Homestead Homeland Home

This is a collection of observations and meditations by Professor Emeritus (York University Toronto) and philosopher Ato Sekyi-Otu on events issues people and ideas culled from recent history and the world from the US and Canada to Ghana. If there is a persistent thread in these entries it is this: Virtually all of them testify to the ironic truth of the saying that there is no place like home no place that is to say which looks like the lodestar called home or comes close to approximating its promise of being a just space of human flourishing. Most of the entries are therefore harsh particularly those on the USA. That is because that nation in his view has in recent history made a major contribution to rendering the world and every homestead we inhabit unhomely and sabotaging attempts to better it. But no one or place is spared certainly not the author's native land Ghana. Canada appears intermittently in these pages in rather fragmentary and contrastive observations. That paucity of comments may be taken to be the complement the author pays to Canada as a place of relative civility and glimmers of decency in a mad and cruel world. It is a short work of predominantly gloomy pictures. But there are a few countervailing images and invocations of hope here and there. There are 166 entries of unequal lengths arranged around 14 headings. These epigrams are contrapuntal variations on the philosopher's searing imprecation and visionary invocation: unfinished ode resounding with intermittent fury to the dawn of human existence set free from all tyrannizing enclosures.