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

            That the personality profile of President Nkrumah seems to have preoccupied many of the global leaders who dealt with him, is a subject that ought to pique the interest and attention of future students and scholars of Ghana’s first postcolonial premier. There was one prominent African leader, for instance, who absolutely had no reservations, or doubts in his mind, whatsoever, that Nkrumah had dire need of a psychiatrist, according to Mahoney. And that African leader, a philosopher-poet and a giant of African letters, was none other than Senegal’s President Léopold Sédar Senghor. Asked by a genuinely confused and palpably frustrated President Kennedy what he thought about his Ghanaian counterpart, Mahoney tells readers that Mr. Senghor simply stated that “What Nkrumah needed more than anything else was a psychiatrist” (JFK: Ordeal in Africa 176).

Implicitly and ironically, however, Mahoney tells his readers that in the absence of any progressive leadership alternative on the African continent, Nkrumah deserved to be tolerated by way of a stop gap or transitional fortitude. In other words, what Mr. Senghor meant by the foregoing was that Ghana’s proverbial Show Boy was that necessary evil of “a mad genius.” The Senegalese leader would further cast matters more tersely and poignantly in his French official tongue: “Et un trés bon psychiatrique.” I have personally wondered in recent years, whether it is not well nigh time that a Department of Nkrumah Personality Studies was established at all the major higher educational institutions on the African continent and, perhaps, even beyond.

Interestingly, while Nkrumah’s evidently volatile temperament, pretty much in synch with the temper of the times (apologies to the Bard-of-Avon), had not remarkably endeared him to the West, much of which global political sphere envisaged the Show Boy as a dyed-in-the-wool communist, nonetheless, his fiery ambition to personally supervise the industrial development of Ghana and, indeed, continental Africa at large, does not appear to have failed in igniting the admiration of America’s first Irish-descended president. Caught between backing and summary withdrawal from the Volta project, otherwise known as the construction of the Akosombo Dam, Mahoney vividly recalls Mr. Kennedy making the following remark: “We have put quite a few chips on a very dark horse[,] but I believe the gamble is worthwhile” (JFK: Ordeal in Africa 179).

In other words, while he may ordinarily not have bothered investing any modicum of confidence in this pet project of the ideologically erratic and temperamentally unpredictable Ghanaian leader, nevertheless, Nkrumah was not altogether unworthy of such blind trust. And so yes, in the cognitively well-calibrated opinion of President Kennedy, the flamboyant Ghanaian leader was worth an iota of the proverbial benefit of the doubt.

One major problem that appeared to peevishly confront the postcolonial African leader throughout most of the 1960s, was the perennial and peculiar white-American hang-up of the “Dumb Nigger” stereotype, a pathological carryover from the historical enslavement of the Diaspora African and its vestigial concomitant of undifferentiated disdain for the proverbial African personality. Thus in June 1962, when President Nkrumah convened a nuclear disarmament conference in Accra themed “World Without The Bomb Conference,” the knee-jerk reaction of the Kennedy administration was to cynically claim that the entire conception and hosting of the confabulation had been hatched in Moscow. This is how the author of JFK: Ordeal in Africa cast it: “The majority of the 100 delegates attending the conference were from the East and, as far as the [Kennedy] State Department was concerned, this meant that it was ‘Soviet Sponsored.’ Ambassador Mahoney disagreed, and set about to organize the Western delegates, chiefly, Sean McBride of Ireland [founder of Amnesty International?], Lord Kennett of Great Britain, and James Wadsworth of the United States. As a result of the embassy’s efforts, the resolutions finally adopted by the conference [conferees?] proved to be considerably less obnoxious than expected” (180).

Mahoney offers, perhaps, the most poignant appreciation, to-date, of what Dr. Danquah characterized as “the ticking time-bomb of Trans-Volta Togoland.” The reference, of course, was to the UN-sponsored 1956 plebiscite, or referendum, that precipitated the incorporation of the British-ruled half of present-day Togo as a part of independent Ghana. Danquah had, hitherto, strongly argued on linguistic and cultural grounds that the present-day Volta Region, or at least the Ewe-speaking parts of it, ought to have been organically unified with its Francophone half. Indeed, it was primarily for this convicted stance of the Doyen of Gold Coast and Ghanaian politics that Danquah routinely trounced Nkrumah at polls organized in the newly created Volta Region.

