Oh Really?
Many nights we’ve prayed
With no proof, anyone could hear
In our hearts, a hopeful song we barely understood
Now we are not afraid
Although we know there’s much to fear
We were moving mountains long before we knew we could, oh, yes
“When You Believe”, from the motion sound picture The Prince of Egypt, performed by Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey.
Yes, really!
Ever since I knew Superman from the early 90s, I can’t believe the beloved superhero of the world has a family around him in present times. He now has aunts, uncles, cousins, brothers, in-laws, children, a wife and a dog. Before someone shouts ‘Get that (Super)man a beer’, you need to hold on a second and know there are also twins in his family tree, make that two! The extent of his extended family is amusing to me about the human nature.
Ghanaians and for that matter a lot of Africans are fighting a lot more battles comparatively to the rest of the world (without data!). There can be an instance of personal battles where one actually thinks how much they are worth to society. I don’t mean the type of worth informed by your assets. I mean the worth of respect, genuine admiration of one’s strengths and abilities, the confidence your presence gives to your social circle that they can be able to face the untold future. There is also an instance where one can have battles outside their inner self about their social capital as well. The thought of whether their social capital can be capable of helping one get the better life or the worst out of one exists too. These types of hand and mind picked battles can get complicated with the human experience and result in a series of complexes with inferiority or superiority. The achievement for humans that encompasses personal, community and national isn’t easy to get to when living in a world where ordinary is not enough. For the average African, becoming the extraordinary is very boggling to inspiration.
Almost every nation on earth has what inspires its citizens to a larger than life sense of living. There are a lot of things that contribute to a country’s ‘DNA’ to inflate that inspirational balloon. One can talk about national anthems, historical human icons, native music, geographical weather, shared spirituality and so on. There are hidden contributors to these national DNA also, and not leaving out the fact some contributors from things which are not hidden but need some searching and impact analysis to associate them under the making of a nation. In this piece, I want to talk about a nation’s superheroes and how they bend the mind for a certain national lifestyle and psyche. The national mentality that allows people to go after a certain greatness. I am not talking about superheroes that once had an umbilical cord to the homo sapiens that birthed them, no! I want to talk about the superheroes made of pencil and eraser, made of computer aided design and the undo button, made of crayons and the imaginary quest, the ones that have their pendulum between cartoons and movies, the one that combines the child and the adult in us. I want us to think about them for a moment and ask some few questions. Put a cape on and mark a “G” at the upper center of your dress. You are going to fly with me over Ghana, my case in point is about Ghanaians.
Personally, I don’t know which is which, whether heroism is in romanticism or romanticism is in heroism, for their arms are often found around each other most times. It is common to hear in romantic songs the chorus or another line asking or telling, can you or I want to be your hero. The award winning Spanish singer, Enrique Iglesias, has ever transported people with heroic themes in his music. The one who has been given the crown as the “Songbird Supreme” by the Guinness World Records, Mariah Carey, hasn’t left heroic themes from her catalogue to the world. One should know what they are getting into, if they want to debate with the fans of the award winning Titanic movie, whether Jack was a hero or not. The movie had people’s heart and Celine Dion knows it at the back of her music notes. One doesn’t need to be told of the good feeling, the need for courage and reflection a well composed music offers. If you are still flying with me on this, you can press play on Bette Midler’s “Wind Beneath My Wings” for a while, all the mention of the word ‘hero’ in her song is in a simple question.
