Watching Courage Grow Quiet

I was listening to the World Service last Tuesday when news of The Gambia’s case at the International Court of Justice against Myanmar came up. I had already been thinking about the Rohingya crisis over the weekend, and about how Aung San Suu Kyi’s silence in the face of such brutality had permanently tinted her legacy. At its core, the Rohingya question is a complicated dispute over citizenship and belonging. It is a problem Myanmar must resolve within its own history and law. But the manner in which the military chose to resolve it in 2018, through fire, displacement, and terror, remains impossible to defend.

From the early 1990s until her final release from house arrest in 2010, Suu Kyi stood as a symbol of quiet courage against dictatorship. For many of us watching from afar, she embodied the idea that moral endurance could outlast brute force. Her 2011 BBC Reith Lectures remain among the most careful and humane reflections on freedom I have ever heard. That is precisely why her later silence felt so heavy. It was not the silence of ignorance, but of knowledge withheld.

I struggled to reconcile the woman who once spoke so clearly about fear and dignity with the leader who found no words when nearly a million people, many of them women and children, were driven from their homes and turned into refugees across a border. Silence, in such moments, is not neutrality. It is a position. And history, which is patient but exacting, records it as such.

Yet there was something about her silence that did not entirely surprise me. It is a familiarity one acquires as a Ghanaian. Forgive me, my countrymen, for taking a swipe at you all the way from Rangoon. We are a people who struggle with principles and with memory. Today’s crusader shouts himself hoarse over injustice. Watch him closely as he travels. When he finally arrives at authority, watch again how injustice begins to look different in his eyes. He does not abandon it. He simply learns how to explain it. He becomes an apologist for the very order he once condemned.

So, a man with whom you once stood against military brutality enters the Ghana Armed Forces and suddenly finds language to defend atrocities against civilians. Another who once shouted for press freedom now explains, calmly and cleverly, why the state must regulate the press. Then comes the final examination: meritocracy against patronage, conscience against access. I watch my countrymen and feel a slow, honest loss of hope. Have we always been like this. A people so ready to trade principle for proximity to power. A people so eager to defend what we know, in our quieter moments, to be indefensible.

Ayi Kwei Armah saw us clearly as far back as 1968:

“Believing nothing, but saying they believe everything that needs to be believed, so long as the big jobs and big money follow.
Men who know nothing about politics have grown hot with ideology, thinking of the money that will come.
The civil servant who hates socialism is there, singing hosanna. The poet is there, serving power and waiting to fill his coming paunch with crumbs.
He will no doubt jump to go and fit his tongue into new arses when new men spring up to shit on us.
Everybody who wants speed goes there, and the only thing demanded of them is that they be good at fawning.”

Nothing in that passage has aged. Only the faces have changed.

Armah knew us. He knew our appetite for advantage, our allergy to consequence. Yet more than fifty years later, must we still recognise ourselves so easily in his mirror. In The Trouble With Nigeria, Chinua Achebe wrote with admiration about Ghana’s early attempts, after independence, to shape a national ethos. Our own motto was, and remains, “Freedom and Justice.” Two noble words, both empty without discipline, both fraudulent without principle.

So, I ask, without performance and without politeness: where are your principles, my countrymen. What do you stand for when no office is in sight. What do you defend when no appointment is coming.

What do you refuse, even when refusal costs you something.

A nation is not betrayed only by its leaders. It is betrayed daily by its clever citizens, those who know better and still choose convenience.

We like to imagine history as something that happens above our heads, written by generals and presidents. But history is also written in the small, private bargains we make with ourselves. Each silence becomes a sentence. Each excuse becomes a vote. Each clever justification becomes a quiet endorsement. And when the next Armah writes of us, he will not need invention. He will only need memory.