Neho! Today, I have come to the village where I grew up. It used to be a town. It’s called Amedeka near Akuse. Akuse and Amedeka are twin villages, closer together than Sekondi-Takoradi. In fact, Amedeka is never mentioned as Amedeka; it’s 'Akuse-Amedeka'. Today’s Akuse-Amedeka is different from the old one. The original Akuse Amedeka was a multi-ethnic settler community of Adas, Ewes, Kwahus, Fantes, Asantes, Dagombas, Mamprusis and many Hausa traveller’s.

The community was so multicultural because Akuse, which was 30 minutes walk away, was a huge colonial trading post. It has one of the oldest government hospitals. It was built in 1911...it is one of the first towns to have a post office in the Gold Coast Amedeka today is different! It was one of those 50000 small communities that were lost to flooding when the Akosombo and Akuse-Kpong Dama were constructed to provide electricity to Ghana.

My grandparents lost everything. For years, my entire community were displaced and moved to some other land by the Volta River Authority. But when the flooding subsided about three to five later, some families made their way back. Mine included. But none of them ever recovered. Almost all homes were rebuilt from roofing sheets and mud. In fact, by the time I was born in the ’80s, only a handful of houses were made from any material other than roofing sheets and mud. Then, in the late ’80s, the PNDC decided that it wanted to test democracy at the grassroots level before introducing it nationally. As a result, my father was the first Assemblyman elected for Amedeka.

Until today, people call him "Assembly". I grew up in the shadow of my Dad’s local activism. My playmates knew me as Assemblyman’s son. And that came with its own notoriety. Every time people see me, they still call me Assemblyman’s son. My Father hasn't been Assemblyman for nearly 25 years. But our roofing sheet house (which was only recently changed in parts) is still known as Assemblyman’s house. But by all accounts, my dad was a controversial man. Not that he had wealth or that he was loud. Ooh, he was as poor as the next man. In fact, maybe even poorer. Because even though he worked as a civil servant with the Land valuation board, his take-home pay barely took us home.

Worse, everyone in the community came to him for their troubles. He gave everything he laid his hands on in the house and gave to people. So we survived on my stepmother's salary as a police officer. Till today he does the same thing. I vowed to stop buying him a phone because he always gave it out when someone came to complain to him that he needed a phone for their son or daughter going to school. My father’s controversy came from being one of a few people who spoke English. My Dad wrote impeccably. He was a man of letters. He was a man of petitions. He has a box full of nearly a thousand petitions he has written on behalf of my community.

When I say writing, I mean typed. He had a typewriter that was his pride and joy. My Dad petitioned just about anybody who will listen. He organized farmers to complain about their yield. He organised fishermen who were losing people to drowning because the VRA used to open the Dama without warning, and this will kill many fisherfolks fishing on the Volta. (Until today, people still die from fishing because of the Dams being opened at no fixed times). He wrote petitions for our roads. He wrote petitions because we still drank water from the Volta, and our community had no running water. He spent every dime, going up and down, leading people to the police station, ministries, and VRA offices. There is no single door he didn't knock on. No single visitor he didn't receive.

Our family Post Box 19 at Akuse was the entire community post box. Everyone received their letters through us. Many times we wrote their replies for them too. I did some, too, when I was a little older. As a child, his letters and petitions were my favourite pastime. I will pull out (as hard as I could) the colonial suitcase that held them and read every single petition. I read them twice or three times even. I would always get into trouble for that. No one understood why I was always ignoring all the books in our huge family library and only « going through my dad's things ». I was spanked many times, but I still did that.

They were more fascinating than the reading material for my age three to six. I remember one such vividly. This was in the late ’90s. He said, "Amedeka gave everything so that this country will be electrified. Yet, like the proverbial fish that lives in water but does not drink of it, Amedeka has no electricity". Yes. I remember this phrasing exactly and so vividly because it made me cry like a child. So I memorised it. Amedeka, more than 30 years after Ghana was electrified, was itself in the dark. We still used lanterns in our homes.

And at Nightfall in Amedeka, we could see the Dams lit up very bright, and the homes lit up from miles away. We didn't hear their TVs on from the distance because the frogs and crickets closer to us were louder. Today, I return to Amedeka. My community is deteriorating, and my Dad is a broken man. He can barely walk without being out of breath. He gave his life to a community that never became. Today, he lives in constant worry that his Son will lose his life doing what he gave his doing. This country has stolen the one thing my father had: Hope!