I read a comment on Baidu Tieba, a Chinese online community, during a discussion about black people in Guangdong, a city in China and I was surprised how a human being could give such a cutting comment. The commenter called on the Chinese people not to let ‘thousands of years of Chinese blood to be polluted’ by black blood. Blackman marrying yellow woman is pollution of yellow blood? It makes sense to term the marriage of a yellow woman by a black man as impure, lewd, and unchaste and oh! go on, name all the many negative words that you fraternize black with, because black is always dark, yellow is golden, and white is pure. If yellow is golden, why have the yellow swarmed over the Blackman’s land scrambling over his gold? Illegal mining of gold, bauxite and other minerals endowed upon Ghana has caused so many menaces to Ghana. Ghana has lost her greens and many of her rivers have turned milky as a result of illegal mining. Inhabitants of villages close to such rivers, who lived on these rivers, are dying of thirst. Funds supposed to be used for other developmental projects are being channeled into providing potable water to these communities. It’s much cutting to see that many Chinese citizens are at the centre of this calamity. So exploiting our gold and marring our environment is not pollution but our men marrying Chinese women is a pollution to the yellow race? Oh my word!!!In the slave trade periods, the chiefs and the various traditional leaders in the then Gold Coast bartered humans, who were supposed to till our land and preserve the honey which used to flow on it, in exchange for liquor, schnapps, guns and gunpowder to make them powerful by assisting them in times of tribal wars. Tribalism, ethnocentrism, favoritism and their more recent ally, nepotism have frustrated the progress of the Gold Coast, and modern day Ghana, no doubt. In modern day Ghana, these same chiefs, together with political leaders have traded our land, endowed with gold, and many minerals in exchange for a dollar, a pound or a Yuan. The gun and gunpowder received from the batter of human beings were used to destroy our own people during tribal wars, likewise the Yuan gained from the trade of our land. How many
times have we not heard of disputes over lands resulting in bloodsheds? Even when the Yuan are not used during land disputes, they are used to solve the injury created on our lands by the exploitation of the minerals. What does Ghana then gain from trading our natural resources, or battering human beings, if not to satisfy the needs of the narcissistic chiefs or political leaders? Slave trade was abolished long ago but the self-centeredness of the Gold Coast leaders lingered. As indicated by Yaw Boadu Ayeboafoh in the March 16 issue of the Daily graphic, the invasion of foreigners, especially the Chinese in illegal mining, validate the claim that politicians as well as chiefs, who are deemed the custodians of our lands, are the cause of the futile fight against illegal mining. Can foreigners just invade our lands without the approval of the custodians of the lands? But why would a custodian sell the nation’s valuable resources to foreigners to destroy them? It goes back to the same thing that started slave trade in antiquity. Selfishness. We can stop ‘galamsey’ but not when there still exist greed, and cupidity among the leaders of the land. These immoral acts (greed, cupidity, selfishness) have stood the test of time; they had existed in ancient days, medieval periods and they are still tarrying in modern times. They have proven difficult to do away with because human needs, they say, are insatiable. Like Oliver Twist, the more they get, the more they want. So are we going to sit down unconcerned and let a few people amass wealth at the peril of the larger population? No. We can’t, and we won’t sit down. The nation needs to act now, not later. We need to put the minerals gifted upon us into judicious use, to create an economy which would benefit all, not a few of Ghanaians. We need to create an economy which would support the average graduate from the various universities, and not an economy which would repel them to seek greener pastures in other economies, only to be referred as ‘pollutants!!