With the scratch of a red pen on an exercise book, a teacher graded papers under a kerosene lantern for a hundred dollars a month on the edge of poverty.
His son now appears on the U.S. Department of Energy's nuclear reactor team page alongside three Nobel Laureates in Physics.
Between those two facts lies a forged letter, a borrowed camera, a fifty-eight percent mathematics score that almost ended everything, Italian learned in six months in a town he could not find on a map, a nuclear engineering degree earned Summa Cum Laude, an Ivy League laboratory at Columbia, a reactor named after two daughters a court tried to keep from their father, and a parking lot in Missoula, Montana, where the engineer opened his laptop and kept building.
Twenty-five chapters. Three volumes. Two tracks — raw memoir and unflinching essay. One trajectory from dust to stardust, documented with the rigor of a man who designs nuclear reactors and refuses to ask anyone to take his word for it.
Every claim receipted. Every name verified. Every chapter earned.
The truth is like a lion.
Let it loose.
With the scratch of a red pen on an exercise book, a teacher graded papers under a kerosene lantern for a hundred dollars a month on the edge of poverty.
His son now appears on the U.S. Department of Energy's nuclear reactor team page alongside three Nobel Laureates in Physics.
Between those two facts lies a forged letter, a borrowed camera, a fifty-eight percent mathematics score that almost ended everything, Italian learned in six months in a town he could not find on a map, a nuclear engineering degree earned Summa Cum Laude, an Ivy League laboratory at Columbia, a reactor named after two daughters a court tried to keep from their father, and a parking lot in Missoula, Montana, where the engineer opened his laptop and kept building.
Twenty-five chapters. Three volumes. Two tracks — raw memoir and unflinching essay. One trajectory from dust to stardust, documented with the rigor of a man who designs nuclear reactors and refuses to ask anyone to take his word for it.
Every claim receipted. Every name verified. Every chapter earned.
The truth is like a lion.
Let it loose.
1
THE TEACHER’S SON
TRACK A • MEMOIR
There is a sound that poverty makes in the early morning, before the sun finishes climbing over the rooftops of Kumasi. It is the sound of a man clearing his throat at a wooden desk, shuffling papers by the light of a kerosene lantern. His name was Matthew Osei Baffour, but this book will call him what his children called him: the teacher, preparing for a day of teaching that will earn him one hundred dollars. Not one hundred dollars an hour, or one hundred dollars a day. One hundred dollars a month. Sometimes, if the Ghana Education Service was feeling generous or simply remembered he existed, two hundred. I grew up in a forgotten corner of the world in Ghana to a father who was a teacher and only made about one hundred to two hundred dollars a month. That is how I would describe it years later, from the other side of an ocean, from the other side of a career, from the other side of a life that began at that desk. But at the time, I did not know it was a forgotten corner. It was the only corner I had. And the man at the desk was not forgotten. He was the most important person in the world. His name was my name. My dad’s face looks like my future twin—that is what people tell me when they see photographs of both of us side by side. The resemblance is not merely physical. It is philosophical. I inherited his jaw, his forehead, and his conviction that superstition prevails wherever ignorance prevails.
Decades later, in 2015, I would see that face again for the first time in eight years. Eight years—from the day I left Ghana for Italy, through nuclear engineering school in Wisconsin, through graduate school at Columbia, through the visa bureaucracies that separate continents—until the stars aligned and I secured my father a multi-year, multi-entry visa to the United States. I picked him up with his younger brother, my Uncle Peter, who had tried to bring his brother to America since the 1980s. When Uncle Peter saw his nephew pull off in months what he had attempted for nearly forty years, he looked at me and asked, half-laughing, half-bewildered: How did you get to bring this guy here? This guy—meaning his own brother, my father. We took my father to the Intrepid Sea, Air & Space Museum in New York City, and he climbed inside the torpedo of a submarine—the same kind of submarine he used to tell us about when we were children in Asokwa, drawing diagrams on brown paper, narrating naval engineering with a teacher’s precision. He had no idea his son would one day design nuclear reactors for the vessels that carried those torpedoes. And when we walked back through Manhattan, past the Nussbaum building at 600 West 113th Street where Columbia housed me, my father would stop and stare at the skyscrapers—not with the tourist’s awe but with the quiet recognition of a man who had engineered an outcome he could not have predicted. We walked Riverside Drive together, watching people bike and jog, and I realized that the man who had graded papers by lantern light was now standing in the city where his son had earned a graduate degree from an Ivy League university. The distance between the kerosene lantern and the Manhattan skyline is the distance this trilogy measures.
Along the straight line that connects the dots from my infancy to the present, there are several milestones where I have been very lucky. But the first piece of luck was not a scholarship or a visa or a job offer. It was a father who believed—with a conviction that bordered on defiance in a country drowning in religious fatalism—that education was the only technology that could permanently alter a family’s trajectory. He did not use that word, technology. He was not an engineer. But he was engineering an outcome, and the tool he used was the only one a man earning his monthly salary could afford: the exercise book, the red pen, and the insistence that homework came before everything. Before church. Before play. Before the opinions of a neighborhood that had long since surrendered to the comfortable certainty that God would provide, despite decades of evidence that God was not providing.
If you think education is expensive, try ignorance. That phrase would find me years later in an American context, but my father had already lived it. Looking at my father was like looking at my own future twin—the jawline, the intensity, the impatience with mediocrity. He had arrived at the principle through a diagnosis by process of elimination that every thoughtful poor person eventually performs: he had tried prayer and it had not worked; he had tried patience and it had produced nothing but more patience; he had tried connections and they had evaporated. What remained was the exercise book and the red pen. And the exercise book and the red pen, unlike the prayers, produced measurable results. Inspired by our dad’s struggle to pay our school fees from elementary through high school, the Scholarship Access Project that I would one day build—a decade-long, free-of-charge pipeline placing students from Ghana into American universities—rolled out about ten years ago to honor his vision that while education is not everything, it was an easier and closer to a sure ticket to upward mobility. But that project was decades away. In those early mornings in Kumasi, there was only the lantern, the red pen, and a man who believed that the ground you are working on today could be your roof tomorrow.
We lived in the Asokwa neighborhood of Kumasi, in the Ashanti Region of Ghana. The roads were red dust in the dry season and red mud in the wet one. The houses were concrete blocks with corrugated roofing, and the wealthier families could be identified by the fact that their roofing did not leak. Our roofing leaked. But our house had something that most houses in the neighborhood did not: books. Not many. But books, actual books, and the expectation that they would be read. My father was not a wealthy man, but he was a man with a theory, and his theory was this: the kids are a reflection of the parenting they receive at their individual homes. Teachers should not classify kids as dumb, average, or smart. The smart kids were not smarter. They were differently conditioned. They had parents who treated education as a discipline rather than a chore, a privilege rather than a punishment. Intelligence is not fixed. It is manufactured by environment, habit, and exposure. The factory settings can be overwritten. Their environments have been consciously engineered to protect their dreams. My father’s engineering was invisible, but it was real, and it was compounding.
• • •
The neighborhood had its own curriculum. It was taught not in classrooms but in casual conversations, in the warnings of aunts, in the sermons of pastors, in the resigned shrugs of men who had tried something once and failed and now considered their failure a universal law. The curriculum went like this: be careful. Do not aim too high. Stay close. Pray. And whatever you do, do not trust the world outside these familiar streets. If your parents do not bring you up well, they try to make it up by telling you all sorts of negative and hate stuff about the system. I wrote that on March 7, 2015, from an account called @optimystyc, but I learned it in Asokwa decades before Twitter existed, watching my father ignore the neighborhood curriculum and replace it with his own.
