Ghana’s predominantly Christian, and Christmas is a major holiday, but in the Asanteman, at least, the pre-Christian New Year’s greetings still win out over any direct translation of ‘Merry Christmas.’ Afe nhyia paa! is the greeting: May the year meet (you/us) well! And the reply, Afe nkɔ mmɛto yɛn!: May the year go (out) and return to meet us! My first December in Ghana, I had a dickens of a time remembering the response properly, so I was careful, every time I met someone, to blurt out ‘Afe nhyia paa-oo!‘.

Christmas is Buronya. The etymology of the term is not clear. The popular origin is that it comes from oburoni (”white person” — this is a somewhat difficult term to translate exactly, as it applies equally to Margaret Thatcher, Jet Li, Salman Khan, and Cheb Mami, but ‘white’ will do for the present purposes) nya (to acquire): White-man-get-something, in Pidgin. J.G. Christaller, whose 1881 dictionary sadly remains the best, gives the etymology as ‘boró-wò-nyã’:

Ɔkrãnni bi kyerɛɛ ase sɛ: Kaŋ wɔŋ a wɔsom Bŏrɔfo Ŋkraŋ no yɛ Bŏrɔfo no ŋkoa, na afe du so na wɔrebɛyɛ ŋkoa no ayɛ a, wɔboro wɔŋ ansã-na wɔamã wɔŋ ntama nè ade no. Enti na ŋkoa no too saa afe no Boróònyã (= wɔboro wo a, ɛnna wunyã)[.]

The above is a little obscure to me, due not to Christaller (whose antique spelling is only a small hurdle), but to my three years’ leave-taking from the Twi language. I believe that it says:

A Gã explained: When first those who served European Accra became the Europeans’ servants, and a [new] year arrived, they would come to the servants as if [?] to beat them before giving them cloths and stuff [possibly, but improbably, 'yams']. That’s why the servants called that year “Buronya” (= if they beat you, you’ll get [something])[.]

A single Gã explanation of a Twi term apparently already more than a century old is rather weak etymology (though given the extent of his endeavour, and the resources available to him, Christaller may be forgiven for cutting a few corners). The term could also originally have meant something like ‘augment what you’ve got’, or it could have an all-together different origin — the term oburoni has the human suffix -ni affixed to the root borɔ, which may just mean ‘Europe’ or ‘European’ (Christaller goes no further), or may have some earlier meaning. A pre-Christian origin is not out of the question, but until someone gets a chance to review mission archives, White-Man-Get-Somet’ing seems the best bet.

That Christmas in Kumase, I joked rather uncharitably that a more appropriate term would be Bibinya: Black-Man-Get-Somet’ing. Most of the Asantes I dealt with in my daily life asked me all through the month ‘Me buronyadeɛ wɔ henfa? Where’s my Christmas present?’ I didn’t really get what was going on, at the time. I didn’t get Ghanaian Big Man-Small Boy relationships. I’d not yet read Marcel Mauss’ Essay on the Gift. It didn’t occur to me that this was anything other than raw acquisitiveness — that it might be a request for a material cementation of a social relationship. I submitted to social pressures and followed the example of Asante Big Men: I bought a jumbo pack of biscuits, and gave out individual small packs to children I knew and children of people I knew. A few friends gave reciprocal gifts: mostly plantains.

Plantains are with me again, this year. I’m alone, for the first Christmas in my life. Last year, I was with Erin’s family in San Diego, but since we broke up I’ve slowly drifted away from all of our mutual friends. I didn’t go to Oshkosh to see my parents and brother; they’ll be leaving in a couple of days for Johannesburg, where they’ll meet my sister, who’s been teaching English in a convent in Lesotho. I had thought about going to Mexico, just to get away, but a deal came up that I couldn’t let pass: Two friends of a friend were going on vacation in New Zealand, and wanted me to take care of their two pugs and their three-story penthouse for the ten days that they were gone.

Well… O-kay.

For all y’all San Franciscans, I’m in that part of the Mission that’s turning into SoMa. For those of you less blessed, I’m in a predominantly Mexican and Salvadorian neighbourhood that’s rapidly being converted into way-upper-middle-class condos and penthouses. To give you some idea of what ‘way upper-middle class’ means, I’m feeding these pugs Brie. No, really.

I’ve got some work to do for my job — mostly accounting and grant application writing — but this is largely, for me, a time to study and withdraw. I’ve been meandering around the neighbourhood, checking out produce markets (whence the plantains, which aren’t as easy to come by in other parts of town, dominated by Anglo and East Asian produce), and reading.

I’m scared — really scared — that I’m not well-prepared for grad school. I just scored, this past week, a second job which should allow me to pay tuition — or enough of tuition that student loans should cover the rest. SOAS is far more of a sure thing, now, than it’s ever been before. But I just don’t feel like I’ve got the appropriate education under my belt. Like I don’t have the theoretical background. My undergrad education was at the Friends World (named after the Society of Friends: the Quakers) Program of Long Island University. The requirements, back in 1999-2002, were minimal, and if you wanted to graduate, it was hard not to. The program is based primarily on experiential education, which means that, while I worked hard and studied hard, my reading almost always dealt with local specifics. I read Asante history while in Ghana. I read classical and Independence-era Indian philosophy while in India. I read Thai engaged Buddhism while in Thailand. Though I read Marxist writers, I never read Marx for school (though I’d read The Communist Manifesto in high school, and The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon on my own), and I never read any Durkheim or Weber. It’s those three names that haunt me most, make me feel the most down-from-snuff, but there are others. I feel especially lacking in classical Western social theory, and economics in general.

Thus, the next eight months are a Year for Dead White Men studies. I desperately want to get into feminism and feminist anthropology. I’m fascinated by post-colonial thought. And really, what I most want to be reading is the specificity of ethnography. But I feel like I need to get this under my belt in order to be well-prepared for school. So, in shā’ Allāh, over the next eight months I will read the basic works of Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Thomas Malthus, G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Émile Durkheim, and Max Weber, probably in that order. If there’s time, there are many, many others I’d like to fit in: Kant, Locke, Hobbes, Comte, Freud, Keynes, Proudhon, Bakunin, Nietszche… But I’ve got to be realistic: Hegel and Marx alone are a handful. I need all the resolve I can screw up.

I’m starting out this week with The Wealth of Nations. Any San Franciscans who wish to join me are more than welcome.

However… I will be balancing the Year of the Dead White Man out with the work of a few dead Semites. Or maybe a dead Semitic deity, per Nietzsche: I’m going to try to resuscitate my Twi by reading the Asante translation of the KJV, in tandem with the English.

So, afe nhyia mo nyinaa paa. Send a little resolve my way. And when the year turns back to meet us, here’s hoping we’ve all attained our goals. In the words of Dickens’ Tim Kakraba: Onyame nhyira yɛn nyinaa, baako-baako.

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