In a sequel to his debut story, a young Ghanaian writer tells an honest and humorous account of learning his mother tongue.
Abraham Ofori-Henaku

Left: My friend and colleague Sandra Burah had me speaking my “broken” Akuapem Twi for the entire lunch break period at work that day. Right: In this shot, we’re both on a call with a mutual colleague who was correcting a word (ankaa3twade3 meaning “lime”) I had mispronounced. Photos: Kofi Talent
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I found this interesting factoid on the Cleveland Clinic’s website. A piece of report last reviewed by a Cleveland Clinic medical professional on September 3, 2022, stated the following:
“It’s uncommon to lose your ability to taste. Most often, a loss of smell makes foods taste bland. The medical term for a complete inability to taste is ageusia (uh-gyou-zee-uh). More people have hypogeusia, which means foods and drinks don’t taste as flavorful as they should. . . . Foods may taste bitter even when they’re not. You may have a harder time telling when things are sweet or salty too.”
This piece from the medical website was written and published against the backdrop of COVID-19. Now, if you’ve ever had the virus and had to endure its frustrating symptoms, then you’d understand that losing your sense of taste, or any of your five senses for that matter, isn’t pleasant (especially when you’re young). The senses help us perceive the world, and I reckon we’d be completely lost without them.

That’s me enjoying one of my mum’s freshly baked butter cookies. Photo: Jeremiah Ofori-Henaku
Personally, when it comes to the sense of taste, my love for good food sits right next to my love for good music, a good book, and good company — I can’t imagine what it would be like to live without tasting my mother’s sweet confectioneries and cuisine. I love them. Call me a foodie or a baker’s son, but I just like to appreciate life’s savory goodness.
The report further highlighted other factors that can lead to the loss of smell and taste: brain injuries; exposure to chemicals; cancer treatments like radiation therapy; smoking; neurological disorders like Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease; and viral respiratory infections, including the cold, flu, and of course, the COVID-19 virus. To my surprise, however, aging was listed among these causes. Apparently, aging often contributes to a decline in one’s capacity to smell and taste, and one’s taste buds become less sensitive after age fifty. A little scary, don’t you think?
That news flash sent chills down my spine; to think there’ll come a time when our sensory organs may fail us. Our ability to walk, see, hear, touch, smell, taste, or even speak will, inevitably, cease to exist by old age’s crippling call. I immediately thought of my mother in that moment of realization. She’s over fifty years old, and I’ve always wondered why her diet changed drastically as she got older. Well, learning about this certainly brings to light one of the many reasons why that’s happened. It’s almost as if she has no tongue. Soon, if nature decides to have its way completely with her sense of taste and smell, it will impact everything around her.
As these thoughts of my mother kept settling in, so did my hurt from a similar experience, one that has frayed the fiber of my cultural roots. Perhaps you know this one. If you recall, in the 2019 issue of Langscape Magazine, I shared a story about my “missing tongue,” basically explaining how I lost touch and connection with my Indigenous cultural roots due to my inability to speak my local dialect, Akuapem Twi (one of the dialects of the Akan language group of Ghana). Well, here’s what the past four years have been like since searching for my missing tongue.
My journey has been characterized by moments of excitement, shyness, disappointment, confidence, and a drizzle of shame and surrender.

