I Resent this Lurid Business of "Nkrumaist-Compunction"

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
I sincerely and solemnly promised Mr. Ekow Nelson, last week, that I was going to promptly reduce this slobbering Nkrumah fanatic to his appropriate level of an intellectual elf. Indeed, sometime last year, this urchin who heretically pretends to rub shoulders with Dr. J. B. Danquah, the Doyen of Gold Coast and Ghanaian politics, merely because Mr. Nelson also attended Dr. Danquah’s alma mater, the University of London, quizzically and gratuitously attempted to justify President Nkrumah’s summary deportation of the Ghanaian-born Alhaji Amadu Bamba, on the purely benign ideological grounds that the deportee was a staunch supporter of the Danquah-Busia-chaperoned United Party (UP). And Nkrumah’s quite “Pan-Africanist” pretext was that Alhaji Bamba was not an indigenous Ghanaian.

Before we venture any further, suffice it to significantly observe that the United Party came into existence in the wake of President Nkrumah’s summary proscription of multi-party democracy, largely the result of the Show Boy’s flagrant attempt to bleeding economically industrious Ghanaians (Fitch and Oppenheimer) for his self-serving pseudo-Pan-Africanist agenda (more later on the latter, especially regarding the epic but largely untold narrative of the rift between the African Show Boy and Tanzania’s President Julius K. Nyerere, particularly how Nkrumah deviously succeeded in undermining the original East African Community, even while also unctuously, and unconscionably, pretending to be promoting the organic agglomeration of African nations in the postcolonial era).

