What forces propel a young bright boy from a rural Ghanaian village to the heights of academia and global public service? How do we grow as our countries change? Who are our mentors and fellow travelers on the road of life? How do we negotiate the delicate balance between making a living and making a life? These are some of the personal and philosophical questions raised by Professor S. K. B. Asante’s fascinating autobiography.
Commentators in the literary world tend to look suspiciously on autobiographies and memoirs as personal recollections that can be dangerously subjective and self-absorbed. Asante’s autobiography, however, is unique in the ways it speaks to us from so many different places of our country and the world. We can indeed, read this narrative from several equally enlightening angles. First, it is the story of how a rural Soabe village in the Eastern Region of Ghana balances its traditional ethos and the impact of a new colonial machinery and commerce. We get glimpses of how the colonial railway and the diamond mines gradually work to shape the aspirations of a community’s youth in the 1930s. The autobiography’s central narrative of a young boy’s search for education and enlightenment stems from this context. For it is clear that if the diamond mines and the railway line offered Soabe’s youth a route to advancement and wealth, it also limited their understanding of the possibilities of higher education and closed their choices. Asante fought this limitation, and his narrative records his long journey in pursuit of education and intellectual development. It is a story of unquenchable curiosity, determination and persistence amidst several odds and hardships. The lengths that Asante and his peer group went in order to get to a good school in the 1930s should humble all of us who now take our right to a good education for granted.
The section of the autobiography that deals with Professor Asante’s career in the civil service and academia is filtered through the political changes in Ghana in ways that link Ghana’s political growth with Asante’s own intellectual and political development. It is an engaging narrative that offers insights on how the civil service and the universities worked in the 1950s and 1960s. Its most valuable section is its critical analysis of the politics of a newly independent Ghana. We read the conflicts between the University of Ghana and Nkrumah’s government not only as the university’s struggle for academic freedom but also as the teething troubles of a newly independent nation experimenting with new ideologies and sometimes faltering in the process.
A crucial part of the autobiography takes us outside Ghana and into the different places where Professor Asante has worked as an academic Professor and as an international civil servant and consultant for the United Nations. We journey with him to Calabar, Nigeria, Harvard and Gainesville Florida Universities, United States, Namibia, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and Pretoria, South Africa. This enlightening section educates us in so many unobtrusive ways, often giving us occasional glimpses of the careful “behind-the scenes” efforts that facilitated the transitions of Namibia and South Africa into independent nations.
It seems logical that a narrative that begins with a young boy’s desperate search for education should conclude with how that same young boy (now a retiree) gives back to his community and people. As the Mandela quote that captions this section makes clear, “what counts in life is not the mere fact that we have lived. It is what difference we have made to the lives of others that will determine the significance of the life we lead.” The story of the “Professor and Mrs. SKB Asante Educational Trust Fund,” construction of teachers’ accommodation, electrification of communities, establishment of Community Information/Computer Centre is an edifying story of vision, dedication and commitment worthy of emulation especially in a country that has not yet developed a tradition of philanthropy on a wide scale. The story makes an enriching and gratifying reading and deserves a separate book on its own.
Throughout the narrative we get to see Professor Asante’s life as a family man, not just at the nuclear family level but also at the level of the extended family. This is very much in order, because above all, the autobiography is also a story of family life, of relationships and bonds that are strengthened through time, adversity, joys and successes. Asante’s narrative recounts these different layers as well as the different emotions they elicit: the amazing joys of a shared life in marriage, the pride in children’s lives and successes, the unabashed delight in grandchildren, and yes, the anguish of a life-threatening illness that deepens our spirituality. Asante offers all these as inseparable constituents of a fully lived life. This is the delicate balance the autobiography negotiates between making a living and making a life. Every transition of the journey touches us in some personal way and makes us look back on our own lives. This is indeed, the pleasant irony of Asante’s journey. It began with no road signs, no manuals. In the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s, this was Professor Asante’s reality. The great thing is that in charting the trajectory of his life, he has left us with the signs and manuals for our own lives in the turbulent yet exciting times we live in.
by Prof. Nana Wilson — Tagoe