Ghanainisms

Chop chop – Some of my favourite Ghanainisms

Here, to eat is to chop, edibles are chopables and restaurants are chop bars. It’s a great word and still after 8 months it makes me smile when people talk about chopping this and that. Of course, it can lead to misunderstandings like the time another volunteer had a Ghanaian friend in the kitchen helping her cook dinner and she asked him to chop the tomatoes, only to find him chop chopping!

Another great & overused word here is pick. You can pick a taxi or a taxi can pick you. You pick someone on the back of your moto. You pick water from the fridge, you pick a phone call or if you’re not answering you’re not picking. The funniest use of the word I’ve heard however was a colleague describing caesarean sections as a “cut & pick”. I’ve also heard cut and paste as “pick & put”. Cracks my up!

To flash means to call someone & hang up before they answer in the hope they will ring you and thereby save your credit. It does lead to pretty funny sayings like “he keeps flashing me”, “flash me”, “did you flash?”, “I will flash you later”, etc....endlessly amusing to us whites.

My all time favourite though is these high-pitched exclamations – oh! It has to be done in a proper high pitch & is therefore particularly funny from the men. I have heard a colleague on the phone answering only in these high pitched exclamations & hang up. It cracks me up. Then there’s the other o. Not high pitched & just put on the end of a sentence like “I am hungry o” or “we suffer here in the north o” or “i like your dress o”, etc... It’s nice o. To agree with something or if you are getting something (“are you getting it?”) it’s a kindof deep nasally “ahaaaah”. Everything is “ahaaaah”. It’s funny o!

Another one I hear a lot in Bolga here is Sollamia – meaning white person. “Sollamia sollamia I am greeting you”, “sollamia good morning”, etc... Or I might be sitting in work or on the bus & I hear blah blah sollamia blah blah & people are obviously talking about you, the only sollamia around. Sometimes I get called white lady, white man or my favourite, just white. Hello white. White, where are you going? I like it. I’m white, they’re black. None of this PC business.

Another incredibly overused word here is come. “I’ll go & come”, i.e. I’ll be back later or shortened to just “go come”. “I’m coming”. People are constantly coming. They make take a while to come but they are coming. The rain is coming. The cheque is coming. You regularly hear sayings like “let me free myself and come”, “let me bath and come” or as our secretary at the last Senior Management Team meeting said “let me urinate and come”.

Of course, if it’s not coming it’s finished. Like the rain is finished. The rice is finished. The chicken is finished. The photocopier is finished. It’s finished. I saw recently a picture of Jesus on the cross with the title -It is finished.

Funerals give rise to some funny use of words. So, if the person died recently, it’s a fresh funeral, meaning the body is “in the fridge”. Otherwise the funeral is not fresh, the body was buried ages ago but they are just having the party now. So, when you ask someone how their weekend was, they will invariably mention funerals – fresh & not fresh! Anyways, it’s getting to 9, gotta pick something to chop and comeJ

Other favourites:

• Are you sure?


• It is not the best. (could be a great understatement, e.g. The famine is not the best.)


• Let me land (let me have my say).


• Walloped! (enjoy something such as he walloped the money/ the girl etc... )


• But why? (with the upturned hands)


• How? (short for how are you?)


• By His Grace – way overused e.g. How was the weekend?

By His Grace.

How will Ghana do against Uraguay?

By His Grace we will score them!

• God is a Ghanaian!