Shatta Wale II: A walking paradox

After my last article on the self-proclaimed dancehall King, founder, leader and life patron of the Shatta Movement(SM), I thought it will be fair to know the man a bit more. Something in his temperament and upbringing must account for his lifestyle. I left a half an hour conversation with a close confidant of his convinced that he was not merely an attention seeker. He is in fact a perfectly good man with an emotional intelligence deficiency worsened by the badman ideology.

According to the source, he is in fact the shy type. He extremely introverted with an incredible capacity for showing respect to others. He is described an extremely generous and self-sacrificing beyond reason individual. He is also very trusting and quite dependent on the people he loves and trust. Quite a contrast you might think—perhaps.  But this personality is not a very rare one per se. Such persons who easily sacrifice themselves and trust others tend to expect the same treatment from others. In our beloved Ghana, you don’t get a lot of that kind of integrity and hence disappointment is the other of the day. The self-sacrificing individual suffers.

Temperaments like his; possibly melancholic is a bit of an extremist. They are either being too nice or reacting too violently. This violence whiles not their nature results from the depth of emotions. This character is also a deep thinker and we know that actions are the result of thoughts. In between is the emotional alarm system that warns us. Deep thinking begets extreme actions and the individual appears unrestrained. Yet those who are close will tell you what wonderful person they are by nature.

In Shatta’s case, he may need a good understanding of his temperament and the reason why he behaves the way he does. He must also understand the nature of his environment and learn to accept how it works. So that he will be clear on how he fits into it and how he can influence it with what his has towards an achievement of his goals. He must also understand that he is influenced by the dancehall culture which is to a large extent abusive and violent. This makes his extremism even worse. Yet he can control himself from the thought level but only if he understands enough.

He must finally realize that what he does on a daily basis will culminate into his larger life and therefore the amount of positives he accumulates in the seconds and the hours are what will determine if his life is a positive or negative one. Shatta Movement like most tools in the hand of individuals is like a knife, he can cook dinner with it or he can stab someone with it. What will be King Wale?