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03.05.2007 Feature Article

Nkrumah’s “legacy” Is Not Sacrosanct

Nkrumahs legacy Is Not Sacrosanct
03.05.2007 LISTEN

As fanatical Nkrumaists begin to feel the righteous heat of historical truth and accuracy, it is only natural that they would become agitated and desperate. Having enjoyed the undeserved honeymoon of tepid and outright diffident Ghanaian scholarship – actually, pseudo-scholarship – for some sixty years, these Nkrumacrats were beginning to feel self-confident and assured in the canonicity of their historiographical mendacity, their veritable stock in trade.

Unfortunately for these “Internal/Domestic Black Imperialists” (I/D BI), a new day has dawned with the turn of the twenty-first century. The preceding simply means that no longer would Ghanaians and, by logical extension, continental Africans sit duck – or idly by – while these primitive Nkrumaist ideologues indoctrinated our sons and daughters with the jaundiced anti-intellectualism that is the hallmark of vintage Nkrumaism.

Consequently, it hardly comes as any surprise that Professor Francis Nkrumah, the otherwise reticent dauphin of the late Tyrant and Dictator of Ghana would cynically rail against what the former pediatrician of the Korle-Bu Teaching Hospital terms as “the elitist mold” of Ghanaian tertiary institutions that routinely produce “neo-liberal capitalist” graduates who, supposedly, are to be squarely held responsible for much of Ghana's massive and grinding poverty (Ghanaweb.com 5/2/07).

Perhaps somebody ought to point out to Professor Francis Nkrumah the fact that as an Arch-Socialist, his father, deposed President Kwame Nkrumah, maintained no fixed salary or income. In other words, what his followers cavalierly presume to represent the purported ideals of the proverbial “African Show Boy” is dramatically contradicted by the practical existence and (mis-)deeds of the man.

Unfortunately for the vested, or interested, likes of Professor Francis Nkrumah Ghana has politically long since transcended the sheepish and stolid era of empty rhetoric and theatrical pontification. In sum, we intend to ensure that none of our children and young relatives, including President Nkrumah's own grandchildren, would be blindly and morbidly corralled into a pathological and neo-Nazi Young Pioneer Movement (YPM) in order to not only unconscionably forge a morally and spiritually regressive Personality-Cult around the late Dictator, but also determinedly bastardize an otherwise creative and ebullient Ghanaian national ethos, or moral sensibility.

But that an organization going by the imperious name of the Socialist Forum of Ghana (SFG) actually exists, and also could freely host ideological fanatics like Professor Francis Nkrumah (and who can really blame him?) and Mr. Kwesi Pratt, Jr., only goes to show just how far Ghanaians have come by way of political and ideological maturity since 1964, when Kwame Nkrumah declared himself Ghana's Life-President and his so-called Convention People's Party (CPP) the only legitimate political institution or assembly in the former Gold Coast, with our woefully betrayed and newly-independent nation shamefully flying the “cock-and-bull” flag of the CPP, rather than the black star-studded horizontal bars of Red, Gold and Green.

Indeed, it is rather oxymoronic for Professor Francis Nkrumah to bitterly complain about the purported “re-writing” of Ghana's history. For, really, if anybody at all could ever be accused of RE-WRITING the history of Ghana, it is the elder Mr. Kwame Nkrumah, who impudently and mendaciously claimed to have been the inventor – or primal proponent – of the Blydian ideology of the “African Personality” as well as the singular spearhead of Ghana's anti-colonial movement (Ghana News Agency 5/2/07).

Needless to say, if ever the righteous, or incontrovertibly corrective, “re-visioning” of Ghana's postcolonial history occurs, it would not be effected via “local and international media…articles,” but in the form of books and comprehensive, scholastic essays published in reputable journals, the very sort of “elitist” media that Professor Francis Nkrumah may not be likely to patronize.

It is, to be certain, rather pathetic that Nkrumaist lackeys like Mr. Pratt would set up a so-called Freedom Center to “infiltrate” the minds of Ghanaian youth. Needless to say, had President Nkrumah ruled Ghana in the Internet Age, this most democratic of global information systems would almost definitely have been banned in Ghana.

*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.” E-mail: [email protected].

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