10. Faculty Dean and Other Activities from 1966 to 1973

In the last quarter of 1969, therefore, a tour of some of the top American Law Schools was arranged for me by John Bainbridge of the International Legal Center, a Ford Foundation institution for the promotion of legal studies in developing countries. The Law Schools chosen were Columbia, Harvard, Michigan, Stanford and Indiana. The last, I think because, William Burnett Harvey, who was earlier on the Professor and Dean of the Legon Law Faculty, was teaching at the institution at the time. My tour started off from Washington D.C., although there was no particular Law Faculty in the District which I was to visit. But I suppose it was a good thing to start from the seat of the federal government, to understand the doctrine of separation of powers, as practiced in the US, and to see the main institutions of government. Before I went, Bainbridge came back to me that there were a number of people insisting to be my host in Washington. Among these was my old class-mate Kodwo Debrah, who was then the Ghana Ambassador to the US, and John Ryan, the former Australian High Commissioner to Ghana, who had arranged my 1965 visit to Australia. There were also old American diplomatic friends who had asked that I stay with them. With the invitation from our Ambassador, my abode in Washington was settled. I told Bainbridge that I would stay with Kodwo.

When I left Ghana on my tour in September, 1969, it was not direct to the United States. I passed through England, where I stayed as a guest of my old College. Dr. Habbakuk was then the Principal of the College. I met some of the dons who were in residence at the time, including the West Indian law don, ***.~[* name missing ]~ There was a seminar of the English Law Commission being held in All Souls College, to which I had been invited. The seminar was to discuss strict liability in torts. Lords Diplock and Pearce were present, as were the Law Commissioners, like Norman Marsh, who was teaching at Oxford in my student days. Patrick Atiyah was also present, and was at his best in demolishing the arguments of their Lordships. Observing his manner, I understood what Jim Gower said about Patrick's attitude which put interviewers off him when they met. In connection with the seminar, there was a cocktail party at All Souls College in the evening, where I met Professor Rupert Cross. I found that the Oxford-Legon relationship was well known in Oxford. It was during my visit to Oxford at that time that I realised that there was something wrong with my stomach, which after a great deal of trial and error back in Ghana, was eventually diagnosed as hiatus hernia.

After the Oxford stay, Patrick Atiyah drove me to and back from Durham where a meeting of the Public Teachers of Law was taking place. Christine did not join us on this journey. The principal guest speaker was Lord Wilberforce, who had already gained a formidable reputation as one of the best Law Lords in the country. I stayed at Hatfield College which was my friend, Roger Korsah's College in his Durham days. I found Durham bery beautiful. I visited Newcastle briefly to get the atmosphere of the city where old Achimotans and friends like Nee Lante Heward Mills, Simon Sotomey, Sylvan Amegashie and Klu Adjetey had had their University training. Patrick dropped me on the way back at Ashford near Derby, where our friends, Robert and Margaret Landor, lived at “the Mount”. I was staying with them on my way out of England to the US. The Landors had been in Ghana where Bob worked in the probation sector. We then saw them quite often. Their last child, Rennie, was born shortly after our son, Ralph.

I arrived in Washington D.C. to stay with Kodwo Debrah over a week end,~[* check sequence, un-accounted for discrete mark made by Uncle Roger ]~ and he took me to see the Washington Redskins win a game of American football. It was during the heydey of the Redskins when they had people like Jurgensen playing for them. Kodwo Debrah had a difficult assignment in the US at this time, especially with American blacks. Kwame Nkrumah was their hero and his overthrow was not taken kindly by them. Where most Ghanaians would avoid debates with them over the overthrow, Debrah gained a lot of respect for taking them on, meeting and discussing matters with them. In New York, I had a permanent invitation to stay with Franklin and Shirley Williams. They were in their West 69th(?)~[* any way to check address and remove question mark? ]~ Street home the redecoration of which Shirley had spent months away from Accra supervising. The result was very good. The Williamses~[* changed from Franklin home ]~ home was not only convenient because one was with friends, it was also convenient because it was only a few blocks away from Columbia Law School where I was to spend practically the whole of my working visit to New York. The Williamses took me to Lincoln Centre for a musical evening and introduced me to Broadway by taking me to a show there.

The selected Law Schools were most impressive. At each law School, I had a host who looked after me and ensured that I met the Dean of the School and all those who could talk to me about the administration and teaching machinery in a Law School. I met a number of distinguished law teachers. At Columbia, I met Walter Gellhorn, a generous host, who acted as a nerve centre from which I developed other contacts and with whom I communicated for many years afterwards. I also met John Hazard who introduced me to the legal systems of the Soviet Union and China as well as a number of African countries which had adopted or profess to have adopted a form of socialist legal system on whom the learned Professor had written. He gave me copies of a number of his publications on the socialist systems of law which I was later to rely on heavily when writing my book on the contribution of the courts to government. He recommended to me Harold Berman's book on Justice in the U.S.S.R. whom I later met at Harvard. I was happy to supplement my collection of materials on socialist legal systems by Professor Hazard's own book on Communists and Their Law. Gerald Gunther, normally holding a chair at Stanford, was at that time at Harvard Law School. He had just been to Ghana where he had as part of the effort to promote the return and practice of constitutional government delivered a series of lectures on constitutionalism. I enjoyed meeting him again. I had the same experience with Louis Loss, the great authority on corporations and securities law, whom I had met before on his visit to Ghana and, who then paid the highest compliment to Professor Gower. Jim Gower was still spending a lot of time in Ghana on company law matters and I repeated to Louis Loss an anxiety expressed by Gower on what this prolonged stay away from the LSE did to his position there. Loss said quite dispositively, “If LSE won't have him, Harvard will have him any day.” I also met Lon Fuller, the great jurist on the morality of law, who had been doing battle with H. L. A. Hart of Oxford University on the meaning of law. At Harvard, I was looked after by David Smith, then the Secretary of the International Studies programme at Harvard Law School, but later to become the Vice-Dean of the School. David had worked in Nigeria before and knew West Africa well. He had in his position also travelled widely internationally. He introduced the young Dean, Professor Derek Bok, with whom I had a discussion. I got the impression that the School had so many books and materials on law in its library that it did not have sufficient space to store them and compared this with the almost total poverty of the Legon Law Library.

