Comrade Kwesi Pratt, Jnr., Managing Editor Of “The Insight,” and General Secretary Of The Socialist Movement Of Ghana (SMG), has indicated that F.K. Buah stands tall as a historian and an educationist whose life inspired many to learn the truth about Africa especially West African history.
According to him, the knowledge acquired from F.K. Busia is being used to transform the world.
“We are all the products of F.K.Buah, the first Headmaster of Tema Secondary School, the historian and author. We are also the children of the 1960’s and 1970’s who have become the adults of today fully inspired by the dreams and legacy of F.K. Buah,” he said.
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Kwesi Pratt was delivering a lecture at the Tema Senior High School on November 19, 2022 during the first F.K. Busia Memorial Lecture.
During his delivery which was on the theme “F. K. Buah; History Education As An
Instrument of Development,” Kwesi Pratt noted that education ought to be defined as the means by which outgoing generations hand over their knowledge and skills to the present generation.
The purpose of this transfer, he said, must be the taming of wild nature to create favourable conditions for improving people’s access to health, better nutrition, good housing, effective transportation, quality education and all the things which eliminate inequality and promote justice in all its manifestations.
He described F.K. Busia as a “Legend” who played key role in the growth and transformation of educational system of the country.
He spoke about his days as the first headmaster of the newly established Tema Secondary School which had been built under the educational expansion programme of the Ghana Educational Trust set up by the Nkrumah Government.
“Our generation owes a lot to the scholarship of F.K. Buah and others who made us keenly aware of our history. He taught us about the giant strides made by the African people in the ancient Kingdoms of Songhai, Mali, Egypt, Dahomey and Anglo. He debunked the nonsense that the African had no history and made us aware of our movement as African people through time and space and gave us hope that we can and must construct a better world.”
Below is the full lecture delivered by Kwesi Pratt Jnr.
FIRST F. K. BUAH MEMORIAL LECTURES
TOPIC: F. K. BUAH; HISTORY EDUCATION AS AN INSTRUMENT OF DEVELOPMENT.
LECTURER: KWESI PRATT, JNR., MANAGING EDITOR OF “THE INSIGHT,” DIRECTOR OF PAN AFRICAN TELEVISION AND GENERAL SECRETARY OF THE SOCIALIST MOVEMENT OF GHANA (SMG). VENUE: ASSEMBLY HALL OF TEMA SENIOR HIGH SCHOOL DATE & TIME: NOVEMBER 19, 2022 AT 2:00P.M.
Distinguished Chairperson, the Headmaster and Staff of a very special school, Tema Senior High School, old boys and girls, and new boys and girls of our alma mater, Ladies and Gentlemen.
It is with great pride that I mount the podium this afternoon to deliver the very first of what is planned to be a series of lectures to salute the memory of F. K. Buah, the first headmaster of a school which has provided the best of instruction to thousands of students.
All of these beneficiaries of the very special education that Tema Senior High School provided are serving in various capacities in diverse fields in the universal effort to make Ghana and the world better for humanity. The list of exceptional achievers who have passed through this school cannot be exhausted because it is a very long one. However, I ask for your permission to just do an illustration. There is my senior and friend Bob Fiscian, who is now a world acclaimed musician playing the piano and organ in Germany. Michael Lartey who was my mate is amazing to watch and listen to on his guitar. Dr. Isaac Charles Noble Morrison is undoubtedly a well-established medical practitioner and Dr. Emmanuel Owusu Ansah who was a table-tennis star is riding very high in sports administration in Ghana. There is also Dong Bortier, the school goal-keeper who joined the Ghana National Team, the Black Stars along with Nkansah, who used to don the number five jersey of the Temasco team. Mr. Kwame Addo also an old student is counted amongst the most prominent business people of our time. Dr. Lennox Agbosu and Anthony Matthews are excelling in legal practice. Umaru Sanda Amadu of Citi FM and Television and Thelma Tackie of Ghana Broadcasting Corporation (GBC) are some of the best journalists to walk the grounds of Ghana. Ashford Abbey who graduated from Tema Secondary School in 1975 has become one of the biggest producers of herbal medicine in Ghana. His Rooter Mixture has become the medicine of choice for the treatment of malaria.
Please join me with a round of applause for all the men and women who have passed through F. K. Buah’s school of life and are contributing significantly to the development of Ghana and the world at large. The current global crisis demands that we do more, and we shall continue to excel to the glory of F. K. Buah and Tema Secondary School/ Tema Senior High School.
