Classics Beyond Borders: Ghana Updates and Sam Ayoma’s Blog

With the generous Leventis funding received in July, the Classics Beyond Borders initiative was able to support two conferences at the University of Ghana. The first, Rationality and Human Development was held in honour of Professor Ackah. It celebrated his tireless work in supporting Classics Studies in Ghana.  There were various talks by international and local scholars engaging with his work and as a token of our appreciation for his foundational role in the initiative, we donated a library of 30 books in his honour to the library at UG. The second was a Classical Association of Ghana conference, Classics at the Crossroads, which was a two-day event supported by Cambridge, Princeton, and Memorial University in Canada. There were two keynote speakers (Professor Sarah Debew and Professor Luke Roman), 43 papers and visitors from Canada, Ghana, Malawi, Nigeria, Kazakhstan, Netherlands, South Africa, Tunisia, the UK and the USA.

This coming year, the Classics Beyond Borders initiative continues to grow, with the continuation and expansion of online Greek and Latin language teaching for students in Ghana. We have more students than ever signed up for language teaching, now with some students from the University of Ibadan in Nigeria alongside our Ghanaian students. The access we can give to learning Greek and Latin is a vital part of removing one of the biggest barriers for African students seeking access to universities in the UK and the US. The mentorship strand of the program will also continue, and we have just launched a new strand of the initiative, which supports one of our students going to Ghana to teach. Sam Ayoma was the first very student to take up this opportunity and he has written a blog about his experience teaching Classics in Ghana:

Sam's experiences in Ghana

In this report I hope to share a glimpse of my time as Visiting Scholar in the Department of Philosophy and Classics, University of Ghana. It was an extremely formative and enlightening experience and one that would not have been possible without the generous support of the Classics Beyond Borders (CBB) project of which the Faculty here in Cambridge is a part. 

The project currently seeks to bolster the collaborative relationship between the Classics departments in the UK and North America and those in countries formerly under British colonial occupation. Ghana boasts a uniquely rich, albeit lesser-known, intellectual history of native scholars engaging with the Classics. Even during the colonial rule of European nations who often weaponised their ‘Classical education’ to engender a sense of superiority over their colonial subjects, still, individuals such as Edward Wilmot Blyden, Joseph Ephraim Casely-Hayford and indeed Ghana’s first president, Kwame Nkrumah sought ways to reframe and redeploy the Classics as they envisioned and at last achieved a free, independent Ghana in 1957. Having discussed the CBB project with Dr Rosanna Omitowoju, it was to these figures that I eventually turned for my undergraduate thesis entitled, ‘Learning from Africa: Resituating the Decolonising debate in Ghana’ which I conducted under the supervision of Dr Frisbee Sheffield.

Over the course of the thesis, I had become fascinated by the open-minded approach of these three scholars in particular towards Classics and their dogged insistence that the discipline could hold a valuable place in the hearts and minds of the citizens of a decolonised Ghana, and indeed, the African continent as a whole. As a result, when the opportunity arose in July, following Frisbee’s kind invitation to attend the CBB conference in Cambridge, I was eager to see first hand the legacy of Nkrumah and his philhellenic predecessors and witness the flourishing of the discipline in Ghana. Over the course of the months that followed, I liaised with Dr Richmond Kwesi, the Head of Department, with whom Frisbee had kindly put me in touch. It was agreed that I would spend one semester at the University of Ghana, Legon, between January and March, assisting with the Greek tuition for current undergrads and recently-graduated Classics Teaching Assistants (TAs) working within the department. Dr Kwesi was also very kind in offering that I stay with him and his family for the duration of my stay.

I landed in Accra on the 8th of January a few days into the new semester after a short delay in snowy Amsterdam with my first task to identify those students in the department interested in taking Greek. On my first day, barely twelve hours after landing, Dr Kwesi invited me to be a part of a meeting between faculty at the Department of Philosophy and Classics, Ghana, and a delegation of Philosophy faculty members from City University of New York (CUNY). During the meeting, Richmond explained the ‘Bouquet System’ which is employed in the University of Ghana. The system groups ‘like’ subjects together so that a student wishing to major in any one must also necessarily study a handful of others. For example, a First-year student wishing to study Political Science must also necessarily begin by taking additional courses in, say, Classics and Philosophy, as part of a bouquet of subjects. In the meeting was a senior Professor in the Department of Linguistics who reminisced about her experience with the Bouquet system indicating that it had been in place for several decades.

It seemed to me that Classics was both helped and hindered by the Bouquet system. On the one hand, the system benefits a subject such as Classics which is still known to relatively few students prior to university and so would otherwise likely suffer a dearth of interest. Under the Bouquet system, however, the Classics department boasts hundreds of students taking its courses from across the Faculty of Arts, with more than one of my Greek students telling me that they are to major in Classics despite not having known about it before university. The blowback of this system, however, is that Classics students in Ghana struggle to study the subject in the same degree of breadth that for instance a Cambridge Classics BA allows, the kind of which feels vital in facilitating one to interrogate and wrestle with the discipline as a whole in any truly meaningful way. One mustn’t neglect, however, the privilege that we have in Cambridge to access, on top of literary material, art and archeological collections. The absence of which augments the limitations of a Classics course in Ghana.

