Opinions of Saturday, 23 April 2005
Columnist: Okoampa-Ahoofe, Kwame
The Enduring Legacy Of Dr. J. B. Danquah ? Part 7
In his review of the activities of the Gold Coast Youth Conference, Dr. Danquah rather disconsolately, albeit eloquently, demonstrates that morally crippling cynicism is as Ghanaian as foo-foo (fufu) and palm-nut soup. For most of its ardent critics, perhaps the sole significance of the Gold Coast Youth Conference, if any at all, inhered primarily in the perceived great fame that the irrepressibly vocal organization stood to accord its founders and disciples. And true to his mettle, or character, Danquah wasted no time in articulating his utter disdain for his critics: ?The Youth Conference says to them, ?My country, ?tis for Thee,?? and they do nothing but laugh. ?What?s for thee?? They ask. Oh, yes, you may not believe it but it is true: A very prominent man was telling me that I have been saying ?My country, ?tis for thee? because I want fame. Yes, fame. [Just] like that; there are people in this country who [actually] think like that. What the d?l [devil?] is any one, is Danquah, to do with fame, or Akiwumi to do with fame, or Lartsen or Hammond to do with fame? Would it [i.e. fame] feed him? But there it is? (Self-Help and Expansion 3).
And, indeed, if the Doyen of Gold Coast and Ghanaian politics took personal umbrage at such crippling expression of cynicism, it was almost certainly because his indisputable personal achievements did not seem to mean much to him, unless they were palpably reflected in the collective developmental achievements of the country as a whole. In this sense, both Danquah and Nkrumah could aptly be envisaged as kindred patriots, their poignant ideological differences notwithstanding. For barely 14 years later, Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah would face the Ghanaian people and the global community at large and charismatically proclaim that Ghana?s independence was meaningless, unless it was organically interlinked with the total liberation of the African continent.
Even so, as the Doyen of Ghanaian politics, Danquah also demonstrated his virtual peerlessness by indefeasibly insisting on the uniqueness of his country?s national identity, vis-?-vis the other British colonies on the African continent. In the summer of 1946, for example, after the British Colonial Office, then headed by George H. Hall, decided to establish a single university college, to be sited at Ibadan, Nigeria, for the collective use of the four British West African colonies ? of Ghana, Nigeria, Sierra Leone and the Gambia ? Danquah took up the issue in the Gold Coast Legislative Council, and in what has been described as ?a very powerful and emotional speech in opposition to the Colonial Office?s position on the university question,? vehemently declared: ?The Gold Coast is not Nigeria, and never could be. Achimota is not Yaba or Ibadan, and never could be?.There are nations in West Africa as there are nations in Europe. There are peoples among black Africans as there are peoples among the white Europeans?. For purely cultural reasons?the Gold Coast, a proud little country with a good reason for being proud, will never, can never and shall never be proud of a university situated at Ibadan and not Achimota? (see Apollos Nwauwa?s ?Creech Jones and African Universities, 1943-50? in AGENCY AND ACTION IN COLONIAL AFRICA, edited by Chris Youe and Tim Stapleton).
Indeed, so flabbergasted was Apollos Nwauwa of Danquah?s intransigent stance on the university question that the Nigerian historian has mordantly observed that: ?Danquah?s speech demonstrated quite clearly how territorial nationalism, elite bickering, and parochial politics were being exposed by the university question. This mood sharply contrasted with the 1920 pan-West African ?nationalism? championed by Casely Hayford and the National Congress of British West Africa (NCBWA). In the postwar years, Danquah, like other nationalists, was positioning himself for a leading role in the self-government which might follow shortly. Hall and Creech Jones [ the putative British colonial expert on African development and successor to George H. Hall as Secretary of State for the Colonies] were quite oblivious to [of?] this matter as they continued to force the colonies in the opposite direction of [to?] the winds of change and public opinion. Seizing the opportunity provided by the postwar colonial development[al] initiatives from London, the African elite began to carve out empires for themselves. Seeing himself as a rising star, Danquah anchored his political future on whipping up public sentiments of this ?proud little country? against the Colonial Office. The entire university scheme became deadlocked as the Gold Coast refused to concede while the Colonial Office continued to support the Minority recommendations? ( see AGENCY AND ACTION IN COLONIAL AFRICA, eds. Youe and Stapleton 136).
