Comment: Must Sekou Also thank Kufour?

Comment: Must Sekou Also thank Kufour?

Author: Nana Akyea Mensah, The Odikro.

Date: 2010-07-25 19:25:00

Comment to: Sekou Must Thank Pres. Mills for Not Being Pres. N

Hi grandson,

This is a draft coming soon as a feature article on a screen near your nose! I shall appreciate comments and corrections before it goes for publication.

Here we go:

I would be damned to expect my grandson to pull a surprise and break this annoying monotony just for a change! The other day, I had a good laugh as he went blowing his Danquah horns at my good friend, 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 the NPP. 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.

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.

Okoampa 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 also aware that this was occasioned by his own hallucinations of seeing the ghost of Nana Akyea Mensah, find it very difficult where to begin to debunk this kind of nonsense. It is a bit ironic to read from Okoampa praising the human rights records of the colonialists over and above that of the Nkrumah regime. I wonder what he would have said if Danquah had been hanged together with the co-conspirators who were involved in the ritual murder 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 Kawma Okoampa is so fond of writing. Danquah was a brain behind the ritual murder of Nana Akyea Mensah. 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.

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 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 and then worked as a clerk for the Akyem Abuawa State. 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. J.B Danquah 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 was that after weeks of a blanket of silence as to the whereabouts of the disappeared chief, the culprits 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. There are reports that Danquah was often haunted by the 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.

It was Danquah fighting his own devils in his own mind that finally proved his undoing. Danquah is not the only hard-core criminal to have died in prison for 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 grosteque, 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 grotesque to read: “be thankful to democracy being practised in modern Ghana, thanks to Kufuor.“ It is rather Kufour who has to thank Sekou, even for the very chance to be 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. "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." 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. As Mr. Ali Masmadi Jehu-Appiah puts it, '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!' (Kwame Okoampa Is A Charlatan! 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 dont 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

Twitter: /twitter.com/TheOdikro,
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