Mfantsipim School

THE EDUMFA LIBRARY

The Private Library of Kwesi Kay, Poet, Playwright, Theatre Practitioner

The idea of establishing a collegiate school to raise educational standards in the Gold Coast was first mooted in 1865 but it was not until 1876 that The Wesleyan High School was established in Cape Coast with donations from local businessmen and the support of the Methodist Missionary Society in London. The school was established to train teachers and began with 17 pupils. It was originally planned to be sited at Accra because the British Government had by 1870 decided to move the capital of the Gold Coast from Cape Coast to Accra. However, local agitation and the urgent need to put the idea into practice after eleven years of debate pressurised the Government to allow the school to begin functioning but on the understanding that it would later be moved to Accra. If that had happened it would not have been called "Mfantsipim" since the name means "a countless number of Fantes".

Mfantsipim was the first secondary school to be established in the Gold Coast and in 1931 it moved to its present location at Kwabotwe Hill in the northern part of the Town, at the top of Kotokuraba Road, Cape Coast. The school sometimes has been referred to as 'Kwabotwe' for that reason. It has turned out some of the country's best known public figures in all walks of life, men such as Alex Quaison-Sackey, former President of the General Assembly of UNO, Dr. K A Busia, the first African to occupy a Chair in the Hague and a former Head of State and Kofi Annan, the current General Secretary of the United Nations. It was deemed to be a Grammar School because Latin and Greek were taught but the school also offered carpentry, art and crafts and it has generally been known as Mfantsipim School. It was an all boys boarding school although the intake included a small number of "day students", that is, pupils who attended school from home. Girls were later admitted to the sixth form.

Mfantsipim School - A Dormitory and Administration Block

I entered the school in January 1955. When you entered the school you became aware in a very short time of the venerable traditions and history of the school and its place in Gold Coast political history. There were 90 pupils who entered the school that year. We were known as the greenhorns and had to undergo a ritual of being initiated into the culture of the school. This took the form of being draped with white sheets and crowned with a bouquet of green leaves and given a short dose of the cane by the senior pupils. I did not enjoy that initiation ceremony. But we soon settled down and just to give us a taste of things to come our English Literature teacher came to our first lesson with a cricket bat and a cricket ball to extol the virtues of cricket and the English character, and that took up the whole lesson. Among the early literary books we read was "Goodbye Mr. Chips".

The organisation of the school day, when I was there was highly regimented. We woke up at 5.20 am, folded our beds, washed, had an inspection and then off we went to assembly which began at 6.50 am and ended at 7.10 am. Lessons lasted 40 minutes and we had our breakfast at 9.10 am. Classes ended at 1.40 pm and lunch was at 2.00 p.m. After lunch we were expected to stay in our dormitories until 3.30 pm when extra curricula activities began. Some went to the fields for games and athletics, others went to piano practice, others went to the library. Dinner was at 6.00 pm and prep began at 7.00 pm. The junior school, that is, Forms 1-3 finished prep at 8.30 pm, Forms 4 and 5 at 9.00 pm and the sixth Form pupils finished prep at 10.00 pm That was a typical day. The morning service was usually conducted by a senior tutor and followed the Methodist convention. Although the school was originally set up with the help of the Methodist Mission admission was not based on denominational affiliation but on the results of your “Common Entrance” examination. Because we were a colony of the British the school's curriculum was very much fashioned after an English pubic school. Although African history was taught the bulk of our syllabus was English. We studied writers like Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare, Orwell, Dickens and Bernard Shaw. At that time there were not that many African creative writers about and therefore it was not surprising that no African literature featured in the syllabi. I suspect also that it was because it was a boys' school that we did not study any female writers despite the fact that the Ghanaian society itself was and still is matriarchal. We took our “O” and “A” Level exams from the Cambridge University Local Syndicate Exam Board. Our results were extremely good by any standard.

The staff was made up roughly of 50% European and 50% African teachers and this gave the students a breath of internationalism in their character development, which was quite healthy.

Drama became a strong subject from 1955 onwards. Led by Joseph DeGraft who later became Head of English and Ian Roddick an Englishman and Head of the French Department, the staff performed a wide range of plays from year to year, from T S Eliot's "Murder In The Cathedral" to Oedipus' "Antigone. This encouraged me to found the student's Dramatic Society and invite Mr. Roddick to become its patron, which he accepted. A classroom was converted into a drama studio and between 1955 and 1961 Drama was well subscribed to by both staff and students. The period, 1955 to 1961, when I was there, was momentous in many other ways. The country went from a colony of the British Empire to a fully fledged Republic.