By a stroke of good luck, the Graysons had returned from Ghana by this time and I had the opportunity of visiting with them at Harvard. This was the time of student protests over the Vietnam war and we spent some time discussing the problem of student protests and their significance with respect to the American involvement in Vietnam. Beverly Pooley, who was before on the Ghana Law Faculty, was my host at the University of Michigan Law School at Ann Arbor. He was by this time in charge of the Faculty Law Library. He took me round the Faculty. He was at the time supervising Kwesi Botchwey, who was at the Law School to do his doctorate. As the new Dean at Legon, Bev expressed to me his concern about the time that Kwesi spent on radical black politics and the possible effect that this would have on the completion of his degree work. Fortunately, there was no adverse effect. I remember that although it was September, the weather at Ann Arbor was the coldest I had ever experienced in the US. I was looked after by the Vice-Dean at Stanford Law School and I stayed at the Faculty Club. I had the opportunity of visiting not only Stanford but also other Law Schools in the San Francisco area. One was Boalt Hall, University of California and the other was the practical institution where Dean Prosser, the great authority on the Law of Torts, was then teaching. I had the pleasure of once more visiting and having dinner with the Quinbys who had entertained me so well some four years before. In the Bay Area, I also met with a number of friends from the Kaiser Corporation, whom I had met while they were in Ghana in connection with Valco. I was entertained by Ralph and Irene Knight, Dick and Noll Davis as well as Jess and Gloria Taylor. From San Francisco, I took the train on the journey over the Rocky Mountains and the Grand Canyon to Denver, Colorado. It was a two to three day journey and was a spectacular experience. From Denver, I continued to Bloomington, Indiana. Of course, Brian Harvey was my host at the University of Indiana at Bloomington. There, I gave a lecture on Ghana and why Nkrumah fell. The reception from the students was kinder than I had expected and, though unrelated, I got the Freedom of the City conferred on me by Mayor, now Senator, Luger. The whole tour provided me with a wonderful opportunity for me to collect a number of American legal literature. I came back as the Professor and Dean of the Faculty of Law at the University of Ghana. The arrangement was that I was seconded by the Courts, from which I continued to receive my salary, to the University.

For most of the events during the Busia regime, I was only an interested observer from the Law Faculty of the University. Chief Justice Bannerman occasionally, but not often, called upon me to add to a panel of the Court of Appeal. But I, unexpectedly, had a call from J.H. one day and he asked me whether I would like to chair a Committee of Enquiry into the State Insurance Corporation. I told him that I was a borrower from the SIC for our house at the Airport Residential Area. He thought this would present no problem. Indeed, his reaction was that the fact that that I had a loan from them would make me a good investigator of their affairs. With me on the Committee was Ussher, an old school friend at Achimota, who was a year behind me and was by then an accountant, and a third member. The enquiry was mainly into the general administration of the SIC, which at this time was also the administrator of the Social Security and National Insurance. Apparently, there had been some dissatisfaction with the control exercised by the SIC over the Social Security Administration. The complaint was that the whole administration was unwieldy. Kobina Wood who was the head of the SIC at the time, thought that the object of the enquiry by the Busia Government was directed against him. Having regard to his early activities as a staunch CPP trade unionist, he could well have entertained such suspicions. We did look at the books of the SIC; that was mainly Ussher's work, but there was nothing improper. The major deficiency in the SIC administration related to the fact that though they had been appointed by Government to look after the infant social security scheme, that aspect had grown so large that it threatened to overwhelm the nurse. Delays to claims for social security, caused mainly by the fact that the SIC did not have adequate staff to deal with them, a fact which Wood himself admitted, were interpreted as acts of deliberate maladministration. In the event, we recommended that the social security administration should be separated from the SIC. After our recommendation had gone to Government we heard nothing, not even by way of thanks for the work we had done. This tended to confirm to some that what Government had hoped for had not come out of the report. Months later, Richard Taylor, who was with the Organisation and Methods section of Government at the time rang me on something else and in the course of it mentioned what a useful report we had presented. I was quite surprised that anybody had been paying any attention to what we had said. Presumably, that recommendation was the beginning of the existence of the Social Security and National Insurance Trust, which later turned out to be the richest single public organisation in income receipts and investments in Ghana.

Otherwise, I was left to get on with the administration of the Law Faculty. I found University life most congenial. I had some excellent colleagues. Tommy Mensah, who in later life was to become the President of the International Maritime Tribunal based in Hamburg, was away during the time that I was Dean. Among my colleagues was Kwamena Bentsi-Enchil, who had been in active private practice until the early 1960s, when he left to pursue an academic life which took him to the Universities of Chicago and Harvard(?),~[* how to check, author's question mark ]~ and subsequently became Dean of the Law Faculty of the University of Zambia. He returned to Ghana in 1970 and was attached to the Law Faculty as Research Professor. Other colleagues who were in the Faculty during my tenure included Kofi Date-Bah, who specialised in Contracts and Torts, and eventually found himself in the Commonwealth Secretariat as a Senior Adviser in commercial legal matters; Albert Fiadjoe, who specialised in Company Law and left in the 1980s for the University of the West Indies, at one time becoming the Dean of the Law Faculty operating from the Barbados campus; Kofi Dei-Anang, who specialised in Contracts and was for many years later the General Counsel of the African Development Bank; Kwame Afreh, who specialised in Criminal Law and Procedure and after a spate of service in the Attorney General's Office became a judge, at the time of writing of the Court of Appeal dealing with commercial matters in the Courts; Ekow Daniels, the constitutional lawyer who is now in private practice in Accra; Sam Gyandoh, also a specialist in Constitutional Law, who left later Legon for the American Temple University; the late Ago Simmonds, the specialist in International Law, who later spent some time in the diplomatic service and later in the Attorney General's Office in Zimbabwe; Aki Sawyerr, son of my father's contemporary, Akilapka Sawyerr and one of the lawyer fraternity which lived in Tudu in Accra, an all rounder who later on became Vice-Chancellor of the University; Kludze, who was for a brief period teaching Land Law in the Faculty but later transferred his services to the United States; Ekua Kuenyehia, who later became the Dean of the Faculty and has remained in the Faculty to keep Police Officers to their proper duties; Turkson, who later went to East Africa to work; and Kwesi Botchwey, who was for many years the Minister of Finance of the Rawlings Administration and now a pundit at Harvard University.

