Cut Your Blasphemy Mr. Agyeman-Duah!

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

It was only a matter of time before I came around to addressing the persistently backhanded attempts by some brazen hangers-on of ex-President J. A. Kufuor to blasphemously relegating the phenomenal achievements of the Doyen of Gold Coast and modern Ghanaian politics to a mere and mildly colorful backdrop to the largely passable, if also stunningly lackluster, Kufuor administration.

At any rate, this particular mischievous attempt to downgrade the seminal achievements of Dr. Joseph (Nana Kwame Kyeretwie) Boakye-Danquah, with which we are currently concerned, comes from an all-too-predictable source; and that predictable source, of course, is the exuberant (official?) biographer of Ghana’s first, real civilian premier of our country’s so-called Fourth Republic.

In either a badly edited or written article captioned “The Philosopher and Foreign Policy,” which originally appeared in the New African magazine’s March 2004 edition, Mr. Ivor Agyeman-Duah flagrantly, if also extravagantly, claims that like Karl Marx, Dr. Danquah laid the “theoretical foundations” of postcolonial Ghana’s enduring culture of liberal democracy. The disingenuousness of the writer poignantly comes to the fore, however, when Mr. Agyeman-Duah makes the following rather hollow and half-baked observation: “Danquah shared a common history with [Karl] Marx of never assuming [political] power. An astute philosopher, a PhD holder from the University of London, Danquah was[,] however[,] no match for Kwame Nkrumah and his Convention People’s Party, which won a series of elections until Nkrumah led Ghana to independence on 6 March 1957.”

Furthermore, the author of Between Faith and History: A Biography of J. A. Kufuor (Lynne Rienner, 2007) observes: “But Danquah had many things against Marx. In 1948, Danquah told a gathering of anti-colonial nationalists: ‘The [UGCC’s] policy is to liberate the energies of the people for the growth of a property-owning democracy in this land, with [the] right to life, freedom and justice as the principle to which the government and the laws of the land should be dedicated in order to specifically enrich life, property and liberty of each and every citizen.”

First of all, there is absolutely no “shared common history” between Drs. Danquah and Marx, for the glaringly obvious and simple reason that the great Ghanaian thinker and pioneering African nationalist, in the primary and classical sense of the term, was also a political pragmatist who actually facilitated the formation of the very first multi-ethnic and cross-regional nationalist political party in modern Ghana, the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC), whereas Karl Marx largely formulated his theories regarding wealth creation and class warfare while teaching as a young university professor and almost wholly as a private thinker, intellectual and scholar of the ivory-tower mold.

In other words, contrary to what Mr. Agyeman-Duah would have his readers believe, unlike the immortalized German thinker, Dr. Danquah actually put his theories into practice, as witnessed in his indefatigable agitation for Ghana’s liberation from British colonial imperialism through the UGCC. Furthermore, being Jewish and with the level of German anti-Semitism at an insufferable height, coupled with his own principled pursuit of a just society and run-ins with academic authorities, Marx was forced to spend most of his adult life engaged in private scholarship abroad, largely in England, on the material magnanimity of his friend Friedrich Engels. Danquah, we must note in passing, also conducted extensive research on Ghana, in particular, and Africa, in general, at the British Museum, though such spells of reflective sojourn were primarily and purely voluntary. Marx, on the other hand, was never known to be an “on-the-ground” scholar-activist in the Danquahist mold.

Then also, it would have been far more accurate if Mr. Agyeman-Duah had pointed out the historically incontrovertible fact that it was, indeed, Danquah’s selfless and meticulous grooming and, in fact, unreserved public promotion of Kwame Nkrumah as an unstinted loyalist and patriot and the former’s “heir apparent,” that enabled the latter to momentarily present a formidable challenge to the former, once the devious, egomaniacal and coldly calculating Nkrumah saw the chance to ride roughshod over his mentors and benefactors of the UGCC by breaking away and forming his half-plagiarized and tastelessly tautological Convention Peoples’ Party (CPP).

