Dr Kwame Nkrumah: Ghana

Last week, Ghanaians from all walks of life and their sympathizers the world over, commemorated the 40th anniversary of the military ousting of their country's first premier, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah.

In Accra, a Socialist Forum of Ghana (SFG) described that critical milestone in postcolonial Ghanaian history as the "shameful overthrow of Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah and his Convention People's Party on February 24, 1966" (Ghana News Agency/Ghanaweb.com 2/25/06).

I don't know where Dr. Yao Graham, coordinator of the Third World Network and keynoter of the SFG commemorative forum, was on the day of President Nkrumah's overthrow; and neither does it matter much to this writer whether Dr. Graham was in Ghana or abroad.

What matters here is the imperative need for Ghanaian intellectuals, scholars and Nkruma(h)ist sympathizers to candidly disseminate the truth, instead of cynically and sophomorically pretending that everything regarding President Nkrumah and the Convention People's Party was beyond reproach.

In sum, it is the perennially raging "Discourse of Denial," on the part of self-proclaimed Nkruma(h)ists, that continues to woefully deny our pioneering premier his due in constructive and critically balanced scholarship.

Ideological sycophancy never did any nation of progressive thinkers any good; and, we are afraid, the latter is precisely what the self-proclaimed staunch Nkruma(h)ists have almost wholly been about for nearly a half-century.

Ideology of Pseudo-Marxian Socialism

For, it goes without saying that February 24, 1966 was neither a "disgraceful" nor "shameful" day in the historiographical affairs of Ghana. February 24, 1966 was simply a tragic moment in their postcolonial history when Ghanaians were compelled to conclude that internal and indigenous political repression was no more acceptable than British colonial subjugation.

And so far, Dr. Yao Graham and Mr. Tsatsu Tsikata appear to be pretending that it was hunky-dory - or perfectly normal - for Ghanaians to passively suffer civic dictatorship in the name of African self-rule, under the guise of a patently alien and unremittingly extortionate ideology of Pseudo-Marxian Socialism. Needless to say, such ideological tack constitutes the immitigable apex of intellectual dishonesty, to speak much less of the outright puerile.

Indeed, there is no question, whatsoever, that by the eve of February 24, 1966 the ideologically experimental and lethal political cup of President Nkrumah and his CPP, one-party statal apparatus, had been filled to the brim and required prompt evisceration or emptying.

Unfortunately for Dr. Graham, however, the very grim fact of the preceding reality merely called for a routine and unfettered celebration of the proverbial "Nkruma(h)ist phenomenon" because, as Dr. Graham recently told his audience of the Socialist Forum of Ghana, "the [egregious] abuse of human rights and unaccountable use of state power has been a deep [an integral?] part of the Ghanaian state for a long time" (Ghana News Agency/Ghanaweb.com 2/25/06).

In other words, what the coordinator of the Third World Network is implying here is that President Nkrumah emerged out of a culture of pathological human rights violation and abject political abuse and so nothing civilized or culturally and morally refreshing ought to have been expected of the proverbial "African Show Boy."

Postcolonial Ghanaian politics

Needless to say, this is a rather condescending, grievous and outright dangerous observation to make. For the preceding not only sacrilegiously devalue both the personality and philosophical significance of the twentieth century's foremost continental African proponent of Pan-Africanism, it also cavalierly insults the intelligence of all Ghanaians, both at home and abroad.

Of course, it would be quite interesting to learn of the exact response that Dr. Graham received from his Ghanaian audience. However, it is not difficult, at all, in the absence of such crucial knowledge, to fairly figure out the preceding.

Indeed, Dr. Graham does not seem to know or appreciate the subtle oddities of postcolonial Ghanaian politics well enough to be readily presented with the kind of forum or audience that he was reportedly accorded by the Socialist Forum of Ghana.

Thus, for instance, regarding Dr. Nkrumah's inordinate witch-hunting of his political opponents, a painful phenomenon which even many level-headed staunch Nkruma(h)ists humbly acknowledge, including this writer's own late father, the following is what the Ghana News Agency had to report on Dr. Graham: "He [Dr. Graham] said [that] the colonial legacy of an authoritarian state serving foreign interests did not offer Nkrumah much to build on by way of democratic culture of practice.

He said [that] the campaign of violence initiated by his political opponents who lost the contest to succeed the departing colonial power, triggered a repressive response that shifted whatever democratic practice [was] being nursed in the womb of the CPP."

Needless to say, I read the foregoing with a mixture of contempt and raw fury. And here, also, if one may logically ask: Does Dr. Graham know anything, at all, about Nkrumah's so-called Positive Action campaign? And has he bothered to study the contents of the 1958 Preventive Detention Act, a veritably neocolonialist CPP import from India?

Indeed, as far back as 1949, in the wake of Nkrumah's breakaway from the seminal United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC), nearly a decade before Ghana's 1957 political landmark, Dr. Danquah was eerily predicting the imminent emergence of an insufferable Nkrumah dictatorship.

It was for the latter reason that Danquah called for the senatorial integration of Chieftaincy into Ghanaian politics, in order for our revered traditional rulers to serve as a necessary and salutary check on executive excesses. For Nkrumah, as early as 1949, had already declared himself the Life-Chairman of the CPP.

Perhaps Dr. Graham ought to read Dr. Danquah's "Voice of Prophecy," "Friendship and Empire" and David Apter's historiographical classic "Ghana In Transition."

And when he asserts that "the abuse of human rights and unaccountable use of state power [have] been a deep [integral?] part of the culture of the Ghanaian state for a long time, exactly what does Dr. Graham mean? Is he for instance, talking about the veritably human rights-worshipping Constitutional Monarchies such as Adanse, Akyem, Asante, Denkyira, Gonja, Dagomba, Akuapem and a myriad others in pre-colonial Ghanaian history?

As for Mr. Tsatsu Tsikata, the indicted pseudo-socialist former chief executive of the Ghana National Petroleum Corporation (GNPC), who also presented a paper at the SFG forum, the least said about him the better.

His discursive deviousness is only to be expected, particularly when the NDC chief-terrorist's associate asserts that "Dr. Joseph Boakye Danquah, who was an opponent of Nkrumah, during the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC) days[,] admitted at a public rally that, 'even if he Danquah failed them, Kwame Nkrumah would not fail them.'"

Of course, when the integral element of rhetorical context is conveniently skewed, Mr. Tsikata comes off to his audience as a historiographical savant. But this "savant" in the salutary clutches of Ghanaian justice can only be pitied, just as one would a grouch. And here also, we charitably counsel Tsatsu to read Joe Appiah's "Autobiography of a Patriot" on the preceding score.

Of course, many of President Nkrumah's policies are still relevant for Africa's development in the twenty-first century, even as charity is known to begin first and foremost at home. However, there can be no gainsaying, whatsoever, that Danquah's unimpeachable philosophical principles for the urgent and total reconstruction of a respectable and economically, culturally and politically prosperous Ghana are even more relevant today than ever before.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., teaches English and Journalism at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is the author of "Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana" (iUniverse.com, 2005). E-mail: .