Writer, I guess 🖤 Darkness Glows Here🕯️ ✨Walking Paradox 🎓 | MA Creative Writing @uealdc Global Voices Scholar | Chief Editor: @thehumjournal 🇬🇭🇬🇧🇳🇬
UK
Joined April 2015
- Tweets4.3K
- Following1.9K
- Followers2.9K
- Likes6.8K
Pinned Tweet
On January 19, I received a career‑defining email. My novella had been longlisted by Simon & Schuster. And this was an application I submitted on a whim. It was one of those ‘let me just do this; you miss 100% of the shots you don’t take’ moments.
1/4 – at Cringleford, England
Boakye D. Alpha 🤓♊️ retweeted
I was commissioned to create a poetry collection in response to a visual artist’s exhibition in Dubai. Had a sociopolitical commentary commissioned by an European radio station, an album recording on suicide, grief and loss, fully funded in the UK, two consecutive headline performances in Brighton, and another in Germany. The studio in England is already collecting fragments of poems I haven’t even finished.
We return home and reinvest our proceeds into shows to keep Ghana’s poetry ecosystem alive. Yet every grant or financial support I have secured in my career has come from Western cultural institutions operating in Ghana.
I bet not a single poetry festival with funding support is on the GoGs The Black Star Christmas thing.
Ghana needs a properly funded, transparent public arts fund that invests directly in artists, independent creative projects and cultural institutions. Not political favours, but strategic investment in the people who represent our culture, enabling them to take their work beyond Accra and tour communities across the country, telling our stories through the realities of our everyday lives as Ghanaians.
If our work can earn international recognition and attract foreign investment, why must we depend on foreign institutions to finance it?
Why can’t our own government invest in the cultural economy it expects us to build?
The amount of cultural exposure and mileage our Ghanaian artistes and creatives give Ghana eh it amazes me how and why there’s still no fund set up by the government to push artiste and creatives for their works! Like each artiste who has been able to push and run their own project or show gets some cool 500k for their next show! But no, we will wait and give it all to Yaanom to go and do keche for sometime and go back to their commercial countries to promote them. When embassies give us money too peoole vex say we are nearing colonialism again! 😂😂 oman Ghana
Boakye D. Alpha 🤓♊️ retweeted
I saw @TroyOnyango’s post saying ‘why is "changing africa's narrative" a lot to do with africans getting into western spaces/institutions? is that all we live for?’
I have been thinking about it, been wondering why that is. Not that I didn't have the answer but I thought I’d give it a bit of space in my mind, try to excavate further, and perhaps, find an answer that isn't quite the obvious one.
But this is the truth. And @mrpoetivist you hit the nail on the head.
There. Is. No. Support.
I have been hitting this same face of the drum for as long as I can remember. I have been going after the media houses as one of the easiest example of how much the institutions we have back home do not care about creatives and would rather have a 2-hour show talking about unnecessary stuff; they’d rather give the airtime to someone lacking in good, functioning brain cells who thinks it is okay to sit on national radio/TV to say ‘every man has r*ped a woman before and there is no issues with r*ape.
Again, that is just one example.
Mr Poetivist has said it all. I have been a witness to all the things he's mentioned below, great great stuff that constantly puts Ghana on the map and not a single government institution has thought to support him in any way.
So, many of us, as he said, have decided to go above the issue, find solutions for ourselves and others and not wait for handouts from a place that is not willing to hand out. We have created platforms to support upcoming creatives with the support we receive externally without asking for anything in return. And yet, sometimes when things get tough and we reach out to these institutions for support, they turn the other way.
This conversation is very complicated, nuanced, and seems not to offer a single easy answer.
So happy to hear what others think.
I was commissioned to create a poetry collection in response to a visual artist’s exhibition in Dubai. Had a sociopolitical commentary commissioned by an European radio station, an album recording on suicide, grief and loss, fully funded in the UK, two consecutive headline performances in Brighton, and another in Germany. The studio in England is already collecting fragments of poems I haven’t even finished.
We return home and reinvest our proceeds into shows to keep Ghana’s poetry ecosystem alive. Yet every grant or financial support I have secured in my career has come from Western cultural institutions operating in Ghana.
I bet not a single poetry festival with funding support is on the GoGs The Black Star Christmas thing.
