Novelists From Ghana

"It wasn't sealed - she opened the flap. Inside was a cheque for a thousand dollars. Made out to her. From Daniel. It was a colossal slap in the face."

"She (Lesley) is using the Biennale as a platform to extend the work she has been doing for decades. Lesley is able to set the stage for others and expose the network that for some of us has always been there."

"There has never lived a people worth writing about who have not shaped out a destiny for themselves, or carved out their own opportunity."

"Bushido () offers us the ideal of poverty instead of wealth, humility in place of ostentation, reserve instead of reclame, self-sacrifice in place of selfishness, the care of the interest of the State rather than that of the individual. It inspires ardent courage and the refusal to turn back upon the enemy. It looks death calmly in the face, and prefers it to ignominy of any kind. It preaches submission to authority and the sacrifice of all private interests, whether of self or of family, to the common weal. It requires its disciples to submit to a strict physical and mental discipline, develops a martial spirit, and by lauding the virtues of courage, constancy, fortitude, faithfulness, daring, self-restraint, offers an exalted code of moral principles, not only for the man and the warrior, but for men and women in times both of peace and war."

"The work of destruction, speaking generally, goes on not in the light of day, but, metaphorically, in the dark hours of night. The mighty Titan does not knock down his victim and deprive him of life outright. Oh no! that would be too crude a way. With the gin bottle in the one hand, and the Bible in the other, he urges moral excellence, which, in his heart of hearts, he knows to be impossible of attainment by the African under the circumstances; and when the latter fails, his benevolent protector makes such failure a cause for dismembering his tribe, alienating his lands, appropriating his goods, and sapping the foundations of his authority and institutions. To apply Tennyson’s simile, the Titan only knows what the Titan wants, or what he means. And all the while the eternal verity remains that the natural line of development for the aborigines is racial and national, and that this is the only way to successful European intercourse and enterprise."

"It is a sad reflection, but a legitimate one, that in the present day the successors of the leaders, who bore the heat and the burden of the day in order that British commerce might gain a footing on these shores, are not remembered as they should be by the British Government. But it is true that they are protected; it is feared very much protected. To be accurate, they are remembered sometimes in the partitioning of their territories, the minimising of their authority, and, worse than all, in some cases, in the sowing of those seeds of discord, calculated to destroy the integrity of a people."

"If you know the history of this town, a momentary sweep of the eye will bring back to memory signs of a former strife; for overlooking the Bay, there stands the old Fort, a symbol of the strife between the Dutch and the English in pre-locomotive days. The struggle, in name, was between two European nations, in reality between two aboriginal factions, who, for aught one knows to the contrary, might have otherwise lived in peace. The Dutch or the English flag was the standard which drew the natives in thousands into opposing camps, and for which they shed their blood freely, only that the white man might obtain freer scope to barter spurious drinks for the precious metal which the torrential rains washed to the very doors of the aborigines."

"To love truth, and to serve under its banner, come what may, that is courage truly, which will endure and stand the test of endless ages."

"In the beginning evil and good were created, and to man was given the command to rule and subdue the evil, and to foster and cause the good to prevail. That is the final reason of human experience, and man becomes a god when he has won the victory. It consists in the building of character, and one star may differ from another star in glory. When mortality fails, the immortal in man prevails and finds its home here where, in the cycle of the heavens, in the case of great souls, it becomes a god dwelling in the temple which character hath fashioned. The temple hath truth for foundation, love for superstructure, and child-like trust for apex."

"Unhappy they who raise their hopes upon the shifting sand."

"Have pity on my simplicity, for I am but a mortal."

"Call me a thinker, a teacher, call me anything that is of the earth, but a god I cannot think that I am one, or can ever be."

"Humility becometh well the triumphant."

"Love and Light dwelt together in the highest heaven."

"Mutual understanding, the true basis of all happy unions."

"I do know, that gods are wont to make use of human instruments in approaching men. The Infinite finds expression in the finite, and the ideal is realised in the actual."

"We worship that we do know."

"No people could despise its own language, customs, and institutions and hope to avoid national death."

"It had been felt for a long time by men of light and leading in Fanti-land that the salvation of the people depended upon education; that to educate the youths of the country properly depended upon trained teachers; and that it was the work of a university to provide such training ground."

"You are only drifting, drifting, drifting away from the ancient moorings that you Westerners built in sand. Jesus Christ came from the East. In Bethlehem he was born, and in Egypt was he nurtured; and, yet, you seek to teach Him us. We have caught His Spirit and live; you follow the letter and are tossed hither and thither by every wind. Forgive me when I say that the future of the world is with the East. The nation that can, in the next century, show the greatest output of spiritual strength, that is the nation that shall lead the world, and as Buddha from Africa taught Asia, so may Africa again lead the way."

"Who says he is equal with God? Man is to-day, to-morrow he is not, Iam is from eternity to eternity."

"So my books never end up being the books that I planned. His Only Wife was a very different story when I started writing it. I was returning to Ghana and His Only Wife started off with a main character who in some ways shared some similarities with my own life - someone living in the US and coming back to Ghana after graduate school. I'm sure you can see that Afi in His Only Wife is not that person, so that shows you how much my writing changes once I begin writing."

