Liberia: a virginity that was De-flowered

Seychelles Islands is an Indian Ocean archipelago. The collection of 86 symbolized the era of Anglo-Saxon dominance in global affairs in the early twentieth century; a reminder also of the extent of empire and British imperial identity as far as across the Indian Ocean. If it was the imperial post of the British it was also a bitter memorial of the dispossession of cultures and peoples, especially anti-colonial leaders from their peripheries in Africa, Asia and the Middle East. With a population of less than 100,000 and reflective of its history-once colonised by France in 1768, it was seized by the British in 1794 when it was part of Mauritius until 1903. Seychelles became independent in June 1976. 90 percent Catholics and 8 percent Anglicans they speak French, English and Creole.

Referred to by a political scientist, Salabert in 1994 as “a prison without bars”, it received anti colonial leaders from the empire who had either engaged the British in war or given them troubles in the colonies .They included, the Sultan of Perak, Malaysia, Abdullah Jaafar Morathan in 1877 for precipitating war with the British and killing an officer, Archbishop Makarios of Cyprus exiled in 1956 on charges of encouraging terrorism as leader of Greek Cypriots when he pressed for independence from Britain, Afif Didi of the Maldives, kings from Uganda, Mwanga and Kabarega, leaders from Palestine, Malawi, Somalia, Zanzibar, Egypt and the longest exile of all, Nana Agyeman Prempeh I, king of Asante, part of modern day Ghana who was exiled for 27 years from 1896.

In 2000 I travelled to the Seychelles. Two things had taken me there. The first, to use the more cultural term, searching for roots- the origins of my extended family’s perceived aristocracy in the 1950s.My maternal great grandfather- Kwame Boatin became a sub- chief to the king of Asante or Asantehene, Kwaku Dua Panin (1834-1867) and Asantehene, Kofi Karkari (1867-1874); he also became a diplomat travelling to the future capital Accra, and the coast, Cape Coast and eventually London to negotiate or prevent confrontation with the British who intended invading Asante and thus making it part of its colonial enclave. Asante became a British protectorate under Nana Prempeh I. The British even after this agreement invaded and had war in 1896. They decided to exile King Prempeh, his mother, wives and some of his chiefs to the Seychelles island.

Kwame Boatin was one of the chiefs. On the exile journey abroad the SS Darkwa in Freetown, Sierra Leone, Paul Boatin my grandfather was born in 1900. His other brothers and a sister –George, Henry, Harold, William, Thomas and Regina were born in the Seychelles subsequently . Kwame Boatin himself died in the Seychelles in 1918 and as it was the case his children under British government arrangement were brought to Ghana.

Delighted to be on the islands, I walked through Mahe, the biggest of them and could see the changed architectural designs that were homes to the Sultan of Perak, Kings Mwanga and Kabarega from Uganda.

Interest in my visit to the islands was shown by the current king of Asante, Otumfuo Osei Tutu II when I first discussed it with him in late 1999. (My late father, Joseph Agyeman-Duah for over 40 years resident historian at the palace and formerly of the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana was seen as an authority on Asante history. He had exchanged in the 1970s, his right of succession to the silver stool of Mampong, the second most powerful king of Asante, to become an Anglican priest having also studied theology up to a doctorate level. That gave me some added contact and connection to contemporary Asante authority and affairs).

The king felt my visit would re-establish contact with the descendants there and also with the government. He personally supported the visit and gave me a gift (the Denkkyem Kye, the emblem of the Royal House of Asante and a photo of his recent coronation as the 16^th king or occupant of the Golden Stool, the symbol of his office) and a hand-written letter for President France- Albert Rene. In the absence of the President who had, someone told me gone to the Middle East for weeks to see to his personnel businesses, I met with the Minister of Foreign Affairs Jeremie Bonnelame for the presentation . Interestingly, the country was preparing for the centenary of the exile of King Prempeh and the Yaa Asantewaa War of 1900, the last Anglo-Asante war led on the Asante side by a queen of Ejisu (a small town in Asante) who was also sent to the islands after Asante’s defeat. She died 21 years later.