His curriculum had only one lesson: sit down, open the book, and think. When there is a competition between what you have to do and what you prefer to do, then discipline becomes the referee. In my father’s house, discipline won every time. Homework came before prayer. Study came before church. The exercise book came before the Bible. This made him unpopular at evening prayer meetings and fasting for miraculous breakthroughs that would last until midnight and produce nothing but hoarse voices and empty promises. The problem is scattered energy—hours dispersed across prayer meetings, vigils, and prophecy sessions when those same hours could compound into a degree, a skill, a career. Ninety percent of constant miracle seekers are lazy people—miracles are all around us: how we sleep and wake up, how fish survive in cold water, how the earth hangs in space. The miracle is the physics. The laziness is the prayer. I tweeted that on December 29, 2014, but the observation was inherited. It was the theology of a man who watched his neighbors pray for rain while he graded papers, and who noticed, year after year, that the papers produced more results than the prayers.
But my father was not immune to the atmosphere he was fighting. Ghana’s religious indoctrination is not a choice—it is weather. It saturates everything: the radio, the taxi, the marketplace, the family gathering, the funeral, the naming ceremony. It seeps into the pores of even the most rational mind. My Uncle Peter—my father’s younger brother—would later confirm what I had suspected: my father picked up religion in his twenties and thirties, decades after their village upbringing in Konkori. He was not raised in it. He absorbed it—the way a sponge absorbs whatever liquid surrounds it, regardless of whether the liquid is clean. Ghana’s religious atmosphere was the liquid. And my father, for all his intellectual discipline, was still a sponge. He carried that absorption into fatherhood. He took us to crusades at Kumasi Sports Stadium, where thousands swayed and wept and spoke in tongues under floodlights. He marched us from Asokwa all the way to Amakom on Sundays—a walk that consumed the entire morning—to attend church services that devoured the whole day, and then marched us all the way back, legs aching, bellies empty. He was not being hypocritical. He was being Ghanaian. The religious programming had diffused into his operating system the way a slow poison enters the bloodstream—not through a single dose but through decades of ambient exposure. And because it is ambient—because it is everywhere, in every conversation, in every proverb, in every social expectation—the person carrying it does not recognize it as foreign. It feels native. It feels like identity. That is what makes it the most insidious form of mental slavery ever devised: you do not know you are in chains because the chains feel like jewelry.
I did not fully understand this at the time. Within my confused eight-year-old reasoning was a growing fear that my superstitious belief was right. I remember lying in bed at night wondering whether my father was wrong and the neighborhood was right. Whether the prayer vigils that lasted until midnight were accomplishing something invisible. The fear was genuine. An eight-year-old does not have the intellectual tools to evaluate competing worldviews. An eight-year-old has the church on one side—with its music, its community, its absolute certainty—and a man with a red pen on the other. The church had louder music. But the red pen had better results. Inferior reasoning cultures that constantly protect inherited low standards will never get anywhere. That expression, which I collected years later, describes the neighborhood’s intellectual immune system: it attacked anyone who suggested a different way, the way a body attacks a transplanted organ. My father was the transplanted organ. And the neighborhood’s antibodies were prayer, gossip, and the quiet insistence that thinking too much was a form of rebellion against God.
By middle school, the pressure detonated. The accumulation of every Sunday march to Amakom, every stadium crusade, every moment where the adults around me professed holiness with their lips and practiced something unrecognizable with their hands—it reached a critical mass that my adolescent mind could no longer contain. I began asking questions that had no approved answers. Why did the people who prayed the loudest live the hardest? Why did the pastor drive a better car than anyone in his congregation? Why did the same neighbors who fasted for miracles gossip about each other before the fast was over? Why did the holier-than-thou posture crumble the moment money or sex or power entered the equation? The questions were not academic. They were forensic. I was cross-examining a belief system with the same rigor my father had taught me to apply to mathematics—and the belief system could not survive the cross-examination. So I resisted. Not quietly. Not politely. I resisted with the full maverick energy of a boy who had inherited his father’s defiance and was now aiming it at the one system his father had not yet defied. My father did not approve. Not at first. The resistance was unapproved, unofficial, and deeply uncomfortable for a man who had spent years navigating Ghana’s social landscape with religion as one of his passports. But here is what makes my father different from the neighborhood: he watched. He observed his son’s reasoning. He saw the logic. And gradually—not overnight, not with a dramatic conversion, but with the slow, quiet recalibration of a man who had always trusted evidence over tradition—he aligned. We stopped attending those churches. The Sunday marches to Amakom ceased. The stadium crusades disappeared from our calendar. My initially unapproved resistance had won—not through argument but through the same method my father had used against the neighborhood: results. The boy who stopped going to church was the same boy who was winning quiz competitions, earning scholarships, and proving, week by week, that the hours reclaimed from prayer were being invested in something that actually compounded. My father saw the returns. And the man who had once marched us to Amakom became the man who let us stay home and study. The red pen won. It always wins. And I have never looked back—because when you escape a cult, and make no mistake, that is what it is, the last thing you do is return to check whether the cult has improved. It has not. It never does. The chains are still there, still disguised as jewelry, still worn by people who mistake the weight for comfort.
• • •
I was born by one mother and one father but ended up being the son of several mothers and fathers who saw the light in me and they took a chance by not giving up on my ability to spring from my squat. The first of those unofficial fathers was a boy named Michael Fosu. Everyone called him Man Mountain—not because he was particularly large as a child, but because his personality took up more space than his body. He was older than me by several years, and in the informal hierarchy of Asokwa’s youth, he was the neighborhood big brother figure who modeled what ambition looked like before I had a word for it. Smart brains that immediately suck information from any situation—that describes Man Mountain at fifteen, a mind that had already outgrown its container but did not yet know where the larger container was.
Decades later, long after I had left Kumasi, left Ghana, left Africa, earned engineering degrees in the United States, designed nuclear reactor cores for American utilities, and found myself listed on a Department of Energy team page alongside three Nobel Laureates and a former Secretary of Energy, Michael Fosu—Man Mountain, the neighborhood big brother from Asokwa who is now a father himself and lives near Sea Girt, New Jersey—would send me a series of text messages that form one of the most important documents in this trilogy. He wrote: “I swear I sometimes think Man is behind and lacking in life.” He wrote: “I sometimes feel so so so weak and like I have failed my Family.” He wrote: “Thanks Optist and I will always be grateful to you and for motivating me on even when I am down and almost out.” He wrote: “With you around I can foresee a better future for my baby girl.” He wrote: “The Man who gives me more reason to keep on going.” He wrote: “I always get a better view of things when we talk.” He wrote: “You make me see my Daughter as a potential and Future leader.” He wrote: “It’s a Blessing not only knowing you but as a Brother.”
The boy who once watched Man Mountain jump across the gap had become the man that Man Mountain looked up to. Neither of us planned this. The gap between Asokwa and Sea Girt is not the kind of distance that responds to planning. It responds to something else—a quality my father had, and tried to give me, and mostly succeeded. Not confidence. Confidence is what you feel when you know you can do something. This was the willingness to act as if you could do something, in the complete absence of evidence, based solely on the conviction that the alternative—sitting still, praying, waiting—was unacceptable. If you want to be a master, do not wait for luck. That sentence was my father’s operating system before I was born.
