Unchained

By SaCut Amenga-Etego

Unchained is not just the title of this book but it is the key to a whole life. The life of SaCut Amenga-Etego, born and raised in Ghana, journalist and activist, who has broken any chain life and people have tried to impose on him over time, especially those that could have undermined his freedom of expression. In Unchained the story of his life is imprinted, from the beginning up to the days of an unfair trial and imprisonment, passing through a very long career as an activist in the Ghanaian political field, economic and family problems, love affairs, the pandemic, and a part of his life spent abroad. He has made his voice heard in every possible way, mainly thanks to an intelligent use of social networks and the internet, and now through this book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Europa Edizioni
• Release date: May 28, 2023
• ISBN: 9791220141147

Book preview

Prologue

Jude was my first visitor at the detention centre. I knew that I had stirred a hornet’s nest with my investigation, and it unnerved those who had arrested me in court on the count of taking photos and videos of the proceedings. Jude sat across from me with my lawyer, Kojoga Adawudu, to break the news that my illegal arrest and detention had not been made public yet. I was incensed. There was a cover-up going on. Ghanaian law doesn’t allow the detention of anyone for more than forty-eight hours without an official charge, yet there I was approaching my fifth day. Mainstream media hadn’t got wind of the news yet and the Ghana Journalists Association had said nothing. Even social media was still silent on me at this point. Why weren’t people aware of what happened?

Before that, rumours were going around among the political elite about whether or not I had committed a crime. Those who disliked me were hoping that I had gotten into something that would hurt my reputation and shut me up forever. The rumours continued to spread. My true friends, on the other hand, knew that I would have done nothing illegal. The story finally went viral on social media after that first visit by Jude Sekley. Mainstream media, apart from a few, remained silent on the matter because they were playing on the side of the government. The Ghanaian Journalists’ Association didn’t even make a statement about the situation. I was not a registered member of the association because I believed they had sold out to the authorities, and true to my belief, they made no statement for a fellow journalist in illegal detention.

It was a Saturday and I had been arrested on Thursday. I had not spoken with my lawyer and I had not received an official charge. I had spoken with no one but my cellmates. We just sat in our cells sweating even with no clothes and our backs against the wall or the leather mattresses that furnished the cells. The cell was a hot box without a window. We sweat all day and night, barely able to sleep. I went on a hunger strike as a prisoner of conscience for the first twenty-four hours until I realised that my detention was going to be an extended one. I still had to admit that my situation was infinitely better than the others who were being held for five and six months when I was dragged in, full of indignation. 

There was an elderly man, who obviously came from a rural community, charged with child trafficking. A midwife who had saved the elderly man’s life twentyfive years before knocked on his door one day with a baby in her arms. She said the baby had no one in the world and wanted him to care for it until she could find a home. Of course, the man said, a baby could not be left out in the world with no one to care for it. The midwife promised to come back with food and necessities to care for the baby. She didn’t return though and the man didn’t think much of it. A few months later, while the man’s wife was preparing food, the baby died. No sickness. No crying. It just expired in the padded basket. The elderly man buried the baby just as silently as it had come into the world. Eventually, the midwife came back and instead of fulfilling her promise of bringing food, she held another baby in her arms. Yet another tiny child without anyone in the world to care for it. The elderly man couldn’t say no but he and his wife didn’t feel they could take on the child. They gave it to their son to care for instead. The son was contacted by a rich family looking to adopt the baby as they had no children of their own. It appeared to be an ideal situation. They had taken the child because they felt it was their moral imperative but they couldn’t see how they could care for it long-term. As the arrangements were made for the rich man to adopt the child the police came knocking at the elderly man’s door and arrested him, his son and his son’s wife for child trafficking. They had been framed and most probably by the driver of the rich family. Six months later they were still languishing in their cells without the money to pay for bail and no court date on the horizon.

There was another man, a Nigerian, who was being held for crossing the Nigeria-Ghana border with too much cash in his possession. He had never imagined there was a limit to the amount of cash he could carry, and to make matters worse, he also carried a bunch of bank cards belonging to other people and only spoke Hausa and Arabic from northern Nigeria. He was being held for eight months already. 

Another man was held on the counts of inciting a coup d’état in the Volta region east of Accra on the border with Togo. Security agents were giving him regular shakedowns to get the names of his co-conspirators and he feared for his life. He was also in his eighth month in jail. These people were helpless in a system that snaked out of control with corruption and arbitrary bureaucracy. They had no support, their written statements were taken without any legal advice, and for this reason, their banal crimes kept them locked up.

