While followers of the beautiful game will be flocking southwards in June for the 2010 World Cup, I could be heading westwards for a different kind of family reunion. Santaclausians from far and wide will converge in the coastal Ghanaian town of Cape Coast to celebrate the 100th anniversary of the founding of their school.

A Santaclausian is a present or past student of Adisadel College, the Anglican boys’ boarding secondary school that was once called St. Nicholas Grammar School. We derive our name from Santa Claus—the politically incorrect monicker of St. Nicholas.

Built in 1910, Adisadel or Adisco is the second oldest school in Ghana, following hot on the heels of Mfanstipim, established by Methodist missionaries in Cape Coast in 1876. Adisco was meant to be the Ghanaian equivalent of an English public school, which meant Latin and Greek was compulsory for every student from Form One to Form Three. I am a proud Santaclausian from the Class of ’77.

We are socialised to believe we are the salt of the earth and that achieving greatness in whatever field of endeavour we choose is our destiny. And the socialisation starts right from the first week.

Two days after I enrolled in Form One back in September 1972, our house prefect gave the homos in his block the traditional pep talk. A homo, to the uninitiated, is a creature who has a long way to go before he becomes homo sapiens—a member of the human race.

And you can only do that by proving you are worthy of a place at school—either in the classroom or on the sports field. Fail to make the grade, or so the threat went, and the prefects would see to it that you packed your trunks and left school never to return.

And so it came to pass that our house prefect, a big, brash, self-assured Sixth Former whose name I can’t recall, stood in front of us and said with great authority: God created Adisadel College on the sixth day and rested on the seventh. This is a school where leaders are made—where being second place is not an option. That is why God gave us the motto: vel primus vel cum primis. Now since you are ignorant greenhorns who don’t understand Latin, you obviously don’t know that this means: either the first or among the first...

Seven years on a diet of such fare and you can’t help believe the world is your oyster. But my cousin Caroline, who is four months older than me and went to Form One at a Catholic girls’ school the same year I did, thinks this is brainwashing and indoctrination at its most dangerous.

Whatever it was, it succeeded in making us all believe that irrespective of age, generation or social circumstances, Santaclausians are a family of brothers. Which makes any student, past or present a relative of mine.

All said, the concept of family is more complicated than the dictionary makes it out to be. For a Mexican gang member, anyone who is ready to kill for him or die for him is family. The Arabs have a more philosophical approach to the definition of family, which goes: me and my brother against my cousin. Me and my cousin against the world.

The complex phenomenon of the African family drove me to pick an ideological quarrel with one Mr. Brad Lucas, the head of Society for Family Health back in 1997. At the time, the organisation had kicked the social marketing of male condoms and other birth control products into high gear.

But my concern was not what they were dealing. It was the logic on which their interventions were based. You see, the social marketing programme was based on the dubious logic that contraceptive use was a synonym for family planning. And that is where I begged to differ and I advanced my reasons for disagreement in this very column.

After the second in a series of articles, I was invited over by Mr. Lucas for a chat. Obviously, he wasn’t enthralled that editorially speaking I had his organisation and its operations in my sights and wanted to find out how “we” could “work together”. From where I was sitting, that sounded like a euphemism for how I could be brought around to doing things his way.

I didn’t budge. “Mr. Lucas,” I said over a cup of coffee, “what you call family planning is based on a misconception that the ideal family is a made-for-TV nuclear unit, made up a father, a mother, a daughter and a son. But real life is not a TV advert for breakfast cereal! The average African family is so intricately large that most of us don’t even know how far the roots go! You can live to be 100 and still not know half your family members. Question is: how does one plan for a family whose size one doesn’t even know? ”

But that, I explained, was not even the heart of the matter. Problem is, the smaller one’s nuclear family, the greater the pressure from the extended family to take on other less fortunate members. Family planning research has consistently revealed over the years that most African women would rather have six children of their own than have three and be forced to look after three others from family members with a penchant for breeding like bunnies! In short, Mr. Lucas, you can market all the birth control products you want, but as an organisation, the biggest mistake you can ever make is to equate consistent contraceptive use with family planning in Zambia.

