Ghana Life: stories of spiders, engineering and drugs

Ghana is well known for its rich oral literature: in particular, its thousands of proverbs (mmebusem) and spider stories (anansesem). These national treasures, passed down from generation to generation, preserved the wisdom of the past and prepared youth to survive and thrive in a world where ‘life is war’. In ages past, storytelling served to educate and entertain during long, dark tropical nights, and many lament that this practice is dying out fast with the spread of television and other modern electronic media. Kwame Mainu was born early enough to have absorbed the oral heritage of his people, as well as a Western-style scientific education: two influences that inspired and enabled, at the same time that they imposed almost unbearable tensions.

Kwame Mainu was born on March 2, 1957, just four days before his country, Ghana, gained independence. As a small boy, and during his school days, Kwame would gather with his classmates after dinner, grouped around an oil lamp on long dark tropical nights, to listen to tales of the Ananse spider, who is said to he is the prototype of Br. ‘er Rabbit from the Uncle Remus stories. The stories of Ananse, often called a lovable trickster, open young minds to the full spectrum of human aspirations, machinations, and susceptibilities. In modern parlance, anansessem could be said to make youth “street wise.” Proverbs (mmebusem), on the other hand, arguably preserve the higher wisdom of the community, and for those with ears to hear convey a deeper understanding of the human condition and the common sense that Bertrand Russell asserted ‘was not so common. .

An even greater influence on Kwame was his father’s love of rationality and rejection of irrational customs and superstitious beliefs. Educated in colonial times and self-taught through constant reading, Kwesi Mainu inspired in his son a respect for democracy and the rule of law and an insatiable thirst for scientific knowledge that the Industrial Revolution could manifest in his new country. . Therefore, Kwame formed the long-term ambition of becoming an engineer, but after the early death of his father, he was forced to delay his formal education and rely on Ananse’s legacy to face poverty and deprivation. immediate of him.

At Suame Magazine in Kumasi Kwame are over a thousand workshops, each owned by a master craftsman supported by five or six unpaid apprentice trainees. Kwame could have become an apprentice, but he refused to wait five years to become a master and have his own workshop, so he decided to organize a group of newly qualified masters to produce market carts under his quality control and marketing regime. . In this way he survived and even prospered for a few years until the mismanagement and corruption of the Acheampong regime crippled the Ghanaian economy in the mid-1970s. Then, with the help of his girlfriend, Comfort, Kwame became the toy of a wealthy market queen who sponsored his return to formal education for the next four years.

Until now, Kwame had relied on the spider spirit to find his way through life, but now, with a degree in mechanical engineering from Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, he was qualified to join a project that transfers new manufacturing skills to the artisans of Suame Magazine. Being familiar with the Magazine, which now expanded to a population of 27,000, Kwame excelled in his work and was chosen to attend a short foundry training course in Coventry, England. This led to the opportunity to study for a degree at the University of Warwick.

At last, it seemed to Kwame that his life was heading the way he had planned with his father. He was nearly a decade older than most of his fellow students but he rejoiced in his deliverance from the poverty of his homeland. Working in all his free time, he decided to save enough money to build a house in Kumasi for his wife and daughter. But other students he knew from Kumasi were building faster and on a much larger scale, and his wife Comfort was growing impatient. Kwame suspected that his compatriots were involved in drug trafficking and he was tempted to join them. Then, on his return from Kumasi at the end of his second long holiday, customs officials detained him at London’s Heathrow airport with an offer that sought to challenge the contradictions of his intellectual heritage and turn his entire life into a chaos.