Mfantsipim School: The inconvenience of wonder

A meditation on one hundred and fifty years of becoming. How dare the morning arrive with such nonchalance, spilling its gold across the firmament as though a century and a half were merely yesterday, as though seventeen boys once gathered beneath an indifferent hoven and did not, in their unassuming beginning, inaugurate a dream too immense for its own name.

We have grown accustomed to the extraordinary, domesticated the sublime into routine, learnt to mistake the bell for interruption and these venerable walls for mere architecture, never wondering what centuries of footsteps have whispered into their foundations. Oh, the peculiar tragedy of familiarity that we may inhabit the aftermath of a miracle and perceive nothing more than an ordinary day; that we may inherit the audacity of generations and complain of the weight of its expectations, while history watches us, patiently, from the corridors.

For what is one hundred and fifty years but the persistence of an unfinished question? How many boys must pass through these gates before we understand that we, too, are passing through time; that the names we bear are borrowed embers, and the futures we imagine, someone else’s prayer? Perhaps, if habit would relinquish its dominion, if the familiar could briefly become strange, we might behold the magnificent absurdity of our existence the boy beside us, a universe of unspoken possibilities; the ground beneath us, consecrated by departed footsteps; the morning itself, an inheritance we never earned.

And yet, tomorrow, the siren shall summon us again, and we shall return to our examinations, our ambitions, our interminable affairs, too occupied with becoming something to comprehend the wonder of having become anything at all. But may there come a moment, somewhere between the past and the precipice of tomorrow, when we stand beneath this ancient sky and finally understand: That mother Kwabotwe is not merely a monument to what has been, but a living testament to what humanity dares to become.

One hundred and fifty years, and the hymn still ascends; still the dream outlives its dreamers, still the future waits, disguised as a boy And perhaps this is the most extraordinary thing of all; not that we have endured the centuries, but that, amidst the bewildering splendour of being alive, we have inherited a story and are still learning how to endow it with meaning. – Master Isaac Kontan Asare 102nd Head Boy, Mfantsipim School Class of 2027