DA505 main
26/7/05
6:56 pm
Page 5
Drum: EDITOR’S THOUGHTS
The stars are many and the night is black. Light from the hotel’s kitchen windows cast
shadows twisted across the yard. Could I live in this place? Amongst these people?
Learning their ways and languages? Two couples to my left are retelling the story of The
Chief’s New Clothes. “Eh! ...Until a small boy came and said, ‘The King is naked! The
King is naked!’ ...You know small boys have much to learn!” After ten minutes, they have
finished discussing ‘Women’s Liberation in Ghana’ – with the two men concluding,
“Women do as much work as men,”...but from what I can see, women are the backbone
of Africa. And with that thought uppermost in my mind, I return to my holiday-reading.
“Until a small boy came and said, ‘The King is naked! The King is
naked!’ ...You know small boys have much to learn!”
During the 1980s, it is said, Ghanaian politics went through remarkable transformations
from revolution, through adoption of a draconian economic reform programme, and the
eventual return to democratic government in 1992. In Big Men and Small Boys: Power,
Ideology and the Burden of History in Rawlings’ Ghana, 1982–1994 [1995], Paul Nugent
covers the entire sequence of events, situating them in the broader historical context and
offering a sustained explanation of what occurred. Since the eighteenth century, he
argues, a central theme dominating Ghanaian politics and society has been the
relationship between wealth and virtue, and Dr Nugent offers an essential explanation of
the ways in which this theme is still predominant today and can be seen in the country’s
‘big men/small boy’ syndrome.
Can I live in this country – ‘a small boy’ – and my own man? I would like to run The Mole
Game Park in Damongo. I wonder if the big man, President John Agyehum Kufuor, could
arrange it. I wouldn’t ask for much, just a twelve-month trial period, a self-contained
bungalow, food, transport, a budget, and some small commission on increased sales. I
know I could send profits shooting to the stratosphere.
The stars are out and bright tonight.
Paul Boakye, Editor
[email protected]
5