Tales of a Ghanaian Prefect
Uncle Harold Tells All
Uncle Harold sat there with a sly grin on his face. He had been a prefect at his all-boys boarding school near Cape Coast, and now he was sitting with us by the beach, just thirty minutes away from his school. Having just gotten off work as a bank branch manager, he wore a powder blue oxford with a black suit of a modern cut. His Ghanaian accent carried faint echoes of resonant British vowels, and he spoke with a deep, jovial voice.
Malcolm, Victor, and I waited on his next words with bated breath. Even his fiancee, who we called Sister Christine, was sitting at the edge of her seat.
“Let me tell you, boys…” he began.
Adisadel College is the second oldest secondary school in Ghana, and is ranked as one of the best in Sub-Saharan Africa. The school taught seven grades of boys, one thousand kids in all. But despite our school’s storied history, we were the rowdiest and naughtiest group of boys in the entire Central Region. Even worse, we were absolutely incorrigible. The things that happened at our school, only God knows.
Now, the campus was situated next to a palm tree plantation. Each time a tree was felled, the farmers would take a bamboo sliver and pierce the stump. After inserting a small tap, they would then collect the sap that trickled out overnight in big plastic buckets. The foggy white palm wine tasted sweet like soda pop when fresh, but when fermented, it could be distilled into a rum named akpeteshie. The liquor was known for its ability to destroy lives, and was commonly referred to as ‘don’t mind your wife’ or ‘kill me quickly’.
Us boys at Adisadel loved palm wine. Every time we heard the thud of a fallen palm tree, we would round up a group at midnight and hop the fence into the plantation. The next morning, the farmers would discover that their buckets were emptier than when they had left them the night before. And we were unstoppable. No matter what barriers the farmers put up, the next time we heard a palm tree’s thud, we’d do it all over again.
“Didn’t you get into trouble?” I asked, “And I thought you were a prefect!”
Of course we got into trouble. The headmaster was a strict man, and with a school of a thousand miscreants like us, he had no choice but to rule with an iron fist. One night, the school dining hall served kenkey (a fist-sized fermented cornmeal dumpling) and nobody wanted to eat it, so we complained to the headmaster. He promptly walked up to his podium and sent us to bed with empty stomachs. He was finishing up a particularly stern lecture when, for a split second, I saw a white chunk of something coming down from the rafters. Before the headmaster had finished his sentence, the glob of kenkey had landed on the floor with a rude SPLAT. The hall was silent for a second before everything descended into utter pandemonium. A thousand balls of kenkey flew into the air, and suddenly, the headmaster was nowhere to be seen.
It was only after the food fight had started to wind down that we discovered the poor man hiding under the table closest to the podium.
The next morning, the headmaster awoke to the smell of burning rubber. As he exited his house, it became apparent that a huge bonfire had been lit on the main road. With what must have been equal parts horror and curiosity, the headmaster walked over to his car—and sure enough, all four wheels had been popped off. That same morning, he lined up all one thousand boys from all seven grades in the school’s front yard. And he caned each and every one of them.
But that’s not even the most outrageous thing to happen at Adisadel. First, it is important to know that the school was next to a small village and that the youngest boys there were 13-14 years old. However, because Ghana’s education system was undergoing a change, there were also some boys in junior high who were very much grown. [Here, Sister Christine commented that there were even some 18-year-olds who were in junior high]. It just so happened that on weekends, when the mood was right, some of the boys would go out into the nearby village and ‘spread their wild oats among the fields’.
At this point in the story, Sister Christine gave Uncle Harold a funny look.
It’s absolutely true, though I didn’t participate. Sometimes, the boys did not even have to go far to do their sowing. Adisadel College happens to be the only school in Ghana with three football fields in our sports complex. On Saturday nights, a few women from the village would come down to the fields, carrying empty woven baskets. Once they reached their field of choice, they would take a small blanket out of their basket and place it on the grass. Then they would place the empty basket next to them, hike up their skirts, and lie down with their legs spread open. The boys would come to them one by one, wordlessly, each making sure to first drop a tin of sardines in the basket. Or a bar of soap. Actually, even a tube of toothpaste would do—really, it depended on what you were able to save up that week. And after everything was said and done, the women would walk back to the village with laden baskets.
It was no wonder then that every day, little children from the village would come to our dining hall during meals. The older ones would walk in with their toddler siblings waddling in behind them, and they would all help themselves to our food. Many of the children came not only for breakfast, but also lunch and dinner. It was a comical sight, and every once in a while, you’d point one out to your friend and ask, “Hey, doesn’t that one over there look just like you?”