Ghana needs a properly funded, transparent public arts fund that invests directly in artists, independent creative projects and cultural institutions. Not political favours, but strategic investment in the people who represent our culture, enabling them to take their work beyond Accra and tour communities across the country, telling our stories through the realities of our everyday lives as Ghanaians.
If our work can earn international recognition and attract foreign investment, why must we depend on foreign institutions to finance it?
Why can’t our own government invest in the cultural economy it expects us to build?
I saw @TroyOnyango’s post saying ‘why is "changing africa's narrative" a lot to do with africans getting into western spaces/institutions? is that all we live for?’
I have been thinking about it, been wondering why that is. Not that I didn't have the answer but I thought I’d give it a bit of space in my mind, try to excavate further, and perhaps, find an answer that isn't quite the obvious one.
But this is the truth. And @mrpoetivist you hit the nail on the head.
There. Is. No. Support.
I have been hitting this same face of the drum for as long as I can remember. I have been going after the media houses as one of the easiest example of how much the institutions we have back home do not care about creatives and would rather have a 2-hour show talking about unnecessary stuff; they’d rather give the airtime to someone lacking in good, functioning brain cells who thinks it is okay to sit on national radio/TV to say ‘every man has r*ped a woman before and there is no issues with r*ape.
Again, that is just one example.
Mr Poetivist has said it all. I have been a witness to all the things he's mentioned below, great great stuff that constantly puts Ghana on the map and not a single government institution has thought to support him in any way.
So, many of us, as he said, have decided to go above the issue, find solutions for ourselves and others and not wait for handouts from a place that is not willing to hand out. We have created platforms to support upcoming creatives with the support we receive externally without asking for anything in return. And yet, sometimes when things get tough and we reach out to these institutions for support, they turn the other way.
This conversation is very complicated, nuanced, and seems not to offer a single easy answer.
So happy to hear what others think.
I was commissioned to create a poetry collection in response to a visual artist’s exhibition in Dubai. Had a sociopolitical commentary commissioned by an European radio station, an album recording on suicide, grief and loss, fully funded in the UK, two consecutive headline performances in Brighton, and another in Germany. The studio in England is already collecting fragments of poems I haven’t even finished.
We return home and reinvest our proceeds into shows to keep Ghana’s poetry ecosystem alive. Yet every grant or financial support I have secured in my career has come from Western cultural institutions operating in Ghana.
I bet not a single poetry festival with funding support is on the GoGs The Black Star Christmas thing.
Ghana needs a properly funded, transparent public arts fund that invests directly in artists, independent creative projects and cultural institutions. Not political favours, but strategic investment in the people who represent our culture, enabling them to take their work beyond Accra and tour communities across the country, telling our stories through the realities of our everyday lives as Ghanaians.
If our work can earn international recognition and attract foreign investment, why must we depend on foreign institutions to finance it?
Why can’t our own government invest in the cultural economy it expects us to build?
That we live in times when teachers come online, make videos of themselves crying frenetically (and you can see the pain in their eyes, feel it in their voice) about the decline in literacy. That many of these kids can't spell, read or make coherent critical thoughts. And yet, somehow, they are being passed through the system because apparently, we reward laziness now, we applaud rearing ‘foolish’ people, so to say.
I waltzed into all this to get my big break at an iconic temple of American whiteness. CK was making waves with advertising that was ethnically diverse and gender fluid. But before that initiative, Calvin's iconography was as white as his staff, which mostly consisted of tall, bony, beautiful WASP girls with thick eyebrows and low ponytails. I could count the Black people inside the building on one hand, and they were almost all security guards. Otherwise there was one Asian producer. Quite a rainbow coalition.
In fashion, as elsewhere, establishment companies, almost all of them owned and run by white people, don't have to have an over-the-top, overtly racist culture for a Black worker to feel panic and fear upon arriving.
It's an instinct we develop over a lifetime of being unfairly judged, and then gaslighted if we actually take the enormous risk of simply talking about our experiences. We know all the stereotypes about us intimately, and jump through hoops - social, psychological, emotional - to counteract them on the job.
We know them because one of the most crucial survival skills for any Black person in a white space is to intimately understand how institutional white psychology works. In addition to knowing our own minds and hearts, we have to absorb the dominant culture, how it thinks and reacts.
