Boko Haram Scholars And King Kongi

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

I personally don't believe, or even think, for one split-second that Dr. Joseph (Nana Kwame Kyeretwie) Boakye-Danquah needs anybody to defend his phenomenal achievements and scholarship against the intemperate tirade of these intellectually unlettered and clinically uncouth Boko Haram "Scholars" of the Kongi University of Africological Head-Niggership. But, of course, King Kongi (my profuse apologies to Nigeria's Prof. Wole Soyinka, who will be turning 80 this coming October) needs billions of reams of morally desperate disquisitions against the indelible truth of his reprobate personality, irredeemable behavioral turpitude and immortalized global notoriety as the founding father of postcolonial dictatorships on the African continent.

Even as one commentator going by the obvious pseudonym of "The Mask" (I wish this eudemonious soul could remove his mask and dish some common sense into the numbskulls of the Boko Haram "Scholars") had occasion to point out recently, it was the putative Doyen of Gold Coast and Ghanaian Politics whose seminal and classical treatise, Akan Laws And Customs, And The Akyem-Abuakwa Constitution (1928), opened the eyes of the Western world to the enviable genius of the Akan, in particular, and the African, in general, in the realm of serious philosophical engagement in the twentieth century.

Literary giants like the African-American novelist, essayist and scholar and Nobel Literature Prize laureate, Prof. Toni Morrison, have poignantly remarked about the profound wit and genius of Dr. Danquah; and so it is rather laughable to presume the greatest Ghanaian constitutional lawyer and thinker, and philosophical theorist of his generation, to be in dire need of the validation of any "Afrological Woodpecker" to guarantee his canonically established stature at the very apex of African philosophical discourse. The great dons of the University of London paid a glowing tribute to this unassailable dimension of the man, when Dr. Danquah was awarded the Best Scholar's Medal in the Philosophy of the Mind and Logic.

And so it is rather scandalous for the intellectual paraplegics of Kongi University to pretend to possess both the scholastic and moral credibility and integrity to subject Dr. Danquah to their decidedly retarded and primitive pseudo-scholarship and be able to draw up a balance sheet in favor of King Kongi, a shameless plagiarist and criminal poseur over and above the erudite substantiveness and moral rectitude of the Doyen. You see, the Boko Haram "Scholars" may not know this - not that it really matters, anyhow - but in 1959, or thereabouts, when King Kongi hired a European consultant to put together a list of the best and brightest minds of what would later become known as the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, you guessed right, dear reader, it was King Kongi's arch-nemesis and former political mentor, Dr. J. B. Danquah, whose name headed the list. Interestingly, King Kongi, against vehement protestations of his Convention People's Party lackeys, would name the Doyen to actually run the academy. The latter, however, never materialized, perhaps by mutual consent.

Predictably, the barely passably intellectual King Kongi would name himself President of the Academy. It is also rather pathetic that the Boko Haram "Scholars" appear to have never heard of Dr. Danquah's other seminal philosophical classic, The Akan Doctrine of God; their best response to such scandalous ignorance - and I have been actually there and done that and so know them like the back of my hands - is apt to be "Afrology," "Africalogy," "Africology," "Monkeylogy" and "Ntu," "Muntu" and "Bantu," as the erudite and phenomenal Prof. Anthony Kwame Appiah brilliantly exposed this wretched underbelly of the New Pharaohs of Kongi University nearly a couple of decades ago.

Then again, what do you expect of Calibanistic bootblacks - or shoeshine boys, somebody has nicknamed them the "Shoetricians of the Kongi Ideological Institute" - turned hustling academic MFs?

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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
Board Member, The Nassau Review
May 9, 2014
E-mail: [email protected]
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