Opinions of Saturday, 2 April 2005
Columnist: Okoampa-Ahoofe, Kwame
The Enduring Legacy Of Dr. J. B. Danquah ? Part 4
The wide acclamation of Dr. Danquah as ?The Doyen of Gold Coast and Ghanaian Politics? and, by logical extension, ?The Father of Modern Ghanaian Politics,? stems largely from our subject?s valiant attempt at according functional relevance to chieftaincy in an increasingly Westernizing as well as modernizing Ghanaian multi-nation. For the advent of British colonial rule, officially dating from about 1844, also meant a dramatic paradigm shift from indigenous Ghanaian and African political culture to one whose terms and practices were increasingly being dictated by the imperialist usurper. And on this score, Danquah?s erudition pointed inescapably to the fact that the country could not be meaningfully and constructively modernized without taking full account of the fact that the various ethnic principalities, or polities, in both pre-colonial and colonial Ghana had, each of them, to varying degrees of coherence, their own time-tested viable institutions of governance. Any rash and gratuitous attempt, therefore, to deracinate the African by means of peremptory imposition of European cultures and structures of governance was almost certainly bound to accelerate the regression of traditional Ghanaian and African development.
Thus where Nkrumah envisaged chieftaincy, and consequently indigenous African cultures, as militating against the rapid material advancement of Ghana, and the African continent as a whole, the more cognitively and philosophically grounded Danquah envisaged the same in terms of the psycho-cultural. In other words, rather than gauging the level of Ghana?s development in terms of the number of factories and first-class highways, the intellectual and psychological balance of the general Ghanaian national temperament had to be fore-grounded as the most significant gauge, or measure, of the country?s level of civilization. It was, indeed, in the cause of the preceding that Danquah erroneously came off to many an average Ghanaian, including even many among the august ranks of privileged chieftains, as a phenomenal bottleneck to the latter?s struggle to avoid being summarily swept away by the new Eurocentric paradigm. It also did not help, as we shall shortly learn from Danquah?s legislative masterpiece The Voice of Prophecy (1969), that the ever-scheming British colonial administration wielded undue ideological influence over the largely semi-literate members of the National House of Chiefs. In sum, as Danquah eloquently demonstrates, Ghana, on the eve of its nominal attainment of sovereignty, had been rigged-, or set, up to fail as an organic and harmonious polity. And so the recent theory of ?Failed States,? as pontifically and triumphantly touted by many a Western and Eurocentric political scientist, was glaringly recognized and promptly decried by The Doyen of Gold Coast and Ghanaian Politics as early as March 22, 1950, when the preceding matter came up for debate before the colonial legislative council.
However, before we delve any further into the preceding, it bears quoting the following observation made by Mr. K. B. Ayensu, former clerk of Ghana?s National Assembly, to impregnably underscore Danquah?s well-deserved accolade of the ?Doyen of Gold Coast and Ghanaian Politics.? Commenting on the precipitous devolution of the Ghanaian parliamentary landscape into a virtual cesspool or waste-dump in the wake of Danquah?s exit, Mr. Ayensu disconsolately lamented: ?After Danquah had left the parliamentary scene, slowly but inevitably the rot set in. The proceedings began to acquire a certain element of insipid farce. Many in the House privately wished for a return to ?the Danquah days.? Such was the meticulous care with which he studied his Bills that Parliamentary Counsel went over their drafts with a fine-tooth comb, the Minister did his home work, and the Clerk sat at the table with suspended animation. During the words of heat he stood his ground with poise and gave blow for blow with the scornful efficiency of a perfect marksman. His style in debate was great, his power of analysis formidable. He was interested in everything, not just the big fundamental issues. While he was preoccupied with the question of self-government, he asked questions about the mosquito menace in Accra? (Voice of Prophecy).
