“Rules are Rules”: Discrimination and Calls For a More Inclusive Senior High School Education in Ghana

On March 19, 2021, Ras Aswad Nkrabea, a father of a young Rastafarian boy admitted to the Achimota Senior High School, posted to Facebook that his son, Oheneba Kwaku Nkrabea, and another teenage boy, Tyron Iras Marhguy, had been denied enrollment because of their locks. The issue caught national attention, and heated debates ensued about the school’s right to enforce its rules and the student’s unfettered rights to access education as well as practice their religion and manifest its expression. However, the broader import of this recent episode of discrimination reveals the systemic problem of inclusive education in Ghana. Writing in 2005, George Sefa Dei has argued that the postcolonial project of a unified Ghanaian national identity advances a notion of sameness that obscures, and even suppresses difference. It also becomes a way to obscure or naturalize power relations as well as practices of social exclusion. Difference is treated as a problem to overcome to ensure harmony and cohesion, instead of an important resource for liberatory possibilities. Educational systems and practices require marginalized groups or minorities to mute their differences and to assimilate into dominant cultural identities increasingly shaped by fundamentalist Euro-Christian hegemonic values and beliefs.

The Achimota episode thus prompts a deeper interrogation. This type of blatant discrimination is not new. Various students over the years have been discriminated against by bigoted ethnoreligious, racist and ableist policies in senior high schools. For instance, students with disabilities have been refused admission to schools and Muslim girls have been forced to take off their hijabs to access education.[1] It’s been reported that Wesley Girls Senior High School, the oldest secondary school in Ghana (founded in 1836 by Harriet Wrigley whose husband was the second Methodist minister in the Gold Coast) and situated in Cape Coast, has gone a step further to stifle the religious freedom of Muslim students, preventing them from having a Quran on campus, praying, and observing religious events.[2] Past and present students recount a system of discrimination, surveillance and religious persecution.

Those who practice indigenous religion have also faced discrimination. An 18-year-old traditional priest was denied enrollment to Dzodze-Penyi Senior High School because of a traditional head cap he must wear as a priest.[3] These discriminatory rules are enforced sometimes at the discretion of the school’s governing authority. For instance, look at the patchwork of religiously motivated rules and their inconsistent application. The Achimota School has granted exceptions to its short hair policy, claiming exceptions were allowed to white foreign exchange students and on medical grounds.

Brief history of Achimota School

Here, it’s pertinent to remember Achimota’s history. Founded in 1924 and formerly named Prince of Wales College and School, this non-missionary school has educated many of Ghana’s former leaders including Kwame Nkrumah, Edward Akufo-Addo, Jerry John Rawlings and John Evans Atta Mills. Writing in 2000, Steiner-Khamsi and Quist, note that its founding was characterized by debates over its proposed education model. The colonialist governor of the Gold Coast, Frederick Gordon Guggisberg, attempted to create a school that would emphasize manual labor and agriculture education, borrowing the Hampton-Tuskgee industrial education model used for US Africans in the South.[4] However, this adapted education model would eventually be implemented as a combination of two models:  the ‘English academic model’ and the Hampton-Tuskegee industrial education model. The former was modelled after British elite academic grammar education while the latter advanced an Africanized curriculum which was also adapted for a rural environment.[5]

Achimota Inauguartion, 1927 (Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Aspects of the Africanized curriculum attracted criticism from the educated elite Gold Coasters. These elites claimed colonialists were training students to remain in the rural areas forever, serving the colonial agenda and confined to indigenous life. The study of indigenous music and drama attracted some of the strongest criticism: these elites claimed that the training was backwards while the missionaries found the indigenous dancing and drumming thwarted their attempts to eliminate what they called “pagan worship”. The curriculum also included “Christian character-building and leadership training, with strong emphasis on agriculture” (p.280).[6] This background is relevant to the present episode because the residues of the school’s complex histories bear upon the present.  It reveals the ongoing tensions over African cultural identity and practices. These practices appear to offend the sensibilities of some educated elite and are perceived as incompatible with academic training and discipline largely derived from colonial Euro-Christian beliefs and values.

