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Ghana School Aid helps the education of children in Ghana by making grants to
schools. The charity was founded by people who had worked there, admired and
respected Ghanaians and wanted to continue to help them. It has a permanent
representative in Accra. Since 1986, 180 schools have been helped and to celebrate the
charity's coming of age supporters decided to record some of their memories from their
working days. The result is an intriguing and diverse collection covering a spectrum of
interests from the 1920s to the 1980s from a wide range of contributors. A brief
historical introduction is followed by sections covering politics, education, work, events
and memories.
What makes this collection of memories so attractive is the way in which they belie
stereotyping and defy preconceived expectations. So the Accra riots of 1948 are seen
through the eyes of a Posts & Telegraphs accountant with all of three weeks service and
comment on the 1951 elections comes from a woman education officer recruited to assist
with the registration of voters. Eric Cunningham, an education officer, was seconded to
the team organising the Togo plebiscite in 1956 and provides a graphic and valuable
account of the nuts and bolts of a significant administrative undertaking successfully
completed with limited resources, typical of the experience of many colonies in the
immediate run up to independence. Lord Listowel comments briefly on his role as
Governor General and Jane Drew, of the famous Drew and Maxwell partnership which
set such high standards for architecture in West Africa and elsewhere, writes about her
arrival in the then Gold Coast during the second world war. Robert Yearley reminds us
of a generation of expatriates many of whom arrived in Africa unable to drive and
several contributors speak of the charm and charisma of Kwame Nkrumah,
acknowledged by all who met him.
Education, rightly, has a major place in these memoirs which include extracts from
the diary of Sylvia Ward, wife of the great educationalist W S Ward whose influence
extended far beyond the Gold Coast. She takes going ashore in a surf boat as a matter of
course. It was 1926. Her natural use of the idiom of the time makes one realise just how
much has happened in the intervening eighty years and how great the achievements in
which both Ghanaian and expatriate can take pride. Here, as on every page, these
memoirs are witness to the undoubted fact that the vast majority of expatriates working
in the Gold Coast and then in Ghana loved their work, the people they worked for and
with, and cherish overwhelmingly happy memories to warm the chill of retirement. In
my experience that is true of everywhere in empire and should be a source of satisfaction
to the people we served as much as to us.
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