In return for ceding the Volta Region to the French, Danquah had argued, unsuccessfully, for the Akan-speaking areas of the Ivory Coast to be organically incorporated into the newly created Republic of Ghana. On both stances, Nkrumah had vehemently and successfully opposed Danquah. Subsequent political developments have, of course, proven Danquah to have been the wiser for his positions. On the foregoing score, this is what Mahoney has to say: “Ghana’s neighbor to the east, Togo, had long been a meeting and staging ground for Ghanaian opponents of the Nkrumah regime. The feud between Ghana and Togo had begun in 1956 when a UN plebiscite had permanently split the Ewe tribe in two by giving Ghana sovereign control over British-administered Togoland. The French Togolese [sic] believed that the election had been rigged and blamed Nkrumah for having forced the UN’s hand. From that point forward, Togo [had] served as a dissident and, at times, terrorist sanctuary for Nkrumah’s adversaries” (181).

In essence, in the pan-Africanist imagination of the Ghanaian leader, the need to preserving the ethnic and cultural organicity of people of Ewe descent decidedly played second-fiddle to the imperative need for the immediate geopolitical unification of the African continent, even as Nkrumah had himself suggested in his speech officially declaring Ghana to be a sovereign nation, as follows: “The independence of Ghana is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of the African continent.” As to whether such agenda had practical relevance for the Africa of 1957 remains moot. At any rate, Mahoney recounts the fact that an “October 1961 conspiracy to assassinate Nkrumah had [been forensically proven to have] originated in the Togolese capital of Lomé,” obviously as a payback by Olympio for Nkrumah’s adamant and “pharaonic” refusal to let Mr. Olympio’s “people go.”

Mahoney further recalls that “Ghana retaliated six weeks later by sending Togolese commandos, trained and armed in Ghana, across the border to assassinate President Sylvanus Olympio. The commandos nearly succeeded in their operation. The CIA and the State Department agreed that Nkrumah at least had prior knowledge of the operation and probably planned it through his Bureau of African Affairs. The establishment of a commando training base for 400 exiled Togolese at Wora Wora, in the Volta Region, was further proof that the Ghanaians were deadly serious about ridding themselves of the Olympio regime” (181).

Nkrumah would have his avid and perennial wish some fourteen months later, on January 13, 1963, when “President Olympion was murdered by a group of Togolese soldiers. All eyes turned accusingly to Accra. Even Nkrumah’s ‘frère de combat’ [brother-in-arms] Sékou Touré demanded an international investigation of the murder (Mahoney 186).

To be fair to the Show Boy, it bears pointing out that Mahoney categorically observes that, indeed, President Olympio had collaborated with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency to subvert Nkrumah’s government (JFK: Ordeal in Africa 182). But the author is also quick to point out that like the CIA, Nkrumah’s so-called Bureau of African Affairs was primarily and squarely established for the purpose of destabilizing African governments, as well as eliminating individual African leaders with whom Nkrumah was ideologically at cross-purposes. In sum, opines Mahoney, Nkrumah was no proverbial altar boy innocently about the godly business of seeing to the welfare of each and every Ghanaian citizen: “The Bureau of African Affairs [headed by the Afro-Caribbean Mr. George Padmore (aka Malcolm Nurse)?] also provided ideological and, to a lesser extent, paramilitary training for several hundred ‘freedom fighters’ from all over the continent. Ghana’s neighbors were frightened by the bureau’s sponsorship of dissidents from their own countries and were nettled by Ghana’s transmission of broadcasts throughout West Africa. The breadth of Nkrumah’s ambition was evident in his remarks at the opening of the Kwame Nkrumah Institute of Ideology at Winneba: ‘I see before my mind’s eye a great monolithic party growing up, united and strong, spreading its protective wings over the whole of Africa – from Algiers in the North to Capetown [sic] in the South, from Cape Guardafui in the East to Dakar in the West” (182).