To go into any white space without that comprehension is like walking into a sword fight without a rapier and a shield. You just don't do it. You have to master the mindset.
Look, don't get me wrong, Starting a new job is stressful for anyone, yet in contrast, white colleagues can at least show up more or less unburdened by preconceived notions of being lazy, crass, undereducated, unrefined, dishonest, shady, a diversity hire, short-fused or dying to accuse everyone else of being racist. Black people know, both by way of advice from our elders and our own experiences, that even from well-meaning white people we rarely, if ever, get the benefit of the doubt if a conflict arises. We know that we're often the first to be blamed, and more quickly and harshly punished than our white peers. If there was ever a question of an item of clothing or jewellery going missing at any job where I wasn't intimately known to the client, I'd be the first one they suspected, even if they liked me, because there's an unconscious tripwire in most white people that says, when it comes right down to it, Black people do not belong. And God forbid I get visibly angry about it. Or express any of my natural fear and insecurity. This emotional and psychological reality is exhausting on its own.
Now combine it with knowing that you'll always need to work twice as hard to keep rising. Being Black in the workplace is not a recipe for inner peace.
I'm glad more and more people are realising that Yaa Gyasi is THAT author.
Since reading @YaaGyasiAuthor’s #HomeGoing, I have considered her one of my favorite authors but just finished Transcendent Kingdom and she sits right there at the top, which one of the very best. A lovely book. Quiet, carefully written and heartbreaking all at once.
Boakye D. Alpha 🤓♊️ retweeted
‘Ghana is a very, very religious country. We take our family values and child protection very very seriously.’
‘Why are we behaving as if it is not normal to r*pe someone? Which man hasn't r*pe a lady before?’
The double standards embedded in these statements do not escape me. In fact, it is precisely this kind of selective morality and ad hoc reasoning that continues to derail our progress as a nation.
Where are these religious leaders and family values fanatics when we need them the most?
Where are the voices that never seem to tire of telling us about morality, decency, and the sanctity of the family when we need them to speak up the most?
Because, we will need to, will have to, must draw the line somewhere but it turns out p*edophilia and child s*xual abuse aren't one of them. I guess the ink for this line runs out when the situation favours the majority of the policymakers who, as ridiculous as it is to say, are men. I guess there are situations that, as a matter of fact, we can look the other way, even when it doesn't involve two consenting adults, even when it is a man in a place of power using his position to force young girls into bed. I guess we can, indeed look away and Ghana might not be all about family values and protection of our children after all.
'Four legs good, two legs bad.’
Apparently, our commitment to protecting children has limits. Our moral outrage has conditions. Our religious convictions
become remarkably flexible when the people implicated are powerful, influential, or conveniently positioned within the very institutions that should hold them accountable.
‘What is good for the goose is good for the gander.’
In the last couple of months,
- An MP looks at a child and calls him his wife. He is let off with an apology. People explain his behaviour away with 'it is our culture No serious conversations are had. No reviews of the nonsense we choose to tolerate.
Nothing is done to make sure that people know that statements like that are not okay.
- Weeks after that, the headline '1,501 girls aged 10 to 14 were impregnated between January and July of 2026 stares at us in the face. Nothing 'serious' was done about that either. Just one of the many headlines. A few
'ei' and 'ah' and life went back to normal. That didn't shake anything in us.
- Weeks into that, an investigation shows that 15 girls have been assaulted in what seems to be a frequent behaviour of a male authority figure. 15 girls but it could be more. Who knows how long he's been doing this.
And as it stands now, he is facing an investigation'. We know that is code for nothing will come of this.
‘Ghana is a very, very religious country. We take our family values and child protection very very seriously.’
‘Why are we behaving as if it is not normal to r*pe someone? Which man hasn't r*pe a lady before?’
The double standards embedded in these statements do not escape me. In fact, it is precisely this kind of selective morality and ad hoc reasoning that continues to derail our progress as a nation.
Where are these religious leaders and family values fanatics when we need them the most?
Where are the voices that never seem to tire of telling us about morality, decency, and the sanctity of the family when we need them to speak up the most?
Because, we will need to, will have to, must draw the line somewhere but it turns out p*edophilia and child s*xual abuse aren't one of them. I guess the ink for this line runs out when the situation favours the majority of the policymakers who, as ridiculous as it is to say, are men. I guess there are situations that, as a matter of fact, we can look the other way, even when it doesn't involve two consenting adults, even when it is a man in a place of power using his position to force young girls into bed. I guess we can, indeed look away and Ghana might not be all about family values and protection of our children after all.
