Is Ampem-Darko for Real?

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

Garden City, New York

August 29, 2014

E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

I have already addressed Mr. Sekou Nkrumah's publicly expressed misgivings about the age and fitness of Nana Akufo-Addo to govern the country, and so I will not waste time rehashing the same here (See my article captioned "On Akufo-Addo's Age, Sekou Nkrumah Is No God"). What does not cease to amaze me about some prominent Ghanaians who ought to know better, is the halo that has been unhealthily knitted around the personality of the country's first postcolonial leader, which prevents President Kwame Nkrumah from being realistically envisaged to have been the all-too-human and generously fallible personality that the Nzema-Nkroful native indisputably was (See Ex-GBC Boss Wonders: Is Sekou Really Nkrumah's Son?" Starrfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 8/28/14).

In his reaction to the younger Mr. Nkrumah's impugnation of the ability of the two-time flagbearer of the main opposition New Patriotic Party to govern the country, primarily on grounds of his age, Mr. William Ampem-Darko, a staunch member of the New Patriotic Party and former Director-General of the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation (GBC), is reported to have written on his Facebook Wall that Mr. Sekou Nkrumah's consistently and predictably erratic pronouncements on Ghanaian politics and political personalities necessitate the conducting of a DNA analysis in order to ascertain, if, indeed, Sekou is the biological son of the late Mr. Kwame Nkrumah.

Now that is a rather cheap and lurid shot that egregiously calls into question the conjugal fidelity of Mrs. Fathia Nkrumah, although this may well not be the intention of Mr. Ampem-Darko. The former GBC head's argument is also rather lame and psychologically absurd. For it presupposes that every known biological scion, or descendant, of President Nkrumah ought to, perforce, conduct her-/himself in a manner that is steretypically associated with the legendary firebrand pan-Africanst.

The reality of the matter, though, is that of all his publicly known and acknowledged children, Mr. Sekou Nkrumah is the one who most strikingly fits being temperamentally and behaviorally characterized as a spitting image of his father. Those who were intimately familiar with President Nkrumah, including the legendary English Africanist historian Basil Davidson, have eloquently testified that the proverbial African Show Boy was as ideologically and politically erratic and opportunistic as his half-Arab son, Sekou Nkrumah.

But, perhaps, the most pertinent question to ask of Mr. Ampem-Darko is whether if he were alive today, President Nkrumah would have endorsed the presidential ambitions of Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo on, the ticket of the political party of his arch-nemesis, Dr. Joseph (Kwame Kyeretwie) Boakye-Danquah. We need to also bear in mind that for most of his tenure, Nkrumah ran a one-party dictatorship, just like his predecessors, the British colonial administrators. The way that Mr. Ampem-Darko chooses to answer the foregoing question would pretty much determine how and why the former New Patriotic Party parliamentary candidate arrived at his rather weird and downright preposterous conclusion on the paternity of the younger Mr. Nkrumah.

He may also do himself a lot of good by recalling the particular circumstances under which Dr. Danquah died and the events surrounding his funeral and burial arrangements. Then also, Mr. Ampem-Darko and those who reason like him, vis-a-vis the icon and personality of President Nkrumah, need to vividly bear in mind that genetically speaking, Mr. Sekou Nkrumah is only half-Ghanaian. His other half, of course, is Arabic. Which may either culturally and/or scientifically explain his inordinate penchant for controversy and general attitudinal petulance.

It is the same genetic profile, of course, which explains the churlish petulance of Ms. Samia Nkrumah, unarguably the most megalomaniacal and politically abrasive of the three children of Ms. Fathia Nkrumah. Would Mr. Ampem-Darko also boldly claim Samia to be any more admirable and ideologically and politically more progressive than kid brother Sekou? I doubt it!

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