Opinions of Wednesday, 26 December 2018

Columnist: Abdur Rahman Odoi Anum Pobee

The tales of slay queens; did we go or come?

Slay queens dress to defy the otherwise known 'Aketesia' tag which defined morality of women Slay queens dress to defy the otherwise known 'Aketesia' tag which defined morality of women

We are keenly dancing to the melodies of the westernized culture. It has become an established fact that the mutual relationship between the Youths of Ghana and their western idols cannot be estranged until its bubble has busted into the relaxation of the free flow of fatalities involved in sightlessly and wholesale copying from a culture which is alien to the African continent. Alvin Toffler was indeed on point when he said that "the illiterates of the 21st century are not those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn"!

What has blindfolded and compelled us to uphold vehemently that the African culture is outmoded? Or, because it has taught us to lower our gaze when we see something inappropriate, not to speak when our elders are on the floor speaking, to maintain the widest possible gap between the opposite sex and to never trade sex for gifts? As far as these and others accede with the injunctions from the obvious books it must be adhered to! Nature handed it down [our culture] and we know that it encompasses all the embodiments of common sense not forgetting that civilization first started in Egypt!

Where civilization is defined as ingenuity, for example, our ancestors nicknamed an indigenous Twi woman as 'Aketesia' [A well covered and chaste woman]. They believed that an ideal woman must be cladded in an ornament which would conceal her privacy as she remains maiden awaiting marriage. And her thoughts are that which would not mock womanhood and the Creator at large!

That said, the foundation of these have been uprooted abruptly and fallen and disintegrated into the sand, so our dear ladies are no more called Aketesia but now beautifully crowned as “Slay Queens”! Satirically, the crown that they wear is symbolical to a wreath thrown onto a grave or used to decorate a casket or an artificial flower which is only seen on snap chat but also advertently demonstrating the amorphous state of their kingdom! The name [slay queen], most of us are still racking our brains to get it demystified but yet it has yielded no positive effect unlike how it has drilled profligacies throughout the nooks and crannies of Africa. So let us use the simplest methodology; breaking the words down to understand it the more. In a layman’s point of view, slay means [to kill, eradicate and defeat], while queen is what has been defined to us long before the birth of Gold Coast.

Undisputedly, the moral fibre of Ghana's culture has been badly crippled with flagitious accounts pertaining to the real life of the Slay Queens. Slaying is the new fad in town; a lady is shamed if she is petrified to espouse the slay queens’ phenomenon. How do they slay? They foremost and often have a wardrobe malfunction if it is to be rubbed against the touchstone of our ancestral code of dressing!

They appeared elegant and well classed when they show up for an event, however, if we are to put on rose-tinted glasses we would see that upon all the flamboyant and exorbitant dress they fail to veil their 'delicate parts'! I mean not only covering their real innermost parts but they expose the parts that could make men aphrodisiac. They mock the creation of God in the sense that a lady who has flat buttocks would go in for the “big ass” in order to be classified as one of the types; "Tundra or coca cola shape"; at a cost of getting it done artificially! They issue blasphemous statements because they are born in a dark complexion! They end up accusing God Almighty for being impartial for giving them a black skin instead of white coloured one!

Putting on wigs is never a matter of contention but the extent at which some of them could go while acquiring these Brazilian wigs is outrageous! It is part of the reasons, in the today Ghana, a fresh graduate from university would have to mangle his piggy bank to grant a slay queen's request. And they are the brain behind why the youths have ventured into the mundane lifestyle of opulence by the kind courtesy of internet fraud known as "Sakawa".She would make life unbearable to a man who proposes barring to the acquisition of an iPhone which may cost half a plot of land at Aburi or Kasoa!

There is no modicum of sanity when it matters to embarking on a barter trade; sex is exchanged for an iPhone X or fried rice or banku and tilapia that is the tragedy of the economy of Ghana! If you are to consider the issue of sex tapes and leakages nowadays, it has to do with a young lady out there who has cerebrated of becoming famous in the media space more than the voluptuous Moesha Buduong!

The moment your status is transmogrified to a Slay Queen, and dogmatically, you think that you fend for yourself, therefore your life must be left for you to trim it with your own cutlasses. That is the appropriate time in which the devil eradicates and defeats the structures of modesty, God consciousness, content and perspicacity. These are what you end up losing as a queen who slays! The obvious books have admonished us to be modest and it is enshrined in 1Timothy 2.9: “I also want the women to be modest and sensible about their clothes and dress properly; not with fancy hairstyle or with gold ornaments or pearls or costly dresses”.

It is not shocking anymore when a young girl dresses half naked to please her 'bae' because modesty is thrown to the dogs! As far as you are slaying there is a high propensity of falling short of the glory of God. When they are reprimanded to be mindful of God's wrath on such people they consider it as the name of their Ex-boyfriend which is being referenced so they would niggardly be fiendish and diabolic. Many of us grew up in communities where we shared single-rooms with other 15 siblings and we were so cool with it because we learned how to deal with people with different attitude and that made us content and not avaricious.

The weaponry of slay queens has eroded this away and they are now awash with the mindset to never be content, in fact, Oliver Twist’s perdurance is incomparable to the slay queens. Their power of discernment has dwindled, oh sorry! While we have young ladies who are working to empower their peers lagging behind, the slays are chanting the issue of being a self-acclaimed queen who has no territory that she governs except the pocket of men and social media!

