While I may have some issues with a few profs at the university, I've also been privileged to have some brilliant lecturers. Last semester I had Akosua Darkwa, an angry, young African feminist who taught Globalization and the Developing World and took no prisoners. For the whole year, I also had Robert Addo-Fening teaching the history of Colonialism and the African Response. He always had interesting insights and had a keen sense of what went wrong then for Africans and what is still happening.
The professor is a 70 year-old man who has been teaching for fifty years in one form or another. He's lived through the Gold Coast's drive for independence and has been witness to the entire history of the nation of Ghana. He was a student at Legon starting in 1959, when it was an elite, Oxbridge-like institution (they had formal sit-down meals and servant boys serve tea every day at 4pm), and with some stints in Australia, Nigeria and the US, has basically been teaching history at the university ever since. The man has seen the trials and tribulations of the university and the nation and his brain should be considered a national treasure.
I started casually popping into his office late last semester, asking questions about the course. The man can talk your ear off and a single question could coax an answer a half-hour long. Sometimes we'd just talk about football for an hour and that would be fine by me. It was so refreshing to hear candid opinions on history and politics from someone who was well-educated, understood issues as someone who had seen it all and wasn't afraid of saying something that would step on another's toes. At his age, he doesn't need to be afraid of the government. Or his students, whom he actually challenges to think, a quality that is becoming increasingly rare for Ghanaian students.
It's really neat to hear him talk. I haven't had a grandfatherly figure to look up to since I was a child and I suppose he is a poor surrogate, but I find him to be the most fascinating person in the country. This year (after 10 years of contracted lecturing, propping up the crumbling history department) he is finally retiring for good. "I want to spend time with my grandchildren", he says. Today I conducted an hour-long interview with him which was part history of the university, part autobiography and it was a privilege. He will be one of the professors that I always remember and will probably be an inspiration for me for a long time to come.
4 comments:
he taught me historiography at legon. He is awesome.
He taught me at Imo State University, Nigeria in the 1980s. He was the best lecturer we ever had.
He also taught me at the Imo State University, Nigeria from 1983 to 1987. A truly great lecturer.
I hold him in high regard for his scholarship. He taught me intellectual history at the University of Ghana in the 1990's. His classes were always fun. He was all business and no nonsense. He was both feared and respected at the same time. But he was a very approachable professor. He asked his students to THINK. And he always emphasized original ideas and perspectives. I will always be indebted to him for the way he shaped my thinking.
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