TAN – The Afro News

Flight Lieutenant George F. Clement Gander, Newfoundland, 1945. Graphics by TAN

“Try to remember …” It’s the first line of Tom Jones’ poignant reflection on passing years. “Try to remember…” More than an invitation it’s virtually a command to anybody wanting to live a fully realized life. Trying to remember is what victims of Alzheimer’s disease find increasingly hard to do until memories are gone and with them the person’s essence. Just a physical shell remains masquerading as the one we once knew. With memories gone the anchor of our sense of identity has no firm grip and we drift into an endless booming, buzzing present bereft of a self able to anticipate a future.

But memories can trap us in the past if our anchor becomes entangled in convoluted dark passages of our minds. “Yesterday will always be if I cannot cut it free,” another line from another song, (“Love is Waiting” by Vancouver musician Ross Barrett) warns of memory’s downside. When I was a tender and callow fellow would my first infatuation have become a true love it I’d been confident enough to speak my heart? Could my father and I have found a way to communicate more freely to express our mutual love? Will embarrassing childhood memories always rise up to assault me when I place a foot wrong as an adult? They will if I cannot find a way to accept my past, the good memories and the regrets, learn the lessons that life offers and move on.

What’s true of individuals is true of nations and on Remembrance Day, November 11, Canadians are given time to try to remember. Try to remember not just the tragedy and triumph of service men and women who risked their lives and who still risk their lives to defend national values of freedom and equality. Remember the obscenity of war itself. Any war is an indictment of humanity for sinking again to the savage brutality of raw violence. We can do better, we must do better but we never will rise up if we ignore both the noble and the painful truths of our past and fail to dedicate ourselves to a higher way of being.

I was born during World War II. I don’t remember those years of conflict but they put their stamp on my soul through the stresses and successes of my parents as they grappled with the challenges of their times. My father, the son of a furniture maker, dropped out of secondary school in the midst of the great depression to earn money to help support his family. When Canada declared war on Germany in September of 1939 he joined the Royal Canadian Air Force with an idea that he might “wash airplanes” and was surprised to find that he had a knack for flying. Graduating at the top of his flight school class he became a flight instructor training men who came to Canada from around the world to become pilots in the Battle of Britain and other theatres of war. After marrying my mother in early 1943 he applied for active service and was stationed in eastern Canada flying convoy patrol to protect allied shipping from Nazi submarine attack. It was dangerous flying: navigation over trackless ocean by dead reckoning; patrols in weather that would ground a civilian flight. Planes got lost, ran out of fuel and went down. He and his crew attacked one submarine and accepted the surrender of a Nazi U-boat in May, 1945, an operation for which he was awarded the Distinguished Flying Cross. Years later he wrote to me about the incident saying, “It was nice to receive a medal. However, over the years, whenever I think about the event I am very grateful that I did not have to strike. We were carrying a new and very sophisticated weapon that would have killed the sub and its crew without question. I am much happier with the memories I have.” After the war he used bursary money for veterans to complete secondary school and enroll in Medicine at the University of Western Ontario from which he graduated with his M.D in 1952. The high school drop-out who became a doctor finally found his niche in medicine when be became an anesthetist in 1961.

My parents have died. I miss them every day but speak with them in my memories. I have told their stories to my children and will do the same to my grandchildren. If they do not know where they come from they will not know who they are.

“A man is not dead as long as somebody remembers his name.” West African proverb.

By Jack Toronto The Afro News Delta

Sex for sale. It’s everywhere but at age 22 I’d never seen it as openly before. In bars and night clubs, in the lounge of the Government Rest House, at the movie theatre, alongside the fresh vegetables hawked outside Kingsway Stores and door-to-door. Sexuality was treated openly and casually in Ghana, certainly more than in Southern Ontario in the mid-‘60s. Add widespread poverty and the prominence of female sex workers was hardly surprising.

Getting an honest-to-goodness date with a young Ghanaian woman was a completely different matter, at least for me. And I wasn’t alone in this. Looking back I can’t recall any white male in a dating relationship with a Ghanaian woman that was based on mutual attraction and respect.

But I tried… and I tried… and I tried…and I tried…

A waitress at The Café de France, a top-end chop house restaurant serving rice with great meat sauces, was cute, animated and petite. I chatted with her in my most congenial manner, I smiled at her when I saw her get on the bus that rattled around Tamale on its erratic schedule and I thought we’d reached the stage of exchanging names that day when she came to my Café table, leaned close and said softly, “You’re wasting your time.” I saw her with her Ghanaian boyfriend at the movies later that week.

A woman at an end-of-term staff party invited me to dance Kpanlogo, a dance that originated with the Ga people in the ‘60s and then swept the country. ”Provocative” is one word that could be used to describe Kpanlogo. “Raunchy” would be better. Would a woman invite me to do this dance without actually liking me? You bet. I never saw her again.

I first saw “Vanessa” at the Tamale polo field. She had accompanied a member of the Accra polo team on their northern excursion to play the Tamale squad. (I was not a member of the Tamale Polo Club but it was a good place to hang around in hopes of being treated to a drink.) I was enchanted and entranced but not too stunned to step up and talk to her. We conversed! We exchanged addresses and after she returned to Accra we began a regular correspondence. She asked me to send her a snapshot of myself and sent me her picture. Through Vanessa I came to know a bit about Ghana’s financial and cultural elite. Her father owned rental property in London and she had studied fashion design there. Quason Sackey, former Chairman of the General Assembly of the United Nations, was a family friend. No longer on air with Ghana Broadcasting, Vanessa worked in production at the GBC when I knew her.

We got together a few times when I made vacation trips to Accra – a movie, a few informal dinners and a visit to Broadcast House where I met some of her friends and colleagues. I was blithely unaware of the attitude of many people in the street when we were out together until one fellow’s scowl was too obvious to ignore. Could it be that many people who saw us together assumed she was a prostitute? Yes, it could. Our face-to-face time in Accra was never as relaxed and flowing as in our letters and before long the relationship was over.

The lesson? Full communication and understanding in a relationship is hard, doubly so when the two people involved come from vastly different backgrounds. That I was an avid student of Ghanaian life and that Vanessa had extensive knowledge and experience of British life were not enough to bridge the assumptions and belief systems of the cultural chasm.

It’s hard but not impossible. Kuk Yan, my wife, is Chinese.