Ghanaian musician Wanlov the Kubolor has revealed that he spent much of his time at Adisadel College in Cape Coast outsmarting the school’s disciplinary system by hiding cutlasses at strategic locations across campus so he could roam freely during class hours without being punished.
Speaking in a candid interview with veteran broadcaster Kafui Dey, Wanlov explained that the idea came to him after he observed a teacher handle a wayward student during his first year at the school. When a teacher confronted a fellow student walking outside during class hours and demanded to know why he was not in class, the student offered no meaningful explanation beyond gesturing that he was simply alive. The teacher’s response, instructing him to go and bathe and return to class, struck Wanlov as a procedural loophole rather than a disciplinary deterrent.
“Some idea just popped in my head,” Wanlov told Kafui Dey. “I borrowed like five cutlasses and hid them around the school at strategic locations.”
With the cutlasses placed at various points around the compound, Wanlov said he could pick one up whenever he returned from leaving the school grounds and present himself to any teacher who stopped him as though he had been sent out on a punishment errand. “As I’m walking during school hours, somebody will say, ‘Why are you not in class?’ I’ll say, ‘They have punished me, I was breathing.’ They’ll say, ‘That’s very good. Go and bath and go to class.’ Solution. Every single other day,” he recounted.
The cutlass scheme, he suggested, was born not out of pure mischief but as a rational response to what he described as a school culture more interested in the performance of authority than in actual education. “By the time I got to Adisadel College, I realised that our teachers were more interested in showing power and inflicting harm than imparting knowledge,” he said. “The power play. Over knowledge impartation.”
The consequences of his near-permanent truancy became apparent in Form Three, when a teacher looked at him during mock examinations and asked, with apparent sincerity, whether he was even in his class. “Form Three, he had never seen me,” Wanlov recalled with evident amusement.
The Kafui Dey interview represents the second time in recent months that Wanlov has spoken publicly about his Adisadel College experience. In an earlier interview on Joy Prime with Asieduwaa Akumi, the FOKN Bois rapper described the school’s conditions as more traumatic than a two-month period he spent in an American jail following a speed chase, citing harsh corporal punishment, poor food quality, and what he characterised as a fear-based institutional culture inherited from the colonial era. He called for fundamental reforms that prioritise student wellbeing over rigid discipline.
Wanlov, born Emmanuel Owusu Bonsu, is one of Ghana’s most distinctive creative voices, known for his barefoot public appearances, his satirical music catalogue, and his willingness to interrogate social institutions that others treat as beyond criticism.