Indeed, it is rather fascinating that the Ghanaian leader, who had firmly in place an elaborate subversive scheme and agenda to rid the continent of leaders whom Nkrumah considered to be insufferably pro-Western, such as Togo’s President Olympio, should vehemently decry imperialist designs to liquidate him. Regarding the 1962 Kulungugu assassination attempt on his life, Mahoney poignantly observes: “The circumstances of the attack suggested an inside job by a handful of Nkrumah’s more ambitious subordinates. Even after the arrest of two cabinet ministers [i.e. Ako-Adjei and Adamafio] and the party secretary [Coffie-Crabbe], however, the terrorist bombings continued. By late September 1962, the toll of dead and wounded exceeded 300. There was little doubt that Lomé was serving as the base of terrorist operations and, at least in Nkrumah’s mind, the reports of meetings between American officials and Gbedemah and Busia revived a fearful specter. In early October, at a meeting in Flagstaff House, Nkrumah, in a desperate tone, reported to aides that the ‘imperialists’ were trying to kill him (183).

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Commmunity College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is Director of The Sintim-Aboagye Center for Politics and Culture and author of “Sounds of Sirens: Essays in African Politics and Culture” (iUniverse.com, 2004). E-mail: [email protected].

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

            It also ought to be deliberately and meticulously pointed out that Mahoney’s JFK: Ordeal in Africa does quite a worthwhile job in underscoring the oft-ignored fact that like most personalities abruptly thrust on the cusp of history, Kwame Nkrumah was no cartoon character, his well-documented egregious and serious personal and ideological flaws notwithstanding. And on this score, this is what Mahoney has to report: “What the Americans did not seem to realize was that for all his vanity, Nkrumah was a subtle and disarming supplicant. How else could one explain his extraordinary odyssey from the obscure shade of colonialism in a remote village in southwestern Ghana to Balmoral Castle, where he dined, as head of state, with the Queen of England?” (166).

Mahoney also reports quite bluntly that Nkrumah’s March 8, 1961 meeting with President Kennedy went poorly, the meeting having been literally rained upon, although by the end of it all, the Ghanaian leader had succeeded in getting Kennedy to fully back the Volta River Project (167). What was most remarkable about the Kennedy-Nkrumah meeting regarded a historic quote that Mr. Kennedy had borrowed from the legendary U.S. President Thomas Jefferson. It went as follows: “The disease of liberty is catching.” Kennedy, however, was to ironically add that, “It has been the object of our guest’s life to make sure that that disease spreads around the globe” (167).

In theory, of course, Kennedy was dead-on accurate in his encomium; however, chaotic events on the ground four years into Ghana’s independence clearly indicated that Nkrumah squarely expected to be in control of the kind of “disease of liberty” that both Presidents Jefferson and Kennedy were talking about. In other words, it clearly appears that in the grossly outsized and megalomaniacal imagination of Mr. Kwame Nkrumah, it was the unique opportunity for him to be able to dominate all else that mattered most.

The first serious attempt to topple the Nkrumah government appears to have occurred in late 1961, when the rather naively self-assured Ghanaian leader spent two months effectively out of the country touring the erstwhile Eastern-bloc countries, largely the Soviet Union and China. He would return to a highly charged atmosphere of chaos and rampantly running labor strikes as well as political intrigues among the ranks of his own cabinet. His rather desperate and strategically unwise decision to farm out the training and equipping of the Ghana Armed Forces to the Russians provoked acute discontent among the ranks of the largely Western-trained officer ranks of the military. The first most potentially successful coup attempt against Nkrumah imploded, after the alleged chief coup-plotter, Brigadier-General Joseph E. Michel, suddenly died in a plane crash in Ghana on September 3, 1961 (Mahoney 171). There is plausible speculation here that it was, indeed, this “chief conspirator,” as Mahoney describes Brigadier-General Michel, after whom the military garrison in Tema, near Accra, was named.

The most elaborately sustained attempt to overthrow Nkrumah, however, was engineered by Mr. Komla A. Gbedemah, the very same man who had vigorously campaigned to get the politically imprisoned future Prime Minster Nkrumah elected to the legislative assembly. Regarding Mr. Gbdemah’s attempt to “palatially” oust then-Prime Minister Nkrumah, Mahoney writes at length: “Despite the virtual paralysis of his country, Nkrumah elected to remain in Russia. Former Finance Minister Gbedemah (then serving on the three-man presidential commission ruling in Nkrumah’s absence) saw his chance to seize power. Gbedemah had no problem in obtaining CIA backing for his conspiracy, but he wanted an official assurance of American support. He approached Ambassador Russell on September 6 and told him of his plans. Would the U.S. support him? Washington gave an unequivocal yes.