Defending Achimota

Supporters of Achimota’s discriminatory school policy claim that short hair is more 'hygienic' and also prevents students from wasting learning time on their hair because, apparently, taking care of one’s hair will negatively impact studying, especially if you are a boarding student. Yet, boarding students leave campus to get haircuts to maintain short hair as well. There are also a number of private senior high schools that allow students to keep their hair long. Moreover, some students have gone through junior high school with long hair and completed their studies successfully. Alternatively, there’s been little interrogation of the potential trauma caused by asking students to cut off hair that they’ve had for years—body image concerns can impact self-esteem.

Additionally, these unsubstantiated claims about long African hair and its relationship to education obscure how this anti-African hair policy disproportionately affects girls and young women. The policy and its justification reflect sexist attitudes about beauty work-- rituals of grooming and beauty practices -- that girls and women perform. Under patriarchal logics, beauty work is regarded as women’s work; as time-wasting and unserious. In fact, there are sexist assumptions about modern fashionable African women: they are superficial because they spend their money on make-up and hair etc. Taking care of one’s body – bathing, shaving, brushing teeth, moisturizing skin—are all important practices of well-being. Yet, there appears to be an arbitrary focus on hair and its grooming as a waste of time. When, in fact, it’s a life skill to be nurtured and developed as part of one’s educational training. Why should one only start to take care of long hair, curly or straightened, when they are in their late teens? And why won’t people hold onto misconceptions that claim Black hair is difficult to maintain?

Proponents of these claims about long Black hair, hygiene and their negative impacts have not presented any comprehensive study to support their claims. As usual, it's just anecdotes and hypotheticals to justify existing prejudices and ignorance about the Rastafari community and, by extension, indigenous practices around hair. Unfortunately, this is how mainstream debates often go in Ghana: unfounded claims are discussed as facts and are used as the basis of policymaking. Yet, rules must make sense, and they must serve a purpose supported by continuous evaluation of their impacts.

“Rules are Rules”

Another key argument advanced by proponents of discriminatory policies, like the Achimota’s anti-African hair rule, is the notion that “rules are rules” and that these rules instill discipline. For instance, the President of the National Association of Graduate Teachers (NAGRAT), Angel Carbonu, argued: "The school is an environment for training. And conformity is part of training and we expect every student to abide by the rules of the school.[7]" He said school is neither for “fashion” nor for the expression of “one’s religious beliefs.” Mr. Carbonu’s conservativism is not new. He opposed the abolishing of corporal punishment with his typical moral panic about disciplinary breakdown.

When I hear teachers like Mr. Carbonu talk about students - as if they are empty containers to be filled, or clay to be molded and shaped by teachers, administrators and rules- I am convinced his philosophy of teaching doesn't seem to recognize young people as full human beings with agency and the capacity to think. I am a teacher, and one of the most important aspects of teaching is to recognize that your students have life experiences and knowledge that is vital to building a community of learning. As such, we, teachers, are not the absolute authority on everything.

Following Mr. Carbonu’s emphasis on discipline, many old Achimotans—and frankly old students of our public senior high schools— also extolled discipline as the defining characteristic of their high school experience. The current Parent Teacher Association (PTA) Chairman for Achimota, Dr. Andre Kwasi-Kumah, argued: “We like the Achimota tradition, we like the way our kids are being raised with these rules … Appearances matter so I wouldn’t want my son or daughter to get exposed to some indecent hairstyle and copy it.”[8] He further made absurd claims that indigenous religious adherents would come with “dreadlocks,” “cowries” or nudists with claims of religious expression.

His claims echo the histories of Christian missionaries using education to convert Africans: boarding schools were to disconnect students from their local populations and their “pagan” ways. As has been noted, rules about appearance were also used to distant students from their cultural identities and practices of grooming. As such, it is simply dishonest to examine the broader discrimination and stigma around Rastafari and conclude that these rules are simply about hygiene and studying time. For instance, symbolically, racialized ideas have placed social values and meanings which have historically associated natural Black hair to negative connotations. In “Black hair/style politics,” Kobena Mercer reminds us that black hair has been described as woolly and tough, and denigrated as a sign of blackness, similar to skin color.

