The Queen of All Subjects What My English Master Got Wrong in 1971 — And What Genoa Taught Me in 1978
I was eleven years old when I started Form One at Okuapemman Secondary School in 1971. The school sat in the Eastern Region of Ghana, and it carried with it — as all Ghanaian secondary schools did in that era — the full inheritance of the British colonial educational tradition. The teachers were serious. The standards were high. The uniform was pressed. And in the first week, the English Master walked into our classroom and made an announcement that I have never forgotten.
He said English was the queen of all the subjects we would study at Okuapemman. He did not say it apologetically. He said it the way you state an obvious truth — the way you might tell a child that the sun rises in the east. He said it with the confidence of a man who had been educated to believe it completely, who had been promoted for believing it, and whose professional identity depended on the rest of us believing it too.
And we did. I did. It made complete, total, unchallengeable sense.
This was 1971. It was the height of American soft power. The Peace Corps was spreading American influence across the developing world — and we had Peace Corps teachers in our own school. American English, British English, the English of the BBC World Service, the English of the examination papers that determined your future — it was everywhere. It was the language of success, of education, of the world beyond the village. The English Master was not lying. He was simply telling us the truth as the colonial curriculum had constructed it.
And so I made a decision — not consciously, not deliberately, but at the level of the values a eleven-year-old absorbs from the authority figures around him. I found no need to study any other language thoroughly. French, which I was taught at Okuapemman, became a subject to pass rather than a language to learn. Twi, my own mother tongue, remained the language of the home and the market — not the language of the educated, the ambitious, the future. The hierarchy was installed. The queen had been named. Everything else was lesser.
Seven years later, I found myself in Genoa.
I arrived carrying the map the English Master had given me. English was the queen. English was universal. English was the key that opened every door in the world beyond Ghana. I had no reason to doubt this. It had been confirmed, repeatedly, by every educational experience I had had since 1971. The examinations were in English. The textbooks were in English. The teachers who commanded the most respect spoke the most precise English. The map was consistent.
And then the Italians politely, gently, without malice or contempt, showed me the map was wrong.
When I tried to communicate with the people of Genoa, something I had never experienced happened. They could not help me. Not because they were unwilling — they were courteous, they were patient — but because they did not speak English. And the response I heard, again and again, in various forms, was some version of this: I could help you if you spoke French. But English — I cannot help you with English.
I stood in a city in northern Italy, a well-educated graduate of one of Ghana’s respected secondary schools, and I was linguistically stranded. Not because I was unintelligent. Not because I had not worked hard. But because the education I had received had told me that the language I needed to navigate the world was sufficient — and the world had not read the same curriculum.
Germany was the same. A different country, a different language, the same gap between what the colonial school had prepared me for and what the world actually required. The queen had a kingdom. But it was not the whole world. And the parts of the world that mattered most to me — the Francophone countries of Africa, the trading partners of a continent that speaks twenty-nine languages of French, the diplomatic corridors where the future of Africa is negotiated — those parts were not in English. They were in French. And I had been educated to believe French was a lesser subject.
English was the sole medium of instruction in Ghanaian secondary schools throughout the colonial and early post-independence period. Local languages were prohibited in formal educational settings. French was taught as a foreign language — a subject to pass, not a tool to master. No African language was granted status as a medium of instruction at secondary level.
I. What the English Master Was Actually Teaching
I want to be precise about what happened in that classroom in 1971. My English Master was not a villain. He was a product — the most successful product of the same system he was perpetuating. He had been educated in colonial-legacy institutions that positioned English as the language of intelligence, of civilisation, of the future. He had been promoted for his mastery of it. His professional identity, his social standing, his sense of what it meant to be educated — all of it was built on English. When he stood in front of our class and declared its supremacy, he was not lying. He was telling us the truth as his formation had constructed it.
But here is what the TSA framework makes visible: he was not teaching us a fact. He was installing a hierarchy. And a hierarchy, once installed in the mind of a eleven-year-old, does not announce itself as a hierarchy. It announces itself as common sense. The choice I made — to study French superficially, to treat Twi as a home language not a school language, to invest my linguistic energy entirely in English — did not feel like a choice shaped by colonial ideology. It felt like the obvious, rational, sensible thing to do.
That is the colonial curriculum’s deepest achievement. Not that it forced Africans to abandon their languages at gunpoint. But that it made the abandonment feel like aspiration.
The TSA Toolkit’s second module — The Excavation — teaches students to trace the origin of what they were taught to value. The questions it asks are simple and devastating:
Who said this? When? What did it cost you to believe it? Who benefited from your belief?
If I had been taught to ask those questions in 1971, the excavation would have looked like this: My English Master said it, in the first week of school, at the height of American soft power, in a school staffed by Peace Corps teachers, in a country whose educational system was designed by people whose economic interests were served by Ghanaians who spoke English rather than French — because Francophone Africa was France’s sphere of influence, and Anglophone Africa was Britain’s, and neither empire wanted its educated subjects to move fluently between the two.