The story begins before the teacher. It begins with the teacher’s father—my grandfather—a man from a village called Konkori in the Ashanti Region of Ghana. Your ancestry is a remarkable path that led to your existence—and mine began with a man who never saw a classroom. My grandfather never attended a single day of formal school. He never sat in a classroom, never held a pencil for academic purposes, never read a textbook. And yet he was guided by his instincts and an invisible compass within him—the compass of a man who had never been taught but had always understood. And yet this man who had never been educated possessed a quality that the educated could not fake: he was trusted. The entire village trusted him. The British merchants who came to buy cocoa pods for the manufacturing of chocolate trusted him. Ghana was at that time among the top cocoa-producing nations in the world, and the cocoa trade required a liaison—someone who could stand between the British merchants depositing huge sums in British pounds and the local farmers who grew the cocoa. My grandfather was that liaison. A man with no education, no formal accounting training, no bookkeeping certificate—yet he knew everything about bookkeeping. The British merchants would deposit money with him. The farmers would deliver their cocoa pods through him. And the books always balanced. My name—Kwadwo AduTwum—is not derived from the Akan day-naming tradition of being born on Monday. My name is a direct, deliberate, dedicated act by my father to name me after his father. My grandfather’s first name and last name are my first name and last name. I carry the name of the uneducated bookkeeper from Konkori who was trusted by British merchants and an entire village. The name carries weight I did not understand until I was old enough to trace the chain.
My grandfather had approximately eight to ten children—farm life, village life, the era when large families were both tradition and labour strategy. Out of those eight or ten siblings emerged my father. And my father, like his father, was a maverick. Somewhere around the completion of elementary and middle school, the road ended. There was no high school available. There was no opportunity for further formal education. The village life dictated the family’s fate: farming, hunting game at night, the typical cycle where something as simple as having shoes to wear was a luxury my father never had. He told me he never had shoes. Not as metaphor. As fact. The boy who would become a teacher, who would raise a nuclear engineer, who would produce a man whose name appears on a United States Department of Energy team page alongside laureates in Physics—that boy grew up barefoot in Konkori.
Out of curiosity—the same curiosity that would become genetic, that would drive his son to board a plane to Italy and eventually design nuclear reactors—my father decided to visit long-distance relatives in the city. The city was Kumasi, the capital of the Ashanti Region, the largest city in the interior of Ghana. And in Kumasi, my father discovered a new hobby: the library. A shanty library near the Kumasi General Hospital. He went there to kill time, to erase boredom, to explore whatever the shelves offered—feeding an inner thirst for knowledge that no one in Konkori had taught him to name. And on one of those visits, he noticed a book sitting on a shelf that appeared to be collecting dust. No one had touched it. No one had checked it out. The book did not belong there.
There used to be a Books for Africa program—organizations that shipped novels and storybooks to children’s libraries across the continent. In the sorting and cataloguing process, an accident occurred. One book that was never meant for a children’s library in Ghana ended up in the pile. The book was a hard cover. My father flipped it open. The front cover read: United States Navy. The title said: Electronics. This was the 1950s or 1960s. In Africa, in Ghana, in Kumasi, in the Ashanti Region—who was going to read about electronics? But my father was curious about the out-of-the-ordinary book that was not a storybook, not a novel, not anything the library was designed to hold. He checked it out. He brought it home. He started reading the first chapters: the atom, the electron, the electron cloud, the nucleus, the protons. And then he realized he needed a permanent copy. There was only one copy in the entire library. There were no photocopying machines.
So my father got brown sheets of paper, bound them into a blank book, and copied the entire United States Navy electronics textbook by hand. Word by word. Diagram by diagram. Circuit by circuit. The entire book, transcribed in longhand onto brown paper bound as a homemade volume. This is how my father became a self-taught, proficient technician in the field of electronics. This is the origin story. The kitchen table, the red pen, the kerosene lantern—all of that came later. First came a barefoot boy from Konkori who found a misplaced Navy textbook in a shanty library in Kumasi and copied it by hand because he could not afford a photocopy. The hand-copied book led to technical school. The technical school led to the City and Guilds of London correspondence certification—an international accreditation in radio and lines transmission that my father earned by writing exams. By his late twenties or early thirties, he was a certified, accredited teacher. He got a position at EMIT Electronic Institute—near Kaneshie in Accra, the capital of Ghana. The barefoot boy from the village was now teaching electronics in the capital city. A United States Navy textbook, accidentally shipped to Africa, accidentally shelved in a children’s library, accidentally discovered by a curious boy who had no shoes—that accident produced the teacher who produced the engineer who designed the reactor.
• • •
Before my father returned to the Ashanti Region to marry our mother, he had already begun planting the seed of education into the family line. He took the daughter of his older sister—my cousin, who is considerably older than me—and raised her from elementary school through to just before university. My father is essentially the first person in our entire family lineage, going back to my grandfather and beyond, who intentionally and consciously made an effort to plant education and knowledge into the bloodline. The concept was not inherited. The concept was invented—by a man who found a dusty book in a library and decided that the accident of that discovery should become the permanent operating system of his family.
My father returned to the Ashanti Region and married our mother. My mother comes from a village called Kantinkyiren—the same hometown from which the father of the current Ashanti King, Otumfuo Osei Tutu, originates. I do not know the royal family personally, but the geographic connection is there in the soil. My parents had me and my sister in the countryside, and at some point—as history repeated itself—my father found a way to bring us from the village to the city so we could have access to school. There was a split between our mother and our father, and unusual for most children in Ghana, where children stay with the mother, my father brought us. I do not blame my mother. I do not have anything against my mother. I do not know the entire details of what transpired between them. It is none of my business. She is my mother. She gave birth to me. She allowed me to stay in her belly for nine months. That is the ultimate rent any child can be afforded for free.
• • •
My father taught my sister and me at home before we ever set foot in a school. We never went to preschool. We never went to nursery school. We were home-taught by a man who still possessed his elementary school textbooks from the British colonial education system—books he had kept for decades. One was a mathematics book called Summon and Middleton, which we shortened to S and M. The other was an English book titled The Pictorial English Grammar. These two books, to this date, if I could find copies, I would pay ten thousand dollars for them. My father used middle school-level mathematics to teach us at the elementary school level, which meant we were always operating above our grade. We did not know what was supposed to be elementary and what was supposed to be middle school. We only knew what we were taught. And what we were taught was ahead of everyone we would later sit beside in a classroom. If you spend more time around a perfume store, even if you do not buy anything, you smell good. That is how the brain works in the formative years. My father also made us read United Nations publications as though they were storybooks. I knew about rice cultivation in Southeast Asia and the American Middle East conflicts before I was ten years old. I could read every news ticker that scrolled across the bottom of the television screen, and I never missed a line.
Our first school was Modern International School in Asokwa, Kumasi. Mr. Serbeh was my kindergarten teacher. Madam Sofia was my first-grade teacher—and Madam Sofia is in the dedication of this book because when my father’s approximately one hundred dollars per month salary could not cover both tuition and lunch, Madam Sofia would see through the eyes of kindergarteners and first-graders who came to school with no food and no money, and from a motherly instinct she would collect small portions of other children’s leftovers into one bowl and give it to me and my sister. That is how we ate sometimes. It would take me almost thirty years to trace Madam Sofia through a mutual friend named Abigail and thank her. Madam Tina was my second-grade teacher. My father was simultaneously teaching at RADISCO—Radio Services Training College—right there in Asokwa, the same neighbourhood, earning the salary that was both building our future and barely covering our present.