“If the king of Asante can join us in this celebration, it will be fantastic.” The foreign minister said.

“I will convey this to him. Since he is eager to re-establish ties, I am sure he will take this official request seriously.” I responded.

The seriousness of the request was reflected in the following day’s newspapers which had photographs of the minister and I and what I was in the Seychelles to do.

I also met with the Archbishop of the St. Paul’s Anglican Cathedral in Mahe where King Prempeh and other exiles were converted and baptized from the early 1900s. The church authorities had been generous and waited for me for weeks to film the building and its interior before expansion work could start. I had also visited the archives to do photo-copies of birth certificates of my grandfathers and other notable exiles as well as met and had conversations with a very eccentric Indian, Kantilal Jivan Shah, a friend of the late Mother Teresa who still has as part of his art collection, a Kuduo (an ancient vessel belonging to King Prempeh) and a wooden stool.

I had earlier filmed the house that King Prempeh lived in in southern Victoria (the capital). In Mahe, I could not tell the Seychelles Broadcasting Corporation crew I was working with, what to film and what not to film; in a country whose natural topography, surrounding sea and mighty rocks, the vistas of whose blue-sky-line only disappears for rocky caves to emerge.

Like blacks in the United States, some people here like hyphenated identification ; Afro-Seychellois to play on their Africa origins least they be taken for people with Indian, Caribbean or one of the other multi-ethnic groups here. The reason race matters here, J.C. Mahoune, an anthropologist explained had to do with the fact that, it is typical to have a mother with four children but different racial fathers- a black, a Chinese, a French and Indian.

And yet the people see themselves as a family. The middle class is structured more on the basis of hard work, good education and excellence –an opened opportunity course but whites are wealthier than blacks or people of mixed races. My kind hosts, Mary Prempeh Mamba, her husband and four children (descendants of King Prempeh still living on the island) who will not let me stay in a hotel are part of this middle class. It would be they who would take me to where their auntie, Huguette Prempeh lived in Rochon in Mahe. Huguette in her 80s was a direct grandchild of King Prempeh and was surprise to find her dressed in a typical Asante old age dress of ‘Kaba’ which I am told was more of her dress mark. Though repatriated to Ghana with her children (of a Seychellois father), she left them in Kumasi in the care of other family members she was introduced to. She has since lived here. I remembered her because she used to come and see my grandfather Paul when I was very young. We also attend the same St. Anne’s Anglican Church in Kumasi with her half-cast children and grand-children. She could still speak the Asante Twi. She was however not of good health and lived in isolation. Though Mary had requested several times she should join them in their beautiful house, she had refused. Delighted to see someone from Kumasi, she relapsed into a melancholic mood after we have had a long conversation. I gave her a small present and as I was leaving her eyes were wet.

The poet and the hymnist, Isaac Watts indeed song for all ages past and the hope for the future :

“Time, like an ever rolling stream,

Bears all its sons away;

They fly, forgotten, as a dream

Dies at the opening day.”

An Asante proverb of nostalgia also reflect her countenance at this point: we remember the departed at the spot or place we all use to concregate.

Four years after my visit, though I had been in contact with Mary, I phoned this time from Washington, DC to find out how Hugetee was doing and was told she passed away three days earlier at 87. When I called her children in Kumasi, they were preparing for the one week funeral rites. It had been decided that she be buried in the Seychelles.

As an island it is expensive to live here. Everything is virtually imported. The first few days before my host took me home, I was paying 65 dollars a day for a hotel room without a TV and phone. I was shown a plot of land that was 120x20 for $20,000 dollars and it would cost over $50,000 to complete a modest house of three small bedrooms. For everything apart from sand, would have an import label. Without any natural resources and even today with an economy built on tourism, food processing and fisheries, it could only be used by the British for punishment of those who had and would resist their exploitation.