I am not sure a eleven-year-old could have held all of that. But the question — whose interests does this hierarchy serve? — is a question a eleven-year-old can absolutely ask. If someone had taught me to ask it.
II. Canada — The Final Indictment
The Genoa experience was a shock. But the observation I have made in Canada — the country where I have lived and built and worked — is the prosecution’s deepest count.
I have watched people born in Canada of African heritage — second-generation, Canadian-born, raised entirely in this country — be interrogated about their background. Not because they look different. Not because their names are unfamiliar. But because they speak English without an accent. They speak the language of this country with the fluency of someone who was born into it, which they were. And the interrogation they face is: but where are you really from? You don’t sound African.
Think about what that means. The colonial curriculum was so thoroughly absorbed, across so many generations, that it produced Africans whose relationship to English is now complete enough to be read as evidence of cultural distance from Africa. The language that was installed to replace their relationship to their own languages and cultures has done its work so completely that it now functions, in the eyes of people who know no better, as proof that they are not authentically African.
They were educated into a language. And the language educated them out of an identity. The English Master’s declaration — made in a classroom in Ghana decades ago — has produced, in its final form, African descendants who are strangers to the continent whose educational system shaped them.
III. The Map and the Territory
The map the colonial school gave us was not useless. English has served me. It has opened doors. It is the language in which I write this prosecution, in which PowerAfrika publishes every Tuesday, in which the TSA Toolkit is taught. I am not arguing that English should be abandoned or that the English Master’s enthusiasm for his subject was wrong.
I am arguing something more precise: the map was incomplete, and the incompleteness was not accidental. A map that told young Ghanaians that English was supreme and French was optional and Twi was for the home was a map that kept Anglophone Africa oriented toward London rather than toward Dakar, toward Washington rather than toward Abidjan, toward a linguistic arrangement that served the architects of the colonial educational system long after independence changed the flags and the anthems.
Twenty-nine African countries speak French. The African Union conducts its business in French, English, Arabic, and Portuguese. The diplomatic, economic, and political future of Africa requires African leaders who move across linguistic boundaries with the same ease that the continent’s colonial administrators moved across them — because those administrators understood something the colonial school never taught its African students: language is not a subject. Language is power.
⚖️ The Verdict
The English Master at Okuapemman in 1971 was not the crime. He was the instrument. The crime was the curriculum that formed him — that taught him to believe in the hierarchy he declared, that gave him the institutional authority to declare it, and that ensured the room full of eleven-year-olds had no framework to question it.
The crime is still being committed. In Ghanaian classrooms today, the hierarchy of languages that the colonial school installed is still largely intact. English remains the medium of instruction. African languages remain confined to the home. French is taught as a subject to pass. And the students who emerge from this system arrive in Genoa, in Paris, in Dakar, in Abidjan — and find that the map does not match the territory.
I was fifty-two years late in understanding what happened to me in Form One at Okuapemman. That is not a personal failure. It is the precise measure of how thoroughly the colonial curriculum does its work — quietly, authoritatively, at the level of common sense, in the first week of school, before the student has any reason to doubt the teacher standing in front of them.
The jury question: If one teacher — in one classroom — at Okuapemman or any Ghanaian school — had taught us to ask whose interests the language hierarchy served, would the map have been different? And if the map had been different, would I have arrived in Genoa in 1978 with the key I needed? The answer to that question is the entire reason the TSA programme exists.
⚒️ Forging the Keys — What Should Have Been Taught in 1971
The TSA framework does not ask Ghanaian schools to abandon English. It asks them to add one practice to every subject, in every classroom, from the first week of Form One: the habit of asking whose interests the hierarchy serves.
- “Who decided English was the queen — and what did they gain from that decision?”
- “Which African languages are spoken by more people than English on this continent — and why are none of them the medium of instruction in this school?”
- “If French is the official language of 29 African countries, and we are an African school, why is French an optional subject rather than a required one?”
- “What would I be able to do — economically, diplomatically, personally — if I left this school fluent in three languages rather than one?”
These are not radical questions. They are the questions that any curriculum designed for African children rather than colonial administration would have asked from the beginning. The TSA Starter Kit gives every teacher the framework to begin asking them — starting tomorrow, in the classroom they are already standing in, with the students they already have.
The English Master at Okuapemman gave me a queen. The TSA programme gives students a map — the real one, with all the languages on it, and the honest account of why some were crowned and others were not.
Reader’s evidence: If you sat in a Ghanaian classroom and were taught the same hierarchy — or if you arrived in a country where the map did not match the territory — your testimony is evidence. Add it in the comments. This prosecution is not complete until the classroom files its own verdict.
We don’t just analyze the chains. We forge the keys. · powerafrika.com · briefing@powerafrika.com