He was gracious enough to listen to my argument, but my point of view was not in sync with his social marketing agenda and we parted company with neither person giving any ideological ground.
And talking about family...
I have just finished reading a book with a totally different take on family planning. It was written by Mario Puzo, an Italian-American best known for his novels on the controversial Sicilian crime family network the world knows as the Mafia. His novel, The Godfather, about the life and times of the Corleone family became an instant classic, spawning a sequel of films and creating a whole new crime genre—the Mafia movie.

But it is his book, The Family, that is causing the biggest waves and the greatest embarrassment to the Catholic Church nine years after it was released.

Published in 2001 by Harper Collins after Puzo’s death, it is an extensively-researched historical novel about the family of Cardinal Rodrigo Borgia who went on to become Pope Alexander VI back in 15th century Rome. He fathered children from different women, but the ones he had with his mistress, Vanozza Cattanei, became pawns in his grand design to unify the Papal States back in the day.

And as part of his master plan, he pushed his son, Cesare and his daughter, Lucrezia, into an incestuous relationship—for the sake of family! Worse, he sat on his throne and watched while the two had sex, with his blessing.

In Borgia’s warped mind, the first man his daughter surrendered to would be the one to whom she committed her love and her loyalty, and which better person than her own blood?

He explained his sanction: “This is the greatest family in all of Christendom. We will rise with great deeds we do for the Holy Roman Catholic Church, we will save souls and we will live quite well while we do God’s work.”

At first, his children were apprehensive about the possibility of eternal damnation if they did what their father, the Pope, was asking of them because even though Lucrezia was only 13 and Cesare was between 16 and 17, they knew that incest was one of the gravest sins one could ever commit.

The fact that their father, Pope Alexander VI, the Vicar of Christ on earth was demanding it of them frightened them. But he reassured them with the authority of scholarship. “In your studies, have you learnt nothing about the great Egyptian dynasties where brother wed sister in order to keep the bloodline pure?

“Do you not know about the young Isis who wed her brother, the king Osiris, elder son of Heaven and Earth? Isis and Osiris had a child called Horus, and they became the Great Trinity, the one that preceded the Christian Trinity of Father, Son and Holy Ghost...The only difference between our Holy Trinity and that was that one of them was a female. Egypt was one of the most advanced civilisations in history and we might as well take their example,” he said.

The life and times of Pope Alexander VI, not to mention his amorous excesses are a part of the secret history of the Catholic Church—the kind that doesn’t grab the headlines and is probably best forgotten in the vaults of the Vatican.

However, recent events involving the man formerly known as His Grace, Archbishop Emmanuel Milingo has brought some of the secrets the Catholic Church would rather not air into sharp focus.

As things stand, he has been thrown out of the church and stripped of the priesthood, which makes him, according to the Zambian spokesperson of the Catholic Church, Father Paul Samasumo, just plain Mr. Milingo. What does this mean exactly?

It means Mr. Milingo is forbidden from wearing the priestly vestments, from celebrating Mass and from baptising anyone, though the Vatican says his defrocking does not free him from the obligation of celibacy.
But Milingo insists he is an apostle with a mission to bring priests back into full service of the church, which means to do everything the Vatican has forbidden him to do. St. Peter, he argues, was a married priest—and so were other apostles. Milingo writes in his official website:

“The role of married priests in the family is essential. The family is the nucleus of the church and society. The priest’s ministry to his family gives him the experience and the relationship to see the gospel differently and practically.

It is estimated that there are well over 150,000 married Catholic priests in the world today anxious to reconcile with the Church.

Milingo is on record as saying that the Catholic Church tolerates homosexuality and disregards the obligation of clerical celibacy.

“Secret affairs and marriages, illegitimate children, rampant homosexuality and illicit sex have riddled the priesthood to the extent that the UN Commission on Human Rights has investigated the church for sexual abuse,” he has said.

I have been unable to confirm the outcome of the investigation, but a number of Catholic priests have told me that they hope the church will flush the clerical obligation of celibacy down the drain of History in their lifetime so that they can live in accordance with God’s holy ordinance without fear or favour.
For better or for worse.

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