The refrain is sweet, infectious, and titillating: ‘Gey Hey for a reason’.
We have not paused to ask for the reason, because we know that the ladies of Wesley Girls’ School (Wey Gey Hey) have put their best foot forward in nearly every aspect of our national life.
You can tell a Gey Hey girl from the way she walks and how she chews at the dining table.
Like the Vandals of Commonwealth Hall, Wey Gey girls stick together, even after leaving school.
Their origins as mission schools are often lost on us, because Wesley Girls’ School represents something bigger than Methodism.
Follow your king
If a young girl dreams of going to Wesley Girls High School after JHS, she is inspired by the alumni who have dignified themselves in the superior court of judicature, banking, diplomatic circles and politics.
Wey Gey Hey stands for scholarship, etiquette and poise. We do not care whether they make better wives than Mfantiman Girls, just as we are not bothered whether Adisadel boys are worse husbands than Achimota boys.
At the secondary school level, students follow the school culture and abide by the rules of the ‘authorities’ to stay safe.
Who cares what kind of God a Gey Hey girl believes in?
Their motto is telling: ‘live pure, speak true, right wrong, follow the King’.
It is just like Max Ehrmann’s Desiderata, which states in part, “Therefore be at peace with God, whatever you conceive him to be…” At Wesley Girls High School, like all mission schools in Ghana, students are free to be at peace with whatever they call God.
The Methodist missionaries who decided on Wesley Girls’ motto were intentional in not using the word ‘worship’.
They simply asked students to ‘follow their King’ while in school.
The students of Wesley Girls must find it funny that Ghana devoted a whole week to talking about religion.
They may be asking: ‘Wey Gey How?’ In the same week, Citi TV’s Umaru Sanda Amadu wrote a long treatise about religious discrimination at Tema Secondary School, regretting that the school heads had prevented the construction of a mosque on a small portion of the vast lands the school commands.
For his revenge, Umaru decided not to attend the school’s 64th anniversary and Speech and Prizegiving Day, an event he had often moderated as MC.
In Umaru’s case, he had led past and present students on a fundraising drive and had mobilised enough money to build a mosque for Muslim students.
Umaru Sanda and Agyagurajah
When I wrote to Umaru, I asked: “Where would you want Kwaku Bonsam’s children to worship if they were students at Temasco?” A small shrine on campus?
If Agyagurajah sent his sons to Temasco and insisted on building a small structure with a chop bar for his devotees, should Tema Secondary School be obliged to dignify that request in the name of freedom of worship and human rights?
When the Wesley Girls matter broke following a suit at the Supreme Court, I wrote to Umaru again, asking him whether Ghana’s eye once again missed the ball.
Shouldn’t we be talking about providing free internet access and quality laptops to schools, instead of where a student gets to worship on campus?
At Bodweseteco, where I received my fifth and sixth form education, there were no Christians on our campus. We also didn’t have any Muslims.
The only thing that reminded us of religion or God was during our Bible Knowledge (BK) class. Mumuni, my best friend, read the Bible. So was Amina Rahinatu, who was brilliant.
I shared dormitories with Mumuni and another friend, Apau Mohamad, the only religiously conscious person in my cohort who never missed the opportunity to remind us that his father was a Christian but rebelled and converted to Islam when he was bypassed for a position in the church. He chose the alias ‘Rebel’, after his father.
The rest of us were fertile and impressionable minds who followed friends to the SU (Scripture Union) meetings, or simply stuck together as groups aligned to certain interests.
Mumuni, Apau and other Muslims walked together and sometimes prayed in the dormitory.
The SDAs met only as a singing group and occasionally delighted the Sunday Service with their songs, alongside ‘Heavenly Jewels’, another singing group that seemed to have sprung from the charismatic stream.
Bodweseteco was blind to religion, and we, the students, were dead to the differences that divided people as Muslims or Christians or anything in between.
Tony Blair and Mahama
Later in my adult and professional years, when I encountered celebrated British Scientist Richard Dawkins, I accepted, reluctantly, his thesis that there is no such thing as a religious, Christian or Muslim child.
In ‘The God Delusion’, Dawkins argues that children are born into the religion of their parents, and they pick it up as a matter of routine, and not from conviction.
He posits that it is hypocritical for the world to find consolation in religion, and when children are involuntarily assigned to a religion, they suffer mental and physical abuse.
Science, Dawkins contends, is a better source of creative inspiration than religion.
So, we expected the discussion on education to be about how to fix the problems President Akufo-Addo left in the tracks of the Free SHS program, when it expanded access to thousands who otherwise would not have received secondary education.
Ghana would always remember Nana Addo for Free SHS, just as the British remember Sir Tony Lynton Blair for his hallowed words when he was asked to sum up his government’s social and economic policy direction: “Education, education, education.” In politics, people may forget the motivations behind misgovernance, but they will always remember the gains of good policies and bold reforms.
President Mahama promised to review the free SHS program, and we believed him.
Today, Free SHS seems like the remix of a song that promises to be better than the original. Yet, we know the chorus has not changed.
The review has positively shown in ensuring good feeding for the students, and there are signs that the double track shift structure might be reviewed, too.
This should be our collective mission, instead of propagating the mission of mission schools.
Tissues Of The Issues
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