ImageNations

Last week,  Stefania of Books of Gold  drew my attention to a particular article by George Packer of Lapham's Quarterly , a magazine of history and ideas . Perhaps it was in the spirit of sharing ideas that Packer wrote his beautiful literary article aptly titled  Dickens in Lagos .  According to Packer, and you could read his article first, the present day reader in Bombay, Rangoon, Mombasa or Lagos is more likely understand the contextual works of Dickens, and Hardy, and Dreiser and Gissing and Balzac than the Western reader in New York or Los Angeles because in these Western countries, The conditions for Gissing’s version of unhappiness, and Hardy’s, and Dreiser’s (and, earlier, Balzac’s), no longer exist in the civilizations that produced their work. In the great cities of the West, the standard of living is too high, public life too rationalized, social taxonomy too fluid, and aesthetic taste too jaundiced, for a novel to turn on the main character’s fra...

It is a fact that every country has its own problems. Be it humanitarian, unemployment, job losses, accidents, rush-hour, murders, developing countries are not alone and so definitely Ghana is not alone. However, what make ours a topic to discuss are the causes of the problems. I definitely am not going to assume the role of an omniscient investigator, neither am I going to pretend to wield within my hand or have in my mind or heart the answers to our numerous problems. However, it is my believe that if we should all dig deep into ourselves as human beings, search every interstice, every nook and cranny (forget the cliché), every orifice, every artery, every nerve and neuron, we will find the causes of our problems with its solution locked somewhere. After all, is not said that identifying of the problem is the first step towards solving it? Though as a country we are faced with numerous and diverse problems, the root causes are common. Hence, identifying one cause could help in rect...

Last Friday, heaven opened its doors and there was a torrent. Though, relatively this can hardly be described as a torrent because it poured for only two hours. It cannot be compared with the countries that had experienced three days of continuous downpour such as Brazil and Madagascar. However, the report that followed in Monday's edition of the Daily Graphic (DG) indicates that this event, which portends bumper harvest for farmers and for which they have earnestly prayed, has wreak havoc on parts of the Accra, to a scale that is somehow comparable to hurricane Katrina or hurricane Ike--A hurricane from a two-hour downpour. Only in Ghana! Accra's perennial flooding has come to stay, yet it leaves the confines of our thoughts the very moment the sun unwillingly dries the waters. As the muddy clay dries up and erases every vestige of the havoc the rains wreaked so the memories of its devastation leaves our mind and our actions that caused the problem continues unabated, with re...