On March 22, 1950, having foreseen the proverbial handwriting on the wall, Danquah proposed the institutionalization of a bicameral system of government; one of these chambers, the House of Representatives or Commons, was to be composed of the general citizenry, while a House of Elders, or Senate, was to be composed of elected traditional rulers. ?The Senate [or House of Elders],? Danquah moved, ?was to check up and revise the legislation of the House of Commons.? A superb motion, which sought to ensure that our traditional rulers would not be ostracized or banished from their time-honored role of governance, it was seconded by the quite clairvoyant Obetsebi Lamptey, a representative for Accra. Unfortunately, when the motion was put to vote, Danquah lost heavily by a gaping margin of twenty-one to five. Prominent among those voting against this historic motion were Messrs. Nii Amaa Ollennu and I. K. Agyemang; also The Konor of Manya Krobo, Dr. I. B. Asafu-Adjaye, The Omanhene of Western Nzima, Rev. C. G. Baeta and, of course, the British Chief Commissioner of Asante, the Colonial Secretary and the Chief Commissioner of the Colony, as well as the Acting Chief Commissioner of the Northern Territories. Among the handful of perspicuous statesmen who voted in favor of Danquah?s motion were Dr. F. V. Nanka-Bruce and Messrs. B. D. Addai and C. W. Techie-Menson. The upshot of it all is that today Ghana maintains a widely maligned unicameral parliamentary system whose protocol largely verges on near-absolute dictatorship. We witnessed this appalling state of affairs during the virtual one-party state which characterized the two terms that Mr. Jeremiah (Jerry) John Rawlings held Ghanaians, literally, by the throat. The infamous ?benign dictator? would even bitterly complain, after having been accorded carte blanch by the largely stupefied and electorally defaulting NPP top constabulary that the putatively civilized culture of consensual deliberation was one that grievously left much to be desired.
But what is even more telling on recent political events in Ghana is the fact that exactly 55 years ago when Dr. Danquah proposed his motion, the retrospective Tiresias of modern Ghanaian parliamentary democracy cautioned that unless a bicameral legislative system was emplaced, the country stood deadly assured of the imminent emergence of ?an insane revolutionary party [that would seek] to get into power and sweep everything [that] we love and hold dear from the land? (see the Preface to Voice of Prophecy). It almost goes without saying that ?The Doyen? might well have been anticipating the unmitigably extortionate and protracted regime of Flt.-Lt. Jerry John Rawlings? so-called National Democratic Congress (NDC). Not quite long ago, a very good friend of this author?s called him and creatively suggested that perhaps it would be more apposite, or appropriate, to re-Christen the NDC as the NATIONAL DECAPITATORS CONGRESS; the gentleman, a fellow poet, even offered to translate the new NDC nominal longhand into Akan, which he poetically rendered as NATIONAL ATETENKORONA KONGRESS.
In the wake of the morally debilitating loss of his motion, Danquah told a Convention (UGCC) rally at the Palladium in Accra: ?The great battle for a Bicameral Legislature has been fought and lost by my friends and I [me?] against the combined opposition of fearful [timid or timorous?] African and [cynical] European odds in the Legislative Council? (Preface to Voice of Prophecy). Indeed, Nkrumah, who had initially sided with Danquah?s faction on the need for a salutary parliamentary system that guaranteed checks and balances, as obtained or prevailed in both Britain and the United States would, by 1951 when he giddily sailed into the glorious seat of power, promptly reject the operable possibility of such a system and, in effect, weigh in on the side of the neocolonialist trap-setters. Indeed, it is almost certain that had a bicameral legislative system existed on the eve of Nkrumah?s meteoric accession to power, Ghana?s checkered political history would have been positively modified. For those Danquah detractors, hiding behind the cowardly mask of pseudonyms, who characterize The Doyen as ?a loser? (they actually spell it ?looser?), perhaps it is significant to observe that Danquah?s loss of his bicameral parliamentary motion is, in hindsight, our collective Ghanaian loss far more than any individual stamp of failure. In any case, does it make any whit of sense that a patently incorrigible and sociopathic tyrant like Mr. Rawlings could readily shoot his way, like a veritable armed robber ? somebody actually compared the man to the recently arrested and indicted Mr. Attaa Ayi ? into The Castle while the illustrious likes of the Asantehene and Okyenhene are impertinently asked by the cynical likes of Mr. Alban Bagbin to muzzle up, or zip up, and stay on the sidelines?
