A Math Roadshow for What?

As a child growing up in Ghana, I witnessed quite a slew of academic-oriented shows organized as a means of inspiring us, children, into forging enviable and path-breaking careers for the development of both the New Ghana and the New Africa.

For me, the preceding came as a matter of course, being that my parents were educators; and needless to say, many of us – relatives and classmates – took remarkable inspiration from these shows and fairs and went on to forge quite distinguished careers. Today, many of my schoolmates and classmates are to be found in all spheres of enterprises in both Ghana and abroad – from politics to religion, engineering to business, healthcare and education – and in this sense, we are partial by-products of these science, food and math fairs and shows.

“Partial by-products,” because it took far more than such dramaturgical nine-day wonders to kindle, sustain and develop enduring interest in our respective spheres of endeavor. In other words, while the far-reaching significance of these academic shows, such as the one that I read about in the media recently, cannot be gainsaid or, perhaps, even overemphasized, the fact remains that it was the classroom teachers who put in long hours of woefully underpaid, albeit dedicated, pedagogical services who ultimately made us individually and collectively what we have become today as professionals and responsible citizens.

And so I hope not to ruffle too many feathers when I impugn the long-term significance and/or impact of the so-called Math Roadshow that “stormed” some ten urban locations around the country in October, 2010 and was reportedly staged by the Meagasa Mathematics Academy, of Lashibi in the Greater-Accra Region, in collaboration with the Ghana Mathematics Society. And here, I must promptly confess to not having heard of any institution called the Meagasa Mathematics Academy prior to reading about the same; and I have been out of the country a quarter-century, so I am assuming that the Meagasa Mathematics Academy came into existence quite recently.

Well, the Mathematics Roadshow, as we learned from both the websites of the Daily Graphic and MyJoyOnline.com (See “Maths [sic] Roadshow Takes Off in Takoradi” 9/29/10), aimed at “revamping Mathematics and sensitizing students and teachers to the importance” of the subject in our daily activities. The problem here, though, has more to do with what the Government and the Ministry of Education, in particular, have done by way of providing the basic necessities for making mathematics education practically worthwhile throughout the country. For there can be no gainsaying that mathematics education has never been known to be as sound as it definitely could be in the country. And while I was in secondary school, for instance, most of us Ghanaian students were put into panic mode whenever we learned that Nigerian educators would be “setting” the questions for both the Ordinary- and Advanced-Level Mathematics qualifying examinations of the General Certificate of Education (GCE) sponsored by the Anglophone West African Examinations Council (WAEC).

Conversely, we would learn that in years that Ghanaian educators set the GCE questions, in turn, Nigerian students were thrown into panic mode over the English examination questions. In essence, the widely acknowledged stereotype was that whereas Ghanaians were linguistically inclined, the Nigerians tended to be more mathematically inclined.

Needless to say, these two preceding stereotypes did not make much sense to me then, since the bulk of the writers on whose works the African Literature sections of both the GCE “O”- and “A”-Level examinations were based happened to be mostly of Nigerian nationality. The list went something like the following: Chinua Achebe, Cyprian Ekwensi, Wole Soyinka, John Pepper Clark, Elechi Amadi, and then either Ayi Kwei Armah, arguably the finest and most versatile African novelist, or Kofi Awoonor was dropped amidst the host. Occasionally, Ama Ata Aidoo and Efua Sutherland were rounded up to provide a superficial semblance of gender balance, as was Nigeria's Flora Nwapa. In the genre of poetry, there wasn't any remarkable variation: Wole Soyinka, John Pepper Clark, then either Kofi Awoonor or Atukwei Okai brought up the rear. There was also a sampling of writings from Eastern, Central and Southern Africa, notable among the authors of whom were, namely, Peter Abrahams, Ngugi wa Thiong'O, David Rubadiri, Dennis Brutus and Oswald Mtshalli, whom I met a little over a decade ago teaching on an adjunct line in the Africana Studies Department at the New York College of Technology, formerly New Technical (Community) College of the City University of New York, Brooklyn. What was even more surprising was the fact that the Ghanaian chairman of the Africana Studies Department had absolutely no idea regarding both the identity and stature of Oswald Mtshalli!

Granted, the foregoing sampling may not be exactly argumentatively representative and/or rhetorically sustainable, largely due to mnemonic atrophy over the withering ruts of time. Still, as a passable picture of the historical reality, it stands without fear of contradiction.

What I have suggested elsewhere and recently, however, is the fact that Ghanaians may have erroneously bought into the equation of our relatively “Anglocentric accent,” as a people and a nation, with linguistic fluency and/or agility, even as the Nigerians, on their part, may have equally erroneously bought into the stereotypical characterization of their national temperament as one that is better accommodating of geometrical rationality than its equally crucial linguistic counterpart. For comparatively and relatively speaking, postcolonial Nigerian culture could not be plausibly said to be any more or less functionally rational and/or verbally agile than its Ghanaian opposite number, as it were.

Ultimately, the significance of the recent Math Roadshow organized by the Meagasa Mathematics Academy, in collaboration with the Ghana Mathematics Society, would be evinced by the extent to which the patently anti-intellectual National Democratic Congress goes by way of poignantly focusing on the far-reaching equipment of our educational institutions, beyond the risibly propagandistic distribution of a single cheap pre-cut uniform per public school pupil, as well as the distribution of drinking mugs imprinted with the image of President John Evans Atta-Mills, to fully equipping tomorrow's proverbial leaders with the requisite pedagogical necessities to enable Ghana to effectively compete on the global market of human development.

Not too long ago, as New Yorkers are wont to say, Ghanaian pupils participated in a global aptitude test involving about 145 countries and ingloriously brought up the rear, as it were. And to the utter chagrin of many of us who had blindly bought into the linguistic facility versus mathematical rationality stereotyping of Ghanaians and Nigerians, in neither English, our official language of instruction, nor Mathematics, the universal language of cognitive acuity, did Ghanaians remarkably demonstrate any laudable comparative distinction. And it is quite certain that a National Mathematics Roadshow involving six personnel that spends two days each in ten locations, largely regional capitals, is highly unlikely to ignite the sort of revolutionary mathematical thinking that has been sorely lacking among the key operatives of the so-called National Democratic Congress, among the teeming ranks of our youths. At the barest minimum, the National Mathematics Roadshow ought to have mandated either the training and/or preparation of a critical mass of expert demonstrators from every school district in the country if, indeed, the aim was to pragmatize mathematics education in the country.

Indeed, were the Atta-Mills government remarkably interested in promoting mathematics education, and for that matter scientific instruction, in our public schools, the President of the Ghana Mathematics Society, Prof. Sitsofe E. Anku, would not have had thrust on him the rather onerous task of writing letters to “all Regional Directors of Education and the Minister of Education…[earnestly requesting] them to liaise with the regional directors [in order] to give the Roadshow Team (of six personnel) maximum cooperation and support in terms of release of students and teachers to attend the seminars, provision of accommodation and feeding of team members [, as well as the] provision of a venue [in which] to hold the seminars” (See “Maths[sic] Roadshow Takes Off In Takoradi” MyJoyOnline.com 9/29/10).

In one of the poems in his maiden anthology of poetry, which was launched at the British Council the same year that I auspiciously left Ghana for the United States, Mr. Kobena Eyi-Acquah has the lunatic speaker-protagonist intermittently utter the following words that may be aptly prefixed with the name of our country, Ghana: “Where we are going is long!” To this, my simple response is: “Indeed!”

*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) and the author of a forthcoming volume of poetry titled “The Obama Serenades.” E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net.