“…if he were a young lad, I ‘d talk to him about it and try to teach him better, but who can be a school master to a child of sixty years old?” John Ploughman’s Talks: Charles Haddon Spurgeon.
“When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things”-1st Corinthians 13:11, read by British Prime Minister Tony Blair at the funeral of Diana, Princess of Wales on 6th September,1997.
“Like as the waves make towards the pebbled shore, so do our minutes hasten to their end; Each changing place with that which goes before… Nativity, once in the main of light, crawls to maturity… Time doth transfix the flourish set on youth and delves the parallels in beauty’s brow, Feeds on the rarities of nature’s truth, And nothing stands but for his scythe to mow…”- Shakespeare’s ‘Sonnet 60’.
A group of young men and women were taking routine training drills at Burma Camp Accra, in the mid -80s and I was one of them. The exercises were so strenuous our only consolidation lay in our ardent belief in the catch-phrase: “The young shall grow.” The ‘young’ (Not: The ‘youngs’) here is an adjective used as a noun; for example, in the case of: ‘a young man’ or ‘a poor worker’, ‘young’ and ‘poor’ are adjectives modifying the nouns ‘man’ and ‘worker’ respectively. But when such adjectives are preceded by ‘the’ and not followed by any nouns, then the adjectives refer to the collective of people who fall into the categories mentioned in the adjectives, e.g. Government must provide shelter for the homeless (=the homeless people); A word to the wise (=the wise people) is enough; The meek (=the meek people) shall inherit the earth. Some book titles make use of these adjectives: for example; The Wretched (=the wretched people) of the Earth by Frantz Fanon; The Naked (=the naked people) and the Dead (=the dead people) by Norman Mailer; The Red and the Black by Stendhal and the Beautiful and Damned by Scott Fitzgerald; the titled The Departed by Martin Scorsese, so also is the American soap opera titled the Young and the Restless.
Also, a ‘nominal adjective’ may be used to donate nationalities, e.g. “The French are noted for their love of leisure”. Compare this with the ‘denominal adjective’, e.g. “The French people are noted for their love of leisure”.
Ever since the ‘Youth Revolution’ of Europe in the 1960s, there has been due recognition of the significance of the youth, especially in the socio-political life of modern societies.
The German post-war society (i.e. after 1945) was “prudish and ultra-conservative”. The common rule of behaviour was not to stir attention. Family life was dominated by strict rules: the father as head of the family was to be obeyed unconditionally, he being responsible for everything and having the last word in all decisions. Children were enjoined to be well-behaved, and not to bring shame upon the family. Any ‘misbehaviour’ was roundly punished with a cane or a slap. The woman’s role was the three C’s- Cooking, Children, Church.
In 1967, however, two students at Hamburg hurled a banner before their professors on which was written; ‘Under Their Roles There’s Fug of 1000 Years’. An angry professor retorted: “You should be sent to a concentration camp”.
A series of protests, demonstrations, repressions and crack-downs followed, and in 1968, the youth had their way: the reforms were very wide (and gargantuan): English was taught in all regular schools; children of all confessions and both gender could sit together in one classroom; obligatory school years were raised from eight to nine, with an optional tenth; flogging was forbidden at school. The collective name for the movement was ‘anti-authoritarian’, and the youth would have no ‘trust’ for anybody over 30 years of age. The youth had nothing against true authorities; “People whose thoughts appeared to be essential and important and helpful to us- these people were accepted, their books were studied and passed around, we could listen to them for hours, and discuss their ideas the whole night long. But the arrogant bumptious authoritarians who had nothing but orders and laws and rules… were only laughed at and ignored. In the darkest epochs of our history always too many Germans had unscrupulously obeyed to every order, even if the laws were inhuman and the orders were criminal, and we were determined to break with this disastrous tradition now.” The students had studied Marx, Engels, Lenin, Luxemburg, Gandhi, Mao and Ernesto Che Guevara, and they were ready to put into practice what they had read.
There were similar youth movements in the United States of America (with the “flower power” idea against the Vietnam War), Great Britain, France, Japan, Denmark, Italy and Japan. In France, for example, the situation escalated quickly owing to mistakes by the government which included the closing of Sorbonne. Thus, what had begun as students’ protest against the police became a massive (gargantuan) outcry against the “status quo”, turning the events into a national crisis. The youth revolution (also called ‘cultural revolution’ of the 1960s) glorified drugs, denigrated traditional values, and defamed ‘formal democracy’. These were the only concepts and attitudes that were seen as ‘politically correct’.
When I entered the University of Ghana, Legon, in 1974, I found almost every student’s room adorned with the picture of Ernesto Che Guevera, the Argentine Marxist revolutionary, with the inscription: ‘Aluta Continua’ (The struggle continues) which is in line with one of Che’s philosophies: “The revolution is not an apple that falls when it is ripe. You have to make it fall”. The correct wording of this Portuguese phrase is not ‘Aluta Continua, Victoria Acerta’; it is rather: ‘A luta Continua, Vittoria e Certa’- ‘The struggle continues, victory is certain’.
When I returned to the University again in 1979, the mood of the students had been whipped up by the June Four Movement (1979), and the likeable student leader was the ‘charismatic’ guy who could rattle ‘revolutionary rhetoric’ and ‘Marxian Logic’. Students were more prepared to listen to such orators more than they were prepared to listen to others whose speeches could at best be described as humdrum, mundane or commonplace. The military leaders were being urged to ‘let the blood flow’, especially on anyone who was above forty years. The Revolution was not ‘friendly’ to Ghanaians above the age of forty. The average age of students at the tertiary level was around twenty three (23), and at this youthful age, anyone above forty was seen as an ‘old’ or ‘elderly’ person. These persons had ruined the country-socially, economically, and politically, and the wisest and noblest thing to do was to eliminate them. The age of the leader of the Revolution, Flight Lieutenant Jerry John Rawlings was thirty one, with some of the ruling clique aged between twenty six (26) and thirty (30), and being at the lowest rungs of the society-the dregs of society. They identified themselves with the ‘struggling masses’ or the ‘lumpen proletariat’- who had nothing to lose but their chains-and had no compassion on the rich and the successful- the ‘bourgoisie’ or the ‘elite’. There was so much impatience in the country that when Dr Hilla Limann promised to flood the markets with ‘essential commodities’ and he could not fulfill his promise after two and a half years in power, he was overthrown by Rawlings who had said in his handover of power to Limann that his government was on ‘probation’. President John Mahama, now fifty-four (54) in 2012 was only about twenty-one (21) when he entered the University of Ghana in 1980. He and his mates at that time were consumed of the fire of the ‘revolutionaries’, willy-nilly (i.e. whether one liked it or not). In a ‘revolutionary zeal’, he filed his papers at the nick of time and contested the Junior Common Room (JCR) Vice-Presidency and won unopposed in one of the halls of the University, preparing him for the Students’ Representative Council’s (SRC) Entertainment Secretary. At this point in time, while he was Vice-President, his room-mate, Yaw Boadu-Ayeboafo was the President of the hall.
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By Africanus Owusu-Ansah