It is also quite interesting that some Danquah detractors have the impudence to claim that: ?In 1950, Danquah called for Nkrumah?s neck, after his [i.e. the latter?s] declaration of Positive Action in the country.? The problem that any serious and meticulous Danquah student has trying to rejoin such a cheap shot, even assuming that such charge had any validity, is that it is not substantiated or referenced by any verifiable documents. Nonetheless, such strategy, the staple propagandistic fare of many a preliterate society, is hardly surprising. For most of the common charges and accusations leveled against Danquah are invariably minted by cynics and reprobates who appear to have absolutely no respect for the intellectual mettle of the proverbial average Ghanaian. On the other hand, anyone who cares to learn would already have made her- or himself aware of the fact that prior to the purported anti-Nkrumah salvo by Danquah, the latter had verifiably been threatened with ?assassination? (see Preface to Voice of Prophecy) by left-leaning Nkrumahists. The preceding incident occurred while Danquah and Sir Henry Coussey (Kusi?) sat in the Gold Coast Constituent Assembly ? as the only Ghanaian and African members ? during which period was drafted the First Republican Constitution. Back then, the Nkrumah faction had vehemently demanded either the presentation of a ?Self-government Now Constitution? or the globular head of Dr. Danquah on the proverbial silver platter (see Preface to Voice of Prophecy).
And regarding the vacuous accusations of those pseudo-Nkrumahists who have been circulating anonymous and slanderous accusations to the effect that Danquah was ?ethnocentric,? it bears being reminded that even as early as 1921, when the future Doyen of Gold Coast and Ghanaian Politics served as the pioneering secretary of the Akyem-Abuakwa Scholars? Union, Danquah had unreservedly sided with J. E. Casely-Hayford?s National Congress of British West Africa on the urgent need for colonial reforms. How could a micro-nationalist or tribalist have been cognitively expansive enough to have supported a broad and liberal campaign aimed at the improvement of the lives of all Anglophone West Africans? But then, here again, such gaping hole in the logic of Danquah detractors is invariably unapparent to these ideological unicorns. Indeed, Danquah, the patrician, did not possess the more street-smart ? or worldly-wise ? Nkrumah luxury of political rough-and-tumble. In a biographical memorandum submitted to the Watson Commission of Enquiry (1948), Danquah deliberately noted:
?All my life, I have been engaged in bringing scattered wholes together, not just the elements of a class or atoms at war, but ?wholes,? the coordinated aggregations which constitute organized society. And that was just where I encountered my greatest difficulty. The Atomic ?individual? as an independent force did not chiefly interest me but the organized whole. My ?element? is not the atom of Leucipus but the earth, water, fire and air of Empedocles, or the more modern conception of the solid, the liquid, and the gaseous. The higher wholes interest me, not for breaking them up, but to bring them together into even greater and greater syntheses. The solidity of the established Government, the liquiferous nature of chieftaincy and the gaseous indeterminateness of the masses could not be resolved into a unit unless coordinated together under a common policy, and understanding. I pursued this aim hard. In consequence, for long, the people were in doubt as to where I stood because whilst I went to them I was also with the Government as well as the chiefs. The chiefs also did not long accept me because they thought I was with the people. And the Government, at first believing that being in with the chiefs I was solely with them, would appear to have been disillusioned when they realized that I stood also by the people? (see Yaw Twumasi?s Introduction to Voice of Prophecy).
In sum, Danquah eloquently and systematically and veristically portrays himself as the all-encompassing and unifying statesman that he incontrovertibly was. And, as we shall shortly see, The Doyen was also much, much more than the preceding.
Views expressed by the author(s) do not necessarily reflect those of GhanaHomePage.
