Feature Article of Monday, 27 November 2017
Columnist: Nat Nuno-Amarteifio
Achimota Academy is a co-educational boarding academy amid at Achimota in Accra,
Since its founding, Achimota College and Academy as it was alleged at the time of its inception, has had a asymmetric access on the aesthetic arts in Ghana.
In every breadth of creativity, music, painting, sculpture, abstract and theatre, Achimota’s access has been abysmal and consistent. This cardboard seeks to analyze the affidavit for this abnormality and to analyze some of the basic affidavit that fabricated these achievements possible. We shall additionally appraise the abreast attributes of this impact.
Colonialism amorphous in Africa in the final decades of the 19th aeon back Europeans accolade for terrritories and took political and aggressive ascendancy of its lands. In India, British aphorism lasted over two centuries.
In Africa colonialism was accepted to aftermost at atomic as continued until Africans captivated the acquaint of pax britanica and learnt to administer themselves. The 1920s was a time of dizzying and unapologetic racism. Accra, the broken-down basic of the colonized Gold Coast was afresh absolute forth ancestral lines.
The appetite was political but the official acumen was medical. The action was justified as a all-important admeasurement to save European lives from African diseases by befitting the two contest apart, abnormally at night.
It was about believed by European medical specialists that Africans were allowed to the furnishings of malaria but that their claret was abounding of the parasites. The atramentous was back mosquitoes fed on animal claret and transported their attenuated burden above ancestral curve to affect Europeans.
On January 28, 1927, the Prince of Wales College and School, Achimota was formally opened. The campus aloft which the academy stood was segregated. No Africans could break there brief afterwards official sanction.
It took the claimed action of the Governor to access permission for Dr. James Kwegyir Aggrey, nominated for the abettor headmaster, to absorb a night below the aforementioned roof as Rev. Alexander G. Fraser, the headmaster.
African ability was admired by abounding Europeans as astern and base and the African average chic bought into this perception. In 1918, Kobina Sekyi a Cape Coast columnist and amusing analyzer wrote a comedy alleged the Blinkards. It was a adverse banter on the beginning African average chic of the 19th century.
Their amusing appetite was to bandage away all identification with their cultural roots and to present themselves as English gentry. It was a cartoonish account of apparition and advised self-deception. The comedy warned of the after-effects back a association loses its moral compass.
Against the accomplishments of these perceptions, the three arch founders had every acumen to be appreciative of their achievement. For one thing, in the bound colonial apple they inhabited, they had been accorded the attenuate honour of a aloof visit. The beneficiary to the throne, Edward, the Prince of Wales was himself present to accord his name on the institution.
The three men, Sir Frederick Gordon Guggisberg, a brigadier in the British Army and Governor of the Gold Coast (1919-1927), Dr. James Kwegyir Aggrey, a built-in of the Gold Coast, built-in in Anomabu and accomplished as a apostolic in America, and the Reverend Alexander G. Fraser, a Scotsman and able educationist were loyal to the crown. They belonged to the advanced and accelerating wings of European backroom and agilely believed that the key to African capitalism was education.
The academy they created was advised to absolve their hopes and ambitions. They saw the appointment as the ultimate endorsement of their aware beliefs. They gave bearing to a school, and let apart account that would advance in three abbreviate decades to the end of British aphorism in the Gold Coast.
The academy was created to claiming the absolute ancestral conventions and to brainwash pride in the nations’s accepted leaders. Its motto, advised by Dr. Aggrey and displayed angrily on a heraldic shield, was composed of atramentous and white piano keys.
Its bulletin declared that all contest are according and as all-important for affable accord as the atramentous and white keys on the piano. At a time back aloof and accepted women in Britain were barred from assembly and added bastions of ascendancy and privilege, the academy accepted accouchement of both sexes and accomplished them calm and equally.
In 1924, back African ability was admired by abounding Europeans as astern and retrogressive, a Department of Anthropology was accustomed on the campus. It was headed by R.S. Rattray, a acclaimed anthropologist. He was accustomed the albatross and the agency to analysis Asante ability and to accomplish his abstracts accessible to the government for action guidance.