This is a picture of my mother in her mid to late twenties; looking beautiful, energetic, and fresh. Photo: Unknown
My journey has been characterized by moments of excitement, shyness, disappointment, confidence, and a drizzle of shame and surrender every now and then. I’ve had days when I felt so confident engaging in small talk in my local dialect with colleagues at work or street vendors in my township. Other times, I felt like the more I opened my mouth to speak my local language, the more I looked silly in front of those I spoke to. The instant regret, followed by embarrassment, cued me to stop trying and give up on learning to speak my local language to avoid bringing disgrace upon myself, my cultural background (which is almost nonexistent at this point), and my family. Regardless, it’s not and it won’t be easy to hide from and escape questions that seek to reveal my “glitching” cultural identity. Whether I speak my local language or not, my lingual deficiency will always open up a can of worms.
With each passing day, I’m reminded of how much better I can be at speaking Akuapem Twi, and at the same time, how much worse I am. I don’t get as much encouragement as I would like from those people who expect me to get better. Their first instinct, upon hearing me speak Akuapem Twi, is to tell me to stop and just speak English because I ruin the language with my foreign pronunciation of the local words. Either that or they question what my ethnicity is, where I’m from, and who my parents are. And here’s the thing: I haven’t even traveled to any English-speaking country, or any country for that matter, outside Ghana. I picked up a lot of the foreign pronunciation of words or “accents,” as some would identify them, from watching foreign movies and Disney shows — but I digress.
With each passing day, I’m reminded of how much better I can be at speaking Akuapem Twi.
This locally acquired foreign accent of mine is obviously the bane of my authentic cultural heritage. I’m past putting this blame on my parents. One might expect me to do so because they were my first agents of socialization and the reason why our native language is called a “mother tongue,” but I’m a grown man now. It’s about time I take responsibility for the poor effort I put into learning my mother tongue and all about my cultural heritage. As a child, I was old enough to know that I couldn’t speak it so well but too shallow-minded to appreciate how it would have served me in the long run. Foresight, they say, is better than hindsight. Now, I’m getting older and, with age, learning to speak fluently in my local dialect is even harder. Aging keeps revealing the centrifugal force of my severed mother tongue and my loss of taste for my true culture — unable to perceive any real connection to my roots.
Remember when I mentioned that should nature have its way with my mother’s sense of taste and smell it’d impact everything around her? Well, let me contextualize that with my reality. Because I don’t speak my local language eloquently, not only has that lingual deficiency affected my relationship with people and my potential to freely express myself, but also, for a long time, I have tried to avoid using my other Akan name, Asamani Yaw. Because my surname Ofori-Henaku is composed of a common name, Ofori, and an uncommon name, Henaku, it always sparks conversation around my identity and background and raises so many questions I usually don’t have answers to. So, to avoid feeling more inadequate or guilty, I try not to bring up the fact that I have additional local names. This may look like a conscious effort to disassociate from anything Akan or Akuapem, but I promise, it’s not. I will, however, acknowledge that at times, whether consciously or unconsciously, I may behave in ways that reflect an internal conflict. While I don’t wish to disassociate from my roots, I am aware that feelings of guilt or inadequacy sometimes influence my actions, leading me to downplay my ethnic identity.
Sadly, down the line, my yet-to-be children will have a hard time navigating life in many parts of Ghana, just as I am.
Sadly, down the line, my yet-to-be children will have a hard time navigating life in many parts of Ghana, just as I am. Most likely, not only will they have limited interactions speaking my mother tongue but will also inherit my ambivalence toward things related to my culture, and grow up without cultural pride. What to do? Well, I guess one possible solution would be for me to marry a nice Akuapem lady from my hometown in the Eastern Region of South Ghana, Akropong, so she would pass down her mother tongue to our children! Then and only then, it seems, would my offspring remain tethered to their Akuapem roots.