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In one of our Ghanaian indigenous languages, called Twi, there is a proverb that goes by saying “s3 nsuo b3t) a, mframa di kan” (with imperfect phonetics). It literally means, ‘before rain falls, the wind starts’. This proverb explains the telltale signs that something is about to happen, the rain (or something) doesn’t just happen. When one listen’s to a country’s catalogue of music, you can make something for yourself about what partly defines the country. The making of a song can catapult a lot of the national experience into 300 seconds and a lot of people playback those seconds again and again over the course of their lifetime. Ghanaian music is known out there to have its peculiar percussions and vocals of varied subjects. A lot can be said about our music genres, so much to the extent they outnumber the music genres of Liberia, Lithuania and Costa Rica combined together. With so much catalogue we have, you will expect the jack of all subjects in them, but it doesn’t play out like that. There’s no talk of heroes in our music (like that!) for example. Do not get me wrong as there been no song with a line or two about the extraordinary self or the need for greatness. In the grand scheme of things, you will find out that the song has its listener’s mind set on something different eventually. What we internailse as lyrically communicating is different from the world. There’s a case one can make for our socio-cultural setting and exposure, but music being a universal language, can’t help it but tell it all. Am not blaming everything on our music, but knowing the direction of the wind matters to be able to set our national sails.
I was born in the 80s, particularly in the year when Michael Jackson’s hair caught fire in the making of a Pepsi advert, children’s television channel Nickelodeon celebrated its 5th anniversary and Oprah Winfrey began her exploits in Chicago to later give us one of the most iconic and successful talk shows in the history of television. Given America was still in its golden age of television, it took a while for my household to transition to colour television from the 80s into the 90s in Ghana. The TV channel that birthed my television viewing was the state’s Ghana Broadcasting Corporation also known as GBC. You could not have high expectation about your television entertainment at that time. State broadcasting infrastructure was not state of the art in its time. Back in the days, everyone was watching the same thing, and so begun watching my early glimpses of superhero tales on GBC. I will remember the first James Bond film I watched, Goldfinger. I couldn’t watch it in full as most of their movies showed late in the night. The gravity of sleep as a child was strong then. Then there was another superhero film in my childhood that will forever remain in my memory. At the time, kids of our generation gave it a popular title of “Head of Medusa” when in actual fact we were watching the Clash of the Titans produced in 1981. In all of these movies, I didn’t understand why the protagonist was taking the pains to go through a lot. I was thinking then couldn’t their story be made easier for them. They were always at near death experience. At my childhood development of about 10 years, I didn’t understand who or what a superhero is in the strict sense. I was just watching anything television could show, quite not the best on my part. My next discovery was Looney Tunes and Superman (the one in technicolor). Superman’s branding was strong. What he was fighting was fairly easy to understand or had my intellectual capabilities developed to interpret what I was watching. His strength was the wish of most kids of my time, fly around and raise very heavy things. His symbol stayed on our minds as kids, as his figure was promoted by toys and other merchandise. Private stations started entering Ghana’s television space. Currently, Ghana has more than 90 private television stations but it all started with the first licensing in 1995. Looking back at the impact of popular culture we had at the time, TV3 (with ownership from Malaysia) and Metro TV (started by a Lebanese entrepreneur) were the most talked about free-to-air private television stations into the late 90s. They expanded on television content offering and brought a better vibe compared to the state television channel. I will go over two key content before the millennium (2000) that had a significant mindshare of our childhood. The first is Captain Planet and the Planeteers which was shown on Sunday evenings. What we found out as kids was that, there was not only Superman flying, another person with a sign on his chest could fly. He was called up by some 5 teenagers from the power of their hand rings to fight certain forces putting the earth in danger. One of the teenagers was named “Kwame” which is one of the common Ghanaian local names. The cartoon’s soundtrack was also catchy and we will always try to sing along. We were more intrigued to say the least. We thought we had seen it all about superhero characters as kids when in fact our minds was about to be blown the more. A live-action series begun on Sunday mornings that will attract audience of kids, teenagers and adults alike. The series was called Journey to the West which was produced in 1986. It wasn’t the accustomed American content we knew, It was from China, it had subtitles. The villains and quest was more difficult. It was the first time we were seeing characters in live-action flying around. It wasn’t one, two or three characters flying around. You just couldn’t predict who couldn’t fly, anyone was suspect to have some special powers to be able to fly, vanish or change form into something else. Journey to the West was about a monk who made a very long journey for his spiritual goals to get to somewhere. He will meet a lot of evil spirits on the way but he made timely friendship with equally matched strange beings who will guide him on his quest. As a kid, I will continuously think, why and how did they put all these together?
