Ghana Memories 1966 – 1968, Part Two Children

By John Clement The Afro News Vancouver

Small fingers gently poked my legs. In the isolated village near Bawku, north-eastern Ghana, white people were a novelty; white people with hairy legs unheard of. Might that odd pale skin feel cold to the touch? Early in my Ghana sojourn I began to experience the charm of the children.

Watching Ghanaian adults relate to children formed a foundation for my life-long efforts to nurture the healthy growth of children and young people as a teacher, parent and youth leader. So what did I learn?

Children thrive when they are included in the life of the family and of the community. Ghanaian kids were not entertained by adults, were not kept busy for the sake of being busy, were not relegated to an adolescent sub-culture when they reached their teens. They were fully involved in the lives of their families and friends, surrounded by love and protection. In the villages children contribute to the work of the family as soon as they are able to walk and understand the tasks. You’ve got turkeys to raise? The kids go out each morning to turn over dried cow dung, catch poop-feeding grubs who’ve moved in overnight and take them back to the pens. The Lobi and other tribes in north-western Ghana make beautiful xylophones using wooden keys lashed to a frame of sticks and tuned to a pentatonic scale (the black keys on a piano). Sound chambers consisting of dried gourds hang below each key with their resonance increased by thin parchment pasted over holes drilled in the gourds. Where do you get thin parchment in north western Ghana? Children go into the bush, strip the bark from rotting logs and bring back cocoons which will be flattened to thin membranes. Each school day as I left after my classes I met four naked seven and eight-year old boys who herded goats all day. (Why grazing animals cannot be kept in fenced fields will remain a topic for another column.) They didn’t know much English but I was always greeted by wide smiles and “Hellohowareyou?” pronounced as one word. Little girls hawking fruit and vegetables for their parents in the market announced the price for one and then instantly calculated the total price for whatever number I wanted to buy. Memorizing multiplication tables is an accomplishment for Grade 3 and 4 children in Canada. These little vendors had never been to school, could not read or write and seldom spoke English. They conducted their sales in three or more African languages and I used Hausa, the Nigerian language used for trade across the sahel grasslands south of the Sahara.

Since the children are fully involved in the work of the family they are full partners in the recreation of the family such as dancing. This is true both of traditional dancing and drumming in villages and of dances in open air nightclubs of small and mid-sized towns. I spent a delightful evening at the Tamale Legion with Adisah, her niece, Shakera, and Shakera’s daughter. The young girl dashed off to find her friends and returned regularly to report to her mother on exactly where she was and who she was with.

Children assume increasing responsibility for family welfare as they grow so there was none of the adolescent trauma we’ve come to expect during teen years in North America. Teenage angst is an invention of industrial and post-industrial cultures which have yet to learn how to find meaningful roles for many of their physically mature young men and women who are not ready to take on adult responsibility in a technological complex world of work.

Does my sketch of childhood in Ghana stem from a simple agrarian culture? Yes, it does. Is it easy to transfer the traditional Ghanaian model to urban Canada? No. Can elements of the Ghanaian model help us to improve the lives of fractured Canadian families? Most definitely. How will be the topic of another article.