A Half-Century of A-Class Education – Part 3

The Oshogolo Drama Troupe was engaged in a hectic rehearsal session when I arrived at the old PERSCO bookstore. It was in the same building as the new one, next to the music room. The location of the old bookstore had just been moved from one end of the old science building to the other more spacious end. The student population had increased by nearly one-hundred, which was quite dramatic.

In 1978, when some (largely male) students of Mpraeso Secondary School (MPASS) thoroughly burned down our school truck, St. Peter's' students numbered six-hundred and twenty, if I recall accurately. And yet the Ghana News Agency (GNA) had sensationally reported that “the over 1,000 students of St. Peter's Secondary School had besieged the campus of Mpraeso Secondary School and vandalized property and equipment estimated to be worth hundreds of thousands of cedis.”

Unbeknownst to us PERSCOVITES, shortly after our team had trounced MPASS in a highly competitive hockey match, on penalty kicks, I believe, some MPASS would-be conspirators of the bus-burning episode had promptly conferred and determined as follows in Latin, as would be later discovered on the blackboard of a lecture hall: “Delenda Est PERSCO.” Nobody readily seemed to appreciate the import of the latter inscription, until Senior Omari chanced unto the scene and observed that the quotation was an allusion to the ancient Roman vow to thoroughly destroy the North-African city-state of Carthage (in present-day Tunisia) during the Punic wars. In sum, it was this sacrilegious affront (at least that was how we PERSCODIANS deemed the gesture) that preempted any possibility of being restrained from our determined retaliatory efforts.

When I entered the disorderly but empty old bookstore (a carton or crate had been left here and there), Peter Adu (he preferred to have his surname pronounced “Aidoo”) was busily improvising what appeared to be the nondescript scene of a lorry station in any typical Ghanaian city, particularly the seamy side of it. Peter was playing the role of a beggar seated in a lotus position, with a bowl in the web of his crossed legs, which immediately reminded me of a forked stump in my own village on which was settled either a calabash of palm-wine, or even an earthen pot brimming and frothing with the same.

Sitting in a lotus posture was not difficult for Peter at all, because he was an ardent practitioner of Yoga. His mother, Peter said, had married a Ghanaian diplomat (who was not Peter's father) and the couple had briefly settled in India. It appears to me that that was how Peter Adu came to be a Yogi. He strictly adhered to a vegan dietary regimen. And as I now recall, it was perhaps from Peter that Senior Kenneth (Lord) Attafuah and I attempted to practice Yoga. I did it for some three long days and promptly decided that going without good, old meat for the rest of my life, was tantamount to nothing short of the outright suicidal. Ken, on the other hand, did Yoga for about two or three weeks and gave up the ghost of the entire process.

While at it, that is the practice of Yoga, we would both enter the school's red-brick, cylindrical chapel to meditate when all was dark and quiet as a graveyard on campus. If it was during the day, this would be between 2 o'clock and three in the afternoon, during our regular siesta hour. We had been warned, before hand, that even being slightly tapped on any part of one's body while deeply engaged in Yoga meditation, could spell the immediate and eternal doom, or demise, of the avid practitioner. The freely roaming spirit would refuse to re-enter a contaminated body.

Anyway, as I entered the old bookstore, Peter gently and deliberately tilted up his head and suffused his face with a kind of rapturous smile that could only be duplicated by a well-trained lighting technologist, such as my own father.

“Sasu Adjei just informed me that you wanted to see me”
Peter slightly nodded his assent, scratched the closely cropped hair on his head and wistfully and half-seriously uttered, “Well, we just formed a drama troupe and I thought that it would be quite a good idea to have you join us, if you are interested. We intend to fully develop this skit, which I recently composed, and tour all the secondary schools in the Kwahu district.”

A fantastic and ambitious idea, I thought. In reality, I was in no such hurry; I was not very excited about the entire idea. And the reason was quite simple. I had just had a couple of my poems performed on Radio Ghana's GBC-2 and so was on the very crest of fame, every bit of which I was religiously relishing. Thus joining the Oshogolo Drama Troupe sounded a tad anticlimactic. It was almost like a punitive demotion from the major leagues into the minor leagues for no apparent reason and out of nowhere. Peter readily seemed to sense my measured reticence and promptly added, “You really don't have to be an integral part of the cast for this skit. You can simply come along and read any of your poems by way of curtain raisers.”

