Flagstaff House Is A Misnomer

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

Originally, the building that has widely come to be associated with Ghana’s presidential palace – and the official residence of postcolonial Ghana’s first president – was earmarked for the residency of the Chief of Staff of the Ghana Armed Forces (See Maj.-Gen. Ocran’s book-length account of the 1966 coup). Unfortunately, the Flagstaff House was selfishly commandeered by Mr. Kwame Nkrumah to serve as his official residence, because the African Show Boy found both the building and its location to be better fortified and more strategic for his personal purposes.
The preceding state of affairs was partly precipitated by the irony of the head of state of a newly independent African nation being officially housed in a former European slave castle. Such striking irony, of course, does not appear to have been altogether lost on the passably historically conscious Ghanaian leader. A further, perhaps even more wicked, irony, however, inheres in the fact that even after he had moved into Flagstaff House, President Nkrumah would continue to use the old slave castle which for several centuries served as a warehouse for the callous and unconscionable merchandising of African humanity.
It thus came as quite an amusement to me when two former cabinet members of the ruling National Democratic Congress (NDC) were reported to have exhorted the Atta-Mills government to convert the building which later became known as the Golden Jubilee House into a museum. Needless to say, one would rather that the old slave castle at Osu-Accra had since long been appositely converted into a national memorial, in order to enable Ghanaians to intimately familiarize themselves with the bloody edifice that for generations served as a major conduit for the massive deportation of our kinsfolk into the Americas as free and core labor for the rapid industrialization and development of Western capitalist culture and civilization.
Alas, it eerily and bizarrely appears that the very temperament of postcolonial Ghanaian leadership inordinately and pathologically craves something akin to perennial servitude, its characteristic stentorian and pontifical rhetoric to the contrary notwithstanding. And thus it is that the leadership of the National Democratic Congress has consistently and persistently maligned the noble efforts by the Kufuor-led New Patriotic Party in both renovating and remarkably expanding the former Flagstaff House in order to comfortably and capaciously accommodate most of the ministerial and cabinet offices of the central government, as well as conveniently serve as the official residence of the president of our Republic.
Now, we predictably learn to our utter chagrin that the Golden Jubilee House has been renamed Flagstaff House. The NDC government had initially refused to move into the $ 70 million-plus edifice on cynical grounds of the huge cost involved in its construction through an inter-governmental loan advance by New Delhi; architectural design and the actual construction of the building were also, reportedly, undertaken by the Delhi government. The latter state of affairs, we are told, partially prompted some security-conscious Ghanaian citizens to question the political soundness of having a foreign government undertake such a sensitive project.
In reality, however, it appears that the refusal of the Atta-Mills government to move into Jubilee House, as it is popularly called, is a decision that is squarely predicated on suspicion, the suspicion of NPP operatives having possibly caused the bugging of Jubilee House with surveillance devices in order to monitor the activities of their ardent political opponents. I guess a far better phrase would be “political enemies,” particularly when one reckons mutual attempts engaged via the tendentious use of the judiciary to systematically impugn the integrity of leading members of either two main parties. Such suspicion, of course, is mutual, in view of the gingerly reticence of the Kufuor administration, in its turn, to occupy any premises cannibalized for nearly two decades by the Rawlings-led Provisional National Democratic Congress (P/NDC).
Needless to say, the building was renamed Golden Jubilee House because its dramatic facelift-cum-construction coincided with the half-century anniversary celebration of Ghana’s independence from Britain. It is also, obviously, intended to mark a clean break with the country’s at once bitter and checkered past. Consequently, in nominally reverting it back to Flagstaff House, the Atta-Mills government appears to be luridly thumbing its proverbial nose at the scions of the Danquah-Busia-Dombo Tradition, or the biological and ideological descendants of those who endured great mischief under the neo-fascist government of the Nkrumah-led Convention People’s Party (CPP). If so, then Ghanaians are in for a protracted wrangling.
First of all, if, indeed, the renaming of the erstwhile Flagstaff House by the Kufuor government was effected through a parliamentary procedure, then, of course, an identical procedure ought to be followed in order to revert to the use of the name Flagstaff House. On the other hand, if such name change was effected via executive edict, then, it goes without saying that the same procedure ought to dictate such nominal reversion. Merely emplacing a metallic plaque on the building with the lettering of “Flagstaff House” would not cut it, as Americans are wont to say (See “Presidential Palace Renamed” Ghanaweb.com 10/3/10). For Fourth-Republican Ghanaians live under the rule of law, not at the capricious whims of strongmen and/or dictators. And no mischievous attempt at even symbolically re-invoking the long laid ghost of Mr. Nkrumah would succeed. For when it comes to brass-tacks, as already noted, the name Flagstaff House is more one of a military residence than that of an executive president. Unfortunately, when abject fanaticism clashes with sound scholarship and common sense, what often results is the placid recoiling of the latter in favor of the former. The actual name of the game, as it were, is one of acquiescence. But acquiescence is mere respite, not total surrender. And the sooner truth and common sense were allowed to prevail, the better it would be for the stability and long-term development of our beloved nation.
*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 a Governing Board Member of the Accra-based Danquah Institute (DI) and the author of 21 books, including “Ghanaian Politics Today” (Atumpan Publications/Lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: [email protected].
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