- K. BUAH, THE LEGEND
In 1961, F. K. Buah became the first headmaster of the newly established Tema Secondary School which had been built under the educational expansion programme of the Ghana Educational Trust set up by the Nkrumah Government. The programme was first captured in the 1951 Manifesto of the Convention Peoples Party (CPP) which sought to address the lack of access to education. As at independence in 1957, the access of the people of Ghana to education was very limited and it became an imperative to accelerate projects and programmes to improve the situation.
The Ministry of Education’s data reveals that the achievements of the CPP far exceeded expectation. As at 1950 enrolment in primary schools was 102,138. This increased dramatically to 456,290 by 1960 and to a phenomenal 1,137,495 in 1966.
From 1951 to 1961 enrolment in 12 assisted secondary schools including Achimota and non-assisted schools rose from 2,776 and 3,319 to 9,882. At the time of the overthrow of the Nkrumah Government in 1966 enrolment in public secondary schools had increased to 42,111. Enrolment in middle schools increased by more than 500 per cent to 267,434 from 1951 to 1966. Two university colleges were also set up in Accra and Kumasi.
Ladies and Gentlemen, the man we celebrate today became part of this grand effort and he performed exceedingly well. One of my best friends and mate in the 1967-1972 group, Evelyn Appiah-Donyina, summed up F. K.’s vision for the school in a tribute. She wrote, “F. K. had great plans for the school and used his influence to get a lot of facilities for the school which was fairly new then. His ultimate vision was to turn the school into a well-endowed centre of excellence befitting the status of the port city of Tema, as evidenced by the futuristic site plan of the school, including a sports complex, displayed at the school’s administration block. In terms of academic opportunities, F. K. ensured that students who passed through TEMASCO had a broad-based education and so there were opportunities to study a wide range of subjects in Arts, Science and Business Studies including not too common ones like Latin, Commerce, Logic, Ghanaian Languages, Accounts, Home Science, Shorthand/Typing and Civics.”
Having F. K. Buah as our Headmaster was simply awesome. We were in a school whose headmaster was the author of history books for elementary and secondary schools throughout West Africa. We held our heads high, and our pride soared beyond the skies. He was around every corner. You could bump into him in the dining hall. He came around the dormitories sometimes. He visited us in our classrooms and being an all-round academic, sometimes taught a class when the tutor was not immediately available. This comment by Anchorite Kwadwo Akosa on the Facebook page “Tema Secondary School Old Students (Anchorites)” on 30th March 2011 is an example: “fellow Anchorites, I was a sixth form student when the renowned F.K.Buah was the Headmaster. One such reminiscence. I would like to share with you all. One day, F.K. (that is what we called him), was making his rounds, he came to our classroom. And asked us “where’s your tutor?” we had no answer. Then he asked what subject, one of us said, Human Geography British Isles. F. k. to our astonishment proceeded to teach the class on the geography of the British Isles’.
He was a regular feature in the Assembly Hall and we all grew to accept him as a guardian of some sort or even a father figure. We were told many stories about F. K. Buah most of which we were able to verify. One story was that early in his life, F. K. had played with the idea of saving humankind from sin and leading us on the path to heaven where milk and honey are the only items on the menu. Try as I did, I could not imagine Father Buah in a white gown walking sanctimoniously to the altar in a Catholic Church offering the congregation the blood and flesh of Jesus the Christ. I have often told myself that only very good people can dream of salvation for humankind and perhaps a mass exodus to Heaven, where Jesus sits on the right-hand side of God the Almighty. Kwame Nkrumah also had such a dream in his youthful days.
We were also told that F. K. Buah had gone to university abroad to study Latin and mathematics but had been persuaded by a mentor to switch to history because in the view of this mentor, the world needed more historians. I have always convinced myself that this story must be true because F. K. liked to toss Latin around and indeed, we were persuaded to learn Latin in our early days at Tema Secondary School. F. K. told me once that Latin is the mother of modern languages and that got me asking whether Fante and Ewe are also modern languages?