Needless to say, Apollos Nwauwa?s analysis gravely lacks adequate appreciation of the historical context or register. First of all, the postwar period came rather, relatively too late for Danquah to have been considered ?a rising star?; for by 1946 when the so-called university question became firmly fore-grounded, Danquah, at 51 years old, was already a formidable Ghanaian political force, having already established himself more than a decade-and-half earlier. On the other hand, it was the yet-to-arrive and relatively youthful Kwame Nkrumah who could aptly fit into Nwauwa?s description of ?a rising star.? For the former had been assiduously working to ?position himself for a leading role in the self-government? which from his vantage sojourner?s locations in New York and London, Nkrumah could more than vividly and readily envisage. Secondly, while it is apt to observe that Danquah had generally supported Casely-Hayford?s National Congress of British West Africa (NCBWA), Danquah was consistently a Gold Coast and Ghanaian nationalist to the hilt, as it were. Thus, it is patently scandalous and mendacious for any historian or critic to presume that it was the so-called university question which, almost overnight, converted Dr. Danquah from an ideological tenor of ?pan-West African nationalism? to that of a so-called ?territorial nationalism,? as Apollos Nwauwa would have his audience and readers believe.
And thirdly, as available records eloquently attest, it was rather incomprehensible, if not outright irrational, for the British Colonial Office to establish the premier and pioneering university college at Ibadan, when Ghana?s Achimota College was indisputably ranked as the best ?post-intermediate? academy in Anglophone West Africa. And here, one must hasten to add that had Yaba ranked as the foremost ?post-intermediate? academy in the entire British West African sub-region, it is highly doubtful whether the Nigerian leaders, or politicians, would have readily consented to the pioneering flagship academy being established in Ghana. In sum, what Apollos Nwauwa engages in vis-?-vis the preceding, is a self-serving pretense to hermetic, or blind, pan-Africanism. For it goes without saying that the latter Nigerian critic deviously admired the curiously nonchalant stance of the Asantehene, Osei-Agyeman Prempeh II, who smugly declared: ?Yes, my people would not mind where[ver] the university is [located], so long as it is in British West Africa and they have access to it? (Youe and Stapleton 129).
Interestingly, while Apollos Nwauwa notes that the Asantehene, among presumably several other distinguished Ghanaian leaders, felt quite at ease in having a single university erected in Nigeria for the common use of the four British West African colonies, curiously enough, ?Nigeria, on the other hand, was more apprehensive over this matter than the other colonies [primarily] because its Yaba [College] never [quite] compared well with the Gold Coast?s Achimota and Sierra Leone?s Fourah Bay College.? In essence, it is not quite clear whether Mr. Nwauwa finds it expedient to caustically castigate Dr. Danquah, by rather disingenuously accusing the latter of being woefully afflicted with ?territorial nationalism? or ideological myopia, simply because unlike the relatively less politically sophisticated King Prempeh II, Dr. Danquah was astute enough to recognize the time-tested fact that it is the better that is accorded the best, rather than the worse or mediocre being undeservedly rewarded with the best.
Fourthly, it is also significant to observe that in 1946, Ghana was far and away the most lucrative of Britain?s West African colonies. Thus, it would have hardly made any logical sense ? in terms of both merit and economics ? for the Colonial Office to have predicated its justification for building a single university for all of its West African colonies on the sheer strength of Nigeria?s teeming population.
And regarding the preceding, it may be recalled, by way of background, that in 1943, the British parliament, upon a suggestion of then-Secretary of State for the Colonies Oliver Stanley, set up the Elliot Commission to study the feasibility of establishing a full-fledged university college for the Crown?s West African colonies. Ultimately, two reports emerged out of the Elliot Commission. The first, called the Majority Report, and realistically mindful of the great distances separating the colonies, recommended the establishment of two universities, one at Ibadan, Nigeria and the other at Achimota, Ghana. The second report, dubbed the Minority Report, which was largely based on the exploitative policies of colonialism ? or economic expediency ? recommended the establishment of a single university college to service the entire Anglophone West African sub-region, with the exception of the American satellite of Liberia. For some curious but not far-fetched reasons, Sir Arthur Creech Jones, a hitherto liberally minded advocate for colonial African development and the putative authority on this aspect of British imperialism, shortly after assuming the post of Secretary for the Colonies grew, almost overnight, into a Fabian or developmental gradualist. And it would only be the rhetorical vehemence of Dr. Danquah, coupled with the eudaemonious and progressive zeal of Sir Alan Burns, then-Gold Coast colonial governor and a Danquah darling, that precipitated the glorious and triumphal establishment of the University of Ghana. In a pragmatic, intransigent and tactical response to the Colonial Office in London, ?In August 1946, [Sir] Alan Burns appointed a 12-man