If you wanted to buy a copy of this book, you’d have to cough up US$487.74! Published by Prof Albert Adu Boahen’s own Sankofa Educational Publishers in 1996, it’s currently out of print and anyone who possesses a copy can make a killing by re-selling it to Amazon.com and other retailers of used books.
Is it worth the near-$500 the sellers are asking for a copy?
It certainly is, but that’s not the issue. A book such as this should be readily available to all our educationists, as well as the general reader. That it should cost so much will, of course, put off those who need to read it for professional reasons, as well as the general reader.
That’s why I am glad to report that some members of the family of the late Professor are in touch with one of our most enterprising publishers, Mr Fred Labi of Digital Books, to bring out a new edition. It will be a service to the country if the deal goes through.
For although Prof Adu Boahen was a historian, the book he wrote about his alma mater is anything but the stodgy historical tome one would expect from such a work. The book is over 500 pages long, and is necessarily full of details about the founding and running of Mfantsipim School. But you can’t put it down once you start reading it, and the reason is that Prof Adu Boahen was a very good story-teller indeed and so handles historical facts as if he were spinning a yarn straight of his witty brain.
He achieves this readability by telling the story of Mfantsipim through the people who made the School what it was and is. He recounts the conflicts that faced the founders, as they sought to establish an institution that would be a religious establishment and yet be able to compete with the best educational institutions –qua institutional institution – anywhere in the world.
Money was a constant worry right from the very foundation of the School. But so enlightened were those interested in making it succeed that no obstacle could stop them. Renting premises for the students; procuring land to erect new buildings; what to teach the students whether they were in rickety rented premises or their own premises – these were problems that had to be solved by white missionaries who only had a few years to spend in the Gold Coast, or Ghanaian intellectuals whose nationalism propelled them to offer cash and intellectual support to an institution which they foresaw as playing a crucial role in training the people who would run Ghana when the time came for it to rue itself.
Three heroes, above all, stand out in the Mfantsipim story: W T Balmer (headmaster of the School from 1907-1910); the Rev. Alfred Bartop who became the School’s head in October 1903 and recruited the indomitable Balmer to take over from him, championing the latter’s cause relentlessly till his death; and the Rev. Alex Smith, who built upon the foundation laid by Barttrop and Balmer and ensured that Mfantsipim became not only the leading educational institution in the Gold Coast, but the whole of West Africa. (Mfantsipim’s leadership in the educational field, by the way, was not bestowed by men but endowed by facts – it did better than any other schools in any external examinations in which it entered its students.)
Adu Boahen relates the School’s story, long and tortuous though it is, with excitement and flair, telling us, along the way, how the ‘Sphinx Riddle’ was solved there; the Africans who supported it through thick and thin and ensured that it did not lose sight of African values and concerns while trying to be a good Wesleyan institution; men such as Mensah Sarbah and Ato Ahumah.
But the book is not only about good people. Like all good reads, it contains its share of villainous racists, who not only fought against the School’s progress but regarded its objective of training Africans to become well-educated, responsible human being as an impossibility but actually fought to prevent the School being developed by others to attain that goal.
Adu Boahen effortlessly glides through numerous memorable and inspiring stories – for instance, that of ‘The Faithful Eight’ students, who stayed on even when the School had officially been closed down, and whose later influence helped to keep it afloat during several of the crises that dogged its existence.
A good historian brings to life matters which happened before he was born and which are brought to life for him on by records or the eye-witness accounts of those who took part in those events. So what happens when the historian is himself an eye-witness to a historic occurrence?
Readers of this book will be treated to a scintillating account of how the 1948 arrest of ‘The Big Six UGCC’ leaders affected the students not only of Mantsipim but also of the two other secondary schools in Cape Coast – Adisadel and St Augustine’s. Adu’s account is extremely valuable, for it shows us that when push came to shove, the European teachers in the Gold Coast, despite the loud noses they had been making about the value of the democratic system of government, were mostly sympathetic to the colonial administration and saw little wrong in the dictatorial policies of such a silly old ass as the Governor of the Gold Coast at the time, Sir Gerald Creasy (who arrested and ‘locally deported’ the Big Six.)
Adu Boahen’s book, then, is a valuable treatise not only on the life and history of Ghana’s first secondary school (a worthy enough objective in its own right), but also, of the life and times of the country in which the school was founded and flourished. There’s a lot more in the book than can be commented upon in this short review, and I urge all my readers to look out for the new edition and to grab a copy, if and when its publication does become a reality.
Reviewed by Cameron Duodu