By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Sept. 26, 2014
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
We go through this nonsensical cycle of half-truths and whole-cloth fabrications every year; and, of course, these half-truths and complete fabrications are deviously calculated by ardent Nkrumacrats to make Ghanaians feel, somehow, regretful about the indisputably auspicious overthrow of Life-President Kwame Nkrumah. And this year, it was the turn of Dr. Vladimir "Putin" Antwi-Danso to take us on this vacuous self-flagellating trip of hot air (See "Antwi-Danso Denies Nkrumah Became Palmwine Tapper in Guinea" Starrfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 9/26/14).
At a lecture delivered in Accra, marking the 35th anniversary of the voting into power of the Hilla Limann-led People's National Party (PNP) on Sept. 24, 1979, the well-known University of Ghana research scholar was reported to have asserted that in the wake of Nkrumah's overthrow, on Feb. 24, 1966, rumors widely circulated to the effect that the deposed dictator was in Guinea-Conakry tapping palmwine, while his Egyptian trophy-wife sold fermented salted fish in the streets of the Guinean capital. Dr. Antwi-Danso was further reported to have asserted that Ghanaian musicians even composed songs celebrating the epic humiliation of the Nzema-Nkroful native and his wife.
The fact of the matter is that while, indeed, popular songs had it that President Nkrumah was "sitting/living" in Guinea as a palmwine tapper, these songs were actually composed and publicly sang as marching songs by the officers and members of the Ghana Armed Forces and the Kotoka-led National Liberation Council (NLC) that ousted the Convention People's Party. And it must be put on record that absolutely no song had Mrs. Fathia Nkrumah selling "Mormorne" or fermented salted fish on the streets of Conakry. Most Ghanaians, of course, were well aware of the fact that Fathia was in faraway Egypt, her home-country, and had not embarked on Nkrumah's self-appointed peace-mission trip to Hanoi and Beijing.
To be certain, the most common and widely sung of the songs composed in celebration of the overthrow of the African Show Boy had the latter's wife selling corn-porridge and corn-donuts (koko ne koose) on the streets of Conakry. Another version of the preceding song claimed Fathia to be possessed of a jumbo pudenda/vagina of unspeakable proportions, the latter with which she was selling her purported corn-porridge in Conakry (See J. C. DeGraft's volume of poetry titled Beneath the Jazz and Brass). The obviously infelicitous implication here was that Ghana's former first lady was a prostitute.
But, of course, what is telling or most significant about these songs is the inescapable extent to which they poignantly reflected exactly how Ghanaians felt themselves to have been watonly savaged and maltreated by the key operatives of the Nkrumah-led Convention People's Party. We must also hasten to add that no government's overthrow in postcolonial Ghana since 1966 has been nearly as heartily celebrated on a scale even half approaching the spontaneous and "explosive" celebrations that greeted the overthrow of Mr. Nkrumah, both in terms of magnitude and intensity, as well as the duration of celebration.
And to be certain, even as of this writing, only a significantly few Ghanaians really believe that the ousting of Kwame Nkrumah constituted any crime against salutary democratic governance. Indeed, if rumors discrediting of the key operatives of the original Convention People's Party were rife during Nkrumah's tenure, this was primarily because the CPP woefully lacked the sort of administrative transparency routinely associated with accountable governance and responsible leadership.
And guess what? Some 48 years on, it is still not clear whether the Nkrumacrats are capable of delivering good governance to the Ghanaian electorate, besides abjectly cheap and tawdry political sloganeering. And this is what all progressive and well-meaning Ghanaians ought to be concerned with and be talking about.
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