Zandu looks a little different from the other members of my family.
He enjoys equal, and sometimes, better attention than even the youngest member.
He is yet to visit Ghana with us because he requires a slightly special flight arrangement, but we have seen some of his lookalikes board aeroplanes.
He will join us for our next vacation and everybody seems excited.
Like all of us, Zandu has DNA, which basically means that he has a genetic material that determines how he grows and develops, how he would reproduce (after himself) and how he functions.
Women’s worst fear
Zandy is our rottweiler family member. He is a dog. Like me and other animals, Zandu produces cells.
Plants and bacteria also do the same. This is the whole mystery about the Deoxyribonucleic Acid Test, the dreaded creature known as DNA, which has dogged many marriages and broken many hearts.
Zandu is never scared of a DNA test, but the mammals around him, especially human beings, palpitate at the sheer mention of DNA.
Often, it is women who fear this test, because when the results do not meet certain expectations, armageddon is born. Families have crashed.
Kingdoms have fallen. Empires have sunk. Nations have collapsed.
Last week, Ghana’s heart was also broken when we buried our sympathies for the gallant eight patriots who perished in August’s helicopter crash under the rubble of a DNA campaign by the family of one of the victims.
The surviving wife of Comrade Samuel Aboagye, a former deputy coordinator of NADMO, is embroiled in a paternity battle for a beautiful child who has allegedly been linked to other men.
It is embarrassing and traumatising for an innocent lady who is still mourning her young husband, but it is more unsettling and disgraceful for a family that is not willing to keep secret things secret, to protect the dignity of the departed.
Look closely.
Take another look. When you take a casual look at the child next door, you would find they may have grown to resemble a finer specimen of somebody you know.
The next time you see them, they may have changed a little, to look like another person in their lineage.
From one resemblance to the other, every person is born into a family, every family into a community, and every community into the larger human tribe.
This was the traditional structure of our DNA until two professors came together to create mayhem for children born to unfaithful parents, by delving into science to discover the double-helix structure of the DNA.
DNA before baby outdooring
Blame it all on Professor James Watson, the American molecular biologist, geneticist and zoologist, and Professor Francis Crick, an English biophysicist and neuroscientist, whose groundbreaking research popularised the DNA test.
Since then, there have been a lot of problems for marriages.
Last week (06 November) when Watson was reported dead at the age of 97, the world celebrated his many contributions to science, including his Nobel Prize for physiology in 1962.
Why would anybody contemplate a DNA test? The joke on social media in the wake of the paternity questions of Aboagye’s daughter, is a recommendation for parents of newborns to invest in DNA tests ahead of the baby ‘outdooring’ or church blessing.
Suddenly, it seems there is an unlikely paternity story in every street corner in Ghana, especially among Ghanaians abroad who only get to know the true paternity of their children when foreign Embassies demand DNA proof.
As part of interventions to curb fake marriages and other mischievous plots for immigration purposes, these foreign embassies introduced DNA to establish a relationship between a parent abroad and a dependent child elsewhere.
This well-intentioned program may have proven effective as an immigration policy, but it has wrecked marriages and frustrated the futures of many children, who may have been exposed as not sharing any genetic property with a parent, usually the sponsor abroad.
Sadly, the embassies do not have any remedial policies for these children when DNA tears them away from their families.
The only option the embassies provide is for the sponsor to adopt such children, but it never happens.
Beyond DNA
Most surprisingly, Professor Watson, the DNA discoverer, is not known to have conducted DNA tests to establish the paternity of Rufus Robert Watson and Duncan James Watson, his biological kids.
When Duncan reported his death at a New York hospice, nobody demanded to see his DNA relationship with the great scientist.
This is how every child-parent family relationship must be treated.
Once a child has been linked to one person, a paternity test may be requested by the child only, and not either parent or a third party.
This will preserve some respect for the institution.
In the present case where Comrade Aboagye’s wife has reportedly refused to ‘donate’ her beautiful baby like a specimen for a laboratory experiment, the decision must be respected by every interested party.
Mrs Aboagye sees her daughter beyond a blood sample, sputum or hair particle, to be used as a source for DNA extraction and analysis.
Mrs Aboagye comes from a place in Northern Ghana where human beings are first treated as spirits, not just blood in veins.
Perhaps, Watson may have made nonsense of his DNA discovery by selling his Nobel Prize for $4.1 at an auction, after he was ostracized by the global scientific community for saying that Africans are not intelligent.
He was reported as lamenting that he feels like an ‘unperson’ after the experience. That might mean if you are a person enough, do not go for DNA. Zandu might even be better than you.
Tissues Of The Issues
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