Rastafarian Girl’s Case Is a Tough Call

Some details of the story may have been left out by the reporter, either out of raw professional incompetence or it could just be that there was not enough time to piece the scattered puzzles together. I am talking about the story of the young Rastafarian woman who was reportedly denied admission to the Accra Girls' Senior High School, under the Akufo-Addo-initiated fee-free SHS policy regime (See “Free SHS: Rastafarian Girl Denied Admission into Accra Girls” AdomNews.com / Modernghana.com 9/15/17).

It is quite obvious that we live under a totally different “Afrocentric” times in which the anticolonial and anti-African mores that originally dictated administrative policies have absolutely no comfortable pride of place any longer. Which, of course, is not the same thing as saying that the age-old rules of discipline ought not be preserved and/or maintained. What I would have loved to have learned about the unnamed young woman denied admission to Accra Girls' is whether she had been born into Rastafarian culture, a largely counter-Eurocentric protest establishment that healthily emerged in the African Diaspora in the slavo-colonial era.

If she had been born into Rastafarianism, and her parents had legally settled in the country, then, of course, the very fact of their legal residency and/or citizenship automatically validates the right of this young Rastafarian woman to access all privileges and responsibilities that pertain to the acquisition of Ghanaian citizenship. Indeed, had her denial of admission occurred at any one of the missionary-oriented schools, I would have staunchly backed the Headmistress and the staff of the Accra Girls' Senior High School. I would have even gone further, even as some observers and critics have suggested, to urge the fast-growing Rastafarian community in the country to establish their own schools and other academies with the relevant guidelines from the Ghana Education Service (GES) and/or the Ministry of Education (MOE).

On the other hand, if Accra Girls', as the school has been popularly known for decades now, is a secular state-sponsored institution, then, of course, the Headmistress and her staff have a bounden obligation to admit the young woman strictly based on academic merit. I must also take this prime opportunity to commend Mr. Samuel Gyebi Yeboah, the National Secretary of the Conference of Heads of Assisted Secondary Schools (CHASS), for urging all heads of Senior High Schools in the country to staunchly pursue a progressive policy of non-discrimination against qualified Rastafarian applicants.

I personally, however, do not believe that the widespread non-acceptance of Rastafarianism in Ghana is one that is necessarily based on ignorance, as the father of the young Rastafarian woman under discussion here is alleged to have observed. And here, of course, I make a clear-cut distinction between the heavily Rastafarian-influenced Reggae Music and the signature dreadlocks of devoted practitioners of this religious culture that is inspired by the historical personality of the immortalized Emperor Haile Selassie, of Ethiopia, whose leadership and contribution to the global and historical shaping of the African Personality is, at best, murky and spotty.

This is where I personally diverge from this group of otherwise deservedly proud Africans. If the young Rastafarian woman is being admitted to the Accra Girls' Senior High School as a non-resident or day student, then I have absolutely no qualms with it. But in the very intimate quarters of the boarding house system, the photograph of her hair that accompanied the story that I read about her plight gives me the jitters. It could be made more publicly presentable, in my measured opinion.

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
English Department, SUNY-Nassau
Garden City, New York
September 15, 2017
E-mail: [email protected] mailto:[email protected]