Record Of Ghana's Historical Past

The recent inauguration of the Kobina Sekyi Memorial Lectures, in addition to the already established J.B. Danquah and Kwame Nkrumah annual lectures, provides an opportunity to draw special attention to the neglected aspects of Ghana’s political history in order to set the record straight for the younger generation.

Our youth seem to have a very limited knowledge and appreciation of the background to Ghana’s independence struggle and its singular significance. We need to go beyond superficial and partisan analysis of past events to recognise the contributions made across the board to Ghana’s position in the world today.

Put differently, Ghanaians must know more about where we have really come from, in order to build upon it. As a country, Ghana is not 53 years (1957 – 2010). It is its independence from the long period of British colonialism (1874 -1957), which is 53 years old on March 6, 2010.

Against this background, it has become increasingly necessary for us to address this lack of knowledge and the high level of intellectual dishonesty associated with Ghana’s history. We should constantly bear in mind that if we lose our sense of history, we lose our sense of identity, and if we lose our sense of identity, we lose our sense of purpose.

It is important therefore for each generation to pass on to the next the stories that help us to make sense of our experience as a people.

The current full-year celebration of the centenary of our First President, Dr Kwame Nkrumah, should provide the rare opportunity to candidly and objectively reappraise Ghana’s historical past, using primary sources available in both the Public Record Office in the United Kingdom and the Public Records and Archives in Ghana, supplemented by Legislative Council and Parliamentary debates, private papers of our stalwart nationalists and structured interviews with participant observers.

One is tempted to suggest this important academic exercise to the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, with its fine and fitting motto, Promoting Excellence in Knowledge, for urgent consideration in the course of its ongoing Golden Jubilee Year celebration.

First and foremost, it has become increasingly evident that the resounding success of Kwame Nkrumah in overthrowing colonialism in Ghana in the 1950s seems to have overshadowed the equally spectacular role and contributions of the early nationalist politicians in the struggle towards Ghana’s emancipation.

Thus, while Nkrumah’s legendary role is constantly brought to the Ghanaian public consciousness, the tendency nowadays is to disregard the tradition of colonial protest and agitation for self-government and independence which Nkrumah came to inherit when he entered nationalist politics in late December 1947. Consequently, the considerable political awakening and pan-African consciousness which were spearheaded  by J. E. Casely Hayford, Hutton Mills, J.B. Danquah, Kobina Sekyi, R.S. Blay, Akilakpa Sawyerr, Kojo Thompson, G E. More, S. R. Wood, Ashie Nikoi, Nanka Bruce, and many others have not received due recognition, especially among those who consider our First President , Dr Kwame Nkrumah, as ‘the architect of Ghana’s independence’.

In 1964, for example, the Spark, the most radical and Marxist –Leninist mouthpiece of Nkrumahism, vigorously argued that there was no Pan-Africanism prior to Kwame Nkrumah (The Spark, October 16 and November 20, 1964). Even such stalwart pan-Africanists as W.E.B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey and George Padmore were ridiculously ruled out as champions of Pan-Africanism. Instead of using the historical traditions of the concept of Pan-Africanism, as one would expect, Pan-Africanism for the Spark began with Nkrumah, its first and only prophet. To say the least, this is mere fiction.

Similarly, Ras Thomas Makonnen, the veteran West Indian pan-Africanist and one of Nkrumah’s closest associates in England, who settled in Ghana during the early years of independence, claims in his 1973 memoirs that it was Kwame Nkrumah who ‘promoted the idea of a separate national university for Ghana,’ as  opposed to a single West African university’ (Ras T. Makonnen, Pan-Africanism From Within, Oxford: OUP, 1973, p.203). Yet it is common knowledge that the minority report  of the Walter Elliot Commission on Higher Education in West Africa  which proposed a single university for West Africa was published in June 1945, when Nkrumah was in England. It is an undisputable fact that it was J.B. Danquah, who fought relentlessly with his Gold Coast Youth Conference for a separate university for Ghana. Nkrumah returned to Ghana in December 1947, and in the following year, the University College of the Gold Coast was formally established.

Significantly, too, although the 1981 Handbook of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences gives a reliable account of the circumstances of the foundation of the Academy, no reference is made to Dr J.B. Danquah who, as early as June 1953, conceived the idea of establishing a Ghana Academy of Sciences.

In his letter reference 30/P/53 of 19 June 1953 addressed to K. B. Ateko, a former Master of Achimota College and Treasurer of the Bond of 1844 Centenary Fund (1944), Dr Danquah firmly instructed that ‘if the Board of Trustees agree, the Centenary Fund be made the initial capital of a learned or scientific society to be called the Ghana Academy of Sciences to be set up as early as possible, say in the year of our attaining self-government, which I hope will be in March 1954, 10 years after the Centenary of the Bond, as an Academy of Sciences is the nearest thing to theosophy’.

He insisted that early steps should  be taken ‘to get Ghana Academy  of Sciences established’. Thus, while we appreciate that it was Nkrumah who formally established the Academy to set the record straight, it should be admitted and fully acknowledged that the idea came from J.B. Danquah, and that due recognition should be given to this incontestable fact.

Nkrumah himself would seem to have consciously or unconsciously encouraged the tendency of distorting or misrepresenting aspects of our political history.

For while in his book, titled I Speak of Freedom, he acknowledges that there was a ‘a considerable political awakening in the Gold Coast between 1919 and 1947’ (Kwame Nkrumah, I Speak of Freedom,  New York: Praeger, 1961, p.1), he amazingly claims in his Dark Days in Ghana, published in 1967 after his overthrow, that it was he who launched the  nucleus of the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC) in Saltpond  on December 29, 1947 (Kwame Nkrumah, Dark Days in Ghana, London: Panaf, 1967., p.53).

