Tribute to The Memory of a Friend

R. B. Perbi to James Ekow Williams

“I am distressed for you, my brother Jonathan; very pleasant have you been to me;
your love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women” (2 Sam 1:26)"

First you feel numb; your mind goes blank and you wonder whether what you have heard could be true. You try to think of the implications; you hope the news will turn out to be false. This is often the feeling when one hears unexpected news of the passing away of a loved one. Such indeed was my aloneness and deep sense of loss and failure when Dr Samuel Ofosu gave me the news over the phone on Friday 13 November, 2009. Later I began to ask myself if that was what some people meant by “Friday the 13th”

My friendship with Willie goes back many years, to our days in Adisadel College; especially to Classroom A1 where the Scripture Union group used to meet Sunday mornings after breakfast. Always a small group then, members were faithful and determined to know the Word of God and to believe and practice it. Willie’s conversion was as dramatic as that of St Paul, and his enthusiasm and passion was infectious. He left no one in doubt about his new found faith and proclaimed it from the housetops. His commitment to the Anglican Young People’s Association (AYPA) was unmistakable. His passion and that of Tim Brew and Ofosu was not one to be put under a bushel. In fact when I was leaving Adisco as President of the SU, my charge to the group was that they should be so focused and committed to the Lord that even if someone like Willie were later to be found to have abandoned the faith, their own faith should not be shaken. Little did I know that I was prophesying, for Willie’s A-levels results did not go the way we had all expected, and finding himself teaching temporarily at Tweneboa-Kodua Secondary school in Kumawu, he was said to have assumed a characteristic very different from how he left Adisco.

He later surmounted many obstacles and succeeded in traveling to America. There was no word from him for many, many years. Till one day I returned from lunch break to find a note that one James Williams had called from the US and would call back in an hour. “James Williams had called?”, I could not believe it. True, within the appointed time the phone rang, and there was Willie on the other end of the line. Apologising for the long silence, he indicated that life was finally treating him well. He had a business going, a real estate business he had started after some sessions in stock-broking.. I felt like Jacob when he heard that his long-lost, feared-dead son Joseph was alive. He said ‘Is Joseph alive? I must go to see him”. This was 1995.

My wife Akosua was then studying at University of Texas, at Austin and was the first to see him when one of her lecture trips sent her to Chicago. They had not met before, but “a true relation needs no introduction”. News she brought was all pleasant.

Reconnecting with Willie on phone provided an impetus for me to undertake a long-planned visit to the US. Traveling from the East coast in New York City to the west in Los Angeles, I later landed at O’Hare Airport in Chicago, Willie’s city. Driving me from the airport in a white Lincoln Continental car to his home, I felt really elated to be well-connected, savouring the pleasantness of life in America.

At the end of my short stay with him, he drove me through Indianapolis to Louisville, Kentucky to visit and have lunch with a friend of my family, and then all the way to Toledo, Ohio to visit the Oforis, continuing in the night to Dolton, near Chicago, where he lived.

His marriage had broken down, he had plans to re-marry- this time a woman from Ghana- and he also discussed plans to build a house at home. I was to contact his sister in Kumasi to assist in this, even as with pleasure I carried highly-valued Dutch wax prints to his mother which my brother Richard , then resident in Kumasi, later helped to deliver.

Too soon after this the candle snuffed off. Willie would not return calls, and quickly disconnected his phone lines. A painful and mysterious silence that descended between us can only be explained in eternity. The closest I came to hearing about him was Dr. Ofosu telling me years later that Willie had been in Ghana for a period to bury his mother. I knew there had to be a reason for his keeping his distance. In a way it was not hard to tell: he knew I would ask after his faith, the one thing we both considered most important at one time. Perhaps he was not ready for that kind of reminder.

He was never out of my mind; nor will he be, even as I gradually come to the realization that I shall not see him again. He had been a friend who was willing to share. In 6th form when he shared some problems with school fees, so simple and yet so deep was our friendship that I was willing to suspend my education after 6th form in order to work and help see him through the A-levels. He knew it, and he knew I meant it. It did not become necessary, but it was like Abraham’s sacrifice of Isaac whom he received back after he had “given him away”.

Rest in peace, Willie.

Your love was truly wonderful.

Damirifa Due! Damirifa Due!! Damirifa Due!!!

R. B. Perbi, Dec. 2009

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