The KNUST Diaries 1 – The Aluta Years

I arrived at the Unity Hall of the KNUST one sunny September afternoon. I was met at the reception by Mr Yamson who told me I was going to be in Room 428. I took my bags and turned right to go to my room in Block B of the Unity Hall. I passed by a notice board on the right, descended a couple of steps, admired some exotic plants and paintings on the walls and turned left. Room 428 was in the inner row of rooms on the eighth floor. But the elevator was broken. In fact it never worked in all the time I was in the Unity Hall. It is often said that the greatest evidence of the paucity of our practical knowledge as compared to our theoretical knowledge was the fact that an institution like the UST, renowned for training the country’s electrical engineers, could never get their own lifts to work.

So I had to carry my bags, one after the other up to the long flight of steps unto the eighth floor and into room 428. These rooms had clearly been designed by Nkrumah to be occupied by one student. I put my bags down and had a look round. The toilets and showers were very neat but there were not many students around. There was a large room that had been designed for washing and drying but which would later be converted to rooms while I was in the university. On the ninth floor was an open area, with equipment for body building and everything else.

I had arrived one week earlier for some reason. Over the week, I had visited every corner of the university. I had been to the swimming pool. I could not swim, but it was nice to just sit there sipping a glass of cold beer and enjoying the atmosphere. I visited the School of Medical Sciences. It was the newer of the two medical schools in the whole of Ghana at the time and a few of the departments were still under construction. I walked by the Great Hall of the University and into the huge University library. I strolled along the roads to all the halls of residence, comparing them to the Unity Hall. It simply felt so good to be here. I eagerly awaited the arrival of everyone else over the weekend.

On the day I had woken up early, had a shower and a quick breakfast and then gone to sit on the balcony of my room on the eighth floor with the day’s newspapers and a story book, looking down at the entrance as one taxi after another arrived. There had been shouting and hugging and even more shouting and hugging as friends reunited after three months away from each other. I felt the quiet serene environment change, bit by bit, as more students arrived, into a noisy rowdy heap. I noticed that once people got their bags into their rooms, they would go straight unto the balconies to do just what I had been doing all day, watching as their friends arrived. I watched as the balconies slowly filled up. I listened as weary steps laboured up the stairs to the eighth floor and doors opening to my left and to my right. Occasionally there would be loud shouting as some very popular bloke arrived.

“Kakra C!”

People shouted from their balconies as he stood at the forecourt, arms aloft, looking up with majestic elegance at one block and then the other, while the poor taxi driver patiently waited to be paid. I watched as he finally turned to pay the taxi driver, got a couple of boys to carry his luggage, entered the “Always Around” and disappeared from sight into the reception area. Still, there was the odd faint shout of “Kakra C” away in the distance. My room happened to be next to the staircase. I listened as the intermittent shouts of “Kakra C” got louder as he made his way up the stairs. I began to hear this deep confident voice responding to the adulation.

“Charley, how be?” he would say to people as he came up

My curiosity got the better of me. I came out of my room to stand by the rails on the staircase to see if I could catch a closer glimpse of him. He landed on the sixth floor;

“Kakra C!”

He proceeded unto the seventh floor

“Kakra C!”

Then he turned unto the stairs coming up to the eighth floor, and I was suddenly face to face with the great man. He was a tall, dark muscular guy who seemed to have spent a fair while in the gym.

“Charley how be?” he extended a hand to me as people popped out of their rooms to say hello. I didn’t realize so many occupants of the eighth floor had arrived.

“You de pump metal?”

“No” I said

“Are you sure?” he asked. He obviously did not believe me, confusing my fatty biceps for muscle.

He moved on to say hello to others before making the slow progress down the long corridor to his room at the very end, stopping many times along the way, to check who had arrived and who had not. People simply do not become popular by chance. In fact, they worked hard to maintain their popularity. Perhaps, for these people, like Kakra C, all this extra work it took to remain popular came naturally to them. That is what made them different. Within a minute, Kakra C had succeeded in making me feel as if he had been an old school mate. It took special skill.

‘Kakraba Cromwell!” the guy next to me said, a mixture of adulation and respect etched on his face.

“Akoholu” he said, as we shook hands

I chatted to him on the corridor for a while. He proceeded to tell me everything he knew about Kakraba Cromwell. He was one of the leaders of the National Union of Ghana Students who had been a thorn in the flesh of the military dictatorship of JJ Rawlings for a few years, organizing numerous student demonstrations. He was particularly known for his eloquence and oratory and students loved listening to him.

“Charley, couple of years ago, wow, people start to get angry say things slow down with the NUGS” Akoholu said “Them organize this massive congress at the Great Hall. Everybody was there. Legon guys, Cape Coast everybody. Then KC get up, he start speak. Then the people wey make angry, Charley, them start cheer!”

He gave me a short version of what had become known in folklore as the KC speech, the KNUST equivalent of Martin Luther King’s “I have a Dream.” There had been no proper records and what he was purported to have said actually varies, depending on who was telling the story. Over the years people had taken the poetic license to add and subtract as they deemed fit, perpetuating the myth of the great man.

“Sometimes, sometimes, the reason our friends of the four-legged bearded variety stop in the middle of a fight and retreat briefly, is not because they are running away, but it’s so they can come back with even more vigour, smashing the enemy, destroying them forever.

“Sometimes, in life, it is better to learn when to fear, how to fear and how much to fear, lest we should squander, all we have fought together for.

“Sometime in the future, you may come across a wall gecko. It may be sitting its somewhere, thinking its own thought and nodding its head. Remember, it will merely be reminding you, that whatever I have said here today is true, its true and its true” he had concluded, nodding his head in time.

Kakra C! I watched as the great man finally disappeared into his room.

Papa Appiah

The rest of the story will be serialized on www.ghanansemsem.blogspot.com