Edmund Smith-Asante, a former Regional Page Editor of the Daily Graphic, has released a 30-chapter book built from his newspaper series about his time in Germany. The book, titled “Abrokyire Abrabo: My Wahala in Germany,” was launched in Accra last Thursday, according to Graphic Online.
The launch drew journalists, media practitioners, the author’s friends, family and associates, who gathered both to mark the publication and to look back on the experiences behind it.
The autobiographical travelogue follows Smith-Asante through a three-week professional journalism training programme in Berlin in November 2009. Graphic Online reports that the stories, first carried in the Saturday Daily Graphic, covered the language and cultural obstacles he met, unfamiliar food, public transport and the wider difficulties of being abroad.
Why it matters
The book preserves a first-person account of what an African visitor encountered in Germany, and it does so in a form that outlasts the newspaper pages where the stories first appeared. It is also a two-in-one publication, carrying English and German versions, which gives German readers access to an outsider’s view of their own country.
For Ghana’s publishing scene, the launch is a reminder of how long a book can take to reach readers. Smith-Asante said the project had stretched over years, mainly because publishing in Ghana is expensive, but that he was set on finishing it so that other books he plans could follow.
From newspaper column to bound volume
Smith-Asante said he never set out to write a book. He began recording his experiences because he believed the written word held on to events more reliably and more accurately than telling them aloud. He first published fragments in other outlets, then, after speaking with his editor at the time, ran the material as a series in the Saturday Daily Graphic.
Encouragement from colleagues and readers kept the series going, he said, and he eventually chose to gather the pieces into a single volume rather than leave them spread across back issues. He explained that he came to see his time in Germany as something he could not pass on unless he wrote it down, noting that a written record stays as it was, unlike a story retold from one person to the next.
The book includes photographs and reproductions from the newspaper series. Smith-Asante was clear about its purpose: it is not meant to push anyone toward travel or to talk them out of it, but to show would-be travellers some of the realities they may meet abroad.
Travel widens a person’s outlook, he said, but preparation matters if a traveller is not to be thrown by surroundings that feel foreign — a position he described from his own early days in Germany.
A caution against easy assumptions
The guest speaker at the launch, Brigadier General Daniel Frimpong (retd), praised Smith-Asante for putting his experiences on paper, saying such records matter for keeping history available to later generations.
Brig. Gen. Frimpong, who has lived in Germany at different times, said life overseas can be far harder than many people expect. Living alone in another country brings problems with housing, food and settling into an unfamiliar setting, he said.
He urged Ghanaians to put their energy into improving conditions at home instead of treating a trip abroad to “hustle” as a simple way out.
Watch for word on the author’s next publication, which he has said the completion of this book was intended to make possible.
