By Richard DABLAH
(richard.dablah@gmail.com)
Scrolling my friend’s WhatsApp status, I paused. The Joy FM graphic filled the phone screen: a long corridor of girls in green uniforms, the school crest half visible, and a small inset photograph of the Attorney General with a determined look. The headline read that Wesley Girls has the right to practice its Methodist Christian faith and to prevent other religious practices on campus. My thumb hovered over the screen, and then I put the phone down. For a few minutes, I sat with the image as a public thing, a public claim, and a public problem.
What arrested me was not the familiar tug of alumni loyalty or the immediate partisan reply of commentators. It was the strange friction between two registers of public life. On one side sits heritage, mission, identity, the sediment of a century of education cemented into brick and reputation. On the other side sit constitutional text, plural lived religions, and a modern state that has accepted the obligation to treat citizens equally regardless of creed. The image compressed that tension into one clean proposition: a school has a past that looks like a religion. The constitution says otherwise.
If we read this as law first, the direction seems simple and urgent. Ghana’s constitution guarantees religious freedom and outlaws discrimination on religious grounds. Publicly funded institutions cannot be the instruments for imposing a single creed. If Wesley Girls is supplied with state resources, then the school’s rituals carry the force of a state-adjacent practice. The legal question is not only technical. It is about whether the state will allow one historical community to use public space and public funds to impose a private conscience conditionally. In that sense, the Attorney General’s defense of exclusivity threatens to make constitutional equality conditional, too.
But law never sits alone. It is hard to persuade people that a statute is more moral than a memory. Mission schools have been, for many families, incubators of social mobility. To alumni, the chapel, hymns, and rituals are not mere ceremony. They are identity. They are the texture of belonging. To insist that those textures change can feel, understandably, like an existential affront. This is the sociological problem. Institutions are not neutral. They are living archives of power, prestige, and symbolic capital. Which parts of that archive remain untouchable, and which must be opened to contestation? The answer is always political.
Power is expressed through customs and through constitutions. Power also speaks through the question of who is seen and who is made invisible. Mission schools have long been sites where certain faith expressions became the default, the public face of piety. When people of other faiths appear, they often seem to be exceptions who must negotiate, assimilate, or withdraw from their own tradition. Who decides which faith is visible, and who must adapt to it? That is a question about symbolic sovereignty. It is easy to dismiss it as ceremonial. It is less easy to see how visible faith shapes a young person’s sense of belonging in the civic order.
There is a philosophical knot here. Secularism in the abstract is not the absence of religion. It is a principle about the allocation of authority. The state, or a state-supported institution, should not have the authority to elevate one religion into a default civic posture. The duty of the state is to create public spaces where multiple faiths, as well as none, can participate without coercion. That is not indifference to religion. It is a method of protecting conscience and plural friendship.
Yet we must also reckon with the weight of history. The mission movement did not simply educate; in many cases, it built the earliest public institutions and shaped civic virtue for nascent nations emerging from colonial rule. The idea that these institutions should be stripped of their formative ethos can seem to some like cultural erasure. The counterargument is subtle. It insists that heritage and inclusivity need not be oppositional. A school can maintain the language of its founding ethos while making room for other ways of praying and mourning, and celebrating. The litmus test is whether adherence to tradition excludes and humiliates, or whether it invites and dignifies.
The Wesley Girls’ question, therefore, becomes a map of competing claims about power. There is the power derived from history and networks, and there is the power derived from law and citizenship. When the two are brought into collision, the real question is not which wins, but which will govern the terms of belonging. Does the right to belong to a historical community trump the right to free conscience in a publicly funded setting? If we say yes, we carve exceptions into equality. If we say no, we risk alienating those for whom the school is more home than a state institution.
I keep thinking about the small, practical tests of institutional culture. Can a school schedule time for Muslim prayers and keep a Methodist chapel? Can dress codes be reimagined so that a hijab is not a provocation but a protected option? Can curricula teach the history of a school honestly while refraining from using public power to enforce homogeneity? These are not merely policy niceties. They are devices for distributing dignity.
Finally, there is the broader political lesson. Democracies manage tension by choosing which freedoms are negotiable and which are sacred. A functioning democracy must be capable of telling an old institution that its rituals are respected, but that its gate cannot be locked by finance and law. Otherwise, public goods become private privileges. The more we allow historical prestige to shield exclusion, the more we accept a civic order where rights are allocated by association rather than by citizenship.
My phone buzzed. Another message. Somewhere in the chatter, a dozen people were already composing their moral outrages. I closed the app and wrote a line on a blank page. For all our devotion to heritage, we must remember that public schools are laboratories of the republic. They are where citizenship is learned in habits and in civics classes. If the republic is to be worth the story we tell about it, the thresholds of its institutions must be porous, not fortress-like. Heritage must teach welcome, not veto. Otherwise, we will continue to produce citizens who inherit privilege and exclusion simultaneously.
Societies decide which freedoms are negotiable not with grand declarations but with small administrative choices. The Wesley Girls case prompts us to name those choices and to weigh them honestly. It asks whether our public life will be governed by the authority of tradition or by the ordinary, sometimes mundane, force of equality. My bet is on equality. I do not choose it because I dislike tradition. I prefer it because a tradition that cannot be shared is no longer a tradition but a claim to power.
*Finis coronat opus.*