I have grown to have a fair idea of how superheroes are designed and developed. You will be astounded by the number of superhero figures in development looking for popularity. It is a lot of paperwork and it takes a lot of thinking even if at all the designed superhero is good at one single thing. The creators of these superheroes will come from countries where the superhero originates usually. They observe their society for inspirational gaps, then state some values and superpowers, give them a difficult villain, ascribe a personality and give them a unique name at its basics. At its core, the creators focus the superhero to fight crime, promote sanity whiles trying as much as possible to fit in their environment. The demonstrable trademark will show how audience connect with the superhero and patronise its stories. It more often becomes an enterprise as the needs of storytelling keeps evolving for a fast growing population. The creators or the enterprise which is always in competition for followership must set itself apart. This is where every aspect of the originating nation’s architectural landscape, economics, intellectual prowess, political history, cultural and social setting will support several parts of the story telling appeal to make the superhero figure as unique as possible in the public’s eye. Certainly, not a single person’s job.
Belgium, China, Japan, India, Britain, Greece, Italy and wherever superhero figures are created often have studies developing links in their society. Yes, something very serious is happening under the surface with regards to the links under study, it could be good or bad. On the good side, it is observed people who follow superhero figures demonstrate a certain pattern. Psychologists studying this are constantly accessing superhero behaviour and its ethical aspects on communities and societies at large. Although their multidisciplinary studies goes beyond superhero figures from media work, their research connects and makes references to computed superheroes in one way or the other. One study from Santa Clara University in the United States shared a survey with some American teenagers that showed they could name Superman and Spiderman twice as often than very popular historic figures such as Martin Luther King, Abraham Lincoln and so on. In another study from Christopher Atkinson, he explored moral modeling and asked a few things. He shared that participants who reflected on superheroes would report higher scores on measures of moral elevation and personal values. I maybe wrong but I will nevertheless express this possibility that in as much as the inspirational brands of Nike, Coca-Cola, Apple, Mercedes-Benz and the likes are in one way or the other influencing human behaviour, superhero figures like James Bond, Tintin, Batman, Robin Hood, Peter Pan, Harry Potter, Indiana Jones, Rurouni Kenshin, Black Panther, Monkey King and the likes are also in one way or the other influencing some behaviour. Audience are buying into the carefully designed nationalistic interest and goals of these superhero figures if one looks at the market position of their business that goes into the tens of billions of United States Dollars. If their values be challenged, the audience return the challenge to creators to bring up more tools, mechanisms and challenges for their superheroes to make their character deeper for that continuous learning experience. The continuous learning experience of sacrifice, humility, gift maximisation, the power of choice and saving the world in their own terms as they get to solve any fictitious national problem. You will find interesting projects and stories of people who have taken action for their families, communities, nation and the world at large just by the inspiration of superhero figures. Their stories are in blogs, music, films and books for posterity. Let’s take it that it is not easy for a past renowned film critic like Roger Ebert to give a documentary three and half stars out of four. It is neither easier for that same documentary to make over $6 million at the box office nor some of its cast to be invited to the White House by then President Barack Obama. Belief gave that documentary the chance to criticize the American public education system and they achieved what was not easy. A popular American educator and social activist who worked in the documentary production once said to himself, “there is no one coming with enough power to save us”, when he recounted Superman in his childhood as just fictional. Imagine such a high expectation given to a pencil crafted figure as it sits somewhere on computer storage. Yes, guess what they named the documentary, Waiting for “Superman”. They know what they were doing with the titling.
