In paying my last respects to Dr Letitia Obeng, Ghana’s first female PhD holder in Science, I have gone back to her seminal autobiography, A Silent Heritage, and selected some passages from the book on different subjects to show what a thoroughly dynamic and forward-looking woman she has been.

Here she is, describing the home she lived in as a child in Afidwase:  

The roof was of corrugated iron sheets.

All “respectable” houses were roofed with corrugated iron sheets.

The iron sheets had been introduced, (no doubt as part of a foreign export drive during colonial days) as an alternative to the African grass-thatch roof which was considered “primitive”.

The promotion had been vigorous, in spite of the fact that, in the climate of the country, the grass thatch roofs made rooms cool.

Granted, the corrugated iron sheets made rainwater harvesting feasible but they also heated rooms up and, with the rains, they soon became rusty, leaving roofs disgustingly ugly.

As I have travelled around the world, I have seen cottages and houses in several places including Europe, roofed with grass and they are highly rated.

I have seen attractive homes and hotels in Kenya, Lesotho, Burundi, as well as in Britain, France and other places, with safe, protective grass thatched roofs.

They were neither rusty nor disgustingly ugly.

Who knows what effective and pleasing roofing may have evolved from our kind of roofing if we had not been brainwashed into accepting that the grass-thatch roof was primitive?

And could the colonial masters not have organized the making of roofing tiles? We had the raw material and abundant labour.

But then, that might have caused the business of the foreign exporters and importers of the corrugated iron sheets to collapse! 

Here she describes her Ntama Campaign.

I might add for the sake of the young people that back in those days, if you were an “educated” woman, you were not to be seen in cloth, “ntama”, you had to wear European dress:

I was still fired with nationalism and I continued to use ntama as my standard attire.

I remember we went in a group one evening to a popular night club in Kumasi.

At the entrance, although I had bought a ticket, the doorman would not let me in because I was wearing ntama.

The others in the group had European attire and they were let in.

George and I were left standing outside.

Just as my fury began to build up, the Proprietor happened to be visiting the club and when he saw what was happening, he apologized and invited us in.

I was the only one inside wearing ntama.

Thereafter, others wearing the traditional attire were also allowed in the club.

That strengthened my resolve to make the ntama acceptable and I started designing and sewing my kabas to look so attractive and different that at social functions, I stood out in my ntama.

The more conservative among the campus wives did not approve of me being in ntama at serious functions.

In fact one of them said to George, “Why does your fiancé continue to disgrace herself by wearing cloth all the time as if she does not know how to wear a dress.”

I decided to organize an Ntama Fashion Show to demonstrate how to be proud of wearing ntama for various occasions.

I had no problem with finding willing models from the Women’s Hall where I was Warden and had friends among the students.

I designed the ntama styles and sewed a variety of nicely fitted kaba for many occasions: sleeveless kaba with a little collar as a secretary’s outfit, a smart one with little straps, for early evening social events, an off-the-shoulder, strapless “will-power” for formal evenings, and others with overlapping peplum, short and long flared out sleeves.

All of them were designed to fit and show the curves of my lovely models.

The show took place in the College Assembly Hall and it was well applauded.

I followed the show-up with articles in a daily newspaper about how to sew and wear zip-fitted kabas and feel good in them.

Of course, I was only addressing a minority of literate women.

It was not the done thing to be a “cloth lady” at formal functions and there certainly were those ladies who, at that time, wouldn’t be caught dead in ntama in public! 

Here she is on the subject of food:

Mama was an excellent cook.

Her local traditional dishes were really great.

Using vegetables, she would make a variety of soups and stews.

Then, there were all the dishes from ripe plantain and sweet potato and maize and yams that I hardly hear spoken about these days.

Obrodokono was a popular dish made from ripe plantain and ground, roasted maize.

The mixture, suitably seasoned with peppers and ginger and blended with a little palm oil was wrapped in green plantain leaves and steamed in a pot.

Then there were the rich and tasty soups, there was always a variety of them: palm soup, groundnut soup, garden egg soup and even plain soup – and they were all delicious.

There would be in the soups, a variety of meats including venison and smoked freshwater fish.

Papa was a hunter and quite often he would return from night hunting with large game.

Palm oil-based dishes were made with finely chopped spinach, garden eggs or different kinds of beans.

They were eaten with yam, plantain, cocoyam, cassava, cooked powdered maize and sometimes but rarely, rice.

l am glad that as a people, we in Ghana, even now, have a large stock of recipes and different ways of making delicious dishes from the same ingredients.

It is no exaggeration to say that there are enough varieties of local dishes for one to eat for many days without repeating a recipe.

Meal times when I was young were always great.

As I grew up, I used to hear quite a lot about how Africans do not eat “balanced diets”.

Thinking back, in my home, at any rate, I think the meals were reasonably balanced.

And here she is, reporting on her first trip to China in 1975 on a favourite subject, always the scientist, ever the pragmatist:

The safe management of human waste was strictly observed.

Traditionally, human waste had been used as manure on the farms.  

The Chinese had devised a special three-chamber latrine which rendered parasite eggs infertile by the time the waste was scooped out to be used as manure.

They could also produce biogas from the latrine.

When we visited a house to inspect one of the latrines, there was a plastic hose through which biogas was being evacuated.

We followed the hose and it led us to a kitchen where the biogas was fed into a stove and used to boil water to make tea for us!

I was so impressed by this direct, no-nonsense utilization of human waste that I passionately rendered an account of it to my sister when I returned home.

