NTOABOMA—If you cannot quite make out the etymology of the term “Elizardeath,” be not dismayed. It is not readily evident. This is entirely my fault. I could level with you and expose straightaway its hidden meaning and the secret agenda—although it’s no longer a secret since you’re reading about it now—behind the occult manifestations of its terror. But bear with me. The roots of “Elizardeath” are petrifyingly complex; its derivatives are even more stupefying, much of which is stooped in reality and the rest in mysticism.
Accordingly, I admit to you that the ensuing paragraphs are a sober, academically exacting attempt to deal with modern mysticism and the occult of Elizardeathanism as an important part of our intellectual inquiry and cultural life in Ghana. I shall try not to call anyone’s religion loony mysticism, even if one believes that a “great” Italian criminal flew into the sky after he was murdered and buried for his indulgence in sorcery, miracle, witchcraft, mysticism and prostitute-worship.
While you may be interested in the etymology of “Elizardeath,” and the complexity thereof, you are probably more interested in what “Elizardeathanism” has to do with Ghana. I shall proceed to make a claim and from this claim present to you how the Elizardeathans in Ghana continue to enslave, oppress and drink the blood of Ghanaians. Literally. This, I understand, may come to you as a shock. But shock is good, so long as you don’t get a cardiac arrest from the fried imported turkey tail you’ve eaten for the past fifteen years. So, bear with me.
While you were busy focused on fried turkey tails and kelewele, a queen far, far away had her claws on your neck. Literally. For more than sixty years, since 1957, our leaders have convinced you that Ghana gained her independence from a tiny island off the coast of a midget continent, Europe.
More, you’ve been peppered with ideas about decolonization, neocolonialism, neoliberalism and the antics of democracy and the rule of law in Ghana. All of which you’ve swallowed hook and sinker. Fine. You’ve been told that this part of the world used to be called the Gold Coast. Not Ga Mashie, not Bibiani, not Ntoaboma, not Sogakofe, not Walewale, not Yendi, not Lawra, not Paga, not Bogoso, but the Gold Coast. This too you have accepted. Fair enough. You’ve been convinced that from the dust of the coast arose this new name, Ghana, which is derived from the Soninke language. That “Ghana” means “Warrior King.” Sure. It blows our minds to know this about ourselves.
Still, some in Ghana claim the Ghana Empire (c. 200 until c. 1200) ancestry, although there’s very little evidence to this effect. Yet, others claim that G.H.A.N.A is an acronym for “God Has Appointed Nkrumah Already.” Nkrumah here is key, since it was Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana who led talks to make Ghana an independent republic.
Then again, independent republic here is the notorious key. In fact, it is the issue. It turns out that the leaders of our country didn’t quite understand the new terms of contract that they signed in 1957. So they signed away another important destiny of the peoples of our lands, in what they call The Commonwealth of Nations or the Commonwealth. It is not to be confused with the Commonwealth of Independent States, which is the old Soviet rendition, however unnervingly awkward and terrifyingly similar, in its purpose and its posture.
The colonialists and their African puppets (although I think the word “ignoramuses” is the more appropriate word) claim that the Commonwealth is an intergovernmental organization. But all fifty-three nations here were territories of the former British Terrorism Cartel. Moreover, they’ve also managed to convince the rest of us that the cover organization for this British terrorism operates by intergovernmental consensus of the member states, including Ghana and Nigeria, organized through the Commonwealth Secretariat, and non-governmental organizations, organized through the Commonwealth Foundation.
Gibberish. Baloney. Won’t you say? Let’s unpack the deeper meaning. The Commonwealth dates back to the time of decolonization. The British Cartel that once unlawfully occupied our lands agreed that “increased” self-governance of its territories was the best route to managing the limitless resources they had to control in Africa and beyond. So the territories, one of which the terrorists called the Gold Coast (for its gold and human beings turned into chattel slaves), was constituted by the London Declaration of 1949. This declaration established the new state that is Ghana, first as a member state of the British Cartel, and second, as “free and equal.”
Our “freedom” is not without this irony. Who in Walewale wanted first to tie her wealth to the commonwealth of the British Cartel, before her freedom and human equality were guaranteed? Apparently, only Kwame Nkrumah and his horde of ignoramuses knew best. More, when the priggish idea of “free and equal” is further examined under the scrutinizing eye of the symbol of this “free association,” who is Queen Elizabeth II, and who is the Head of the Commonwealth, one is left with nothing warm and fuzzy left inside your bosom, but huge hairy pimples of cold chilling Neanderthal terror.