Some of my colleagues were more difficult to deal with than others. Professor Bentsi-Enchill was often prickly to deal with. He at times argued as if his Zambian experience ought necessarily to be replicated at Legon. Simmonds, who I understand had once asked his International Law Professor at Cambridge to call on him whenever the Professor had intractable problems to deal with, was a colleague with whom I found it impossible to be level on the same wavelength. From the grapevine, I was always hearing of his snipings at my shortcomings which he never put to me directly. Kofi Dei Anang made it difficult to keep to an organised schedule. He had a number of overseas commitments and required permission to re-arrange his lectures or get others to substitute for him while he was away. But he never kept to the dates he gave for his return. As a result, the rescheduled lectures had to be further rescheduled or the substitute's time had to be extended or another substitute found. There came the time when the Vice-Chancellor, Alex Kwapong, refused, as a matter of course, any application by him to travel. But I knew Kofi was good at his subject and I wanted him to develop as much as he could. So I had to go begging Alex each time to relent and permit his travel, knowing full well that I would have to do some fancy footwork to keep his classes happy during his extended absence. I suspected that those who felt that I was an intrusion, delaying their advancement to higher things would if not overtly, be influenced by an undercurrent of resentment to some degree towards my presence as Dean. As a result, I was to some extent reactive in my relations. But, by and large, I found my colleagues an excellent group to work with.

We had rich resources in Ghanaian law teachers, which was supplemented by teachers from abroad who visited from time to time to enliven and bring fresh perspectives to the local scene. Several institutions abroad helped us in this endeavour. Because of the Oxford-Legon relationship in law which had been established before I go there as the Dean and which continued to flourish during my time, we had law teachers from Oxford visiting Legon to teach for various periods. Naturally, being an old boy of Oxford, I was very pleased with the relationship. Teachers like Ian Brownlie, now the Professor of International Law and a well-known figure in the international litigation field, served as a Senior Lecturer in Legon for one term; Dyson Heydon, the Australian teacher on Evidence also visited Legon on the same programme. So did David Bentley, who later left Oxford to join the legal staff of the British Home Office. A number of Oxford law dons were also connected with Legon in various capacities. Peter Carter of Wadham College who, with Alex Kwapong, had been instrumental in the establishment of the relationship continued to visit Ghana to test the pulse of the relationship. Brian Simpson, upon leaving the Deanship, continued for a while as an external examiner. Later, it was Reynolds of Worcester College, later on a Reader at Oxford University. Ekelaar was a supporter of the relationship from the sidelines. I tried my best to get Professor Rupert Cross to visit Legon during my stewardship. He had been one of my lecturers at Oxford in the early 1950s. He was the remarkable man who, because of his blindness, was helped into the lecture hall, with new students feeling sorry for him, but who in ten minutes or less managed to turn this atmosphere of pity into genuine excitement. He was the one teacher who maintained, if not increased the number of his student audience over the whole academic year, including the summer term. I thought he would be an inspirational teacher for Legon. At one time, I thought I had got him fixed. He had returned to Oxford from a lecture tour of Australia when I wrote asking him whether he could then make his visit to Ghana. He replied enthusiastically that he would. He had not calculated with his wife who had always been the person watching his health. She vetoed the idea of an immediate visit. As a result, he came later to Legon but at a time when I had left for the United States. From all accounts, he fulfilled my expectations and to my regret, I was not there to enjoy it. He was later knighted and, in my congratulatory letter, I made the impish suggestion that I had given some help in his attaining this honour. He replied with characteristic humour that, no doubt, I had.

We, in Legon, also benefited by being able to send some of our brilliant students to Oxford to take further degrees. Tsatsu Tsikata, who at the time held the reputation of being the most brilliant student the University of Ghana had ever produced, went to Wadham College for his Bachelor of Civil Law (BCL) and justified his sponsorship by obtaining a first class degree at Oxford. He had got a first in his first degree in Legon, which was a rare event. The Oxford external examiners always said that we were rather stingy with our award of first class degrees.

By the time I was leaving for the United States, we had got to a point where we had sent Date-Bah to Oxford, not as a student but as a teacher of law. We had thought that, from that time onward, we would from time to time be reciprocating the flow of teachers from Oxford to Legon by a counter-flow from Legon. Alas! Date-Bah was not only the first, he was also the last of Legon's contribution to this co-operative endeavour. Whether because of lack of funds or of enthusiasm in my successor to continue the relationship, it ended while I was in the US. Temple University in the US, which had been using the facilities of the Faculty for its summer courses, seems to have supplied a needed external relationship after the Oxford connection ended.

Help for the Legon Law Faculty also came from the International Legal Center (ILC) of New York in the form of books and lecturers. I had always thought that American law courses were much broader than the English courses we knew. Law is, after all, a gloss on many basic disciplines. A knowledge of economics and sociology will definitely be helpful to a study of Contract and Torts. The English training totally divorced the study of law from the basic studies on which it depends. By the same token, there were subjects which American Law Schools taught their students and which as a result made their students specialise in that area of study which the English training did not care about. One such area was taxation, which had become in England a field of specialisation of accountants, with the majority of lawyers totally innocent of its effect or impact on the society. I thought that this should be corrected. We got Robert Halliwell, the American tax law teacher, to visit Legon over a period of time to interest students in the subject. I am not sure how successful he was. He was followed by Professor Speight(?),~[* author indicates name needs to be checked ]~ of Stanford Law School. He, at least managed to inspire one student who went to Stanford and did his doctorate there. He returned to Legon to teach tax law, not during the time I was Dean but while I was still teaching there. Later, he became a Professor, then combined his teaching duties with an appointment as the Commissioner of Internal Revenue. Now he is Vice President of Ghana. He is Atta Mills. But I had a problem with the help of organisations like the ILC. They often offered money for programmes that they thought should be pursued at the Faculty and not programmes that I or the Faculty really wanted. Population studies, for example, were the in-thing with Americans at about this time. There was a lot of money available for that. I was keener on a programme of a comparative study in the laws of Ghana and our neighbouring States. I asked the ILC for money for this. No, there was no money available; but if I wanted money for a population study, there was some available. I said no thanks to that. I did not want the ILC or any other American institution to determine the agenda or priorities for the Faculty.