Imagine my surprise when, instead of catching my excitement and showing the enthusiastic interest that I expected, her face went funny, as she asked, “And you drank the tea?” I got a similar reaction from other people, not only in Ghana, but also elsewhere, whenever I told my story.

Fare thee well, Dr Letitia Obeng, you were special, we haven’t got anyone like you.

Sleep well, Auntie Letitia

Take, for example, the section in the advertising pages of Ghanaian newspapers which goes under the headline of Change of Name. The narrative there often goes like this: I, Mary Akua Brown of house number 55, Mahogany Street, Mangoase, now wish to be known and called Mrs Mary Akua Opoku. All documents bearing my former name still hold valid.

It is easy to understand what is going on here. A Miss Brown has got married to a Mr Opoku and wants to adopt her husband’s name and be called Mrs Opoku.

On the same page, you would often find a Mrs Cynthia Ama Boateng now wishing to be known and called Miss Cynthia Ama Mensa. It is also easy to work out this one too, as Mrs Cynthia Boateng’s marriage has broken down and she wants to revert to the name she had before she got married and assumed her husband’s name.

Christian names

There are others that fall in the category of Benjamin Kwame Mensa wishing to be known and called Kwame Mensa; lots of people drop the Christian name they had never liked or turn the Christian name, in this case, the Benjamin into an initial, B. and thus would now be known as B. Kwame Mensa. Some people had assumed names given to them by teachers because the schools in those days insisted on everybody having a “Christian” name, which is defined as a name found in the Bible.

Suspicious names

Then there are the name changes I could never work out; Cyril Kofi Mensa Ansah now wishing to be known and called Ebenezer Kwaku Adom Yusuf. This always leads me to think there is something suspicious going on, like a new and, probably, stolen identity is being assumed.

This penchant for changing names is not limited to individuals. The naming and renaming of structures, roads and towns is a national obsession. We, after all, changed the name of our country at independence from Gold Coast to Ghana and we are justifiably proud of that. There is no reason why we should be defined by a name given to us by our colonialists.

Sometimes, the change is really a case of correcting a past mistake, like the Indians abandoning Bombay, which is how the lazy Brits chose to call Mumbai or insisting on Beijing instead of Peking, which is how the world used to know and call the Chinese capital. When I knew the town back in the early 1960s, it was called Kibi, today it is Kyebi. But then, maybe, like Mumbai and Beijing, the locals always called it Kyebi and it was left to us strangers to call it Kibi.

Sometimes, the change can only be attributed to wanting to score a point. Ghana is not known for many dramatic architectural structures. But when the Huffington Post put up a list of the Most Stunning Presidential Palaces back in 2010, Ghana’s newly constructed presidential office and residential complex featured on that list.

When it was completed and commissioned in 2008, President John Agyekum Kufuor, who built it and was roundly abused for his efforts, named it Golden Jubilee House.

When the late President John Evans Atta Mills won the elections that year, soon after the commissioning, he refused to move there but had the name of the complex changed to Flagstaff House. That was what the place was known when the original structures built there were occupied by the British Military Command and later by independent Ghana’s first President, Kwame Nkrumah.

When President Mills died in office in 2012, the place almost became a cemetery when seven graves were dug on the premises to bury the dead President and probably future dead ones as well. Mercifully, that plan was abandoned. The next President, John Mahama, moved into the offices and for a few days, and the building became Jubilee Flagstaff House until it reverted to Flagstaff House again.

Something told me we had not seen the end and true enough. When President Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo came into office in 2017, the presidential office and residential complex was formally renamed Jubilee House.

Some of the name changes end up in a total fiasco. I recall, for example, the attempt by the then Mayor of Accra to mark the first anniversary of the death of President Mills, by renaming the national hockey pitch, the John Evans Atta Mills Hockey Stadium, erasing the name of Madam Theodosia Okoh, who had been a famous hockey player and administrator. Now sadly passed on, she was at the time a redoubtable 91-year-old in dignified retirement, who also happened to have been the person that designed the national flag of Ghana.

That particular name change, or attempt at name change, caused such an uproar that the then President of the Republic was forced to intervene and the Mayor had to beat a retreat to the original name.

I am glad I decided to stick to my name.

A CORRECTION

I must make a correction to part of the article I wrote titled Only Lawyers would Understand.

In narrating the story about lawyer Ohene Djan’s infamous murder trial, I did not state correctly how the trial ended. Let me try and have another go and see if I get the sequence correct this time around.

Dr Ohene-Djan, a famous Sunyani lawyer, was arrested, charged and brought before the courts and put on trial for murder. After the prosecution had finished and after the accused person, Dr Ohene-Djan, himself had gone into the witness box and testified on his own behalf, when it came to delivering the judgment, things took a strange twist (strange to us non-lawyers, that is).

After the judge (a lawyer), the Director of Public Prosecutions (a lawyer) and the accused person’s lawyer had some lawyerly discussions, the judge announced that Ohene-Djan had been found guilty and was being convicted of manslaughter.

He hadn’t been accused of, nor tried for manslaughter and at no stage during the trial had there been any talk of the murder charge being changed to manslaughter, but he was suddenly convicted of manslaughter.

Now, here is the correction I must make: he was not “let go” as I wrote. He was sentenced to 15 years’ imprisonment and served two to three years and then benefitted from some general amnesty and immediately left for the United Kingdom.

My apologies for missing out the 15 years sentence and him serving two or three years of it, even if it does not change the point being made of a murder charge and trial being changed to manslaughter at the point of sentencing.

I shouldn’t really be making sloppy mistakes if I am going to be questioning.