“Ordained” and “Self-Styled,” Not the Same

A Ghana News Agency (GNA) news article titled “Self-Styled Pastor Subjects Lady [sic] to a Sex Ordeal” was published by Ghanaweb.com on August 7, 2007. The very brief story detailed the gruesome rape of a female minor by the pastor of a village called Kasseh, in the Ada district. The case itself is before a circuit court in Sogakope, in the Volta Region.

What piqued my interest was the compound adjective of “self-styled,” which appeared as part of the caption to the aforementioned article. For the alleged perpetrator of the rape, a pastor, was reported to be the minister in charge of the Presbyterian church station, or chapel, in a village called Sokpoe, near Sogakope, in the Volta Region. The GNA reporter of the story, curiously enough, did not mention anywhere in the contents of his story that the alleged rapist, a Pastor Prince Doe, is, indeed, not an ordained minister but a quack clergyman. And so the critical reader is left wondering just what makes Pastor Prince Doe a “self-styled pastor.”

For unlike many of the so-called Spiritual Churches, or neo-traditional Ghanaian Christian revivalist church movements, the Presbyterians are a well-recognized mainstream Christian establishment in Ghana. They also have a formal and officially recognized seminary, Trinity College, near the campus of the University of Ghana, Legon-Accra, where their clerics and other church orderlies are trained. This writer is well aware of this fact, because quite a remarkable number of his own relatives, including three who served as Moderators, or spiritual heads, of the Presbyterian Church of Ghana (PCG), either trained at Trinity College or taught there in various capacities. Also, this writer has had the privilege of sponsoring several church deacons at Trinity College.

Secondly, while the PCG has recently incorporated some aspects of Christian revivalism into its hitherto Eurocentric liturgy, the whole notion of a 17-year-old woman, a girl, in fact, being left, by her parents and relatives, in the “therapeutic care” of a Presbyterian cleric at the latter's manse, or official residence, rather than in a well-supervised clinical, healing center, is quite unusual.

Thirdly, the anonymous GNA reporter also significantly, albeit woefully, failed to observe the quite well-known and recognized fact that there, indeed, there exist two main groups of Presbyterians in the country. There is the Scottish- and Swiss-oriented Presbyterian Church of Ghana, also known as the “Basel Mission” or “Basel,” after the cultural roots or nationality of its founders and pioneer missionary evangelists. Then there is the largely Bremen, or German-oriented, Evangelical Presbyterian Church of Ghana (EPG or EP).

The Presbyterian Church of Ghana (PCG), the one into which this writer was born, baptized and raised, is recognized as the main Presbyterian Church of Ghana. For not only is it much, much larger than its Evangelical sister branch, it is also the more inclusive, multiethnic and multicultural in membership, whereas the Evangelical Presbyterians (or EPs) are largely confined to the Volta Region and the Ewe community, although like their “Big Sister,” the Presbyterian Church of Ghana, for quite a long time, the EPs have also had their clerics trained at Trinity College. And even at one time, if memory serves yours truly accurately, an ordained cleric of the EP Church served as Principal – Rector – of Legon's Trinity College. That was in the late 1960s and early 1970s. That principal's name was, I believe, Dr. John Agbeti, with a middle initial of “K,” if yours truly remembers correctly.

I remember Dr. Agbeti quite well, because his daughter, Joy, was my classmate in the 4th grade, at the University of Ghana's Staff Village Primary School. But even more than that, I had been madly in love with Joy Agbeti. In my starry, fourth-grade eyes and heart, Joy was the prettiest girl in the whole wide world, as it were. Light-brown skinned and a proud Afro hairdo. We also sat next to each other in class.

I would soon pick a fight with Joy, largely provoked by other male classmates whose acute jealousy, in my apparently obsessive love for Joy, I had overlooked. And although I barely appreciated the complexities of human sexuality in fourth grade, it appears that my hitherto unknown, or rather unrecognized, rivals for the affections of Joy, appreciated much more than I could fathom about such private adult matters. For at about 8 or 9 years old, I had classmates who were 14 and 15 years old!

The oldest of my classmates was Veronica (I forget her surname); her father operated one of those monstrous University of Ghana buses. Veronica was my “Mother-Protector,” my corporeal guardian angel of sorts. In return, I helped Veronica with her out-of-class assignments. And I remember Veronica mercilessly thrashing one of the class bullies who made the near-fatal mistake of having a pleasurable go at me, as it were. After the near-apocalyptic beating of my tormentor, no stronger or bigger classmate ever made the judgmental error of attempting to assault me.

What made me pick a fight with Joy Agbeti was that my rivals and enemies started spreading false word around that I had congressed – or conjugated – with Joy. Such criminal mendacity was supposed to explain off the fact that I was the only one among her classmates that Joy Agbeti would not sell candies to; I could have them for free and without numerical restriction. Now, looking back, some thirty-and-odd years later, it seems that Joy was, indeed, my first true love. In my youthful immaturity, however, I had woefully failed to appreciate it as such.

In any case, whether a brutally, sexually assaulted 17-year-old Ghanaian female ought to be journalistically described as a “Minor,” which in reality, or legally, she is, or a “Lady,” may be neither here nor there, after all, although the immediate craft of journalism demands cultural sensitivity and reportorial accuracy.

The apparent confusion of the two Ghanaian Presbyterian churches in the mind of the Ghana News Agency reporter may, perhaps, have something to do with the fact that the Ada district – and its people – are almost imperceptibly and seamlessly sandwiched between the Eastern and Volta regions, as I believe, also, the Greater-Accra Region. For ever since Mr. Jeremiah John “Cement-Bag” Rawlings officially, perhaps to score cheap political points, caused the traumatic separation of the Greater-Accra Region from its Eastern regional parent, yours truly has virtually lost his geopolitical bearings in Ghana. And here, we must hasten to acknowledge the fact that the plan for separation had actually been on the books since, at least, 1967, as I learned back in the early 1980s.

Still, in my mind's-eye, I continue to envisage Accra as the capital of the old, rich and proud Eastern Region whose “proto-geography,” my memory refuses to vacate. And who knows, perhaps it is the pan-Africanist (or is it pan-Ghanaianist?) aspect of my psyche insisting, against all reality, on its inviolable right to ideological and cultural integrity. Then again, who ever heard of a Nii Ababio living separately from his kin, in the proud and noetic path of the rising sun?

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., teaches English and Journalism at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is the author of “Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana” (iUniverse.com, 2005). E-mail: [email protected].