A rejoinder to: Must Sekou Thank Pres. Mills for Not Being Pres. Nkrumah?

A rejoinder to: Sekou Must Thank Pres. Mills for Not Being Pres. Nkrumah, Feature Article of Monday, 26 July 2010, by Okoampa-Ahoofe, Kwame

My dear grandson, I would be damned to expect you to pull a surprise and break this annoying monotony just for a change! As I wait impatiently for the day your darkness admits a ray, I do not give up in beaming my own lights in the hope that something can pass through your thick skull. The other day, I had a good laugh as you went blowing your Danquah horns at my good friend, and also a member of the Governing Board of the Danquah Institute, Dr. Arthur Kobina Kennedy. Even though Dr. Kennedy is also a member of the Governing Board of the Danquah Institute, in what he described as Okoampa's "misguided effusions", Dr. Kennedy wrote:

"Dr. Okoampa-Ahoofe has an unfortunate tendency to see many things around him in the context of his family and his tribe... Unlike Dr. Okoampa-Ahoofe, I believe that in the modern Ghana that we seek to build, each and every one of us must be judged, not by the deeds of some illustrious ancestors but on our own merit... I urge Dr. Okoampa-Ahoofe to mind his language. His disagreeable pieces do not serve the causes and the people he supports well. It is the misguided effusions of people like him that tend to give credence to the unfair pejorative appellation of members of his esteemed family as the “Kyebi Mafia”. As Ghanaian patriots, let us disagree if we must but let us do so with courtesy."'(Re: Arthur Kennedy is being sexist and petty, by Arthur Kobina Kennedy, Dr. Feature Article | Monday, 10 May 2010).

Since the dismissal of Sekou as a result of the very unfortunate interview he gave recently to the New African Magazine, I have read all sorts of nonsense from some NPP supporters. First, it was John Ndegugri. who publicly called on Sekou ”to take a bold decision and join the NPP, which he described as a more liberal party which is receptive to criticisms from all people.” (See: Sekou Should Join The NPP - Ndebugri, Date: 17-Jul-2010). As for Ndebugri, he has his own tribulations, and as a friend of Vladmir, his son, I shall leave the reader to make his own opinions. We all have our weak points.

Yet another trash that I read on this was a comment by one:

”Avoka mate” who said: ”Sekou is right but he should be thankful to democracy being practised in modern Ghana, thanks to Kufuor. If it had been his father's time he would have been sleeping at Nsawam Prison. He should be grateful President Mills for peacefully releasing him of his post. He should ask his father's ghost what J. B. Danquah did and his father sent him to prison to die.”

The reason why I have bothered to repeat this is because I believe it is far more better, however silly it is in its own right, than the entire article by this callow professor of yellow journalism called Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., who happens to be my own grandson.

Okoampa wants to achieve the impossible: he wants to take from Kwame Nkrumah what even the CIA-inspired coup of 1966 could not do. He writes:

'In such an atmosphere of convenient dishonesty, myth has been permitted to trump the truth of history, with the first premier of sovereign Ghana being mendaciously and deviously and superficially cast as the “epic liberator” of Ghana and continental Africa as a whole.' Just after this he proceeds to lie: ”Nonetheless, even as Mr. J. A. Braimah, a staunch and influential CPP operative, had occasion to painfully opine in the wake of the summary imprisonment and the deliberately induced death/assassination of Dr. J. B. Danquah, it very well appears as if the British colonial administration was far more interested in upholding and preserving the human and civil rights of their erstwhile Gold Coast colonial subjects than the Convention People's Party under President Kwame Nkrumah.”

Those of us who do not only know the immediate cause of Danquah's death as heart attack, but are also aware that this was occasioned by his own hallucinations of a very tormented soul who upon supposedly seeing the ghost of Nana Akyea Mensah, developed a heart failure. Of a truth, I find it very difficult to determine where to begin to debunk the kind of nonsense Okoampa has delivered in his latest article. It is a bit ironic to read from Okoampa praising the human rights records of the colonialists over and above that of the CPP government led by Kwame Nkrumah. I wonder what he would have said if Danquah had been hanged together with the co-conspirators who were found guilty in the ritual murder case of Nana Akyea Mensah, the Odikro of Apedwa in 1944.

