#150 #Anniversary #Mfantsipim #MOBA.
There was a time when a song was more than a song.
From 1987 to 1994, music was woven into the fabric of Mfantsipim School life. It accompanied our Saturday entertainment, filled the dormitories at night, followed us into town, and provided the vocabulary for some of our earliest attempts at romance.
We were growing up at a fascinating moment in popular music. R&B and soul were evolving; hip-hop was becoming a powerful cultural force; ragga was everywhere; and pop and rock continued to provide the songs that made young hearts beat faster.
Our musical world included Michael Jackson, Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey, Luther Vandross, Anita Baker, New Edition, Bobby Brown, Keith Sweat, Boyz II Men, Toni Braxton, Janet Jackson, Mary J. Blige, TLC, Heavy D & the Boyz, MC Hammer, Public Enemy, Naughty by Nature, Salt-N-Pepa, Queen Latifah, Biggie Smalls, Tupac, Snoop Dogg, Lionel Richie and many others.
Then there was the Jamaican influence: Shabba Ranks, Maxi Priest, Chaka Demus & Pliers, Yellowman and Buju Banton. Ragga was becoming an essential part of the soundscape of our generation.
Saturday Entertainment
At Mfantsipim, entertainment took centre stage on Saturdays only.
That made Saturday special.
The entire week seemed to build towards it. After the routine of classes, prep, dining, house activities and all the other demands of school life, Saturday gave us a chance to relax, socialize and enjoy ourselves.
There could be Film Shows, Free Nights or Records Night.
Film Shows brought the excitement of cinema to the school. We gathered at the Assembly Hall and, for those few hours, the ordinary school environment disappeared.
Free Nights were more relaxed, giving boys an opportunity to unwind, laugh and socialize.
Then there was Records Night.
For music lovers, Records Night was something special. The records came out, the music played, and the atmosphere changed.
Songs such as Richard Marx’s “Right Here Waiting,” Glenn Medeiros’ “Nothing’s Gonna Change My Love for You,” and Chris de Burgh’s “The Lady in Red” provided some of the romantic soundtrack.
The music was not merely something we heard.
We felt it.
For boys of our age, some of those songs seemed to contain all the words we needed but could not find ourselves.
The Dormitory and the Judy Boucher Ritual
At night, Bartels/Sneath Middle Floor had another atmosphere altogether.
After lights out, when the school became quieter, the ’92 Cot became our own little world.
There were conversations, jokes, arguments, stories, gossip about girls’ schools, football discussions and plans for the future.
And, somewhere in the background, there was music.
One particular memory remains unforgettable.
There was a cassette player and a cassette containing Judy Boucher songs. That tape seemed to have a permanent residence in the cassette player.
At night, it would play continuously. Boys would gradually settle into their beds and pretend to be asleep.
But nobody was really asleep.
We were listening to Judy Boucher’s “Can’t Be with You Tonight.”
Then the tape would reach the end.
Silence.
Almost immediately, somebody would shout:
“I beg, make you turn the cassette!”
The boy with the cassette player was expected to get up quickly and turn it over.
Because a cassette had Side A and Side B.
There was no playlist, streaming service or phone to automatically continue the music. You physically had to take the cassette out, turn it over and put it back.
And so the music would start again.
The boys would settle down.
And everybody would return to pretending to be asleep.
It was a simple ritual, but it captures exactly what our dormitory life felt like.
The Business of Letters
Music and romance were inseparable.
In our days, if you liked a girl, you wrote her a letter.
There were no mobile phones, WhatsApp, text messages or social media.
A letter required paper, an envelope, a pen, a stamp and, most importantly, the courage to write what you felt.
Even the postage stamp presented an opportunity for innovation. Boys were washing the ink off postage stamps so they could be reused for other letters.
Nothing was wasted, especially when the next letter to a girls’ school was considered urgent.
The lyrics of popular songs became our raw material. We borrowed romantic lines from Judy Boucher, Milli Vanilli, Whitney Houston and many others.
A song lyric could become the opening of a letter. Another could provide the emotional climax.
Sometimes we were practically writing poetry without realizing it.
HolyCo: The Same-Day Letter Service
There was another way to beat the slow postal system.
HolyCo girls trained on the Senior Field, by courtesy of Mrs. Beauty Hope. This gave Mfantsipim boys a precious opportunity to send and receive letters within 24 hours.
When HolyCo came to train, boys would rush to the Senior Field to collect their letters, then hurry back to the Academic Site to write their replies. The reply had to be completed quickly enough to return to HolyCo that same day.
That was our version of same-day delivery, long before Amazon.
But there was one important rule: choose your messenger carefully.
If you sent a letter through a senior boy who happened to be interested in the same girl, don’t expect a reply.
Your letter might get there, but your reply could mysteriously disappear.
Such was the delicate—and sometimes dangerous—business of romance at Kwabotwe.
The Letter Boys
In our days, two Form Four boys served as the “letter boys.”
For reasons I never understood—and, truthfully, never bothered to ask—they were always Freeman/Aggrey boys and always in Form Four.
Perhaps it was simply one of those traditions of Kwabotwe that nobody questioned.
The letter boys were entrusted with the boys’ letters. Sometimes, a boy had to ‘tua’ with a tin of solid or liquid before his letter was handed to him.
They could open the letters, read them and then reseal them before delivering them to their intended recipients.
It was a remarkable arrangement by today’s standards.
And, naturally, information travelled very quickly.
If a boy wrote to a girl and received a rejection, the story did not necessarily remain between the two of them.