Then there were those connected with the case that I was investigating—Ghanaians, other West Africans and Indians—being held. They only knew of me as the journalist that was investigating the allegations of extortion by rogue security agents and their government official enablers. They were present outside of the courtroom when I was arrested ostensibly for taking videos and pictures in the courtroom. The people held in jail represented the corruption of the country from minor abuses to deep-state lawlessness. I understood the worry of my cellmates because I had felt it the first few days that I was held without explanation, without adherence to legal procedures, and without the ability to speak to my lawyer, family or friends. As a journalist, politicallyexposed person and public figure, I was convinced that my case would get resolved sooner than the others and when I was finally able to meet Jude and my lawyer, my assumptions were confirmed.

SaCut, it is not illegal to take pictures or videos in court. my lawyer said to me, They don’t have a leg to stand on in confiscating your phones. The good news is that because there is no legal reason for them to be holding you, we will figure out a way to get you out—and soon. The bad news is that you have information that is of interest to national security so they will not let this all go over easily. You know something they don’t want you to. It’s time for you to tell me the story.

Chapter 1: The Fate Of My Grandfather Sets The Stage

My grandfather’s reputation reached beyond Kandiga of which he was chief. He was the first one in the area to have an automobile. It wasn’t exactly a car because they hadn’t arrived in the northern part of Ghana yet. It was a simplified contraption of gears and levers, but it was more exciting than moving on foot and he was the first to have it. He travelled around the region in that contraption, his reputation spreading like the veil of pink dust in the wake of the automobile and the grand entries it afforded him and his entourage on his travels. My grandfather had a reputation for carousing in town with his elders. And there is a tale in the family and community that he used to enjoy having his beer foam on his moustache. One day he piled an entourage of elders into his machine and drove the eighteen kilometres to town to attend to some business. Though usually the one to take the lead on all matters of business, my grandfather suddenly fell silent. A thin veneer of sweat had gathered on his forehead and his eyes looked as if they were trying to conceal some discomfort. The elders took him to the hospital and before the day had ended, he was dead.

He was no more than fifty at the time and the way of his death was suspiciously sudden. In those years—a decade before Ghana would be the first to gain independence on the continent, when his son, my father, was just barely becoming a man, and several years before I would be born—autopsies were not practised and as such, the circumstances of his death would be forever clouded in speculation. Something was not right for the leader of the people, a man of sound health and veracity, to so suddenly perish. Hypotheses of poisoning whipped through the community like the harmattan. The first wife of my grandfather was certain of this. Looking into the eyes of her first-born son, about to inherit the chiefdom from his too-early deceased father, she knew she had to protect him from the same fate that had befallen her late husband.

It had all started with my grandfather’s wife. Not my father’s mother. Not his other wives, but his spiritual wife, Dongo. Dongo is a powerful goddess who, among other powers, grants the position of chief and bestows him with divine power. Her selection is considered a spiritual marriage. She is a deity who is at the side of his throne, and like all marriages, she must be kept happy. She imbues charisma, wealth, love and protection of the people to the chief, his family, and his community. The chiefdom is a patriarchal system that flows down to the family line of first sons only bypassing those who have somehow disqualified themselves. In this way, Dongo granted this position to the line of first sons in my family, eventually reaching my grandfather. My grandfather had married Dongo and her throne sat next to him as he ruled the community and he unfurled ritual sacrifices and ceremonies in her honour.

But Dongo’s grace is like a faucet; when rituals are performed and sacrifices are made it is abundant and full like the rivers in the rainy season, and equally vengeful when she is neglected, her powers and protection drying up, leaving a chief vulnerable and weakened. It is this foundation that I would inherit as a boy in the savannah of Ghana. But something went terribly wrong with the culture before I was even an idea. My grandfather faced a decision that would change his life, my father’s and mine as well.

Since the end of the 19th century, Westerners showed up believing that Christianity was a better business than slavery. Previously concentrated on the coast, the missionaries made their way inland. The Methodists and the Protestants burrowed in from the Atlantic coast, while the Catholics descended into the savannah from the north, from Burkina Faso. It was the Catholics that reached Kandiga, and my grandfather, first. The missionaries used a subtle approach. They didn’t just come with the Bible; they flooded the community with incentives to convert. With each parish that was built, schools followed and then medical clinics, and then fancy articles and food. My grandfather didn’t need a new god— he had his goddess—but education was a good thing, the foreign articles were amusing, and the clinics extracted the poison of snake bites that before would have killed people. People may even have thought orthodox medicine was magic. Conversion was about going to school, about the feeding program, about the clinics and hospitals. It was about getting so-called civilization and enlightenment. Those who maintained and practised the African traditions were framed as not enlightened but as if they remained in the Stone Age. If one didn’t go to secular school or go to church or take a colonial name, like Peter or Paul or John or Matthew or Denis, they were left behind. Before the formal schools, children followed the profession of their parents becoming the replica of their fathers through apprenticeship. That was the narrow scope of traditional education. It is characterised by an oral tradition where everything is passed down through folklore and observing traditional rituals and ceremonies. And then this new education system came along and people wore uniforms and looked smart and fancy. They were given new names, fanciful names.