"Tell the story you want to tell. It's a very simple message but it's really affected my writing in a positive way. I hadn't read any book on Ghana like His Only Wife so I couldn't look at anyone's trajectory of success and say ‘this person wrote a book like this so if I write it, I will have a similar response’. I just knew that this was the story I wanted to tell. You have to believe in the story and trust the book will find its readers and readers will find the book."

"But when I'm thinking about starting a book, I want in those first few pages for the reader to get a good sense of who the main characters are, but also a good sense of the tension or conflict that is going to propel the book forward. So in those first few pages or the first chapter, by the time you get to the end of that chapter, you have a good sense of the characters, and you have a good sense of what is driving them, and what is driving the story. That's what I aim for."

"You need connections, you need to have a certain kind of training, you need an agent, and if you send your work to an agent, it ends up in a slush pile. It was all too much. So I never sent out a book manuscript - my plan was that I would look into publishing my books when I retired from academia. I just figured that I would keep writing, then when I was 65 or 70, I would try to get published. That was the plan."

"The transition probably happened when I was working on my doctoral dissertation. Around that time, I started sending out short stories. Short stories were more manageable because, in some ways, submitting them was similar to submitting academic research articles. So I think it was easy for me to do. But I remember going online, because I didn't know much about publishing or people in publishing - I only knew one person who was a writer before I published my book. I went on Google and searched, ‘how do you publish a book?’ and the steps just seemed so overwhelming."

"An important role that writers can play is in documenting resistance movements. This can ensure visibility, facilitate recognition, and bring marginalized voices to the center."

"My identify plays a huge role in my writing. I’m Black, Ghanaian, and a woman, and one of the reasons I wrote His Only Wife was that I was hungry for stories of Black women just living their lives and doing regular things. In the social sciences, we know—although some continue to resist this truth—that our identities matter for our research: They matter for what we research, how we conduct our research, and how we write our findings. In the same way, I think our identities matter for the stories we tell and how we tell them."

"Stories serve so many purposes. We need them because they document our truths, they magnify our dreams, they teach, they entertain, they inspire."

"However, when I’m able to think and write about fiction, I very much enjoy it. I began writing fiction for myself when I was about 10 years old, because I ran out of books to read. I discovered that I enjoyed it almost as much as I enjoyed reading. Therefore, I think the pleasure I get out of writing fiction is what enables me to maintain my momentum and interest—and is the reason I’ve been writing for almost 30 years, even though most of what I’ve written has not been read by anyone."

"Before I begin writing a book, I spend months—and sometimes years—thinking about characters and plot. In fact, I like to think that a lot of my writing happens in my head and I spend a great deal of time with characters and their stories in my thoughts, before I write anything down. But because I also work on multiple research projects, on which I also publish—so far, a book and several academic journal articles—I tend to switch back and forth between thinking about fiction and nonfiction. Therefore, there are long periods when I don’t focus on fiction."

"In the social sciences, we know. . . that our identities matter for our research: They matter for what we research, how we conduct our research, and how we write our findings. In the same way, I think our identities matter for the stories we tell and how we tell them."

"I’m very interested in presenting the truth of people who are not centered in mainstream narratives. But I’m also fascinated by how we construct our version of truth, by how two people can have the same experience and not only describe it differently but also believe that their version is the only truth. The novel I’m currently working on excavates this phenomenon."

"I’ve been impacted by many books, but one that has profoundly impacted me as a writer is Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude. After reading it as a teenager, I began to think seriously about how I could use words to create images and to effectively show the reader what I was thinking. Before then, my focus had been on producing fiction to entertain myself."

"I said to love with your head but I’m also the first person to tell you that it is hard to live like that. It is brutal and it eats at you every day and leaves you empty."

"Marriage shouldn’t be a never-ending competition where you spend your life fighting to be seen and chosen."

"How can I be a good wife with no husband by my side?"

"I knew that even though we were surrounded by a large family, we had nobody."

"I have to fight for what I want, for what's mine."

"Not everyone who smiles with you wishes you well."

"If there was one thing I agreed with my mother on, it was that one could never be sure about a person’s intentions, no matter how kind that person seemed."

"A person who talks so freely about her own life will talk just as freely about yours."

"Please, put love aside and be practical. Love will not put food on the table; it won’t hold you at night."

"It takes strength to walk away from someone you love."

"I use fiction to teach in my social science courses and I am always keen to explore the issues that I work on in my research."

"Stories allow us to peek into the lives of others, and they also allow us to see ourselves."

"Respect is important and something that is very much needed in society, but has been constructed by some to mean submission and self-denial, especially in regard to young women."

"Nobody could tell me writing was a man’s job."

"Yes, I agree! Adult education in our environment is a very necessary complement for education. Adult education as an institution has to be re-energised and reorganised by reminding the public of its importance. In a society like ours with so many adults literally having had no formal education, adult education should be dynamic so that it helps fill some of these gaps. The fact that adult education seems to have declined so drastically is also a symptom of what has happened to us as a people and as a country, both in terms of education itself and in the application of knowledge generally."

"The exclusion of women is not something that we in Ghana have inherited. In a greater part of Ghana at least, even those tribal areas that are ‘patrilinealʼ, girls are just like other children. So this business of women canʼt do this or do that is very new somehow. I didnʼt grow up in a home where I was forced to learn how to cook. Maybe my people were too strange. Nobody ever told me not to do anything because I was a girl."