We also established a relationship with the University of Leiden in Holland. From Leiden we had Cees Flinterman(?)~[* author indicates name needs to be checked ]~ who worked with Sam Gyandoh on Constitutional Law matters. A mission was sent from Leiden headed by Professor ***,~[* name missing ]~ who subsequently became a judge of the European Court to study the Faculty's needs and the best mode of co-operation.

My job as Dean, as I saw it, was to organise the teaching of the Faculty, to attend to the problems of both teachers and students within the Faculty's concerns, to see to the maintenance and building up of the law library and other Faculty facilities, to organise and effect the admission of students, their examination and graduation, and the generally to ensure that the objectives of legal training in the Faculty and the country generally are advanced. It was not easy to get more funds from our own University for the law library. But books and journals from countries with an analogous system of law could be obtained as donations through some of the diplomatic missions. Thus, we were always after the United Kingdom, the United States, the Australian and the Canadian missions for such books. Of course, these countries were quite proud to propagate their systems and, therefore, happy to donate books, if they can. There was a time when book gifts were easier to obtain than later. But as law books are a very expensive commodity, with the cutting of budgets, this was bound to affect the desire to give.

As Dean, I once more became a member of the General Legal Council, the body which regulated the affairs of lawyers, on which I had served for many years while I was Director of Public Prosecutions and Acting Attorney General, but from which I had stepped down when I became the most junior judge of the Court of Appeal. I was concerned that the legal educational system in Ghana was turning out new lawyers who had no experience at all of the practical side of legal practice. I thought this deficiency could be met by a course which provided for assignment to a selected set of practising lawyers who could impart something of the work of the profession to the students. The system when I returned to the Gold Coast as a qualified lawyer was that as the country had an undivided legal profession and as practically all of us qualified as barristers in England before returning to Ghana, we could be admitted to practise as advocates right away. But we had to be attached to a practising lawyer, then described as Barrister and Solicitor, later in the Legal Profession Act 1960 (Act 32) as legal practitioner, for a period of a year before we could undertake the solicitor's or attorney's side of the lawyer's work. This system may have worked well with some. But generally, it was inefficient because many newly qualified lawyers merely registered as “pupils” of the established lawyer and started working unsupervised. They never saw their supposed “pupil masters” again until they were ready for their certificate to show that they had carried out their apprenticeship. Any established lawyer of a certain number of years standing could take on a “pupil”. The system was otherwise uncontrolled. When the Law School was established near Makola Market, it at first acted as a rival body to the University Law Faculty which had just previously been established to train lawyers for Ghana. So the position was unchanged. The system I was thinking of was that there should be two law qualifications, the academic, which would be pursued at Legon, followed by a practical course at the Law School, during which the apprenticeship to the selected lawyers would be carried out. That latter course should lead to the qualification to practise at the Bar. I was prepared to allow two years for the post degree practical course. But the majority opinion was that two years were too long, so a year was adopted. The practical course could be taken by a student who had done the law degree course leading to an LL.B degree. But it could also be taken by any other graduate who, after his first degree, had taken a year to do a course in the core subjects of Constitutional Law, Contract, Tort and Land Law. The problem with the course I had now proposed was that the number of practising lawyers with whom I was prepared to entrust the training of the students in the practical course was so limited. I had some difficulty listing a dozen lawyers. As a result, instead of having one or two students assigned to one practising lawyer, several had to be. That turned the exercise into a permanent tutorial course for the practising lawyers who must have found it hard, in all good conscience, to discharge their responsibilities to the students. Nevertheless, the course was adopted and persisted with for a while.

Dealing with the students was challenging. The intellectual stimulation from exchanges with them and with the law teachers was wonderful. The part of Faculty administration which I did not like too much is the number of meetings with other University authorities that one had to attend. But by comparison with meetings in other societies, these were quite business-like and intellectually high. I still taught Criminal Procedure and Evidence. Criminal Procedure I had taught for a number of years and, while I did criminal work in the Attorney General's Office, it complemented my work. The mutual benefit derived from teaching continued when I became a judge. Evidence was a subject I started teaching later but which, like Criminal Procedure, complemented my work in other capacities. As such both were less demanding than any other subject I could have chosen to teach. The competition to get into the Law Faculty was probably the keenest to any University course. The job of selection of students was as a result very onerous. As Dean, I operated a kind of affirmative action with respect to applicants from Northern Ghana. As they had, since the colonial period, been denied education comparable with that provided for people from the south, they had produced the least number of lawyers. The affirmative action that I took was that whenever there had to be a choice between two students, both with more or less the same qualifications, I chose the student from the north in preference to the student from the south. As a result, we had a number of law students also from the North. This private affirmative action may have caused prejudice to the student from the south who lost but someone had to lose out in the selection exercise and, to my mind, the system that I applied was better than tossing a coin. I felt gratified when it was justified by some brilliant students from the north who did so well as the late S.Tierwul, who later went to Harvard and worked with the United Nations system, quickly attaining a very high position, and Kaburise, who landed eventually teaching law in Papua New Guinea and later in New Zealand, making good from the system. It was touching that many years later when I was living in London, I should, out of the blue, get a telephone call. Upon picking the receiver up, the caller shouted, “This is Kaburise, I am speaking from Papua New Guinea. We need a judge here and I have given the authorities your name.” He was wondering whether I was interested. I thought Papua New Guinea was rather far out of my travel plans, so I did not accept. That is not to say that we did not admit good students from the southern Ghana. Tsegah, later diplomat and Legal Adviser to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, was always competing with Tierwul for honours in their examinations. Patti Ofosu-Amaah, George's younger brother who became a senior Counsel at the World Bank, was also one of the brilliant students who passed through the Law Faculty during my time. Both of them came from the south.

