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

Page 2 of 4

Impressions of the School after Twenty-five Years

We arrived at the school later that Friday afternoon and had a meeting with the Headmaster and staff in the Administration Building to finalise arrangements for the next couple of days. We went for a walkabout after that. My first impressions were nearly all about the apparent timelessness of the whole place. Of course there has been some infrastructural deterioration but this has happened to virtually every educational institution in Ghana as a reflection of the general economic crises the country has been through over the past twenty-five years. In some respects, and thanks to the gallant activities of the various Old Santaclausian Associations particularly those in the UK, North America and within Ghana itself, Adisadel seems to be in pretty good shape compared to the other educational institutions that I saw. Everything seemed pretty much as they were twenty-five years ago. The Canterbury Hall and the classrooms seemed pretty much the same. The Library looked rather run down compared to what it used to be and rehabilitating it to what it used to be could be something for the Class of 1974 to think about. The school uniform though has changed. In our day the Forms 1-5 boys wore a light blue shirt over khaki shorts and the Sixth Formers wore white shirts. The SSS boys now wear a distinctive and , I guess more attractive, zebra-patterned shirt in the school colours of black and white. For those familiar with the English football scene, the school uniform looks a bit like Newcastle United on the football field. It was entertainment evening that day at the Canterbury Hall and I went to have a look at the goings on and again it seemed everything was just like they were twenty five years ago.

The old Houses on the Hill ( Hamlyn, Elliott, Knight and Canterbury) were pretty much the same. In our days there were only three Houses in Katanga at the bottom of the Hill – Quaque, Aglionby and Jubilee – and there were more students obviously more students in the four Houses in Leopoldville on top of the Hill than in the three in Katanga. The schools centre of gravity now seems to have shifted definitively in Katanga’s favour with the establishment of two recent much bigger Houses in Katanga ; Eburadzie House in 1973 and Thomas Jonah House in 1997. Thomas Jonah House is, of course, the magnificent new House situated near Jubilee House. It was commissioned by Mr. Sam Jonah, Chief Executive of Ashanti Goldfields, in honour of his father Thomas Jonah. Sam Jonah was the Chapel Prefect during the 1968-69 academic year when our class of 1973 was nothing more than a bunch of skinny and spotty little boys in form One.

 We later on went to have a barbecue at the Biriwa Beach Hotel just outside Cape Coast where we were able to reminisce over the good old days and what had been happening to us and everybody else over the past twenty-five years.

Some members of the Class of 1973 at the Acropolis, March 1998

School Sports Fields and Gymnasium

The rehabilitation of the Dreary Gymnasium , as said earlier has been , one of the projects of the Class of 1972 and is now looking in pretty good shape. the old basketball court is still there and there was a large Tae Kwon-do class on that morning. The football and hockey fields near the Mercer Gate did not look quite as green and well maintained as I remembered them but I guess they merely needed some rain . The main sports field, on which we regularly and habitually trounced other schools at athletics, football, hockey and cricket was having a lot of work done to it. It is the only eight-track sports field in the Central region and according to the Headmaster, Mr. J.E. Kitson, it has been agreed with the Government that it should be converted to a fully walled Central Regional sports stadium which would be used by all institutions and sports clubs. Hopefully this will generate some much-needed revenue for the school though it would be at the cost of a major change to the school’s character. There is also , I guess, no guarantee that the Government may one day not want to exercise full control over this stadium. That would be the day when the school authorities and students will have to obtain permission from some faceless bureaucrat to use the school’s own sports field!

Page 2 of 4

Page: 1 2 3 4 Next>