The Beautiful Tree (10 page)

I’d given up hope of finding anyone reasonably priced to help and was about to leave the country, sadly abandoning it as a possible research base, when I heard of the Educational Assessment and Research Centre. It had done work for the U.S. Agency for International Development and came highly recommended as a rarity that charged realistic rates for its research. In its offices in a suburban house in the suburb of Legon, Accra, I met the deputy director, Emma Gyamera, a wonderfully warm woman, always ready to laugh and always smiling. I sat in her office and told her what I’d found in India and what seemed to be also true of Nigeria, and what I was looking for in Ghana. She blushed deeply, laughed, and rather embarrassed said: “In our country, it is the opposite, private education is for the rich. What you found in those countries doesn’t happen here.”

But I persevered—after all, I’d already found the modestly priced De Youngster’s International School on my earlier visit, so I was convinced there were others. And the Honourable Minister himself had thought that I might be onto something. I hired a car and driver and went looking. First, I visited Madina, a low-income satellite town, north of the airport. Apparently, my driver Richard told me, it was named after Medina in Saudi Arabia and had a large Muslim community. On the way from the hotel, we circled what Richard proudly told me was “the largest roundabout in the whole of West Africa.” He told me again on the way back.

We drove down bumpy, craterous tracks with open drainage ditches. The road abruptly disappeared at one point, an overflowing open sewer had apparently washed it away, so we parked the car. And we found Gina International School. We were introduced to the proprietor, Gina, who suffered from excessive sweating. It was very humid, true; we were all finding it difficult, but she had streams of perspiration pouring down her face, which she continually had to wipe with a handkerchief. She told me she established the school eight years before, starting with kindergarten; it now went up to fifth grade, with 300 students and fees of about $5 per month. There were 14 staff members, 8 of whom were men. Although in this predominantly Muslim area, it was a secular school. The children seemed lively and cheeky—when I greeted one class, “Good morning and how are you,” one boy imitated my accent to much boisterous acclaim from his classmates.

We continued walking. My driver Richard told me that he also sent his child to private school. I asked him why. “Because the teachers are reliable in a private school. In a government school, they might turn up on one day, but then not another.” The next school we approached had a sign proclaiming, “Elim Cluster of Schools” and beneath the legend “Exodus 15:27.” Initially, of course, I assumed that it was a church school. Mama Janet L. A. Nugar soon got rid of that illusion. A fierce-looking woman in her late 50s, Janet was wearing one of those unruly permed wigs often sported by African women of her age; she also wore bold gold-rimmed spectacles, which added to her fierce appearance. But she was friendly enough, and when I told her that my luggage had not arrived and that was why I was not properly, formally dressed, she said, “Ah, Ghana!” choosing to place the blame firmly on her country rather than KLM, my carrier from Europe.

The name Elim was from the Bible, she agreed, but pointed me to her business card that said, “Proprietress.” She had been inspired by the verse from the Bible, but her school had nothing to do with the church, but it was “properly run,” she proudly said, “‘as a business.” She told me that in Ghana, everyone liked to name his or her business after some religious verse or sentiment. And it was true. As I left her, I saw down the same street Try Jesus Carpentry Store; No Problem is Too Great for God Fashion Centre; God Is Great Beauty Parlour. I didn’t view these as being part of a church mission. But somehow I easily made that assumption with regard to schools. It’s something that I was to realize was to put many people off the scent about the ubiquity of private schools for the poor—too often if people heard of them, they assumed they were affiliated with the church.

Her “cluster” of schools comprised daycare, nursery, primary, junior secondary, and senior secondary; she also ran two computer-learning centers. She had started the school chain 12 years before with the daycare center. She herself had been a trained government teacher, as had her headmaster; but she had then given up and joined the Ghana Prison Service, from where she took early retirement and decided to establish the school. All told she had 704 children. A handful received free tuition—and she knew each of them by name. But “I’m a business woman,” she said, “I can’t afford to give many.”