The guy attending school was called Peter, while the guy who didn’t was called Attia. Since Peter is a white man, it sounded more exotic and attractive. The psychology behind it encouraged people to change. There was only one path to becoming a global citizen, a civilised man or woman. While making Christianity very attractive, the missionaries were demonising the people's traditional religion as pagan, and because religion and culture are interwoven, their culture was also considered pagan. This created a feeling of shame and lack of self-confidence in the people and the more they went to school and adopted the Western philosophy of secular education and lifestyle the more confident the people felt. The Christians considered Grandfather’s marriage to Dongo, the ritual sacrifices and ceremonies that fed and honoured her, indeed her very existence, to be pagan superstitious practice and idol worship. The social, economic and psychological incentive for Christianization was very high and my grandfather, ever the progressive leader, could not have resisted the infiltration of the Christian movement nor could he halt the invading popular culture and its corrupting effect on the traditional culture. Since my grandfather was inclined to progress, it was not such a difficult task for the Christian missionaries to convert him in the 1940s.

Many thought it was a good idea to embrace the church and all its materialism brought by white people but there were others, hard-line traditionalists, who thought my grandfather, by embracing Christianity, getting baptised and given the name Paul, was selling out the traditional spirituality or main source of meaning to the people, offending the gods, and abandoning their heritage. To these radically extreme right-wing traditionalists, Christianity and African Traditional Religion were irreconcilable; churches and schools had become the devil’s work to them. 

A house with too many gods gets crowded and more so when they don’t hail from the same tradition. Each god needed attention and my grandfather only had so much to give before he was spread too thin and had to make choices and a great confusion set in. On the one hand, Dongo had bestowed on him the privilege of being a chief, while on the other, the Christians’ god brought in Western education and fanciful things. As he embraced the Christian practices, part of his community resisted the change. They refused to allow their children to go to either Church or school. And without church or school, the names remained unchanged and the traditions continued. But others took the resistance a notch higher and they plotted to eliminate him. Some elders shot suspicious sideways glances at him and schemed behind his back. Grandfather withdrew from appearing in the many outdoor community events to avoid giving an advantage to the plotters. He began to attend fewer gatherings and then open conflicts broke out with elders of the community. They accused him of encouraging the pollution and corruption of the traditions and told him that if he continued, the gods would be angered and tragedy would befall them. But he was already under the grotesque grip of the Christian religion and Western cultural imperialism. He saw his young daughters and sons learning to read in school and saw that the missionaries were going to stay and their ways would be the future. He had two roads in front of him and he felt compelled to take them both. Chiefs before him had never had to juggle appeasing two gods who were at odds with each other and they had never had to decide between tradition and literacy. My grandfather was on his own, all eyes watching his next move and the consequences that it brought. Meanwhile, Dongo sat on her throne and fumed while grandfather weakened under the duress of this cultural crisis.

Grandfather had underestimated the anger of the traditionalists. They believed that if someone in the community didn’t put a stop to it, trouble would find them all. It was a question of maintaining, sustaining and honouring the traditions that motivated those people who made it their moral duty to eliminate my grandfather through poisoning.

Grandfather left behind his wives and over twenty-five children that were all growing up and embracing the Christian tradition when he passed. It was my father, the first son following a line of four elder sisters, who was destined to take on the chiefdom. My grandmother was sure that it was the lack of protection from the Dongo that sent my grandfather to his early grave. My father, barely old enough to be a chief, needed guidance. The matriarch became the de facto ruler while her son naturally grew into his position. She gave him direction and guidance and he could trust her. She understood that her husband had died because of the risk he had taken in partially abandoning the traditions and that he made so many enemies among his own people for his conversion. The same fate awaited her son if she didn’t do something.

She sat her son down and she told him his responsibilities.

You must not abandon your traditions. I am baptised, you are baptised, we have all embraced Christianity but our traditions have not disappeared. You must not forget that it is our tradition that makes you a chief and you must carry out your traditional duties or you will make enemies with the goddess and the people. My father must have been attentive as his mother told him these things in great seriousness. Your father, he was not capable of this, and you see that he was sent to an early grave. You must find a way to balance both. If you go to church, it is ok, if you pray with your rosary, it is ok, but don’t forget your traditions because it is your source of life.

She was much more prudent in her worldview and in the way she approached the traditions, old and new. She understood that my father would have to maintain the practices of a traditional ruler and also maintain the appearance of a Christian ruler. She taught him to balance both worlds with appearances and practices.

And so, my father offered sacrifices to Dongo at home, prayed with his rosary at church, performed traditional religious rituals and ceremonies in the community and sent his children in turn to school. He didn’t neglect his traditional responsibilities and no fatal ill fortune befell him. 

When my father married his first of five wives, my mother, she followed the traditions as the wife of a chief had to do. To demonstrate this point,