CPP: Still a Copycat Party at 59

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

On June 13, 2008, an article titled “CPP Salutes ‘True Big Six’” appeared in the Features column of Ghanaweb.com. I was, naturally, beside myself with uncontrollable laughter, obviously, because the writer had not been thoughtful enough to readily recognize the fact of such unimaginative caption giving his lurid game right away. This did not surprise me the least bit, knowing the nauseous fanaticism of many a fire-and-brimstone spitting Nkrumaist. Their madness is strikingly akin to the old Ananse story, in which the trickster-protagonist Spider presumed to have successfully collected into a giant gourd, all the wisdom available right here on Earth.

You know the rest of the story, don’t you, dear reader? How Mr. Ananse’s own young and favorite son, Master Ntikuma, happened to espy his father’s woefully ineffectual assay at epic mischief – for the perennial mischief-maker had not, predictably, been intelligent enough to figure out exactly how to smoothly transport his gourd of collected wisdom up the forked branches of a mahogany tree. He would shortly and roundly be brought to his senses; and with his feelings and sense of dignity, as well as his sense of self-importance, piqued and promptly deflated, Mr. Ananse would drop and break up his giant gourd, thereby counterproductively spreading even more wisdom across the globe.

Well, that was the original, true Ananse Story, except that in the tragicomic case of the so-called Convention People’s Party (CPP), the protagonist, Mr. Kwame Nkrumah, actually succeeded in collecting the totality of wisdom among his followers and absconded with it upon his death. Otherwise, whoever heard of anything cynically called the “True Big Six” among the behemoth corpus of contemporary Ghanaian history? And here, once again, for the umpteenth time, we are taking occasion to remind our avid and critically-thinking readers that on June 12, 1949, the real and authentic “Convention” people’s party, popularly known as the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC), gave birth to a clinically deformed monster called the Convention People’s Party (CPP). The deformity of the latter lay in the very tautological name of this Black Beast or Bête Noir, in Francophone parlance. And the latter anathema has continued to dog postcolonial Ghana, without let or hindrance, as it were, to this day.

The preceding notwithstanding, we were elated, almost to no end, when the publishers of Ghanaweb.com, the website to which the article titled “CPP Salutes ‘True Big Six’” was posted, saw the salutary and unalloyed wisdom in publishing the classic 1948 photograph of the “Authentic Big Six” alongside the afore-referenced article. This was obviously an in-your-face riposte to the author, a Mr. Kosi Dedey, who officiously signed himself off as “Chairman, Publicity Committee – CPP.”

The problem here is that while, indeed, there ever existed a Mafia-like political gang called the Convention People’s Party (CPP), or THE PARTY, as the gang members called their political machine, there never, in reality, existed any member of the human species called “Kosi Dedey,” who was “Chairman” of any “Publicity Committee” of any political organization called “CPP,” on whose membership roster existed a posse of rabble-rousing apparatchiks called the “True Big Six,” made up of Messrs. Kwame Nkrumah, Krobo Edusei, Komla Agbeli Gbedemah, Archie Casely-Hayford – the pedigreed statesman who would shortly be dirty-slapped out of the CPP by the weird and godforsaken man-child widely credited with coining the pseudo-ideological term of “Nkrumaism” or “Nkrumaist Philosophy,” with the curious condonation of the African Show Boy, of course – and Kojo Botsio and Nathaniel Azarco Welbeck.

First of all, isn’t it rather strange that the very hardworking Party operative who coined the cultic term of “Nkrumaism,” a term that appears to fascinate the clinically colorful “imagination” of Mr. Kosi Dedey to no end, does not appear anywhere among the list of Mr. Dedey’s “True Big Six”? Then again, if one may aptly ask: Exactly when did the functional and political culture of “Democracy” gain any practical expression, and/or relevance, among the government and people of the defunct German Democratic Republic (GDR)? And just when did the term “Democracy” become anything more than a complete dramaturgical mockery in the Democratic Republic of the Congo? Or even the People’s Democratic Republic of (North) Korea?

Then again, did we really need to look any farther than our own good, old Dzelukope, “The true birthplace” of the so-called Provisional National Democratic Congress (P/NDC)? In other words, the clinically discombobulated likes of Monsieur Kosi Dedey have not quite come to even the patently pedestrian realization of the fact that gaping and ahistorical lies have a way of drawing disdainful attention to themselves, thus making the concocter(s) appear far worse off than they, otherwise, would be, were unalloyed historical truths allowed to have their legitimate footholds in the collective national memory bank?

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is the author of “Ghanaian Politics Today” (Atumpan Publications/lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: [email protected].