With an objective foreign eye, the book "We Two in West Africa" by F. Gordon Guggisberg and wife (Decima Moore) provided an account of the Gold Coast landscape in the 1900's.]
Rediscovering this exceptional institution was like meeting a pedigree of bold, bright, down-to-earth, committed souls that made it great: Freeman, Parker, Mensah Sarbah, the Picot brothers, Balmer, Lockhart, Acquaah, Grant, and an eminent gang of "Who's who?" that will fill the school's armoury of biographical sketches. These encounters with ancestral roots were captivating. The series are dedicated to all old boys, especially the "sixers" groups: 1956, 1966, the centenary, 1986, 1996, and 2006.]
Mfantsipim was founded in 1876 in Cape Coast (in the same year as Fourah Bay College, Sierra Leone). Since its birth to spread Wesleyan evangelism, the school has gone through dramatic changes, including closures. The name also evolved around Wesleyan High School, Wesleyan Collegiate, Richmond College, and Mfantsipim. Legal ownership too passed from Wesleyan Methodist Missionary Society, to the Fanti Public Schools Ltd, and back to the Missionary Society. The settings, similarly, shifted to locations such as a mission house, Coussey house, Kotokuraba school room, Sea View house, Mount Hope, and finally Kwabotwe Hill.
An old picture - dubbed The Faithful Eight - still hangs upstairs in the administration building. It showed eight spirited adolescents sporting willpower on their faces, but with no sandals on their feet - no teachers - and no headmaster. That was the entire enrolment of the school by 1907. Like dripping taps of water, short of gathering a flow and yet never quite stop trickling, the eight nestled, taught each other, survived - and heralded a storm. Welcome to this epoch in Mfantsipim's meek beginnings. But that wasn't the only time the school almost dried up along the way.
Earlier in 1886, the enrolment was already in limbo, and expenses exceeded fees. The Mission lost interest in the High School, and chose to close it down. Though Rev Dennis Kemp became principal of Mfantsipim, he and colleagues preferred raising "a self-supporting church". Convinced "that the Negro is not built so as to be on an equality - intellectually - with white races," he wrote home, "Your Wesleyan Englishmen are too few. You leave too much in the hands of natives, they are yet only children".
Several "native gentlemen" including W.E. Pieterson, J.P. Brown, and John Mensah Sarbah opposed a closure, so the District head allowed that, "if the natives were prepared to bear the financial burden, we ought to give them the opportunity".
Visionaries perceive fully what is only half visible to their lesser contemporaries and not seen by the plebeian. At its chrysalis stage, the school's growth came in small bits, and sometimes not at all. The opposition to closure was led by men like Mensah Sarbah supporting the plausible objectives in the historical movement created by: one, The Gold Coast Aborigines' Rights Protection Society (in response to the Bond of 1844); two, The Fante Confederacy (to raise political awareness and leaders); and three, the enlightened demand for education that (J.E. Casely Hayford said) the colonial government had "not yet showed any visible signs of accomplishing". Casely Hayford visualized the "Mfantsipim National University" as "a spiritual grove" for growing education personnel for the country.
(In a timeline, the Accra Native Confederation initiated by William Lutterodt, John E. Richter, George F. Cleland, Lebrecht Hesse, James Bannerman, and others supported similar requests for their region.)
The Fanti group (in the spirit of "Gone Fantee") accepted the District head's challenge, and took the school over. But it soon became obvious that the horses and the carts were headed in different directions.
Expectations were great; the means were small. For starters, the array of wishes could not fit into one measly curriculum. The demands ranged from the theological, industrial, commercial, technical to academics. When the wishful population of "young men (of) all ages 10 to thirty years or more" (plus qualified teachers plus the cash for salaries) was factored into the mix, the ideals approached impossible dreams.
But, the local doubts that emerged and shied parents away from enrolling their wards were not for the reasons stated above. The situation was a peculiar one. Cape Coasters longed for a particular credibility for the school, namely, a European headmaster, with a degree. That last straw confirmed the unsavory remarks made earlier by Rev Kemp that, deep down, the natives couldn't continue the school by themselves.