One morning, my father told us we were not going to Modern International School anymore. The school fees were drilling a hole in his finances. We were moved to Adventist Preparatory School in Amakom, Kumasi—thirty to forty minutes walking distance from our house in Asokwa. That walk, every single day, in both directions, was my first and best gym membership. I have never needed a gym since. At Adventist Prep, Mr. Oduro was my second-grade teacher, and Mr. Oduro saw something in me and made me feel I belonged at a school where I had just lost all my friends from Modern International. Mr. David taught third grade. Mr. Okyere taught fourth grade—and in Mr. Okyere’s class, the school decided to experiment by putting a fourth-grader into the sixth-grade quiz competition. I answered almost every question for my team. We won. I became known across the entire school. The United Nations publications and Summon and Middleton mathematics that my father had been feeding us at home were operating at a level the sixth-graders could not match. Mr. Opoku taught sixth grade. And above all of them stood Madam Gladys, the headmistress, who lived at Atonsu and whose grandchildren were my classmates. Madam Gladys did something that had never been done in the history of Adventist Prep: she single-handedly chose me as head prefect without a student vote. On the first Tuesday of the academic year, in front of the entire school assembled in the giant church auditorium, Madam Gladys announced my name and the auditorium erupted. Even the headmaster, spying through the transom of his office door, stepped out to witness the ovation.
Three days later, my father told me and my sister to stop going to school. The fees for the trimester were fifteen dollars. One-five. Fifteen dollars for the entire term. And my father could not afford it. So three days after being inaugurated as head prefect of Adventist Preparatory School in front of every student and teacher in that auditorium, I was sitting at home in Asokwa making bamboo kebab sticks with sharp knives, my fingers accumulating blisters and cuts, wondering if this was the end of my life. I was eleven or twelve years old. I had been made the school’s leader and seventy-two hours later I was a school dropout because of fifteen dollars. The emotional distance between the auditorium’s cheers and the bamboo knife’s blade is the distance this book measures.
Halfway through that lost term, my father found a way into Amass Junior Secondary School at Asokwa—a school that was producing some of the best students in the entire Ashanti Region, with no spots available. A teacher who came from my mother’s hometown knew my father and agreed to secretly insert our names into the school register. I attended the first term as a ghost student—my name was not officially in the system. Whenever the register was called, I sat in silence. My classmates did not know that the boy sitting beside them had no official record of existing at that school. It was not until the following term, when the academic roster was reshuffled, that my name was formally planted. I became real on paper. And at Amass JSS, across three years of middle school, I took ten subjects and I remember every teacher to this day.
Mr. Boateng—whom we called Amisty Boat— taught mathematics—the single most influential subject and teacher that gave me a foundation in the discipline that would become my career. Mr. Boamah taught technical drawing—draftsmanship, geometric construction, precision on paper. Mathematics and technical drawing are the two subjects that gave my entire career a skyrocket. Madam Gifty taught English. Madam Patience and Mr. Amoah taught science. Mr. Teye and Madam Felicity taught visual arts. Madam Hafsa taught social studies. Madam Khadijah taught religious and moral education—and Madam Khadijah would occasionally see through the eyes of struggling children and give me free exercise books for the whole term, sometimes for the whole year. Mr. Kyei taught French. Madam Helen taught agricultural science. Madam Evelyn taught the Ghanaian language, Asante Twi. These ten teachers and their ten subjects built the foundation on which a nuclear engineering career was constructed. And I served these teachers in ways that went beyond the classroom—in their offices, at their various homes—copying their lesson notes by hand because I had no money to buy textbooks. The copying was my tuition. The service was my scholarship. And the lesson notes I transcribed became the textbooks I could not afford.
At Amass JSS, I watched the National Science and Maths Competition on television—hosted by Professor Mrs. Ewurama Addy—and saw the contestants from Prempeh College turning heads with their brilliance. I told myself: I am going to that school or I will never go to any school at all. When the time came to register for the Basic Education Certificate Examination and select our preferred high schools, the headmaster, Mr. Sam, suggested I choose Amass Secondary School. I looked at him and said: first choice Prempeh College, second choice Prempeh College, third choice Prempeh College. My logic was unassailable: if they do not pick me first, they pick me second; if not second, then third. Mr. Sam did not fully approve. I did not need his approval. I needed Prempeh College. But before I could sit for the Basic Education Certificate Examination—the BECE, the national exam that every Ghanaian student must pass to gain admission to secondary school—there was the matter of the registration fee. My father could not pay it. The pattern was familiar: ambition blocked by money, potential blocked by economics. And then Mr. Abdullah stepped in. Mr. Abdullah was the father of my classmate Razak. He lived near the Kumasi Sports Stadium, on the road to Lobito. He saw a boy who wanted to take an exam and could not afford the registration, and he paid the fee. Without Mr. Abdullah’s intervention, I would not have sat for the BECE. Without the BECE, I would not have qualified for Prempeh College. Without Prempeh College, there is no Italy, no America, no Columbia, no nuclear engineering, no reactor named after two daughters. Mr. Abdullah’s registration fee is one of the earliest links in the chain—a link that this book now records permanently, so that his generosity is never forgotten and his name is never lost to the dilution of oral tradition.
Many people exhibit the potential. Few realize it. My father realized it the only way a man earning that teacher’s wage could: he invested not money but attention, not wealth but discipline, not connections but the one thing that no amount of poverty could take from him—the conviction that his children would not repeat his life. And yes, those are sincere words. Like Elon, I am a US citizen who was born outside of the USA but have over the years carved out an imaginary sculpture of admiration for this country, the opportunities it presents, and how humbling it is to look back to my dust-to-grace journey growing up to a father in Ghana who worked as a teacher and taught us hard-work ethics similar to the hardworking ethics I came to find manifested in many well-meaning Americans striving to push the limits for America’s greatness.
What you are procrastinating or not willing to get started now simply because you think you should have done it years ago is the same thing someone is about to do and end up being a great person at a time in the future when you would ask what if I had started. My father never asked what if. He started. Every night. With the lantern. With the pen. With the stack of exercise books that represented not his salary but his strategy. The idea of undocumented thoughts facilitated by procrastination in documentation of rare events that could have been the recipe for success of the younger generation is a disservice to the honorable burden that should come along with the pleasure of being the guinea pig of realities in life. This book is the documentation he never wrote. This chapter is the methodology he never published. I signed up for this twenty-four-credit-hour class called lifelong learning that does not stop. And the first lesson—the one my father taught by lantern light—is that the ground you are working on today could be someone else’s roof tomorrow.
Through his vision for education, he paved way for our future and I ended up with a full scholarship to study in Europe. The America talent magnet caught my attention the summer of 2008 and I boldly took fate in my hands and moved to the USA. That single sentence contains three continents, four languages, five nuclear engineering companies, a DOE team page with Nobel Laureates, and a reactor named after my daughters. But it all started at that table. The responsibility is a glorious burden. That phrase came to me years later, but it describes exactly what my father carried every night. The burden of knowing that your children’s futures depend on your willingness to grade one more paper, correct one more error, stay awake one more hour. The glory of knowing that the work matters.
Cynics criticize and winners analyze. My father was a winner. He analyzed the problem—poverty, religious fatalism, a neighborhood that had resigned itself to miraculous thinking—and he designed a solution: homework. The most boring, most overlooked, most undervalued technology in human history. Not an app. Not a platform. Not a disruptive innovation. Homework. Done correctly. Every night. By lantern light. For a hundred dollars a month. And it worked. It worked so well that the product of that homework is now writing this book, in a language his father does not speak, from a continent his father has never visited, about a career his father could not have imagined. Only later do we come to appreciate what something is and what its value is or what it stands for. I appreciate it now. Every equation I write in the VioletMadison-20 textbook is a footnote to my father’s red pen.
