Kwesi Frempong – Black through Ho, Capecoast, Kumasi and Sunyani

i got to see more of my host country this week. i was on official assignment to the volta region, brong-ahafo region, central region and the ashanti kingdom. as usual i’ll take a swipe at my home country. some of the places i visited where tertiary institutions and i daresay they are better run and better equipped than those in home country. for the first time in my entire life , i was able to use the loo in a tertiary institution. and it flushed! i also found something interesting about the tertiary institutions we visited; the students had more say in the running of affairs. fees were negotiated. any proposed increase in fees was discussed with the student body first and agreed upon. the authorities always had to explain in great detail any actions they were going to take that would affect the lives of the student. the press provided a check and balance. it appeared the authorities avoided by all means any unfavorable attention from the press. any student agitation would attract the press.

i got to learn some interesting things about the people of some of the visited regions. the people of the central region were laid back. it was joked that the dutch took all the building materials to kumasi and left the eggs and bacon with the people of the central region. it was said that their women could cook very well and their men were very romantic but lazy. it was joked that if you wanted a romantic man and were prepared to live in penury you married a man from the central region however if you were interested in the finer things of life and could forgo romance you married from the ashanti region. thus, the industrious business people were the ashantis (kumasi i could see was a bustling town). the ashanti king, king otumfuo osei tutu ii, recently celebrated his 10th anniversary. the occasion was graced by obasanjo and igbinedion (esama of benin) amongst a host of others. i gather it was pretty grand. yes, i also got to know that the ashantis were big on burials. they took out large bill boards for obituary announcements (saw a couple in kumasi). burials were a week long affair; i did see a lot of people in the traditional black wrapper.

i guess you would be wondering at the title of this piece. those are the places i visited. ho is in the volta region, capecoast in the central region, kumasi in the ashanti region and sunyani in the brong –ahafo region. i passed through koforidua (eastern region) on my way to kumasi. ghana has ten regions and so far i have visited five and live in a sixth one (greater accra). sometime in future i hope to visit the rest. now for the name kwesi frempong – black; i figure that would have been my name had i been ghanaian. kwesi because i was born on a sunday, frempong because it was on of the first of local names i saw on a signboard on my visit here (frempong water works) and the black aspect because i would like to have taken my ancestry from the central region. there are a lot of white (dutch, english and portuguese) sounding surnames from there because of the influence of the slave trade. some intermarriage had happened between the locals and the ‘traders’ and the descendents took on english names. interestingly, ancestry is matrilineal in some areas similar to the jews.