This paper investigates the academic implication of Western influence on the study of Ghanaian oral literature and the extent to which literature in Ghana is “indigenized”, especially in the area of drama as addressed in Nana Yaw Asare’s Ananse in the Land of the Idiots. As the iron walls of Metropolitan English begin to show cracks, there is now a new development that brings new imaginations crucial for critically looking at the Ghanaian folklore as a literary piece. Using the ethnographic and the stylistic approaches for this study, one of the results of these new imaginations is to investigate “anansesεm” text as both drama and narrative. From that perspective, one of the findings in this paper is that Ananse, whose behavior makes people taxonomize “anansesεm” as a trickster folklore, far from being a trickster, is a real philosopher and cultural hero. Other findings are that the very behavior that qualifies Ananse to be called a trickster is indeed an Akan philosophical expression of how to survive in a secular world and that among the Akans, thinking right is highly prized, failure of which does not only bring about the doom of the perpetrator but that of the entire community. Again, the current moral thought in Ghana is based on the fact that religion is a Western invention and that the real moral thought of the Ghanaian as a social or a secular being as demonstrated by Ananse leads to the conclusion that corruption is the result of weak cultural thinking structures. The Akan folklore therefore has a lot to offer in terms of literature if treated as a locally produced text.

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“Anansesεm”, far from being just a tradional source of entertainment for the youth in Ghana, as the uninitiated would believe it, is a serious Akan discursive approach to providing the social philosophy that guides their life. This investigation is done using ethnographic and structural analysis approaches that pair characters in “anansesεm” to create a binary or coding system and this system helps to interpret the social ideologies inherent in the text. Through such interpretations, it is seen that the framing of the “anansesεm” text gives us a dual function for Ananse__ an art and a character. The Akans combine both functions as a huge pedagogical and ideological resource for training the youth and for socializing the adults. The paper also unpacks the epistemology of the Akan social order as a function of good thinking on the part of the individual members and this is a prerequisite for a peaceful society.

Ghana is seriously reeling under the weight of the scourge of the COVID-19; while the scientists are doing their best to provide information concerning the dos and don’ts of the disease, its communication to the people has been a huge problem. This paper uses the qualitative research approach and the Performance and Communication theories to investigate this challenge. The study isolates the Akan communities for this investigation and argues that the Ghana COVID-19 communication uses too many elitist approaches and the local language is rarely used. Again, the paper establishes that the communication falls short of considering the Akans as oral thinkers and completely ignores their ideological identities as a group of people who rely on oral structures in language and morality. The paper further observes that the COVID-19 communication in Ghana fails to recognize the subtle creative processes of translating concepts in English into Akan due to the influence of the contexts of contact. These challenges have resulted in minimum or complete lack of cooperation by Akan communities thus throwing the whole COVID-19 campaign into jeopardy. The paper recommends that the COVID-19 communication should reconfigure its approach to reach the Akan communities. KEYWORDS: COVID-19, Akan communities, Akan moral thought, communication and cultural shareability, Ghana.

For many years, African women have been blaming men for the inferior position of the female gender in African societies. In this blame game, the patriarchal and cultural stipulations of societies are not left out since they present the male gender as superior. This observation is emphasised by the myriads of texts on feminism which largely present discourses that highlight the roles of the male gender and patriarchy in perpetuating female otherness. In doing so, the females are portrayed as mere victims who do not play any active roles in this ordeal and are therefore exonerated from blame. This notwithstanding, a close study of events in patriarchal societies and the evolving contemporary current of thought in feminist domains questions the portrayal of women as helpless victims of patriarchy. By using the theories of feminism and deconstruction and by focusing on the themes and language of the stories, this paper seeks to unearth some patterns in Unigwe’s “Possessing the Secret of Joy” and Aidoo’s “The Girl Who Can” which speak to the involvement of women as agents of patriarchy. It also argues that some of the time too, men can be victims or subjugates of patriarchy in the African context. The paper concludes that the fight against patriarchy remains the lot of both genders and not in the blame game.