Ghana is in shambles, the memory of Yaw Asantewaa is obliterated and our ladies want to be seen as some of the Caucasians! Slaying has left the female child in the fiddle grounds and has intensified social vices! Young girls are eagerly yearning to become a Slay Queen. After age 16 that the nation needs her precocity she might end up becoming somebody’s bed-warmer. I do not buy into the idea that when a lady wears an indecent cloth she is inviting for a treat, but the slay queens themselves do the marketing and if a man is not ready to pay he is put on a high purchase, the reimbursement becomes teenage pregnancy and child labour. Some of them are terrified when they are pregnant so they resort to abortion which unfortunately leads to complications and untimely death. If a research is to be conducted in the pharmacies along the coast alone, the sale of ‘Postinor 2’ and ‘Lydia’ would hiked in sales more than Coarterm and Paracetamol.


Previously, we frowned upon fornication and committing adultery but these have no grounds anymore. The slay queens are avid to get peoples’ husband to slay with and we the men know that slay queens have no atom of shame so during the days that one's wife is pregnant; he will invest more in the slay queens so as to be slain. It is lucid why many of them are with the repugnant ideal of advocating for same sex marriage!

There are avalanches of factors which have led to the ubiquitous of slaying. The first people to be wiped are the media outlets. They are the source of vital information; some are very circumspect with what they put forth. In the name of entertainment, some media houses first consider getting traffic on their site than entertaining to educate but they rather entertain to indirectly misguide the gullible ladies! The dress, flashy cars, ornaments and apartments of female actress would appear in the front page while the issue of a deplorable condition of the people of Zabzugu is kept in the 14th page! Ladies are mostly enticed by what they see and hear and by so doing they are being induced to become exactly what they have read in the graphic or seen on the television!

Some blogging sites would unceasingly diffuse leak tapes which may have surfaced on the media space out of gaffe to allow the saints to deliberately troll and meme the perpetrators! But the young girl who is doing so well in the remote place would not be brought to the lime light for sponsorship and verily mentor her peers. Of this, young girls have no reservation after seeing Rashid Black awarded unless she also does something trendy. Thus cringing for Slay Queens’ membership card because the media dignifies it without considering its repercussions.

Our elders have said that charity begins at home. This goes to our dear mothers who during the early days of their girl child's life envisioned them to look so curvaceous and walk stylishly like a pregnant fish! But, when they are adults they now want them to behave like Virgin Marry, how possible? Is there anyone who could invest at Unique Trust Bank and withdraw his proceeds from Capital Bank? Parents are aloof when they start watching the needless telenovelas without a proper check of the contents shown. If a female actress in a fictitious movie slept with big men and excelled, she would perchance consider it as a real life situation and become morally inhibited. The peers they familiarize with must have the same goal of becoming rational citizens, if not so one could easily mislead her counterpart for the cat and mouse have never been friends!

They mentor wrongly by copying rather the pitfalls of successful women. Amazingly, the realities are that a Slay Queen she may have seen on the set or around have that positive side she is oblivious of but the glaring ill-motives are what she would emulate ignorantly. We have Slay Queens who are entrepreneurs, and business oriented, but the young ladies chose not see, and immediately behave proverbially to the ancestral more which says that looking at the king’s affluent life one would wonder if he had never sucked at his mother’s breast. Meanwhile, if you enter into the house of Parliament, journalism, business, the banking sector, there are astute women who have contributed significantly to the development of the Nation but the young girls would not follow their steps; harbouring that their journey to success is farther than walking from Accra to North. Her Excellences Rebecca Akuffo Addo and Samira Bawumia; the first and second ladies of Ghana, the former Chief Justice, Georgina Theodora Woods, Nana Oye Lither, the former Minister of Gender, and the benevolent Mrs. Matilda Amissah Arthur, and many more must be the real mentors.

Above all, the guys must be wholesomely vituperated! Men patronize the slay queens because they feel that they could be easily eaten like fruits! They are more than half of the reasons the ladies want to be impressive and appealing but unfortunately appalling. If we are to stop patronizing slay queens the market would collapse but we are the same people who would tell the very dark girl to look fair and sexy! You cannot come visiting by wearing a tight jean as if you are going to stare in Jesus's [as] film. And I do not go out with ladies with flat tits, boobs and buttock. Men have forgotten that these lamentations of theirs inure to the Slay Queen's fantasy!

Let me bring you to the heel; If you are a slay queen consider dethroning yourself because some of the Slay Queens’ soup are tasted by pleasure seekers and they go free; our elders have said that “if the owner of a calabash calls it a worthless calabash, others will join him use it to park rubbish”.

Slayers do find it hard when they need that faithful man to settle with; anyone who might come their way would only want to have a taste of the Persian spring, you can confer it with Princess Shyngle. To slay means to protect your iPhone at the expense of safeguarding what is betwixt your legs! A slay queen appears so extraordinary on social media but in the real life she is not what is portrayed on the internet! Just sit somewhere in the sobriety of contemplation, when you are done, kindly inflict the penance; simply by repenting to the Almighty, do not forget that King Paul was once a murderer but ended up becoming goodly.

A man who is advised and he takes it has still acted on his own will! If whether we have gone or had come, you be the judge? Our prayers are that the western culture would soon not start breeding Slay Kings too!