Danquah was Akufo-Addo’s granduncle, not his uncle

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

It is one of the great annoyances that keeps being repeated over and over again, year in and year out. I am talking about the constant media misidentification of the Doyen of Gold Coast and Ghanaian Politics as the “uncle” of President Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo, and not the granduncle of the former Attorney-General and Minister of Justice, which is what the immortalized spearhead of the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC) was to Nana Akufo-Addo. For Danquah was the paternal younger brother of Nana Sir Osagyefo Ofori-Atta, I, the man credited with having been the first invested traditional ruler of modern Ghana, or properly speaking the erstwhile Gold Coast, to be formally seated in the Legislative Council as a bona fide member of the august House.

It is an unpardonable irritation because it reflects poorly on the quality of both Ghanaian journalism as well as the quality of the nation’s public education in general (See “Akufo-Addo Remembers JB Danquah” Classfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 2/4/17). And speaking of journalism, it is a matter of public record that Danquah was unarguably the foremost journalist, editor and publisher of his generation. Danquah also published the earliest-known daily newspaper in the country, called the Times of West Africa. He would shortly hire Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe as editor, when his deep involvement in the country’s liberation struggle made it extremely difficult for him to manage the day-to-day affairs of The Times. This was long before there was any government-owned newspaper called The Ghanaian Times.

Of course, the equally erudite and pioneering likes of Mr. Joseph Ephraim Casely-Hayford and the Rev. Attoh-Ahuma, the half-Fante and half-Asante firebrand writer and orator, had preceded Danquah. Dr. Azikiwe, the future ceremonial president of Nigeria, was the first African to graduate from the Columbia University School of Journalsim. It is also not quite accurate to describe Dr. Danquah as “a member of the Big Six who began the struggle for political freedom from the British colonial masters.” The truth and reality of the matter is that Danquah was the de facto and de jure leader of what became known as the Big Six. But in reality, the group ought to have been called “The Big Seven,” for the financial or material force behind the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC) was Mr. George “Paa” Grant, the Sekondi-Takoradi merchant in whose office the embryonic hatching of this epic political movement was induced.

And here, of course, I am thinking in terms of adding the pictorial bust of Paa Grant to that of the Big Six onto our national legal tender, the Cedi. On this occasion, as I recently observed in another column on the putative Doyen of Modern Ghanaian Politics, President Akufo-Addo also needs to go well beyond the ritual pouring of libation and the offering of prayers to putting before Parliament a bill for the renaming of the University of Ghana Law School as the JB Danquah School of Law/JB Law School. To-date, Dr. Danquah is the only major contributor to the foundation and the establishment of the country’s flagship academy who has not been fittingly honored with a seminal social and/or cultural institution of remarkable significance. I had hoped that President John Agyekum-Kufuor would initiate such a laudable and long overdue process, but the man only ended up establishing his John Agyekum-Kufuor Institute on both the campuses of the University of Ghana and the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, neither of which he ever attended.

Now, President Akufo-Addo has the prime opportunity to fittingly not honor only Dr. Danquah, but to also honor all those of our national heroes and sheroes who deserve to be recognized and memorialized but have yet to be duly afforded the same. I am also thinking of a National Holiday for the other Big Five (Big Six, when you add the name of Paa Grant), and the rest of the real founding fathers of Modern Ghana on a day that also commemorates the 1948 arrest of these stalwart freedom fighters by the British colonial regime.

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