Back to Legon matters!
My faithful readers will recall that last year, I got into a pointless argument with the authorities of the University of Ghana, Legon, over appropriate recognition and honours for the first African Vice Chancellor of the university.
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I had argued that Nana Kobina Nketsia IV was the first to hold that office. It was one of the few occasions I had received a riposte to something I had written in this column. In that instance, I permitted Legon to have the last word not because I had accepted what it had to say, but because I did not want to give the impression that Professor Kwapong was not a distinguished and excellent Vice Chancellor who did not deserve the honours heaped on him in his lifetime, including, in my opinion, the highest, his chairmanship of the Council of State from 2001 to 2005.
I knew Professor Kwapong a bit, but not Nana Nketsia, who are both now deceased. So as not to give offence to a living acquaintance in a matter that could be seen as a personal attack, I can return to the subject now that Professor Kwapong has also departed this world.
A lot of the interactions I had following the first publication of this matter sought to give the false impression that his tenure as Vice Chancellor was marked by a lack of turbulence in relations between the staff and students of the university and the state. Of course, this was flatly untrue, and was the result of transferring all possible encomiums to someone who had presumably become the first Ghanaian head of Legon. This observation is very pertinent, in that it has since his departure as Legon VC, informed the near hagiography in which his stellar career in university administration had been discussed.
It has been pointed out to me by several people that the activist politics of Nana Kobina Nketsia, even when he was Vice Chancellor, was the reason Legon and other observers were reluctant to give him his due as the first African Vice Chancellor and University Council chairman. Nana Nketsia was one of those detained for the Positive Action incident in January, 1950, the only chief who went to jail as part of the struggle for independence.
He was, undoubtedly, a close colleague of Osagyefo Dr Nkrumah throughout the entire period of the latter’s politics in this country. If it was this closeness to President Nkrumah and his shameless identification with nationalist politics that rendered him unfit to receive his due after the coup of 1966, even from impartial university dons, then it is a bad reflection on the requirement of the true academic to stick to the bare facts, and let others do the interpretation thereof.
This is the meat of my problem with the refusal by some of us to render unto Nana Nketsia his due in the history of the development of the university. Professors Conor Cruise O’Brien, Kofi Abrefa Busia and Albert Adu-Boahen, were all at one time or another, active in off-campus political activities, though, admittedly, not in the high-octane nationalist politics of the Nkrumah era. O’Brien was a well-known Irish politician and academic before the UN Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskold, tapped him to be his Special Envoy in the Congo Crisis, from which assignment President Nkrumah picked him to be Vice Chancellor in 1962.
When Legon became a fully fledged university in 1961, the first head of the institution was Nana Nketsia, who, as Interim Vice Chancellor, was the person who conducted Queen Elizabeth around campus when she first visited Ghana. I am sure the use of interim has persuaded some readers that Nana Nketsia was not the head of Legon. Who was? I am very certain the highly qualified lawyers in the Law Faculty would be happy to enlighten all of us as to the difference in meaning between the words acting or interim on one hand, and substantive on the other. When O’Brien assumed the post substantively in 1962, Nana Nketsia went upstairs to become the third African chairman of the University Council after Arku-Korsah and Kofi Asante Ofori-Atta. He acted again as Vice Chancellor when O’Brien left in 1965, till the coup of February 1966.
These are facts in the public domain, and published actually in the official history of the university on pages 127 and 317 of ‘’A History of University of Ghana,’’ by the acknowledged historian, Professor Francis Agbodeka, [Woeli Publishing Services, Accra, 1978].
It is instructive to recall that the facts in this fine work were drawn to my attention by good products of the university. Again, it is noteworthy that Professor Kwapong himself became a professor in February 1962, when Nana Nketsia was Vice Chancellor [page 127]. One should note that this work was published in 1998, 15 years before my column last year, in which year Legon honoured some distinguished individuals associated with the university, and which prompted my first foray into Legon matters.
Readers will recall that in my short response to the Legon riposte, I made reference to a similar rendition of facts concerning my own alma mater, Mfantsipim, where it is generally assumed, wrongly, that FL Bartels was the first African Principal, as the headmaster was then called, to head the school. I pointed out that cursorily looking at the list of heads of Kwabotwe since 1876, I could detect the names of at least four Ghanaians before Bartels, among whom were JE Casely-Hayford, Adam Wright and Kobina Fynn Egyir-Asaam.
In the case of Mfantsipim too, just as in the case of Legon, there is a wrong assumption, unstated, but they are the same, that pointing out the truth degrades the achievements of Professor Kwapong and Bartels. Indeed, I disagree with the assumption driving this perpetuation of error. Both Bartels and Kwapong possessed solid unchallengeable portfolios of feats which have been properly acknowledged and rewarded by the naming of several institutional properties and monuments after them in both institutions.
To conclude this excursion on this matter, let me quote with approval Professor Agbodeka’s evaluation of the climate of opinion at Legon at the time, still in evidence today, on page 124 of his magisterial work on the history of Legon; ‘’Again it was thought that the liberal ideals of Legon were due to its nurture in the Western tradition which was vaguely equated with the “Oxbridge-London” system. Since Legon- government relations deteriorated from 1961, the Opposition in Parliament developed an academic colouring, particularly since its one-time leader, Dr. Busia, was a renowned university Professor from Legon.
Indeed, Legon appeared to many to be an elitist institution bent on obstructing a progressive African government trying to bring development to the masses of the people. The criticisms that we shall now consider were made against this background picture of Legon. The first to consider came as self-criticism from within Legon itself. The critics, a section of the dons, pointed out the flaw in the system which, as we have seen, was to be a marriage between two models after modifications were made to both.’’
