oil and therefore suggests there is little reason for concern.
The reasoning offered appears to be that plastic serves merely as an addition to the grease rather than its substance. The grease itself is already a matter of discussion, but the narrator’s reassurance concerns the extra ingredient. The public is thus invited to accept that the plastic contributes only modestly to the composition of the frying medium.
One cannot help noticing how closely this reasoning resembles earlier public assurances offered in other industries. There was a time when cigarette manufacturers explained with equal calm that smoking was safe—indeed, that it was no more dangerous than riding a bicycle. The resemblance between the two arguments is not exact, but it is close enough to attract attention.
So close, in fact, that one is easily brought to understand the conviction of the modern pharmaceutical establishment when it assures the public that the presence of heavy metals in certain immunization formulations for infants poses no danger. The language of reassurance travels well between industries.
But I digress.
In many cities in West Africa, the water used to cook street food is often no better than runoff. The methods of preparation mock the very idea of inspection. Kitchens—when they exist—are little more than corners carved from chaos. Yet vendors plant themselves at every junction and gutter, unquestioned, unexamined, free to sell whatever concoction their hands can dredge together. And we, the unsuspecting public, eat from these pots of uncertainty. It is not merely dangerous—it is suicidal.
Suicidal is what you become by buying plantain chips from the streets of Ghana. The stores are no better. The food market in Ghana has collapsed. Indeed, in several African nations, food markets now dance with death in new forms.
There is the reckless addiction to bouillon cubes—blocks of salt and chemicals masquerading as flavor. Yet they are killers. There is the over-salting, not even with natural sea salts, but with industrial salts touting the addition of the poison they call “iodine” as safe. The quiet poisoning in the Ghana food market has already announced itself in the rising epidemics of kidney failure and liver disease in Accra and beyond. This is not rumor. It is the postmortem of a society that once believed cooking was a sacred duty.
For centuries—and even in the brief, disillusioned decades after colonial administrators handed the reins to African governors—our villages and small towns carried with them a residue of the honor they had inherited. Mothers cooked with the pride of lineage behind them. Traders sold food with the weight of ancestors watching. The system was imperfect, yes, but intact.
It would be one thing if the addition of plastic to the frying of plantain chips were merely a dishonorable act. It would be another thing if the sellers’ point of view were grossly aligned with that of the cigarette industry or with that of the vaccine brigade, who altogether advertise poisons as necessary ingredients in our diets. It would be one thing if it were regarded as an instance of dishonor—an act performed with awareness but against custom—if it were viewed alongside other modern practices that introduce unfamiliar substances into the food chain, from industrial additives to the widespread presence of microplastics in marine fish caused by global plastic pollution.
Yet, for some reason, the conscious, voluntary addition of plastic to food by some vendors in Ghana spells a sickness that is more deeply rooted in stupidity than in actual indiscipline in the face of honor. The Ghana government of today oversees an unprecedented gold-mining culture—galamsey—that pollutes rivers, lakes, forests, and drinking water. The government prioritizes the mining of gold dust over the actual growing of food, so much so that Ghana imports tomatoes from an arid Burkina Faso.
Everywhere one looks, the culture of stupidity rears its ugly head. It takes one Russian man to descend on Accra Mall for a few days and still manage to have sexual encounters with over 150 women—married or not, registered prostitutes or not—without the slightest indication that these women are aware of anything.
Take marriage in our urban centers—from Accra to Nairobi. The skyrocketing levels of paternity fraud (some 70 percent in some circles in Ghana) testify to the death of honor. Women who know the truth and bury it beneath silence commit an injury older than betrayal. Men who know fathers are raising children sired by others yet refuse to confront it commit cowardice in plain sight. It is not merely dishonor; it is societal rot.
Perhaps, some say, the honor system never worked as well as we imagine. That most people have always been stupid. Perhaps the village hid more than it revealed. But whether this is about dishonor or sheer stupidity, the truth staring us down is this: in the twenty-first century, without the cultural scaffolding that once protected our moral architecture, the honor system—and the educational system that goes with it—does not work. They have no legs. They have no ritual spine.