But like Botswana and Mauritius, small economies and less populated, it is governed well. The GDP per capital is $11,117. It ranks well in the accounting of the UNDP Human Development report and the Moi Ibrahim Index for good governance since it was instituted some few years ago as well as doing well on the Transparency International ranking on corruption.

In a book that is partly revisionist oriented, a justification of colonial rule in some respect (not solely with grabbing of natural resources and political control), Niall Ferguson’s controversial but well written book, Empire -How Britain Made The Modern World, he writes :

“Without the spread of British rule around the world, it is hard to believe that the structures of liberal capitalism would have been so successfully established in so many different economies around the world. Those empires that adopted alternative models-the Russian and the Chinese- imposed incalculable misery on their subject people. Without the influence of British imperial rule, it is hard to believe that institutions of parliamentary democracy would have been adopted by the majority of the states in the world…”

Ferguson who at the time of the publication in 2004 was professor of International History at Harvard University and a Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford further writes:

“Consider too the role of the British Empire in facilitating capital export to the less developed world. Although some measures of international integration seem to suggest that the 1990s saw greater cross-border capital flows than the 1890s, in reality much of today’s overseas investment goes on within the developed world. In 1996 only 28 percent of foreign direct investment went to developing countries, whereas in 1913 the proportion was 63 percent.”

In other words, British colonial rule was not all about benefits to Empire but how a country like Seychelles owns its modernity to that encounter.

I always wondered what my grandfathers brought up in mixed influences of French, English and Indian cultures in Mahe, thought about such arguments- empire, identity and colonial societies. They who had been given such English names at their baptism. Paul Boatin died when I was too young to consciously ask such intriguing questions. The last of them, Thomas died in 2008 at 96 years. But they were (like the few dozen others repatriated from the 1920s to Asante) never seen as well integrated. And they themselves perhaps also felt isolated with their love for plants, garden, tea-parties, cricket, the BBC World Service and their evening walks to the palace of the king of Asante. When King Prempeh himself returned in 1924, he was already an Anglican convert with the baptismal name of Edward and hence the Asante royalty would be Anglican. His children like the Boatins who also settled at Ashanti New Town close to each other’s house also bore the same biblical/ English names- Henry, William, Joseph, Grace and the like. They would become leading lawyers in Kumasi and the eldest Henry an Appeal Court Judge, first Chancellor of the St. Cyprian Anglican Cathedral with his brother William as Registrar at one time . They carried themselves in high esteem and respected their countenance . Henry’s dead wish had been like a notable Englishman of good accomplishment be interred at the Cathederal of his co-founding St. Cyprian the Martyr in Kumasi.

The Boatin brothers never forgot lessons of modernity they brought along. After their education in Kumasi and at the Achimota School in Accra, they became educationists and public administrators in the newly independent Ghana.

Paul Boatin was made a Member of the British Empire (MBE) by Queen Elizabeth for his services to the king of Asante and public service to Ghana. When he died he was succeeded in these services by his brother, Henry Boatin. William who was once the resident director of the Institute of Adult Education and what was also called the Institute of Extra Mural Studies in Kumasi (a branch of the University of Ghana) also gave cricket commentaries; his best day in life could probably be when he was the designated protocol guide and Master of Ceremony by the King of Asante in 1977 at the visit to Kumasi of the Prince of Wales, Charles ; Harold Boatin an educationist was also very fluent in French and its civilization ( Kwame Nkrumah’s classmate at Achimota) he was made Ghana’s Ambassador to Guinea in 1957. Thomas went to the School of Oriental and African Studies in London to study and to teach and to the University of Durham in the mid 1940s; by the 1960s he had joined the West Africa Examination Council in Freetown and became the first Ghanaian head of its office in Accra. Their only sister Regina, died young. They introduced many Anglican practices including Paul’s formation of St. Mary’s Guide in Kumasi and later Thomas (on retirement), the co-founder of St. Anthony Anglican Church in Accra. In 1981 the French government awarded Thomas the CHEVALIER DE L’ORDRE DE PALMES ACADEMIQUES for his contribution to French culture and civilization in Africa including the setting up of the Alliance Françoise d’ Accra. Thomas also co-founded the freemasonry, Asanteman Lodge with Paul. They spoke Asante Twi with ascent but a lot of English and I guess when they wanted to gossip about others the Creole or French. They were more comfortable in suite than traditional wear-‘ntama’.