Yet it is again common knowledge that the UGCC was launched by Pa Grant, Danquah and their associates on August 4, 1947, when Nkrumah was still in England. Osagyefo, perhaps unconsciously, takes the date of confirmation of his appointment as Secretary General of the UGCC, which was December 29, 1947 to mark the date on which the organisation was actually launched in Ghana.

All this tends to deepen the myth around the personality of President Nkrumah and his role in Ghana’s recent past. For no keen observer of Ghana’s political history can deny, for example, that Nkrumah’s pan-African ideas, his concept of African personality and of West African unity as an approach to Pan-Africanism, the relentless opposition to colonialism and imperialism and organisation of the youth against both the colonial establishment and the traditional rulers, were not particularly new in Ghana’s political history.

His was, in fact, a revival at a critical period of Ghana’s history of ideas or concepts which had held sway among the forerunners of Ghana’s independence. What Nkrumah did when he entered nationalist politics in late 1947 was to give greater expression to the tradition of anti-colonialist stance and pan-African consciousness which the early nationalists had planted in the soil of Ghana.

Thus, the triumph of Ghanaian nationalism culminating in the country’s independence in March 1957 is but the final co-ordination and intensification of all the tangled strands of an earlier, usually unrecognised movements and sustained agitation for self-government.

Another significant aspect of the so-called Ghana House Which Nkrumah Built, to quote the title of Professor Agyemang Badu Akosah’s recent Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences lecture, which has so far not received any attention, is the governance legacy of the Nkrumah era. Until barely a week ago when the eminent scholar, Professor A.K.P. Kludze, boldly ‘opened’ aspects of this Ghanaian “ Pandorah box”, Nkrumah’s repressive governance style would seem to have been forgotten.

For the sake of our younger generation, who never experienced Nkrumah’s governance era, it has become necessary to undertake a critical analysis of the impact of the Nkrumah governance experiment: the one-party political system and the turning of the presidency into a lifetime position, which were widely emulated by many an emerging African state of the 1960s.

During this period , democracy, rule of law, good governance and human rights became ‘scarce commodity’ in Ghana, which contributed, in no small measure, to the collapse of many of the forty-seven state corporations set up from 1961 to 1965. Without good governance, democracy and human rights, it would be difficult to achieve any meaningful sustainable development.

Closely related to life presidency, is the imperative need to research into the rationale for Nkrumah’s enactment of the Preventive Detention Act (PDA) in July 1958. The PDA, a dangerous weapon of oppression, had a disturbing impact, particularly on the fate of four of Nkrumah’s stalwart nationalist “Big Six” colleagues.

Under it, (i) J. B. Danquah, the doyen of Ghana politics, the flower of West African scholarship and fighter in the cause of human freedom, was detained first, in July 1961 and released on June 20, 1962; and second, arrested on January 8, 1964 and detained again without trial at the Nsawam Medium Security Prison and died on February 4, 1965; (ii) Mr. William Ofori Atta, popularly known as Paa Willie, was detained twice, first in 1963 for two weeks and in 1964 for eleven months; (iii) Dr Ako Adjei, then Minister of Foreign Affairs, was detained in August 1962, following the Kulungugu assassination attempt on Nkrumah and, (iv) Obetsebi Lamptey was detained in an unknown place where he died.

The fifth ‘Big Six’ colleague of Nkrumah, Edward Akufo Addo, was disgracefully dismissed from the Bench by President Nkrumah for acquitting Dr Ako Adjei, Tawia Adamafio and H.H. Coffie Crabbe, who were alleged to have initiated the Kulungugu episode.

The threat of indiscriminate use of the PDA forced into exile Komla Agbeli Gbedemah, a one time very close associate of President Nkrumah, the one who successfully campaigned  for Nkrumah during Ghana’s first ever general election in 1951, when Nkrumah was in detention.

Gbedemah got Nkrumah released to become Leader of Government Business and subsequently, the first Prime Minister of Ghana. Similarly, a senior Cabinet Minister, P.K.K. Quaido, was rushed to detention for speaking his mind  in Parliament on some critical issues of the time and many more.

Further research would be required into the impact of the Young Pioneer Movement on the Ghanaian society, as an aspect of the governance experiment of the Nkrumah era. Significantly, too, we need to undertake a serious research into the cause of the sustained widespread jubilation of the people of Ghana over the overthrow of President Nkrumah on February 24, 1966, a pomp and pageantry and fun fair which far surpassed the one which greeted the declaration of independence on March 6, 1957.

Indeed, for many  serious thinking  Ghanaians, February 24, 1966, was  Ghana’s day of ‘Redemption’ and NOT a day of ‘Shame’ as  being peddled about.

Related to this is the following searching question. Why did the people of Ghana consider it extremely necessary to change the original words of the national anthem soon after Nkrumah’s overthrow? And why were such sentences, as the following, for example, were inserted in the National Anthem: ‘And let us resist the oppressor’s rule ….’  Who was the ‘oppressor’ in the 1960s?

Undoubtedly, a great deal of a fair and objective research is urgently required into the Nkrumah era to straighten the record for our ‘rising generation’.

---

Add this page to your favorite Social Bookmarking websites

 

Comments

Add New Search

this is the historical records (196.201.34.xxx) 2010-03-28 09:22:20 the appropriate historical resource to shed light on the happenings at independence we the youth have been misled by mischievous characters who parade themselves as saints and apostles of history. thank you prof. we want more records from your outfit Reply 0 0

Write comment
Name:
Email:	do not notifynotify
Website:
Title:
Please input the anti-spam code that you can read in the image.

Powered by !JoomlaComment 4.0 beta1

!joomlacomment 4.0 Copyright (C) 2009 Compojoom.com . All rights reserved."