¶ “Nkrumah returned to Ghana on September 16 and demanded on national radio that striking workers return to their jobs. The next day 3,000 skilled and semi-skilled workers struck in Accra. Railroad and dock workers in Takoradi also ignored the directive and appealed to American, British, Liberian and Nigerian unions for financial support. Nkrumah thereupon dismissed four of his cabinet ministers (including Gbedemah), and relieved all 230 British officers of their command positions (including his chief of staff, General H. T. S. Alexander). He warned the strikers for the final time to return to work. This time they obeyed” (172-3).

Further, Mahoney notes: “George Ball, who was monitoring cable traffic from Ghana, urged the President to sit tight on the Volta decision; there was a chance that Nkrumah might be overthrown in the next couple of weeks and a ‘really solid government’ would be installed. The State Department also wanted ‘to see if Gbedemah get anywhere.’

¶ “Gbedemah, however, proved to have little aptitude for intrigue. He seemed to want the Americans to do the work for him and spent as much time plotting with the CIA station chief in Accra as he did with other Ghanaian conspirators. Also assisting Gbedemah was the local agent of a New York diamond merchant, Leon Tempelsman and Son. The son, Maurice Tempelsman [who would later become romantically involved with the widowed former U.S. first lady Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis], was a friend and political supporter of Adlai Stevenson and had a liking for mixing conspiracy with commerce in his African trade. A few days after Nkrumah dismissed him from the cabinet, Gbedemah sent a letter to [former Michigan State] Governor [G. Mennen] Williams detailing those involved in the plot and requesting money. Kennedy was apprized of this unusual message at [his family’s estate in] Hyannis Port [Massachusetts] and instructed Bundy not to respond.

¶ “Whatever chance Gbedemah may have had of ousting Nkrumah was lost when Tempelsman’s agent in Ghana, Mr. Grosse, called his employer on an open transatlantic line and ‘spilled everything,’ including his assurance to Gbedemah of U.S. support. As U.S. officials feared, the line had been tapped by Ghanaian security agents.

¶ “Washington prepared for the worst. Grosse had apparently compromised ‘everybody,’ including the top CIA man in Accra. Bronson Tweedy, the CIA chief of Africa operations, was summoned to his office on Saturday to attend to the damage. Ball telephoned Tempelsman and coldly informed him that Mr. Grosse had been ‘quite indiscreet’ and should be pulled out.

¶ “Nkrumah, who had generally been restrained in his use of the security apparatus until this point, now struck back. In early October, he ordered the arrest of forty-eight persons (including three MPs) under the Preventive Detention Act. Ball briefed Bundy on the situation, Gbedemah was under surveillance and might be arrested and shot. The affair might be identified as an American plot. Maybe the Ghanaians didn’t have a recording of the telephone conversation, Bundy ventured. That was a possibility, Ball replied. ‘We might be lucky but we didn’t deserve that sort of luck.’

¶ “On October 31, the Ghanaian Parliament passed a bill requested by the President to establish special, nonjury courts that could order the death sentence for political offenses with no right of appeal. In late October, Gbedemah fled the country. ¶ …. ¶ …. ¶ …. ¶ …. Volta Dam or not, September 1961 marked the beginning of the end of Nkrumah’s relationship with the West” (JFK: Ordeal in Africa 173-5).

What is rather fascinating about the foregoing account by Mahoney is, of course, the fact that at no point in the author’s quite detailed narrative about Gbedemah’s elaborate and long-running conspiracy to overthrow President Nkrumah does the name of Dr. J. B. Danquah, or any of his close associates among the formidable ranks of the Ghanaian opposition drop in. what the foregoing clearly means is that there existed at least a critical mass of malcontents among the higher echelons of Nkrumah’s own government who wanted their increasingly insufferable proverbial drum-major for liberty radically removed from the scene. But what is even more fascinating is the fact that, somehow, even widely touted CPP loyalists like Gbedemah appeared to have cynically put their own material well-being far ahead of the commonweal or the greater national good. And the latter largely explains why “Afro Gbede” would write a letter to Governor G. Mennen Williams implicitly seeking to be heartily congratulated, while also simultaneously and shamelessly demanding to be paid for being able to assemble a panoply of conspirators who were ready to give the Show Boy the heave-ho.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is Director of The Sintim-Aboagye Center for Politics and Culture and author of “Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana” (iUniverse.com, 2005). E-mail: [email protected].