How did parents compare her school with the government school? I asked. Well, I’d have to ask the parents, she said. “But parents do compare, they are looking for the best for their children, and they see our examination results and see they are always good, and realize that they had better pay more.” And she added, “If a school is private, they know that the supervision of teachers is always keen; in a government school, they don’t know that.”

Later that day, my driver and I went out along the coast road, traveling for four or five hours, past Cape Coast to Elmina, with its terrible history of a Portuguese, then Dutch, then British, slaving station. We stayed at a comfortable hotel, and the next morning set off again. Miles beyond, in the remote district of Ahanta West, I asked Richard to turn down a rough track, signposted to a pig farm. We continued along this winding road in the low hills until we reached a small village built around the Catholic church. We asked a young woman at one of the ubiquitous shops fashioned out of a converted metal freight container, with a wood veranda, whether there was a private school there. No, she said. There was the public school by the church, which we could see from our car: it had marvelous spacious grounds and well-constructed buildings (built with aid from, among others, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, I was told later). I probed her: but are you sure there is no private school? Well, she ventured, there is one, a small nursery; one, that’s all. From my experience in India, nursery schools often continue on to primary school, once the children get older and parents ask the proprietor to extend provision, so I asked her for directions. A young man standing nearby turned out to be a parent at the school and took me there. And sure enough, this village did have a small private school, up to sixth grade, not just nursery grades. It was called Christian Hill, was in a makeshift wood building, and had well over 100 children. All around there were signs that read “Speak English.” The children crowded around, delighting in their foreign visitor, and exploding with joyous laughter when shown their photographs on a digital camera.

From there, my driver took me down through the public school grounds, aiming for the next village on the coast. Down winding narrow dirt roads that usually had no motor traffic, we arrived at a steep bank, in an opening in the rocky promontory, to a beach, where fishing boats lay and men sat and mended nets. It was a beautiful, idyllic setting. I asked whether there was a private school here. No, I was told, the Catholic school was in the village a few miles away, I must have passed it . . .? No, I said, I was looking for
private
schools; isn’t there one here, even a small one? Oh, well, yes, there was one, just over there. Past the village bulletin board advertising next week’s soccer match, and over the village soccer field, haphazardly laid out on the bare soil, was a small two-room concrete-block building, with blocks outside by the sandpit and additional rooms under construction. It was another private school, going up to grade 2, with 80 students but ripe for expansion into higher grades as the children grew older. The school had no name, “because it is not yet complete,” offered a villager called Isaac, who spoke very good English. In fact, several of the men did. Although when I gave them my business card, they scrutinized it upside down, suggesting no one could read as well as he could talk.

Two random villages, 100 percent success in finding private schools. So I returned to Accra and to Emma at the Educational Assessment and Research Centre, and told her that I was happy to go ahead with the project and see what we would find. We soon had a contract signed, and the research was under way. The research from then on wasn’t straightforward. The greatest difficulty was convincing the researchers—all graduate students recruited from the University of Cape Coast—that I really was interested in finding the small, often-ramshackle private schools. It was almost as if they couldn’t possibly think I was seriously interested in these nondescript buildings, that I must really be interested in the sounder government buildings and plusher private schools—just as the villagers themselves seemed to believe on my first visit. It was almost as if everyone was hung up with a sense of inferiority about the budget private schools, that they should really be hidden from outsiders. But I persisted, even going back in the field with the researchers a few times and finding five or six other private schools they’d missed.