Other historians and writers have followed and assessed the impact that these British exiles had on their return to the colonies. Archbishop Makarios would become the first President of Cyprus after his exile years; Mwanga II who was also exiled with the King of Bunyoro Kitata Kingdom (in today’s modern Uganda) in 1899 died there in 1903 and the remains returned to his people in 1910; Abdullah Jaafar Moratham, the Sultan of Perak finally returned after 18 years as did the others.

When I think of Ferguson’s first quoted argument and the values of my grandfathers and their contribution to Asante and Ghana, I feel there is a sense in which some indirect impact of colonial rule was of essence for a future globalization of thoughts and liberal institutions: western education which for over centuries have dominated global scholarship, democracy and its affiliate institutions which are part and parcel of global governance arrangement, belief in Jesus and Christianity which straddle the globe, the BBC still the world’s most reliable radio broadcaster.

In the case of Abdullah Jaafar Moratham, he fell in love with Seychelles classical music and especially “Ma Rosalie”one of the songs he endlessly enjoyed listening to and which would define the identity of Perak on his return. The borrowed tune became the national anthem of Perak. It eventually became the national anthem of independent Malaysia in 1957.

King Prempeh when he returned and restored as king against the agreement with the British (a condition for reparation in 1924 been that he would not be king), indirectly abolished ‘human sacrifice’ for occasional rituals in Asante and instead live stock for the same rituals. This had been influenced by his Anglican faith as were other rituals which he thought had outlived their usefulness.

But these were more of by-products of colonial objective then its meaning. These exiled years no matter the longetivity of absence did not diminish the faith of the subjects. All of them came back though with some level of liberal dispositions which mingled well with their old traditions as shown above. The destruction of traditional systems which the British had anticipated in their absence survived them but the secondary anticipation of “western modernity” was successful to a degree.

The meaning of empire had been as it was- voyages to find sea routes to Asia and Africa and the Americas; to promote private British enterprises be it through the East Indian Company with authorization from Queen Victoria or not; to force if need be trade relations and to determine the terms; crash any resistance to it and possibly kill to the glory of rule Britannia!!

These essays have been written with an optimism about Africa’s progress as we get into the second decade of the twenty-first century. The major drafts were written within a four month period from October 2010 to February 2011. I do not know if the historical confrontations dealt with here and the contemporary interpretation given, as well as the sketches and the witness I bear is indeed deserving of this optimism. For often the emerging good in the narrations seem to lie side by side with the discomfort of high political theatrics: a fictional truth in Ivory Coast, the failure of Somalia and emergence of the al-shabab an Ismamic sect which threatens the country’s already failed stature; the case of Boko Haram in Nigeria which by 2012 was advocating for Sahria Law and making martyrs out of Christians in especially northern Nigeria; the still abyss situation in the Congo which surprisingly has not overcome the ancient observation of Joseph Conrad’s A Heart of Darkness (still in the volatility in the Great Lake Region) or what another travel writer of my generation, Tim Butcher correspondent for the Daily Telegraph described in his 2007 book, Blood River as the “broken heart of Africa”; the intransigence in Zimbabwe and the somehow inability of regional bodies like ECOWAS, SADC and the AU itself to deal decisively with these.

Within this incongruity it is still a transition of a sort- the soldiers or military dictatorships and mafias are giving way since the 1990s. They may change clothes or in other designs (including supervising elections in which they are contestants) to a sometimes semblance of democracy ; one of interpretation of constitutions, bad electoral laws, in other words, rigging of elections.