The latter sounded good to me. I craved the chance of extending my newfound fame more intimately through the vehicular use of Oshogolo; and who knows, I could land one smashing chick or two. And so I nodded my assent and wildly jubilated within myself. What with the prospect of becoming a household name in the whole of the Kwahu district and even up to the far reaches of the Afram Plains? At least this much was certain – I was poised to becoming the talk, or rage, of all the girls' dormitories on the Kwaku Ridge.

That, in sum, was how I became a bona fide member of the Oshogolo Drama Troupe. Other significant members of the Troupe whom I readily recall are Samuel Adjei-Sasu; he had an older and younger brother at PERSCO. I believe it was his younger brother who joined Oshogolo with Sammy, my classmate. Adjei-Sasu hailed from Abetifi, scarcely three miles from Nkwatia, where St. Peter's was located, a mile off the center of Nkwatia-town proper. I vividly remember Sasu because he was such an inimitable Nkrumah-quoting loudmouth, both denotatively and metaphorically. He also quoted Germany's Chancellor Adolf Hitler like the Holy Scriptures and even once got into a serious conflict with Senior Oppong Prince, another swaggering and blustering PERSCO politician.

Prince Oppong (or Oppong Prince) claimed to be the doted son of a paramount chief somewhere in the Akyem-Oda area. And, boy, did he walk with the dramaturgical swagger of a pachyderm! Like Sasu Adjei, Oppong Prince had a peculiar way with grandiloquence.

The incident that sparked Sasu's conflict with Oppong Prince had to do with the latter, who was a house prefect, or captain, punishing Sasu, whose father was known to be a trusted lieutenant of the world-famous and politically flamboyant Mr. Ackah Blay-Miezah and the latter's so-called Oman Ghana Trust Organization. Sasu had decided that Prince Oppong's punishment, (this almost invariably entailed clearing a portion of the weedy areas of the campus or scrubbing the bathroom and/or toilets of any one of the houses or student halls), was highly unjustified and likely motivated by some unspecified streak of animosity. The victim thus studiously delved into his massive compendium of Hitler quotes and strung together a menacing anonymous letter, apprising Prince Oppong of an imminently dire comeuppance, for having dared to humiliate the spiritual avatar of the African Show Boy. All I remember from the afore-referenced letter is that it ended with the refrain: “The rest is silence!”

I am recalling this incident for the quite curious and simple reason that it was widely rumored that, somehow, Senior Oppong Prince suspected me to be the author of the threatening anonymous letter; the letter had been either slipped into his classroom desk or under his pillow, or some such place. I, on the other hand, found Senior Oppong's suspicion not only to be grossly misplaced but also rather stupid and sophomoric; that is, if, indeed, Oppong Prince suspected that I would both have the time and cowardice to write and dispatch anonymous letters.

Significantly, anybody who knew me well enough at PERSCO ought to, also, have been fully cognizant of the fact that Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., was perhaps more fearless of his enemies, seniors or juniors, than almost every one of his classmates. And so just how Prince Oppong got it into his jumbo noggin that I would be afraid of him enough to pen an anonymous letter in response to a punishment that I vehemently deemed to be unjustified, or unjustifiable, is beyond my wildest imagination. For instance, wasn't I widely known to be among the handful of Third-Formers (or Form-Three students) who vigorously campaigned against the election of Senior Emmanuel Ofoe as School Prefect? In the end, though, it was the PERSCO teachers, led by Senior Housemaster, Mr. Nartey, legend has it, who got together in their Staff Common Room (once it became apparent to them that Senior Ofoe was on the verge of losing the election) and crowned that godforsaken son-of-a-bitch PERSCO's School Prefect.

And for the year, or so, that he served as Senior Prefect, I vigorously fought Senior Ofoe. And to be certain, I also never quite learned to call him “SP,” his abbreviated title. And the reason was justifiably simple: On my very first day at PERSCO, as a Form-One student – or “Subbo,” for subordinate – and seated at the same dining table with him, and feeling nervous and visibly out-of-place, Senior Emmanuel Ofoe, who was in Form-Four, seated on the opposite bench, looked intently at me with an indescribably satanic face and sneered at me, also pointing at me with his index finger: “You this boy, I hate you!”

From then on, I knew my epic battle for survival at PERSCO was joined; and there would be absolutely no backing off. Not even to fetch a clayey cup of water from the tank next to the PERSCO swimming pool.

Curiously, my auto-response to Senior Ofoe's gauntlet, his sworn animus against me, was a simple chuckle.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English and Journalism at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is the author of “Odo Ye 'Wu: Love Is Till Death” (iUniverse.com, 2005). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@aol.com.

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