Indeed, it is just a big pity that J.B. Danquah did not hang with the other co-conspirators who were involved in the ritual murder and a sordid human sacrifice crime in the early morning of Sunday, 27th February, 1944 at Kyebi. It would have made our history very simple and spared us of the kind of nonsense Kwame Okoampa is so very excruciatingly fond of writing. It was an open secret even in Kyebi that J. B. Danquah was an accomplice in the ritual murder of Nana Akyea Mensah. The reason he lost the elections to his nephew Aaron Ofori Atta. The plot to kill Nana Akyea Mensah was hatched in the evening of Saturday, 26th February, 1944, after a meeting involving all the principal players in the stool blackening ritual, ended in a confusion as they assembled for final preparations for the burial of the departed King, Okyehene Nana Sir Ofori Atta I.

According to the case officer, ACP/Mr Nuamah, "the climax of the week-long funeral of the late Okyehene Nana Sir Ofori Atta I was set for Sunday, 27th February, 1944. The last rite marking the end of the funeral was the celebration of the WEREMPE custom, which was the act of blackening the stool of the late chief, formally making him "an ancestor in the line of kings." The divisive issue was the question of which human being's blood was to be used for the ceremony. Present was the powerful Nana Akyea Mensah, Chief of Apedwa, and traditionally commander of the Okyehene's royal bodyguard. Nana Mensah quite clearly explained to his colleagues that times had changed. The colonial authorities at the Christianborg Castle in Osu had taken over the power of life and death from the chiefs. It was no longer possible for the chiefs to sit anywhere and condemn anybody – if they used any human blood in the ritual, the Gold Coast Police would arrest them.

This did not go down well with the Akyem fundamentalists who wanted human blood and considered Nana Akyea Mensah's intervention as an attack on their traditions and power. They opposed Nana Mensah. It must be recalled that since the return of Dr. J.B. Danquah from Britain with a Ph. D. degree in philosophy, precisely the period between 1927 and 1943, Danquah served as Ofori Atta's secretary, ambassador, and legal advisor (Attorney General). And that it was this position that gave rise to J.B. Danquah s political career. It was with his help that Ofori Atta instrumented the Native Administrative Ordinance of 1927. Naturally his advice would be sought in such a contentious issue, even if it were not for his conspicuous presence in town, also for the funeral. (Further Reading: A Murder in the Colonial Gold Coast: Law and Politics in the 1940s Richard Rathbone, The Journal of African History, Vol. 30, No. 3 (1989), pp. 445-461 (article consists of 17 pages) Published by: Cambridge University Press. See also: Reap the whirlwind, Geofrey Bing, London, 1968).

J. B. Danquah, a member of the royal family and leading barister in the Gold Coast, countered the authority of this "Kwaw Botwe" Krakyi (Akyea Mensah was not a lawyer, he completed his secondary education at Mfatsipim College as Emmanuel Ohemeng and then worked as a clerk for the Akyem Abuakwa State. This gave him access to financial misconducts of J. B. Danquah which amounted to causing serious financial loss to the Akyem Abuakwa state. It is not very clear that with the departure of the late King, he feared exposure. In any case, he would refuse to condemn human sacrifice and recommend the head of Akyea Mensah as a fourth columnist. The superior legal prowess of J.B. Daquah directed that the Akyem Abuakwa State was independent of the British Colonial rule, and the laws of Akyem Abuakwa State were not dependent upon British colonial law. It was the same argument he would use in court to the horror of the judges, who easily condemned the murderers to death sentences. Earlier, it was clear that J.B Danquah was looking for yet another opportunity to dip his hands into the Akyem Abuakwa state, in the event of such a big case going to court, encouraged and assured legal protection to the conspirators: Asare Apietu, Kwame Kagya, Kwaku Amoako Atta, Kwadwo Amoako, Kwasi Pipim, Opoku Ahwenee, A. E. B. Danquah and Owusu Akyem-Tenteng who were later found guilty of ritually killing Nana Akyea Mensah, and sentenced to death by hanging on the neck until declared dead.