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

            Contrary to the widely held view, largely among circles of his detractors, that Nkrumah had had a direct hand in the tragic events leading to the brutal assassination of Congo-Kinshasa’s Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba, by forces loyal to Belgium and Eisenhower’s America, Mahoney provides clear and convincing evidence that what played out and culminated in the demise of the firebrand Congolese leader was a gross miscalculation of the aims and intentions of the dominant forces at work in the proverbial “Heart of Africa.” The young and radical Prime Minister Lumumba is depicted as a hopelessly impulsive, brash and naïve statesman/politician in league with an equally brash, albeit relatively more mature and foresighted, President Nkrumah with an inexorable urge towards the hasty implementation of a pan-African nationalist agenda of Ghana-Congo unification that violently clashed with the entrenched interests of the capitalist West.

Needless to say, Nkrumah’s agenda, while theoretically and morally admirable and even heroic, unpardonably verged on the patently quixotic, particularly when the astute observer and critical thinker on developments in contemporary African history and culture reckons the complex concatenation of disparate colonial influences, military strength and organization and the woeful lack of any remarkable intellectual and cultural awareness between the two radical African leaders and their respective peoples.

In other words, in agreeing to unify their two countries, Messrs. Nkrumah and Lumumba had woefully underestimated the potent counteractive agendas of the Eisenhower West, and the latter’s dogged determination not to share Africa’s sphere of influence with a “communist” Soviet Union in the cutthroat world of  Cold-War politics. In thus attempting to both deftly and diplomatically play the NATO countries against the Warsaw Pact countries, in the dubious name of “Nonalignment,” both Messrs. Nkrumah and Lumumba found themselves to be suavely outmaneuvered. To this effect, the author of JFK: Ordeal in Africa observes: “The sudden emergence of Lumumba as the Congo’s most popular leader appeared to give Nkrumah the opportunity to unite Ghana and the Congo. Prior to Congolese independence, Lumumba had discussed the prospect of such a union with his ‘idol.’ When order disintegrated in the week after independence, Nkrumah lifted more than 1,000 troops, as well as medical and administrative personnel, to the Congo in support of the UN peacekeeping operation. Lumumba was grateful. He flew to Ghana on August 8, 1960 to sign a document uniting the Congo and Ghana. It was Nkrumah’s finest hour. ¶ But then Lumumba miscalculated [the military might of Ghana and the stature of Nkrumah in the global scheme of power relations]. He broke relations with [UN Secretary-General Dag] Hammarskjold, and in so doing lost the protection of the UN force against domestic mutiny and international intrigue. When he invited the Russians to intervene, the United States and Belgium moved to eliminate him [by using Lumumba’s arch political opponents, of course]. In the [ensuing] struggle for power in Leopoldville, Nkrumah repeatedly urged Lumumba to restore relations with the UN before it was too late. On September 5, when President Kasavubu dismissed Lumumba, Nkrumah’s own troops (acting under UN orders) prevented the premier from gaining access to the radio station. Lumumba accused Ghana of ‘treachery.’ Nkrumah’s trump card was lost”(164).

In sum, in deciding to meddle in the internal affairs of the Congo vis-à-vis the latter’s troubling relationship with Belgium, the erstwhile colonial overlord, Nkrumah had naively overestimated the bonding mortar of “Africanity” that readily appeared to organically unite the peoples of Ghana and the Congo against their common Western-European enemy. Essentially, Nkrumah had also failed to afford himself adequate time to study and appreciate the character and personality of Prime Minister Lumumba, in order to be able to more effectively work with the relatively younger and far less academic and intellectual Congolese leader towards the total emancipation of continental Africa.

