Spend ten minutes on Ghanaian social media this month, or listen to the chatter in a campus cafeteria in Legon, and you will encounter a recurring wave of cultural panic.

The source of this collective outrage? Street food and casual slang.

Pundits and self-appointed guardians of culture are sounding the alarm: young Ghanaians are reportedly ordering puff-puff instead of bofrot, calling koose akara, referring to sobolo as zobo, and punctuating every expression of mild disbelief with a theatrical "omo" or "chai." Heated threads lament that our very "Ghanaian-ness" is evaporating, swallowed whole by Nigerian popular culture.

It is easy to join the chorus of indignation. But the fury over akara and puff-puff reveals far more about Ghana's own unaddressed cultural neuroses than it does about Nigerian influence.

The question we should be asking is why it took a misnamed fried dough ball for us to notice that we have been systematically abandoning our own cultural inheritance for decades. That young Ghanaians borrow terms from across the border is the smaller part of the story.

The hypocrisy of the "vernacular" elite

The sudden passion for defending Ghanaian identity feels painfully performative when set against our everyday social habits.

Consider our relationship with language. Ghana is a country where elite private basic schools have spent generations punishing children for speaking their mother tongues. Headmasters proudly instituted systems of public humiliation: students caught speaking Twi, Ga, Ewe, or Dagbani were made to wear derogatory placards reading "I Spoke Vernacular."

Generations of middle-class Ghanaian parents took active pride in raising children who could not construct a coherent sentence in their ancestral language. Speaking the Queen's English with a clipped, polished cadence was enshrined as the proxy for intelligence and refinement, while speaking local languages with fluency was subtly coded as uneducated, backward, or "too local."

Yet today, the very class that treated indigenous languages like an embarrassing secret is seized with righteous fury because a teenager used the word "omo" on TikTok.

You cannot spend sixty years teaching your children that their native tongues are a handicap, only to feign horror when they adopt the slang of their neighbors who actually take pride in theirs.

Church clothes and borrowed aesthetics

This cultural schizophrenia extends well beyond spoken language. Look at our wardrobes and consumption habits.

Wearing African print, hand-woven kente, or northern fugu went from being standard, everyday attire to a costume reserved almost exclusively for Sunday church services, traditional weddings, and state funerals. In corporate boardrooms, government ministries, and universities, three-piece woolen suits and Western corporate wear remain the mandatory armor of professionalism, regardless of Accra's 32-degree humidity.

We eagerly embrace every passing Western lifestyle trend (matcha lattes, boba pearls, Scandinavian minimalist decor) and treat anything stamped with foreign approval as inherently superior and "cool."

There is nothing wrong with global exposure or with enjoying foreign cultures. But in Ghana the transaction has long been one-sided: we rush to discard our own aesthetic traditions the moment a shiny import enters the room.

The Nigerian mirror

When Ghanaians complain about the ubiquity of Nigerian slang, music, and food terminology, they are reacting to a mirror they do not wish to look into.

Nigeria did not conquer West African pop culture by military force or imperial decree. It won it with unapologetic cultural conviction.

For thirty years, Nigerian creatives invested in their own vernacular storytelling. Nollywood directors shot low-budget films on the streets of Lagos and Enugu, unbothered by whether Western film festivals understood them. Nigerian musicians sang in Yoruba, Igbo, and Nigerian Pidgin over high-energy beats, and international audiences learned the slang if they wanted to sing along. Nigerian designers turned traditional agbada and senator wear into modern red-carpet power statements.

While Ghanaians were busy worrying about sounding "proper" and palatable to the West, Nigerians built a cultural export machine that turned daily life into global soft power.

Instead of sulking over the fact that a Ghanaian vendor uses the word puff-puff to appeal to a wider market, the Ghanaian public ought to ask harder questions:

• What have we done to institutionalize, document, and celebrate our own culinary history?
• Why has our creative arts sector been chronically underfunded by successive governments?
• Why do we mock local highlife artists as "old-fashioned" while lavishing praise on foreign chart-toppers?

Culture is practice, not outrage

Culture cannot survive on nostalgia, and it certainly cannot be saved by grievance.

Culture is not an antique museum exhibit that stays preserved simply because you throw a tantrum when someone touches it with dirty hands. Culture is a living, breathing muscle. It survives only when people love it enough to speak it, wear it, eat it, fund it, teach it, and pass it on.

If you do not teach your children Ga at home, your culture is fading. If you do not support Ghanaian literature, independent cinema, and regional music collectives, your culture is fading. If you treat a woman wearing traditional cloth as "archaic" while admiring Western fast fashion, your culture is fading.

We did not start losing ourselves when bofrot was called puff-puff. We began losing ourselves the day we decided that being Ghanaian was something to be managed and toned down in polite company.

If we genuinely care about our Ghanaian-ness, let us stop policing casual slang and start doing the heavy, joyous work of cultural production. Until we value what is ours enough to live it every day, we have no right to complain when the world fills the void we so casually left behind.