Vandalism

The 50th anniversary of Ghana's independence is also Commonwealth Hall's 50th year. The Vandal City, as Commonwealth is dubbed, is renowned for the spirit and enthusiasm of its residents. I experienced this during my year at the University of Ghana. My hallmates (V-Mates) had initiations for freshmen (and foreign students), pre-dawn route marches around campus, weekly debates on the hall steps, and an annual hall week replete with school boy, traditional wear and crossdressing days.



For all the shenanigans, the Vandals are by and large excellent students. The hall is held in such regard that their Jubilee Durbar was attended by John Kufuor, the president of Ghana, among other luminaries.

While visiting an old friend (and Old Vandal) in Winneba, we came across a television programme on the history of Commonwealth and the ethos of Vandalism. Although not a very incisive look (it was funded by an Old Vandal), the show had some fun reminders, such as that the other residence halls are referred to as "the colonies." When I visited there I was uniformly greeted with shouts of V-Mate! and got to see that the spirit is still strong. The hall is actually in fairly good condition, although the old problems remain (the water wasn't on that day). It was fun to get back and reminisce about the days there, the closest I got to fraternity living.

An End to Ponding?

27 January 2006 -- I was listening to some listener feedback on the BBC World Service this morning. This is always entertaining, as the BBC will put just about any text message, now matter how deranged, on the air (Network Africa is especially fun because of this). Anyway, the callers and texters were commenting on a piece that focused on initiation rites at universities. The original story was about one man's experience with some form of hazing at a university in central Africa (I believe it was Congo-Kinshasa).

One of the respondents wrote about "ponding," a rite of passage into Commonwealth Hall (a.k.a. Vandal City) at the University of Ghana. Built by the Brits in the 1940s, the University features some nice architecture. Commonwealth, on top of the hill, has a terraced structure, and here and there are small rectangular ponds. It is into these ponds that new Vandals are violently dunked (in the case of Freshers) or allowed to gently roll in (exchange students such as myself). A little while ago, the listener wrote, one victim of a vigorous ponding (around 10 Vandals hold you and slam you up and down on the water) suffered a "sprained femur" and ended up missing the school year.

The university authorities suspended those responsible and banned ponding, draining the ponds (which I think have relied on rainwater rather than plumbing for the last few decades) for good measure. I was saddened to hear this, as I look back on that night with some fondness. To be sure, my initiation as a Vandal was gentler than more, but there was still plenty of vitriolic epithets to take in (not to mention the latent homoeroticism of young men carrying on in various states of undress). Another incident made this a seminal night in the early days of my stay in Ghana. Shortly before being carted off for ponding, our hardy crew (there were six of us from America in the dorm - me, Isaac, Ziggy, Kwame, Guy Jesus, and Snake) was robbed by a couple of shady guys (not university affiliated). The next several days saw us pushing the police into action (with much credit due to plying them with yoghurt ice creams) to capture the thieves. The eventual early morning raid (complete with automatic firearms) would not have been possible without the assistance of two young men who remain great friends to this day -- Senanu and Essel. Senanu's quite old now, though.