The Beautiful Tree

by James Tooley

  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.2

  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.

  A Day in the Life

  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 behin
d 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.

  Erskine greets Mary, and together they sweep the schoolyard, getting everything ready for the new school day. Erskine is the only teacher in the school who doesn’t live in the village itself. Last year, he had graduated from senior secondary school. He had wanted to go on to the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology in Kumasi, but couldn’t afford it. So to try to save some money, he looked for work in his and neighboring villages, and found this vacancy at Supreme Academy. He loves being a teacher. He loves it that the children seem happy when they are around him. He feels proud when he can impart something new to his charges. And he reflects on the happy memories of his own school days and is continually astonished at his own achievement of now being a teacher, and no longer a pupil! And not only is he able to teach his own class, but he also teaches computer science to all the classes. Crammed into the tiny room that doubles as the proprietor’s office, he shows them how to format a disk, what a computer monitor looks like, and all the basic computing skills of the Ghanaian national curriculum. He’s sorry that so many children must cram into the classroom with only one computer because they rarely get to use it themselves. He’s not unhappy with his wages. The 200,000 cedis per month, about $20, enable him to save toward his goal of higher education for himself.

  Other children filter into the compound, and by 7:30 a.m., the schoolyard is buzzing with children. One of the last to arrive is Victoria, a beautiful child of 11, tall for her age, and already very elegant. Her family lives nearby, in a large block house they share with three other families. Victoria’s father is a fisherman, and her mother is a fishmonger, who smokes the fish caught by her husband for the market and also runs a small store in the yard, selling canned goods and dried milk. Victoria’s home is more or less adjacent to the government school compound. Her parents had started her schooling at Supreme Academy, the closest private school to them, in the nursery classes, but then had fallen on hard times. The owner of the fishing boat who had employed her father went out of business, and they could no longer afford the fees. So for a year, Victoria went to the government school. They had worried about her progress there. Before, she had been so bright and keen to learn; now she seemed listless. She didn’t tell them what was happening in the school—somehow it wasn’t her place to tell them. But most days, she knew that the teacher did very little; he arrived late in the morning, wrote a simple exercise on the blackboard, then went to sleep or read the newspaper, ignoring the children. Sometimes he didn’t show up at all. Most days, she sat in the classroom, eager to learn, eager to do something. But it was impossible. As the other children ran riot around her, she’d given up.

  Fortunately, her father, Joshua, in his late 30s, was hired by another fishing boat. And with income once more assured, he managed to send Victoria back to the private school. Indeed, having saved arduously for the last two years, he himself was now the proud lessee of a fishing boat and employed five other men from the village. He could see the problem in the government school with crystal clarity—the proximity of his house to the school meant he didn’t need Victoria to tell him what was going on. Like Mary’s father, he was out on the ocean by 3:30 a.m., to return home by 10:00 a.m., when he lit the fire in the blackened mud bowls of the kilns in readiness for smoking the day’s catch. But often when he returned home from fishing, he could see the children still playing in the adjacent government schoolyard—even though the school day was supposed to start before 8:00 a.m.! Sometime later, as he helped his wife carry the fish on wood slats, buzzing with flies, across to the smoking kilns, he’d see some of the teachers saunter in, waving the children into their classrooms. But in only a few hours, he’d see the teachers pack up and leave, their work finished at midday, to enjoy a beer in the chop house on the corner, before flagging down the buses on the main road back to Accra. Nice work if you can get it! he thought. Joshua knew from his own experience now as a businessman and employer that the private school had to be different. There, the owner is totally dependent on fees from parents like him—if he removes his daughter, the proprietor will lose income, and that’s the last thing he wants, since he needs the income to pay his teachers and make a profit. So he’s bound to watch his teachers closely and to fire anyone who doesn’t pull his or her weight, just as Joshua would do if one of his employees didn’t show up. It’s simple really. It’s the way his own business works, and that of his wife, too. If she doesn’t smoke the fish properly, her customers won’t like her offering and won’t return. Nothing complicated here. It’s all so different in the government school, he can see that; “Government jobs,” he mutters to himself, knowing exactly why it is so hard to
discipline the teachers.

  Joshua is proud that his daughter seems to be doing well again now that she’s back in the private school. She has regained something of her old spirit and enthusiasm. He loves his daughter very much—his only child with his wife, although he has five children from another marriage across the village. She’s so dear to his heart, so intelligent and bright. She will go far, he knows. One day, she will become a doctor or lawyer. That makes him very proud, to think he, a humble fisherman, with such an accomplished daughter.

  His wife Margaret had easily persuaded him when she stated that education for girls was just as important as for boys nowadays. “Anything a man can do, a woman can do too, sometimes even better than a man,” she had said, and he’d had to agree. And while he was out fishing, he knew that she’d been gossiping with the other village women, comparing notes about the respective merits of all the private schools in the village. In the end, none seemed better than Supreme Academy, where they knew from their previous experience that the teachers cared and taught well. Indeed, Margaret had persuaded her sister to move her children there only this last year.

  Victoria’s mother, Margaret, is preparing the baskets to take to the lagoon to pick up the fish, and sorting firewood in readiness for smoking the day’s catch. From where she is gathering wood, she can see the fine buildings of the government school, newly improved thanks to the generosity of American benefactors. “What’s the point of having such nice buildings, if learning doesn’t go on?” she muses. She wishes that Supreme Academy had better buildings, however. Perhaps if the teaching improves at the government school, she can send her next child there.