Kankan-Priest In Town

THE KIND OF TRADITIONAL PRIEST TO RUN OUT OF BUSINESS

In the wake of the recent motor-accident involving a convoy carrying Ghana’s Vice-President, Alhaji Aliu Mahama, the Accra Daily Mail (ADM) posted a news article to its website in which a traditional priest was reported to be claiming that the prevalence of road accidents were, supposedly, being caused by the spirit of former President Kwame Nkrumah.

While we strongly believe in the potent spirits of the dead, particularly the eudaemonious spirits of beneficent ancestors, we found this particular narrative, coming from a Nii Addo Ansah Otwatri II, the aforementioned priest and newsmaker, to be quite bizarre and amusing all at once. And we are almost equally tempted to add that Nii Otwatri’s call on Ghanaians, especially the ruling New Patriotic Party (NPP), to pacify the spirit of the deposed late president in order to drastically reduce the spate of road accidents in the country to be flagrantly insulting.

But before we even proceed any further, we are forced to point out the fact that we find the name of the traditional priest to be quite intriguing, in the theatrical sense of the term. Nii Addo Ansah Otwatri II, which roughly translates as “Chief Addo Ansah the Executor Par-Excellence,” or, perhaps, even more aptly, “Chief Addo Ansah the Decapitator.”

First of all, somebody ought to remind Nii Otwatri that if any of Ghana’s deceased leaders required a belated, fitting funerary send-off, as it were, it is definitely not the late President Nkrumah, but the pioneering and seminal likes of Dr. J. B. Danquah and Mr. Obetsebi-Lamptey, both of whom Nkrumah not only brutally assassinated but also criminally forbade their families and political associates and disciples from according fitting send-offs. The Akan have a maxim which states that: he who would not let his neighbor to take the ninth turn would also not be allowed to take the tenth turn.

Secondly, according to traditional Ghanaian lore, President Nkrumah does not qualify to be considered an “Otofoo,” one who meets accidental death and thus whose spirit perennially haunts the vicinity of his/her former existential purview or sphere of influence. In essence, since he did not die on the throne but, rather, was “fittingly” dispatched through a revolutionary military coup detat, Ghanaians have nothing to worry about the spirit of the deposed president feeling immitigably aggrieved and mordantly bitter and therefore gratuitously and pathologically indulging in mayhem in order to call attention to his need for propitiation, whatever that means.

Indeed, if anything at all, Nkrumah was accorded the kind of fabled (or fabulous) State-Burial that no other Ghanaian premier or illustrious citizen has ever been accorded. And what is more, Nkrumah is the only deceased Ghanaian leader, to date, who has had a flamboyant and extravagant mausoleum constructed for him – so short of his own absolute and, perhaps, incurable lunacy, just exactly what is Nii Addo Ansah Otwatri talking about?

Our own theory, here, is that going by the sanguinary overtones of his name, Nii Addo Ansah Otwatri II may be up to no good, other than desperately and cynically adding to the existing confusion and mayhem surrounding these road accidents. Besides, since Nkrumah was never a Vice-President of Ghana, why, on God’s good Earth, would he want to send a bloody message through Mr. Aliu Mahama and not through President Kufuor, the substantive president himself?

Of course, we also fully recognize at this juncture that Nkrumah was, indeed, as swashbuckling as the name of Nii Otwatri suggests. And if, indeed, Nii Otwatri is a Ghanaian of Ga-ethnic extraction, then one would rather that he translated his last name of “Otwatri” into Ga and stop using his Akan-sounding name to deceive people. For we Akans want no part of his “religious” madness. Thirdly, one is almost apt to suspecting that, perhaps, Nii Otwatri II (we would really love to see how Nii Otwatri I actually looks or looked like) is deviously staging his melodrama in cahoots with the cynical likes of Mr. Kwesi Pratt and some of the other swindling malcontents of the rump Convention People’s Party, which is why the “fetish” priest would also insist that any attempt to “re-pacify” the spirit of Nkrumah must, perforce, involve the active participation of “the Convention People’s Party…because some of the party members followed Dr. Nkrumah to places to swallow the concoctions.”

Needless to say, the preceding smacks of a desperate and facile attempt by fanatical Nkrumacrats to insinuating their deposed demi-god into the salutary affair of a democratic Ghana, in hopes of making themselves and their party an electoral force to reckon with. If so, then Nii Otwatri had better prepare to drink his own decoction with his Nkrumaist buddies and leave the rest of us out of it!

On a salient note, though, is our need to thank Nii Otwatri for confirming for us what many of us have suspected all along – that President Nkrumah was a concoction-quaffing megalomaniac who thought Ghana, Africa and the rest of the world revolved around his whims and caprices.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., Department of English, Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City.

Views expressed by the author(s) do not necessarily reflect those of GhanaHomePage.