One Man’s Dream Becomes a Dream Village for Rural Ghanaian Community
A Regenerate:Hope story, featuring people who dedicate their energy, time, and love to making our planet a better place for all human beings and more-than-human beings
Clement Matorwmasen is a stern-looking man who is quick to laugh. He takes his work with a similar attitude, meticulous and thoughtful but with an infectious optimism. He is a serial regenerative creator, having founded Green Gold Social Enterprise, Dream Works Ghana, Cletek Services, and Dreamivill; a certified village boy with over twenty years of working with rural grassroots communities; a survivor from hopelessness and attempted suicide; and a tribal leader of the Sosoro Clan within the indigenous Guan-Nchumuru tribe of Oti region in Ghana. Now he’s also a dream maker and dream developer, with his work at Dream Village. His life story is being told in a documentary called Zongo — the biography of an African Dreamer.
Dream Village is exactly as it sounds. A village where dreams are made into reality. Clement started in 2007 by painting a mural artwork of traditional huts, vibrant village life, and nature living side-by-side in Tamale, the capital city of the Northern Region of Ghana. The idea was to inspire people to reconnect with nature and weave together the old and the new in a renewed definition of what it means to be Guan-Nchumuru.
‘We aim to create a collaborative space for co-creation, where individuals can work with nature to thrive. This space will serve as an eco-village, agri-tourism hub, college of life, regenerative hub, prototype hub, co-living and working space, dreamers academy, and a centre for regenerative thinking.’
Remembering their lifeways
In the aftermath of colonisation and colonial rule, many Ghanaians not only lost their autonomy and sovereignty, but also their indigenous knowledge and ways of life. It continues to this day, as the government finds itself in a constant tug-of-war with locals to continue ‘modernising’ and ‘developing’ the country. To modernise is to erase ‘backwards’ ways of living, which includes indigenous wisdom that taught Ghanaians how to live in harmony in their environment for thousands of years. Clement resists this. He is concerned that his tribe will soon go extinct, along with their language, festivals, and ceremonies. In his work with Dream Village, one of the most important pillars is showing fellow Ghanaians how to look inward, bringing back native and ancestral knowledge, starting with recording the oral history of the elders in their tribe to preserving traditional historical artefacts that are being demonised and destroyed in the name of religion.
‘[My goal] is to close the gap between old and young people. Our elders guard the knowledge and many of them are dying. I want to create space for the young to be interested in that knowledge,’ Clement shares with me, looking resolute. ‘Bringing the old and young together revives a sense of community at Dream Village. The youth are fascinated by the stories their elders tell.’
The land provides
Currently, there are 3000 hectares of tribal land under Clement’s jurisdiction which he aims to use to demonstrate how to regenerate soil, grow food, and live in harmony with nature. In most Ghanaian communities, land is owned by families, clans, or Nsuro (Tribal Divisions). Chiefs are made custodians or stewards of the collective land, hence the term ‘customary land’ in land tenureship. It is important to note that families, clans, and Nsuro come together in a form of democracy to elect a tribal chief who becomes the spiritual and authoritative mouthpiece of the entire tribe.
Although people do own land, the soil has been deteriorated by climate change, deforestation, and conventional agricultural practices. Regenerating land takes time, and when a family waits to be fed, time becomes a luxury that many cannot afford. The only alternative to these land-holding families is to sell the land and move to the city. Industrial capitalism has stripped many rural Ghanaians of their independence and ways of subsistence; Clement laments, ‘how do I convince people not to sell their land?’
‘There is a direct relationship between the loss of cultural diversity and the loss of biodiversity. Wherever Indigenous peoples still remain, there is also a corresponding enclave of biodiversity.’
— Winona LaDuke, All Our Relations
In Dream Village, Clement grows traditional food crops and teaches others the traditional ways of growing them, in hopes of bringing back indigenous lifeways through eating. His syntropic farm also grows herbal medicines that have healed his peoples for generations. In regenerating land and biodiversity, he and the farmers are also regenerating cultural diversity and ethnic identity. But this didn’t come without its share of challenges. The land on which they now cultivate was returned to them in 2016 totally degraded after extensive conventional agriculture by the government. Through hard work and regenerative farming practices, a once sandy, bare, lifeless parcel of land turned into a thick and luscious food forest. They now use this space as a training and demonstration farm.
A dream that honours the essence of place
What makes Dream Village so powerful is that it fulfills ‘the uniqueness and significance of its place as a basis for engaging in regenerative [practices]’. Dream Village fulfills the basic needs of all that it serves, producing food and water, as well as housing for displaced youth. It’s also a place to co-create and to collaborate, to train and to learn, and to provide employment opportunities for the youth.
Dream Village connects people with place, as well as with each other. Understanding the needs and potential of everyone that interacts with the space, they have built and continue to build a project that honours the essence of everyone that comes along. They organise regular events for smallholder farmers, such as trainings, workshops, and fireside chats. They build communities through storytelling. They brought together 90 women to form the Moringa Mothers, a woman-led farming collective that experiments with growing organic food to feed themselves and support their families. They have a computer lab and Internet connectivity, training youth to use computers in case their work requires it.
What’s next?
Clement shows me a colourful and detailed masterplan of their new location near the regional capital of Dambai, which offers more convenient transportation options. It illustrates a village with interconnected traditional huts, a food forest, an agricultural college, and more — an autonomous, vibrant, living and working space. ‘We know what we need to do. Getting the finances to support it is the main challenge. Sometimes it feels lonely in this fight with people pulling towards capitalism.’
Clement questions the definitions of poverty and livelihood that neoliberalism and extractive capitalism placed on them. ‘I don’t have money in my account. I do have houses that can host a lot of people. When I build a house, I build a house; I don’t have a mortgage. Even the poorest in Ghana can afford to build a small hut and farm on a small piece of land.’
Clement’s Dream Village is not his alone. What started in 2007 has become a collective dream for all the children, youth, women, and elders in his community. His way of preserving his tribe’s lands, soil, customs, language, culture, and knowledge is a long conversation with all aspects of living — from rebuilding their connection with Mother Earth, to feeding themselves and the soil, to transmitting stories from elders to youth, to vocational training, to integrating indigenous knowledge into their education system. He saw a holistic, beautiful way of living that he and his community now continue to foster and nurture.
What does your Dream Village look like?
Regenerate:Hope is a series that tells the stories and regenerative journeys of people who dedicate their energy, time, and love to making our planet a better place for all human beings and more-than-human beings. If you know a story you would like to share or wish to be a part of the series yourself, please contact us at truequerxs@gmail.com.
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