An unexplained phenomenon which many witnessed, and refer to, to this day, was that after weeks of a blanket of silence as to the whereabouts of the disappeared chief, the culprits themselves started recounting their own macabre story one after the other, in what they claimed to be under the compelling demands of the ghost of Nana Akyea Mensah, the Odikro. The ghost apparently did not rest until all those directly involved with the murder had been brought to justice, before he turned his attention to the accessories. Reports that J. B. Danquah was being haunted even started before the case went to court. Others explain his extremely poor performance as the defence lawyer as being the work of Nana Akyea Mensah, even though the guy was genuinely bad as a defence lawyer. He did it for the money. He was qualified as an expert in constitutional law and so it stood to reason that he was such a pathetic and a dismal failure. Whilst some thought he was losing his mind because of the shouts and screams whilst alone in a solitary confinement, there were reports that Danquah was often haunted by a ghost, and must have been killed by Nana Akyea Mensah's ghost. This, to me, does not contradict the autopsy accounts of heart attack, since an intense fear of a determined Akyea Mensah could not have produced anything less than an instant heart attack.

It was Danquah fighting his own devils in his own mind that finally proved to be his undoing. Danquah is not the only hard-core criminal to have died in prison from absolutely natural causes. It reveals a special form of radical stupidity to ask the descendants of law-enforcers and politicians to consult the ghosts of their relations who were around each time a criminal dies prison. And for Okoampa to raise this issue with Sekou is therefore extremely grotesque, particularly considering the simple fact that Dr. Sekou Nkrumah has already paid his full citizenship dues as a civil society leader who fought and won with other Ghanaian freedom-fighters, the current constitutional dispensation we are all enjoying to day.

Whilst Kufour was a clear PNDC collaborator and Under-Secretary for Agriculture until he was dismissed by Rawlings, Dr. Sekou Nkrumah was the Regional Chairman of the Greater Accra Branch of the Movement for Freedom and Justice, the famous MFJ that spearheaded the struggle for the 4th Republican democratic order from the hands of a determined PNDC dictatorship. So it is extremely unfair to Sekou for anybody to write that Sekou must be “thankful to democracy being practised in modern Ghana, thanks to Kufuor.“ It is rather Kufour who has to thank Sekou, for putting his personal safety on-line and helping to create the very chance for him to become a president of Ghana.

As for Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., his own confessions about his behaviour under the PNDC dictatorship smacks of such cowardice that I am even disgusted by the tenor of his article. Not so long ago, thinking he was on a war path against Rawlings, he ended up exposing himself as an invertebrate coward.

Justifying why the NPP Administration should maintain a complete monopoly of the Daily Graphic, he went a step too far that rather did him in:

"Those of us with a lode of fiery conscience would be utterly disgusted and feel unpardonably violated, but we would sport a poker-face demeanor, lest we be promptly branded as "Enemies of the Revolution" and find our very existence to be at risk.... Nobody then either bickered or griped about the "biased reportage" of The People's Daily Graphic. George Orwell (a.k.a. Eric Blair) had eloquently and poignantly taught us to be nimble for the sake of being able to keep our heads on our shoulders with his literary classic Animal Farm...Those were the days when many of my most intimate classmates called me Togbui Sri II; it was a sort of ethnic camouflage. And as you can vividly see, dear reader, such ethnic camouflage perfectly served its primary objective: it would enable me to live out those lunatic days of Ghana's "Tribal Imperialism" in order to document Flt.-Lt. Yor-ke-Garri's "Housecleaning Exercise" for the benefit of my children, compatriots and posterity." (See: 'The "Graphic" Has Been Entrusted to the NPP, as Simple as That!' by Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., Feature Article | Mon, 06 Oct 2008.

I would thus like to conclude by calling on Okoampa to show Sekou some respect. He did not go and hide under his mother's bed and changed his name to Togbe Sri at a time when our nation needed men and women to stand up and be counted. As Mr. Ali-Masmadi Jehu-Appiah puts it, in a rare reaction to Okoampa:

'One would have thought that considering the extra-ordinarily large size of your mouth, coupled with what you call your "lode of fiery conscience", you would have walked your talk with the courage of your convictions, like many ordinary Ghanaians did with just a pair of balls, instead of sporting "a poker-face demeanor" as Ghanaian judges were being butchered!' (See: Kwame Okoampa Is A Charlatan! Feature Article, Wednesday, 15 Oct 2008 by Ali-Masmadi JEHU-APPIAH)

Sekou did not put on a poker face demeanour during the period of the PNDC misrule. He spoke out, as he is doing now, and whether what he says is right or wrong, that is another matter. What we don't need is every time he opens his mouth we have any Tom, Dick, and a Togbe Sri of an Okoampa making ugly noises!

Forward Ever! Backwards Never!!!
Cheers!
--
Nana Akyea Mensah, The Odikro.
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