Further, Mahoney observes that the tragic events in the Congo, culminating in the brutal assassination of Prime Minister Lumumba, may well have pushed the Ghanaian premier over the proverbial edge, thus unwittingly provoking Nkrumah into prematurely digging his own grave, by being propelled by the forces of anger and frustration to move dangerously close to the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War: “The Soviets were quick to take advantage of Nkrumah’s anger at the West. During the week of December 15, 1960, Ghana received two of an eventual six Ilyushin aircraft from the Soviet Union. Nkrumah welcomed a thirty-four-member Soviet technical-assistance team to discuss $40 million worth of projects. Pointing to Nasser’s unhappy experience with the Americans, the Russians suggested that Nkrumah scrap the Volta project in favor of a smaller Soviet-financed dam. Nkrumah told them that he would consider the offer” (JFK: Ordeal in Africa 164).

For Mahoney, no Ghanaian politician more deftly deputized for the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) than Nkrumah’s own chief-lieutenant and finance minister, Mr. Komla Agbeli Gbedemah: “Whatever the case, the White House let it be known that inviting Nkrumah to Washington [in the wake of Lumumba’s assassination] had been ‘a difficult decision.’ The prevailing editorial attitude in Washington was grudging at best: ‘Mr. Kennedy decided that it would be useful to meet Nkrumah since he is rated as the only person in his country [with whom] to do business.’ The White House received another view from Komla Gbedemah, Nkrumah’s pro-Western finance minister, who was in Washington to see World Bank officials about the Volta project. Gbedemah suggested to Walt Rostow at a midnight meeting at Rostow’s home that the President should express ‘with great directness and force’ his concern about Ghana’s communist ties. This would not be the last [time that] the White House would hear from Mr. Gbedemah” (JFK: Ordeal in Africa 166-7).

Earlier, the CIA had sketched out and presented the following profile of the Ghanaian premier: “The Americans were beginning to realize that they had on their hands a man whose need for attention exceeded all other concerns. The CIA’s briefing paper [for President Kennedy] may have overstated matters somewhat, but [it] did identify the central trait: ‘[A] man beginning to slip just a bit and too conceited to see it, a politician to whom the roar of the crowd and the praise of the sycophant are as necessary as the air he breathes…[and who] desperately wants a favorable verdict from history” (166).

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is Director of The Sintim-Aboagye Center for Politics and Culture and author of “Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana” (iUniverse.com, 2005). E-mail: [email protected].

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

            In his book JFK: Ordeal in Africa (New York: Oxford UP, 1983), the author helps the reader to also begin to remarkably appreciate a bit of what might have prompted Mahoney to characterize Nkrumah as “a troubled personality.” While he had, in fact, produced several children by Ghanaian women both before his landmark departure for advanced studies in the United States as well as after his return to his motherland in December 1947, we find Nkrumah rather mischievously, frivolously and vainly quibbling about why, somehow, no individual Ghanaian woman met his conjugal standards. On this score, this is what the author of JFK: Ordeal in Africa has to say: “In the heady days after independence, he had laughingly said that he would never marry a Ghanaian woman because ‘all of Ghana is my bride.’ He had eventually married an Egyptian woman (on whom he had never set eyes before her arrival in Ghana) in order to fulfill a prophecy that the son of a black African man and a white African woman would rule all of Africa. For Nkrumah, liberation was only the first step. The next was the unification of the entire continent” (158).

In other words, what Mahoney is clearly implying here, wittingly or unwittingly, is that Nkrumah suffered from an acute case of what I have personally termed as THE DACOSTA COMPLEX, a bizarre form of conjugal neurosis verging on clinical self-alienation deftly and politically cast in terms of continental African integration. In the case of Nkrumah’s daughter by his Egyptian wife, Samia Yaba Nkrumah, who has been widely reported to be fervidly gunning for the Ghanaian presidency come 2016, the conjugal malady may well be aptly cast in terms of a HANNIBALIAN COMPLEX or even the SICILIAN COMPLEX, where Africa’s historic racial admixture with the Greco-Roman denizens on the Italo-Iberian peninsula becomes metaphorically sublimated and strategically projected onto the Ghanaian votive/victim on the altar of cosmopolitan pan-Africanism, epically cast in terms of pan-African globalism.