The criticism I had of the students was that they had mainly come from their secondary school “A” level courses, where the normal teaching procedure was spoon-feeding students with notes. They were, therefore, quite unprepared for independent pursuit of subjects at University. They expected the feeding method to continue. I thought this limited their independent growth and favoured too much uniformity. I tried to introduce the American system of discussion of cases at one time but I found that the inspiration of the class ran into the ground every time. So I gave up and went back to the straight forward lecturing procedure, allowing them to take notes from my preparations. They were also somewhat blinkered, focusing their attention almost entirely on the law examinations that they had to pass. Once, I arranged a lecture for them by Aron Broches, then General Counsel of the World Bank. Broches had been visiting Ghana from time to time and he asked to meet with and speak to the law students. A time, at about 4 pm., was arranged for this lecture and notice of it was given to the students. By 3.50 pm. that day, there were no students around the Faculty premises. I was anxious that our distinguished lecturer would find that he had no audience when he came. In desperation, I went round collecting all lecturers around at the time to come to my office for a discussion with Broches. The discussion session went off well but, I am sure, Broches noticed that those present were not the students whom he had asked to meet. I was quite put out by this apparent boycott. At lectures next day, I asked the class whether they did not know of the lecture. They did. Then, why did no one come? This was an important international lawyer who had something to share with students and they had deliberately ignored him. Their answer was that the lecture was “not relevant”. I was puzzled by the answer. “Relevant to what?”, I asked. Relevant to their exams, they unanimously replied. I was shattered.

One problem which I met but which kept me occupied during my tenure was whether and how much private practice to allow the lecturers to have. This problem had ramifications which affected lecturers in other Faculties and Departments and, generally, affected University administration. As I was not faced with the problem of having to supplement either my pay or experience from law practice, I was not personally affected by the result and I, therefore, thought I could bring a more impartial mind to the resolution of the question. The pay levels of University lecturers have always be terribly low. Lecturers can supplement their official salaries by consulting, which had not developed to any high degree during my time or doing permitted work during free time, including the vacations, or publishing books which bring an income. For most lecturers, the opportunities for such supplementation were rare, if ever available. Lawyers, however, have an obvious avenue: to do private practice. In general University circles, including the administration, this avenue was to be discouraged. The position of the lecturers who did not have the lawyers' option was easy to explain: they did not see why lawyers should be given this very lucrative privilege which they themselves did not have. University administrators had a further difficulty, which unfortunately was created by the law lecturers themselves. Once permitted a limited private practice, they soon became so involved that they missed their lectures or the content of the lectures otherwise suffered. I understood these concerns; but I could also see that private practice, if in the areas of the lecturer's teaching interest, enriched the content of lectures, as it gave him practical issues and illustrations of the theories that he taught. There was also a countervailing benefit to the practice of law: a good law teacher could raise the level of legal practice by his knowledge. The debate went on over the period while I was Dean. Sometimes there was a yielding of the administration position. Then it became a question of the negotiation of the limits of the privilege. Private chambers practice could be allowed during a lecturer's free time, provided it was limited in time to allow the lecturer to prepare his lectures, seminars and tutorials properly. Should this include advocacy in the Courts? This was the most difficult aspect to approve. Although advocacy also improved the substance of lectures and could be raised by the practice of the lecturer, it was notorious in being uncertain in time. The courts determine the time; the length of time taken cannot be controlled by the lecturer. All these factors could interfere with the lecturer's work at the University. The parameters for private practice after all the arguments in its favour had to be adjusted from time to time to meet the requirements of the University. But I am glad that private practice was allowed during my time.

Two appointments that I had during this period which gave me much pleasure were the membership of the Academic Committee of the University of Cape Coast and the trusteeship of the Valco Trust. Cape Coast had been a University College attached to the University of Ghana since its establishment. It had been regarded as an institution where teachers were trained. There was now the feeling that it should become a fully fledged University and should be more ambitious in its programmes. To assure sceptics that its standards, which were before supervised by the University of Ghana, would be maintained, an Academic Committee was formed to oversee the new University's performance. The Chairman was Justice Azu Crabbe. Justice Hayfron-Benjamin and myself were the other academically inclined judges put on the Committee. Then there was the Vice-Chancellor of Cape Coast, who was originally, Professor E. Amanor Boateng but later was Professor Dickson, the geographer, not his divinity elder brother. Also included among the membership was one Professor from the University of Cardiff in Wales, then some other dons from the University of Cape Coast, like Dr. Djangma. The letter inviting my participation was written by my old teacher friend, Dr. Modjaben Dowuona, who was then the Commissioner for Education in the NLC Government. He asked whether I would like to serve on the Committee. I replied that, if appointed, I would be happy to serve. When he next saw me, he upbraided me: he said he had asked me a straight forward question and, instead of giving him a straight forward answer, I had given him a lawyer's reply. I found Azu's chairmanship somewhat oppressive to bear. He could never start a meeting on time and was often argumentative and confrontational in his approach. Otherwise, I enjoyed serving on the Committee because it made me feel good that I was participating in the creation of something new.

