Book Review: Never Say Die!

The Autobiography of a Ghanaian Statesman (Nyaho Nyaho-Tamakloe with Felix Odartey-Wellington)

365 pp., Ghana Universities Press. GH75

Genuine autobiographies–that is to say very few autobiographies–tell it as it is, giving the past a distinct otherness while allowing the chief characters some latitude to situate themselves in our world. As they struggle to gather together the pieces of their usually effortful and eventful lives, we hear two audible yet instructive voices talking through their personas: There is the voice that drives the narrative, and the other voice lodged deep within that connects us to the events and the places. The rest is the story of the person we know, complete with all the details we didn’t know.

Never Say Die!, Nyaho Nyaho-Tamakloe’s autobiography, is at once gripping and revealing, offering the reader a penetrating examination of the multi-ethnic political smorgasbord that is Ghana. He avoids what he calls “rhetorical semiotics” to advance the narrative; instead, he deploys confrontational honesty as a plot device to present Ghana in a style that is brutally frank and disarmingly true. He lifts off with a roar, shelving niceties to confront the heated subjects of ethnicity in the military and the strategic relevance of 5BN (Fifth Battalion of Infantry) to coups in Ghana. He forcefully asserts that “ethnicity cannot be divorced from the military-led coups that have characterised Ghana’s political landscape, and by logical extension, politics in Ghana.” The colonial authorities, he writes, “injected ethnicity into the armed forces through a policy of recruiting overwhelmingly from the Northern sector, and keeping that part of Ghana underdeveloped.” The anti-colonialists were mainly in southern Ghana.

Nyaho-Tamakloe is a medical doctor, diplomat and always a politician. This, the younger generation in Ghana, know. Well, he had also been in the ‘firing line’ of national football administration. This is also common knowledge. What the young reader may not know is that he had joined the military as a medical officer from Czechoslovakia, imprisoned for plotting a coup, and after his release and a controversial tenure as Chair of Ghana’s premier football club Accra Hearts of Oak, had been thrown back into prison for economic offences. And while in prison for the second time, he had been elevated to practice his craft on fellow inmates, in a classic case of professional misadventure.

As a soldier, he tells his mind in an almost no-nonsense fashion–from the perspective of a founding NPP member whose labour and ideas shaped big decisions, and also as an army captain who sought to torpedo the political process. So he knows coups happen because of “personal feelings of disgruntlement.” But he also knows that the command element is crucial in every coup. He joined the Minyilla coup plot because he was convinced a senior officer leading the action “would maintain command and discipline” to avoid a bloodbath. The absence of the command element is what led to the June 4 brutalities, which Nyaho refuses to call an uprising or a revolution. He calls it an “orgy of violence and mean-spiritedness” marked by “entrepreneurial reticence.”

It is with the same stubborn audacity that the author sets out to implode certain myths in Ghanaian politics while affirming that “in postmodernity, perception is reality.” This is where the thematic project of this important book seems to assume prominence. Here too, the young reader, and maybe the greying apparatchik who may be struggling with the left wing and right wing dynamics of our politics, have something to take away. These labels, according to the seasoned politician, do not necessarily apply to us.

There have been compromises across the political ideological divides that do not divide us anymore. The Danquah-Busia-Dombo tradition has formed alliances with parties of an Nkrumahist orientation. The Progressive Alliance and the Great Alliance speak to the contention that both the NPP and the NDC are made up of people who think and act alike. If footsoldiers from the two parties “think they deserve a carte blanche to appropriate property and government institutions”, it is because of what Nyaho terms the “commoditisation of our politics” where “political office can be bought and sold.”

If parties have collapsed the dividing walls, so have the people who form the organisations. Nana-Addo is of a true, almost undiluted Danquah-Busia stock, but Bawumia is a blend of many stocks: His father belongs to a different political school while his wife’s father is Chairman of Hassan Ayariga’s Nkrumahist PNC. So, as John Jinapor answers to President John Mahama, Nyaho-Tamakloe and President Mahama are bonded by one family (Joyce Tamakloe, Nyaho’s cousin, married E.A Mahama, President Mahama’s father). Nyaho is also cousin to NDC lawyer Tsatsu Tsitaka, while his brother, Kojo Tsitaka, is his uncle. Meanwhile, Samuel Jinapor speaks for Nana Addo. “That is the complex nature of Ghanaian politics,” Nyaho underscores.