Can you even imagine that Nkrumah actually represented the best option for Ghana in 1957? Yes. Some people, some newly-acclaimed Ghanaians, amply schooled on the poppy Islands off the coast of the midget continent, actually wanted to stay, fully, under the rule of the British Cartel until we were matured enough to walk to the farm on our own. Well, not exactly in those words. But certainly their machination to oppose Nkrumah’s “Self-Rule” even by the sententious standards of self-governance was akin to that picture, in every respect. Even then the idea that those who opposed Nkrumah largely claimed Ghana Empire Ancestry is perhaps, also, paradoxically axiomatic.
But why Queen Elizabeth, the queen of poppy terror? If you have no idea what this means too, bear with me for a second.
Like I said, shock is good. Sometimes we forget. Let me remind you of British imperial history. In its entirety, it is the result of a barbaric and ancient plot on the part of the poppies; a Papaveraceaen pact ranged against all humanity. For centuries they schemed in their hedgerows and shitty pastures (poppies actually grow in shit), while they dined around huge dinner tables with forks and knives made from actual silver, dreaming up strange and cruel ideas, in those pale ugly flaring heads of theirs, communicating their vegetable conspiracies through codes carried on unwitting bees (while the rest of us in Africa just innocently assumed them to be having sex), until the time came to strike. And hard, did they strike Africa with their conniving European hordes with a pungent hatred!
Ever since the dwarf, Frenchman Napoleon Bonaparte, first caught sight of the continent that gave Europe its civilization from his tall horse, poppy Europeans have never stopped dreaming cruel barbaric ideas against African humanity and all other African forms of life. Wherever that barbaric British cartel came in Africa, in the name of trade, poppies have followed with their canons, blood-lettings and sheer carnage. Colonialism and slavery are its most obvious landmarks. But there’s more to this hatred of life.
Queen Elizabeth herself is the poppy queen. The lady who’s been rumored to space shift between human and lizard forms, and who descends from a family known to have had human meat served at dinner—without salt and pepper—is plenty aware that her so-called Commonwealth is really her grey dish bowl from which she devours the carcasses of “member states.” Proper, even outside of Africa, she remains the actual monarch over lands full of people of African descent: Jamaica (95 percent Black), Antigua et Barbuda (89 percent Black), The Bahamas (91 percent Black), Barbados (92 percent Black), Grenada (95 percent Black), and more.
The taste and number of African flesh made available to this poppy queen, Elizardeath, is without number.
Even if this rumor about Elizardeath’s spaceshifting isn’t true – and I don’t see why it couldn’t be – it doesn’t matter. Conspiracy theory is always true in a sense, in form if not in content. Ghanaians might not be necessarily controlled by British creatures from outer space, but whatever kind of lizard that Elizardeath is, it’s one that is autochthonous to that island off the coast of the midget continent, Europe.
It is clear that her grip on our country Ghana, as an Agama lizard clasps my grandmother’s nim tree, continued after 6th March 1957 alright, and it seems that the London Declaration will enforce and ensure the grip of her successors too. The declaration states that Elizardeath acts “as the symbol of the free association of its independent member nations and as such the Head of the Commonwealth,” whereby republics such as Ghana can recognize the poppy queen as head of the Commonwealth in addition to her heirs who shall also be future heads of the Commonwealth.
Consequently, our country Ghana exists in a milieu of perpetual slavery. This is the declaration to which our elite in Ghana subscribed and continue to subscribe, even without our consent.
To this end, you can arrange the little clues about the extent of the hand of Elizardeath and her Elizardeathans in the day-to-day affairs of our country and you’ll never be able to make a complete and rational account of things – but at the same time our Ghanaian community functions by this un-welcomed declaration of a commonwealth, which is a conspiracy. No actions are innocent, every meeting of two—between our elite and Elizardeath—implies the express exclusion of a third, a fourth, a fifth, and so on, up to and including the twenty-seventh million, forty-third thousand and ninety-third Ghanaian.
We’re constantly told by our Elizardeathan elite in Ghana that this is a time of synoptic openness because we are now a democratic republic, having evolved from the lowly interstices of a Maatocratic backward water to higher ground; nothing is further from the truth. It no longer makes sense to say, for instance, that you’re going shopping at the Accra Mall: you’re being made complicit in a conspiracy between yourself and the supermarket against your poor indentured grandfather who’s a cocoa farmer in Adowso in the Eastern Region. We’re all complicit, we’re all somewhere in the cold staring pyramid, and the poppy queen, Elizardeath, and her fellow poppies in Ghana are growing in straggly clumps all along its base.
