A Half-Century of A-Class Education – Part 7

Between the hockey field and the red-brick cylindrical chapel, lay the softball and basketball courts. The softball court was rarely used; and, to be certain, one had to actually troll around looking for it in order to find it. Ensconced almost imperceptibly between the hockey field and the basketball court, the softball court, or rather pitch, looked more like a doormat laid between its more prominent neighbors. Diagonally due northeast and directly behind the red-brick chapel, lay the fenced and gated tennis court – American tennis, that is. We called the latter lawn tennis, since historically, at least in the Ghanaian experience of the game, it had originally been played on a grassy lawn. Here in St. Peter's, however, the tennis court had a concrete flooring. Its being gated and almost always locked, perhaps, had something to do with the fact of its being out-of-bounds to us students. Mostly, it was our white teachers – primarily American and English – who we witnessed at play on the tennis court. Occasionally, some students also reported having espied “Owudo,” our headmaster, and Father Bernard, the school chaplain, duke it out on the tennis court.

On one or two occasions, I had fleetingly wondered why none of our Ghanaian teachers played tennis on the court. Perhaps it was merely a matter of cultural preference – for most Ghanaians were known to be religiously tied to the game of soccer – or sheer priority. Almost none of our white teachers were known to have children or even spouses.

On approaching the school from the main gate, the manicured hibiscus hedges flanking the road into the school on both sides, gave the campus a pensively grave solemnity. Nobody needed to be told that PERSCO was a mini-citadel of impeccable scholarship. The insistent solemnity of the atmosphere pretty much advertised the school as such. Undoubtedly, the towering presence of the red-brick chapel, with its free-standing steeple, or belfry, had a lot to do with such solemnity. I believe the chapel was called St. Peter's Chapel, after the Apostle Peter, for whom the school had also been named, at least so it said on a postcard sold at the school's bookstore, which the exuberant fresh was invariably eager to send his girlfriend and relatives as a regal announcement to the fact of his scholastic arrival. After the first year, most students practically forgot all about the red-brick chapel. Attending mass also became quite a bore. The wistful conclusion belied its initial novelty and architectural appeal. The thrill of the chase, in romantic parlance, having rather prematurely petered out, the chapel became just another one of those landmarks that one merely tolerated, because there was nothing else one could do about it.

Still, perhaps, the most striking landmark that the new arrival encountered, if only because of its rocky insistence, was the apparent statue of Apostle Peter facing down the main gate. The statue was apparent because in one hand, St. Peter had what looked like a key; the other hand had an index-finger poking petulantly at the gate. And as one inched a little closer, it became glaringly evident that in the classical sense of the description, the life-size statue of St. Peter was no statue at all, but what appeared to be an amateur sculptor's wretched attempt at the same. For it looked as if the artisan – for this was no genuine work of art – had simply mounted a protean rocky frame around which he had splattered several tons of spitballs. Almost every one of us students, without exception, or even the benefit of comparison, readily agreed that PERSCO's statue of St. Peter was the ugliest of its kind ever!

We would soon learn of the name and identity of the equally ugly hands and mind behind this retching and morally sickening image of the greatest disciple of Jesus Christ of Nazareth. The artisan was none other than Mr. John Kofi Agbenu. He was St. Peter's' one and only art “master,” as our teachers were called. And for the next three years of our stay at PERSCO, we were to suffer the pedagogical ugliness of Mr. Agbenu. Today, I am told the man shamelessly sits in Ghana's National Assembly pretending to represent some part of the Kwahu district, including the landmark Afram Plains, in the Volta Basin.

While I schooled at St. Peter's, it was our brilliant Geography teacher, Mr. B. B. Ofori – affectionately called “BB” by adults and children alike – who represented most of the Kwahu district, including the Afram Plains, in Ghana's then-fitful parliament. BB's other nickname was Bhramaputra, after the famous river in the Indus Valley. For some curious reason, BB concentrated most of his instruction on Asian topography and climatology. Locally, however, his interest lay in map reading. And on the latter score, I recall BB challenging the Form-Four students to enter a map-reading exam contest with us Form-Two students. BB had promised his senior students that they would be no match for us; and true to his prediction, we handily trounced our seniors. From then on, we second-formers had convinced ourselves, and with good reason, that Forms, or school grade-levels, were just superficial and arbitrary symbols of academic gradation.

In another instance, in Math, in which Mr. Jeff Dunham, our American Peace Corps volunteer teacher tested us against our immediate seniors, we were first-year students then, somebody stole the exam papers before they could be graded. Nonetheless, Jeff insisted that we had bested our immediate seniors. The exam consisted of a set of twenty questions on decimals. Our seniors, aptly, claimed that testing them against their juniors on the subject of decimals was grossly unfair, since we, “subbo students,” had been studying decimals all-year-round.

As a human form, phenotypically speaking, Kofi Agbenu was quite sunny and personable. But as a human character, Mr. Agbenu had an unpardonable mean streak about him. So prejudiced, indeed, was the man that almost no Akan student in his class received the equivalent grade of “A,” even if that student well deserved it. His immutable mantra was that being of Akan ethnic background, automatically translated into one's pet innate aversion for Ewes. And so throughout my five-year stay at St. Peter's, Mr. Agbenu ensured that most otherwise talented Akan, and non-Ewe, potential art majors would promptly abandon any such “superlative” ambition.

What did it for me, in particular, was when a bed-wetting student by the name of Michael Adzovie, also the youngest student in my class, did not present anything for his art exam and yet was awarded 90-percentage points by Mr. Agbenu, while those of us who had studiously followed the stipulated requirements for the course, received insulting marks of anywhere between 60- to 80-percentage points. In sum, for Mr. Agbenu, one's ethnicity either damned the student or exalted the student. And so learning of Mr. Kofi Agbenu having elected to gaily truck ideology with the Ewe-minted and sanguinary Dzelukope Congress of National Democrats (P/NDC) did not surprise me in the least. I am only sorry for any non-Ewe-speaking Akan, or Ghanaian, who has the misfortune of being trapped in “Atatsu's” Afram Plains constituency.
*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 “Nananom: Foremothers” (iUniverse.com, 2005), a collection of poetry. E-mail: okoampaahoofe@aol.com.
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