History of Adisadel

Over the years attempts have been made to explain the meaning and the origin of the name Adisadel. In George McLean Amissah`s 1980 ground-breaking work: Reminiscences of Adisadel – A short historical sketch of ADISADEL COLLEGE, he proffers two legends as theories underpinning the name Adisadel which has gained traction over the years. In the first theory, Amissah (1980) speculates that the name Adisadel is a vulgarisation or Anglicisation of the Mfantse expression Alice ada ‘Alice is asleep’, which emanated from a response patients get from a caretaker of a nurse called Alice who lived in the area in the 1900`s and was noted for her afternoon siesta. In his second theory based on another hearsay, Amissah (1980) speculated further that the name Adisadel emerged in the 1930`s from the rallying cry of the students-turned-labourers who uttered Adisifo, mu mfa mu Adere “Workers, take up your cutlasses”, as an encouragement to themselves for participating in the construction of the current school buildings above the hill after classes and at weekends. Amissah (1980) claims that Adisifo, mu mfa mu Adere transmogrified into a hypocoristic name phrase Adisifo Adere and finally to Adisadel.

Incontrovertible evidence from an archival source, the 1933 version of the Santa Claus Terminal Magazine, Vol. 2, however, disproves Amissah`s mainstream narrative on the meaning of the name Adisadel.  In the volume, the celebrated economist cum global diplomat, Dr. Robert Kweku Atta Gardiner, the then Assistant Head Prefect who was close to history as a continuing student, posited that the name Adisadel is simply the vulgarisation of a personal name, Alice Adele, which means ‘The Exalted Noble’. The name Alice means ‘Exalted’, ‘Exalted One’ or ‘Person of Noble Rank’, and Adele is a Germanic-Dutch name which means ‘Noble’ or ‘Nobility’, thus Adisadel by extension is a derivative of ‘The Exalted Nobleman’ or ‘The Exalted Man of Nobility’.