Kojo: I am insisting that it is no crime if you understudied my mother
Esi: Eiowula stop
Kojo: stop what?. I am asking that you cook it stew soup like what my mother gave me.
Esi: oh Kojo today and since when we have been together?
Kojo: Esi, please be honest. I have complained severally throughout and often I have had to cook to teach you demonstrably. Its nothing. She worries and she is too willing to give you that tutelage for free for her precious son.
Esi: for your loud mouth mother and her talkative groups to broadcast and friends point figures at me speaking under sleeves. You won’t get me. You can choose –marry your mother and I will be off.
Kojo: Today. She brought me up before you met me. She didn’t give that. I say emphatically and I am tired.
I suppose that sets the key note for what tops marriage feuding into separation. Its familiar but unspoken openly to reach a modest rapprochement to stabilise too many going single with children hanging down apron strings and the man shuts off. You wonder the guts and who is punishing whom.
There are too many such societal problems that can be resolved but we shy away for actually no tangible reasons or excuses except “dzi wo fie asem” [chop your own home matter, literally translated]. But this is where the grotesque irresponsibility lies on all of us.
I draw attention to a reference in my article here few weeks back describing the fresh young couples as each bringing in their own baggage not opened until after the festival post-wedding. The saying “the way to man’s heart is through his stomach” I have a problem with that because it asks many questions as answers
The first is this generation have been allowed and pushed into marriage for its glamour and the mothers compete for their daughters into that limbo not having taught them housewifery if they had learned which was instructed at school or as attempted by the mothers imparting domestic science. The response is “in this modern world today”? I understand that to refer to “take away” fast food which had served the quickie during courting. You see there was always a misunderstanding of hopes between the two.
For the young man the “take-away” was a temporary convenience. But the girl taught that would be the routine. Then the grumblings start neither is prepared to discuss. The solution inadvertently begins in the “I am alright” from the man arrived from work.
Secondly, the girl runs to the Priest or Rev. and or Pastor. The finding from my random discourses, usually in passing, with that confrere is that the girl goes to them complaining about rival suspect(s). Its like going to the medical doctor to report stomach ache while it is a heart breaking bag that we could call our own, considering all from our yesterdays to the present to save this generation from themselves to secure it is safe as assured that those we leave our places for will neither fritter their opportunities; nor destroy what’s bequeathed to them and in a desperate fit of haplessness and the rage that psychologically induces, rush to invade the cemeteries to spank us innocently.Seriously unfair, as if we did not strive to correct advisedly—pause and think young man young woman before entry. They will tell you its love. Sorry until you grow up and look back, I say to you it is “infatuation.”
Anyway that rough time prospect and the unseen obviously complicate the issues and gradually, the mislead pollutes the kernel and quickly gathers scores of advisors into a stand-off as the gap widens and its no point of return—the marriage is caput –punto finale.
This is the mix we have in society today. The concerns are two: the single parent mother and likelihood of destitute children; but that precisely is reason that this country would need to take stock:[a} it takes the next generation to hand over to and expect to build on their heritage and not destroy because they don’t understand it pretty unaware it must be confessed.
At the root, as I tried to establish in that piece previously on “Two Dimensional perspectives in Divorce”.[Ghanaian Times May 2020] is the era of shot-gun marriages that seized this country from about the mid-80s. So the rate of divorce and percentage of the total at the courts, palaces and homes of family heads rise and no one acknowledges the danger for the future. I suggest policy planners, not politicians, would do their damnedest.
But as much as no one could physically hold down the numbers my sense for raising it at all is the current presumption that nothing is going to be the same when covid-19 is seen off. Unless we want to continue to playing both sides of the equation about the homes for the inheritors in disarray now. My craziest belief is we each of us cares about our succession. If we extrapolate it nationally, we can imagine silhouettes of, for the future to sit us up to either go back to our norms from our roots , jettison them for the imported ceremonial “I do” only to undo, or craft a mixed bag which we can call our own.