Rattray animate his acceptance as analysis administration and undertook acreage analysis in the towns and villages about Achimota and beyond. These communities independent demobilized above soldiers from all over the country. The after-effects were appear and acclimated to advise bounded history. The exercise approved the lie that Africans lacked a history.
Achimota was accustomed ten years afterwards one of the best abandoned and blood-soaked wars in beat history. The Aboriginal Apple War (1914-1918) was evidently amid European admiral but it afflicted every bend of the apple and did not leave any political academy untouched. The battle apparent the airiness below the affectation and beam of 19th-century European imperialism. It additionally approved the charge for a new political apple order.
The Aboriginal Apple War was clearly assured in 1919 by the Accord of Versailles. The accord was adjourned by The United States of America the best able nation in the apple at the end of the war. The United States was led by Admiral Woodrow Wilson, a bookish baby-kisser who alien radically new account of all-embracing order.
These were embodied in the anew founded League of Nations. The alignment was based on the aggregate will of all the world’s peoples and abandoned all-embracing wars as anachronistic solutions to all-around conflicts. It repudiated colonialism and declared that all bodies of the apple had a adapted to aphorism themselves on their own land.
These account no agnosticism aggressive the founders of Achimota and were distilled into the images on the school’s shield. The decades afterwards the end of the Aboriginal Apple War in 1919 saw the actualization of beginning account and concepts in the arts and education.
American troops including African American soldiers took applesauce into Europe and afflicted European music forever. They aggressive beat European adroitness and afflicted its giants.
The new acknowledgment for African art was not bedfast to artists’ studios or music halls. It entered academia. Art schools amorphous to administer its attempt to brainwash new ancestors of students. Back Achimota was founded, this new absorption in African art and its attempt afflicted and shaped the school’s program.
Achimota was created not abandoned to alternation adolescent African minds to cope with a colonial apple bedeviled by Europeans values. They were additionally accomplished to accept and accede the African apple that they accepted to advance one day.
They were consistently apparent to acceptable ability and encouraged to accessory it with modernity. African ability was alien to the acceptance not abandoned through the bookish chic but it was additionally amid into their circadian activities. They were encouraged to abrasion acceptable accoutrements at every adapted opportunity.
The acceptance were accomplished acceptable dances and music and acclimated them for ball as able-bodied as to address academic occasions. These acquaint helped them in afterwards activity back they affected administration positions in the country. Achimota able them to transcend their affiliated niches and to embrace the nation as one.
The abolitionist apparatus of Achimota back the 1920s was the advised admittance of African art and ability into the alertness of its students. This was done to actualize a focus for them and to consistently admonish them of their albatross to their people. Among the aboriginal art agents was the Hungarian, Eva Meyerowitz.
She was amorous about acceptable African art and insisted that her acceptance account and abstraction this art anatomy and analyze it in their works. Kofi Antubam and Saka Acquaye (1923-2007) were amidst her acceptance and they agitated these perspectives into their able careers. Both of them became acclaimed and abounding artists who larboard a abiding access on the aesthetic industry in the country.
Nkrumah and the Aesthetic Industry
One of the acceptance of Achimota who captivated the acquaint of the aesthetic ability and activated it to change the country back he had the befalling to do so was Kwame Nkrumah. He was an agog Pan Africanist, an bookish and a abstracted who became the country’s aboriginal African ruler. In that role, he had ascendancy over its abounding resources.
He had an cutting access on the aesthetic arts which he saw as admired assets in his attempt to accord Ghanaians a faculty of nationhood and to apprehend his Pan African ambitions. He belonged to that bearing of African nationalists that included Leopold Senghor, and Julius Nyerere. They beheld their countries attempt for capitalism as added than political but additionally as greatly cultural and transformational.
They capital not abandoned a new nation but additionally one inhabited by a bodies who were acquainted of their ancestry and appreciative to use it to move forward. Kwame Nkrumah commissioned works from arch artists like Kofi Antubam, Saka Acquaye, Dr. Oku Ampofo, Philip Gbeho (who composed the civic anthem), and Ephraim Amu (who was amenable for the accepted canticle “Yen ara ya Asase ni”).
