Adjetey Anang has stated that he purposefully left out explicit information about his cheating on his wife in his memoir.
He stated that he intended to focus the memoir on its ultimate goal of empathizing with and empowering “young people” to rise beyond their failures and do better.
“…the experience [cheating] was hard-hitting [during] the early years of marriage,” he also revealed.
“For me, intentionally, I left it at that,” he stressed, adamant to give details concerning the “physical” range of his cheating escapades.
It is “because the moment you expand that, we lose focus of why this book was set out in the first place,” he noted.
“There is a culture of glorifying negativity,” he said, indicating he had no desire to feed this culture.
“It is high time we moved away from that,” he added.
Anang went on to say that Africans “do worse” than the West in painting negative images of the continent.
The belief is “negativity sells,” he said.
“How does that develop a nation? How does that develop our society?” he worriedly quizzed.
Anang went further to identify one of the blowbacks of sensationalising people’s private challenges.
“…when you do that when people are going through issues that are real [and] need attention and help, they won’t seek the help – they [rather] cower,” he bemoaned.
Anang envisions a society in which people, particularly those in the spotlight, are encouraged “to really search deep [within] and say: ‘Look, these are my weaknesses, I need to confront them to become a better person.'”
The goal of his memoir, he says, is to tell struggling people, particularly “young people,” that “what you’re going through is not new.” That is something I have experienced… These were the buildings I built to get out of it – that’s resilience – and I battled them. These are the things you can do to get out of it as well.”
He further explained that Adjetey Anang: A Story of Faith, Imperfection and Resilience was published in hopes that it would stop “people from replicating what [wrongdoings] we have done”.
Adjetey and Elom have been married for 16 years and have a son called Ryan.