You may be thinking I am bias for not talking about local content in the 90s that gave our childhood another dimension of superhero figures. Local content for children at the time was into very simple productions that didn’t use any significant amount of special effects (if any!), didn’t have sophisticated plots or the significant use of brand development. It was kept very simple. There was one production that will have our hearts and minds as kids in addition to the foreign ones. It was the telling of Anansi stories. Anansi is a character who is known to use wisdom to get around problems in any social setting. The emphasis on his wisdom projected trickery as his most gifted ability to watch out for in stories usually. Anansi wasn’t human (or was he?), he was depicted as a spider but will often star mostly in human centered stories. Unlike Kwame that we heard of in Captain Planet, Anansi was popularly named “Kwaku”, another common Akan name in the country, so in full he will be called ‘Kwaku Anansi’. The origins of Anansi is shrouded in diverse history with roots in West Africa and spreading to the Americas through the slave trade. Given the culture of life as Africans, the sharing of stories or folktales for children was quite different. Reading from books such as the manner of bedtime stories children from the West are accustomed to wasn’t the socialisation at the time. Our kind of story telling promoted gathering, hierarchy, singing and dancing. Such was how our hit Anansi stories on television was produced to convey the culture. An elderly man or woman was surrounded by little children mostly sitting on the floor. The elderly will say short stories about Anansi which will be dramatised in a post-produced technique. The production was named ‘By the Fireside’. We will always be impressed with Anansi’s wit someway or the other. There was a part of us that yearned to be in the production given the hallmark of what it served to us as a story loving culture. A very popular Ghanaian actress and television personality called Grace Omaboe (aka Maame Dokono) graced the production as one of the elderly who told the stories. For all of her achievements, no one will leave her out of their living memory about how she became a greater household name as far as television is concerned through that production. But somehow, the more I came across more foreign superheroes, the more Anansi felt lonely to me about the local entertainment discourse. I will only grow out of childhood to get to discover Akokhan in one of the weekend newspapers. Akokhan comic appeared in a very small section of a weekend paper, which would take about 30% of a single page area. When ever I got to read Akokhan’s comic, the feeling ‘now, that’s what I am talking about!’ will yell in me although I was reading it calmly in the house. Akokhan could also do something in the air, yes! The author, Frank Odoi, was a fan of western comic book superheroes as a child. Influenced by that, he created Akokhan, an African superhero whose source of power was very strange enough that it couldn’t be explained. It was the best comic of the subject of African sorcery I have ever seen. One day, I never saw it in the papers again.
The Kwaku Anansi conundrum crosses my mind often. I accept the simple story telling style of Anansi but it seems things were not that simple after all (in life!). I was growing infront of the television and I continuously observed that I was not able to connect some dots about our folktale superhero character. Somewhere in the 90s, The Ghana Broadcasting Corporation on one Sunday afternoon showed a Spider-Man film which was produced in 1977. The contrast to today’s Spiderman will make the 1970s edition not stand out to the benchmark of modern cinema but it sure did entertain us during its time. When I watched the film, I was not understanding what a ‘purported’ Anansi was doing in America. He had a costume, he was walking on walls in broad daylight and showed all signs and senses he was human after all. Later when I will catch up with By the Fireside program, our local spider man was doing what he does best there too. The more I listened to Anansi stories, the more I thought why are there two spider stories or even two Anansi stories in the world. By the end of the 90s, my global outlook of the world when it comes to films was expanding as I had the chance to register with four video libraries for the household of which I took an advantage of, for my entertainment interests. Had I missed a memo about Americans getting Anansi and giving him a green card? In later years, I will discover America also has Ironman, Aquaman, Ant-Man, Wonder Woman and more included to the Superman and Batman we already know. I had to stop my personal conspiracy theory for Spider-Man and Anansi. Instead, I started appreciating the novel thinking about people’s creativity. I agree the brand development for these figures are very strong but Anansi was fundamentally missing something. This