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“One day my old man told me, ‘Who told you to wear shoes to school? Your friends, do they wear shoes?’” Justice Mensah recalled.
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Long before he wore the robes of a Supreme Court Justice, Philip Bright Mensah was a schoolboy whose decision to wear shoes to class was enough to attract his father’s attention.
The retired Justice shared the surprisingly funny childhood memory during his conversation with Kafui Dey.
Justice Mensah recalled that, as a senior student, he began wearing sandals to school.
But his father was not impressed.
“One day my old man told me, ‘Who told you to wear shoes to school? Your friends, do they wear shoes?’” Justice Mensah recalled.
The concern was not really about the shoes.
It was about money and what wearing them might suggest about the family’s circumstances.
His father feared people would assume the family was wealthy.
“You want to let people tell me that I’m a rich person because I’ve allowed my son to wear shoes to school?” he recalled his father saying.
The solution was simple. Justice Mensah stopped wearing the shoes.
“I retired the shoes,” he told Kafui Dey.
And then came the final blow: the shoes disappeared.
“The shoes got lost,” he said.
The exchange prompted Kafui Dey to ask whether someone had taken them.
Justice Mensah’s response suggested that, in those days, going to school without shoes was hardly unusual.
“Everybody came to school without shoes,” he recalled.
But there was one notable difference.
“The teachers wore shoes,” he added.
The retired Justice used the memory to illustrate how dramatically Ghanaian society has changed.
Today, he observed, children can be dressed for school almost as if they are attending a special occasion.
“Now a child going to school, you have to dress her like somebody attending a wedding,” he said.
Then came his reflection on the changing relationship between parents and children.
“Those days we served our parents,” he said. “Now we are serving our children.”
The anecdote may appear light-hearted, but it offers a glimpse into the modest circumstances from which Justice Mensah emerged.
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