Best Boy 1979

[Josette Werst]

IfI talked about the formative experiences of my childhood with friends a few years older, like playing "The Oregon Trail" on a brick of a computer in elementary school or wearing ripped flannel while head-banging to Nirvana in high school, they simply couldn't relate.

It didn't make sense. How could we feel so outcast when everyone just slightly older or younger seemed to fit the Generation X and Millennial molds? (No wonder grunge music was so popular with us in high school.)

It argues that we are part of a microgeneration whose childhoods were basically analog. We grew up writing notes to each other (on paper!) and playing in the street. We had the carefree innocence of a life not lived on social media.

Yet we came of age just as everything was turning digital. Which explains why we grew up with cassette tapes yet voraciously consumed everything we could on Napster. The Internet quickly became our friend.

Others have made similar observations about those born during this small window of time, though perhaps because we are such an enigma to everyone else, there's no agreement on what to call us. (Personally, I like Generation Oregon Trail, because the best way to win that game is to buy more bacon, and who doesn't like bacon?)

Us Oregon Trailers have both the cynicism and the optimism to broach this chasm, to bring understanding among the warring factions. Or at least not let their protests completely ruin our lives (remember, we more or less patented the word "whatever").

Each day from the window of my bus as we pulled up to school I scanned the parking lot for the magical green MG. During class I dreamed up elaborate stories of putting luggage on the rack and traveling to distant places. Every day a new adventure. There was something about the headlights and the way it sat alone in the parking lot. It was rumored that the teacher bought it when he turned 50 years old.

That same day I started looking for my car. And before long I found it: a 1979 MG Midget sitting in the barn of John Becker. The cassette player still worked, and it only had 35,000 miles on it. John bought the car for his wife for her 50th birthday; she had since passed away.

I have learned a lot through the journey of finding a wonderful car. A classic is more than a car, it is a connection to all the people and stories that, in my case, came to life in the very special year of 1979. The responsibility has come to me to keep this classic alive and to share those wonderful stories and create new memories.

So when I hear persons such as Babangida and Obasanjo in Nigeria and Rawlings in Ghana going on about parties they created, I wonder why they do not put their leadership experience to bigger challenges in full view of the whole world. Military dictators, in my view, owe the electorate a debt of gratitude for disrupting the democratic process of their countries inevitably they leave their countries in a worse state, socially, politically and economically, than when they took over. We civilians are therefore grateful for term limits on presidencies; the fact is that presidents do not perform better because they stay longer, most do not come with any vision for the transformation of their countries and it is likely that the longer they stay the worse they will become.

I have read the recent pronouncements of Flight Lieutenant Jerry John Rawlings Retired, a former military ruler and former president of Ghana extolling the ideals of June 4th, one of the most chaotic period of our political life in Ghana. The tragedy that was unleashed on the people of Ghana by mindless soldiers, supported by students barely out of breeches who had no concept of governing a country having only experienced a clueless military government, gives me the shivers even today 30 or so years after the event. Supporting actor in this June 4th braggadocio, is another retired soldier, Major Boakye Djan now seeking another taste of government as a civilian legislator; he who wants us to believe his invention that the spokesperson is the actual leader and the leader is really only ceremonial.

I lived in Ghana between June 4th and September 24th 1979 and I did not see any probity and accountability during that period. All I saw was the chaotic posturing backed by empty rhetoric of young men and some boys, drunk with power, intent on sending our country into an unfortunate downward spiral of economic disaster that unfortunately was inherited by the legitimately elected civilian government of the Peoples National Party.

June 4th was about students who had misread bits of Marxist political theory mistakenly thinking that those concepts have general applicability far removed from their context of 19th century peasant Europe and could be transplanted into 20th century Africa. For them, the Russian revolution could be replicated by a military revolution in Africa, totally forgetting that soldiers in Ghana are part of the elite protected by generous salaries from our taxes.

