Kafui Dey interviews Ben Brako

The Gentle Rebel: A Conversation with Ben Brako

He was born in Accra but grew up in Cape Coast, attending over ten schools before secondary because his father kept getting posted to different villages for the agricultural service. His grandmother threw him a piece of cloth and told him if he wanted to mix with the boys from Sudu he had to dress like them — so he took it happily and went. His mother sang a special song for each of her children during bathing and grooming and could still sing them in her old age. He was the lead singer of the Famous Flames at St. Augustine's College, where Alfred Bannerman played in a rival band called the Beavers, and the two groups settled matters in inter-school pop chains. He traveled to Lome and Kumasi and Accra with his bandmates by public transport, carrying school instruments and sleeping at the YMCA, with promoters who kept most of the money. He did interviews on Mike Keegan's television show as a teenager. He has been called a gentle rebel every time someone tries to name what he is. He turned 74 the day before this interview and was woken with eto and eggs and avocado and treated like a prince until a beautiful dinner ended the day. He is writing a new album. He still has the feather.

Ben Brako is a highlife musician, songwriter, cultural thinker, and traditional leader — and a man who has spent his entire adult life questioning things that other people accept without examination.

The Birthday and the Passage of Time

He was woken on his birthday with freshly made eto — red palm oil with plantain or yam, kobi, spices, and onions — not a celebrity food, he clarifies quickly, but a special food for special occasions, particularly birthdays, and a blessing. He was treated like a prince and a king the whole day. The dinner that closed it was beautiful. But what made the day was the feeling — the relationship, the ambiance, being surrounded by people who made him feel good about himself.

The passage of time, he says, means growing up and maturing and beginning to explain yourself to yourself. Understanding where your instincts come from. Knowing why you do certain things. He compares it to sitting an exam you were not warned about. He is 74 and has been taking it seriously for a long time.

Born in Accra, Rooted in Cape Coast

His birth was in Accra but his consciousness belongs to Cape Coast, where his mother's family was based and where the family always returned between his father's postings. His father was an agricultural officer who trained as a surveyor, moved into agronomy, and spent his career managing cocoa farming operations for government in rural communities across the country. The family traveled with him — which is why Ben attended over ten schools before secondary, moving from Cape Coast to various small villages and back, covering four or five schools in Cape Coast alone, then Dunkwa, Wineba, Kpando Leford in Accra, and others.

He says it was fun. Every new school was an adventure. He did not accumulate many lasting friendships because they kept moving, but he gained a freedom in that movement he still values. He collected water from the river in the villages not because he had to but because the other kids were doing it and it was enjoyable. He experienced rural life and urban life simultaneously in a way most people get only one of.

His Mother and the Music She Gave Him

His mother Ruth was a teacher — patient, nurturing, liberal-minded in ways that stood in deliberate contrast to her own mother, who had married an Englishman, run a church, and been deeply status-conscious about who her grandchildren mixed with. His mother had seen what rigid social sorting did to people and rejected it. She loved everybody. She took everybody in. She did not distinguish between people based on whether they spoke English or acted English.

She sang constantly. For each of her eight children she had a special song — not her own composition but a song she associated with that child — which she would sing during bathing and grooming. He cannot remember his own song but he saw it happen for the siblings who came after him and it stayed with him. In her old age she would be singing and if you sang with her she was so happy. He misses that.

She was also his first vocal coach. When he began developing nasal singing habits she heard it and told him directly. She was not surprised when he became a musician. She saw it in him early and guided the development with quiet precision.

What she taught him most was a lesson about provocation delivered when he was a small boy being taunted by his older brother. His brother kept calling him a mad man's name. Ben would chase him across the compound throwing stones. His mother watched the whole performance and called him over. She said: you know you are not a mad man. You know that is not your name. So when he calls you that name and you react, you are doing his work for him. Ignore him and it will stop. He ignored. It stopped. He has used that principle on social media trolls for decades and it continues to work.

His Father and the World of Tradition

His father was a typical Akan man in the traditional sense — many children on the paternal side, at least 21 that Ben knows of, most of whom did not grow up together. He ran government cocoa operations and took Ben along sometimes to observe. What Ben noticed as a child was that the local farmers registered on the government payroll, came to mark themselves in at dawn, and immediately went back to their own farms, returning only at the end of the day to mark out.

This was not laziness or deception in their own understanding. It was a statement about value. They had always owned their own farms, no matter the size. They understood what their labor was worth. The government wage did not come close. They felt they were being robbed. Ben says this insight — that cocoa farming became successful in Ghana because of the Abusa system, a traditional tripartite arrangement in which labor, management, and ownership all share the profits — has never been properly absorbed by the people who design government policy. The system had no exploitation. It had trust. It had everyone with skin in the game. It worked.

