Kweku Baako, J. B. Danquah Was Not Tried, Period!

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Feb. 6, 2015
E-mail: [email protected]

To assert that the tragedy of Dr. J. B. Danquah's prison assassination at the hands of Mr. Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's first postcolonial prime minister and executive president - a contextual euphemism for a "constitutional" dictator - inheres in the fact of the victim's not having been afforded due process or a fair trial is inexcusably heretical, to say the least about the criminally heinous and unforgivably blasphemous (See "NPP Must Be Cautious In Attributing Achievements to J. B. Danquah - Kweku Baako" Vibeghana.com 2/4/15).

The fact of the matter is that Dr. Danquah was never afforded the semblance of even a Kangaroo trial. He was simply and rudely taken out of his home in the thick of darkness, savagely cuffed, brutally manhandled and systematically executed at the Nsawam Medium-Security Prison by the application of lethat injections and criminally poor dietary regime, that even President Nkrumah would not have given the house dog, for a political prisoner of his stature and status in both continental Africa and the heady global community of the 1960s whose guilt was never proven during the thirteen, or so, months of his second incarceration (See The Asafu-Adjei Commission's Inquest Into The Death Of Dr. J. B. Danquah At The Nsawam Medium-Security Prison).

The congenital and deliberate wickedness of President Nkrumah is evidenced by both Danquah's own letter from prison demanding prompt trial or his immediate release, and that of his former wife, Mrs. Mabel Dove-Danquah, in particular, and the curt and sadistic response dispatched to the latter by the infamous African Show Boy. On the two occasions that he was arrested by President Nkrumah via executive edict, under the sinister aegis of the infamous Preventive Detention Act (PDA), a British colonial carryover legacy copied from Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru's India, Dr. Danquah was never once arraigned before the judge of any legitimately constituted court of Ghana.

And so one logically begins to wonder whether short of visceral hatred, President Nkrumah possessed any forensically sustainable evidence of sedition against his former mentor, as the founding-father of the original Convention People's Party alleges in a paper. Now, this is where my quarrel with the editor of the New Crusading Guide. About the only members of the legendary Big Six who could be aptly said not to have been afforded due process or a fair trial, were Messrs. Ebenezer Ako-Adjei, the man who brought a largely unknown Mr. Kwame Nkrumah to the landmark attention of Dr. Danquah and the former's subsequent global limelight; and Mr. Emmanuel Obetsebi-Lamptey.

Now, the question of whether in eulogistically celebrating the great and foresighted achievements of the putative Doyen of Gold Coast and Ghanaian Politics, some disciples and kinsfolk of Dr. Danquah may be egregiously erring on the side of the indiscreet and flagrant falsification of the objective facts of history, while worth noting, coming from the firespitting editor of the New Crusading Guide newspaper, sounds rather bizarre and insufferably hypocritical.

If anything at all, it is brash and petulant rump-Convention People's Party (r-CPP) street brawlers like Mr. Baako, whose father, Mr. Kofi Baako, coined the theo-political terminology of "Nkrumaism" who ought to be constantly and perpetually reminded of the imperative need to check their rather cavalier and proprietory arrogance, when it comes to recounting what his supplicants and apostles deem to be the unique and singular achievements of Mr. Kwame Nkrumah, including, of course, the patently farcical heresy that, somehow, the Nzema-Nkroful native is the bona fide founder and creator of postcolonial Ghana.

Indeed, it is very refreshing to hear Mr. Baako open up about "the significant political contributions of J. B. Danquah," because such intellectual and discursive concession to their yeomanly political opponents, particularly those coming from the Danquah-Busia-Dombo Tradition, is as historically rare as snowfall in equatorial Ghana. But the historical fact and context in which the recent Muslim convert bases his cautionary note is quite fascinating, if also becase traditionally it has been the fanatical Nkrumacrats who have shamelessly sought to credit President Nkrumah with the conception of the Volta River Project, a landmark achievement whose indisputable credit wholly and incontestably belongs to Sir Albert Kitson, the celebrated British geologist and explorer, going as far back as 1915, when the future President Nkrumah was barely 5 years old, and the future Dean of Gold Coast and Modern Ghanaian Politics was just a little shy of 20 years old.

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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is the author of "Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana." New York and Bloomington, IN: iUniverse.com, 2005.

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