No one can make you feel inferior without your consent. My father did not consent to inferiority. He did not consent to the neighborhood’s low ceiling. He did not consent to the church’s insistence that thinking was a form of disobedience. He withdrew his consent from every system that demanded his surrender, and he replaced it with a private revolution conducted at a kitchen table by lantern light, one exercise book at a time. The spiral commonality is a universal geometry woven and written into the fabric of creation. The first spiral I ever noticed was the one connecting my father’s lantern to my future: education funded discipline, discipline funded opportunity, opportunity funded exposure, exposure funded ambition, and ambition funded the next generation’s education. The spiral was invisible. But it was real. And it was compounding.
Even if it is one attack, it is one too many. My father treated intellectual contamination the way a nuclear engineer treats radioactive contamination: with zero tolerance, immediate containment, and the understanding that even small doses accumulate. One evening lost to a prayer vigil instead of homework was one too many. One conversation with a well-meaning relative who suggested that perhaps the children should spend less time studying and more time in church was one too many. He was building a radiation shield, one exercise book at a time, between his children and the source of the contamination.
For some it is a lifestyle and for others it is a lifeline. Education, for my father, was a lifeline. Not a lifestyle choice. Not a decision made from a menu of attractive options. It was the only rope in a well. You grab it or you drown. He grabbed it. He held on. He pulled his children up with him, hand over hand, rung by rung, exercise book by exercise book. When sweat lost becomes strength gained, you know the work was real. The sweat was my father’s. The strength is mine. And the work continues. It continues in the Telegram group where I mentor students at noon Ghana time. It continues in the Dropbox library of free GRE and SAT materials. It continues in the VioletMadison-20, where every equation is a love letter to two daughters and every chapter is an exercise book.
Don’t listen to people. Listen to your inner self. You succeed in life when you are a constant maverick who likes to grind against the grain. My father was the original maverick. And his grain was Kumasi. The dust had not yet become stardust. But the lantern was lit. And the light reached further than anyone in Asokwa thought possible—across the Mediterranean to the Italian Alps, across the Atlantic to the American heartland, across the continental divide to the Department of Energy, and back again to a quiet house in Budd Lake, New Jersey, where the teacher’s son is still grading, still correcting, still believing that the ground he is working on today could be his daughters’ roof tomorrow. Beacon of hope—to use the story of dust to stardust to create a legacy of opportunities helping the next generation. And the beacon was lit, like everything else in this story, by a kerosene lantern in a house in Asokwa. That was my father’s voice. Every night. At the table. For the salary that funded everything. And it changed everything.
He loved the book. He loved the red pen. He loved the process of taking ignorance and, through patient, unglamorous, line-by-line correction, turning it into something that resembled understanding. I think about his hands sometimes—the hands that held the pen, the hands that turned the pages, the hands that adjusted the wick on the kerosene lantern when the flame began to gutter past midnight. Those hands never held a nuclear fuel assembly. They never typed a CASMO lattice physics calculation. They never signed an NRC Safety Analysis Report. But every fuel assembly I have ever designed was designed by those hands, working through mine. Every calculation I have ever run was a continuation of the calculation he began at that table: the calculation of how to convert his modest wage into a future that transcends the circumstances that produced it. The answer, it turns out, is education. Applied consistently. Over time. Without interruption. Without apology. Without asking anyone’s permission.
I have traveled far from that table. Three continents. Forty-plus American states. A dozen European countries. An Ivy League degree. Three nuclear security clearances. Reactor cores designed for Xcel, Dominion, Holtec, and Deep Fission. A spot on the federal team roster with Nobel Laureates. A startup—BlueCore Energy, where I serve as Employee Number One and Lead Reactor Engineer under founder Kofi Asante. A reactor named after my daughters: the VioletMadison-20, seventy-one chapters, over a thousand equations, the most complex love letter ever written in the language of neutron transport and thermal hydraulics. But the table is still there. The lantern light is still there. And my father’s red pen, moving across the page with the steady hand of a man who believed that the ground you are working on today could be your roof tomorrow, is the image that anchors every chapter of this book. Accomplishment is energizing, success is fulfilling, but the ultimate sense or measure of success is purely a relativistic dimension of measurement. The dimension that matters to me is the distance between that lantern and this manuscript.
Knowledge is archaeological wisdom—layers upon layers, each generation building on the deposit left by the one before. My father’s layer was the exercise book. My layer is the reactor. My daughters’ layer is whatever they choose to build on the foundation we have laid. The archaeological record is continuous. The deposit is never lost, even when the archaeologist does not yet know where to dig. Burying the seed does not bring about its end but rather its beginning. My father buried the seed of education in Asokwa, in red dust, by lantern light, for a hundred dollars a month. The seed did not die. It germinated. It pushed through the soil of poverty, through the concrete of religious fatalism, through the corrugated roof of low expectations, and it emerged on the other side of the world as a nuclear engineer who names reactors after his daughters.
Death is not the greatest loss. The greatest loss is what dies inside of us while we live. Nothing died inside my father. Not his curiosity. Not his discipline. Not his conviction that the exercise book was more powerful than the prayer mat. Not his refusal to accept the neighborhood’s verdict that his children were destined for the same hundred-dollar salary, the same red-dust roads, the same corrugated roofs that leaked in the rainy season. Everything that could have died—hope, ambition, the belief that a different outcome was possible—my father kept alive by the simple, daily, unglamorous act of grading papers by lantern light. He was not saving money. He was saving minds. And the minds he saved are now distributed across three continents, designing reactors, writing software, mentoring students, and documenting the story that he never had time to tell because he was too busy living it.
You cannot create the future by clinging to the past. My father understood this before any motivational speaker turned it into a bumper sticker. He watched a neighborhood that clung to the past—to ancestral customs, to religious traditions, to the comfortable certainty that the world was fixed and unchangeable—and he watched that neighborhood produce the same results, generation after generation. He did not cling. He released. He released his children from the gravitational pull of low expectations and aimed them at the only target that mattered: a future that did not yet exist but that could be manufactured through education, one corrected exercise book at a time.
I broke the mold to find my shape. That sentence, which I would write years later as a distillation of my entire trajectory, begins here. The mold was Kumasi. The mold was the prayer vigil. The mold was the hundred-dollar salary and the corrugated roof and the red-dust road and the assumption that a boy from Asokwa would become a man from Asokwa and nothing more. I broke it. Not with a hammer. Not with money. Not with connections. I broke it with a red pen, borrowed from my father’s hand, applied to my own exercise book, under a kerosene lantern, in a house where the most valuable object was not the television or the furniture but the stack of papers waiting to be graded. The mold broke. And the shape that emerged—nuclear engineer, global citizen, scholarship architect, reactor designer, father of Violet and Madison—is the shape that the rest of this book will trace. From dust to stardust. From Asokwa to the Department of Energy. From a hundred-dollar salary to a reactor named after two daughters a family court tried to keep from me. The shape is still forming. The red pen is still moving. And the lantern, my father’s lantern, is still lit.
