WE NEVER LEARN FROM OUR MISTAKES AS A PEOPLE AND AS A NATION SO WE KEEP REPEATING OURSELVES AS WE’RE ONLY MOVING IN CIRCLES, SAME CIRCLES AND TELLING OURSELVES ‘…BUT WE JUST PASSED THIS SAME PLACE LAST TIME or BEFORE?”

…OVER the last fifty years plus since I entered Mfantsipim School, Cape Coast in 1967, I have grown up to learn about and appreciate the Aborigines Rights Protection Society (ARPS) and their linkages with the Founding Fathers of this great ‘School’, and how they sacrificed for the common rights of our people and our nation…

…of particular mentions were a number, who were also old students of ‘MFANTSIPIM’, and to the extent that one gave the school its name as well as its motto – ‘DWEN HWE KAN’ and the School’s Crest…

…what these ‘nationalists’ from school as students of Mfantsipim to their matured, adult-working lives sought to achieve was independence for our nation without sacrificing who we are as a people…and why the school name and motto were all in Fanti; and to the extent that the images of the School Crest of four parts, were carefully chosen to advance an indigenous - socio-economic - developmental paradigm for ourselves…

…indeed, the records show that the first person to suggest the name, Ghana for us was Rev. J. B. Anaman in 1895 in his book “The Gold Coast Guide”, however that is not what this piece is about…what is frightening rearing its head before our very eyes is the fact that we have been going round in circles for a number of years now for whatever reason only the intelligentsia can explain to us, the followers…

…all the people, who are trying to lay claim to being the people who should or ought to be credited with bequeathing the name ‘GHANA’ to us on Independence Day on  WEDNESDAY, 6^TH MARCH, 1957, do they really know what happened to the great ‘Ghana Empire’…..?

…the then Ghana Empire, properly known as WAGADOU, was a West African empire located in the area of present day southeastern Mauritania and western Mali with a capital known as ‘Koumbi Saleh’ and the following languages – Soninke, Malinke, and Mande….the name ‘GHANA’ was the title of its ruler, whilst its people traded in salt and gold since ancient times…and allowing for larger urban centres with the introduction of the camel as mode of faster transportation…but as the empire declined mainly out of their own GALAMSEY issues of the times…losing clean water to the extent that now the citizens have to import water for drinking and cooking…same clean water we still take for granted…with all kinds of foreigners fronting for some high-powered officials of state and other appointees of government….

…the then powerful Ghana Empire declined to the point of finally becoming a vassal state of the then rising Mali Empire at some point in the 13^th century…there was also several allegations of massive corruption and injustices in the administration of justice amongst the leadership under the King and heads of the vassal states…and when in 1957, the Gold Coast became the first country in the sub-Saharan Africa to gain its Independence from colonial rule, our leadership at the time renamed the country, Ghana in honour of the long-gone empire….that we are still fighting over who owns the credit to the naming….

…if we go back to the Book of Genesis 2:19…where God paraded animals before him “to see what he would call them”…the Scripture records that Adam animal names stuck to indicate that the names are more than titles in that they accurately described the animals…so we note that NAMES like GHANA are important to everybody and everything….especially a NATION…as we inherit what the history, successes, mistakes and failures of the old Ghana Empire, including what GALAMSEY did to that empire….let me dare another one to look for the history of Ghana Empire and come back to say I am lying unless we don’t want to face up to the truth as always…and why we keep going round in circles as a people…never acknowledging anything about our past than to pretend we are the very first to achieve this or that…

…what is worse still is we lose the whole essence of our lives: TRUTH…the very essence of who we are as a PEOPLE and as GHANAIANS…when at naming ceremonies of new babies, they place a bit of salt and say, “if it’s salt, it’s salt”; and then place a bit of water and say, “if it’s water, it’s water”…so you will know that whole of one’s life, TRUTHFULNESS is everything…and yet what do we see now, we lie with no shame at all….from the very top to the bottom with careless abundance and why we keep going round in circles as a nation and a people…

…let us trace our steps to our christening moments and start afresh to save our nation, Ghana…

By Magnus Naabe RexDanquah, the Ghanaian