There is a commonly held notion that Ghanaians do not support their own. I have often fought back against this idea because I am of the school of thought that we are not entitled to anyone’s support just because of nationality. I also believe that great things end up getting the support they deserve anyway. But living in Ghana for as long as I have, I have also come to accept the fact that, great things do not always end up getting the support they deserve. There are a lot of reasons why this is the case but one reason that has always bothered me is how much value is placed on what something looks like rather than its intrinsic value. You don’t have to be great or even good at what you do to be celebrated around here. You just need to play the right game, meet and know the right kind of people and do things that will get you talked about. The Ghanaian media seems to have both created and fueled an ecosystem that gives this unfortunate situation all the nourishment it needs to thrive.
I came to this story randomly while swiping and liking my way through Instagram. I saw a post from Chris Attoh on my explore page that was surprising. I have been a fan of his since the days of The Perfect Picture and had gotten to know him briefly years later but I hadn’t heard or seen much of him in a very long time. The last thing about him I remember hearing was the tragic story of his wife’s passing in the United States. As someone with a limited capacity for bad news, I did not follow up on that story. So when I saw this post, which was a screenshot of an article from Deadline Hollywood announcing an upcoming TV project he was a part of in the United States, I was baffled. I took a deep dive into to his Instagram page to find out that he had indeed been in Hollywood for a few years and had been involved in a number of projects here and there. As recently as February this year, he had co-starred in the movie ‘Lover’s Discretion’ with Shanti Lowry (The Game, Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle). How had I missed all this? Was I so out of touch with pop culture news that I had missed the story of one of our own breaking into Hollywood? I proceeded to find answers to these questions by googling him
and that was when I made an unsurprising but deeply saddening discovery. There was almost no mention of these anywhere on Ghanaian media.
By the fifth page of my google search, I had found only two articles that mentioned Chris Attoh’s Hollywood career. Both of them were from Ghanaweb.com. The first one was about a show he was cast in last year and the second was a report on an interview he had done for VoyageLA. Every other headline in those five pages of search results were almost exclusively about the passing of his wife and his divorce from ex-wife Damilola. These headlines were carried by multiple media outlets who found different ways to come at these stories but somehow did not care enough or did not think his career trajectory in the biggest movie market in the world was worth mentioning. The personal tragedies he faced that made for exciting content for these outlets happened in 2017 and 2019; but for context, he has been in about three projects in Los Angeles between 2019 and now.
Like I said at the beginning, I do not think anyone is entitled to our support as Ghanaians, but for a media ecosystem that writes full articles describing in detail Sarkodie’s outfit in his latest Instagram picture, it is disheartening to find that a story of this nature could have slipped through the cracks. Additionally, for an industry that has come to accept the fact that a story written by one news outlet, can be plagiarised by other outlets with impunity, the sheer lack of copies of those two Ghanaweb article was indeed surprising. I will concede that, for the average Ghanaian, Chris Attoh has not been top of mind for a while as a result of him no longer living here, so there isn’t an incentive to go out looking for stories about him but we are also a country that cannot seem to stop creating listicles about which obscure American celebrities may have Ghanaian origins, so that might not be a very good excuse after all. While I have been working on this piece, I have googled actors including Jackie Appiah, Joselyn Dumas and John Dumelo. There is a lot on there about what they post on social media and what they wore to one event or another but almost nothing about their careers or the projects they are working on. Conversely, a cursory search of Mark Ruffalo or Keanu Reeves gave me a pretty good idea of what those actors are doing in their careers currently.
The media is usually a reflection of who we are as a people, but it also plays a significant role in what we become as a society. As we continue to prioritizes sensational content, we will become a nation of sensationalists. The next generation of stars will have even less credibility than the ones we have now because anyone who wants to be a star will understand that you are better off doing something absurd on social media to get any press at all. I will not pretend that these content types I am talking about are not what get the clicks and I am definitely not saying everyone should stop writing those (even though I think we are better off without them). I strongly believe though that, at the very least we can have a balance where, when one of the leading men we had in this country started making strides in Hollywood, we may have seen a headline like ’10 Times Chris Attoh Showed Us A Ghanaian Actor Can Make It In Hollywood’.
COVEBEAT 
Leave a comment