All, all are gone, the old familiar faces!
A few weeks ago, I received a call from a familiar number, a person who had never failed to call and encourage me whenever he had the opportunity to read my column. It was not the Very Reverend Dr Kwasi Ohene-Bekoe, retired pastor of the Adenta Methodist Church, who had called but his daughter to inform me that my encourager and valiant supporter had departed this world two days earlier.
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The funeral of Jake Obetsebi-Lamptey today, the fact that he was 70 years old and the fact of his presence in our politics since 1992, now made me realise that many of the people I personally regarded as contemporaries are fading away from the public stage, either due to irreversible ill-health, or that the ultimate leveller, death, has claimed them.
Rev. Dr Ohene-Bekoe had returned to Ghana from the United States in the 1990s where he had been living for about 30 years. His name featured frequently in the house when I was young as he was a protégé of my father. But I had forgotten h
In the event, he wrote a full page tribute to my father in this very paper in March, 1987, a few days before he was interred at Abura Dunkwa Wesley chapel. I do remember the then editor of this paper, Sam Clegg, whose name points to his uterine relationship with the person who was named after the JT Clegg Methodist Church at Kaneshie, demanding that we supply him with one of the tributes to my father so he publishes it! Sam Clegg had no idea what his decision caused at the time.
The next time I heard of Rev. Dr Ohene-Bekoe was when he returned home in the 1990s, and did two things for the Methodist Church. The first was spearheading, with others, the establishment of the Methodist University with the main campus at Dansoman here in Accra, sharing the same compound with Wesley Grammar School. The second was providing the theological armoury and intellectual foundation and support for the transition of the church from its former system of church governance to the present episcopal system.
He was very passionate about the latter since he had spent 30 or so years of his professional life in the United Methodist Church in the United States which practised the episcopal form of church governance. He was the happiest of people when the system was inaugurated in the presence of church prelates in the country and the West African region with the then Vice President, John Atta-Mills, attending. This was in January, 2000.
But I got to know him personally earlier when the Methodist University was established. Some sub chiefs of Larteh, through the prompting of the NPP MP for the area, the late Agyare Koi Larbi, had donated a parcel of Larteh land for the siting of a Larteh campus of the proposed university. The laudable idea was taken up by the District Chief Executive for Akuapem at the time, and presented to the church as such.
Mr Koi-Larbi’s justifiable disquiet at this snub of his efforts resulted in the confusion which attended the event and in which Rev. Dr Bekoe pointedly ignored my remonstrations. He later visited my mother and told her that there was no way he was going to quarrel with his brother in public, referring to me! When he was posted to his final station before retirement, Adenta, we visited him at home several times to relive old times.
At the church service we organised for my father to mark 20 years of his death at the Calvary Methodist Church in Adabraka here in Accra in March, 2007, we invited him to share his memories with the congregation. Even here, he forcefully edited parts of the programme to reflect the proper appreciation of events and personalities.
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Any time I wrote about the church, he never failed to call to encourage, advice and to thank me for my views. He also prayed for me.
He was a bold and fearless Man of God for whom the Word of God is revealed truth. He was lambasted by the leadership of the church when he wrote extensively about new pathways of the episcopacy he had earlier championed that he vehemently disagreed with.
He was, as a practical Protestant and a proud Wesleyan Methodist, very uncomfortable with the growing power and influence of the bishops as against the ordinary priesthood and the lay congregation. He foresaw theological and church tyranny and warned against it. He was a champion of the doctrine of a faith grounded in reason and rationality, and had no time for the abuses of the prophetic ministry exploiting the faith of ordinary folk.
Rev. Dr Ohene-Bekoe was himself the son of another minister of the church, who I remember vaguely as a senior and retired contemporary of my father in the early 1960s then living in Larteh. I hope to be able to make it to Larteh, for his interment next month, to say farewell to a staunch and unwavering Methodist priest who had done his bit for his beloved church. May he rest in peace.
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