I was consulted by Nii Quartey, the Chief Executive of the VRA, when he and the Valco representative were engaged in the constitution of the membership of the Valco Fund and I hope I was useful to him. The name of the Fund was a misnomer. I was not a charity established by Valco for the benefit of Ghanaians. But there was nothing we could do when the first membership was determined. The Fund was already so named in the agreements between the Ghana Government and Valco for the establishment of the smelter as the largest consumer of electricity from the Akosombo Dam. In the course of the negotiations, Nkrumah had wanted a share of the aluminium production plant for the people of Ghana. But, being the capitalist that he was, Government participation in the project was the last thing that Edgar Kaiser wanted. He did not want Government to interfere in the management of the plant. So what Edgar Kaiser did was to suggest the alternative of a Fund for the development of education, health, the advancement of science and knowledge generally for the people of Ghana, into which a certain portion of the profits from the plant would be paid. Government was not to be the distributor of the fund but an independent trust appointed by VRA and Valco. The determination of the amount to be paid to the Trust depended on a complicated formula. The Trust was to get a percentage of the profits when the profits of Valco had reached a certain level, which was also a matter dependent on a complicated formula. Pending the attainment of the level, Valco was to advance against the ultimate profit share of the Trust, the sum of $200,000 a year to the Trust, which the Trust would distribute. This, it was thought, would give the trustees some experience in their work, especially as the expected future sums to come to the Trust were to be substantial.

The Trust was constituted, I believe in 1969, but the trust document back dated it to 1968. The idea was to have a rotation of Trustees so that initially some were appointed to a full three year term; others to two year; and yet others to one year. The anointments were renewable. Nene Azzu Mate Korle was the first chairman of the Trust. Among the other trustees were Dr. Modjaben Dowuona, the educationist; Owura Ephraim Amu, the great musicologist; Dr. Susan de Graft Johnson (nee Ofori Atta), the well known doctor dealing a lot with children; Saki Scheck, a lawyer and politician; Isifu Ali, an economist and politician, and myself. Nii Quartey, the VRA Chief Executive, and Ward Saunders, the Kaiser official responsible at headquarters in Oakland, California, for the affairs of Valco, were present at our meetings as advisers. Laryea, a senior VRA official, was secretary of the Trust. I was on the Trust until about 1970. By then, Nii Quartey and Ward Saunders had been replaced by Louis Caseley-Hayford, who was then Chief Executive of VRA, and Jimmy Phillips, who was the Valco representative responsible for relations with Government, as advisers. Modjaben Dowuona, being the head of the committee dealing with disbursements, was the hardest working member of the Trustees. Upon guidelines developed by the Trust and in accordance with his committee's recommendations, the Fund's money was judiciously distributed to deserving schools, health projects, academics in need of support to attend conferences and many other worthy causes. A financial statement of Valco's operations was submitted to us annually to show that Valco had not, according to the agreed formula, reached the time when the profits of the company would be shared with the Trust. That meant that the advance of $200,000, instead of a share of the actual profits was payable to the Trust. Studying these statements, I discovered that there were items in them which were doubly charged by Valco i.e. the expenditure appeared to be to be charged at least to two different heads. I brought this up at a Trust meeting. That led to very long arguments with Ward Saunders, who was a formidable opponent as he was both a qualified lawyer and an engineer and he had the Valco operations at his finger tips. At several meetings over a period of time, during which I held my own ground, it came to be accepted that my position was correct. This hastened the time for the sharing of the profits which placed the Trust Fund in substantial funds. But by the time the large injections of money were made to the Fund, my term of service as Trustee had been ended. Perhaps this was the greatest service I did for the Trust Fund. I did not know at the time but some ten years later, when I visited the VRA premises looking for the Chief Executive, Louis Caseley-Hayford, I saw Laryea, who was still connected with the Trust Fund. He told me that the Trustees were meeting and pleaded with me to step into the conference hall to greet them. I obliged, and I found Dr. Mirinda Greenstreet, the current chairperson, and the Trustees in session. Dr. Greenstreet greeted me with such warmth, it was most heart-warming. She announced proudly who I was and asked the Trustees if they knew me. She then told them that but for me, the Trust would not have had the money at its disposal. The Trust had had such funds that it had even used part in building the imposing Valco Trust House in Accra.

A project which I was keen on promoting was on contemporary history. I had always regretted that our great men were passing away without leaving anything of their lives for posterity. After they died nobody was able to recapture the richness and variety of their lives any more. In my own life-time, people like Sir Emmanuel Quist, Sir Henley Coussey, Sir Arku Korsah, Nana Sir Osei Agyemang Prempeh, the Asantehene, Nana Sir Ofori Atta, Okyenhene, Justice J.S. Manyo Plange, A.L. Adu, Justice Akufo Addo and many others, whose recounting of their life would add much to the knowledge of our recent history, had passed away without record. Even among our own Trustees, there were people, like Nene Azzu Mate Korle, an important Chief who had started as a policeman and had contributed to the administration of the country in the colonial days through the Joint Provincial Council of Chiefs; Owura Amu, the musicologist who had written so many tunes in different languages of the country; and Dr. Susan de Graft Johnson, were candidates for this project. By a narration of their life stories, they would tell of the development of the country through the years in various spheres. It appeared to me that the problem was that most of our people found themselves unable or unwilling to write. Even those who could write doubted whether there was anybody who would be interested in the history of their lives. We tried to persuade Valco, to obtain appropriate equipment for us from the US and the Trust to establish an organisation whereby identified personalities would be approached to tell their own stories in their own way. After recording it, the person in charge of the project would edit it and check corrections with the narrator. These stories could, at the option of the narrator, be published or put in an archive for anybody writing a history of contemporary Ghana to consult. Valco duly provided the equipment. Henry Ofori, “Carl Mutt”, the humorous journalist, was appointed editor. I was told that he had visited some personalities to record their life stories. Somehow, the project ran into the ground. As this book shows in its small way, I still think it is a good project.