Naturally adept at complex simplicity. That paradox—four words that seem to contradict each other—describes exactly what my father did every night at that table. He took the complex problem of multigenerational poverty and reduced it to a simple mechanism: correct the exercise book. He took the complex problem of religious fatalism and reduced it to a simple alternative: do the homework. He took the complex problem of a neighborhood that believed in miracles and reduced it to a simple empiricism: grade the papers and measure the results. The complexity was in the diagnosis. The simplicity was in the prescription. And the prescription worked—not because it was magical, but because it was mechanical. Education is a machine. You put in time and attention. You get out capability. The machine does not care about your faith. It does not care about your pastor’s opinion. It does not care about your family’s income. It cares only about whether you showed up, opened the book, and did the work. My father understood the machine. He fed it every night. And the output—standing in front of you now, writing this sentence, from a house in New Jersey purchased with nuclear engineering salary—is the proof that the machine works.
The truth is like a lion. You do not have to defend it. Let it loose; it will defend itself. Augustine of Hippo said that, and it is the epigraph of this entire trilogy, because it describes the method my father used: he did not argue with the neighborhood. He did not debate the pastors. He did not defend his philosophy at family gatherings. He simply produced results. The results were the lion. And the lion—roaming now across three continents, speaking four languages, designing nuclear reactors, mentoring forty students, naming a reactor after his granddaughters—is defending the truth of his method more powerfully than any sermon ever preached at any prayer vigil in the history of Asokwa.
I have a scholarship project that started about ten years ago to honor everything he taught me. It has seen about forty students placed in universities and careers across the United States and Europe. That pipeline—the Telegram group, the Dropbox library, the Google Meet sessions at noon Ghana time—is the exercise book scaled up. It is my father’s red pen, digitized and distributed across the internet, reaching students in Kumasi and Accra and Takoradi who have never met the man whose methodology makes it possible. They do not know his name. They do not need to. They know the method: sit down, open the book, do the work, and the ground you are working on today could be your roof tomorrow. That method is not a theory. It is not a prayer. It is not a hope. It is an engineering specification, tested across generations, verified by outcomes, and documented in this book for every parent who earns the wage that built an engineer and refuses—as my father refused—to let that salary define the ceiling of what is possible for the minds in his care.
Well done is better than well said. My father never said much. He did not make speeches about the importance of education. He did not write essays about the failure of religious thinking. He did not post on social media about the dangers of miracle-seeking. He graded papers. He corrected errors. He sat at a table by lantern light and did the work that the neighborhood was too busy praying to do. And the work—silent, patient, invisible—produced a nuclear engineer, a scholarship pipeline, a federal team listing, a reactor named after two daughters, and a book that begins where everything begins: in the dust, at the table, with the lantern, and with a man who believed that education was not merely important but sacred. Not sacred in the religious sense—not requiring prayer or fasting or submission—but sacred in the engineering sense: load-bearing, structural, the one component that, if removed, causes the entire system to collapse. He was right. He was always right. And this chapter—the first chapter of a trilogy that spans three continents and twenty-five chapters—is the documentation of how right he was.
The courage is contagious and has paved a way for a new generation to achieve their potentials without negotiating. My father’s courage was the original contagion. It infected me first—at the table, by the lantern, through the red pen. Then it infected Man Mountain, through the example of a boy from Asokwa who left and became something the neighborhood did not think possible. Then it infected forty students through the Scholarship Access Project. Then it infected Kofi Asante, who founded BlueCore Energy and hired me as Employee Number One. Then it infected the readers of this book—you, sitting wherever you are sitting, reading this chapter, wondering whether your own table, your own lantern, your own red pen could produce the same result. The answer is yes. The answer has always been yes. The formula is not secret. The formula is not patented. The formula is free. Sit down. Open the book. Correct what is wrong. Do it again tomorrow. And the ground you are working on today—whatever that ground looks like, however dusty, however dark, however far from the Department of Energy—could be your roof tomorrow. My father proved it. This book documents it. And the next chapter—where the teacher’s son turns his red pen on the religion that kept his neighborhood stuck—is waiting.
He gave his knowledge away for his monthly salary. He did not hoard it. He did not monetize it. He did not build a consulting practice around it. He gave it away, night after night, correction after correction, to other people’s children, because he understood something that the prosperity gospel will never teach: the most powerful investment a human being can make is in another human being’s mind, and the return on that investment is not measured in currency but in capability. Invest in a stock for social change such as sending economically disadvantaged people to school, and their graduation becomes a dividend. Those words went public as a general principle. But my father lived it as a specific practice. He was the original social-impact investor. His portfolio was a stack of exercise books. His dividend was a nuclear engineer. And his annual report—this book, this chapter, this sentence—is the documentation that the investment paid off. The ground he worked on became my roof. And the roof I am building—out of reactor equations and scholarship pipelines and this three-volume trilogy—will become someone else’s ground. The spiral continues. The lantern is still lit. And the teacher’s son, sitting at a desk in Budd Lake, New Jersey, is still grading papers. Just like his father taught him. By lantern light. For the next generation. For free.
Since embracing the concept of global citizenship shortly after high school, I have been blessed by immense help, support, and friendship in journeying through this thing called life—from Ghana, to Italy, to Poland, to Great Britain, to Germany, to Portugal, to Switzerland, to Sweden, to France, to Estonia, to Finland, to Iceland, to Hungary, and touring over forty of the fifty states of the greatest land of opportunity on the planet. And every step of that journey—every passport stamp, every boarding pass, every apartment key, every security badge, every reactor core design, every scholarship placed, every mentee email received—traces back to a single origin: a kerosene lantern in Asokwa, a stack of exercise books, and a man who earned a hundred dollars a month and turned it into a legacy that spans three continents. The teacher’s son is still learning. The teacher’s lessons are still compounding. And the story—which begins in dust and will end in stardust—has only just begun to be told.
Then came the classrooms of Junior Secondary School and Junior High School, and with them, the observation that would become one of the incendiary lines of this trilogy. At JSS and JHS I realized the entire mindset was to breed idiots and I quit. I need to be precise: I did not quit school. I quit the mindset. I looked around the classroom—at the curriculum, at the teaching methods, at the way questions were discouraged and memorization was rewarded, at the way religious platitudes were woven into secular instruction—and I realized that the system was not designed to produce thinkers. It was designed to produce compliance. Usually people who grow up anyhow tend to have specific requirements. The system had grown up anyhow. Its requirements—obedience, memorization, religious deference—had nothing to do with producing engineers or scientists. They had everything to do with producing a population that would not ask inconvenient questions. A child is born with no state of mind, blind to the ways of mankind—and the Ghanaian educational system was determined to keep that child blind.
The decision to attend Prempeh College changed everything. Prempeh College has a wider intellectual footprint than any secondary school in the Ashanti Region. The corridors of education often reverberate with the footprints of intellect, and Prempeh College serves as a poignant example. Nothing like having a Prempeh College education—the experience is beyond books. Consider it a lifetime network. At Prempeh, for the first time, I was surrounded by peers who had been conditioned the way I had. Not all of them. But enough of them were serious, disciplined, intellectually hungry in a way that I recognized because I had seen it in my father. The OWASS contestants—listen to them; they had wanted to attend Prempeh College. That oral history of excellence preceded and followed every graduating class. Prempeh College, S4 Class of 2004. Strictly anti-religion. That is how I would later describe myself on a Twitter profile, and the roots of that description are in Asokwa, but the branches grew at Prempeh, where critical thinking was not heresy but curriculum.
As the journey through Prempeh College’s legacy unfolds, readers are prompted to consider how education can shape societal progress. Institutions of learning not only impart knowledge but also plant the seeds of innovation and change that reverberate far beyond the walls of the classroom. Prempeh’s network was intellectual infrastructure—a distributed system of mentorship, accountability, and example that stretched across decades and continents. Profoundly influencing someone’s trajectory—that is what Prempeh did. Not through inspirational speeches but through the daily, unglamorous insistence that you would meet a standard or you would not pass. The standard did not hand out participation trophies required by entitlement mentality. The honesty of that system was the most valuable education I received before leaving Ghana.
