Abstract
Ghana is seriously reeling under the weight of the scourge of the COVID-19; while the scientists are doing their best to provide information concerning the dos and don’ts of the disease, its communication to the people has been a huge problem. This paper uses the qualitative research approach and the Performance and Communication theories to investigate this challenge. The study isolates the Akan communities for this investigation and argues that the Ghana COVID-19 communication uses too many elitist approaches and the local language is rarely used. Again, the paper establishes that the communication falls short of considering the Akans as oral thinkers and completely ignores their ideological identities as a group of people who rely on oral structures in language and morality. The paper further observes that the COVID-19 communication in Ghana fails to recognize the subtle creative processes of translating concepts in English into Akan due to the influence of the contexts of contact. These challenges have resulted in minimum or complete lack of cooperation by Akan communities thus throwing the whole COVID-19 campaign into jeopardy. The paper recommends that the COVID-19 communication should reconfigure its approach to reach the Akan communities. KEYWORDS: COVID-19, Akan communities, Akan moral thought, communication and cultural shareability, Ghana.
Highlights
On the 12th of March, 2020, a formal announcement of two COVID-19 infected persons who travelled into the country was made
Ghana is seriously reeling under the weight of the scourge of the COVID-19; while the scientists are doing their best to provide information concerning the dos and don’ts of the disease, its communication to the people has been a huge problem
The other challenge is the fact that they have not been able to develop the right ethnographic information to feed into their programs on COVID-19 and even though they might be doing their best, they lack information as to what to tell the non-literates to get them get in line with the fight against COVID-19
Summary
On the 12th of March, 2020, a formal announcement of two COVID-19 infected persons who travelled into the country was made. This study explores communications around the COVID-19 pandemic and how the protocols to be observed are communicated to the people, using the Akan communities of Ghana as a case study. Akan Communities in Ghana The Akan people are found in Ghana, West Africa, to be precise, and they form almost half the population of Ghana. Due to their large numbers, whatever affects them affects almost half the population of Ghana. Their language is called Akan which belongs to the Kwa group of Niger-Congo language family.
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