Arthur Kennedy is Being Sexist and Petty

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

Following the auspicious, astute, constructive and laudable decision by the Legon Executive Council to gender-mix the residential composition of the institution’s at once most celebrated and notorious hall of residence, Commonwealth Hall, Dr. Arthur Kobina Kennedy wrote and published a rather intemperate tirade captioned “Leave Commonwealth Alone!” (See MyJoyOnline.com 5/6/10). And here, we promptly recall the fact that the Legon Executive Council’s decision to gender-mix Commonwealth Hall follows the inexcusably boorish heckling of the former United Nations Secretary-General, Mr. Kofi Annan, and other dignitaries of both national and global renown, by a group of student residents of the hall during the University of Ghana’s most recent graduation exercise. It is also significant to highlight the fact that Mr. Annan currently serves as Chancellor of Ghana’s flagship academy.

In the main, Dr. Kennedy’s discursive thrust is largely predicated on his sentimental attachment to Commonwealth Hall, both as a former resident of that residential hall and an alumnus of the University of Ghana, rather than an objectively and intelligently reasoned analysis of the series of events that provoked the Legon Executive Council’s unarguably progressive decision to gender-mix the residential composition of Commonwealth.

Still, what is even more logically pathetic about the thrust of Dr. Kennedy’s argument against gender-mixing the residential composition of Commonwealth Hall, is the notion that, somehow, the “reintroduction” of female residents into Commonwealth (as the hall is affectionately known) is flagitiously, and egregiously, tantamount to the at once insanitary and regressive induction of cultural intolerance into both Ghana’s flagship academy and the nation at large. Consequently, the former New Patriotic Party presidential aspirant exuberantly, if also sophomorically, catalogues a litany of some of the distinguished national political figures who were “tolerably” and “democratically” heckled and disrespected by Commonwealth Hall students – among them, former Prime Minister K. A. Busia, Gen. I. K. Acheampong and Flt.-Lt. Jeremiah John Rawlings – almost as if to imply, or even suggest, that, perhaps, rampantly heckling prominent political figures and leaders intrinsically constitutes the raison d’être for being assigned a “Commonwealth Residential Status.” There is also something disturbingly and palpably strange about Dr. Kennedy’s apparent inability to grasp the immitigably reprobate gravity of the events precipitating the Legon Executive Council’s astute and constructive decision to return Commonwealth Hall to its historic and original status as mixed-gender hall of residency. Which is precisely why the critic is able to cavalierly muster the chutzpah to imperiously inject Mr. Annan amidst an affair of which the latter’s name and personality are only tangential and/or incidental.

In other words, isn’t it rather unpardonably insolent for Dr. Kennedy to suggest that, somehow, Mr. Annan is guilty for both deciding to attend Legon’s most recent graduation ceremony as well as for accepting the largely ceremonial title of Chancellor of “The J. B. Danquah Academy”?

Anyway, Legon alums like Dr. Kennedy who facilely and gleefully ignorantly assume the Commonwealth Hall to have always served as the exclusive residential preserve of male students must rudely awaken to the verifiable fact of their having Dr. Jones Ofori-Atta (a paternal uncle of mine) to thank for the currently exclusively male composition of Commonwealth Hall. Personally, this writer never attended Legon, although he is proud to tout the fact of his late father having been, perhaps, one of the most “famous” bona fide Vandals and one who even once had a room specially reserved for him in that hall of residency after he had graduated from Legon’s School for the Performing Arts (formerly The School of Music and Drama) and was working as Technical Director in the same department. And need he also add the enviable fact that as a toddler helping his father, mostly on weekends, design, paint and build stage sets (long before Ghana acquired something called “The National Theater”), he had the privilege of lodging quite a few times in the august and glorious comfort of Commonwealth Hall? Of course, this too was also long before Dr. Kennedy sat for an examination called GCE “A”-Level and gained admission to Legon!

It is also rather pathetic, the sort of rambunctious sentimental drivel of a wagon to which some among us who would have their fellow citizens envisage them in the mold of some “New Moseses,” would readily hitch their proverbial stars in times calling for progressive and foresighted leadership. Then again, whoever said LEADERSHIP is simply about stentorian pretence to the same?

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is a Governing Board Member of the Accra-based Danquah Institute (DI), the pro-democracy think tank, and the author of 21 books, including “Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana” (iUniverse.com, 2005). E-mail: [email protected]. ###