For starters, it is unpardonably criminal and outright obtuse for Mr. Nelson to claim that “Dr. Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr.,…is a latter-day convert to the cult of Danquah worship” (see “Likening Nkrumah to Hitler: The Ignorant Effusions of a Danquah-cult Worshipper” (Ghanaweb.com 4/21/08). This is because, as is now widely known (and this writer was even once accused of being criminally related, by blood, to Dr. Danquah and Nana Akufo-Addo, by his graduate-school professor whose paternal uncle was the national coordinator of the Young Pioneers’ Movement), I am a bona fide grand-nephew of the Doyen of Gold Coast and Ghanaian politics; and so the rather cynical and puerile suggestion that, somehow, Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe recently “converted” to something called “the cult of Danquah worship,” as opposed to “Nkrumah’s cult of personality,” is not only patently “asinine” (my sincere apologies to Mr. Nelson), it also constitutes the very height of ratiocinative discombobulation on the part of the critic, if the reader recognizes exactly what I mean. It is also ahistorical and scholastically scandalous for Mr. Nelson to libelously claim that I have personally asserted that I, Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, was a bona fide member of the Nkrumah-worshipping Young Pioneers’ Movement (YPM).
In brief, this is what Mr. Nelson has to say: “The article [i.e. “If Danquah was a CIA Operative, then Nkrumah was Hitler Incarnate”] was riddled with inaccuracies and the self-serving arguments of a latter-day convert to the cult of Danquah-worship. I say latter-day because, although Dr. Okoampa-Ahoofe singles out the Young Pioneer Movement as evidence of Nkruma’s [sic] admiration for Hitler, as recently as May 2005, he described Nkrumah’s YPM, OF WHICH HE WAS A MEMBER, as “a civic organization which inculcated a positive sense of national identity in its members” (Ghanaweb.com 4/21/08).
First of all, those who have any meaningful or intimate knowledge of Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., fully appreciate the fact that it is absolutely impossible for this author to have been a member of the Young Pioneers’ Movement. I leave the transparent conclusion to the imagination of the reader; but I must also add, at least, pertinently, in passing that, indeed, this author’s father who, by the way, firmly believed Dr. Danquah to have possessed at least thrice the cranial capacity of Mr. Nkrumah, had been, as a young man, the Sekyere (Asante-Mampong) patron of the YPM, as well as a campaign spokesperson for Mr. J. C. Akosah (a.k.a. DC Akosah) as well as the CPP’s District Organizer . And so is there any wonder that Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., could have once admired “Osagyefo” Mr. Kwame Nkrumah and his CPP?
In sum, the point that I am trying to make in the preceding is that Mr. Ekow Nelson’s pretence to historiographical scholarship is simply that, SHEER PRETENCE! And thus the critic’s constant need to drop the name of a Dr. Gyamerah, almost as if to assure his evidently insecure temperament that such mere name-dropping would lend a desperately needed credibility to his flagrant lies and scam-artistry.
Unfortunately for the shameless and pathological liar, the Danquah-Busia scions have always been miles and miles ahead of the fast-talking and rabble-rousing charlatanic Nkrumaists. In any case, does having a father who staunchly supported President Nkrumah as a youth, and who was also a card-carrying member of the CPP (and, in fact, partly got fired from his Asante-Mampong Technical-School teaching job and was rendered unemployed for three long years by the Rev. Asihene, his own relative, for spending “too much time in CPP activism,” make one an ideologically frozen Nkrumaist or one who is eternally doomed as such? Indeed, it is precisely at this juncture that Mr. Nelson’s question of “asininity” comes into the equation, as it were; for who is, here, guilty of exhibiting gross asininity? Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, the progressively maturing scholar, or Mr. Ekow Nelson, the “Makaranta” scholar who keeps repeating the same tired and tawdry Nkrumaist mantra?
Regarding the summary and on-site arrest of Messrs. Ako-Adjei, Tawia Adamafio and Coffie Crabbe, the critic claims, rather cynically and fatuously, that these men “were not responsible for Kulungugu and [that they] were framed.” If so, who framed them? And why did President Nkrumah not promptly order their release from prison, where they were, each, on a death sentence, and instead left this bounden duty of justice to the National Liberation Council (NLC), the neo-liberal military junta that auspiciously overthrew the so-called Convention People’s Party (CPP) in 1966? We think we know the answer; and it is that Mr. Ekow Nelson impudently takes his readers for dupes!
The writer also makes a ridiculous, special pleading for the victims of the Jewish holocaust, an admittedly horrendous, unspeakable and apocalyptic event in modern historical memory, almost as if to assert that the relatively lower magnitude, or lower number, of Ghanaians who unjustifiably perished upon the instructions of President Nkrumah, most prominent among them being Dr. Danquah, had, somehow, lived less valuable or meaningful lives.
Interestingly, the routine and patently criminal subterfuge used by fanatical Nkrumaists, that of the CPP victims being already terminally ill at the moment of their decreed assassinations is, once again, trotted out for farcical display by the proverbial sorcerer’s apprentice(s); which leaves one wondering whether, indeed, Mr. Nelson fully appreciates the civilized meaning of “compunction.” Or, perhaps, Mr. Nelson is a certified criminal himself? At least a nondescript intellectual criminal? And that is why the writer is glibly able to justify the unforgivably bestial assassination of Mr. Emmanuel Obetsebi-Lamptey, in much the same way that Dr. Danquah was alleged to have authorized Constable Ametewe, a person of whose existence the Doyen had absolutely no knowledge, whatsoever, to snuff out the breath of Mr. Nkrumah.
By all means, Mr. Nelson ought to spend sometime poring over the hundreds of pages of the Asafu-Adjei Commission that enquired into Nkrumah’s Nsawam-Auschwitz atrocities. Indeed, as Tibor Szamuely, a lecturer at Winneba’s so-called Kwame Nkrumah Ideological Institute wrote in his introduction to Afrifa’s The Ghana Coup, about the only differentiating factor that ensured that Hitler would cause the deaths of far more number of people that Nkrumah, lay squarely in the low level of Ghana’s industrial technology. In terms of temperament, Nkrumah could readily be mistaken for sporting the spitting image of his ideological patriarch. And such mistaken identity would not have been altogether egregious.
It is also rather amusing that Mr. Nelson should “sic passim” my spelling of “Coffie,” as in Coffie Crabbe, and then proceed to spell Mr. Crabbe’s name in exactly the same manner. Is this a pure symptom of inferiority complex or plain stupidity? I am still convinced that this panjandrum of a historian is an insufferable disgrace to the global, Ghanaian intellectual community. And then to speak of clinical poseurs and imposters! And, by the way, Mr. Nelson, it was 6 million, not 3 million, Jews that perished in the Holocaust. Now, tell me, who is belittling whose untold and excruciating experience of injustice? Puffffffffffffffffffffffffffff!!!!!!!!!

*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 15 books, including “Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana” (iUniverse.com, 2005), as has also been a member of the Jewish Studies Committee at his college, having also won Best Essay Prize from the “Nassau Review,” (1999), for his scholarly essay, “An Afrocentric Critique of the Diary of Anne Frank. E-mail: [email protected].

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