was what I was making out from the conundrum. No one was really owning the story of Anansi and taking the creative responsibility to grow the character or make it a greater enterprise. Anansi’s stories as told by different sections of the society had almost the same plot sequence to put a spotlight on his abilities, he only mattered. There was not a single story pushing the bar about his thinking abilities let alone bring him to the urban areas too, where cobwebs are also a thing. The values Anansi stands for is not clear enough. Was his moral and ethical values making as weary of one another or deepening our collective wisdom about one another. Sometimes to solve a national problem needs a collective consensus to execute and I don’t know how Anansi stories was exploring that. Bring up a need for consensus thinking, Ghanaians will often break the guard to individually sound like ‘I have more sense than you!’ to the next person or neighbour. It even becomes more baffling to me if the state of ‘I have more sense than you’ can’t be applied to international competitions we partake in. You wouldn’t see any formidable ‘Anansi tactics’ in our football even though the dark arts in the game is regarded at some point. In another point, one will want to ask whether the ‘pull him down’ syndrome is a part of the broader ‘I have more sense than you’ mentality. Has our academia helped in studying Anansi stories in terms of the ethics and brain psychology it has left a generation with. One may ask whether I am insinuating whether Anansi must do it alone? I may answer this from a hospital stand point intentionally. I don’t mean to enter that said hospital but just stand infront of it, I want to stand infront of the 37 Military Hospital in Accra and share something with you. At the front of the hospital, lives a big colony of bats for some decades now among the trees estimated about one million for those who haven’t been there. The ground there will tell you to look up at some point. Supposing our local ghost stories hasn’t inspired our own Ghostbusters, scattered metal scraps hasn’t inspired our Ironman, Yaa Asantewaa hasn’t inspired our own kind of Wonder Woman and to the count of a very large number of bats hasn’t produced an iota of a local Batman story, then it leaves an indictment on where Anansi stories stand so other prospective stories can see further. The only giant of a local superhero I remember from childhood till today is Kwaku Anansi, its fair to have high expectations for his impact on our society.
I know the making of a good nation is a very difficult task. In as much as there are a lot of executive pens signing policies that will impact on nationals, much can also be stressed on the pencils and design software partaking in the futurism of such countries as well. The futurism that asks what could possibly be, the strength and honour it takes to get there and letting the best of it continue to future generations. There is a lot to fight for in this and a lot not to give up on. We wish we all had mystical powers, great wealth and be able to fly to wherever to save the whole world if it matters but superhero figures remind us that there is more to that than that meets the eye. When we enjoy their stories, we are challenged to look at the world differently perhaps. I am proud to have followed some superhero figures and can’t believe Superman wouldn’t make it in my top five today. Beyond Superman, other superheroes came and provoked more thought which I wouldn’t have expected. With no special order, I will like to give my appreciation to Tobey Maguire for playing the best Spiderman (in film) for me, Wesley Snipes for making Blade a sudden superhero I needed to pay attention to, Heath Ledger for playing the best Joker that gave me the best Batman ever, Robert Downey Jnr for making analysis on the ground and in the air look very cool, Godzilla’s monster fights since when I watched it for the first time in 1998, Rurouni Kenshin’s mental notes before a fight and more I could go on to list but for your reading time. I really love what Frank Odoi was achieving with Akokhan, I can’t thank him much enough. Was he living today, I will wish to send him so long an email.
But wait!
I think it is a good thing we are not able to meet our comic and television superhero characters in real life. There’s a million chance they might tell us not to follow in their footsteps. I can imagine Wolverine coming out of a fight looking like he lost so much blood telling a kid, “Stay outta the way, kid, this ain’t time for heroics”, or Alfred handing a letter to Bruce from a kid who needs life advice and getting instruction back to reply the kid, “Never meet your heroes. They’re right”. Maybe it is a good thing we can’t meet them in real life. As also another Akan proverb goes, “Anomaa antu a, ɔbua da”, meaning “If a bird does not fly, it goes to bed hungry”. If you feel inspired by a superhero, do not be afraid to make an impact, fly in your own way.