All said, a posse of enigmatic challenges availed themselves. And thus emerged the so-called "Sphinx Riddle" whose unraveling Mfantsipim's survival rested on. The teething pains were so overwhelming that in a period of thirty-one years (1876-1907), a hefty twenty fresh headmasters had come and gone, each serving only briefly.
Fate became benevolent in providing the floundering school with a father figure in the shape of Rev W.T. Balmer, thanks to Rev A.T.R. Bartrop, chairman of the Mission. The new headmaster embraced the few boys he found like his own begotten sons, and coined the term "The Faithful Eight" to match his admiration for their shared vision and team teaching. His arrival as headmaster (1907-1910) steadied the flow, and the school was handed back to the Synod.
Shortly, he sorted out the administrative and teaching concerns, and raised morale. Stable contours were now visible in the once meandering school. With the settling of the so-called "Sphinx Riddle" a heartening stability was created. The survivor's threshold was crossed; the school was rooted a little deeper; closure was now out of the question.
Bartels's profile of Rev Balmer remains an enduring tribute: "Late afternoon of each day, a lonely figure topped by a floppy-brimmed panama hat would walk past the Fosu Lagoon towards Elmina. That was Balmer, a teacher of incomparable powers of communication. Before I knew him, Latin was just a dead language, requiring feats of memory to cope with its demands. When he handed us back to our teacher, the subject had come alive, as had the school he left in 1910."
While a full time headmaster and teacher, Rev Balmer researched "A History of the Akan People", and taught it as a subject. (He published it in 1925 in book form.)
But Rev Balmer's successes were pyrrhic victories. Without help, the effort nearly killed him. In January 1910, he wrote: The work is "really too much for the health of anyone, either of soul or body - I toil from morning to night." In July, he wrote: "I have again and again been positively ill from nothing but sheer fatigue." In October, he lamented: "I have never dragged so in my life - I have had to work to the utmost limit of my strength teaching hour after hour everyday".
On 28th November, the school's "best friend", Mensah Sarbah died. The very next day, the 29th, Rev Balmer was ordered home by his doctor. He had suffered from recurring attacks of malaria fever, and his cardiac condition was bad. By early November, "boils and septic lashes" appeared all over his body. He was "anaemic and his spleen had enlarged". It was clear he could not end his term, July 1911.
By the time he left the Gold Coast for health reasons, enrolment at the Mfantsipim he had recreated had risen from eight to eighty. While Cape Coast mourned Sarbah, Bartels captured the essence: "Sarbah with others before him has the credit for the vision; Balmer made the vision a reality - the visionary and the man of action left behind them a School with great possibilities."
In turn, Rev Balmer's tribute said: "I am not ashamed to own that in my work (at Mfantsipim) I drew from John Sarbah inspiration and encouragement " I never came away from his presence without feeling enheartened and braced anew to my task "Much of my work was done for his sake." (A superior soldier with an invincible spirit, Rev Balmer returned years later as an acting head.)
It happened that both the expansion of Wesleyan missionary activities and local prospects required ancillary services and expertise. To satisfy all these, the infant Mfantsipim, like the babe in the manger, provided the hope and the nucleus, while serving as the transit hub for the nation's future in education.
The offshoots were many: An earlier example was the transfer to Aburi of the Wesleyan Training Institution (in 1916) under Rev J.S. Gibson, Mfantsipim's vice-principal, to be assisted by Rev R.A. Acquaah, and later Rev F.C.F. Grant. The institution was moved further north to Kumasi in 1925 as Wesley College to cater for a wider area in the Gold Coast.
Schools modeled after Mfantsipim included Prempeh College (with Mfantsipim teacher Rev Pearson as the first principal), Accra Academy, Wesley Grammar, and Fijai Secondary. The constitution of President Nkrumah's Ghana National School was drafted at Kwabotwe.
It was the trust of the Founders that at Mfantsipim the strivings of the people would result in the maturing of the nation's soul through education. There were no limits. The original badge embraced the noble ethnicities of "Mfantsi, Wassaw, Akwapim, Accra, Sekondi, Ogwaa, Appolonia, Asante" and others, with the inspiring motto "Dwin Hwe Kan", Think into the future. |