But my years after 1966 were not all work. I was attached to Mensa Sarah Hall at Legon. I thought, how appropriate. John Mensah Sarbah was the first indigene to qualify in Britain as a lawyer and was, no doubt, a learned man who left behind a tome on Fanti Customary Law. I enjoyed the dinners that I attended there. We saw friends, especially Frank (Kojo), who was Professor of Chemistry; Iris (Naawaa) Torto; my sister, Mildred and; her husband, my old classmate, Ebenezer (Yosi) Laing, who was Professor of Botany. Through Ralph, we met Judy Grayson who was at the Ghana International School with him. Through Judy, we met her family, the Graysons. Leslie Grayson was a member of the Harvard Group of academics who were advising the Ministry of Finance on economic matters. They worked with Nii Noi Omaboe. We saw a lot of the four Graysons: that is Leslie, wife and mother, Olivia, and Judy's elder sister, Carol and Judy. Les has a dry sense of humour, which threw me into fits of laughter. They derived a great deal of fun from Rafiu, the little son of their cook-steward, whom they spoilt terribly. Ghanaians are fond of the expression “Let's go”. This, Rafiu turned into “Les go”, which he repeated any time he was waiting for the family to take him to the beach. Les was always looking forward to the time some sixteen years ahead when Rafiu would become a “campus militant” at University. The Graysons became regular members of our Saturday “club”. That was the arrangement which we started with Mungo Franklin from the days that he used to visit us in Kumasi. Our greatest event during this period, however, occurred before I became Dean. That was the birth of our third child, Juliet on 16 February, 1968. I remember that Stella had, as gynecologist at the time, my old School Senior Prefect and later room-mate and benefactor at Hans Crescent in London, K. K. Korsah. When Stella was admitted into Korle Bu Hospital on the 16 February, she was seen by K. K. who said that she was not going to have the baby before the next morning. I then went off to Legon to have dinner with the Tortos. I came home that evening to hear that there had been a call from Korle Bu that Stella had had the baby. I rushed there. But it was not the same as being available when Stella wanted me. Juliet was so different from Tossan.~[* pointed out that Tossan's name is spelt differently earlier, explain ]~ Juliet had practically no hair for a long time, and she was so serious. Because of this sombre look, Les Grayson named her “the Bishop”.

The other major event of the period was the building of our house at Ablenkpe. I supervised the building which is the one practical achievement in my life. The fact that I was working at Legon and had to go there every day, from Cantonments in Accra, helped my supervision of the building. I had bought the land in Ablenkpe in 1960 from Auntie Martha, Naawaa Torto's mother. It was supposed to be a very long term investment. From 1960 until I started doing anything about the building in 1971, I went through quite a number of phases when I was the owner or not the owner of the land. Auntie Martha, who derived her title from the Swaniker family, went through a long drawn out spate of litigation with a man called Sali, who had been selling the lands in the Ablenkpe area simultaneously. As I was never intellectually interested in land matters, I did not follow the course of the case too closely. But I recall that a High Court decided that Sali had the title to sell the lands. As a result, I accepted that the land no more belonged to me. Later, on appeal, this decision was reversed. Then I knew that the land once more belonged to me. I am sure there was further litigation during which my fortunes as owner of the land swung like a pendulum.

Some ten years after I had bought the land, on an occasion when the Court's decision was in our favour, I visited the site with our driver, Ebenezer. I was pointing out to him in his wilderness where this elusive land lay. The only house in the area was the new one which Fred Apaloo had moved into. I found that our land was just a few yards from Fred's. When Fred found out that I had land in the area, he started advising me to build on it. Of course, we would be neighbours, which would be nice for both of us. The site at the time had the ideal advantage of being close to the centre of Accra and yet being in a lovely fresh rural atmosphere. I told Fred I did not have any money to build at the time, which was true. He asked me a very pointed question: he asked me where I was going to take Stella if I were sacked from office as a judge the next day. To this question he answered by a further question: “to the family house?” My vulnerable position suddenly became crystal clear. I told him that if I started building right then I would have to proceed slowly and in stages whenever I had the money to do so. He laughed and said that house building, once started takes a momentum of its own. I suggested that I used the building supervisor that he had used for his. As an experienced property man, he advised me to go see my bank manager. The only bank manager I knew at the time was Patrick's younger brother, Theo Anin, who was in charge of the High Street branch of Ghana Commercial Bank. I went to see Theo and told him that I needed money to build a house. The statement did not come as a surprise to him. He asked me whether I had an account at his bank. I did not. He asked me to open an account at the bank. The next question was how much I wanted. I had no idea but I thought I should at least build the house to platform level and then wait until my finances improved before proceeding to the next stage. So I said 2,000 cedis. Theo laughed at me, and suggested that he would give me credit for 10,000 cedis and when it was finished I should come back to see him. The arrangement was that the development of the house would be the security for the loan. But of course, we had the Airport House which the lender could resort to where there is a default.

It is amazing what help friends offer and give at such times. We were helped a great deal by them. Apart from Fred, who passed by from time to time to see how matters were progressing, once the building started, and Theo, who gave me the required credit, our Estonian born friend, Arno Janimaggi, who was then manager of the building company, A. Lang, was a tower of strength. He first told us that A. Lang had a number of plans of old houses that they had built for clients. He did not think that I needed to use an architect to draw up a plan for a house. We should first come and look at A. Lang's old plans, if we found any which was of interest to us, he could modify it to suit our purposes. We knew the type of house we wanted: it had to be on a single floor; this was because we hoped that Stella's invalid sister would be able one day to visit us in Ghana and, being in a wheel-chair, a two-storey house without a bedroom downstairs would be a disadvantage. Besides, this was the house that we intended to live in in our old age and we thought a single floor house would be much better for us at that time. As to the shape of the house, as we did not like air-conditioning much, we thought we should have a bungalow type where there could be a through breeze. The house, therefore had to be well sited to catch the breeze. Our old friend, Mungo Franklin, the lawyer, who had continued to see us practically every Saturday for tea, gave good practical advice on the positioning of the house in that respect. We had lived in the two-bedroomed type of Government bungalow known as the “A49” type in Kumasi, which fulfilled this condition and which we had liked very much. So when we visited Arno's office at A. Lang to look through their old plans, it was a bungalow of the A49 type, perhaps extended to accommodate our family and to provide me with a study, was what we needed. It did not take us long looking at the old plans to identify a house we liked. It was a two-bedroomed bungalow. When we pointed this out to Arno, he laughed and asked whether we knew whom they had built that bungalow for. It was Komla Agbeli Gbedema's guesthouse. We asked Arno whether this could be modified to provide four bedrooms, which would include a guest room and to include a study. Arno thought that was easy and started making rough sketches which would cater for our request. Because of the lie of the land, the front of the house had to be raised. Arno thought that the stoep in front ought to be widened. As he said at the time, you would not understand this now but you will later appreciate it. His prediction has turned out to be correct. It is one of my most enjoyable pastimes to sit on the extended part of the stoep and gaze for hours at the world pass by. In the course of the construction, Arno would provide incidental help like supplying cement mixers when needed, advising on the finish and actually seeing to the fixing of the tongue-in-groove timber, of the stoep ceiling as well as supplying the expert artisans to fix the wooden floor. But otherwise we used Fred's supervisor, Mamattah, and the workmen that he provided. But I was there practically every day on my way to or from Legon, or both.

