Kojo Minta memorial dinner, Saturday 22 October 2011
Dear Mr and Mrs Minta, Kofi Minta, Anna Minta, ladies and gentlemen, honoured guests, friends of Kojo’s here present -
It’s a great honour for me to have been asked to address you at this dinner in memory of Kojo, a very beloved and very sorely missed member of the College and of this University. When Mark Stevenson asked me if I would speak this evening, he reminded me of the welcome speech which I, as Tutor for Graduates, held at the first Dinner of Michaelmas Term when Kojo and all those of you who came up to St Hilda’s at the same time as Kojo were new here. Mark wrote: ‘I remember that our time at Hilda's began with a dinner at which you implored that we take time to 'wallow in the life of the mind', and this very much sums up Kojo's attitude over the past two years.’ Well, that wasn’t quite what I implored you all to do; though when I looked back at what I said back then, I realised how much I must have been speaking to Kojo’s interests, because in fact it was a speech about food. The Founder of St. Hilda’s College, Dorothea Beale, was, according to her biographer, ‘indifferent to food and disliked entertaining’. I, by contrast, wanted to encourage you to eat well and enjoy talking to each other at dinner, since, as Virginia Woolf inspires us to think, fine dining – and indeed fine drinking – lights in the soul, and I quote, ‘not that hard little electric light which we call brilliance, as it pops in and out upon our lips, but the more profound, subtle and subterranean glow which is the rich yellow flame of rational intercourse’. Little did I know that Kojo was going to take me so seriously! Not only was he a wonderful and very painstaking cook, with an eye for the finest ingredients, who gave pleasure to all those friends who were fortunate enough to dine with him – well, at least once all that duck fat in jars in the fridge had actually been used – but he also, as I was later to learn, nursed an ambition to eat a ten-course dinner with a matching flight of wines in a Michelin-starred French restaurant – an ambition he was able to fulfil before his untimely passing.
Altogether, we remember Kojo as a man of very discerning tastes, whether in food, in books, in poetry, or in clothes. I have to mention That Suit. I was delighted to discover that the website of Ede & Ravenscroft, London’s oldest gentleman’s tailors, where Kojo had his bespoke three-piece suit made, bears the tagline ‘Dress of Character’, for that was exactly what that suit was. Kojo understood, rather rarely for someone his age, the rhetorical force, if I may call it that, of clothes. Good clothes are sometimes no more than that: fine cloth adorning a human frame, suggesting degrees of wealth and taste. But clothes can also amplify a person’s character, expressing through the outer image the person’s inner truth. Kojo’s understated elegance remains imprinted on all our memories – it is a legacy he leaves to us, that strong image of the matching socks and pocket square, the fine fabrics, the good shoes, and how he moved so gracefully in those carefully chosen clothes – but the reason it affects us so strongly is that it was not just a sartorial grace, but rather an expression of who he was. The understated grace was in the man more than it was in the suit. The image of Kojo beautifully dressed takes us straight through to the person and his qualities.
I found it very striking in the many conversations I’ve had over the last two months with those who knew and worked with Kojo how many people have mentioned the quietness of his ways while at the same time emphasising his effectiveness. He was in no sense a flashy person. Working with him when he was Vice-President of the MCR, I was often surprised at the subtlety with which issues were addressed, the little pieces of the jigsaw of a planned event moved quietly into place, or an issue which was upsetting others moved into a slightly different light until it ceased to be a problem. That kind of confidence of judgement which does not draw attention to itself at all speaks, I think, of an enormous strength of character. Talking to his close friends, I gather that strength came from a lot of good reading, an upbringing in faith, and, one felt it always, didn’t one, a profound thoughtfulness. Meeting his family yesterday, I saw that the strength and the dignity came to him as a birthright.
It is devastating that he is gone. We all wanted to go on seeing him, talking to him, enjoying his company, and having those little pieces of the jigsaw subtly moved into place for us. We might have been reconciled to the fact that death comes to us all and so also to Kojo if he had been a ninety-year-old man with a lifetime of achievement behind him – and he would have had a lifetime of great achievement behind him, that was clear. But the fact of the matter is that, even going from us at twenty-four, he had led a very full life and we carry him in our hearts and minds as a very fully fledged character with very clear convictions and a very clear sense of what was right and what needed to be done, and who was determined to act to the good of all who came within his purview. It is very difficult to accept, but I think Kojo’s legacy to us is to teach us that there is such a thing as life after death. Physically taken from us, he nevertheless is very present with us because each of us in his or her own way, depending on our own personal relationship with him, has such a strong sense of who he was and what he was about as a person. And Kojo being still with each of us issues us the following challenge: live life to the full, be joyous and full of laughter, read well in the great authors, think deeply, be curious, learn discernment, choose friends carefully with whom to converse and so to work out your true convictions, see what is good and go out and do it. May he go on living with all of us.
