In the land of Nunyãdume, where drums echo and memory has a seat at every fire, there once came a time not of war, but of erasures. The warriors had long laid down their spears, but a new weapon emerged — the fountain pen. Not to build, but to rename.
They called themselves the New Patriots, sons of Daa Nkwa (Everlasting Life). But unlike the founders who broke chains, these heirs broke plaques — and planted their names in other people’s gardens.
They renamed universities that they did not build.
They hoisted flags over shrines they never swept.
They crowned ancestors who had never gathered the people under a baobab.
They changed calendars not with consensus, but with cabinet memos.
First, they tried to call Legon — the Hill of Knowledge in Ga — by another name: Daa Nkwa. But the gods of the Academic Hill coughed in Latin and rejected it. Their ears detected that the libation poured was not pito but burukutu, and the ancestors do not dance to unfamiliar brews.
Then, they hovered over UHAS, where cadavers rested quietly, and the ghost of Obengfo Atta-NikaNika still whispered through the wards like a gentle diagnosis. They reached for Ephraim Amu, that noble son of the flute, whose hymns once stirred conscience. But even his harmonium paused mid-note, as if to say: “Build first, then name.”
The hand behind the attempt was none other than King Akpefu-Adu, a monarch decorated not with a stethoscope but with a Doctorate in Revisionism. Never mind that UHAS was a house of healing — the king’s quill had no prescription pad, only renaming forms. After all, had they not done it before? When they seized KNUST, a citadel built for Science and Technology, they snuck humanities through the backdoor after unseating “Our Kwame Nkrumah,” as though you fix a microscope with a poetry recital.
In Nunyãdume, the elders say: “The drumbeat of a name must match the dance of its purpose.” For the Atumpan does not beat without a message, and the Fontomfrom is not struck for amusement — it speaks, commands, remembers. You do not dance Adowa when the drumming calls for Kete. But alas, here they were — renaming shrines of healing with chants of revisionism, playing foreign rhythms on sacred skins, hoping that old wounds would forget their pain to the beat of borrowed praise songs. Yet the people of Nunyãdume have danced too long to be misled by mismatched drums.
And unlike the Revolutionist Rawlings, fierce as fire, yet measured in legacy, once midwifed UDS with seed from his own pocket. But when golden ink came, offering to etch his name in stone, he waved it off with the humility of a man who knew: legacy is not a monument — it is memory. He left no statue, only sweat. No inscription, only inspiration. And so he stands taller than those who rename but never raise, who revise but never build.
King Akpefu-Adu, the Revisionist, built no complete, fully staffed hospital — not one from his fabled Agenda 111 — yet built and unveiled his own statue with pomp and pageantry. One refused monuments in life and was remembered in spirit; the other builds shrines to himself while the people wait for beds, for healing, for truth.
But King Akpefu-Adu, Chief Scribe of the Revisionist Scrolls and valedictorian of the PhD in Historical Delirium, was not done. No — the architect of amnesia took up his ancestral quill, dipped in the ink of self-adoration, and began scribbling on the national calendar like one possessed by borrowed spirits. July 1, once clothed in the garments of Emancipation, was stripped naked. In its place stood August 4, cloaked in new robes stitched hastily by court tailors. Republic Day began to feel like an elective in a colonial syllabus — a performance, not a memory. Even the ghosts of the Revolution stirred uneasily, muttering, “This is no rewriting. This is a fever dream.”
Yet the people watched.
They remembered the smell of July rain when Nkrumah raised the flag.
They remembered the torch of self-rule not lit by committee, but by conviction.
And so they smiled when the drums whispered that July 1st was returning, not with trumpets but with quiet resilience.
It was Emancipation, yes — but not from the white man.
This time, it was emancipation from revisionism.
The elders of Nunyãdume said:
“Those who eat the harvest must first know who tilled the land.” And “Those who wear Kente must know the story of the weave.”
Let the names stand where the bricks were laid.
Let Prof. Mills claim UHAS, not as vanity, but as vindication.
Let Founder’s Day be rooted in truth, not genealogy.
Let the calendar reflect the struggle, not the slogan.
In the new moonlight, as the ancestral fires flickered, even the children could see the moral:
“If you rename the pot but do not stir the soup, the hunger remains.”
And so, in Nunyãdume, the ink may still flow, but the people now carry their own pens.
*******
Papa Dee, the Stammering Linguist of Nunyãdume. Paa Dee is a pen name for Dr. Eugene K Dordoye, a consultant psychiatrist with UHAS, and a Social Justice Advocate
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