Missing Babies At KATH Is Hardly New

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

Ms. Suwaiba Abdul Mumin's ordeal of having delivered an apparently live and healthy baby, only to be told by some scheming and mischievous hospital staff later that he baby had died, is what is curious about the entire KATH missing baby affair (See "Lone Woman's Crusade" Daily Guide / Modernghana.com 3/1/14). On the question the missing newly-delivered babies at the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital, this is not altogether a wholly new phenomenon either at Ghana's second-largest publicly-owned medical facility or any of the major urban government-owned and operated facilities across the country.

In 1959, when my immediate older sister was born at the Komfo Anokye Teaching Hospital (my parents were then living at Asante-Mampong, where my father taught woodwork at the Serwaa-Amaninampong Presbyterian Middle School), a nearly similar incident occurred as that reportedly experienced by Ms. Mumin. My mother had left her room in KATH's maternity ward to have a bath. It could not have taken more than a half hour, as she intensely narrated the same to me sometime between 1985, when I first arrived here in New YorkCity, and 1990, when I entered Temple University's College of Liberal Arts and Sciences for doctoral studies. I must have actually heard this story as a child growing up in Ghana from my mother; but so faint and hazy is childhood memory that the only version that I remember is the one I heard right here in New York City as a young post-sixth form graduate.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, when my mother returned from the bathroom, my sister could nowhere be found. She was abruptly plunged into panic mode; and I strongly believe that my eldest maternal uncle's being a nurse-pharmacist at KATH immensely helped with frantic efforts to find my missing sister. My own birth was nearly twenty-six months into the future. I must also quickly point out that my late uncle's recently deceased wife, Mrs. Mercy B. Sintim-Aboagye, also worked as a KATH nurse.

My sister would shortly be discovered in another woman's room, in a different cot/crib from that to which she had been originally assigned soon after delivery. I also believe that my mother "regaled" us, her five children, with this story more than several times, both while we were growing up in Ghana as well as into our adulthood right here in New York City. And such umpteen retellings of this story would, naturally, occur whenever there was a news flash of a newly-born baby having been abducted from a hospital's maternity ward on one of the major television networks.

I suppose what inspired me to write this brief piece about my mother's ordeal of long ago, has something to do with the cultural identity of the young woman in whose room and cot my sister had been found, kicking and giggling cheerfully, almost as if she lived in the best of worlds. You guessed it, the woman who had stolen my sister was a Muslim of about the same age as my mother, in her mid-twenties then. And now, this is also where the story gets quite a bit fuzzy. It turns out that my sister's abductor had given birth to a daughter the looks of whom she did not like. And so she had exchanged her for my mother's. It was their wrist-tags that had given the would-be abductor away. Of course, exchange is naked robbery, especially where the transaction happens to be wholly unilateral.

Anyway, from time to time, until my mother passed away some sixteen years ago, I would tease my sister by asking her to go and look for her real mother. This would be whenever our mother showed us something - maybe a keepsake - that both of us fervidly coveted. But I also suppose that the Suwaiba Abdul Mumin's story strikes a vivid mnemonic chord with me because it happened around my sister's birthday of February 24. And for a long time, now, I haven't once forgotten my sister's birthday, being that it falls on the same day that Ghana's legendary dictator, the African Show Boy, was auspiciously ousted by the Kotoka- and Ankrah-led National Liberation Council (NLC).

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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
March 2, 2014
E-mail: [email protected]
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