What a letter from Accra can teach Australia about prejudice and why our convictions must be accompanied by curiosity.
I wrote to Ama after many years. We had not kept in close contact. Life had carried us into different countries, marriages, responsibilities, illnesses, funerals, children, disappointments and repairs. I did not know whether the letter would find her.
I asked whether she remembered the afternoon under the tree when she told me about her father’s discomforting views on the Ewe people. At the time, I believed I was consoling her. Looking back, I realised she had taught me something: prejudice is not always a shout. Sometimes it is an inheritance spoken softly by someone we love. Sometimes it arrives as advice. Sometimes it calls itself protection.
Before posting the letter, I added one more sentence: I am still learning how not to inherit every blindness handed to me.
Months later, Ama replied. Her father had died years earlier, she wrote. In his last days he had softened in some ways and hardened in others. He had accepted a northern son-in-law reluctantly, then loved the grandchildren without admitting defeat. He remained suspicious of Ewes in general but had been fond of me, continuing to refer to me as ‘your Sixth Form friend’ until his death, one of the absurd compromises by which prejudice preserves its dignity.
Then she wrote: ‘You once told me that familiarity can disguise itself as superiority. I did not understand fully then. I am not sure I understand fully now. But I have repeated it to my children.’
I read that sentence several times. It reminded me not only of her father’s certainties, but of my mother’s. Each parent had loved their child. Each believed they were protecting us from danger. Neither thought of themselves as cruel. Yet both had inherited a moral map in which some people appeared naturally suspect.
That memory returned recently as Ghana debated legislation seeking to intensify punishment of LGBTQ people and those who support them. Same-sex conduct is already criminalised under a colonial-era law. The newer political energy is moral. It claims to defend family, culture, children and national identity.
Reading Ama’s letter from my adopted home in Australia, I recognised a familiar pattern. Australia’s arguments about antisemitism and Islamophobia increasingly resemble parallel conversations rather than a shared one. Jewish Australians describe fear, abuse, intimidation and a heightened sense of vulnerability since October 2023. Muslim Australians describe Islamophobia, public abuse, suspicion and political rhetoric that too often blurs ordinary Muslims with violent extremists.
Neither fear is imaginary. Neither deserves qualification before being acknowledged. Yet public debate often behaves as though empathy were a scarce resource. Concern for antisemitism is sometimes dismissed as an attempt to silence criticism of Israel. Concern for Islamophobia is sometimes portrayed as an attempt to excuse extremism or minimise Jewish suffering. The public question becomes: which pain must come first?
This is where Ama’s letter helps. The deeper issue is not only prejudice. It is what might be called benevolent certainty: the conviction that because our cause is moral, our own assumptions require less scrutiny than those of others.
Democracies are vulnerable to this because democratic politics rewards clarity, loyalty and mobilisation. Social media intensifies the habit. Certainty travels faster than hesitation. Outrage is easier to share than complexity. Political leaders seek slogans, journalists seek conflict, activists seek urgency, and citizens are asked to declare allegiance before they are invited to understand.
Australia knows this pattern from its own history. Indigenous dispossession was defended as civilisation. The White Australia Policy was presented as nation-building. Restrictions on women were justified as protecting family life. Homosexuality was criminalised in the name of public morality. These ideas endured not because everyone argued them daily from first principles, but because institutions made them feel ordinary. Schools repeated them. Newspapers normalised them. Governments translated them into law. Eventually they became common sense.
That is why every generation should be cautious when it feels most certain. The question is not whether we care about justice. Democracies need citizens who care deeply. The question is whether our care still permits self-examination. When conviction no longer allows curiosity, disagreement becomes evidence that others are ignorant, dangerous or morally suspect.
Institutions matter here. Universities should cultivate disciplined curiosity rather than moral performance. Journalism should complicate simplistic narratives rather than amplify outrage. Schools should teach young people how prejudice is inherited, not merely how past prejudice was defeated. Political leaders should enlarge the nation’s moral imagination rather than forcing every issue into contests between virtue and vice. Civic dialogue should make disagreement compatible with mutual recognition.
None of this requires abandoning conviction. It requires remembering that compassion is not a zero-sum resource. Jewish Australians can face real antisemitism. Muslim Australians can face real Islamophobia. LGBTQ Ghanaians can be endangered by laws presented as cultural protection. One truth need not cancel another.
Ama’s sentence travelled farther than either of us expected. Familiarity can disguise itself as superiority. So can religion. So can nationalism. So can progressivism. So can victimhood. The challenge for democracies is not simply to choose the correct side more loudly. It is to build institutions and habits that help citizens ask, especially when they feel righteous, what blindness they may be inheriting.
Democracies rarely become fragile because citizens disagree. They become fragile when citizens lose the capacity to question themselves. Conviction without curiosity eventually ceases to be wisdom.
Komla Tsey
Komla Tsey is a Ghanaian–Australian writer, retired Professor of Education for Social Sustainability, and part-time Professorial Research Fellow at the Jawun Research Institute, Central Queensland University. His writing explores education, democratic culture, identity, Indigenous empowerment, colonial legacies and the moral certainties that shape public life. His forthcoming memoir, Botoku Child, traces a journey from a small village in Ghana to universities and communities across the world, examining how inherited beliefs, curiosity and lived experience shape both personal lives and democratic societies.