His father taught him what being a man meant in a traditional sense. Without that side Ben says there is a lot he would have missed and shunned. The depth and the non-superficiality of Akan culture — what it means to truly treasure something — came through his father.

St. John's Preparatory, the Matron's Whip, and a Tortoise

St. John's Preparatory School in Cape Coast was the attempt to stabilize Ben's schooling given the constant movement. It was a boarding school, which meant he lived there — a small boy from a big compound with gardens and fruit trees and chickens suddenly confined to a schedule run by a bell. He says he enjoyed it. Childhood was magical wherever he went.

He remembers a matron in the dining room who carried a long whip and would suddenly lash out without warning. One day she caught him mid-meal. He did not react the way she expected. She whipped him again. He got up and ran. He still cannot understand why an adult would do that to a child who was simply eating.

He also remembers going into the forest to collect water and catching a tortoise in the river with a friend. They brought it back to the compound and let it loose somewhere within the grounds. Whether it ate anything at all he has no idea. These were the joys.

Famous Flames and the Cape Coast Pop Chain Era

St. Augustine's College in Cape Coast was where the music took organized form. The Famous Flames — a student band with two guitars, bass, melodica, and drums — needed a lead singer. They remembered that Ben had performed at the Saturday night entertainment and asked him. The first rehearsal he was so struck he could not sing at all. He went home, told himself to stop being ridiculous, went back, and it worked.

The first public performance he was supposed to share with a friend who knew the song. When they were called to the stage, the friend jumped out of the window and left him alone at the microphone. He performed the song anyway. He cannot remember what it was.

The repertoire was Otis Redding, soul, romantic material. Sitting by the Dock of the Bay. These Arms of Mine. He was an Otis specialist. Their rivals were Mfantsipim and Adisadel, the latter of which had Alfred Bannerman — now a world-famous guitarist — playing in a band called the Beavers. They settled their competition in inter-school pop chains. Judges from among the teachers declared winners. He is still not completely sure Mfantsipim was ever beaten convincingly.

They traveled. During long vacations they would get permission to use the school's instruments, find promoters who booked gigs and kept most of the money, take public transport to Lome, Kumasi, Cape Coast venues — the old hotel near the bus stop that became SG Bank — playing at Tiptoe, at Circle, wherever there was a stage. They slept at the YMCA. They ran their own economy. He appeared on Mike Keegan's television show as a teenager, performing and doing a full interview. His aunties in their circles could not believe it.

His father approved of the music but worried about what he had observed of musicians generally — always at the bar, people buying them drinks, the drift into drinking as a lifestyle. He told Ben it was fine to play but he did not want him to end up there. Ben did not end up there.

Sixth Form in Tema and University of Ghana

After St. Augustine's he went to sixth form in Tema, a complete change of atmosphere — no compulsory church, mixed students, girls in proximity for the first time. He enjoyed it enormously. He remembers it as seriously popping. He still had occasional GBC television appearances during this period so the music was never fully put down.

He enrolled at the University of Ghana in 1969 to study agricultural economics. He did not put his hands inside a cow's mouth. The cow was not his friend and he had no way of communicating with it if it decided to clench. He refused. He let that particular practical requirement pass him by.

What he enjoyed was agri-economics, because he could think through it analytically. He could visualize it. He did not have to memorize characteristics the way crop science required. The degree gave him an armory, he says — a general capacity for problem-solving that has served every dimension of his life. It did not make him a better musician, but it gave him the confidence to write his own songs.

He formed a band at Legon called Agroa Guda, which he renders as the children are still coming — because that is the nature of life, people keep blooming and coming through. The band played only two gigs at the school auditorium, performing mostly his own compositions, including what would become some of the central tracks on his first album. Six of the main album tracks were tested with that university band. He says the reaction at those two gigs is part of why he is sitting in this chair today — many years later, people still remembered the phrases they had heard only once.

His hall tutor at Legon was Professor Kofi Assakou, who asked him probing questions at what were supposed to be posh social events and validated Ben's instincts about who he was — African, Ghanaian, Fante, Akan — at a moment when that validation from an adult he respected made him not look back.

Baya: The Debut Album

The title track of his debut album was written at university. Baya is an Akan word meaning back — in all senses, including sometimes a reference to a woman's back — but for him it meant a return to something, a going back. He had been studying a foreign curriculum, playing covers and foreign songs, and decided he wanted to do something with a more traditional orientation. The word for him signified reflection and return. The album carried that intention through.

His name George Bernard — chosen by his mother after George Bernard Shaw, a writer she admired — never felt like him. When the teachers read it from the register it sounded corny. Everybody called him Ben, which was actually a Ghanaian derivation: his brother was Kofi, called Koba at home, and when Ben came along they tried calling him Koba too since he was also born on a Tuesday, but it didn't work, and the variations eventually settled into Ben — which is the male form of Ba. It is not a contraction of Bernard. Bernard never successfully became anything.

