Jewel Ackah Tainted His Great Talent With Politics

Jewel Ackah

I met Highlife Maestro Jewel Ackah, as the man was popularly known by many a DJ on Ghana Radio and Television, exactly 20 years ago (See “Jewel Ackah to Be Buried August 4” Graphic.com.gh / Ghanaweb.com 5/13/18). He was in the company of Lt.-Col. Ernest Okwampa, then Director of the Ghana Armed Forces Band. I believe it was at the band’s play pen at Burma Camp. I was introduced to him by my recently deceased maternal uncle, Col. Emmanuel Boapea Boamah (Kwaku Brown) Sintim, then Director of Religious Affairs of the Ghana Armed Forces, popularly known to most Ghanaians as the Chaplain-General of the Ghana Armed Forces. Of my six maternal uncles, Wofa Brown, as he was affectionately called, was the one that I was closest to. He would also later confide to me I was his most beloved nephew. Actually, what he had said to me was that “Of all my nephews, I have noticed that you are the one that loves me the most.”

I had been an integral part of his family growing up, while my parents sojourned here in the United States. My chance meeting with the Gospel Highlife musician – some of the DJs at the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation described his kind of music as “Pseudo-Religious Highlife” – was quite interesting. Wofa Brown and I had gone looking for a musical band to play at my mother’s funeral. The old lady had expired on March 23, 1998, aged 63, at the Milstein Ward of the Columbia University Hospital, right here in Washington Heights, New York City. My siblings and I had flown her mortal remains for burial at Akyem-Apedwa at her own express request. As I vividly recall, the more Eurocentric of my cousins and other relatives called him “Uncle Brown.” My uncle had taken me to the play pen of the Forces Band, as it was popularly known, because the band’s director had a strikingly similar name to mine.

You see, Dear Reader, I was baptized at Asante-Akyem Bompata Presbyterian Church with the name of Ernest Ayimadu Kwame Okoampa, which was also my late father’s name, long before I simply became Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., when sometime between the mid-to-late 1960s my father decided to redo his nominal identity. The “Ahoofe” of “Okoampa-Ahoofe” had been the old man’s nickname for quite some time. And so in a practical sense, Wofa Brown wanted me to meet my hitherto unknown paternal uncle Ernest Okwampa. The latter, he told me, hailed from Somanya, on the Manya-Krobo scarp. But, of course, it was quite likely that we were blood relatives, as there is evidence that some of our Akyem-Asiakwa ancestors who went to Akuapem-Akropong to help the Guans throw off the yoke of Akwamu domination and enslavement may very well have ended up settling in the Krobo area. What of the globally storied pretty and voluptuous Krobo women?

The building that housed the Forces Band looked deserted when we got there. My uncle rapped the door a couple of time and a few seconds later, we heard the lock turn as Col. Okwampa emerged, fully uniformed with his name-tag displayed on his left breast pocket of his green khaki shirt. Or maybe it was beige-brown. I forget precisely which. He was about the same height as Wofa Brown. He saluted my uncle and then the two men proceeded to exchange some pleasantries, and then my uncle announced to Col. Okwampa that he had brought along his nephew to meet him. The Forces Band, it turned out, was fully booked for months ahead. Then just as we turned to leave the badly weather-beaten and paint-peeling hardwood building, if memory serves me accurately, a man with the globular physique of a teddy bear, almost as if out of nowhere, emerged flashing a sheepish smile. He had a few gold teeth in his mouth.

“Kwame, meet Jewel Ackah, the world-famous musician.” I nodded wistfully and shook hands with him. Then my uncle added, “He was the one who composed the campaign jingle for the National Democratic Congress.” Then I felt deeply disappointed, for I thought the Jewel was far too old and smart enough to recognize the fact that the musical art and the sort of crude, arm-twisting politics of the Rawlings-led National Democratic Congress were like oil and water. They did not readily mix, let alone do so as comfortably as the Jewel seemed to fathom. But what struck me even more disturbingly was the fact that the Jewel looked grossly out of shape, from the quite healthy and handsome man that I had known him to be on television, in the early 1980s, when he sang lead vocals for the Powerful Pilsners, shortly before I left Ghana for the United States.

I cursed under my breath just before we left my Krobo Uncle Okwampa’s office that the Jewel was too overweight and out-of-shape to last past a couple of years, that is live past the year 2000. Now, how true is the saying that “He whom the gods have blessed, none can curse.” But, of course, a couple of decades later, it is quite obvious from his bitter public complaints to the media recently, just before the report of his April 27 death, that the Jewel’s clearly expedient trucking with the Rawlings Posse had not paid off as well as he might have thought it would.

*Visit my blog at: kwameokoampaahoofe.wordpress.com Ghanaffairs