We finished the building with finance under 30,000 cedis of the money of those days. Of course, that meant that I had to return to Theo Anin for an extension of my credit. I cannot thank friends and other helpers enough for what they did for us in the building of the house. I was quite exhausted by the supervision which I provided and took my bed for some days when it was completed.

To my way of thinking, we were going to bring our things slowly from the Bing house to the new house and then move to the latter when we had put all our things there. I was in for a shock. I was working at my desk during the early days of movement of our things one day in June 1972 when our children came to tell me that they were going to move some more things to the house. I thought that was a good idea. Then they added, “And Daddy, when we go today, we are not coming back.” I had been upstaged, I thought Stella had put them to this. I left my desk and joined in our final move from Government accommodation to our own house. From that day, we stayed at our own house and continued moving the rest of our belongings from the Bing house until completed. Living at Ablenkpe at that time was idyllic. Fred's and ours were now the only two houses on the hill-top. Our house faced a slight valley, so we could see from the stoep down to the railway station and the Police Station at Tesano, as well as the development of Tesano across the Nsawam Road some distance away. On a misty morning, the sight was divine. How was I going to pay for the house? The instalments were not unmanageable. But I did not then know that I would have the means for an accelerated payment of the outstanding capital, which was shortly to present itself.

We had kept in touch with Franklin Williams. He had become the head of the Phelps-Stokes Foundation on his return to the US. The Foundation was set up some time before to support black education both within and outside the US. I had discussed the possibility of a sabbatical while I was at the University with Alex Kwapong and he was quite positive to the idea. Franklin suggested that I apply to the newly established Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars in Washington DC. The Center had been established by the American Congress as a memorial to their former scholarly President. Woodrow Wilson, the Congress thought, would not want to be immortalised by the usual statue that famous men are remembered by. Congress thought he could best be remembered by the establishment of the Center as a place where scholars could collect and pursue their academic or intellectual interests. The Center established had a system of awarding fellowships for up to a year, sometimes renewable, to enable the scholars to work there. The scholar had to give some idea of the interest which he wanted to pursue. If acceptable, he was given a stipend, usually related to his earnings of the previous year, given secretarial assistance and backdrop support which meant that he could obtain any publication that he wished from either the Library of Congress or any other library with which that library had an exchange arrangement. The scholar was then left alone to pursue his interest. The only institutional obligation of the Center was that about once a week, the fellow should join his colleagues during a sherry hour and discuss with them and during his term there to present a paper to the colleagues at the sherry hour. I applied. My interest which I presented in my application was to research and write on the contribution which the courts make to the governance of a nation. The doctrine of the separation of powers and the independence of the judiciary and its incidental imperatives have always given the idea to people that the judiciary was a separate organ of State with little or no connection with the ideas and aims of the other organs of State. I thought this gave a totally wrong impression, as all three recognised arms of government, the executive, the legislature and the judiciary, had at least the community of interest in the preservation and advancement of the State. My interest was in trying to give a correct balance in the organic relationships in the State. I put forward this proposal to the Director of the Woodrow Wilson Center and it was accepted. I was given a fellowship, which must have been intended to begin in the fall of 1972. When I turned up at the Center on January 2, 1973 I was greeted with a big, “Where have you been? We have been expecting you for ages.”

Before we left for the States, I had an invitation from an organisation in Norway to present a paper to a seminar on development in Africa. I wrote on the air communications, or rather lack of it, in Africa. That took me to Oslo, with the seminar being held at the conference centre in Holmenkollen, just outside Oslo. An invitation came to me at the Holmenkollen conference through Zdenek Cervenka, who served in the Attorney General's Office under Geoffrey Bing during the exciting days of “the World Without the Bomb”, and was now in Uppsala, to also visit the University of Uppsala in Sweden. I was met at Stockholm Airport by my sister-in-law, Inger, who took me to her place and later directed me to Uppsala. There, I delivered a paper giving what I thought was a balanced view of Nkrumah's rule. Both papers were published by the respective organisations. In Uppsala, I was invited to dinner at the home of the Dean of the Faculty of Law. That, as Zdenek explained to me, was a great honour, because Swedes did not invite a guest to their home unless they knew him well. A number of the members of the Faculty, including Zdenek, were present. I sat on the left hand side of the hostess, which I understand meant that I was the guest of honour. At an early stage in the course of the dinner, the host made a speech of welcome to me. This was all very good. We had practically gone through the dinner when Zdenek gave me a nudge and suggested that I say something then because, if I did not, all the guests would remain at their seats and not leave the table. That was the Swedish custom. In alarm, I made my extended speech of thanks which I had not originally intended to make formally at the table.

I took the opportunity to travel further to Finland after Sweden to spend a few days with Momma and Nora in Kimito. All this was in about September of 1972. The opportunity was too great to be missed. I knew I was coming back with the whole family to stay over Christmas with them on our way to the United States. I returned to Ghana to organise the departure of our family for the United States, which I thought would be for a year. We came to Finland for the last three weeks of December 1972. The children expected to see their first snow in Finland. But there was not a drop of snow for the whole of our stay. That made Momma very sad. We left for Washington D.C. on New Year's day of 1973.