He formed adamantine to animate the development of highlife as the country’s addition to African accepted music. According to the backward Stan Plange and John Collins, aboriginal in the 1950s Nkrumah saw the abeyant for highlife to become a audibly Ghanaian cast back he visited Liberia and Nigeria.
He was entertained at official functions by the badge and army bands and sometimes by amphitheater orchestras consisting of Lebanese and Syrian musicians. However, there were already African orchestras in Accra, Kumasi and Takoradi amphitheatre the added accepted highlife. He fabricated a point of travelling with one or two Ghanaian bands back he visited added African countries.
They were abundantly acknowledged and were acclaimed by African audiences. E. T Mensah who afterwards acquired acclaim as the baton of the Tempos bandage had accompanied him on one such trip. He was so accepted in Nigeria he lived there for a few years and became one of the founders of Nigerian highlife.
Nkrumah encouraged the admixture of highlife and the alleged guitar bandage music. Below his patronage, several bands were created and accurate by the Accompaniment and they contributed decidedly to the aesthetic industry. Amidst them were state-sponsored bands like the Workers Brigade Bandage and the Farmers Brigade Band.
Each produced works that added the repertoire of highlife music and created actual for added bands. Acclaimed musicians like Nana Ampadu who wrote songs like “Ebi ti yie” and afterwards on “Agatha” developed their talents in the Workers Brigade band. He went on to begin added bands. It was during this aeon that the aboriginal bearing of accompaniment hotels were built.
Every above burghal or boondocks had one. These included the Ambassador Auberge in Accra, The Meridian Auberge in Tema, Burghal Auberge in Kumasi, and Atlantic Auberge in Takoradi. Anniversary auberge animate a abode band. This fostered application in the music industry and deepened the basin of talent. Abounding accepted ball bands flourished as a aftereffect of the state’s advance and patronage.
They accommodate the Ramblers Bandage led by Jerry Hansen, the Tempos Bandage led by E. T. Mensah (1919-1996), the Atramentous Beats Bandage led by Baron Bruce (1922-1997), the Comets led by Teddy Osei (1937), the Broadway Bandage afterwards renamed the Uhuru Bandage below Stan Plange and the Stargazers led by Glen Coffie and afterwards Eddie Quansah.
Nkrumah additionally revolutionized the appearance industry in the 1950s. He answer and affected the cutting of acceptable attires. This was an important action to adverse the alleged “colonial mentality” satirized by Kobina Sekyi in the Blinkards.
This mentality flourished at a aeon back abounding adolescent men and women were scrambling to accompany the burghal workforce. They believed that their adventitious of application in the colonial white collar bazaar would be added by abnegation “native” habits and clothing. It became fashionable for some of the adolescence to pretend benightedness of their own emphasis or to allege it with a strangulated British accent.
Nkrumah fabricated acceptable accoutrements fashionable by insisting that his ministers abrasion kente bolt or the batakari of arctic Ghana for official functions. At accompaniment banquets, ladies were encouraged to dress in alluringly cut cloth.
They afflicted the country’s fashions and helped to authorize the advantageous appearance industries. According to Professor Kofi Baku of Legon University, Nkrumah’s acceptance and popularizations of the batakari was additionally allotment of his action to access the balloter advantage of voters from the arctic amphitheatre by anecdotic with them.
Professor Ivan Addae-Mensah, himself an Akora and a agog apprentice of Ghanaian development below Nkrumah, claims that the president’s adventures in Achimota approved to him how the constant use of acceptable accoutrements could brainwash a accepted appearance in adolescent bodies of assorted aboriginal and chic backgrounds.
The abolitionist convenance of transforming acceptable accoutrements into a approved allotment of a academy compatible advance to added accessory schools and became allotment of a civic consensus.
The celebration of this action is that today, Ghanaian bolt fabricated by GTP, Printex and ATL is actuality acclimated added generally for men and women’s circadian abrasion and we admit every Friday as a acceptable dress day above the nation.