Anyhow, Never Say Die! is the culmination of several ironies long conceived in the womb of time. If the pages turn seamlessly in silken prose, and if Nyaho’s narrative is supported with rich historical research, it is because every sentence has benefitted from the scholarship of a communication professor who coauthored the book with his medical doctor friend. Dr. Felix Odartey-Wellington plies his trade at Cape Breton University in Canada, where he obliged to tend his side of what he calls a “telepathic relationship” that had bonded the two since the academic was a child. He went on to become National Secretary of the National Union of Ghana Students, the politically potent students umbrella body. He worked as a lawyer in the law firm of Nana Akufo-Addo, Nyaho-Tamakloe’s NPP colleague. Felix’s path had however strayed to the media, contributing to a rather multidisciplinary professional background which he appears to have leveraged in coauthoring this book. Many years before, however, Dr. Nyaho-Tamakloe had held the young Felix in his arms for treatment at the 37 Military Hospital.

That is not the poignant irony in this fine book. The main irony is that Felix’s father, celebrated Army Commander Major-General Neville Odartey-Wellington, was a cabinet member of the SMC administration that Captain Nyaho-Tamakloe plotted to overthrow, and which consigned Nyaho to various detention centers. But the irony blossomed: With Nyaho in the thick of Ghanaian politics after a diplomatic stint in Serbia, and Felix a sought-after public intellectual reaping the gains of his work on Canadian broadcasting policy, they did not anticipate that media ecologist Marshall McLuhan spoke for this book when he predicted a global village in 1962. And perhaps, it also serves their purposes that they have, in a bold way, actualised Victor Owusu’s advice when Nyaho and former President J.A. Kufour visited him many years ago. The veteran politician was working on a similar politician-academic autobiographical enterprise when he admonished his protégés to document history for future generations. Never Say Die! is the product. And it is also a product of what Felix describes in the preface of the book as “the ethos of taking the university to the community.”

The excellent collaboration between the authors (who are worlds apart–literally) should provoke future politicians to engage the intellectual class in Ghana, to continue the political conversation in this format. In our present mass media climate where access to information is almost unfettered, there should be a fierce urgency to memorialize good intentions and achievements for political and academic scholarship.

The two authors enjoy a good yarn, and it shows in the sequencing of events, which gives the reader the pleasure to blend in and also stand out like a vicarious participant. With the headlamps of a taxi as the only source of light, it is heartwarming to imagine Dr Nyaho-Tamakloe deliver a baby on a concrete pavement in a street corner in Accra, “cut the baby’s umbilical cord and also extract the placenta …and with ordinary black thread tie two ends on the umbilical cord…” He was in pajamas, all covered in blood. This is how far Czechoslovakian medicine goes. The description of this experience, as well as the chilling scenes of his prison life at Nsawam, where some inmates had become “somnambulists who sleep on their feet,” would make good reading for anybody who also enjoys a good yarn. The memoir at this point is hugely entertaining.

It is to Nyaho-Tamakloe’s credit that Never Say Die!, a substantial political autobiographic commentary, distances itself from the usual autobiographical format–by avoiding the temptation of creating heroic transplants. In fact, there are no heroes in this book, real or imagined. The narrative motor is powered by a deliberate effort to project good institutions and clever leadership as solutions to our governance problems. For starters, this is the work of a statesman who had personified his country as an ambassador. You will find that the concluding chapters of the memoir are full of propositions for clean politics. He turns back to the dreaded issue of ethnocentrism and warns that “Should we continue to sow winds of ethnic propaganda, we will reap the whirlwind.” Politicians need to demonstrate a clear intention to stamp out “ethno-political mobilisation” and inject discipline into our politics. He signs off with a promise: “Ghana has the potential to succeed.” Never Say Die!

By Kwesi Tawiah-Benjamin, Ottawa, Canada

bigfrontiers@gmail.com .