Seven Stories and more: Family, Ethnicity and Politics in the life of an African Lawyer

This is a fascinating collection of seven stories and more …. on Ghana. It covers the vast expanse of Ghanaian politics and the author’s sojourn in Britain at an early age. This memoir includes discussions on the English Bar, a comfortable haven for legal gossips and debates. His legal representations of the famous Liberian and Sierra Leonean rebel leaders; Charles Taylor and Corporal Foday Sankor. He also shares his experience as a Special Prosecutor in the Kukoi Samba Sanyany Treason Trial in The Gambia in 1981.

By Azanne Kofi Akainyah, digiBooks, 2023, pp 353.

Akainyah’s knowledge and command of law and politics lends authority to the topics covered - ‘small and big stories’ and great and not so great people among others. The big people include Justice Nii Amaa Ollennu, who the author describes as ‘…a politician masquerading as a judge.’ IGPJWK Harley the man who initiated the coup against Kwame Nkrumah and recruited Col. Emmanuel Kwesi Kotoka. According to Kofi Awoonor, Kotoka a ‘‘simple minded and singularly naïve soldier’’ brought in Major A. A. Afrifah to stage the February 1966 coup. Harley also recruited Police Commissioner A. K. Deku, who is believed to have coined the phrase ‘the myth around Nkrumah’. These men were powerful members of the National Liberation Council (NLC) government. Other stories include the flamboyant, Cambridge educated lawyer who became Attorney-General of Ghana and later Zanzibar, Alhaji Bashiru Kwaw-Swanzy, who converted to Islam after prison service. A mercurial intellect, incisive and quick. In 1962 Swanzy defended Sir Dauda Jawara of The Gambia against allegations of electoral fraud. Another Ghanaian intellectual heavy weight Akain kay enjoyed rigours intellectual debate with is the affable expert on Italian Socialist Movements, Moses Anafu. He was a highly respected technocrat at the Commonwealth secretariat in London. The struggle against UNIGOV, the infamous murder of the 3 high court judges and a retired military officer on 30th June 1982 are comprehensively chronicled. The book is packed with information.

Immediately after the February 1966 coup, the new government, the National Liberation Council (NLC) appointed Sole Commissioners to investigate on a number of corruption allegations against the Nkrumah government. The most important of these Commissioners was the triumvirate of Justices Ollennu, Apaloo and Azu Crabbe. Ollennu’s responsibility was to investigate corruption related to the import licenses system. The three (3) justices were ‘versed in criminal law and procedure and ‘apparently’ committed to fair trial among others under Nkrumah. But, soon after the coup Akainyah writes; ‘these individuals were actually visceral political opponents of Nkrumah (and) those associated with him.’ Ollennu, Apaloo and Crabbe presided as different Sole Commissioners, ‘but would then sit as judges in trials arising from findings made by their fellow judges who had sat also as Sole Commissioners in separate inquiries. It became a circus of horror since each one of them found it expedient to support the recommendations or findings of his colleague. In the specific case of Mrs Victoria Adobea Akainyah, the findings were made by the Ollennu Commission. The trial judge during prosecution was Azu Crabbe, already a Sole Commissioner. Justice Apaloo another Sole Commissioner thereafter sat on Mrs Akainyah’s appeal. This was simply an abuse of the judicial process. ‘You scratch my back, I scratch your back was in full play’.

The central characters of the memoir are the author’s father, Mr Alfred Augustus Akainyah (AAA), a Nzema and the son of Tufuhene (a chief adviser to a chief in the rich Akan tradition) and his mother Victoria Adobea Akainyah from Akwapim and, a respected hardworking businessman. AAA was a police officer before going to Britain to read law and becoming a judge. Something unusual in the early years after independence. AAA could best be described as an archivist who documented everything. A kind of Tony Benn, the Labour MP of Britain. A lawyer by profession, but a historian at heart who argued that the past is never the whole story because the present also counts. The past gives birth to the present which leads to the future. The author’s schoolmates once confronted him saying that the Nzemas are ‘a people feared for being versed in witchcraft’ from the Western region. Madam Victoria Adobea Akainyah’s background is as fascinating as her life’s journey. She was an Akwapim business woman whose ancestors partly came from Jamaica. She was unjustly imprisoned at the famous James Fort Prison Accra constructed in 1673 as a slave and gold market. Her imprisonment by the National Liberation Council government (1966-69) is a sad story. She was accused for being an agent of Mr Kwesi Armah and allegedly collected bribes on his behalf. Mr Kwesi Armah, an Nzema was a close confident of Nkrumah. As High Commissioner in London, Mr Armah had no role in domestic trade. However, this was the time for attacks on the Nzema ethnic group that to which Mr Akainyah and Nkrumah belonged. Mrs Akainyah who learned to write and read through adult education was simply the easiest way to have Judge Akainyah pay for his association by birth with Nkrumah. Judge Akainyah had refused a suggestion from Nkrumah to be made the Chief Justice in 1964

The author gives an intimate account of the 1966 coup. One that stands out is the senior Akainyah’s encounter with a police constable who was on guard duty at his bungalow. The police Constable walked up to Judge Akainyah and confidently said to him, “Look here, if you play the fool, I will shoot you. Nzema power is finished. It is now Ewe power!". Senior judges then and now have the services of a uniformed police officer, a relic of the colonel era.

Akainyah offers a brilliant explanation for the campaign by his father against the unjust incarceration of his mother. Letters upon letters. Protest upon protest. Reading the book, I thought his father was riled at one point. However, sustained protest is what is needed in a dictatorship - be it civilian or military. The NLC’s judiciary failed to silence the Akainyah family. Judge Akainyah wrote more than 400 letters, protest notes and complaints about the unjust incarceration of his wife.

While Seven Stories and more … is mainly comprised an assortment of first-person narratives and it’s less sprawling, more balanced; revolving around two poles father and mother. It’s also a cerebral book with a peculiarly Pan-African bias. The debt to Kwame Nkrumah is evident throughout the book. Akainyah by training is meticulous. He uses the archives to demonstrate the misinformation paraded post the CIA financed coup. For example, it was widely reported that Krobo Edusei aka ‘Mok’ a notoriously verbose politician whose wife Mary Edusei had purchased in 1962 a ‘golden’ bed for GBP5,000. This became “emblematic” of the corruption of the Nkrumah regime. In fact, the bed was not a golden bed. But was plated ‘with polished brass”.

An intellectual discussion in the popular and respected West Africa Magazine published in London drew attention of the author’s sister Clara and hundreds of other Ghanaians. It was photocopied and passed on. She admonished her brother not to be ‘horrid’ to Prof Kofi Awoonor again.

It was during the years of what is generally known as ‘a culture of silence’ that a simple book review in 1985 created a storm. In the review of Kofi Awoonor’s book "The Ghana Revolution" – background account from a personal perspective published in 1984 Akainyah noted that a tribalistic interpretation of Ghana’s history and specifically an assault on Ashantis’ was the central focus of the book. This book, is described by a reader of the magazine ‘as brimful with hatred’ Awoonor, whose ancestors came from Sierra Leone and Brazil was unapologetically an ‘Ewe Supremo’.

Seven Stories presents a rigorous analysis of Ghanaian history over the past 60 years, drawing on a wealth of evidence from archives. It is superbly a fascinating read, and not to be missed.