committee under the chairmanship of the acting colonial secretary, Kenneth Bradley. The report presented by this committee in November 1946, three months after its appointment, recommended the immediate development of Achimota into a University College, with costs to be met from the colony?s surplus balances and endowment. Either the Colonial Office would allow for a second university in the Gold Coast or the colony would unilaterally start to build one? (Youe and Stapleton 136) Needless to say, his utter frustration with the lethargic cynicism of many of his countrymen and women, was only matched by his ardent zeal for the rapid development of the Gold Coast. It is in view of the foregoing that in making a strong case for ?African Freedom,? Danquah, echoing sometime British colonial officer and novelist Joyce Cary, vehemently declared: ?Only free men [and women] can live in an expansionist world. Colonial status is not a free status. Nor, like slave status, is it a natural or a Christian status. At least, if St. Paul is any guide, God, who made of one blood all nations of men for to dwell on all the face of the earth, decided and determined what were to be the bounds or limits of each nation?s habitation. If for a country to be a Great Power is a good thing, then for a country to be a Colony or settlement of emigrants from another country, is an evil thing, for, said Lord Cranborne in the House of Lords on December 4 [1943?], ?A Colony in that truest sense almost inevitably involves the gradual extinction or serious disturbance of the indigenous population.? Colonial status is not an expansionist status. It is the status of a subject, not of a citizen; of subjection, not of citizenship; of extinction, not of expansion? (Self-Help and Expansion 20). By ?expansion,? Danquah anticipated what in the Twenty-First Century has come to be called ?Globalization,? not in the nugatory or imperialist sense of its current connotation, but rather the salutary cosmopolitanization of the world, or what might be progressively termed as ?Global Multiculturalism.? On a more basic level, an ?expansionist world? envisages the institutionalization of universal or global brotherhood or sisterhood of the nations, whereby all nations are organically recognized as sharing a common destiny, and thereby being one another?s keeper, as it were. Consequently, Danquah echoes his nephew, Mr. William Ofori-Atta, an Oxbridge-trained lawyer and economist, who observed the bleak landscape of colonial Ghana as follows: ?There are no avenues (in the Gold Coast) for investment. The country is therefore in a dilemma. How can we get out? I think that one way out, which has to be tried along with other ways?is that our Government should borrow from abroad. It should be a Government borrowing because Government borrowing in the proper way is cheaper. It must be largely foreign because there is not much loose capital about in this country? (Self-Help and Expansion 19). And to the foregoing, Danquah grimly adds: ?This, then, is our dilemma, and it is the dilemma of all countries of Colonial status. Your Government must borrow large sums from abroad, or you cannot develop industrially, but your Government may not borrow because it may be afraid to hurt Lancashire. Therefore, the demand has gone abroad to-day, that, just as slave status was abolished after the experiences of the 19th century, so must colonial status be abolished if the world is to be a really expansionist world? (Self-Help and Expansion 19-20). In essence, for Danquah, the continuous and systematic underdevelopment of the colonial world woefully detracted from the collective productivity and development of the world at large, for the slavocratic status of the colonized logically implied that labor was not free to exert itself to its fullest potential ? it was, thus, tantamount to the proverbial case of a half-free and a half-enslaved society uneasily negotiating its diurnal terms of survival. The ultimate result becomes one of abject regression and outright barbarism.
Even so, Danquah acutely appreciated the fact that capitalist colonialism was patently regressive, by virtue of its pathologically self-interested orientation: ?Colonel Oliver Stanley [the extant British Secretary of State for the Colonies] tells us that Britain has never in the past and shall not in the future desire to see economic development from purely selfish motives or on purely selfish lines, but Colonel Stanley is a Minister and not an industrialist (at least, I think so), and one never can tell what the industrialists or capitalists can do, and when it comes to this matter of who first? The Colonies or Lancashire? If it is [, indeed,] a question of ?Paramount interest,? we know what happened in Kenya. Therefore, if we are to have that 75 percent of our wealth, or a major portion of it, the broad solution of the lectures [hosted by the Gold Coast Youth Conference] was that we must, as soon as practicable, have autonomy or self-government. Our Colonial status must be abolished. With self-government we shall be able to speak of our Government as ?our Government,? and any Executive or Cabinet of the Gold Coast that refused to do the will of the people, could be made to cease to be the Executive or Cabinet in a day?s general election. The case for African freedom is a cast-iron case? (Self-Help and Expansion 20). In sum, observes the Doyen of Gold Coast politics, the essence of British colonialism, and all breeds of colonial imperialism, for that matter, is the forked-tongue of abject hypocrisy.
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