MY TOPIC
The Chairperson, I have deliberately chosen “F. K. Buah; History Education As An
Instrument of Development” as a means of highlighting the contribution of our Headmaster and historians like him to the global effort to understand and improve society. I must say from the onset that education ought to be defined as the means by which outgoing generations hand over their knowledge and skills to the present generation. The purpose of this transfer ought to be the taming of wild nature to create favourable conditions for improving people’s access to health, better nutrition, good housing, effective transportation, quality education and all the things which eliminate inequality and promote justice in all its manifestations. For the purpose of this lecture. I would like to define history as a record and analysis of the process of evolution and revolution moving society from qualitatively lower to higher levels. I completely reject history as the stories of kings and queens and their priests. History ought not to be about just the very few at the top but all the phenomena and things that cause movement of and in society. It is history that establishes the development of human society through the stages of primitive communal society, the slave society, the feudalist society, the capitalist era and the expected socialist and communist, socio – economic formations. History debunks the racist and bigoted notions which suggest that under development is a consequence of the inferiority of some races. For the purpose of this lecture, I define History education as the transfer of the knowledge about the passage of society through time and space and how that knowledge is used to define today and shape tomorrow.
HISTORY AS AN EYE OPENER
The Chairperson, history is an essential eye opener. It makes us all aware of the fact that religion has not always been about sanctimonious pretensions. It points to the denial of science and the futile attempt to suppress it. The story of Nicholas Copernicus who was murdered simply because he proclaimed what even religion accepts today as fact – that the earth is round and not flat – confirms the damage that religion has done to the advancement of human society. We may also recall the Papal Bull issued by the Pope which authorized King Alfonso of Portugal to embark on a civilizing mission in our part of the world in 1452. The pretensions of the early churches are shattered when history reveals that it authorized slavery, pillage and murder. For centuries, the African people have been struggling to undo the damaging consequences of the infamous Berlin Conference in 1884 convened by the German Chancellor Otto Von Bismarck. These European adventurers, pirates and buccaneers put the map of Africa on a table and drew lines across it to mark their areas of influence. The purpose of this exercise was simply to avoid conflict amongst themselves as they stole the resources of the African people with lies, racism and violence as their instruments of choice. They didn’t care about the welfare of the African people and were not minded by the need to keep families together and they didn’t give a dime about our prosperity. In the end they created many non-viable states which they continue to manipulate through the establishment of an unfair economic, social, political and information order.
How do we explain the situation in which so called French-speaking African countries keep their foreign reserves in the Central Bank of France, borrow their own money and pay interest on it, beyond the fact that it is a modern-day continuation of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade and classical colonialism? How can we explain the situation in which Africa alone has 52 percent of the World’s resources and yet its people suffer hunger, illiteracy, lack of access to such social services as health, education, decent housing, and clean water? Does history not teach us that as in the period of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, the African people still serve as drawers of water and hewers of wood? We still live in a world system which does not make us owners of our own resources, and which ensures that our resources are exploited not for the benefit of our people but to swell the bank accounts of those who sit in the boardrooms of the multi-national corporations in the colonial metropolis.
In an unpublished article titled “A Critical Assessment of the US Strategy Toward
Sub-Sahara Africa” Dr Gamal Nasser Adam, Vice President of the Islamic University in Accra, writes. “Stripped to its barest essentials, therefore, this new strategy is designed to ensure America’s unimpeded access to Africa’s mineral wealth and to keep others out. In fact, there are no limits to how far America will go to ensure its access to Africa’s natural resources even if it will mean the use of military force. American policy makers have routinely flaunted their country’s capacity to deploy violence to have its way. Madelene Albright, former United States Secretary of State, once declared. “If we have to use force, it is because we are America; we are the indispensable nation; we stand tall and we see further than other countries into the future….” This must be extremely worrying for all African patriots, anti-imperialist and revolutionary forces and must inform current discourse on the struggle against foreign domination and poverty on the African continent.
We must still be struggling to understand why any self – respecting government in Africa will sign the military pact that the Akuffo-Addo government entered into with the United States of America. An agreement which gives more privileges to US soldiers than Ambassadors and High Commissioners under the Geneva Convention. Under the agreement.
US soldiers can enter Ghana without passports and visas. All they need is their US Army identity cards. They are also not subject to any kind of inspection including customs inspection on arrival or departure from Ghana.
Ghanaians are also estopped from using judicial processes to seek compensation for the loss of lives and property.
The US military is entitled to use Ghana’s radio frequencies for free.
And even the President of Ghana is not allowed to set foot on the US military Base without prior approval.