Shipping, the 1979 Coup, and the Buga Buga Threat

After university he did national service teaching agricultural science at a secondary school in Ashanti. He found teaching young people with curious minds genuinely enjoyable. Then he moved to a shipping company in Tema as a commercial manager — canvassing for cargo, managing the commercial side of import and export, working out of offices near Kwame Nkrumah Circle.

When the 1979 revolution came, his boss ran. Soldiers with guns would come to the houses of people they considered well-to-do and try to extort them. There were atrocities at traffic checkpoints. People lost their lives for nothing. He had to drive his wife from Accra to Legon Hospital through curfew checkpoints in the middle of the night when she went into labor — hoping not to meet someone evil, praying through every barrier.

He was not entirely sorry the system before the coup existed — it had never worked for the ordinary person — but the coup itself was terrifying. He believes Rawlings may have been a necessary intervention in the specific sense that the so-called Buga Buga elements, soldiers who had developed a taste for power and were plotting to kill everyone over 40, had to be stopped. That kind of thinking — that your only basis for leadership is access to a gun — has no logic and no legitimacy. He says it matter-of-factly, as historical observation rather than political endorsement.

The executions shocked him in a way, he admits, though not because the individuals were necessarily innocent. The problem was the absence of proper investigation, the personal selection involved in who was taken, and the impossibility of justice under those conditions.

Aban Versus Oman: His Central Political Argument

He returns to this throughout the conversation, in different forms and from different angles, but the core is always the same. Aban — government as Ghanaians know it — is a garrison. The word comes from the original Akan understanding that what the colonial administration represented was a wall, a separation, a structure that imposed rather than served. Traditional understanding of government says: you drag aban on the floor, you use it and abuse it, because that is what it does to you. You do not carry it on your shoulders and treasure it.

Oman — meaning the people, the community, the country in its true sense — is what you love with your whole heart and your whole life. The two are not the same thing. Government as currently practiced in Ghana is aban — a continuation of the colonial structure, handed to a different class of people after independence but not fundamentally changed in its relationship to ordinary citizens.

He points to the fact that you cannot effectively go to a police station for redress if you are a traditional community person. The system does not speak your language, literally and figuratively. It was not designed for you. The courts cost a fortune and require a lawyer to translate everything. The legal system is adversarial where traditional systems were consiliatory. The chiefs have been disempowered — they cannot even stop illegal mining on their own lands because the army and police have no formal obligation to take direction from them. The parties that fight to control aban have no community roots and no training for leadership in any traditional sense. And the President has been given so much power that everything can be made legal by whoever controls the office.

He is not despairing. He is angry in the way that a person is angry who has understood something clearly and cannot understand why others cannot see it. The Japanese, he says, the Chinese, the Indians — they did not start by teaching their people a foreign language. They established who they were first. You must be able to answer the question of who you are before you try to compete with anyone else on their terms.

His proposal is not revolution but restoration: give the chiefs back their power as a legitimate upper chamber with a traditional lens on legislation. Study and teach Ghanaian culture from infancy as a core subject — not as an add-on but as the foundation. Do research into our own practices and history rather than only importing frameworks from elsewhere. Stop sending money to import expertise for things Ghanaians already know how to do.

The Abusa Model and What Economics Missed

The Abusa system — labor, management, and ownership sharing profits equitably — made cocoa farming in Ghana successful because it gave everyone a stake. No one was being robbed. No one was being treated as an input like sulfur or a catalyst to be priced at minimum. The farmers understood the value of their own work and they refused a wage system that did not reflect it. That is not backwardness — it is economic wisdom. Human capital should not be treated like a commodity input, he says. That is what the farmers who walked away from government payrolls already understood.

His broader argument is that the Ibusa model was part of a coherent philosophy of life that is still available to be learned from, studied, and adapted. The philosophy says: the living are caretakers of resources on behalf of the unborn. We do not own the land. We hold it. We are supposed to improve it and leave it worthwhile. Galamsey — the illegal mining destroying Ghana's river bodies and farmlands — is the precise opposite of this philosophy. When Ghanaian communities revered river bodies, people called it fetish and backwardness. If they had continued that reverence, the rivers would not be in the state they are in today.

Music, Highlife, and the Clubs That Became Churches

The live band and pop chain culture that shaped him — the Famous Flames, the inter-school competitions, the weekend performances at hotels and clubs across Cape Coast and beyond — largely disappeared after the Rawlings era. A lot of the venues became churches. Musicians left Ghana because there was no business. Instrumentation suffered. The learned proficiency on live instruments that produced his generation of musicians got replaced by digital studio culture. He is not dismissive of what came after — he recognizes that people found ways to express themselves — but he is clear about what was lost.

