The Day the “Primitive” Village Revealed It Was a Cut Above the “Modern” State: An Insideout Chronicle on the Living Intelligence of Oman

By Ben Brako

The Neural Kingdom

Every nation, at its heart, is a nervous system — a network through which signals of life, danger, joy, and duty are transmitted. The question is not whether a people are connected, but how.
In the Ghanaian imagination, that living network once had a name: Oman.

Oman is not merely territory or government; it is the breathing organism of kinship and duty. Its arteries are family ties, its neurons the councils of elders, its synapses the drums that speak across valleys. Through Oman, the will of the people travels as vibration, as heartbeat. It knows before it is told. It feels before it is measured.

Then came Aban — the fortress-state, the mechanical mind. It severed the nerves and replaced them with wires and files. It mistook information for understanding and bureaucracy for wisdom.
What follows is the story of a moment when the two systems collided — when the living intelligence of the village revealed itself to be a cut above the state.

The Office of Nothingness

At the Ministry of Cocoa Affairs district office in Ofinso, I met laughter instead of data.
“Records?” they said. “We have none. Go to the farms if you want to know.”

Thus began my five-mile trek to Namong, accompanied by an amused officer. By the time we arrived, the farmers had already gone to their fields. Only the aged and infirm remained — five weary souls, long retired from the work.

Day two was no different. Frustrated, I complained. The officer smiled and said, “Let’s go see the Chief.”

The Chief’s Laughter

That evening, I entered the Chief’s courtyard. The air carried the fragrance of wood-smoke and authority. The Chief sat surrounded by elders, radiating calm wisdom.

As soon as he saw me, he laughed — not mockingly, but knowingly.
“So, the young man has finally come to his senses,” he said. “You have been walking all over my village, questioning my people, and never thought to greet me? You think I do not know? I have been watching you.”

I apologized and explained my mission. He listened, then said quietly:
“You are a government man, come to collect information to assess us for increasing the taxes on my farmers. You wear innocence like perfume, but we can still smell Aban on you.”

That sentence pierced me. I saw myself through his eyes: an emissary of a system that had long stopped serving its people, yet demanded their obedience.

Still, he was fair. “It is not for me to decide. Come tomorrow at five-thirty in the morning. Speak to the farmers yourself. If they believe you, they will tell you what you seek.”

The Assembly of the People

At dawn, I returned to Namong, reaching at six — half an hour late.
Before me stood the entire community of cocoa farmers, already assembled in the courtyard. The Chief sat in state, his face both stern and amused.

“You are late,” he said. “These people should already be on their farms. Speak.”

He introduced me, narrated my mission, and then — in a gesture of true democracy — invited the farmers to decide for themselves.
“I do not trust him fully,” the Chief said openly, “but I leave the decision to you. Hear him and decide.”

That moment has never left me. The Chief, often caricatured as an autocrat by modern narratives, was in fact the embodiment of consultative governance. He was transparent with his doubts, accountable to his people, and trusted them to choose.

I spoke haltingly, stumbling over my Twi. The farmers grew restless. Then one of them said, “Massa, just give us the questions.”

In minutes, the courtyard transformed. Tables appeared. Groups formed. Answers flowed. By sunrise, I had my hundred data samples.
The “primitive” village had accomplished in one hour what the “modern” bureaucracy could not achieve in years.

The Revelation

That morning, I realized that Namong was not a village — it was a living organism.

The people functioned as one composite being, each member attuned to the others and to nature. The Chief was not a ruler but a node in a great neural network — a consciousness connecting the people to themselves and to the land.

Nothing went unseen. Every movement in the village echoed through its invisible web of relations. The Chief’s knowledge of my arrival was not surveillance in the modern sense, but awareness — a living intelligence cultivated through interdependence.

In this system, no one was “beneath” authority; they were part of it. Each villager was both eye and ear of the whole.

When the Chief said, “Come tomorrow,” the message pulsed through the network of kinship faster than any broadcast could travel. At dawn, the entire village stood ready.

This was time-keeping with purpose. The same people derided as “primitive” had convened before sunrise — disciplined, punctual, and efficient — not because they were commanded, but because they were invested.

Meanwhile, the salaried officers of Aban, equipped with budgets and mandates, treated time as an inconvenience. For them, punctuality was punishment, not purpose.

The Kingdom as a Neural System

Each village is a cell. Each Chief a neuron. Each Akwasidae — when communities gather to report to the King — is the synapse: the great transmission of the collective mind.

The Asante Kingdom was not merely hierarchical; it was cognitive. A living intelligence. The King, Otumfuo, was not just a monarch but the consciousness of the organism, receiving and processing information from every limb of Oman.
That is how a true nation breathes.

Compare this to Aban — a system built on distrust and detachment. In Aban, authority is imposed, not grown. Its officers are paid to serve, yet serve self. The very man who accompanied me confessed that their office’s main occupation was selling insecticides meant to be distributed freely to farmers.

Aban steals from the people because it does not belong to them.
Oman serves the people because it is them.

The Propaganda of Modernity

For centuries, we have been told that the village is backward, that tradition is slow, that modernity is efficient. Namong exposed that lie.

The only efficiency the modern state has mastered is the efficient extraction of wealth from the people — taxes without trust, policies without pulse.

In contrast, the so-called “primitive” system was not only efficient but ethical. It was transparent, responsive, and immediate — powered by relationship, not regulation.

What Aban needed budgets and reports to achieve, Oman accomplished with integrity and shared understanding. The Chief did not issue memos; he sent a message through the human heart.

The Insideout Lesson

That day, I understood that civilization is not a matter of technology, but of truth. Modernity, as we practice it, is an aesthetic of imitation — an outside-in performance of progress. But real progress grows insideout — from values that align with our essence, our rhythm, our sense of duty.

Namong proved that governance works when it is alive — when authority, accountability, and affection form one continuum.

Aban is mechanical; Oman is organic.
Aban rules by distance; Oman governs by closeness.
Aban speaks in documents; Oman communicates in drumbeats.

And until we reclaim the Oman mind — the consciousness of the whole — we shall remain strangers to ourselves, ruled by systems that neither see us nor serve us.

Epilogue: The Laugh That Echoes

I still hear the Chief’s laughter sometimes — deep, rich, instructive. It was the laughter of wisdom watching ignorance masquerade as knowledge. He had seen through my education, through my mission, into the hollow pretensions of modern governance.

He was saying, without saying:

“You came to measure the farm. But who will measure the people?”

Namong measured me. And in doing so, it measured us all.

For the village has always been a cut above the state — not in wealth or weaponry, but in wisdom.
It knows what the state forgets: that a people bound by duty and truth are faster, stronger, and more enduring than any institution built on deceit.

And that is the lesson still waiting to be heard, when the drums call again.

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