Are we the nation others think we are?
A ‘Nation’ is, of course, constituted of PEOPLE, so the question that is the pith of the above headline could as well have been framed as “ARE WE THE PEOPLE THAT OTHERS THINK WE ARE?”
You see, other nations respect us greatly.
One year after our independence in 1957, Ghana was deemed worthy of being invited to a Conference of Afro-Asian Writers held in Tashkent, capital of Uzbekistan, one of the Republics of the Soviet Union.
I was one of the delegates elected by the Ghana Society of Writers to represent Ghana.
The reception accorded to the Ghanaian delegates was stunning. I was allowed to stand very close to the Soviet leader of the time, Mr Nikita Khrushchev and a feisty interpreter called Olga Kruslgersya asked him questions on my behalf! He answers them seriously and I was able to send a dispatch to Radio Ghana telling Ghanaians about the views of Mr K on Disarmament, future Soviet economic cooperation with African nations which would follow Ghana into independence and so.
A picture of me talking to Mr K was published world-wide and when I returned to Ghana, a copy of the London Times with the picture in it was waiting for me, courtesy of Mr R. J. Moxon, Director of the Ghana information Services Department.
Earlier, on my way to Moscow, I had stopped over in Cairo and had made the mistake of walking in the streets wearing my Kente cloth. People crowded around me to feel the texture of the cloth and shout: Ghana! Nkrumah!” In Tashkent I read poetry to small crowds that gathered round me as if I was a film star.
The World honoured Ghana. What would the good people of the world do if they got to know that today, the people of Ghana use excavators to pollute their own drinking water? That they wash sand with mercury in their rivers, seeking gold from soil dug up from it?
What would they say if told that Ghanaians, although warned by scientists that such practices can cause deformities in foetuses, including malformed skulls, single eyes or ears and faces without noses still do?
A large part of the Ghanaian populace are involved in “galamsey” or illegal mining that is destroying Ghana’s environment and poisoning the soil in food farms to such an extent that the genocide of Ghana’s future generations cannot be ruled out?
[01:11, 7/27/2026] Cameron Duodo: The sad truth is that murdering the Nation by seeking gold from its rivers and farms is not necessary at all. The generations that preceded the modern gold-seekers dug and exported so much gold that foreigners named the country “The Gold Coast”! Yet they left a viable country to their descendants to enjoy
They did that by using their brains to EVOLVE TECHNIQUES OF GOLD-MINING THAT DID NOT HARM THE ENVIRONMENT!
That is what earned them respect in the world and made others think that they were not people they were, NAMELY, PEOPLE INNATELY ENDOWED WITH– COMMON SENSE.
BY CAMERON DUODU
Follow our WhatsApp Channel now! https://whatsapp.com/channel/0029VbAjG7g3gvWajUAEX12Q
