Ama Ata Aidoo Nearly Always Gets It Wrong

Rather than conduct a casual Google Search and then facilely and ahistorically conclude that in countries where state-owned secondary schools have been in existence for over a thousand years, and covers 90-to-95-percent of the population, the system is day and absolutely free, Ms. Aidoo could have taken the simplest and most relevant approach by reading up on the history of the boarding-school system, both at the middle and secondary levels, before making such an outlandish and abjectly nonsensical claim and an irreparable mess of whatever vestigial reputation she may be left with on the discourse of Ghanaian education. One is apt to plausibly chalk this bizarre turn of events to the fast onset of senility (See “Professor Ama Ata Aidoo Writes: Ghana Second-Cycle Education Crisis” Modernghana.com 2/27/18).

She was once Secretary of Education under Chairman Jerry John Rawlings’ so-called Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) junta and did not last long, because Prof. Aidoo, though a very good playwright and short-story writer – her largely melodramatic novels are a different species of literature altogether –had more than amply demonstrated that she was grossly incompetent with little or absolutely no talent for academic administration and, perhaps, ought not to have been offered the job in the first place. Evidently, the 70-something-year-old Visiting Professor of several quite reputable American colleges and universities, including the Rhode Island-located Brown University, the globally renowned Ivy League academy, is still grossly incompetent when it comes to participating in or contributing meaningfully to an informed discussion on the history of Western-type of education in Ghana.

Which is why it was “easy pickings” for Mr. Bright Simons, the talented young founder of the high-tech firm called mPedigree, to lay Prof. Aidoo’s rather disingenuous argument to waste, literally speaking, with the backhand of his tongue in just a couple of sentences. You see, those of us grandchildren of grandfathers born in the 1880s and 90s who were themselves, like us, the vintage products of the boarding-school system, have a more historical, educated and enlightened appreciation of the system because, for example, as a pupil of the Presbyterian Middle Boys’ Boarding School, at Akuapem-Akropong, or Akropong-SALEM in the early 1970s, I had to purchase a copy of the biography of my school and devoured it as part of the educational process.

Ms. Aidoo clearly does not seem to have had this privilege. And so rather than exhibit such imperious pretense, she would do herself great good to sidestep this particular subject and turn on to other more familiar issues of equal significance and relevance to Ghanaian public education. The fact of the matter is that the boarding-school system, the way it is known in Ghana, presently, has not existed here in the United States for one-thousand years, neither has it existed in the erstwhile USSR for a millennium. So what is this malarkey being peddled by the renowned author of such formidable dramatic works as Anowaand The Dilemma of a Ghost?

It is a well-known fact that the boarding-school system, as we have come to know it and taken it for granted, was spearheaded by the Christian missionaries, largely from Switzerland, the Basel Missionaries, and later from Scotland, both the Wesleyan or Methodist and the Presbyterian Missionaries (the latter of whom were the successors of the Basel Missionaries). The Catholics and Anglicans are also somewhere in the mix. To be certain, the British colonial government did not get directly involved in the development of public education in Ghana until much later. But, of course, it was the Nkrumah-led Convention People’s Party (CPP) government that nationalized these missionary-established boarding schools as a means of making them accessible to all Ghanaian citizens, irrespective of religious denomination, suasion or creed. These missionary schools then became known as “Government-Assisted Schools.” And, by the way, the Danish, headquartered at the Christianborg or The Osu Castle, were the first to recognize the relevance and necessity to educate Ghanaian youths at both the secondary and post-secondary levels (See A Century with Boys: The Story of Akropong SALEM, or some such title).

And so realistically speaking, the crisis vis-à-vis the sustainability of the present-day boarding-school system, was precipitated by President Kwame Nkrumah. It is also true that the secondary-boarding system was never fully budgeted for, even with the availability of the Danquah-facilitated and Nkrumah-created Cocoa-Marketing Board (CMB) scholarship regime (Google Ambassador Kwesi Armah’s Address on JB Danquah to a Graduating Class at Ghana National College, Cape Coast, shortly before the renowned diplomat’s death). Nkrumah’s fee-free system of education covered only the primary and middle school system (or grades one through ten). The boarding-school system emerged for a number of reasons, including the necessity of detaining the young pupils at Akropong-SALEM, for example, because the parents of these young pupils were reluctant to have their children attend this “strange” European mini-academy whose fundamental pedagogical philosophy seemed to be predicated on corporal punishment: “Spare the Rod and Spoil the Child.”

Schools were also not cheap to establish and run those days, especially in sparsely populated colonies like the then-Gold Coast, so the boarding-school system enabled talented and academically promising pupils out of town to attend at a nominal fee or sometimes on scholarship. Over the course of time, the concentration of talent pools at several boarding mini-academies ensured that these urban and suburban-located institutions became the best of their kind. This may be what IMANI-Africa’s Mr. Bright Simons was alluding to when he pointedly rebutted Ms. Aidoo’s argument for the blanket or wholesale abolition of the secondary-boarding system (See “Bright Simons Rubbishes Ama Ata Aidoo’s Call to Abolish Boarding System” Ghanaweb.com 3/2/18).

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