TWO ECCENTRIC BOARDING SCHOOL BOYS…

One of the things that the interesting journey of my life on this earth has taught me is the value of loyal friendships. I have been truly blessed with lots of friends whose value to my life has indeed been above the price of rubies. From my friends, I have grown wiser and stronger in a collective resolve to succeed in this journey of life.

The strength of friendships is truly tested in adversity and I must say I have endured my fair share of adversity with my friends. The people I call friends are the people to whom I have been able to call upon in the deepest moment of anguish in my life. They are the people who have seen me at my lowest ebbs and stood with me in those moments. They are the people who are going to read this blog and laugh off my reminiscing of our shared experiences as an exercise in therapeutic writing.

Meet my friend, Ebo. I have known Ebo for close to twenty years. He was one of my earliest friends in senior secondary school at Winneba, a seaside town in Ghana. Looking back on that fateful day of October 5, 2004, when I first met Ebo is a slightly unnerving experience for me, primarily due to the intensity of bulling I endured in secondary school boarding house. Yet it is to the testament of the tenacity of our friendship that I look upon it with an awesome sense of nostalgia.

On that wet Tuesday morning in October, 2004, I found myself as a newly admitted senior secondary student at Winneba Secondary School. I had had to report to school two weeks later than the official reopening date due to a myriad of factors I cannot recall here. Ebo was one of the very first persons to speak to me. He looked tough and sounded boisterous. His Fante was as impeccable as his English. He knew things and the things that held his passion intrigued me. He was passionate about basketball and hip hop and could intellectualise those interests.

I knew nothing about basketball at the time and only listened to hip hop as a form of entertainment. He was fascinated about science and knew exactly why he was sitting in the science class. I was still wondering why I was in that class aside the fact that my teachers in junior high school had dissuaded my interest in the liberal arts, insisting the keys to a life of prosperity was in the sciences. I accepted this grudgingly and suppressed my questioning attitude to the subject.

Coleman Stephen was an unusual surname but being a Fante, I knew anything was possible. We love unusual names and Coleman’s family was no exception. There was something perversely entertaining about the way Ebo always had to explain to people that his surname was Coleman Stephen. I actually thought it inane that my friend had what I would describe as three English names; his full name was John Coleman Stephen. I am restraining myself from laughing now.

In our sophomore year, our friendship took a rather surprising intellectual turn. Ebo had been moved to the Agricultural Science class whilst I remained in the General Science class. We still took Chemistry and Physics together but we hardly ever sat down to discuss any topic in those two subject unless it was related to nuclear energy and atomic bombs, a rather curious topic that fascinated both of us.

Beneath the seemingly life of privilege and an upper-class sense of humour, Ebo was a searcher. A searcher on the question of black spirituality and identity. When he listened to the redemptive themes that pervaded the songs of Bob Marley and the Wailers, he was drawn to it, it was on this subject that our intellectual curiosity converged. We spent time reading and discussing the writings of Marcus Garvey, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King Jr.

At Preps, we hardly brought any book related to the subjects we were supposed to be studying in school, instead spending several hours every day dissecting what we had read.

We were both born Wesleyan and were members of the Methodist Students’ Union on campus, however, what marked this period of our lives was our mutual decision to stay away from any form of Christian church gathering on campus. This inevitably brought us into conflict with school authorities since they insisted on a policy of recognition of only two religious faiths on campus. You were either a Moslem or a Christian. If you were not at the mosque on Fridays, you were expected to be at church on Sunday and failure to do so could result in serious consequences. On one occasion, we had to stay out of class on a Monday to carry out the punishment that was meted out to us for failing to attend Sunday evening church service.

On the contrary, when Ebo and I decided, after reading a pamphlet from a Bobo Ashanti Rastafarian friend of mine, to go vegetarian, we didn’t face any blow-back from the authorities. When we had a sympathetic dining hall prefect in second year, he actually ensured we got a specially-prepared vegetarian diet from the kitchen occasionally.

I have often wondered what that fixation with the compulsion to attend church services in the boarding house. We had a period on our timetable every week marked as ‘library’, yet no one ever bothered to make it a compulsory task to go to the library at that time to read a novel. It was the one rule in boarding school I can proudly say I followed to the latter. The library was my refuge, constantly harassing the librarian for the week’s newspaper so I could read all my favourite columns whilst in school.

Aside our shared intellectual interest in black identity and spirituality, the one thing that bonded Ebo and myself in secondary school was our shared desire to allow our disciplined nature to be perverted by the eccentricities of boarding school. We had both come from homes where discipline was strictly enforced, boarding school was our chance at being mischievous and irreverent.

In the five years after secondary school, when I spent a gap year just sitting at home and the next four years studying at the university, I must have spoken to Ebo just a couple of times. We drifted apart, each pursuing different paths in life.

It was to take six years before we reconnected. I had graduated from university and was back in Winneba undertaking my national service, Ebo had just gotten into town and called that we hung out. When we met that evening, six years apart looked like six days apart. We simply picked off from where we had paused our pursuits in 2007 and armed with more information, rekindled them in 2013. Physically, Ebo had grown tougher with a beard to match. I was now very small in stature in comparison to him.

The terrifying desolation of our boarding school life had been replaced by a greater burden to understand the essence of our spirituality. We were both back to the church despite our determined effort to stay clear of it in boarding school. The only difference now was how we had abandoned the Methodism of our upbringing and replaced it with the fervour of the charismatic movement.

As we matured in our friendship, our conversations and encounters tended to be more introspective without losing any of its adventurousness. Ebo could still let us go to the university of Ghana campus, where he would play basketball with a group of friends well into night. We would then be confronted with the unenviable task of driving back home in Ebo’s rickety Ferrari that always had a faulty taillight. The police never stopped giving us warnings about that taillight. Ebo always had a story for them.

Just as he had a story for his mechanic friend who we always had to rely on to fix something whenever the car broke down. This was almost every time I was around, visiting Ebo at his home somewhere in Achimota.

I was up at four in the morning from a difficult sleep on a rather unbearable hard pillow. The room was pitch black with the curtain drawn. I switched on the light to check the music playing on Ebo’s laptop. It was Third Day’s ‘Cry Out to Jesus’, I was intrigued how we were now listening to Third Day at dawn, to be followed by Bob Marley’s prophetic wailing in the afternoon and Ghanaian hip-life music in the evening. We were still in search of the answer to black spirituality, I guess.