He believes if the live band school culture had survived with good guidance and financial support it would have produced and continued to produce musicians of a different kind. The depth and maturity that comes from learning an instrument, from performing with others, from reading an audience and responding in real time — that cannot be completely replicated in a studio.

He praises highlife without qualification or apology. He dismisses the snobbery he encountered growing up, when listening to highlife was considered native and listening to foreign rock and roll was considered sophisticated. That inversion was deliberate — part of making people see everything about themselves as inferior. He never accepted it then and does not accept it now.

On Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and the Alien Source

He respects Nkrumah but has reservations. Nkrumah was a fantastic man — the lies told to discredit him during and after 1966 were transparent to anyone paying attention. But Nkrumah's pan-Africanism had an alien source. It was a movement conceived by people who thought they were emancipated and wanted to maintain a Black identity, but it was not rooted in the communities. It came from outside. Pan-Africanism that is not built from the ground up — from the family unit, the busiao pim, the odikro, the chief, the community — cannot truly thrive because it lacks the organic roots that give legitimacy and staying power. Any community that succeeds, anywhere in the world, has a strong belief in its own culture and history and is proud of who it is. Anybody who is proud to be somebody else is a lost soul. That is his assessment and he does not soften it.

On Religion, Spirituality, and Asking the Right Questions

He does not practice religion. He lives spirituality. The distinction matters to him enormously. Organized religion as it arrived in Africa was used to tell people to obey their masters, to accept suffering in this life while awaiting reward in the next, to consider the knowledge and practices of their ancestors as inferior and shameful. He cannot accept that and he does not. He finds it impossible to look at the story of Adam and Eve — two sons, one kills the other, and somehow the population multiplies — and not ask basic logical questions. He is not asking to offend anyone. He is asking because God, if God is anything, is truth, and truth is not afraid of questions.

He says if you fill in a religion box on any official form he writes spirituality. He wants to write it. He knows himself to be spirit and that spirit to be divine. You do not need an institution to mediate that.

On AI, Soul, and What Cannot Be Replicated

He is not afraid of artificial intelligence. AI can simulate and copy but cannot create. When it appears to create it is assembling and recombining fragments of what human intelligence has already produced. That is why they called it artificial — the word was chosen deliberately and honestly. What concerns him far more is the scarcity of genuine human intelligence in the world right now. He asks — touching his head — whether what is being done in the world today, the bombs being dropped, the people being killed for material interests, can honestly be called intelligent. He invites whoever is listening to touch their own head and answer truthfully.

If AI generates a highlife song, he says, it will have no soul. Because you cannot copy soul. Soul is what happens when a specific human life, with all its specific griefs and joys and knowledge, makes something. There is no algorithm for that.

Without the Applause: Who is Ben Brako?

He pauses at this question and laughs at himself for pausing. Then he says: I try to be an honest and truthful person. I want to be real. If you ask me to pretend that everything is equal and fine when it is not, I cannot do it. I will not fight you and cause havoc. But I will not make it comfortable for you either. I will not make it easy.

He regrets that there were times he let things slide he knew were wrong — times he was cajoled into accepting things that were being taken from him, and he allowed it because the fight seemed too costly. He wishes he had insisted on the things he knew were right. He has tried to learn from it.

What gives him peace is peace itself. Being able to be yourself. Being able to relax and enjoy your life — and enjoying your life does not mean drinking and material acquisition. Even the thoughts you have can bring enormous enjoyment. He is 74 and feels nothing of the kind. He does not know what a 74-year-old is supposed to feel but it is not what he is feeling.

He is writing a new album. Still highlife. Of course. He wants to do a lecture tour too. He wants to stir up debate. We owe it to the unborn, he says. We are supposed to be taking care of this place for them.

What Ghana Must Never Forget

Ghana must never forget where it comes from. Who it is. And never forget the pride that comes with knowing that. Never.

Future Guest Recommendations

Ben recommends Emmanuel Crepy — a young man he describes as having characteristics and assets which are very enviable. He also suggests Asaropong, who will be returning to Ghana just after June 11th and has written books on traditional spirituality that Ben says will amaze anyone who reads them. And he recommends Professor Kwami Kakari, the communications professor.

Closing Exchange on the Word "Ayekoo"

After the formal interview ends, Ben explains the word ayekoo to Kafui. He says it literally means thank you but in a deeper sense means: whatever you did for me, get it back a thousand times. The word for a thousand is also another meaning embedded in the phrase. He is fascinated by Akan as a language because the tones carry so many meanings inside one sound — comprehension requires complete attention, not just hearing. He finds that beautiful.