Homosexuality Has Been Rife in Kwesi Pratt’s Native Central Region for Decades

It is rather absurd for Mr. Kwesi Pratt, Jr., who was born and brought up in Agona-Nsabaa, in the Central Region, where the “Supi System” or Lesbian Subculture and the “Oso System” or the “Kojo Besia System,” that is, the Gay Lifestyle was incubated for decades, through the Missionary Boarding School System, before spreading to other parts of the country, in particular the northern parts of the country, to be hypocritically railing against Vice-President Mahamudu Bawumia for supposedly not doing much to stamp out this widely disparaged practice, when there is absolutely no formal or official evidence indicating that LGBTQ+ Culture has since long been proscribed by Fante cultural and customary mores and traditional rulers and politicians in the part of Ghana where it has been rife and rampantly practiced more widely and intensely than any other part of the country (See “Anti-gay bill: You've done nothing in Ghana to prove you're against LGBTQ+; there's nothing to show — Kwesi Pratt jabs Bawumia” Modernghana.com 4/16/24).

To make his caustic but, nevertheless, patently lame accusation against the 2024 Presidential Candidate of the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP) more convincing, the Editor-Publisher of the so-called Insight newspaper needs to cite instances in Fante Culture and Customary Law where Homosexuality was officially proscribed or expressly prohibited and members of the Gay and Lesbian Community were legally and officially banished from Fanteland and society. The desperate attempt by the leaders of the country’s organized opposition political establishment, especially the leaders of the main opposition National Democratic Congress (NDC), to make a major electioneering-campaign issue out of LGBTQ+ Culture or Subculture in the runup to the 2024 General Election, in particular the 2024 Presidential Election, will not wash.

You see, there are too many bread-and-butter issues that cut at the very heart and the existence of both the immediate and the long-term survival of the overwhelming majority of Ghanaian citizens for voters to worry themselves silly about a sectional and a minuscule minority of the country’s 35-million-plus population that has done a diddly little to absolutely nothing to create the acute problem of gross leadership irresponsibility and rank official corruption that have been plaguing the country ever since any mature adult Ghanaian citizen, including Mr. Pratt, can remember.

As this writer has emphasized and reiterated a countless number of times, the real determination of which of the leaderships of the country’s two major political parties gets to occupy Jubilee House for the next four years, will be squarely dependent on which of the leaderships of the ruling New Patriotic Party, on the one hand, and the National Democratic Congress, on the other, has an established track record of having relatively served the interests and the needs and the aspirations of the overwhelming majority of the Ghanaian citizenry better.

So far, it clearly appears that it is the leadership of the party that has not adequately catered to the needs and the aspirations of the Ghanaian people that has been making the loudest and the most noise and a major issue out of the very presence and the existence of Homosexuals in Ghanaian society, a global phenomenon that exists and has existed in all cultures across the world since time immemorial. Thus, the grossly misguided attempt to impose Judeo-Christian and Judeo-Islamic traditional and cultural values, wholesale, on the Ghanaian people runs counter and antithetical to the postcolonial Secular Democratic State to which Modern Ghana is presently sworn and to which it subscribes.

If Ghanaian leaders are really serious about jealously safeguarding what constitutes Indigenous Ghanaian and African Cultural Values, then they need to establish the most authentic “scriptural” reference points, and not cavalierly and vacuously pretend as if Judeo-Christian and Islamic Cultures are fundamentally all that there is to our Continental African Identity as a respectable category of Global Humanity. Calling oneself “Abraham Agbodo,” for example, may be perfectly legitimate in our free-speech and free self-expression oriented ideological and political culture, but it also goes without saying that there is the need for the bearer of such name to equally significantly recognize the fact of the “Mongrelized” or the “Syncretic” nature of such a name, and not casually take it for granted that, somehow, this half-colonial nominal or nomenclatural importation and/or imposition, in some cases, is the Cultural Golden Standard by which all “Personal-Identity Markers” are to be envisaged or validated.

Ultimately, the issue at stake here vis-à-vis the Anti-LGBTQ+ Debate has to do with the Human and the Civil Rights of this marginalized group of bona fide Ghanaian humanity. And on the latter count, absolutely no group of self-described Moral Police Agents has a right to impose its brand of what constitutes the “Wholesome Lifestyle,” any more than having the members of the LGBTQ+ Community cavalierly and self-righteously presume that they could simply impose their brand of morality on their fellow Non-LGBTQ+ or Heterosexual neighbors and relatives.

It is also downright despicable for National Democratic Congress-sponsored shills and hacks like Mr. Pratt to presume that they can deviously and cynically lecture and pressure Vice-President Bawumia to disrespect the moral conviction of his immediate boss, to wit, President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, on whether to append his signature or executive seal of approval to this most depraved attempt by the Galamsey-promoting and double-salary drawing kleptocratic leadership of the country’s main opposition National Democratic Congress to unconscionably violate the Human and the Civil Rights of LGBTQ+ People.

*Visit my blog at: KwameOkoampaAhoofeJr

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., PhD
Professor Emeritus, Department of English
SUNY-Nassau Community College
Garden City, New York
April 16, 2024
E-mail: [email protected]