If the girl had “bounced” him, the news could spread through the school, turning one boy’s romantic disappointment into the entertainment of an entire group.
That was the strange ecosystem of communication at Kwabotwe: letters travelled slowly through the postal system, but once they entered the school, their contents could travel remarkably fast.
Patrice, the Letter Writer
Then there was Patrice.
Patrice had the nicest handwriting.
That single quality made him an important man in the romantic affairs of the Bartels/Sneath Middle Floor boys.
A boy would select a song, identify the lyrics he wanted and explain the message he wanted to convey.
Then Patrice would write the letter.
He became, in effect, the unofficial letter writer for the Middle Floor boys.
There was only one problem.
While Patrice was helping everybody else communicate with girls, he himself was not getting letters from the girls’ schools.
And so the boys gave him a nickname:
Free Boy.
The irony was priceless.
Here was the man helping everybody else write love letters, yet his own romantic correspondence seemed nonexistent.
But eventually, in Form Four, the drought ended.
Patrice received his first letter.
The sender was Catherine Adu-Gyamfi.
That letter was treated as a historic achievement.
After all the years of writing letters for other boys, Patrice had finally become a recipient himself.
We celebrated him.
We carried him shoulder-high.
The Free Boy had finally received a letter!
It was funny, affectionate and completely characteristic of the friendships we had built at Mfantsipim.
Cape Coast at Night
Outside the school, Cape Coast offered another dimension of our musical education.
Dans P and other entertainment spots gave us an opportunity to hear the music in a completely different environment.
R&B shared the night with hip-hop and ragga.
The beats were infectious.
We were witnessing a musical transformation. American R&B and hip-hop were influencing young people across the world. Jamaican ragga was equally powerful. Ghanaian youth were absorbing all of it, adapting it and making it part of their own cultural experience.
And there were the sounds closer to home: Willy Chi, Moon Dogs and V103 Sounds—names that instantly bring back memories of the musical world we inhabited in those days.
The music at the clubs was not the same as the music in the dormitory.
At the dormitory, we listened.
At Records Night, we danced.
In town, we experienced the music.
And somewhere in between, we fell in love.
The Soundtrack of Our Youth
Looking back, it is remarkable how much music surrounded our Mfantsipim years.
For the romantics, we cannot forget the Mac Band’s “Roses Are Red (Violets Are Blue)” and The Whispers’ “Rock Steady.”
There was the soul and R&B that gave us Luther Vandross, Anita Baker, Whitney Houston, Keith Sweat, Bobby Brown, New Edition, Boyz II Men, Mary J. Blige and TLC.
Then came the hip-hop revolution, with artists such as Biggie Smalls, Tupac, Snoop Dogg, Public Enemy, Heavy D, Naughty by Nature, Salt-N-Pepa and Queen Latifah.
And the Jamaican influence remained strong.
But the music was only part of the story.
The real story was us.
It was the boys in the dormitory pretending to sleep while the cassette played.
It was the frantic shout when the tape ended.
It was the boy washing the ink off a postage stamp because another letter had to be sent.
It was the two Form Four letter boys, mysteriously and traditionally always from Freeman/Aggrey.
It was the news of another boy being “bounced” travelling through the school faster than the original letter itself.
It was Patrice carefully writing letters for everyone with his beautiful handwriting.
It was calling him Free Boy because he had no letters of his own.
It was HolyCo training on the Senior Field and boys rushing to collect letters, dash back to the Academic Site and compose same-day replies.
And it was the unforgettable day when Catherine Adu-Gyamfi finally wrote to Patrice, and we carried him shoulder-high as though he had just won a major championship.
These were the things that made our Mfantsipim years special.
Today, technology has made communication instantaneous. A message can cross the world in seconds. Music can be accessed without a cassette, a record player or even a radio.
But something has been lost.
We once waited for letters.
We waited for Saturday entertainment.
We waited for Records Night.
We waited for a particular song.
We waited for the cassette to finish.
We waited for the next letter from the girls’ school.
And perhaps because we had to wait, we appreciated everything more deeply.
Those songs were not merely songs.
They were the soundtrack to our friendships, our mischief, our first romances, our heartbreaks and our dreams.
They played while we lived those years, and decades later, when one of them comes on, the years disappear.
For a moment, we are young again.
We are back at Kwabotwe.
The cassette is turning.
Side A has finished.
Someone is shouting from the darkness:
“Turn the cassette!”
And somewhere in the dormitory, Patrice is probably still writing somebody else’s love letter.
Except this time, perhaps, there is a letter waiting for him too.
150 Years of Mfantsipim
As Mfantsipim celebrates its 150th Anniversary, these memories are a small contribution to the rich tapestry of stories that make Kwabotwe what it is.
May the generations that follow continue to create their own friendships, traditions, adventures and memories, and may they one day look back on their time at Mfantsipim with the same affection and gratitude.
For the boys of yesterday, today and tomorrow, may the spirit of Kwabotwe continue to live on.
And decades from now, may they too look back and simply say:
“My oh my… the memories.”
- Read also
- Mfantsipim School @ 150 and Creech’s Mfantsipim Diaries: My First Shock
- Mfantsipim School @ 150 and Creech’s Mfantsipim Diaries: My second shock
- Mfantsipim School @ 150 and Creech’s Mfantsipim Diaries: Shock Number Three
- Creech’s Mfantsipim Diaries. My final shock
The writer is Philip Creech-Jones of MOBA 1992 (Mfantsipim Old Boys Association).
