The ochre building |
The small library at Morning Star Preparatory School in the 1980s was my kingdom; this was a veritable treasure trove of information. There I read about Kwaku Ananse(the Ghanaian sage anti-hero), Loki the perennial trouble causer god of Norse mythology and of course the Iliad(when I confronted it as a Classics student at the University of Ghana, Legon it was familiar terrain); in that library I circumnavigated the world a zillion times in my mental interstices before I ever leaped bodily across the oceans into other climes. In my high school years the Ghana Library Board facility (then obviously losing its verve but still very useful) in down town Accra near the Ghana Supreme Court buildings was a regular haunt. By my twenties I had visited every library(
joined where possible and borrowed books) in Accra. I noticed in the last few years the demise of those libraries I was familiar with in our capital. The British Council Library suffered a meltdown and has morphed into a confounding temple for profits (which should not be a bad thing except that the profit motive incinerated the library). The Martin Luther King ,Jr, Library began to unravel after the George Bush, Jr., led cuts on such facilities and has relocated to the fortification that is the American Embassy(too many guns and war like infrastructure in sight to attract an unarmed potential reader and too way out of town!!). The W.E.B Dubois Library is struggling while the George Padmore Research Library on African Affairs is just soldiering on. Today as a society we seem enamored of actively building malls, stalls, stores and drinking spots not thinking spaces like libraries in our communities and that is how we have choked off the circuitry for fresh imaginings, deep self reflection and the sheer pleasure of mental exercise.
Children doing their thing! |
The Nima Learning Centre |
ps: all pixes taken from the Osu Children Library Fund website.
What can I say but thank you for saying this!
ReplyDeleteThank you too for musing over this and reading this!!!! Cheers!
ReplyDeleteYou're kidding! I've never seen the place, although I did wander the warrens of Nima several months ago on my bicycle (raising suspicions about what an Obruni would be doing there!)
ReplyDeleteCharlie