Nkrumah founded the Adolescent Pioneers Movement to approach the energies of adolescent bodies into socially advantageous enterprises. It was based on the Boy Scouts and the Girl Guide movement.
Several practices from Achimota were adopted and congenital into their training e.g. acceptable music and dance, theatre, storytelling, and literature. The movement additionally contributed to bounded tourism by visiting assorted genitalia of the nation.
Ephraim Amu and the Significance of Music in Achimota
Ephraim Amu was one of the aboriginal music masters in the school. He abutting the agents in 1934-1949. He was a abounding artisan and choirmaster. His works were alien into the chic and provided the soundtrack for activity in the academy and in afterwards years for the nation as well.
Ephraim Amu was not technically a apprentice at Achimota but he accomplished music in the academy for 15 years and was associated with it. He organized choir competitions for the acceptance and wrote the music for them.
He was a ablaze artisan who specialized in choral music. He acclimated his ability to brainwash the acceptance on African values. He additionally originated the acceptable ball accepted as affiliated boot which aggregate the acceptance in their aboriginal groups to study, sing and ball their affiliated culture.
Much of his choral music has anesthetized on to become allotment of the repertoire of the nation’s ancestry and are sang in all genitalia of the country. Ephraim Amu advisedly crafted his music to advance the Christian acceptance in simple apprehensible language.
He additionally wrote lyrics in Asante Twi, Fanti, Ewe and Ga. He chose these languages to admonition his countrymen and women to arch the abysm of blindness acquired by to their benightedness of added Ghanaian languages. He wrote this music to be accompanied by African instruments like the atentenben and the simple drum.
These instruments came in all-inclusive bounded variations and by belief how to comedy them, the acceptance acquired added compassionate of Ghanaian culture. Amu was actual abounding in his compositions and he wittily accumulated African proverbs to bear his Christian message. This was abolitionist at a time back the two cultures were consistently portrayed as adverse and uncomplimentary.
Music was a huge accountable in the teaching of the aesthetic arts in Achimota. It was animate for added than bookish affidavit but additionally for ball and religious rites.
The founders of the academy accustomed the accent of music in the amusing activity of African bodies and fabricated abiding that the accountable animate a agnate role in the chic of the school. Achimota was clashing added accessory schools in the actuality that it was secular. Music was not primarily a agent for religious convenance but could be acclimated for a abundant array of objectives.
Achimota contributed several important musicians to Ghanaian accepted music. They accommodate Baron Bruce (Black Beats), Jerry Hansen (Ramblers), Kofi Ghanaba (Tempos and African Jazz).
Achimotans are still animate on the aesthetic ancillary of pop music. Rocky Rockstone and Richie to name abandoned two who are producers and recording artists axis out hits for adolescent consumers.
In the classical amphitheatre are Ken Kafui, Kofi Agawu, Eric Akrofi, George Francois, Emmanuel Gyimah Labi, and William Chapman Nyaho accept and abide to analyze themselves locally and internationally.
Amu acclimated his music not abandoned to allegorize the aspect of the acclaimed atramentous and white piano keys of the school’s adage but additionally to advise the accepted bequest of Africans.
He succeeded brilliantly. Thanks to his agreement and the consecutive works of bodies like Akora Dinah Reindorf, the acclaimed musician, music educationist, pianist and composer, and one time aqueduct of the Civic Symphony Orchestra, Amu’s works are broadly accepted above the nation and act as a cement to civic cohesion.
Kofi Antubam and the Beheld Artists
Kofi Antubam was one of the best affecting beheld artists of his generation. He was the Head of the Arts Department at Achimota and afflicted the apprenticeship of dozens of adolescent artists. Like abounding African artists and intellectuals of his generation, Antubam was actual acute to the challenges airish to African ability by European cultural imperialism. He wrote a book on Akan arts and ability and encouraged his acceptance to abstraction aboriginal life, abnormally in the rural areas and use it in their works.
He was a abreast of Kwame Nkrumah whose Pan-Africanist account he absolutely shared. He was commissioned by the accompaniment to assassinate abounding important works including the civic billy for parliament, the brand of accompaniment for swearing in the admiral and the civic throne.
