By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
August 7, 2015
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.com

The decision by the Presbyterian University College of Ghana to launch a lecture series on “Inter-Religious Schooling and Christian-Muslim Relations in Ghana” is to be resoundingly applauded (See “Mahama Faulted Over Christian-Muslim Remarks” DailyGuideGhana.com 8/7/15). Indeed, I expected such a refreshing intellectual engagement to happen at some point in the near future. For it is an open-secret that among the Christian community, Presbyterian missionary schools have educated more Muslims and other non-Christian Ghanaians than any other denomination. On the latter score ought to be emphasized the fact that Presbyterians have dominantly championed the development of higher education in the country. Here, of course, I am thinking about the founding of the country’s flagship academy, the University of Ghana, whose first Ghanaian Vice-Chancellor, Prof. Alexander Adum-Kwapong, for example, was Presbyterian by birth and upbringing.

Well before the establishment of Legon, of course, was the 1848 founding of the Akuapem-Akropong Presbyterian Teachers’ Training College (PTC), which preceded the University of Ghana by exactly one-hundred years. When in February this year President John Dramani Mahama spoke about some anti-Muslim Christian academic administrators violating the human rights of Muslims attending their schools who were not permitted to practice their cultural habits at these Christian establishments, I noted the unmistakable fact that Mr. Mahama was straining to humor the diplomatic representatives of the Gulf-States’ Arab sheikhs and their cousins and relatives in North Africa resident in Ghana, with whose overlords the Ghanaian leader had struck personal friendships of late, for obvious economic reasons. The fact that Mr. Mahama’s own extended family is widely known to be heavily Muslim clearly tapped into his rude expression of such anti-Christian sentiments, his own personal acceptance of the Christian faith and religion notwithstanding.

What made the massive public protest by the young Muslim women students in the streets of Sekondi-Takoradi this past February very disturbing, was the fact that such protest came at a time when Islamic fundamentalist-oriented acts of violence in the Middle-East and most of the Arab world were at a level not witnessed or experienced for quite some time now. Then you also had the Boko Haram terrorist activities raging in northeastern Nigeria, right in our neighborhood. What made the devious attempt by President Mahama to stoke the flames of inter-religious tensions and conflicts in Ghana inexcusably reprehensible, even as National Chief Imam, Sheikh Nuhu Usman Sharubutu pointedly observed, was the fact that Ghanaian Christians and Muslims had been coexisting for centuries without any cataclysmic upheavals. We must also quickly point out that the young women in Sekondi-Takoradi were protesting the prohibited use of the hijab or Muslim head and facial scarf at examination centers around the country. The concern had to do with the extreme difficulty that proctors and invigilators were having in identifying these head and facially covered Muslim girls and young women from the official mini-portraits on record, in order to prevent such exam malpractices as impersonation.

While, indeed, some head-teachers and principals of some of these Christian missionary schools may well have been insufferably high-handed in their enforcement of disciplinary rules, the fact remains that handled diplomatically by both sides, the necessary accommodation could have been made for these Muslim girls and young women. Instead, we had President Mahama instructing the courts to decide the proper course of action. Indeed, a few misguided citizens launched some lawsuits. Fortunately, not much that is worthy of either public concern or attention appears to have come out of such suits. Very likely, the bulk of these suits were summarily dismissed. The fact remains, however, that just as Ghanaian Muslims have an inalienable right to practice their religion in publicly and privately acceptable spaces, Ghanaian Christians equally have the same right.

If the Presbyterian University College of Ghana-sponsored lecture series fully recognized this fact, then, of course, there can be no gainsaying that good progressive was made. I often tell the quite instructive story of the fact that my very first serious girlfriend was a Muslim woman whose maternal grandparents were born in Kano, northern Nigeria. I can assure the reader about the patent absurdity and absolute insignificance of religious differences, even putatively pronounced differences, when it comes to matters of the heart.

And, by the way, Dr. J. B. Danquah did not name his son, and my paternal granduncle, Mr. Vladimir Danquah, born in 1921, or thereabouts, after Vladimir Lenin, as one Nkrumacratic scumbag sought to suggest recently. Danquah was far more erudite, sophisticated, foresighted and intelligent than that. My distinguished retired World Bank administrator, Morocco-resident, British-mothered Uncle Vladimir Danquah was named after a famous philosopher-theorist who partly supervised the award-winning dissertation of the Doyen of Gold Coast and Ghanaian Politics at the University of London. You see, cut-and-paste faux-scholarship can only get one so far.