But the seeming bad cases are like rose flowers and their thorns. The Ivory Coast- the world’s leading producer of cocoa, the Congo- the richest natural resource constituency in Africa and even Somalia (in its three halves) was once the most literate state in Africa under Siad Barre; Eritrea, the Comoros. If it is not visible challenges of governance in civil wars, post-conflict situations in others, it is combinations of these, scarcity of food in environmentally depressed places like Ethiopia or rural parts of northern Ghana or Kenya. These are only examples of multitude of governance issues in the 53 nation continent .

If we however look at the bottlenecks that these present us, we lose what Africa is or capable of as it becomes increasingly part and parcel of the global processes in the century.

In June 2010, The McKinsey Global Institute published its Africa research report, Lions on the Move: The Progress and Potential of African Economies. The continent in the first decade of the century fared this way:

1. 
   $1.6 trillion- Africa’s collective GDP in 2008, roughly equal to Brazil or Russia’s.
   
2. 
   $860 billion- Africa’s combined consumer spending in 2008.
   
3. 
   $316 million- the number of new phone subscribers signed up in Africa since 2000.
   
4. 
   60% is Africa’s share of the world’s total amount of uncultivated, arable land.
   
5. 
   52% is the number of African cities with more than 1 million people each.
   
6. 
   20 % is the number of African companies with revenues of at least $3 billion.
   

1. 
   $2.6 trillion will be Africa collective GDP in 2020.
   
2. 
   $1.4trillion will be Africa’s consumer spending in 2020.
   
3. 
   1.1billion the number of Africans of working age in 2040.
   
4. 
   128 million the number of African households with discretionary income in 2020
   
5. 
   50% will be the portion of Africans living in cities by 2030.
   

The report says, “Africa long-term growth also will increasingly reflect international social and demographic trends that are creating new engines of domestic growth. Chief among these are urbanization and the rise of the middle-class African consumers. In 1980, just 28 percent of Africans lived in cities. Today, 40 percent do-a portion close to China’s and larger than India’s- and this share is projected to increase.”

Whilst these projections and statistics are reliable, they do not of themselves speak to a glorious future of happiness. Growth of middle class and consumer spending could be ambiguous. Are the consumption patterns going to be goods and services produced largely in Africa? If not and the incomes are rather spent on imported goods from outside- canned food, vegetables, rice, fisheries, poultry in the numerous foreign owned malls springing up all over the cities in Africa then what type of growth does Africa get? The truth is that some of these acquired cosmopolitan tastes and fashion will see Africa adding more to global growth (through international trade in commodities) then their domestic ones and only increasing urban- rural poverty if policies are not in place to steer it in certain directions . If its farm produces are not in these malls but rot on the streets and farm houses, because the growth is not one that affect its industrial and agricultural sector, again Africa loses.

Whilst it is good that Africa now gets the attention and is the subject of economic research by such global institutions, it is within Africa’s court to direct how these opportunities; inevitable integration of the world benefits it.

Within the same period that the MGI report came out in 2010, The Chatham House (probably Europe’s most influential think thank) in June, published its own, Our Common Strategic Interests- Africa’s Role in the Post-G8 World. Established as The Royal Institute of International Affairs in London, it created its Africa Programme only in 2003 and since then has made it relevant to the discussions of global affairs. The report is also true when it says, “Africa has never been in such a strong bargaining position in international affairs, with increasing numbers of suitors.”

On the continent itself, civil society awareness with a large range of media-orthodox- newspapers and magazines, FM stations, independent television, social (internet, twitter, face book) and mobile phones are registering their own phenomenal growth. For of the 6,480 think tanks spread around the globe in 2010 according to Think Tanks and Civil Societies Programme of the University of Pennsylvania and published in 2011, Africa’s share is a progressive 548 - 8% over-runing North Africa and Middle East as well as Oceania.

