From haircuts meant to build character to Rasta hairstyles they swear will twist cobwebs and pasta into the minds of young students, from prayer and fasting believed to be holy security guards blocking sin from entering the soul through the stomach, from Prince of Wales College, baptised and renamed Achimota, with waters running wild to a thirsty land, from Gambaga to Accra, from Wiawso’s greens to Keta’s ocean spray, all the way to Wesleyan High School and its Cape and Coast.
We have been told, in Wesleyan methodology since 1836, that Jesus is the only way to Wey Gey Hey.
And in the courts, in the rulings, in the carved-in-stone commandments of mission statements and school rules, the Mission School oxymoron marches on, holding aloft the torch of science and superstition, mixing myth with microscopes, faith with physics, clogging the arteries of our minds with the colonial cholesterol of a long-dead Empire.
Meanwhile, Sky Daddy’s unholy ghost falls on our hearts and land like a second-hand generator bought on the streets of Abeka Lapaz, sparking seizures and social spasms, Pentecostal plumes fogging the whole nation’s judgement. And still we move forward, in every way backward.
But look—from these same mission schools, we churn out scholars, polished elites, people who know every book, people who show enough respect when faith rises and demands its pound of recognition from folks who confidently tell us it is their belief that Bolgatanga sits somewhere along Ghana’s coastline.
Or—more oxymoronic than that—that without the chemistry of sex, and outside the facts of biology, somewhere in ancient Judea, a Jewish woman, just once, is believed by those who saw her not, to have had a baby.
Amarkine Amarteifio - amarkine51@gmail.com