Is there any wonder, therefore, that Ghanaian womanhood was crassly undervalued throughout the 15-year tenure of the Nkrumah-led Convention People’s Party? According to T. Peter Omari (See Kwame Nkrumah: Anatomy of an African Dictatorship), the proverbial African Show Boy was known to rascally counsel his CPP male disciples to “take good care of the Ghanaian woman,” in the abjectly vulgar sense of the term. No wonder that not many Ghanaian women scholars and avid students of CPP political culture have had a lot that is complimentary to say about the treatment of women, besides the expedient and public use of a handful of them to great propagandistic effect (See Kwame Arhin’s The Life and Work of Kwame Nkrumah).

For Mahoney, as also for other avid students of postcolonial Ghanaian culture, Nkrumah may well have conveniently orchestrated his own political debacle. Or, perhaps, it had something “Caesarean” about it, in Shakespearean parlance: “Later, when there were attempts on his life, Nkrumah saw the hand of the West at work. Vowing not to become another Lumumba, he sought refuge – and vindication of his pan-Africanist dream – in the East. The Russians gave him what he wanted – the Lenin Peace Prize and military advisors to train his praetorian guard – but no amount of attention from the Kremlin could restore his lost standing at home. The week before his departure for China in February 1966, there were reports of military plots. His aides urged him not to leave the country, but Nkrumah brushed aside their warnings. Perhaps he felt, as Basil Davidson later wrote, ‘an inner hopelessness’ about it all” (Mahoney 158).

The author of JFK: Ordeal in Africa also depicts Nkrumah’s relationship with the United States as the leader of newly independent Ghana in terms of exuberant and abjectly naïve desire to please his Washington supreme overlords, even while at home he pathetically pretended to be an intransigent bulwark against Western imperialism. There was, of course, no doubt that the Ghanaian premier harbored an apishly megalomaniacal desire to playing Big Brother in the Third World. On Nkrumah’s 1958 official visit to the United States, for example, Mahoney writes: “As Africa’s emissary, Nkrumah said everything he could to allay Eisenhower administration anxiety over the radical course of events in North Africa and the Middle East. Time [magazine] wrote, ‘Seldom was a guest from a small country more welcome. The State Department saw the nationalism of his year-old country and the promise of his African leadership as a possible future counterbalance to rampant nationalism spreading from the Mideast.’ Nkrumah even proposed the creation of a United Nations force led by three Ghanaian battalions to replace American marines in Lebanon” (JFK: Ordeal in Africa 161).

Nkrumah would also vigorously defend the at once lurid and abominable culture of Jim Crowism, or racial segregation, as a highly exaggerated social blight, or a minor blemish of human nature, capriciously and unfairly harped upon by rabid detractors of the United States to embarrass the latter. On this score, a palpably horrified Mahoney opines: “He [i.e. Nkrumah] cast himself as the West’s best friend in Africa, scolding Nasser for his irresponsible declarations and stating on [the American television talking-heads program] Meet The Press that, ‘We in Ghana have no fear of communism.’ The Preventive Detention Act, he said, was only ‘temporary.’ As for the spectacle of segregated America, ‘the racial question has often been exaggerated by those wishing to bring [the name and dignity] of the United States into disrepute.’”

A firebrand and a vanguard freedom fighter, indeed! Mahoney himself seems to be taken aback by Nkrumah’s patent display of abject insincerity, almost verging on downright cowardice, in the preceding quote. On this score, the author of JFK: Ordeal in Africa bitterly laments: “Anyone in the American government who had read Nkrumah’s memoirs [i.e. Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah] published the previous year, would have had reason to question the sincerity of these remarks. During his ten years as a student in the U.S. during the Great Depression, Nkrumah had lived the wretched life of the American Negro. He had felt the sting of racial humiliation. His 1958 motorcade through Harlem may indeed have been ‘triumphal.’ It may even have awakened the ‘somnolent imagination of the American Negro,’ as one reporter put it. But it was difficult to say which American memory lay deeper in Nkrumah’s mind: that of the Ghanaian Prime Minister standing in the back of a Cadillac waving to the screaming Harlem crowds, or that of the shivering ‘Negro’ of fifteen years before standing on the corner of 125^th Street in the dead of winter hawking fish” (161-2).

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is Director of The Sintim-Aboagye Center for Politics and Culture and author of “Sounds of Sirens: Essays in African Politics and Culture” (iUniverse.com, 2004). E-mail: [email protected].