'Four legs good, two legs bad.’
Apparently, our commitment to protecting children has limits. Our moral outrage has conditions. Our religious convictions
become remarkably flexible when the people implicated are powerful, influential, or conveniently positioned within the very institutions that should hold them accountable.
‘What is good for the goose is good for the gander.’
In the last couple of months,
- An MP looks at a child and calls him his wife. He is let off with an apology. People explain his behaviour away with 'it is our culture No serious conversations are had. No reviews of the nonsense we choose to tolerate.
Nothing is done to make sure that people know that statements like that are not okay.
- Weeks after that, the headline '1,501 girls aged 10 to 14 were impregnated between January and July of 2026 stares at us in the face. Nothing 'serious' was done about that either. Just one of the many headlines. A few
'ei' and 'ah' and life went back to normal. That didn't shake anything in us.
- Weeks into that, an investigation shows that 15 girls have been assaulted in what seems to be a frequent behaviour of a male authority figure. 15 girls but it could be more. Who knows how long he's been doing this.
And as it stands now, he is facing an investigation'. We know that is code for nothing will come of this.
What is worse is that slivers and whispers of his act were first made known in 2025. In early 2026, two teachers petitioned school management over the same issue. Nothing is made of it. Then in March, 5 girls made complaints. It was put under investigation and then...you guessed right.
Nothing. In July, the old students' association also petitioned the school, with written complaints even from parents. Again, nothing. Then another rape. Then students got fed up, got outraged, because no one would come to their aid.
If it took this long for an allegation as grievous as a sexual assault to be looked into, especially when there was not one or two or three victims, if it took this long for anyone to even bat an eye and still after all available evidence (and a documentary) we are still investigating, then we know who the law protects. Certainly not our children. Not the so-called family values.
We only whip that weapon around when it is convenient for us.
Let's even put the law aside for a second. Since we are a 'religious' country.
Where is the outrage of all the religious people in the country whose sole concern is to do everything the Bible commands to the dot?
Where are the quotations and sermons to condemn this act
Some sins are probably acceptable. It must be.
Perhaps. Because when the headmaster's crimes were even exposed, he was let off with a warning and sent to teach somewhere else. Business as usual because what is the future and trauma of a couple of girls compared to the future and reputation of a man?
'Four legs good, two legs better.’
It was Nelson Mandela who said 'If you talk to a man in a language he understands, that goes to his head. If you talk to him in his language, that goes to his heart.'
So, Ghana, here is a language I think would go to our heart.
We are hypocrites.
We are not angry enough.
We need to recalibrate our focus, consider exactly what we deem worthy of action.
And as has been said for a couple of months now, we have a p*edophilia and s*xual assault problem.
Act on it!
#JusticeForObuasiGirls
‘How did we, as African writers, come to be so feeble towards the claims of our languages on us and so aggressive in our claims on other languages, particularly the languages of our colonisation?’
— Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o
Writing Ghana Now: In Conversation with Contemporary Ghanaian Writers
Saturday 17 October 2026
1:40 PM – 2:40 PM
Goethe-Institut / München
Akorfa Dawson · Michael Agyapong
moderated by Boakye D Alpha
@akorfadawson
#pagya #PaGya2026 #pagyaat10
Grateful! 🖤✨
On 10th September, myself and 9 other writers on the Escalator New Writing Fellowship were celebrated at our Fellowship showcase at The London Library.
I really want to thank Yvvette Edwards , my mentor, for seeing the potential in my work, for choosing to mentor me, for all the valuable lessons she brought to our sessions, for teaching me new ways to approach my craft, for being so encouraging, for constantly telling me to trust my writing instincts (now i have it posted on my wall), for affording my approach to this project the understanding it deserves. All these and many others. I remain eternally grateful.
A special thank you to Ellie Reeves, Programme Officer, National Centre for Writing
To other fellows, it was my pleasure and privilege to share this stage with y’all. What a talented and incredible bunch y’all are!
Thank you to other mentors as well.
And to the National Centre for writing, for dreaming up this initiative which has been running for 20 years and counting.