At your best, you will still not be good enough for the wrong person. At your worst, you will still be worth it to the right person. My father was never good enough for the neighborhood’s opinion of what a responsible man should be—a man who prayed loudly, attended church visibly, and accepted his station with graceful resignation. He was too quiet for their taste. Too focused on a table and a stack of exercise books when the rest of the block was focused on a pulpit. Selective or subtractive admiration—liking part of what someone does but not the whole—is how most people in Asokwa regarded my father. They admired his dedication as a teacher. They respected his consistency. But they subtracted the part they could not stomach: his refusal to participate in the religious theater. They wanted the results without the methodology. They wanted the roof without the ground.
A reservoir of goodness needed to change the world into a conducive place. Someone named Oluwaseun Gbemi wrote that, and I kept it, because it describes my father more accurately than any sentence I have written myself. He was a reservoir. Not a fountain—fountains are showy, decorative, designed to be admired. A reservoir is buried underground. It feeds the city without being seen. My father was the reservoir beneath Asokwa—the hidden supply of educational discipline that fed his children’s futures while the neighborhood drank from the well of prayer and found it dry.
I have to download my thoughts to a safe intellectual repository in order to preserve the logical and chronological coherence of the notes needed to tell this story properly. That sentence, which I wrote to myself in a private note, is the reason this book exists. The thoughts were accumulating—decades of observations, expressions, arguments, confessions, and evidence—and they were in danger of being lost to the general dilution of oral traditions which has cost our culture a great deal of rich details that cannot be traced accurately to their roots. The argument here is the first download. What follows is the first deposit in the intellectual repository. And the repository begins where everything begins: at a table in Asokwa, with a man, a lantern, and a red pen.
The most precious things in life are always around us if we seize the moment, be in the moment, and enjoy the moments. The most precious thing around me, in those early years, was not the exercise book itself. It was the man holding the red pen. It was the discipline he modeled. It was the silence of the house at midnight, when every other house on the street was either dark or full of prayer, and ours was full of light—kerosene light, steady and warm, illuminating a page full of corrections that were also, in their quiet way, a form of love. I did not know it was love at the time. Children rarely do. I thought it was homework. I thought it was punishment. I thought my father was strict and the neighborhood was kind. Only later—much later, from the other side of an ocean and a career—did I understand that the strictness was the kindness, and the neighborhood’s kindness was the cruelty. The neighborhood was kind enough to lower the ceiling. My father was strict enough to remove it.
People carry opinions by generalizing personal experience and in the process they miss important trends that fall through the cracks created by narrow-minded view. The neighborhood’s opinion of education was generalized from the experience of people who had never left Kumasi, never seen a university from the inside, never met an engineer, never sat in a room where the conversation was about neutron flux density or graphene growth on copper substrates. Their sample size was the street they lived on. My father’s sample size was the stack of exercise books on his desk—each one a data point, each correction a measurement, each improved grade an experiment replicated. He was doing science before I knew the word. He was running a longitudinal study on the effects of educational discipline on life outcomes, with his own children as the experimental group and the neighborhood’s children as the control. The experimental group produced a nuclear engineer. The control group produced prayer warriors. The p-value is statistically significant.
Seeing you today was the highlight of my day. I would say that to my father if he were sitting across from me at this desk. He would not understand the English. He would not understand why his son is writing a book instead of grading papers. But he would understand the principle, because the principle is the same: you sit down. You open the book. You correct what is wrong. You do it again tomorrow. And the day after. And the day after that. Until the corrections compound into something that neither the teacher nor the student could have predicted—a life that stretches from Asokwa to the Department of Energy, from a hundred-dollar salary to a reactor named after two daughters, from dust to stardust, from a kerosene lantern to a manuscript that bears his legacy in every paragraph.
It echoes loudly in their silence mode. That expression describes what happens when this chapter reaches the person it was written for. The person who reads about my father and recognizes their own parent. The person who reads about the lantern and remembers their own kitchen table. The person who reads about the neighborhood’s prayer vigils and recognizes the vigils in their own community. The echo is not in the speaking. The echo is in the recognition. And the recognition—that quiet, private moment when a reader says yes, that is my story too—is the reason this book exists. Not for fame. Not for profit. Not for revenge against the neighborhood that doubted my father or the system that failed his students. For the echo. For the moment when a parent earning that teacher’s wage in Kumasi or Accra or Lagos or Nairobi reads this chapter and thinks: I can do that. I can sit at a table. I can pick up a pen. I can correct an exercise book. I can fund a philosophy on a salary that everyone else considers insufficient. I can be the lantern.
If you permit yourself, someone will draw a straight line mapping through the dots of your circumstances to enrich themselves. The pastors did that in Asokwa. They drew a straight line from my father’s poverty to his insufficient faith, and they offered a solution—prayer, tithes, submission—that enriched the church while leaving the poverty intact. My father refused the line. He drew his own: from the exercise book to the scholarship exam, from the scholarship exam to the Italian Alps, from the Italian Alps to South Carolina State and the University of Wisconsin-Madison, from Madison to Columbia University, from Columbia to Xcel Energy, from Xcel to the Department of Energy, from the DOE to BlueCore Energy, from BlueCore to a reactor named after two daughters. That line—his line, drawn with a red pen by lantern light—is the one this book follows. Not the pastor’s line. Not the neighborhood’s line. Not the straight line of low expectations that every well-meaning relative tried to draw around his children like a fence. The line of the red pen. The line of the exercise book. The line that begins in dust and ends in stardust and passes through every chapter of this trilogy.
In figuring out what works and what does not work for you, you evolve as a person. My father evolved at that table every night. He was not born knowing how to produce a nuclear engineer from a hundred-dollar salary. He figured it out. Night after night, correction after correction, exercise book after exercise book, he figured out that the formula was simpler than anyone in the neighborhood believed: show up, do the work, measure the results, repeat. The formula did not require God’s intervention. It did not require the pastor’s blessing. It did not require a miracle. It required only a man, a table, a lantern, and the refusal to accept that poverty was permanent. That refusal—quiet, persistent, invisible to everyone except the children sitting at the table—was the most revolutionary act in the history of our family. And the revolution is still in progress. It is in progress every time I open the VioletMadison-20 textbook and write another equation. It is in progress every time a student in Ghana opens the Dropbox library and downloads a free GRE prep guide. It is in progress every time Man Mountain texts me from Sea Girt and says: you make me see my daughter as a potential and future leader. The revolution my father started at that table has not ended. It has compounded. And the compound interest—measured not in dollars but in trajectories altered, in minds opened, in ceilings removed—is the subject of every chapter that follows.