This is an example of the rich culture I’m missing out on by losing connection with my ancestral roots. All my life, I’ve never attended the Odwira festival, which is an annual traditional festival celebrated by the Akropong-Akuapem, Aburi, Larteh, and Mamfe. Here, we can see the paramount chief of the Akuapem area, Oseadeeyo Kwasi Akuffo III, seated on a palanquin. I hope to witness this in person someday. Photo: Manuel Photography
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Over time, my interest in the Akuapem culture has been in flux due to my many moments of defeat while learning my mother tongue. I recall having strong apathy toward learning about my hometown and my family’s history. At any given opportunity to learn about my culture, I still tend to ask myself, “What’s the point?” I take it a step further to avoid people who might gaslight me with reasons why I should feel terrible for not speaking my language while growing up, or worse, for questioning my parents’ upbringing skills. Sometimes, I find myself getting comfortable with not knowing how to speak my local dialect just because many other Ghanaians can’t speak their mother tongues either — but that’s a story for another day.
Had it not been for the journey and this opportunity to pen down my experience, I wouldn’t have been able to realize nor articulate the depth of the cultural harm thrust upon myself.
Don’t get me wrong. I really want to get better at speaking my mother tongue! It’s just that sometimes it’s a lot easier to give up the determination and hope, especially knowing that my best efforts will never equal the expected growth of my fluency — not now that I’m twenty-six years old . . . To top it off, I’ve moved away from home to the big city and currently live in a suburban neighborhood in central Accra, called Osu, which is a predominantly Ga community. I can’t speak the language of the Gas either, and my unwillingness to learn, so that I may relate much better with people in the community, stems from my lackadaisical attitude toward learning my own Akuapem language.
Oh, it gets deeper than that. Just stick with me. Right before my eyes, I see my not-so-little brother being raised the same way my older sister and I were — speaking English all the time. This young member of Gen Alpha, already in his second year in the very same high school my father and I attended, has developed the same attitude I have toward learning our Akuapem values and traditions. His high school and my own alma mater, Okuapemman Senior High School, located in our hometown, provides a supposedly conducive environment meant to influence him to get on with learning his mother tongue. Just like me, however, he comes home every vacation speaking English very much like he was before, even though he’s spent so much time in a predominantly Akan environment. When he’s home, it’s back to square one, with my folks continuing the pattern and my sister and I inadvertently reinforcing the same mistake. We struggle to form sentences in our local dialect and fail at it every time. It feels like a dreaded chore. And just like that, another generational harm looms.

This is my little brother, Jeremiah, at his junior high school graduation looking all serious like he’d “rather by somewhere else.” LOL. One thing about him is that he’s a man of few words, which makes it difficult to practice our native language. Photo: Mercy Ofori-Henaku
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This is the weight of my dilemma, and had it not been for the journey and this opportunity to pen down my experience, I wouldn’t have been able to realize nor articulate the depth of the cultural harm thrust upon myself. For every one positive step of progress I make, I’m ten steps behind. The more I learn, the more my ignorance is revealed to me, and I realize there’s so much I’m out of touch with culturally. To make sense of all of this, I share a quote from a very close acquaintance of mine, Isaac Nana Kwame Frimpong, who said, “When there are no speakers of a language, the language dies. When the language dies, certain cultures, history, background, identity, ethnicity, systems, roots, tribes, and ideologies attached to the language, die too.” Then he concludes with an exclamation, “SPEAK YOUR MOTHER TONGUE!”

Here’s my mum now — still looking so beautiful, by the way. Photo: Mercy Ofori-Henaku
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My fragile cultural pride and limited ability to interact using my mother tongue should be enough reasons for me to take my language deficiency seriously, rather than relying on this quote for motivation. However, I need this kind of tough love from time to time: the hard truth that’ll knock my sense of urgency back on track — to keep going and growing. No one is going to resuscitate my identity for me. Yes, I’ll need all the help I can get if I want to get better and polish my Akuapem Twi, but at the end of the day, the onus lies on me.
No one is going to resuscitate my identity for me.
What I’ve also learned is that I need to be patient with myself. I’ve come a long way since I last wrote about my inability to speak my local language and connect with my roots. I find myself doing better despite the numerous failures. I’ve improved quite significantly for someone with a “severed mother tongue.” Time and age will continue to take their due course in changing my sense of taste and how I perceive my Indigenous roots. Nonetheless, I’ll continue to give myself more grace on the journey. It won’t be easy, and I may not be as good as my parents or Akan peers but nkakra nkakra, medu h (“little by little, I’ll get there”).
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Support the Cause: Speak your native language daily, even if it’s just with friends, family, or language apps. It’s never too late to reconnect with your cultural roots. Take tiny steps, accept mistakes, and be patient with yourself; progress happens over time.
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Abraham Ofori-Henaku is a young Ghanaian writer with a keen interest in culture, the arts, the environment, and personal development. Professionally, his expertise in communications centers on brand storytelling and crafting digital growth strategies through content creation.
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