He was a abounding painter whose works were calm by the accompaniment to adorn embassies abroad. Two of his masterpieces could be apparent on affectation in Accra. One is on the advanced of the Community Center. It shows a accumulation of men in acceptable attire. The assignment acclaimed peaceful co-existence in the nation. The aboriginal archetype of his added accessible masterpiece was abominably destroyed.
It was commissioned for the admirable antechamber of the nation’s aboriginal all-embracing hotel, the Ambassador. The auberge was abandoned afterwards several years of account and was awash back the Ghanaian abridgement burst in the 1970s. The painting was anxiously affected and reproduced for the amphitheater of new Ambassador Hotel, now adapted as the Mövenpick Hotel.
It shows a alternation of abnormally Ghanaian scenes including a arch captivation court; a arena in a apple market; farmers cultivating their acreage and a baby automated park.
These were the accepted capacity favoured by Antubam in the 50s and the aboriginal 60s. They showed aboriginal landscapes, corrective in ablaze adorning colours and advised to boost the viewer.
Antubam afflicted artists as assorted as Ato Delaquis who took the appearance to new heights and Professor Ablade Glover, a acclaimed painter who created the best acknowledged arcade in the nation.
Antubam and his colleagues like Asihene and Bartimeus actual rural activity in the country. His best of acceptable themes, the artlessness of band and animated colors won him lots of absorption and admirers. His assignment and appearance were so accepted they were affected widely.
It became an accustomed and calmly apparent appearance and formed the base for bartering art in the backward fifties and aboriginal sixties. Like decrepit bottle windows in Medieval churches, Antubam’s art both accomplished and entertained.
In an era back the majority of the citizenry was benighted and responded added readily to beheld signs than the accounting word, trotro lorries, chop bars, artery ancillary appearance shops and beautician shops advertised their casework by employing bartering artists and assurance writers to adorn their boutique fronts with images aggressive by Antubam’s artistry. The affluence with which the appearance was reproduced provided actual for collectors.
Eventually, the appearance pioneered by Antubam and his adolescent beheld artists became the accepted ability for abandonment managers of European enterprises. They additionally helped to authorize the arts bazaar for tourists and added bounded collectors.
Today the anamnesis of Kofi Antubam and his aggregation is actuality kept animate by galleries like the Loom, endemic and curated by Akora Mrs. Francis Ademola. Her gallery, the Loom, is one of the aboriginal and continuously activity art galleries in the nation.
Achimota and Aesthetic Writing
Achimota produced some of the finest writers for the country’s growing arcane culture. It was empiric by Historian, Dr. Kofi Baku that it is a accolade to the holistic attributes of Achimotan apprenticeship that in the canicule back these writers were accomplished in Achimota, there were few books accounting by Africans on Africa for Africans. Best of the books were by English or American authors and dealt with contest far from Africa.
Despite the Eurocentric focus of this programme the academy managed to aftermath abounding analytical and acute commentators on the African reality. The account of writers spawned by Achimota accommodate the all-over Kwame Nkrumah, Ayi Kwei Armah, Kofi Awoonor and the Nigerian biographer Cyprian Ekwensi.
Coincidentally added writers produced by the aesthetic arts at that aeon accommodate non-Achimotans like Efua Sutherland, Kwesi Brew, Atukwei Okine, Ama Ata Adu. They were allotment of a bearing of African intellectuals who were weaned on the exhilarant dreams of African Liberation in the 1950s and 60s.
As adolescent adults they witnessed the attempt for ability by abounding African people. They were absorbed with the thoughts and account of advocate leaders like Kwame Nkrumah, Augustine Neto, Jomo Kenyatta, Joseph Savimbi, Nelson Mandela, Ben Bella & Patrice Lumumba. Afar from Kwame Nkrumah, these names were about accepted by the majority of their contemporaries. Their adherence to the account of African Liberation was adored back these nations amorphous to win their freedom.
On liberation canicule the Union Jacks and the French and Belgian tricolours descended from flagpoles to be replaced by the blithely optimistic flags of new African states.
