By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Sekou Nkrumah is a veritable symbol of his father's abject disrespect for the Ghanaian and Black-African woman. And so I don't know what business the third publicly acknowledged son of President Nkrumah has in rather gratuitously and insolently impugning the stature and achievements of Dr. Kofi Abrefa Busia, Ghana's foremost scholar-activist in the immediate postcolonial era (See "Busia Wasn't Visionary; Had No Agenda for Ghana - Sekou" Radioxyzonline.com/Ghanaweb.com 5/15/13).
Indeed, Nkrumah's decision not to make a first-lady out of an indigenous Ghanaian woman, including the mother of his eldest known child and son, Dr. Francis Nkrumah, clearly reflects the blistering extent of inferiority complex of which he was morbidly afflicted. He also did not have any remarkable and/or viable and comprehensive agenda for the development of the Ghanaian woman; and so what "vision" is his half-Arab son talking about?
Anyway, recently I came across a news feature captioned "Kwame Nkrumah's Tattered Legacy" by somebody called Chals Wontewe, bitterly and stridently lamenting the abject failure of the self-proclaimed disciples and adherents of Nkrumaism to unify and become a formidable political force in honor of their icon. Mr. Sekou Nkrumah would do himself a lot of good to familiarize himself with the contents of the aforementioned article, a copy of which is still lying on my desk.
Indeed, no levelheaded Ghanaian doubts the fact that President Nkrumah registered quite a remarkable level of achievements on the Ghanaian geopolitical landscape. But on the home-front, he was absolutely no match for Prime Minister Busia, in terms of the imperative need to affording a democratic face to political leadership. It is also significant to point out here, for the benefit of both Mr. Sekou Nkrumah and those who may not be aware of the same, that Nkrumah's government engaged in the largest volume of trade with Apartheid South Africa (See Kwame Arhin's The Life And Work Of Kwame Nkrumah).
It is therefore rather silly and outright disingenuous for undeservedly privileged people like Sekou Nkrumah to presume to cavalierly devalue the great intellectual breadth and stature of the first Ghanaian to obtain the Doctor of Philosophy Degree from the University of Oxford. Remember, also, the fact that Mr. Kwame Nkrumah used to frivolously brag about having been the first Black-African to have dined, wined and danced with Queen Elizabeth II, and also to have been named into membership of Her Majesty's Privy Council.
I clearly guess that what I am trying to make Mr. Sekou Nkrumah humbly appreciate here is the irredeemably embarrassing extent of his own father's vanity. Now, what the younger and brazen and brassy Mr. Nkrumah ought to be boldly and frankly made aware of is the incontrovertible fact that President Nkrumah largely pursued the equally admirable implementation of the "visions" of personalities far and away astute and foresighted than himself.
And as I have already extensively detailed elsewhere, the very conception and architectural planning of the Akosombo Dam, or the Volta River Scheme/Project, is the veritable brainchild of British archeologist Sir Albert Kitson, and a white South African entrepreneur by the name of Mr. Rose. And Kitson's idea goes back as far as 1915, when the future President Nkrumah was a mere toddler!
Then also, the glorious concept of Pan-Africanism has far more to do with the immortalized Dr. W.E.B. DuBois, of the United States, Haiti and later Ghana, and a Trinidadian lawyer by the name of Mr. Henry Sylvester Williams, than it has to do with the African Show Boy. To be certain, it is the collective bona fide meta-identity gift of the African in the Diaspora to her/his brethren on the primeval continent. Likewise, Nkrumah's much-touted concept of the "African Personality" was shamelessly plagiarized from Dr. Edward Wilmot Blyden, of the United States Virgin Islands and Liberia, and later Sierra Leone.
And so what is all this nonsensical talk about Nkrumah's "vision" by the latter's grossly misguided son Sekou? Indeed, what we actually ought to be talking about is the agenda that freeloading people like Mr. Sekou Nkrumah have for the development of both Ghanaian and Egyptian democracy, particularly the seemingly intractable trajectory of democratic culture and governance in the so-called Arab Republic of Egypt.
And, by the way, has Sekou Nkrumah ever questioned why every July 1, Ghanaians celebrate "Republic Day" with only the picture of President Nkrumah beamed up our television sets and blown up on the front pages of our newspapers? It is, of course, squarely in painful commemoration of the irredeemably extortionate and neo-slavo-colonial dictatorship of the so-called Convention People's Party!
Come on, Sekou, get us something better to remember, cheer and celebrate!
_________________________________________________________
*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
July 17, 2013
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
###
