Romeo or Die: How Romeo Tuffour allegedly killed Shakespeare’s Juliet at KNUST

Gen Zs have no patience to read introductions and other literary niceties, so we will skip the protocols and confront the vexed question: should university students be having sex?
Why are boy-girlfriend relationships a staple on university campuses today? University life in the 1990’s when I was a student at University of Ghana, Legon, was a veritable university life–ordered along the boring routines of lectures, tutorials, Observatory chataways, Daavi banku, and Balme Library visits.
We read about sex only in books, but didn’t practice it (we did ours in secret). There was no WhatsApp or facebook. We looked at people in their faces; not on the internet.

Romeo or Die
In our days, university work reduced students to amanuenses (secretaries), poring through the encyclopedia for the spelling of words, to pass our exams.
We wrote essays; not guessing through multiple choice options.
Today, ChatGPT and other cheating Apps vomit answers to exam questions. In the process, university students have replaced the encyclopedia with sexopedia, a sex guide for the ultimate sexual pleasure.
The young minds have devoted more time to sexual relationships.
Presently, the student community at KNUST (Kumasi Legon) are struggling to come to terms with the murder of Joana Deladem Yabani, a final year student studying Biological Sciences.
It is more terrifying that the murderer was in their midst; another student they see in their lecture halls and hostels everyday.
We understand the pair had a tempestuous relationship, and friends knew about their difficulties, including the victim’s father who had impressed upon his daughter to end the affair with the boy.
As we await the court’s judgement for the suspect, parents and educationists have asked again: do we send kids to university to marry or to study?
CCTV evidence has revealed that while returning from night studies, Joana’s boyfriend, 21-year old Daniel Tuffour, pressed his knees on the victim’s neck–in George Floyd style–following an argument.
He is reported to have sat beside the body for fourteen minutes, eventually dumping the lifeless body near the Disability and Rehabilitation Centre on campus. The next day, Daniel had the composure to write an exam in the same shirt he wore to commit murder.
Young Tuffour just rewrote Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, in this case, Romeo or Die.

Matrimonial hostel
Have you visited any university campus lately? The last time I dropped my nephew at KNUST, I questioned the ages of some of the students I met in his room at a private hostel.
Would they be able to wash themselves properly in the shower, I wondered?
They wore trendier clothes than we did in the 1990s, and carried beautiful laptops and expensive smartphones, but they looked rather too young to engage in any mature discussion.
However, the records show they are very smart and have been producing quality first class degrees more than we did.
University intake is ten times the numbers that benefited from tertiary education in the analogue era of the 1990s.
The courses have trendier names and university administrators seem more intentional about pursuing scholarship and preparing students for the global community. The lecturers are younger and beautiful.
At the same time, we are worried about the excesses of some aspects of student culture, and how university managers are bearing with the huge explosion in student numbers.
There is a lot of freedom on campus these days, probably due to the hostel culture, where the organic university experience is diluted. There are reports of sleepovers in these new hostels.
My nephew paints a disturbing picture of students literally living and sleeping with their lovers in the hostels, and waking up to breakfast already prepared by their wives.
They even shower together and hold hands to attend lectures. It is a subculture that has come to stay.

Borla birds and beautiful girls
Did university students of the 1990s maintain serious amorous and sexual relationships on campus? Well, not me.
I belonged to the AGCM (Assemblies of God, Campus Ministry), and sex was not on the menu.
At Commonwealth Hall, we could count the few students who had affairs with girls on campus (inter) and the lot who were occasionally visited by their girlfriends from town and sometimes outside Accra (exter).
My roommate, a sociology student, conducted his project work on the topic, surveying students on Legon campus to find out whether their intimate relationships affected their academic performance.
I don’t remember his findings, but he reported that students carried the two businesses along quite well.
We had a few fun moments. There were strategic maneuverings when beautiful girls visited their boyfriends at Commonwealth Hall.
Friends were invited to come say hello and were encouraged to send the good news around.
Roommates were happy to be narrowed (abandoned the room for privacy) as their reward to the muncher (the sex-ready boyfriend) for bringing home a beautiful girl. When the girls were not good looking (we called them borla birds), they were remote controlled so that their boyfriends would not be seen in their company. There was an ugly rite of passage when a muncher wanted to teach a stubborn girl a lesson.
This was the Allan Gyimah experience where friends peeped through windows and key holes to spy on the sexual bout. Culprits were punished by ponding (harsh water baptism).

To be fair to our Gen Zs, university life, irrespective of the period in history, has always had its extremes. Even in my time, we played a bit with the sexopedia and strayed into foolish moments, too.
But the zeitgeist of the 1990s (spirit and mood of the time) would never have prepared us for murder on campus. Adieu, Joana.

Tissues Of The Issues
Kwesi Tawiah-Benjamin
bigfrontiers@gmail.com