The school wasn’t a typical Ghanaian one. It was Catholic, and in quite a wealthy part of town. But neither was it the sort of school that British diplomats would choose. Most of the teachers and the pupils were Ghanaian.

It was a tin-roofed building with a bare concrete floor. The playground was quite sandy and in the mornings there’d be these cone-shaped dimples where insects had burrowed down, and we’d spend five or 10 minutes trying to winkle them out. There was also a termite hill outside which I’m sorry to say we broke up to get the queen out.

I had Frank Mason as my teacher when I was 11, the year after I’d had a woman teacher who was a bully. She had told me I was incredibly thick, and told my parents that Common Entrance would be a waste of effort, although my two sisters had taken the exam and gone off to English schools.

Frank Mason wasn’t a bully; he never made me feel small, although he was very strict. I’ve got a scar where he hit me with a ruler which broke, but that wasn’t a big thing. It was just part of everyday life, and with him it was never brutal. He was an incredible chap. He had these amazingly bandy legs, and he used to wear shorts and long socks with ankle-length suede shoes, and he was always clean and neat and well turned-out.

There are some people you just look up to. He made me feel confident and at ease, so I could open up and do well. He believed I could get somewhere, and I did. I passed my Common Entrance and went to England to school in Portsmouth, and although I don’t remember much about my education in Ghana, I never felt disadvantaged later.

However, I do remember feeling a cultural misfit. I was essentially Ghanaian by then, and spoke a kind of pidgin English, which we used to effect in the playground even though we could all speak perfectly properly when we had to. It’s the same with my kids today. They wear Afro-Caribbean street clothes and try to adopt that street way of talking.

Frank Mason liked children. He enjoyed their jokes. I remember he rode a motor bike and it was a ritual after school that he’d try to ride off and we’d all try to hold him back. Then off he’d go, covered in dust, with his knees sticking out on either side.

In the years after independence there was an air of unbounded possibilities, and we would sit there and he would talk to us about how John Glenn had gone up into space, and how we were going to put an African up there, too.

The second conference of the Organisation of African Unity was held in Ghana, and there was huge excitement. We sang the national anthem every day. I was very conscious of the fact that we, as Tamils, were the trampled people of Ceylon, while here were all these children of freedom.

There’s a picture of Frank Mason’s class in the book I’ve just written about Africa. When I returned to the continent as a journalist 20 years after leaving, I had trouble reconciling the Africa in which I grew up with the famine and strife I found myself reporting. But there are signs of a rebirth. People are no longer looking over their shoulders and saying if only the white man hadn’t done this or that. They’re building their own solutions.

Journalist George Alagiah was talking to Hilary Wilce

The story so far

1955 Born in Sri Lanka

1961 Moves to Ghana

1967 School in Portsmouth, England

1975 Studies politics at Durham University

1981-87 Journalist on South magazine

1989 Joins BBC

1994-98 BBC’s Africa correspondent, based in Johannesburg

1994 Amnesty’s Best TV Journalist award; One World Broadcasting Trust award

1998 Newsreader for BBC

2000 Part of team which wins a Bafta award for coverage of Kosovo

2001 A Passage to Africa published by Little, Brown (pound;16.99)

2001 Reports for the BBC from New York on September 11 atrocities