The house cleaning exercise was all about lofty ideas of fixing a country that had struggled under the yoke of a military that had strangled the fragile economy and replaced it with rent seeking behaviour that was driving the country into bankruptcy. The fact of fixing a country however demands vision beyond youthful exuberance. There were even disputes, after the event, about where the monies extorted from supposedly corrupt business people had been lodged and Accra was left in a much filthier state after the housecleaning exercise. That period was total chaos and there is nothing to celebrate about it. I still fail to see the ideals that day represents.

June 4th achieved nothing notable for Ghana and did not add to, or lead to, better governance; it pales into insignificance when compared to the achievement of Rawlings when he handed over to Kufour on 7th January 2001. So why he continues harping on about that day beats my imagination.

Talking about Rawlings here triggers a trip down memory lane to my secondary school years and questions about whether there were any indicators that the Jerry John that I knew would turn out to be the leader that some sections of the public craved for in 1979, hailed in 1982 and resoundingly voted for as president twice in 1992 and 1996? All of what I write about him is of course unauthorised since I have not seen him or spoken to him since 1977 when I organised some meetings of my year group at Ambassador Hotel during the golden jubilee celebrations of our school.

I picked on him immediately and got him to carry my trunk and chop box into the house and dormitory. He and Lawrence Dagadu were probably the biggest, though Holdbrook Smith was certainly the tallest. The others that I remember are David Wilson, Gilbert Mansu-Asmah, then Foli, Benneh, Adu, Mainoo, GEY Doe, Ansafo-Ofei and Tekpetey.

Of course he was not too happy that such a small boy had bullied him, and was livid when he discovered that I was also in the same D dormitory with him and was also a Form 1 boy, though in my case I was repeating because I had spent the better part of the year in hospital which meant that I missed some of my exams and flunked those that I took. He however had to live with the fact that I was there to initiate them through the course of negotiating their way through the school as Nino boys, a fate that I had endured the year before, and was spared this time round.

Though we stayed in the same dormitory, I do not recollect being in the same class with Jerry. For some reason in our junior years, the youngest students were put in the A stream where I was, the oldest in the D stream and the Roman Catholic students in the C steam where Jerry was.

The Roman Catholic students had an infallible Pope, read the Knox version of the Bible during the morning quiet period, they went to a separate chapel in the main administration block and part of their service was in Latin, they used a rosary like the Muslim prayer beads which had always fascinated me, they chanted Hail Marys and they were the reason why we were always served fish on Fridays and they actually went to confession, to confess their sins to a priest. What sins at that age? Jerry John was a devout Catholic and took his religion seriously during his junior years and I have always wondered what it was that turned a cherubic ruby cheeked choir boy who served at the altar of God into the macho irreverent boy of later years by the time he left the school.

He was academically sound and in the fourth and fifth year it was clear that his interests went beyond the academic and the technical, he was good with his hands, creative and loved the pursuit of fine arts. For some reason, I always felt that he would have ended up in design and would have been an outstanding architect or a design engineer combining the artistic with the technical.

Rawlings at secondary school was one of the stronger boys who also excelled in sports, aggressive and confident. He was a good swimmer and a good boxer and practiced Judo though that was not on the normal sports curriculum and I am certain that he would have readily taken on weightlifting if that had been part of the fare.

He was more laid back when he became the full inspector in Form 5, in realisation that coercion results in resistance and that if he delegated more, his expertise at cleaning alone would get their commitment. But he could also be persuasive and most times had quite a few of the junior boys around his bed side. He would regale them with stories that he had read from books about the Second World War and how the Yankees, Frogs, Limeys won the war from the Japs, Nips, Krauts and Jerries. So Rawlings always told a good story and could also sweet talk most people into doing his bidding, even begging when he had to. I can visualise him as he was then, with his Elvis Presley haircut and his tight shorts and raised collar and scruffed up short sleeves crooning the Jailhouse Rock with its attendant gyrating moves in the middle of D dormitory to the younger ones and his rather successful attempts to tease some Elvis chords out of the remaining two strings of an original six string guitar.

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