By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

It is not clear to me what Prof. Ali A. Mazrui has to do with the ongoing debate (or is it uproar?) over the intended balkanization of Ghana’s Northern Region into “at least” two discrete administrative entities, though writing in a piece presumptuously captioned “A Humble Letter to Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe” (4/22/09), a Mr. Iddisah Sulemana had the effrontery to flagrantly suggest that this writer had, somehow, gratuitously and, also perhaps, rather disrespectfully, attacked the distinguished Kenyan political scientist and unarguably one of continental Africa’s foremost scholars.

To back up his curious claim, this is what Mr. Sulemana, an avowed Gonja separatist, had to say: “Ahoofe’s utter disdain is not only for people who don’t share in [sic] his political persuasion. I read a piece where [sic] Ahoofe lambasted the all[-]time revered Prof. Ali Mazrui of New York University [sic]. As a professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing, I appreciate your ‘control’ over the Queen’s language. But I really wonder the kind of creative writing you are spewing [emphasis added] on American children at Nassau Community College. It’s not just about expressing yourself, and telling the whole world you can write good English. The substance in what you write is what readers are interested in. And please, when you write, remember you are writing for public consumption.”

That Mr. Iddisah Sulemana who wrote the foregoing patently mendacious vitriol is, presumably, a Ghana Government-sponsored graduate student at the University of Akron, Ohio, is all the more to be pitied. And if sponsoring Mr. Sulemana is not a criminally wasteful enterprise on the part of our government, then, needless to say, I don’t quite know what else is.

First of all, the critic’s apparent hallmark of “practiced stupidity” cannot be lightly glossed over. And as my old English language and literature professor, Mr. Chinua Achebe, is wont to say: “I may be famous and all the other things as well; but I do not suffer fools gladly.” And on the latter score, I cannot begin to tell the dear reader how often and how long I have agonized over Mr. Sulemana’s “most humble letter.” And to be certain, I have had to greatly restrain myself in order not to commit the utterly unforgivable crime of presuming this woefully misguided urchin’s tantrum to be representative of that of the other “Salaga Separatists.” Not that it would make any iota of real difference.

All the same, one thing is unremarkably clear about Mr. Sulemana and his “Humble Letter.” And it is the quite predictable fact that the “letter writer” has absolutely no respect for either himself or his audience. And it is largely for the preceding reasons why he deliberately and facilely fails to provide his readers with both the exact source and context in which “Ahoofe lambasted the all time revered Prof. Ali Mazrui.” And by so doing, not only does the critic grossly and crassly exhibit his abject disrespect for sound scholarship but, even more significantly, he insults the intelligence of his audience!

At any rate, for those of our readers who really care to know, Prof. Ali A. Mazrui is a man that I personally know and have met several times, and to whom I have also expressed my great respect and admiration. Prof. Mazrui, who is the Albert Schweitzer Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at the Binghamton Campus of the State University of New York (SUNY), NOT New York University (NYU), was also one of the very first recipients of a free autographed copy of my volume of poetry titled “Atumpan (Drum-Talk).” And so precisely what is Mr. Sulemana talking about here?

Perhaps somebody ought to apprise the “Salaga Separatist” of the fact that if, indeed, he aspires to becoming a formidable intellectual/scholar in the near future, then he had better learn to respect and appreciate what scholars and intellectuals do as professionals, rather than fatuously pretending as if the kind of scholastic enterprise in which I am engaged, or Dr. Mazrui has been engaged in for decades, for that matter, were a bona fide branch of fundamentalist Islam, with an Imam dictating the rubrics and tenets while the rest of us are commanded to slavishly toe the line, as it were.

To be certain, were the preceding the kind of enterprise I opted for, I would have since long found myself among the ungodly ranks of the “Boka Haremites” of Kano. Interestingly, though, I know somebody, a former graduate school advisor, the misfortune of it all, who behaved exactly as such, albeit with practiced pretense to the same. Else, how could this Islamic fanatic have presumed to co-edit a massive publication called “African Intellectual Heritage,” issued by a major American university press, without a single essay offering from Dr. J. B. Danquah, the man who even then-Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah could not scholastically ignore on the eve of his establishment of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, as well as being the very first continental African to write and publish a doctoral dissertation on African philosophy in the twentieth century?

Obviously, one cannot take Mr. Sulemana seriously when the “Salaga Separatist” describes Vice-President John Mahama as “a man who has no invectives in his vocabulary.” Maybe being clinically deaf to the truth is integral to being envisaged as a bona fide denizen of the Northern Region. Else, Mr. Sulemana would also have been bold and courageous enough to recognize the stark fact of Mr. Mahama having been the NDC’s SHIT-BOMBING INFORMATION MINISTER! Or are we to chalk the latter default to sheer professional fatigue? No pun intended, of course!

Then also, the critic accuses me of “washing your dirty linen in public.” Needless to say, my “Kente” or “Adinkra” would have been the more appropriate characterization. And for what reason? Merely because I had, in an article on the subject of the splitting of the Northern Region of Ghana, alluded to “a colleague” with whom I am no longer on speaking terms. What a pity, it is, for our government at home to be engaged in the wasteful business of sponsoring such linguistically oafish and narcissistically daft citizens abroad in the name of scholarship these days!

In other words, if one cannot tell the difference between a “colleague” and a “friend,” then one has absolutely no business presuming to engage one’s academic betters. It is also rather amusing, albeit hardly surprising, at least based on our knowledge of critters like Mr. Sulemana, for the critic to presume to instruct this writer on what he ought to be using his “Ph.D.” for. Incidentally, just as I was in the process of putting the finishing touches to this article, as it were, MyJoyOnline.com reported about the discharging of a fusillade of gunshots on a durbar grounds at Buipe, in the Northern Region, where Vice-President Mahama was on an official tour. Readers were also told that the gunshots directly regarded the impugned legitimacy of the sitting Buipe-Wura, or Chief of Buipe.

I bet in the poetic imagination of Mr. Sulemana, the Buipe gunshots were unmistakably about Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe “trying to knock [the] heads of Gonjas and Dagombas” against each other.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is a Governing Board Member of the Accra-based Danquah Institute (DI) and the author of 20 books, including “Ghanaian Politics Today” (Atumpan Publications/lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@aol.com. ###