So what: the Head of the Commonwealth is just a symbol, it’s just a “nice way” of remembering our past and where we have come from as a nation. So, why not make Ga Mantse the head? Why not make the Awomefia the head? Why not make Asantehene the head? Why not make Yana the head? Why can’t the headship rotate if we are indeed now “free and equal” to the “colonial master?”
The problem is that our Elizardeathan elite are blinded by the shine of the queen’s forks and knives made from actual silver from our African backyards. They forget that every act of ritualized remembrance necessitates a simultaneous forgetting. They forget that remembering Gandhi—a controversial statue at the University of Ghana campus—excludes the memory of Corporal Attipoe. What’s remembered is the ritual itself, of walking by the statue of a racist every day.
The po-faced charade of Elizardeath and British Terrorists constantly staring us in the face every time we join hands at the Commonwealth Games (formally known as the British Empire Games from 1930–1950, the British Empire and Commonwealth Games from 1954–1966, and British Commonwealth Games from 1970–1974) is bloodcurdling, to say the very least. It is absolute terror to stare in the face of the shiny swords and knives over which our Ancestors suffered, over which we continue, even if only symbolically, to writhe.
Nobody now seems to remember that the whole poppy charade of British imperialism was brought to our coasts by barabrians who were responsible for the brutal waste of millions of Kukuom lives, Nakpanduri lives and Kpetoe lives at the forts and castles of the Trans-Atlantic Slave trade. Now they strut around in Ghana, buoyed by their resident Elizardeathan Ghanaian elite, with a fake badge of friendship in their lapel, and by its apotropaic magic the teeming ghosts of their victims, the Spirits of our Ancestors, no longer impede their sight but can only claw ineffectually at their shoulders.
If that queen Elizardeath as head of the Commonwealth were just a symbol inscribed with unfortunate militaristic overtones in its exploitation of Ghana, it could be opposed without much effort, but in fact it’s much more subtle and dangerous than that. We’re locked in a struggle against dreams and magic. Accepting the poppy queen as the ceremonial head of Ghana at the commonwealth doesn’t honor the victims of our sordid past in slavery and colonialism, it banishes them.
As long as we can fixate on the narcotic solemnity of these terrorists as our “Colonial Masters,” we don’t need to think about the mud and gas and rats, or the victims of slavery tried and shot by their “owners,” or the millions of innocents slaughtered before, during and after slavery, and the many African soldiers who fought and died in the two world wars of their terrorists, to prop up the British, or those ethnic and religious minorities who are even today compelled to demonstrate their patriotism by wearing poppy-patterned hijabs.
Ghana’s dalliance with the British and all things British is a drug; tomorrow a presidential candidate must travel to London to hold a meeting; a supreme court judge must seek medical advice in London; children in Ghana must take British examinations to get access to British universities for college and graduate work; the people ejaculate with pleasure when they see Elizardeath spaceshfiting on national television (as if spaceshifting was a new sport); and they expostulate when they cannot afford to travel to London to shop for a British-made wrist watch.
Ghana’s romance with British terrorism is a drug; the same tranquillizer out of the caves of France that has been sprinkled all over Francophone Africa, it produces a warped reality and entraps us. If we’re to start really remembering the tragedy of the coming of Europeans to West Africa, the only way is to burn all the poppies, get rid of the Elizardeathans, wipe out their evil magic with fire, and look our ghosts, stare the Spirits of our Ancestors, squarely in the eye and with a contrite heart proclaim that we are sorry!
But that means that we must rise as Ghanaians to give meaning to the Soninke word, “Ghana,” and grow into the warrior kings it entreats us to become. Warrior kings who are not afraid to die; kings who are the sum total of the quotations of all their Ancestors; kings and queens who do not, cannot bow ever again to a poppy queen. Warrior kings who charter their own destiny with a self-assertive manhood. This is what the twenty-first century calls on Ghanaian manhood to be—kings, not slaves.
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This post is dedicated to the memory of Sergeant Adjetey, Corporal Attipoe and Private Odartey Lamptey who were killed by British Terrorists in the Accra Riots of 1948 for daring to regain their freedom from terrorism. The British head of terrorist cops, Superintendent Imray, grabbed a gun and ultimately shot these three heroes. May they rest in peace and continue to inspire us to completely break free from the blue demon.