After the briefest interludes the era of colonial struggles concluded and they amorphous to see on their cinema screens the aforementioned cities in bonfire from the aforementioned countries. The revolutions had started to absorb their children.
They watched as above guerrilla fighters now angry presidents looted their nations’ abundance with the admonition of their families and cronies. Generally they aboriginal sacrificed their bygone assembly in accoutrements by active them publicly. They abutting angry aloft their writers and added analytical voices. The flags absent their optimistic abandon as the nations sank into anarchy, accomplishment d’etats, and civilian war.
That is back the acclaim stopped.
The artists paid a abundant amount for actuality witnesses. Those who batten out were silenced. Some were assassinated, abounding were chased into banishment or were imprisoned. One of Ghana’s greatest thinkers, Kofi Awoonor was attempt in a war in which he had neither absorption nor a role.
He was aloof casual through the country. His executioners did not apperceive him. Others like Efua Sutherland, Ama Ata Adu, Atukwei Okine and Kofi Anyidoho backward and lived on about as an act of defiance. They survived adjoin the odds.
Ayi Kwei Armah came home from belief and alive abroad. He wrote the book that summed up the betrayals of the generation’s hopes and the soul-crushing abort of the era. It is alleged “The admirable ones are not yet born”. He larboard the country in disgust. He now lives in self-imposed banishment in Senegal.
Like a appearance out of a Greek tragedy, the assured Kwame Nkrumah larboard ample aisle on the arcane mural of the epoch. He played abounding roles and in each, he activated the banned of the country’s aesthetic tissues. He began as one of the founding acceptance at Achimota in the backward 1920s.
He went to America to abstraction divinities again he got complex in Pan-African circles and eventually alternate to the Gold Coast. He became the baton of a advocate affair which went on to appropriate the nation’s abandon from the British. He emerged as admiral of the new nation. He was covered with celebrity but additionally added with hubris.
A few years afterwards he had his name on bill and figure on stamps. He became added oppressive. His bygone assembly in accoutrements rose adjoin him and he abandoned them.
He was a ablaze biographer and wrote about actuality betrayed by those he trusted. Eventually, he absent his authority on the favour of the gods and was apprenticed into exile. He died in a adopted acreage abandoned but not forgotten. The aftermost irony of his ablaze tragedy was actuality brought home by the bodies who had abandoned him to be accustomed a burial fit for a king.
Today, there is a new crop of Achimotans actuality accustomed for their aesthetic writing. The artist Nii Ayi Parkes is one of the leaders of their group. I had the amusement of affair three aftermost year back I was the bedfellow apostle at the Burt Award for African Literature. The Burt Award for African Abstract is a arcane award-winning that recognizes arete in adolescent developed fiction from Ethiopia, Ghana, Kenya, and Tanzania.
Achimota in the 21st century
We are on the beginning of a new world. Achimota now faces a new apple bedeviled by aggressive technology. A new apple of alien borders, basic reality, and assorted identities.
We shall charge new guides to clue our way in these new acreage of burst realities. Fortunately, several Akoras accept led the way and burst the aisle for us. Dr. Victor Lawrence was inducted into the Inventors Hall of Acclaim of the United States in 2016. In the aftermost 30years, Victor Lawrence has fabricated a cogent appulse on the all-around telecommunications industry.
His beat assignment has paved the way for developments in broadband, DSL, HDTV technologies and wireless abstracts transfer. Additionally, his advancements in beat technology and all-embracing standards accept had a all-around appulse acceptance for interoperability of computer networks above the globe.
I ambition to accede the afterward bodies whose admonition and advance fabricated this cardboard possible. First, I appetite to acknowledge my sister Korkor Amarteifio, who in my admiration has done added for the aesthetic arts in our bearing than anybody abroad I apperceive through cultural advocacy, aesthetic productions and her acceptable abutment and advance for adolescent artists throughout the land.
I appetite to acknowledge my accompany Professor Kofi Baku and Professor Ivan Addae Mensah for their able and acute admonition and comments on the actual aspects of the paper.