The Chairperson, ladies and gentlemen, this is obviously an indication of how far we have moved away from the dreams of the independence movement and its leaders, like Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah, Gamal Nasser, Modibo Keita, Sekou Toure and George Padmore. These leaders wanted to build a united and prosperous Africa, free from foreign military imposition-An Africa without a bomb Reports that other African countries like Zambia are beginning to copy Ghana’s bad example should be frightening for every African. If the current trend should continue, Africa will look like Djibouti which has become a contested space where any country with some military might has set camp. In August 2017, China opened its base there, which it uses as a supply center for peace-keeping and humanitarian assistance operation. Japan has its first overseas base at the Ambouli airport which it uses for counter-piracy operations and evacuation of Japanese citizens from the region. Italy’s Base Militare Nationale di Supporto, stations 300 personal in Djibouti used for counter piracy missions. France’s Heron Naval Base in Djibouti is the largest, stationing 2,900 personnel and hosting German and Spanish forces. The US’s Camp Lemonnier is the home of the combined Task Force – Horn of Africa. It hosts 4,000 personnel used for operations in Somalia and Yemen. There are credible reports that Saudi Arabia is negotiating with Djibouti to set up a base for supporting its war effort in Yemen.
GHANA: A WARNING SIGN
History teaches us that the current economic conditions in Ghana are the direct result of imperialist meddling. Accounts by Jack Mahoney, son of a former US Ambassador to Ghana, Philip Agee, a former agent of the Central Intelligence Agency of the USA and many others point in this direction. In September 1961, the then British High Commissioner in Ghana sent a cable to his home government in which he made the case for the overthrow of the Nkrumah government. He insisted that Nkrumah was making the African people too politically conscious and that if he was not removed from power it would be difficult for the British ruling elite to pursue their agenda of neo- colonialism throughout Africa. On February 24, 1966, Western Intelligence Agencies led by the CIA overthrew the Nkrumah Government and set Ghana on path to doom. Since then, more than 400 factories established as part of the import substitution programme of Nkrumah have either been privatized or destroyed. The retrenchment of labour has been carried out on a massive scale, frequent devaluations of the national currency has made the cedi very weak, and the withdrawal of subsidies on social services has greatly limited the people’s access to health, education, housing etc. The cumulative effect of these measures is that today, Ghana needs more than 100 percent of total national revenue to cater for debt servicing, debt repayment and public sector emoluments. Food inflation is hovering around 120 percent and the real value of wages and salaries are less than 15 percent of what they used to be in the mid-1970s. Unfortunately, this is not peculiar to Ghana. All of Africa appears to be in the same situation and we need to get out of it.
RELEVANCE OF F.K. BUAH AND HISTORY
F.K. Buah and history teach us important lessons. First, they teach us that the path to the apparent prosperity of the advance capitalist states is not available to us.
I do not see which people we can go and capture as slaves to work for us free for hundreds of years. I also cannot see which lands we can go and colonize today.
As stated in the final resolution of the 5th Pan African Congress held in Manchester in 1945, in the United Kingdom, the path forward for Africa can only be a path which leads to the ownership of our resources by us and the exploitation of these resources for the benefit of our people. This ought to be a path which insists on greater international solidarity of all oppressed and exploited people. This must be the path to scientific socialism.
Our generation owes a lot to the scholarship of F.K. Buah and others who made us keenly aware of our history. He taught us about the giant strides made by the African people in the ancient Kingdoms of Songhai, Mali, Egypt, Dahomey and Anglo. He debunked the nonsense that the African had no history and made us aware of our movement as African people through time and space and gave us hope that we can and must construct a better world.
It was also F.K. Buah who stood firmly against the blatant attempt by some historians to rewrite the history of Ghana to deliberately devalue the contributions of Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah to the liberation of the Gold Coast and Africa from the clutches of classical colonialism. As far as progressive and revolutionary forces are concerned, Nkrumah remains the African of the millennium. He made us proud to be Africans and he taught us that we can aspire to any height. The African people who lived on the shores of the Nile, developed mathematics, they conducted sophisticated medical operations and the pyramids they built are testimonies of a great people who can never be marginalized in the pages of history.
F.K. Buah stands tall as a historian and an educationist whose life inspired many to learn the truth about Africa especially West African history and to use the knowledge acquired for the transformation of the world. We are all the products of F.K.Buah, the first Headmaster of Tema Secondary School, the historian and author. We are also the children of the 1960’s and 1970’s who have become the adults of today fully inspired by the dreams and legacy of F.K. Buah.
A very big Red Salute to F. B.Buah.
I thank you all.
