Achimota School as I Knew It

I too claim to be a member of the '75 Year Group. I left the School in 1975, have recently turned 75 myself and went back last month for the 75th anniversary celebrations. They were wonderful. The dancing on Founders' Day was spectacular (the Fantes being particularly notable).

I arrived in the Gold Coast in 1955, Derek Holt and I being the last two members of staff to be interviewed by the Ref. A.G. Fraser (who was teaching in Uganda in 1906!). I was something of a fraud, never having been teacher-trained, and came straight from installing industrial pension schemes in South London. I broke all the rules of good teaching. The Minister of Education once came into my Form One to find a boy standing in the waste-paper box, "where the rubbish goes".

However, I found I enjoyed teaching, and when Miss Bentley and I wrote "English for Modern Africa", it was satisfactory to immortalize troublesome students by putting their names in. When Miss Bentley left and got married, I made my Fifth Form write letters of congratulation and sent them to her. One boy wrote: "I thought you would always remain a sinister."

The 1960 Form 5A was the most remarkable class I ever had the luck to teach and the only one to achieve the distinction of being able to converse in quotations from its set books. Of the 25 or 16 boys in the class, five became university professors and one of them (no names) was one of the two cleverest students I ever taught. The other was the distinguished novelist Ayi Kwei Armah, whom I had the honour to teach in Form 6. I stayed with him four years ago in a poor Senegalese fishing village, where he was looking after the elderly and the sick - I realized that the old Achimota Red Cross spirit lived on.

Armah was also my House Prefect in Livingstone. I was a Housemaster from my second term and the job gave unending pleasure and interest. Particularly good memories are of the late K.N. Owusu, a shrimp of a boy, winning the cross-country year after year and gradually taking the House (which had won the Snail for many years) with him until they won the team cup.

Also of the Garden Competition, usually a battle between myself and Livingstone or Cadbury and Mr. Holt and Lugard. Honours, I think, were about even. The annual Gilbert and Sullivan opera was a treat. I had no voice, so was given the job of rewriting the "patter" songs, a somewhat risky business in the early 1960s. Later I greatly enjoyed listening to bath-time in Cadbury before supper, when the whole opera would be run through, with the female roles sung in falsetto.

There were, of course, less happy times: for example, the mid-1960s when everyone had to watch whatever they said and eavesdroppers listened in to all the telephone lines in the School. However, one stayed on because one always wanted to see what became of a particular year, and the next, and the next.......

In fact, most of my ugly ducklings became swans, and when I go back to Ghana or am invited by the O.A.A. in America, I am spoilt rotten by distinguished Akoras. In the early days, I taught the children of the High Commissioner. Later on, the High Commissioner had been one of my fellow members of staff. It makes one feel rather old.

I owe an enormous amount to Achimota School. It gave me a purpose and meaning in life which I would not otherwise have had.

Thank you all for that and God bless you. Enjoy the dance!

Adrian Sherwood April 2002