<<Print>>

The Rawlingses are arguably the most famous couple in Ghana�s contemporary political history, but the genesis of the love that has bound them together as a married couple for the past decades, has never been known to many Ghanaians until none other than former President Jerry Rawlings himself told the story on Monday. It is a story that would see a young man convert from Catholicism to become a Protestant just for the sake of love. Cast in the mould of the Shakespearian Romeo and Juliet love story - minus the tragic end - the love between the Rawlingses, as a couple, would blossom on the strings of music. Few know, or could have imagined, that the man who would later � both as a Military Officer and a Civilian - lead Ghana for close to two decades, and who could shout his voice hoarse in a milieu of intense charisma when delivering his polemics and harangues, actually used that same voice, as a young man, for the more subtle endeavours of life. At the age of 15, young Jerry Rawlings, who had been brought up as a Catholic, ditched his religion, ironically, for a religion that up till now, has no love lost between it and Catholicism � the Protestant Church � and all that was for the love of a young �beautiful girl� that got the lad smitten to bits with love and struck right through the heart by cupid�s arrow. He would confess this himself with a tinge of nostalgia, decades later of course, when he addressed students in his home region just yesterday. ��I was a catholic, she was a Protestant. But because I wanted to be close enough to her, I left my Catholic Church to go and join the protestant Choir. But not too long after I�d joined the Protestant choir, I don�t know what the young lady [Nana Konadu Agyemang] and her friends did wrong. They [were] kicked out by the music Teacher so I was stuck in there and I was wondering what I could also do to get kicked out�. Rawlings said he had to slave for Konadu�s love. �I don�t know what it is like these days but in those days, it took me close to five years to be able to hold her hands, and long after I�d joined the Air Force and became a Pilot Officer, whenever I would try to visit, I had to remove my cap and actually scrub her mother�s car before I could say hello to her�, he recalled to cheers from the young horde of students. ��Anyways, that lady many years later, became my wife�, and thus the story ends. Happily ever after.