The result of all this for me personally was that the optional ‘Ancient Greek 1’ course I was to teach was traditionally first offered to 3rd-Years as their first exposure to Ancient Greek language. Naturally, this felt strange to me having come through the Cambridge system in which so much emphasis is placed on the importance of the languages, particularly in Part I. I discussed the possibility of opening the course to students in the first and second years with one of the Classics lecturers. She warned me that to do so would be to risk being overrun by quite literally hundreds of bright-eyed freshers. This seemed quite the reversal to my warning prior to departure that I may only muster enough students to count on three fingers. After deliberation, I decided not to break with tradition too much. Even with focus singled in on Third-years (or Level 300s as they are called) I was slightly apprehensive when over one hundred students joined the course whatsapp group within the first two days. The coin soon flipped once again when my inaugural lecture boasted a single attendant; myself. It transpired that, despite the semester having begun, many students seem to miss the first week or two until they have successfully paid their course fees. At the second attempt, with more successful advertising, a class of around twenty joined for an introduction to the course. Having benefitted from the small class sizes of IG Greek in 1A, I was keen to keep group sizes to a minimum, and so proceeded to divide the cohort into seven classes of between two and six students which I would see once a week.

The primary university campus is in Legon, about ten kilometres north of Accra city-centre, and is a self-sufficient town in and of itself. There is a food market, a supermarket, countless eateries, a hospital, a nursery and primary school, a secondary school, a pharmacy, a post-office, the list goes on. In fact, the campus is so large that the most common means of transport is its own taxi service. It is flooded with greenery and towering deciduous trees that line its almost mile-long ‘boulevard’. At its end, the boulevard bifurcates as the roads obliquely climb a solitary hill upon which sits the Main Hall with panoramic views of the area and visible from the freeway as we would drive in each morning. The Hall, presiding over the rest of the university, felt reminiscent of the Parthenon. Indeed, much like the Acropolis, at its foot sits a Greek-styled theatre. Dr Kwesi had said it was entirely possible that these similarities had been intentional by the university's founders, of which Nkrumah was one. The Philosophy building sits part way down the main avenue with the Classics building about two hundred metres away. Despite sharing a Department, Philosophy and Classics remain largely independent with their buildings each housing their own libraries, offices, seminar rooms and specialist staff. I spent the majority of my time in the Philosophy side as Dr Kwesi very generously permitted me the use of the designated Head of Department’s (HoD) office in the Philosophy building. Although the office already lay empty as Dr Kwesi preferred the comfort of his long-standing office upstairs, it remained an extremely thoughtful gesture and one I felt quite unqualified to receive. It signified, however, one of my first experiences of the selfless generosity and kindness that followed wherever I went or whomever I met whilst in Ghana. 

On account of my small class sizes, I was able to conduct all my classes from the HoD office. The room had been very thoughtfully cleared by the Philosophy TAs and the airconditioning resurrected, offering a constant and immutable fifteen-degrees that meant I quite often forgot I was in Ghana altogether! The office not only provided me with a hub from which to teach but also, being adjoined to the general office, meant I quickly got to know the Philosophy TAs, whose company I enjoyed immensely during my stay and were of similar age to me. Together with them, I explored Accra, sampled quintessential Ghanaian dishes (as far as my European constitution would withstand) and attended Church services in their communities. It was a wonderful way to discover more of the Ghanaian culture beyond the department.

Although Dr Kwesi had been initially surprised at my decision to expand my teaching load from a proposed one or two classes a week, it proved to yield a number of positive results. For one, the increased timetable allowed the students, many of whom faced shifting commitments and travel challenges, to dip between the different timeslots based on their availability and since all were beginners, progress between classes was largely synchronised. Secondly, I believe the smaller sizes encouraged swifter progress both because it provided a more natural, conversational environment for me, with relatively little teaching experience, and a fluidity which allowed classes to take the shape and pace that individual students required. The third benefit was that the already swifter pace of learning and the conversational nature of the sessions meant that we were often able to digress into discussions on subjects such as Classics more broadly, the university experience in Ghana and indeed their lives and ambitions. As such, I learnt the most about the country, the legacy of its history and role of Classics in the midst of all this, as they saw it, through these conversations.

As the Semester drew on, I was struck by the fervour of the students to stay the course and their good humour in doing so, with only a couple of losses from the original group. This enthusiasm was pervasive and in-discriminant of the fact that only two of the twenty were taking the course for credit with the others motivated by nothing other than pure interest. Among the group, there were even those who were no longer studying Classics but instead subjects like Philosophy, Information Systems, Political Science and Music. This, I felt, really spoke to the success of the Bouquet system in the Faculty of Arts in fostering a holistic and continually inquisitive attitude to learning which places a whole host of humanities subjects, Classics included, in communion with each other instead of isolation.

I spent my final day in Ghana in the department. Dr Kwesi had organised a lovely farewell gathering in which the esteemed Professor Ackah gifted me a framed Citation in recognition of my time spent there. It was wonderful to see almost all the students I’d taught in one room for the first time since the first lecture. As I had been so often during my trip, I was struck by the kindness of my sendoff. It was a privilege to spend the semester in the department as an ambassador of the CBB project and would encourage others to travel to Ghana in contribution to the wonderful spirit of friendship and collaboration being cultivated across our borders.