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

This is the first in a series of articles on the protracted debate between the followers of Dr. Joseph (Kwame Kyeretwie) Boakye-Danquah, the widely acclaimed Doyen of Modern Ghanaian Political Culture, on the one hand, and those of the first Prime Minister and later Executive President of Ghana, Mr. Kwame Nkrumah, on the other. In part, this series has been occasioned by recent torrents of abuse in which the abusers, largely the followers of Mr. Nkrumah, have sought through diverse mendacious ways to impugn both the patriotism and the phenomenal and seminal contributions of Dr. Danquah to the shaping and development of modern Ghana. One source which the followers of Mr. Nkrumah, the so-called Nkrumaists, have consistently, persistently and perennially cited to cast both doubt and aspersions on the integrity of Dr. Danquah is Richard D. Mahoney’s quite authoritative treatise on United States’ foreign policy vis-à-vis Africa during the Eisenhower and the Kennedy years, titled JFK: Ordeal in Africa (New York: Oxford UP, 1983).

But that the author’s father, William P. Mahoney, was the U.S. Ambassador to Ghana during the Kennedy years, has predictably served to further enhance the credibility and authority of his book in the opinion of these diehard Nkrumaists. What, so far, none of those Nkrumah disciples who have made a rather routine ritual of citing Mahoney’s book to purportedly prove their point alleging the collaboration of Dr. Danquah with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) have also woefully failed to publicly alert their audience, is the possible reason, or motive, for the author’s decision to title the chapter exclusively devoted to their hero as follows: “Quite a Few Chips on a Very Dark Horse” (JFK: Ordeal in Africa 157). Naturally, I am intrigued by the convenient, albeit gaping, silence of the Nkrumaists on the foregoing observation. I am also fully aware of the fact that a significant part of the answer squarely lies in the fact that many an Nkrumah fanatic who pretends to be intimately familiar with Mahoney’s JFK: Ordeal in Africa has merely been told about what the author is supposed to have reported in his book about Dr. Danquah, invariably in twisted terms that are predictably meant to put Mr. Nkrumah in a saintly and progressive light, where the reality tells quite a decidedly different story.

I know the foregoing for a fact because, as already adumbrated, many an Nkrumah fanatic – and there are legions of them – does not read English in the meditative and scholastic sense of the term. Indeed, about the only language that these faux pan-African jihadists are intimately familiar with may properly be characterized as “PROPAGANGLISH,” which is why they continue to indiscriminately cite Mahoney whose quite formidable treatise deals almost exclusively with U.S. policy towards Africa, rather than critically, poignantly and objectively probe the question of whether any of Nkrumah’s inveterate political opponents, indeed, collaborated with the CIA in order to auspiciously remove the pro-communist and neocolonial monstrosity that was the Nkrumah-led Convention People’s Party (CPP).

At any rate, it may interest his apostles and disciples to learn that in the chapter devoted to their cultic demigod, Mahoney poignantly describes Nkrumah as a “unique and troubled personality” (JFK: Ordeal in Africa 157). Earlier on, the author had described postcolonial Ghana’s pioneering premier as “the self-styled leader of Africa.” But what is even more intriguing about Mahoney’s book is the author’s suggestion that “Kwame Nkrumah of Africa” (the way the Show Boy desired to be known and identified) may well have orchestrated his own exit from the Ghanaian and continental African political scene. We learn, for instance, that just six days before he embarked on his largely self-instigated China trip on the resolution of the Vietnam War (See Fitch and Oppenheimer, Ghana: The End of an Illusion), Nkrumah had had his will revised. Could it be that the messianic African Show Boy had espied the proverbial handwriting on the wall? Even more intriguing, however, is the fact that this critical question has never been amply discussed or even marginally highlighted by CPP ideologues and fanatics. And if, indeed, the Show Boy had evidently envisaged the proverbial handwriting on the wall on the eve of his fateful departure for Beijing (Hanoi), then what is the glaringly paradoxical rationale behind the perennial plaint of those Nkrumaist apostles who both decry and wistfully lament the fact that their idol/hero had not been allowed to remain at his already-befouled post in order to complete his supposedly epic and nonesuch development agenda for the country?

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is Director of The Sintim-Aboagye Center for Politics and Culture and author of “The Obama Serenades” (Lulu.com, 2011). E-mail: [email protected].

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