Beyond the obvious bigotry against locks, and by extension Rastafarianism, there is an uncritical celebration of rules and discipline. It seems like the lesson of discipline is rather a lesson of absolute subservience and compliance to authority even if that authority is wrong. This fetishization of authority inherently trains students to fear and have unquestioned fealty for authority. These are not admirable qualities in a democratic society where citizens are supposed to actively hold those in authority accountable and ensure they are receptive to their needs. The “rules are rules” discourse also reflect the desire to create conformity by muting difference and producing sameness.

Inclusive Education

The Ghana Education Service needs to do a comprehensive investigation of discrimination in schools - from ethnic bigotry to ableism to religious intolerance. It also does not seem to have strong anti-discrimination guidelines and oversight over our schools despite its mandate. It has ignored the problem of discrimination – and in effect emboldened it in schools for years. What this eventually means is that our schools are teaching students to be silent while Muslim, Rastafari or minoritized students are being mistreated. They are learning to be indifferent when confronted with injustice against others. It is thus unsurprising then, that we don't name discrimination enough in Ghana. People think their prejudices are merely personal opinions-- from ethnic bigotry to Islamophobia. It appears that our public educational institutions have become a safe haven for violent dogma and bigotry which manifest as school rules.

An important part of education is learning how to live with difference. Schools need to be inclusive spaces that recognize and appreciate the strength of difference. Young people need to learn, and at the same time unlearn, how to practice inclusiveness in schools. These antiquated colonial rules don't teach young people how to live with difference because they are forced to pretend difference doesn't exist. That the rules don’t allow for it. We are all not the same, but we must learn to live together. The US African American intellectual, Cornell West, calls on us to have a “deep human coming together that doesn’t homogenize our specificity, but it uses our differences as a way of deepening communion and community, rather than deepening domination and subordination.[9]”

For now, the matter has gone to the Human Rights court; the two teenage boys are suing, claiming Achimota violated their right to education on religious grounds. The case is pivotal to opening up a broader conversation about discrimination in our educational institutions. At the same time, it is pushing back against a Ghanaian fatalism that often defers to accepting injustice in the name of maintaining a version of peace that masks and fails to deal with discontent.

Nii Kotei studies African popular culture. He is interested in how meaning-making practices inherently relate to broader questions of power among axes of social difference and hierarchy (race, ethnicity, class, gender, sexuality, nationality and language). His research is theoretically informed by critical cultural studies, cultural production, political economy of communication, and decoloniality. He employs qualitative and visual methodologies to examine these concerns. His creative practice draws on my background in graphic design and documentary photography. Currently, his research examines development discourse in Ghanaian popular culture.

Notes and Sources

[1] See “Wearing of hijab.” Retrieved from https://www.facebook.com/CitiTVGH/posts/2730674560528904

[2] See “Systemic discrimination against Muslims exposed in Cape Coast Wesley Girls as school bans Quran, hijab.” Retrieved from https://www.mynewsgh.com/systemic-discrimination-against-muslims-exposed-in-cape-coast-wesley-girls-as-school-bans-quran-hijab

[3] See “18-year-old traditional priest allegedly refused admission by Dzodze-penyi SHS.” Retreived from https://www.myjoyonline.com/18-year-old-traditional-priest-allegedly-refused-admission-by-dzodze-penyi-shs/

[4] British Colonial educational policy for Africa modelled after a 1922 report from the Phelps-Stoke Fund a New York-based philanthropy that promoted educations of native and US African Americans in the South and abroad.

[5] See Steiner-Khamsi, G., & Quist, H. O. (2000). The politics of educational borrowing: Reopening the case of Achimota in British Ghana. Comparative Education Review, 44(3), 272-299.

[6] See Steiner-Khamsi, G., & Quist, H. O. (2000).

[7] See “NAGRAT calls on GES to reverse its directive to Achimota School.” Retrieved from https://www.myjoyonline.com/nagrat-calls-on-ges-to-reverse-its-directive-to-achimota-school/ 

[8] See “Achimota PTA explains selective application of school rules.” Retrieved from https://www.graphic.com.gh/news/general-news/achimota-pta-explains-selective-application-of-school-rules.html

[9] See “Domination and Liberation: An interview with Dr. Cornell West,” A world to win with Grace Blakely. Retrieved from https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/domination-and-liberation-an-interview-with-dr-cornel-west/id1527993484?i=1000493071748