Senior,
Given you make a respectful contribution, it will be disrespectful for me to ignore you.
So, though I have only my smart phone with me at this stage, I will put down a response. We must engage the facts more systematically later, possibly at an institution or organisation that has the requisite intellectual courage to seek truth from facts.
Aggrey faced significant racism at Achimota School. I see no exculpatory basis to exclude any Governor of the Gold Coast, especially Guggisberg, from the racism at the school then.
But I do not argue by just asserting things. So, let’s try to lay hands on Professor L. H. Ofosu-Appiah’s book.
Alec Fraser is recorded as having threatened to return to London if Aggrey was not housed in the same manner as white teachers. When I finally lay hands on the book, I will send you a picture of the page.
In the early 1920’s, Aggrey gave up a chance to be a Professor at University of Fort Hare. He was already a Phelps-Stokes scholar. A man who had interacted with people of the calibre of W. E. B. DuBois.
Please give me the institutional grounds, which you suggest, would have been the basis for such a man not being a principal of such a school in his own country?
I exchanged E-mails on the matter with Professor Felix Konotey-Ahulu, a few years before his final farewell.
While he was a well known scholar on Aggrey, I share his email now and hope to get the lecture itself from GAAS. I have tried two times previously and failed.
This was Konotey-Ahulu, who told me he was only one year behind my mother at Achimota School. We delayed his recording of an interview on The Sages, so it could coincide with an autobiography he was just about to publish. Alas, the interview was not to be, Konotey-Ahulu was called to his maker while we waited.
“Thank you Yaw for writing to me.
Yes, I rehearsed the various prejudices against Dr. Kwegyir Aggrey in my ‘Tenth Dr Ephraim Amu Memorial Lecture at the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences’.
So GAAS may help you with what I said.
When Mr Ephraim Amu insisted to preach in Ghana cloth at Akropong Presby Church and was reprimanded and virtually sacked, it was Aggrey and Fraser who invited him to Achimota School where he later taught your mother and me.
He had been an object of prejudice until Rev Fraser corrected the Tafracher Rubbish.”
After this email exchange, I went further to confirm the story with Dr. Misonu Amu, daughter of Ephraim Amu. A very intelligent, nice and helpful woman, she is alive and well and can be contacted.
Now, having laid that premise, my declared objective with the post you replied to, was to demonstrate the racial climate in the school, not necessarily just Guggisberg.
How in the political-economy of the 1920’s Gold Coast would that not have been the case? I really wonder.
But, and the reason I am keen to get a copy of the book, which as far as I can tell does not exist in electronic format, L. H. Ofosu-Appiah went further.
1. Guggisberg maintained a racist promotion policy for employees in the public service. This was the basis of his clash with people like Dr. Nanka-Bruce, Dr. Bruce-Konuah and others.
2. Under his Governorship there was a de facto Group Areas Act. Africans like you and I, were constructively discouraged (by law) from entering Ridge and Cantonments (where European teachers from Achimota were housed before the school had bungalows of its own) after 5:00pm. The daylight allowance for ‘us natives’ was to enable domestic staff to work in European households.
3. Ridge Hospital was for Europeans, Korle Bu for the so-called natives. Qualified African medical practitioners were put in a professional category called “Native doctors,” which to most intents and purposes was inferior to their European equivalents. Though, at the time, all African doctors had trained in European institutions.
4. Having first encountered these movements in Adu Boahen’s 1988 lectures, I studied the Manbii party of Kojo Thompson and the Ratepayers association of Dr. Nanka-Bruce. Under Guggisberg, Thompson (the father of Tommy Thompson who was to become the intrepid publisher of the Free Press), being the more radical and popular mobiliser, there was massive agitation against colonial era policies and practices. This is well documented in history.
5. I will not go on much this time about the overt discrimination of Gordon Guggisberg and the colonial project against people from Northern Ghana. It was a familiar practice of the colonial project everywhere to create “a periphery within the periphery.” Northern Ghana, mentioned as such in his Ten Year Development Plan, was denied formal education so that it could act as a labour reserve for the extraction of sustenance from the colony to the metropolitan centre. Colonialism, in essence, was a strategy for capital expansion. The mentioned discrimination against Northern Ghana was to pose a major development challenge for Kwame Nkrumah, when he first assumed office. When people pillory Nkrumah for pursuing Free Education in the North, they must realise it was effectively an act of Reparations. The original problem was created by the deliberate and insidious design of the colonial project and its agents like Guggisberg.
Even in the 1920s there were men like E. Nelson Padu, so there is no surprise if people struggle today, a hundred years later, with acknowledging some of Guggisberg’s credentials that do not flatter him.
A bit more on the kind of person E. Nelson- Padu represents:
S. S. Quarcoopome (1991)
“The Politics and Nationalism of A. W. Kojo Thompson: 1924–1944.”
Research Review (New Series), Vol. 7, Nos. 1 & 2. has an interesting observation.
> Kojo Thompson’s critics said he “had no respect for the Europeans who opened our eyes.”
In the full article Quarcoopome cites E. Nelson‑Padu as one of the conservative Gold Coast commentators who accused Kojo Thompson of:
– disrespecting Europeans
– attacking chiefs
– stirring up the masses
– failing to appreciate “what the Europeans had done for us”
Therefore, what is new if a few people are upset today that unflattering facts are being mentioned from Guggisberg’s history?
It used to be that some resorted to de facto intimidation, as though they styled themselves an elect which could impose a Fatwa on historical materialists digging into the matter.
I do not believe in the erasure from history of any major actors, only on the basis of later political sentiment. Which is why I find the brouhaha around renaming our airport unfortunate and unnecessary.
Our responsibility should not be to censor out historical facts, we should contextualise the narrative though with all the facts.
I see no need to wipe out all memory of Guggisberg from Achimota School’s history. But the full facts must be laid out.
Then, on the basis of full information, the question of whether chants of gratitude and hagiographic praise must still be rendered to him, I dare to suggest, must be revisited.
We may find out that too many others who sacrificed a lot to get the school going – people like the cocoa farmers, the indentured construction labourers, several chiefs, the peasants made landless; have been institutionally ignored by the commemorative celebrations of this school.
This is a distorted and unjustifiable approach to any serious study of history. There is no acceptable reason why it should persist in 2026.
That can easily be remedied; if there is a will, and if there is a passion for justice in historical narrative.
Gordon Guggisberg may have been a good father; he may have been a good son, as well as a good husband and friend of some. Maybe he was also a good cook and cricket player.
I have no basis to dispute any of this.
But, incontrovertibly, ineluctably, inescapably, the historical record shows him up for being a racist colonialist.
It is not my intention to make people comfortable about that. It is just what the historical record shows.
Guggisberg’s legacy cannot be understood outside the racist colonial system he administered, and any commemoration that omits this is historically dishonest.
