UG lecturer labels Achimota School 'anti-education, miseducation' center

Correction: The title of this story has been edited to reflect who Dr Obadele Kambon is. He has not identified himself as a 'Rasta' as was initially suggested in the headline.

Achimota School has come under new fire from a Senior Research Fellow at the University of Ghana who is accusing the school of being a factory for miseducation.

Dr Obadele Kambon is the Head of the Language, Literature and Drama Section of the Institute of African Studies at the premier university.

According to him, the refusal of Achimota School to admit students with dreadlocks showed how as Africans: “we denigrate our own but treat white people differently”.

“The same people who went to this school and are taught to worship an imaginary white man – if that exact same imaginary white man came there and said, ‘I want to go to school,’ would they ask this imaginary white man that they pray to every Sunday, ‘You have to cut this bushy hair that you have?'” he posed rhetorically in an interview on the AM Show on the Accra-based Joy News channel.

“It would be child abuse to send my children to a place that is going to basically make their minds into what would amount to little more than mush at the end of the day.

“That is going to teach them to be anti-African. That’s going to give them miseducation and anti-education,” he added.

Authorities at Achimota School insisted that some first-year students cut off their dreadlocks before they would be granted admission to the school, citing their internal regulations and standards.

The aggrieved students lodged a suit at the Human Rights Division of the Accra High Court but the court yesterday dismissed an interlocutory injunction that the students filed demanding that they be admitted pending final determination of the case.