How? Its easy because the import has come unstuck.Its quite important to think about it redoing our cultural policy following the changes to come, if our world should be better. Like quoting former US President Barak Obama recently: its up to you” [us]. The family together is pivotal reconstructing a nation as broken as ours today. Too often politicians have not hurt their campaigns for office with pledges to “re-construct” this nation but delivered that in as silent as light.
However, without losing the focus of the prompters for the main theme: “my mother did not give me this or that to eat” the digression, so to state, and the discourse to this juncture expose fundamentals we left to stray. These derive from the fake fight against an ancient saying that the kitchen is the place of the girl-to-be woman. We loosely hung up for the omnibus “women’s equality” and “rights”.
There was and is nowhere from our native anthropology which pushed the girls aside. Some religion may segregate but schooling is open, Of course there had always been the two major constraints which confronted and still challenges the girl-child education. It’s the “have” and “have-not” economics and Confucius philosophy—indeed striking the balance between hard and foreseeable returns on investments choices. Otherwise, we were and are at school on the same bench from the kindergarten or class “wait” through class-one to wherever each ability led.
The losses that euphoria over the equality and rights carrots dangled made some families look backward, archaic. It compelled influences which made the girls going to the kitchen to learn from Mum anathema. Mothers also suddenly became protective of daughters being cooking-celibate. And I am doubt there are many today who remember “domestic science” and “mechanical with carpentry” taught at schools lapsed. We had here indeed Technical and carpentry state schools –Asuansi and Takoradi for the Boys. I believe Mbofratro at Kumasi (Mrs Mancell) as augmenting the domestic science for the girls. The introduction of Home Economics is a latter day as it followed the Polys meant solely initially for catering.
As regards that we failed to vision ahead of their future and therefore we though profit from the variety of private catering services, really the mother of the “take-away packs”. Something else had followed that on the quiet which none again, took seriously as impacting instability ultimately, the too early marriages of our younger generation, reckoning presently in the cause-accounts.
Recall the AFRC hit town and country [4 June 1979] in dire crisis especially food supplies and purchases. Here is the starter at the final bottom of all the transistors I have tried to pull back indeed rip off literally the curtains on. The young just married and single mothers left baskets at Kebab sellers’ as well as the kenkeys’ [and that is how they also acquired the exalted title “boutique”] .At the boutiques you could buy fish and gravy. The baskets are collected after work en route home. Food is ready.
At the close of the AFRC interregnum, the excuses’ main tangent is exigencies of work. At one point of the time, the question erupts, the protest follows and the pride-injured feeling ensues to issue a quarrel which ends the marriage. Certainly his mother “did not give him…” He has an absolute right to say it. The problem is the girls or is it wives! Are too quick temperamentally not to reason this simple innocuous exclamation. The meaning is ‘you are insulting me and my mum taught me nothing.’
Well, it could be so coming from the series of changes that the system has succumbed. Simply finding a subtle way to respond at Mother’s is not any self-cheap-making. There is a solution there. Unfortunately we have a three set scenario when things begin to go sour the Kids: the state simply washes its hands off, signs ‘go your go’; families take sides and dig in heels—irreconcilable and the church goes arbitration. The undermining mishap is you will hear stories about this Priest or Pastor , ostensibly the peace-maker, is in cahoots with the wife. Some turn out true the others follow by whispers—false, merely following the gossip fashion, regardless of grievous damage to reputation and co-joining that are the gullible public. “Did we go; did we come?.
We used to mid-50s-early 60s at Presentation Control Room in GBC[BH2 to 3] tease the paucity of ladies among us, never that they were kitchen-abstinent,with an old Akan countryside ‘pop’ dance song—“AdwowahAmissah”—allegedly she she couldn’t cook soup. It was all good decent humour: the chorus goes “obabasiaonnyimnkwan ye oooo… Adowa Amissaheeee….ayiei….”..
© Prof nana essilfie-conduah.