• • •
I have listed nine subjects. The tenth was the Ghanaian language—Asante Twi—taught by Madam Evelyn. Madam Evelyn taught me the grammar of my mother tongue with the same rigour that Madam Gifty brought to English. The Twi language taught me how to integrate grammar in an ingrained way that set the foundation for learning English under the British educational system that Ghana inherited. If you understand the architecture of your own language, you understand the architecture of every language that follows. Madam Evelyn gave me that architecture. So the full roster of ten subjects at Amass Junior Secondary School in Asokwa, Kumasi, was this: Social Studies under Madam Hafsa. Religious and Moral Education under Madam Khadijah—who gave me free exercise books for whole terms and sometimes whole years. English under Madam Gifty. Science under Madam Patience and later Mr. Amoah. Visual Arts under Mr. Teye and later Madam Felicity. Technical Drawing under Mr. Boamah—the draftsmanship and geometric precision that became the blueprint skill for nuclear reactor core layouts. French under Mr. Kyei. Asante Twi under Madam Evelyn. Agricultural Science under Madam Helen. And Mathematics under Mr. Boateng—the single most influential subject and teacher who gave me the foundation on which an entire engineering career was constructed. Ten subjects. Ten teachers. Three years at a school I entered as a ghost student with no name in the register. And I served those teachers in capacities that went beyond the classroom—in their offices, at their various homes—copying their lesson notes by hand because I had no money to buy textbooks. The copying was my tuition. The service was my scholarship. The lesson notes I transcribed became the textbooks I could not afford. And the teachers who allowed a boy with no money to serve them in exchange for knowledge planted a seed that grew into a nuclear engineering career, a Columbia University degree, and a United States Department of Energy team listing alongside three Nobel Laureates in Physics.
My sister endured this journey with me at home. She is the only one who saw it all from the inside—the bamboo sticks, the sharp knives, the blisters, the walk to Adventist Preparatory School every morning, the day our father told us we were not going back to school, the silence of the house when two children who should have been in class were sitting at a kitchen table with nothing to do but read Summon and Middleton and The Pictorial English Grammar for the hundredth time. She saw the ghost-student registration at Amass. She saw the tears I never shed in public. She saw the fifteen dollars that ended a head prefect’s career. And she endured it alongside me without complaint, without drama, without the self-pity that would have been entirely justified. I have always had a big-brother, big-picture vision for her—to explore the world outside the myopic lens that poverty and geography impose on children who grow up in Asokwa. The tough love is there. It will never diminish. And my nephews and niece from her will grow to live this legacy at a higher level than either of us could have imagined when we were cutting bamboo at the abattoir and wondering if the education would ever resume.
But the story of the United States Navy electronics textbook is not the full story of why my father ran from Konkori to Kumasi. There is a layer beneath the library, beneath the dusty shelf, beneath the hard cover with the word Electronics on the front. Before the library, before the curiosity about the book, there was a wound. My father had passed his middle school examinations with flying colours. The results were so strong that he received a scholarship letter from Prempeh College—the very same Prempeh College where, decades later, his son would forge a letter to a headmaster and teach university teachers from a boys’ quarters. The scholarship letter arrived in Konkori village. It was addressed to my father. And my grandfather—the cocoa liaison, the trusted bookkeeper, the man whose name I carry—sat on that letter. He never disclosed it to my father. The letter stayed hidden. Prempeh College made attempts to reach out. The school wanted the boy from the village. The boy from the village did not know the school wanted him. A year passed before my father discovered that he had been offered a full scholarship to one of the most prestigious secondary schools in Ghana and that the opportunity had been buried by his own father in the village. The reasons are lost to time. Perhaps my grandfather needed his son’s labour on the farm. Perhaps the concept of secondary school in a distant city was too alien for a man who had never attended school himself. Perhaps the letter simply got lost in the chaos of a household with eight to ten children and a cocoa trading operation and no filing system. Whatever the reason, the result was fury. My father, upon learning that his future had been concealed from him, ran out of Konkori to Kumasi under the pretense of visiting long-distance relatives. He never went back. The pretense became permanent. The visit became a life. And the fury that drove him out of the village became the fuel that drove him into the shanty library near Kumasi General Hospital, where the United States Navy electronics textbook was waiting on a dusty shelf for a boy who had just lost his chance at Prempeh College and was looking for any book—any knowledge—that could replace what had been stolen from him. The grandfather who sat on the letter produced the father who found the textbook. The textbook produced the teacher. The teacher produced the engineer. And the engineer carries the grandfather’s name. The chain is unbroken. The chain includes a betrayal. And the betrayal—however painful—was the catalyst that put a barefoot boy in front of a dusty shelf at exactly the right moment in history.
There is one more thread in the origin story that must be documented before this chapter moves forward. My family lineage—a lineage that traces itself to the Ashanti Kingdom, to the royal occupant of the Golden Stool, to a people who defied an empire—is the thread that this section must now pull traces to Otumfuo Prempeh—the Ashanti King who was sent into exile by the British to the Seychelles Islands in 1900 as punishment for resisting colonial authority. Otumfuo Prempeh is among my great-great-great ancestors. The same bloodline that produced a king who defied an empire produced a teacher who defied poverty and an engineer who defied probability. I do not invoke the lineage as aristocratic decoration. I invoke it as evidence that the defiance is genetic. The refusal to accept the status quo—whether the status quo is colonial occupation or a fifteen-dollar school fee or a family court restraining order—runs in the blood. The Ashanti King who sat before the British Governor and refused to submit was operating on the same code that the boy from Asokwa used when he told the headmaster of Amass Junior Secondary School: first choice Prempeh College, second choice Prempeh College, third choice Prempeh College. The code does not negotiate. The code does not compromise. The code defies.
I’m different. I’m better. I’ve changed my strategy and thinking. Reading Kwadwo Adutwum’s nonfiction, The Global Citizen: A Three-Volume Memoir & Essay Trilogy, changed me. On the subject of religion, racism, and African-immigrant success stories in the US, this book has given me ideas and knowledge to share.
Kwadwo’s journey began in Kumasi, Ghana, a place I’d never heard of before, then progressed to Italy, finally ending in the US, and there’s a lot to learn along the way. What’s the story behind his journey from a boy in a poor neighborhood to a nuclear engineer holding three FBI nuclear security clearances and naming a reactor after his daughters? How did he pull it off? Kwadwo owes it to his father, a teacher who spent all he had on his students and family, who sat down to read books and painstakingly correct errors.
Of his father, Kwadwo writes: ‘My father did not consent to inferiority. He did not consent to the neighborhood’s low ceiling. He did not consent to the church’s insistence that thinking was a form of disobedience. He withdrew his consent from every system that demanded his surrender, and he replaced it with a private revolution conducted at a kitchen table by lamplight, one copybook at a time.’
As a three-part book, this memoir begins with the background of Kwadwo, delving into his time in Ghana. He thinks back to the days of his youth, and now that he’s able to see and interpret things as an engineer, he sees a lot more clearly. He sees poverty as a manifestation of religion and mindset. He sees his father’s struggles as a solid foundation from which he ascended. He doesn’t blame God, but the middleman–the pastors and those running the church.
The second part focuses on his marriage, mostly his love for his daughters, the battles that unfolded in the courtroom, and why there were troubles in his marriage to begin with. The third part tackles what it takes to be a nuclear reactor engineer and a Ghanaian living in America.
Throughout, Kwadwo writes with conviction. He reasons like an engineer and the son of a teacher. He’s a data-oriented guy. His take on why America is still the king, an essay bursting at the seams with America’s shortcomings and strengths in comparison with Europe, compels. On religion, he lays it all bare for all to see; hate or love it. On Africans abroad, he again withholds nothing.
Though there are repetitions here. For instance, the matter of the case and his time in Biella, Italy. Also, him having three security clearances. I think they’re intentional and meant to send the message home. So that even long after the reader has put the book down, they’ll still be able to remember The Global Citizen, mostly for the things that make it stand out.
And here is my parting shot. Kwadwo wrote this book not for himself or his father, but for the young people entangled in whatever lemons life throws their way, be they work troubles, family challenges, study challenges, and much more. His message is that we must prepare and have the right mindset.