By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
March 6, 2015
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
I have generally made it a ritual of staying away from Ghana's independence anniversary festivities, because oftentimes those who really laid down their lives and sacrificed their fortunes and even paid the ultimate price for our collective self-governance are the ones who are virulently and gratuitously maligned and flagrantly ignored.
And, once again, this year was no different. We witnessed Mr. John Dramani Mahama pull up deafeningly short of fully acknowledging the real people who spearheaded the excruciating and epic move towards March 6, 1957. We watched the name of the man whose scholarship definitively influenced the choice of the latter date as the milestone of our country's new begining scandalously and glancingly hinted at in the deafening breach; and the effect was inescapably heretical (See "Statement: Mahama's Independence Day Address" Adomonline.com /Ghanaweb.com 3/6/15).
On the whole, though, the Mahama speech was far better and more refined than President John Agyekum-Kufuor's Golden Jubilee Address, some eight years ago. Still, as a bona fide member and hearty celebrant of the African-American experience, in which I am deeply invested and incurably implicated, I tend to focus more on March 6, 1857 and the infamous Dred Scott Decision, in which the extant Chief Justice of the United States Supreme Court categorically asserted that the Blackman or African person had not rights which White-America was bound and/or obligated to respect. Well, the matter regarded whether an African-American legally deserving of manumission would be duly granted the same or callously short-shrifted.
First of all, one thing must be clarified, and I hope this will be definitive. I am quite certain that Mr. Mahama has young children like me in whom he has been striving to inculcate the principles of truth, honesty and integrity. Mr. Kwame Nkrumah never earned any title called "Osagyefo" from either his own traditional heritage or any traditional ruler in the country. Indeed, in the wake of his overthrow, then Maj. A. A. Afrifa pointed to this effrontery towards our cultures and traditions as one of the factors that motivated him to join the National Liberation Council (NLC) coup plotters. The title does not even exist among his own adopted Nzema culture of Western Ghana. This is not a question or matter on which we must agree to disagree. Anyway, as I understand it, it was Nkrumah propagandist Mr. Tawia-Adamafio who wrote the title into newspaper pages and made it stick. We also know which traditional Ghanaian ruler such deliberate affront was directed towards or against, so there is not need to quibble over how many other traditional rulers share the same title.
At any rate, we cannot make truth the prime casualty of Ghana's independence history. The man also had no earned doctorate, and I am pretty certain that if any of his arch-rivals, and later inveterate political opponents, had gone around proclaiming themselves to be possessed of any honorific which they had not conventionally earned, the rabid Nkrumacrats would be up in arms and vehemently and vitriolically denying, denouncing and condemning the same and demanding its usage discontinuance. But what is even more significant, there is absolutely no shame in calling Ghana's first Leader of Government Business, Prime Minister and Executive President "Mister" Kwame Nkrumah.
It is also rather ironic that people who would not accord Dr. J. B. Danquah his duly earned honorific of "Doctor," have absolutely no qualms in addressing the man who did not conventionally earn any, not for lack of trying, by such unearned honorific. What does this communicate to a Ghanaian child being brought up on the moral teachings of honesty and integrity? What does this say about Ghanaians as a people? Then also, if you are going to list names like Sgt. Adjetey, Cpl. Attipoe and Pvt. Odartey-Lamptey who, by the way, had no direct bearing on Ghana's nationalist and independence movement, except for having been accidentally executed as World War II veterans while marching in demand for better benefits from the British colonial regime at the Osu Castle, as freedom fighters, why also not be bold, honest and courageous enough to list the names of such genuine Ghanaian nationalists and liberation fighters as Dr. J. B. Danquah, Messrs. Emmanuel Obetsebi-Lamptey, Ebenezer Ako-Adjei, Edward Akufo-Addo and William "Paa Willie" Ofori-Atta? And, of course, Mr. George Alfred "Paa" Grant?
I mean, I have absolutely no problem with the mention of Edwesohemaa (Ejisuhemaa) Nana Yaa Asantewaa, sister of the Okyenhene and my own great-grandmother, but why be timid about the genuine facts of history? Then also, there was something scandalously hypocritical and decidedly absurd about President Mahama's pretending to be a unifier of Ghanaians, when all he has been really doing for the past two years, and counting, is playing on ethnic tensions and differences as a prime political strategy. I mean, something does not add up here; but, of course, the fault here belongs more to the Atuguba-presided Supreme Court panel that declared him 2012 presidential election victor.
Then also, pretending as if the Rawlings-minted National Democratic Congress juggernaut had any enviable track-record of peaceability about the same constituted the height of moral outrage and unpardonable deceit. He was, of course, echoing the strategic double-talk of the man whose "mysterious" death, as his predecessor, Mr. Mahama has yet to definitively put paid to. I mean, this is the same man who made northern Ghanaians swear an oath not to vote for any "Kabonga," or any Ghanaian southerner of Akan descent, unless the main presidential candidate on the ticket of the New Patriotic Party was a northerner! Some sort of epiphany here, you say? My foot!
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