The western media may have their powers of influence and hundreds of millions of audiences globally but there is space in much of Africa now for their independent media to help debate and act on the doings of recalcitrant leaders and in some cases help with successful elections as has been the case in Ghana since 1992. In Nigeria, Ghana, Kenya especially but in many other places also, dozens of public policy institutions are looking at economic development, security, local government, banking and non banking financial institutions(capital markets and local investment more then at any time since independence) .

When Ghana needed about 750 million dollars in 2007 it went(not to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund where there would have been issues of justification of what it wanted to do with it and some conditions to fulfil) but to the capital markets. With its B plus rating by Standards and Poors’ and Fitch, it got oversubscribed three times for what it needed to finance infrastructure development. When Nigeria at the beginning of 2011 needed billions of dollars for similar exercise, there were hue and cry in the international media about its bad address and how over 14 billions dollars had been stolen from its treasury by osentibly the same politicians who wanted credit from the markets. The bad publicity notwithstanding, Nigeria got more then it needed. The time has even come when bad news is analysised more for its economic possibilities then the value of its journalism internationally.

It is the effect of this side of Africa that gives optimism; a side largely in the hands and influence of the private sector. High political drama may survive this decade but slowly it’s time to die will come as everything else does. But at the end it is dignity that counts. And it is that which should be Africa’s biggest indulgence. Naipaul maybe controversial in many ways but not all even in the fictious sense of his character as in, A Bend in the River. For whether as individuals or collective ideal called state or nation, he was right: “The world is what it is; men who are nothing, who allow themselves to become nothing, have no place in it.”

About the Book

Africa- A Miners’ Canary Into the Twenty-first Century (Essays on Economic Governance) is a collection looking at Africa from the perspective of one who has travelled the Continent. It looks mainly at the first decade of the twenty-first century and deals with issues of economic governance. From the regional points of the continent, this travelogue looks at the political class and economic development from as small an island country like the Seychelles to medium one like the Ivory Coast and an emerging economy such as South Africa’s. Presidents and Prime Ministers as well as opposition leaders, working class champions and peasants are encountered and their varying views of lives reflected. It is at once a complete departure of travelogues of natural histories and nature.

The writer, Ivor Agyeman-Duah, travelling in the company of a former African leader- John Agyekum Kufuor of Ghana and sometimes alone, discusses and profiles such issues as : what a first woman president in Africa could do and not do in Liberia; the sainthood of Mandela’s post-apartheid rule and the philosophy of kingship witnessed in the succession of Thabo Mbeki and the effects of such transition on South Africans; in Facing Mount Kenya for instance, he discusses one country two economies - the Nairobi economy and the non- modern one of nomads and the Maasei and looks at public policy as a craft in the hands of its first President Jomo Kenyatta and how it contributed to its current state; he also looks at how to re-build a beautiful country like Rwanda from a post-genocide ideology as well as a re-visitation of the famous West –Africa wager- the different but interesting paths to development undertaken by Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Felix Houphouet-Boigny of the Ivory Coast and the results five decades after; Mauritius and Seychelles are subjected to the relative comfort of managing small economies as well as the role of romance to growth. And above all, how the British empire in particular, and other European colonizing forces in the 19^th century helped shape the identities of these peoples and countries.

Ivor Agyeman-Duah, founder of the Centre for Intellectual Renewal, a cultural economy and development think-tank in Ghana has been a writer since his 20s initially for Panos Institute and West Africa magazine in London. As documentary film maker, he was part of the production team for the BBC and PBS documentaries, Into Africa and Wonders of the African World presented by the Harvard University professor, Henry Louis Gates, Jr.; served as a production advisor on Ampitheatre of Death, an Africa and Arabian slave trade documentary presented by the Nigerian Nobel laureate, Wole Soyinka; as well as the producer of the acclaimed, Yaa Asantewaa: Heroism of an African Queen.