What is the spirit of a people? Hear me out, Ghana, what defines thou? Who defines your spirit, for someone has to. Is it the politician? No! This politician! Before he puts pen to paper, or tongue to cheek, we already sensed his sophisms, and sophists have no seat at defining a people’s spirit, for spirit is truth.  Perhaps, we could turn to the philosopher, perching on the higher branches of knowledge, looking down on everyone else with pride, claiming he has discovered truth. I worry that the philosopher, flying in his abstractions, has lost any connections with his roots, leaving him to hang on to his dreamy, Apollonian conception of reality. Granted, let us ascribe the philosopher the task of defining the country’s spirit, for he alone knows the truth, and truth is divine, again, truth is spirit. Which philosopher do we tend to? Should we go to Kwame Gyekye, that son of the land whose communitarianism pierced through the academe like a wildfire in the harmattan? But wasn’t this communitarianism epistemically similar to that with which all the other ethnophilosophers of the previous century described all of African thought? Is negritude, for example, at its core not an offshoot of communitarianism? Maybe we turn to Kwame Anthony Appiah, the NY Times ethicist whose philosophical thoughts sprang from his father’s house at Manhyia. By the 1990s, Appiah was already a part of the new black intelligentsia , who, armed with Harvard’s prestige, set off to liberate African, African American studies from the shackles of its civil unrest origin and transform it into a rigorous academic discipline. Can Appiah’s philosophy set the spirit of Ghana free from the shrubs that have covered its lights like a lampshade?

I will leave you to wonder as I, too, wander in search for a persona to proclaim the Ghanaian spirit , a search that brought me to the musician. You will exclaim, why the musician, does he not corrupt with his vulgar expressivity and copious innuendos? I will then respond: listen attentively to the music I am about to describe below. Does it corrupt? Does it smirch your purity? Does it not unite your senses with reason? Then, I will take you on a boat ride to 19th century Germany to visit 50 year old Nietzsche, sucked in Bizet’s masterpiece for the 20th time [emphasis his own words]. Poor Nietzsche, after decades of being a slave to Wagnerian chorus, was now redeemed from Wagner’s corrupt music. This liberation is what makes a person whole, free from decadence. And wholeness, like truth is spirit for truth is wholeness. It is this wholeness that Afa ne Afa seeks to bring to the fore in contemporary Ghanaian spirituality.

Defining a Ghanaian spirit is a tedious task, but it is one that needs to be done, particularly at this point when Ghanaians are in a quagmire. In many areas of daily life, there are crossroads between enchantment and disenchantment. Does one stand behind mysticism, such as be an adherent partisan or take the rational road towards issues of national development? This period in Ghana’s development is critical, as it can define where the country heads in the next couple of generations ahead: whether the country continues in its enchantment or not. If music expresses the masses’ vitality, then Afa ne Afa, the 10 track album by the duo Afa ne Afa (made up of Kwame Brenya and Megborna) conveys the country’s zeitgeist.

Afa in both Akan and Eʋe means half, so Afa ne Afa, can be translated as the two sides. What two sides you say? Afa, in Eʋe signifies the divine, which can be attained either through Dionysus or Apollo, essentially making Afa ne Afa a dialectic between mysticism and rationalism. The blend of Akan and Ewe on all the songs exemplifies the period Ghana finds herself. Since at least the rise of electoral politics in the country, the Akan people and Ewe people have been polarized through the weaponization of tribalism by the political class. Any union between these two groups were frowned upon, so the seamless marriage between the dialects on the album is a testament to the progress made in disbanding excessive chauvinism. Despite the progress, there remains unhealthy level of attachment to people’s politics, tribe or creed and its accompanying selfishness, which morph into crass decadence, enough to hinder any meaningful progress now, and in the immediate future. By the fourth song on the album (afa yae), the listener is already made aware of the impacts of such moral decay on the country. In particular, the song touches on the moral debasement among the ranks of the Ghanaian political class, and their complicity in what has been described as an ecocide brought about by illegal mining.

The issue of illegal mining in Ghana is one that requires an assessment through practical reason. A step or two leap towards reason will make it clear to anyone that the current rate of exploitation of the environment is not sustainable. Yet, the ruling political class have done nothing to ameliorate the predicament, and understandably so, because any intervention will be lethal to their political and economic gain. I wonder if those who gain from illegal mining, and therefore have masterminded its continuity think that they are immune to its adverse effects. They must be inebriated from their conceitedness.

My wonder leads me into the mind of a baby bird roosting on a branch of a tree, with its head resting on its left limb, and holding its balance with the other limb. The bird chirps (kye, kye, kye), and ponders where it will get its meal for the day, while hoping that everyone gets their meal for the day. Then, it notices a human predator, with a stone in hand, trying to make it their meal. Afraid, confused and deluded, the bird looks west and east, seeking salvation from its parents but both are unavailable. With the realization that both the mother and father, its custodians, are engulfed with greed and are now egoistic, the baby bird takes flight, wandering in estranged lands to escape the impending peril and also make ends meet. If this anecdote seems all too familiar, it is because the conditions facing the baby bird is not dissimilar to the existential milieu of most young Ghanaians.

If the current situation at home is hostile to the development of the young Ghanaian, it has no doubt created a Sisyphean task for well- meaning Ghanaians who want to make their homeland a place of comfort. Yesterday’s man, subsumed in their avarice, dig through the country’s wealth and redistribute to their cronies, leaving those without access in despair. Their only hope of surviving is to take flight to strange lands, where they are promised a phantasmagoric gold that can be plucked like the leaves of the ‘onim’ tree. On Norvinye, the third song on the album, Afa ne Afa talks about this ease, but very fantastic acquisition of money. Of course, this ease in accumulation is not only a fantasy for those whose forks reach the national cake. For such people, it is experiential. Here, too, there arise a crossroad for the young Ghanaian, whose response to inaccessibility of wealth invokes one of two affections: uniting or defensive affection, as I’ve written elsewhere. The type of affection an individual exercises at any point is circumstantial on what affections others exercise, or perceived to be exercising. For instance, defensive affections, such as anger are practiced when an individual feels others are not exhibiting a uniting affection such as love, justice or veracity. And injustice and deceit are replete among the people entrusted to manage the country’s resources. Does one respond with an amoral affection or continue to practice uniting affections for communal cohesion?

Perhaps, one could take an apathetic stance, but as the duo reminds us on Bebree, one makes the whole, and so nonchalance will still be morally wrong since it affects the whole. Caught in a snare, the two viable paths out are to work extra hard to get out of the maze, or relinquish control to an external force. The duo talks about hard work in a couple of songs and there’re others that touch on invoking the unknown to take over.

Afa ne afa comes off to me as a bit exploratory, with limited cohesion between the songs, a feature that I have enjoyed a lot from previous work from one half of Afa ne Afa, Kwame Brenya, such as his Brenya ne Barima, which I consider his magnum opus, or Four Days in Faso. Even so, I think the width of the work makes for a good exploratory project. There’s also enough of didacticism to please a well-discerning ear and some word play to heighten the listener’s pleasure. I believe the duo can go on to produce some creative, and provocative works in the coming years and I am excited to see what unfolds from this collaboration.

What the album does best is its focus on wholeness. While the group, Afa ne Afa itself depicts a kind of wholeness, there is a sum of parts rooted in the albums exploration of what makes the spirit. The spirit is a product of our relations with our thoughts, other people and the other aspects environment around us. These relationships create an individuals spirit that can be edified to relate with other uplifted spirits, such as the Mawu, Onyankoropon, or God. Afa ne Afa tells us how the musician, if they do not corrupt like Wagner, can define a nation’s spirit.