By Gilbert Nii Okai Addy (Knight House, 1973)
May 1998

Friends, Santaclausians and Countrymen...

Here is an account of the traditional 25th graduation anniversary reunion, during the Speech and Founder’s Day celebrations at Adisadel College in Cape Coast . The year 1998 was the turn of the Class of 1973 and the event took place over the weekend of 13th to 15th March. The Speech and Prize-giving Day was on Saturday 14th March and Founders’ Day service the next day, Sunday 15th. March 1998.

Last year the Class of 1972, by all accounts, had a really big occasion and they collectively rehabilitated the Drury Gymnasium. Those of our class who are based in Ghana met weekly at a hotel in Accra and so a lot of groundwork had already been carried out . A big fund-raising dinner had been organised earlier in the year in Accra and a delegation had visited the school a number of times to meet with the Headmaster and staff and to identify and agree on suitable school development projects. I myself arrived in Accra on the 5th of March and was able to join in one of the weekly meetings held at the hotel in Accra prior to the weekend of the 13th-15th March. The plan was that a convoy of cars would leave Accra for Cape Coast around noon on Friday 13th March.

Santaclausians ’73 Year Group Projects

Our Class of 1973’s three main projects are:

• to revamp the water and sewage system for the campus on the hill,
• connect the school fully to the internet by the end of this year and
• produce a souvenir compendium listing all the boys who have attended the school since it was started in 1910.

Work on the first project is to begin soon although we are still raising funds in order to meet our target. the catch phrase , of course, is " Pay Up ! Pay Up ! Santaclausians !"

Some members of the Class of 1973 at the 25th anniversary re-union
(L-R) Kwesi Amanfo Sagoe, Eric Nyane-Addo, Valdo Abruquah, Stephen Lartey, Sam Asamoah, Gilbert Addy, Jimmy Heymann

Dr. Nii Narku Quaynor of Network Computer Systems, a fellow Santaclausian and widely acknowledged as the man who brought the internet to Ghana is to be approached to help make the internet connection a reality by the end of this calendar year. The last of these is a really painstaking project as it involves transcribing names and other details from hand-written school records going back to 1910.

The old boarding schools in Ghana were modelled on elite British educational institutions like Eton, Harrow, Westminster etc. These schools, like those in the US, are however self-financing because they charge very high fees and are effectively schools for the seriously rich. We cannot afford to do that in a poor country. It would also be unethical to exclude the majority of our people, who are definitely not rich, from the opportunity of a good education. In Ghana today therefore, the boarding institutions find that the fees they collect together with the subventions from government cannot cover the cost of operations. So we really are caught in a bind.

Some have argued that the boarding school system is too costly and should be abolished altogether but then there is a great value in the fact that they bring people from all over the country together which is good if not necessary for building a common nationhood. Many of us are friends precisely because we spent our formative years in the same institution going through the same experiences. Besides if all the schools in Cape Coast became day schools they would probably collapse because as has always been the case the overwhelming majority, probably over 90% of the students, actually came from outside Cape Coast.

The trip to Cape Coast was most interesting and nostalgic and brought back fond memories of my boyhood when one had no professional or family responsibilities and life was simply to be enjoyed. for me and I guess most of us, school days have been definitely the best of my life so far. This was a trip I made several times as a teenage boy ( at least twice every term for the five years that I was at the school from 1968 to 1973) and after so many years without having done it, the experience again was most exciting. The journey to Cape Coast was also a vivid reminder of how much, for better or worse, Ghana has changed over the intervening twenty-five years. What were once little and insignificant villages on the route had grown in size out of recognition. We stopped at  Winneba and Mankessim for some typically local refreshments . At one of these wayside restaurants we bumped into Dr. Augustus Asmah who is of the Class of 1972 - a year our senior – and who is now Chief executive of the Central Regional Development Agency based in Cape Coast (http://www.cedecom.org) . He was on his way to Accra but promised to join us at the Speech Day formal dinner the evening of the next day at the Acropolis (Headmaster’s Residence). The Agency , and he, seem to have some really ambitious plans for the economic development of the Central Region and Cape Coast.

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