But even more significant, rather than pat and cavalierly asserting that “Danquah was[,] however[,] no match for Kwame Nkrumah,” the Kufuor biographer ought to have honestly acknowledged the fact that a largely illiterate (and preliterate) Ghanaian electorate in the 1950s was hardly sophisticated enough to have been able to cut through Nkrumah’s largely vacuous propaganda rhetoric and abject campaign of half-truths, outright mendacity and flagrant sophistry. For the preceding is actually that which incontrovertibly and handily passes historiographical muster, systematically and objectively subjected to scrutiny.

Then also, it is absolutely untrue that only in 1948 did Danquah, who had been frontally engaged in the drafting of at least two constitutional documents paving the way for Ghana’s independence, lay down the theoretical foundations “from which the Kufuor government [took] inspiration.” As pointed out, time and again, in several of my essays and articles on the Doyen of modern Ghanaian politics, the theoretical foundations of Ghana’s liberal democratic political culture began to be laid by Dr. Danquah as far back as 1929, when the John Stuart Mills scholar and gold medalist in the Philosophy of the Mind and Logic established his Gold Coast Youth Conference (GCYC), a seminal quasi-think tank charged with the progressive objective of systematically laying down the architectural foundations of an Independent Ghana in the offing.

It sadly and, one may aptly add, painfully appears that Mr. Agyeman-Duah’s whole premise in composing his article titled “The Philosopher and Foreign Policy” was to slyly stake out a discrete and superior claim for his benefactor and in the process, wittingly or unwittingly, “put Danquah in his place.” I am forced to write frankly about this question because I found the author of Between Faith and History, which I only partially perused, for I found the book to be unacceptably fraught with too many typographical and grammatical slips to whet my reading appetite, to be engaged in the same historiographical mischief vis-à-vis the 1979 political rift that caused the Danquah-Busia ideological adherents to be regressively split into the so-called Popular Front Party (PFP), led by Mr. Victor Owusu, and the William (Paa Willie) Ofori-Atta-led United National Convention (UNC).

On the preceding score, this is what Mr. Agyeman-Duah, a former ministerial diplomat without portfolio in Ghana’s London High Commission under the Kufuor government, has to say: “But Ghana’s foreign policy under President Kufuor does not rest on only what Danquah had to say. Article 40 of the 1992 Constitution …creates the framework for how successive governments should conduct their relationships with other governments and international organizations, including the African Union, United Nations, Commonwealth and others.” The Shakespearean rub, however, comes when the writer asserts the following: “The details of this [i.e. Ghana’s foreign policy], however, lie in the formulation of policies. President Kufuor, who at the age of 30, [sic] was already a deputy minister of foreign affairs, has ‘economic diplomacy’ as the mantra but it has more practical meaning than intellectual formulation.”

Anyway, whose non-practical/abstract or sheer “intellectual formulation” is Mr. Agyeman-Duah alluding to here? And just what sort of “Kufuorian economic diplomacy” are we talking about here that patently makes Danquah’s “intellectual formulation” appear to be more chimerical – or airy-fairy – than realistic or even pragmatic? And exactly how does the following observation make ex-President Kufuor a more effective and astute leader than his predecessors, other than, as one Ghanaian editor-publisher then put it, Mr. Kufuor having been a premier so afflicted with such pathological wanderlust as to make him crave seizing the least opportunity to get on an aircraft and fly abroad, as far away as conceivable, and away from the teeming socioeconomic problems of the country?

Regarding the foregoing, Mr. Agyeman-Duah confirms the worst of our fears as follows: “The president, in his fourth year in office, is the most traveled leader since independence, having made over 63 visits to foreign countries. He has visited many neighboring countries that Ghana previously had serious political problems with because, as he said in his inaugural address in January 2001, ‘We cannot hope to build a vibrant and prosperous Ghana unless we are at peace with our neighbors.”

It goes without saying, of course, that it is all-too-natural for both Danquah and Busia’s ideological scions to be expected to have positively advanced, in practice, the collective ideals for which these two liberal democratic patriarchs stood, although I just happen not to believe that demanding six chauffeur-driven private automobiles from the state, to be freely service and replaced every four years by way of a partial presidential gratuity, as well as two homes and a million dollar-plus annual salary, is integral to the sort of altruistic or service-oriented liberal democracy admirably advocated by both Drs. Danquah and Busia.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is a Governing Board Member of the Accra-based democratic think-tank the Danquah Institute (DI), and author of 20 books, including “Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana” (iUniverse.com, 2005). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@aol.com. ###