If you were an adult, would you ever want to share your problems and secrets with a young person? Many people wouldn’t, but somehow Dr Araba Sefa-Dedeh was able to win the confidence of many adults and successfully encouraged and advised them to overcome their problems.
Her ability to listen to them and urge them to find out more about their problems, as well as the fact that she was a good listener, motivated them to keep going to her every now and then.
Though she had a listening ear for people at that time, she little knew that she would end up as a counsellor.
Today, her name stands tall when clinical psychologists in Ghana are mentioned. A clinical psychologist is a person who attends to people with emotional and mental problems.
Dr Sefa-Dedeh is the first Ghanaian female clinical psychologist. For 28 years, she has been a lecturer at the University of Ghana Medical School.
As a result of her achievements, she was selected to counsel people who had suffered various emotional problems under political regimes in Ghana. She was, therefore, the Head of the Counselling and Support Unit of the National Reconciliation Commission.
To find out how she lived her life as a child, Junior Graphic caught up with her at the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital in Accra.
According to her, counselling was something natural in her home. Her father was a counsellor, as a result of which people always went to him with their problems. He also created a kind of atmosphere in which people could easily go to him with their problems for counselling.
Dr Sefa-Dedeh was born in Cape Coast and grew up at Mfantsipim, where her father was a tutor. According to her, it was fun growing up there, as she had a large compound to play on. She said as a child, she used to go for long walks to collect fruits such as mangoes and black berries.
Dr Sefa-Dedeh said although she went to school barefoot, she never felt deprived because “all the students walked to school without any shoes on. Interestingly, we teased the few students who put on shoes,” she said.
Because Dr Sefa-Dedeh started school early, by age 11 she was at Wesley Girls’ High School (WEY GEY HEY) to continue her education. She was nice to her teachers as well as to her colleagues, but she was a talkative.
Guess what position she occupied at WEY GEY HEY? — the Library Prefect. That was because she visited the library at the least opportunity she got.
After WEY GEY HEY, she gained admission to the University of Ghana, Legon, where she studied psychology. She continued to the United States of America to pursue her PhD at the Washington University in Missouri.
She came back seven years later to become the first Ghanaian woman clinical psychologist in 1980.
Fifty-seven-year-old Dr Araba Sefa-Dedeh is married to Prof S.A. Sefa-Dedeh, Dean of the Faculty of Engineering, University of Ghana, and together they have three children and seven wards.
Story by Augustina Tawiah
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