Narmer Amenuti takes on the meaning of the symbolism of the Commonwealth of Nations to which Ghana morbidly belongs without the people’s consent. This also comes at the back of essays on Grandmother Africa which rose against the symbolism or rather, the mysticism about which the newly erected statue of Gandhi at the University of Ghana has been discussed. Narmer’s style of questioning of our pact with the Commonwealth is obvious. It is catchy, shocking and unrelentingly provocative. But then again, if provocative disturbs the moral code of the average Ghanaian then we have much miles to travel. If we have not made much progress with truth and error, then we stand to make even less with good and bad.
This is an entertaining essay. Enjoy!
What a surgical examination of a problem so deep that it is very difficult to spot. Sometimes the fleeting day-to-day drudgery of life makes it impossible to detect what yokes we fall under, what burdens we carry and what curse stares us in the face. The idea that we still accept the primacy and supremacy of the queen of England, Elizardeath, as the head of our wealth creation and hence the head of our commonwealth, which essentially gives the lizard queen the symbolic power, if nothing at all, over African, Ghanaian lives, is a little chilling to accept. How much stupidity actually is there at the top that it is ever so pervasive at the upper echelons of our society? I can’t make heads and tails of this paradox: so many degreed people and yet we wallow in poverty, idiocy and above all poverty! I am shaking my head just reading every single line in this essay. How revealing of who we are and who we call our leaders.
There is a slippery slope of a rat hole that our leaders and our miseducated elite fall through. They say symbolism doesn’t matter, so they accept anyone’s symbols. They don’t push back as Narmer suggests to make Ga Mantse or Asantehene or Yana the head or simply rotate. They submit fully by accepting shopping malls over the market women’s truly free markets, and in other ways. Generations later, these symbolic losses are sure to consume entire traditional cultures. Symbolism works slowly but can deeply ensnare. I agree there’s so much within this essay that is mundane, taken for granted details but those details are what keeps us drowning in some queen-lizard’s prickly whirlpool of pungent roses.
Boom, Boom! Abena Maanu, let me borrow your English and say, “Symbolism works slowly but can deeply ensnare. I agree there’s so much within this essay that is mundane, taken for granted details but those details are what keeps us drowning in some queen-lizard’s prickly whirlpool of pungent roses.”
Narmer Amenuti you just slapped me across my face. A well deserved slap it is too. Thanks for this wake-up call. I am reminded of my royalty not my enslavement. But how do I live royally in a land where an enslaved mentality is celebrated?
The paradox my dear friend Esi Arhin Turkson. That is the paradox of being “free and equal” but nor really “free and equal.” That is the paradox of being a royalty but under another royalty, under a lizard royalty at that. This should make everyone feel uncomfortable. When I started the essay, I felt slapped too, so I understand the feeling. Then I realized that words do not understand apology, rather, they must invoke a revolution in our thinking. To fully understand the vast expanse of our African enslavement is to be a Black person constantly depressed. But, awake we must. Or we die.
To me the paradox goes deeper than that. Notice the recurrence of the word “equal”, conjoins the word “freedom”. That’s is what I find interesting. It is used based on a presumption that a group perceived to lack the ability to govern themselves-never mind their vernacular royalties-is gradually being given their freedom to learn how to govern themselves.
Their progress in this very normal yet difficult for them to execute task will be monitored until they finally become not just free, not freer than, but equal to the civilized and able to do it on their own.
Not only does this enforce the notion that the colonized are sub humans, it also does enforce a misguided notion that colonization, with its terror, molestation, displacement, murders, etc., is a legitimate tool for remolding the savage into a proper human.
There you go Audu Salisu. The civilizing theme of the missionary is ever present here as well. The idea that Africans are incapable of civilization and that she must be conquered, subdued, maltreated, abused, enslaved and exploited in order to drive her from the backward Maatocratic marshy lands to high dry land continues to plague every relationship that the west forges with us.
But again, it’s not the west’s place to shun their ways. If only we had the head, and the appropriate amount of breast-milk in our childhood upbringing, who knows? We might spot some of this craziness before it became pervasive within our won culture. Which brings me to the last point. It seems that instead of only attacking western ideas, we must attack their source. The source is now squarely rooted both in the west and now in Africa. Solidly in the minds of the Elizardeathans. Those who say that attacking other ideas does little justice to our own ideas are wrong. Or even go as far as calling it “reactionary,” are terribly wrong.