We conducted the most detailed study in Ga, a largely rural district surrounding Accra, named such, not as I first thought as an abbreviation for “Greater Accra,” but because it was home to the Ga people. The district was classified by the Ghana Statistical Service as a low-income, periurban area—that is, a rural area surrounding the metropolitan city—one of the poorest districts in Ghana, despite (or possibly because of) its proximity to the capital. About 70 percent of its 500,000 people reportedly lived at or below the poverty line. Ga included poor fishing villages along the coast, subsistence farms inland, and large dormitory towns for workers serving the industries and businesses of Accra itself; most of the district lacked basic social amenities, such as potable water, sewage systems, electricity, and paved roads.
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During the course of the research, I was privileged to spend several days in one of the fishing villages, Bortianor, a small community set in the beautiful coconut groves that line the oceanfront. It was only a few hours from Accra, from the lavishness of the DfID offices and the Ministry of Education parking lot full of new four-by-fours. But it might as well have been a million miles away, for all the notice anyone seemed to take of what was happening there.

Ten-year-old Mary Tettey gets ready for school. It’s 6:00 a.m.; the brilliant orange sun is rising over the horizon. She lives in the tiny village of Faana, wedged onto a narrow strip of sand not more than 30 feet wide, facing onto the golden sands of the ocean, with a shallow lagoon behind them. Her home is a compound of wood-frame huts with rough thatched walls and roofs. Her mother chases the ducks out of the living area where they’ve been rummaging around the cooking pots; they waddle onto the beach to settle down for the day in the dwindling shade beside an upturned fishing boat. Mary packs her bag with her exercise books and some dried fish wrapped in newspaper for her lunch. Every day except Tuesdays—the day of rest for the spirits of the ocean—her father will have been out on the ocean since 3:00 a.m., riding the waves in a 30-foot wooden fishing boat, with an outboard motor fixed into a little wood canopy on the starboard side, and “God is Great” and “Psalm 91, 1-2” carved into the wood on the port side. Each day he’ll return by 9:30 a.m.; on the weekend, Mary will watch from the shore with her mother as the boats are steered through the gap in the surf into the lagoon. Then they’ll pile the small fish into their baskets and return to their yard to smoke them, while the younger men in the village drag huge nets onto the beach to the rhythm of drums.

But today is a school day. Mary joins a dozen other children at their little beach on the lagoon side, where women are already washing pots, and they climb into the canoe that will take them to Bortianor, the main village. One of the schoolboys, barely taller than the wood pole itself, punts the canoe. It slides away from the shore and noses quietly through the reeds and lilies. A posse of terns combs the water searching for fish, while a black-tailed godwit, elegant on stiltlike legs, stalks the fringes of the lagoon.

It takes them 20 minutes to reach the head of the lagoon, where several fishing boats lie idle, and where the women will soon gather to welcome back their men of the main fishing fleet under circling vultures. The children disembark into the shallow water. On dry land, Mary puts on her sandals and sets off through the village, following the dirt paths between mud-and-thatch huts, with compounds lined with coconut palms and thatched fences. As she walks, Mary thinks of what she wants to do when she grows up. She wants to be a nurse because she loves to help the sick. Her favorite subject at school is integrated science; she worked hard on her homework for that subject the night before, knowing that it will help her in the future. As she gets farther from the lagoon, the huts become grander, huts made of planks or bamboo huts rendered with dark mud, with fig and mango trees in the yards, and cacti bristling at the compound edges. A cockerel crows, and chicks scamper across the path in front of her.

Mary reaches the center of the village where a sign points to the government school to the right. No children are there yet, but she can see the imposing plaster-coated block building at the head of the large playground. But she doesn’t turn there. She walks past the sign and instead turns left, into a gap where there is no sign, and enters the compound of a ramshackle wood building. This is Supreme Academy, one of six private schools in the village. It’s her school. It’s 6:30 a.m. She’s one of the first children to arrive, but one of the teachers is already there.

He’s 21-year-old Erskine Feruta. He lives with his parents in a larger village a few miles down the coast. Every school day, he accompanies his parents in the company bus that takes them to a factory on the edge of Accra. It picks them up at 6:00 a.m. and 15 minutes later drops him at the main road, just past the workshop of the carpenter, a friend from his childhood who makes coffins in any shape you want, like fine fishing boats or monstrous fish, beds, or cakes even.