But Nkrumah Was Wickedly Demented And Paranoid, Prof. Akosa!

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

Garden City, New York

Feb. 6, 2015

E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

The caption for this article is obliquely culled from the much misquoted Mahoney book titled JFK: The Africa Ordeal. It is much misquoted because many of those who claim to be quoting from this quite notable and scholarly American politician and the son of a late former diplomat, and former U.S. Ambassador to Ghana, are often quoting from hearsay. As of this writing, I am in the process of collecting into a volume a series of short articles that I wrote based on my own reading and analysis and interpretation of the aforementioned treatise.

The title of this article echoes the response of Senegal's immortalized scholar-statesman and French-Constitution grammarian President Leopold Sedar Senghor, who was once asked, according to Prof. Mahoney, to offer his personal views and opinions on the personality and leadership of Ghana's President Kwame Nkrumah. According to the author of JFK: The Africa Ordeal, the erudite polyglot and foremost proponent of the Negritude literary movement and ideology is reported to have tersely, albeit poignantly, riposted that the infamous Ghanaian dictator needed to promptly consult a psychiatrist.

Prof. Agyeman-Badu Akosa's rather sheepish and self-righteous declaration that Dr. J. B. Danquah was no saint, would come as absolutely pedestrian and a patent non-issue, if the former Director of Medical Services in Ghana had also not mischievously sought to implicate the man who is widely regarded as The Dean of Gold Coast and Ghanaian Politics as one who may have been directly, or indirectly, implicated in the Black-Star Square / Independence Square assassination attempt on the life of President Nkrumah (See "Dr. J. B. Danquah Was No Saint - Prof. Akosa" Graphic Online 2/6/15).

Prof. Akosa weirdly claims that during the second arrest (he does not actually specify the period) and summary detention that led to the death of Dr. Danquah at the Nsawam Medium-Security Prison on Feb. 4, 1965, the then-accidental pinch-hitter or stand-in leader of the Busia-led United Party (UP) had been arrested in the vicinity of the buildings housing the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation "with a prepared speech" which the 1960 default Presidential Candidate of the UP had deliberately and deftly "choreographed to coincide with the attempted assassination of Nkrumah by Constable Seth Ametewe."

Now, this very interesting apocryphal narrative - for no credible and authoritative scholar of the period in question that this writer knows of makes any such outrageous claim - verges on the criminally calculating; Prof. Akosa is a pathologist or a coroner, or medical examiner, and so he may be pardoned (my profuse apologies to Nana Akufo-Addo) for so shamelessly peddling such mendacity. Still, we must quickly point out that such curious fabrication makes his assertion no less serious, if also because it facilely and inexcusably seeks to justify the patently untenable.

I have personally examined the Ametewe narrative (See my book, Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana, iUniverse.com, 2005). Needless to say, there is absolutely no evidence indicating that, indeed, Constable Seth Ametewe had any known acquaintance or relationship, either directly or indirectly, with Dr. Danquah. If his forensically established motive for attempting to assassinate President Nkrumah was to have the latter's former political mentor illegally assume Ghana's reins of governance, then his abortive operation had been undertaken for reasons and/or purposes that had absolutely nothing to do with the perceived political ambitions of Dr. Danquah.

Legend has it that the would-be assassin of President Nkrumah had confessed that he was on a revenge mission for Dr. Danquah. What is fascinating about this narrative is that the only witnesses present were two, or three, bodyguards of President Nkrumah one of whom reportedly perished by interposing himself between President Nkrumah and the gunman. That slain guard, Mr. Issa Salifu (I cannot recall his exact military rank) had a son with the same name who was three years my senior at St. Peter's Secondary School, Okwawu-Nkwatia.

We must also point out that by 1954, when he was resoundingly defeated in a legislative assembly election by his own nephew, Mr. Aaron (Kofi Asante) Ofori-Atta, Dr. Danquah had conclusively come to terms wth the grim fact of the end of his political career having dawned. From then on, he had largely resigned himself to being an elderly statesman, in spite of his quite youthful vitality and inimitable intellectual acuity and puissance at just under 60 years old. His decision to vehemently contest the heavily rigged 1960 presidential election (See Dennis Austin's Politics In Ghana: 1946-1960) was due primarily to the increasingly tyrannical and dictatorial tendencies of then-Prime Minister Nkrumah, as well as the latter's very well-known assassination attempt on the life of his most formidable political opponent and parliamentary opposition leader, the Oxbridge-educated Dr. Kofi Abrefa Busia.

And so this nonsense by Prof. Akosa about Dr. Danquah's being hell-bent on acceding to the presidency as a birthright by 1960 and beyond, reeks of the arrantly and abjectly asinine, to speak much less about the downright idiotic. Indeed, by 1960, Dr. Danquah was more intent on fighting off Nkrumah's fast-creeping "constitutional dictatorship" and his virtual reign-of-terror. At any rate, if President Nkrumah had any forensically foolproof evidence linking his arch-nemesis to the Ametewe Affair, what had prevented a megalomaniacal, narcissistic and self-absorbed and self-righteous President Nkrumah from arraigning Dr. Danquah before a legitimately constituted court of law? After all, hadn't the Show Boy caused Messrs. Ako-Adjei, Kofi Crabbe and Tawia Adamafio to stand trial before the Supreme Court of Ghana for their alleged and / or suspected involvement in the Kulungugu Affair?

I really don't believe by any measure, or stretch of the imagination, that he sincerely means it, when Prof. Akosa observes that the prison assassination of Dr. Danquah by President Nkrumah was "regrettable." If, indeed, it was then why have the CPP stalwarts back-handedly and resoundingly rejected Nana Akufo-Addo's laudable conciliatory gesture of forgiveness and kinship or brotherhood on this half-century commemoration of the assassination of Dr Danquah? You just think about it!

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