Nkrumah was Significant but Neither Great Nor Visionary - Part 2

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

Well, as it is to be expected of fanatics with no credible and/or remarkable critical or studious perspective on things iconic, pathologically and perennially aggrieved Nkrumacrats like "Apostle" Kwamena Ahinful (See Part 1 of this article) continue to peddle the jaded and long-discredited "Kulungugu Myth" as being solely accountable for the widely purported skin-cancer death of Mr. Nkrumah.

The reality, however, is that even as convincingly noted by Ama Biney, perhaps the most authoritative Ghanaian scholar of the period in question, in recent years, Nkrumah, a widely known heavy smoker, died of lung cancer and not skin cancer, as the Nkrumacrats so facilely and self-righteously allege. Then also, most of the criminal suspects in the Kulungugu Affair, as the target of assassination attempt himself publicly attested after the fact, were prominent cabinet members of Nkrumah's own Convention People's Party (CPP) government. The preceding, of course, attests to the high level of disaffection for their leader among the ranks of the top-echelon membership of the CPP by the eve of Nkrumah's overthrow.

Then also, "Apostle" Ahinful rather farcically accuses then-Prime Minister Kofi Abrefa Busia who, by the way, was a not-so-distant relative of Nkrumah's - by way of Wenchi and Sefwi (Sehwi) - of having callously denied a terminally ill deposed President Nkrumah the scarcely sensible privilege of returning from his exile hideout in Guinea-Conakry, in order to receive reliable herbal treatment from a traditional medicine man resident in Ghana. Well, I am hearing this poppycockish story for the very first time; and, needless to say, it doesn't surprise me one bit.

The stark, albeit inadvertent, contradiction here though is that while "Apostle" Ahinful claims that on his fateful self-invited trip to Hanoi (See Fitch and Oppenheimer's Ghana: The End of an Illusion), President Nkrumah had taken aboard with him some medicinal herbs to meliorate his skin-cancer caused pains. Paradoxically, however, according to "Apostle" Ahinful, somehow, while in Conakry in the wake of his auspicious overthrow, the Show Boy had not found an imported supply of the same herbs to be effective and would rather have been flown back home, to Ghana, to receive direct treatment from his healer.

The logical question to ask here, of course, is as follows: "Why hadn't his healer been asked to accompany Life-President Nkrumah to Hanoi, Vietnam, if his herbal medicinal treatment had been that effective? My own well-considered contention here is that having been utterly shocked into the rude realization that he was far less loved by Ghanaian citizens, whose tolerance he had taken for granted for so long, than he had been grossly misled by his handsomely paid teeming pool of sycophants into believing, a politically desperate Mr. Nkrumah madly craved a last-ditch attempt to return to Ghana in order to continue with his Soviet-sponsored atrocities against his former hostages.

And on the latter score must also be underscored the fact that the near-total lack of any remarkable resistance on the part of Nkrumah's elite Republican Guard against the Kotoka-led putschists, clearly and indisputably attests to the fact that by the eve of his landmark overthrow, the Show Boy had effectively lost control over the state security apparatus and the Ghanaian citizenry at large. But even more poignantly to note, it would have been unpardonably irresponsible, and even stupid, to speak much less of the downright idiotic, for Prime Minister Busia to have allowed for the return of the man who had missed capturing and imprisoning, and possibly executing, him by a mere couple of hours, or so, at Ghana's western port of Takoradi.

It is almost certain that Nkrumah and/or his supporters would not have hesitated to capitalize on the raging economic crisis at the time, largely created by a corrupt and profligate Convention People's Party regime, to destabilize and possibly unseat Prime Minister Busia. Of course, that would shortly be done by a grossly misguided Gen. I. K. Acheampong, then Col. Acheampong. The fate of the latter in of itself ought to give some cerebral pause to the fanatical Nkrumacrats.

But that Dr. K. A. Busia, a devout Christian of Methodist denominational suasion, in the patently warped and comically mischievous imagination of "Apostle" Kwamena Ahinful, would "uncharitably" refuse permission for a terminally ill Mr. Nkrumah to return home from Guinea, in order to peacefully meet his proverbial Maker in Ghana, is as logical a question to pose to our readers as it is for any patriotic and well-meaning Ghanaian to ask why Life-President Nkrumah had adamantly and even mockingly refused medical treatment to a diabetic and hypertensive 69-year-old Dr. Danquah at the Nsawam Medium-Security Prison.

Earnestly petitioned by Mrs. Mabel Danquah to release her acutely ailing now-former husband, President Nkrumah is widely reported to have riposted to Mrs. Danquah that if the latter were a politician and the President of Ghana, she would very likely not be asking the Show Boy to do the most abominable thing in human existence. Such was the generosity and Christian charitability of President Nkrumah that "Apostle" Ahinful would have Ghanaians applaud and eternally celebrate!

Likewise, the bleeding-hearted Nkrumah apologist ought to ask himself why his hero and demi-god would so cavalierly cause the arrest and imprisonment of Dr. Danquah, twice, at Nsawam for more than a year without affording his former magnanimous political mentor the fundamental democratic right to a trial before a legitimately constituted court of law. But then, hadn't Mr. Nkrumah also pontifically claimed in his rather presumptuous autobiography, Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah, that he was a Marxist-Christian who found absolutely no contradiction in pursuing both diametrically divergent ideologies simultaneously?

Even against the earnest pleas of the globally reputed British mathematician, philosopher and thinker Sir Bertrand Russell, among a host of other distingished global personalities, President Nkrumah adamantly continued to thoroghly humiliate Dr. Danquah by having the latter chained in his cell, in the Condemned Block at the Nsawam Medium-Security Prison, around the clock. Was this a man who deserved the charity of any living human? Go figure!

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