I do not fight a vague war. Vague wars do not end. In fact, a vague war cannot end. The enemy must be named. The enemy is the enervating ideologies of the west, specifically of western Europe. The source is in the writings and machinations of western thought. That must be defeated in superior measure with African thought and conscience.
This strategy accomplishes two things: (1) we challenge the prevailing paradigm with a more solid one and (2) we regain our standing by replacing the enervating schools of thought with the more energizing philosophies of Africa.
So, I agree my friend Audu Salisu, that the conjoining of “free” and “equal” must be appropriately named as a clandestine and Pecksniffian hustle into our subconscious. The enemy then, is thus named. Hence the attack. The attack to reveal where it hides, where it festers and where it grows like a cancer to attack every other part of our consciousness before it become an uncontainable tumor.
Esi Arhin Turkson, I have to agree with you also that this is quite a slap in the face. It’s the biggest slap I have received in years, especially seeing that I never even saw it coming. I am no longer sure if I should discuss the slap or the reason for the slap. I will attempt a brief question, perhaps this will stoke the interest of Narmer Amenuti so that he can explain why the shocking slap.
How then do we go about defining or demanding the kind of relationships that respect our kind? For example, how do we demand that the headship at the commonwealth must rotate amongst the fifty-three nations? And if our demands are not accepted do we just pack bag and luggage and vamoose from the commonwealth of nations. Even more fundamental, what do we gain from such international relationships? Are we just their catamites to be exploited at will and without consent? This question is surely directed at Audu Salisu also.
They say that the club runs a “good scholarship programme” and “development projects” for its poorest members. But the tangled and ineffective bureaucracy, including at least 70 different organisations, which appear to exist chiefly to provide junkets for a well-heeled Commonwealth elite – the Elizardeathans – cannot be hidden!
Forty-one of the club’s members still have colonial-era laws. Besides the bonded common language, the common legal code and aspects of an imposed shared English culture, there’s nothing to really write home about. Some say that these things are advantages claiming that it has helped some nations prosper—African members of the club are conspicuously better off than their non-Commonwealth neighbours! But is this because of the commonwealth or is it because Queen Elizardeath is our head? Or is it because of a more enervating French Terrorism on the rest of Africa? In a very surprising move that slapped me in the face, but which I have since forgiven the Rwandan leader, he rode Rwanda, which was colonized by Germany and Belgium, not Britain, nonetheless to join the club. The British terrorists now point to Rwanda to tell the rest of us that the commonwealth of nations works.
Really? It works for Rwanda but not Nigeria? The difference between Nigeria and Rwanda is clear, and it is not the commonwealth. In fact, the commonwealth is what they have in common.
Dade Afre Akufu here is an attempt at answering your question.
I have three point in this regard as answers. The first of what I have is somehow dealt with by Narmer, which to always read between the lines, read well and try to unearth the subtle sub conscious invading oppressive thoughts hidden in their attitude towards as well as in all the knowledge they avail for us for consumption.
The second is not to take part in such institutions at all. Some years back I would have said let’s build a wall around Africa. But I think we should be aware of the fact that they are very brutal and will never no for an answer. So how Tanzania did it is the way. You remain officially there but you change language to African India and leave them confused. Your medical doctors, teachers, nurses and all the workers they would have taken stay home and after a while nobody cares if you were there or not. When you translate the books you know where to find the hidden agenda meant to be implanted in your subconsciousness.
Since we can not close our doors completely, the other thing we should do create competition for them. Seek some other not so exploiting relationships to rival what they to offer.
In seeking relationships to rival what they have to offer I thought Africa could possibly have found that in China except we’ve gone about it the wrong way…we are depleting our resources faster than we can say jack and it’s up for grabs on a silver platter… African leadership is botched.
Two reasons account for that. 1. Is the fact that the new relation was build on the same colonial paths left behind when Elizabeth showed on the eve of independence and republic days. She did not fly out here for nothing. What she built when she helped Charles Adden Clarke to pack his stuff and follow her to London is what we built our China relationship on.
The other is a fact that is connected to what I just said, which is the idea that we have leaders after the likes of Nkrumah. But in reality, we don’t. What we have are those put there to ensure the elizaberthian trails are followed. Hence our bad new relationship.
What an article on the sheer ignorance of African leadership. Or should I call it cowardice?