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

            We also learn in Chapter 9, technically the penultimate chapter of Mahoney’s JFK: Ordeal in Africa (Oxford UP, 1983), that President Nkrumah had originally intended to have Mr. Ebenezer Ako-Adjei, his former Foreign Minister, who had been implicated in the Kulungugu assassination attempt on his life, tried as a “local bastard” or one of the local agents of the CIA because, evidently, Mr. Ako-Adjei had been discovered to have had some links with at least two U.S. embassy officials, namely, Dr. Carl C. Nydell and Mr. William B. Davis. Nkrumah would vehemently demand the immediate removal of these men, whom the Ghanaian leader had “accused of anti-regime activity” without success (231). Once again, it was the specter of the humongous dollar sum that hung between the Show Boy’s dream and the Akosombo Dam project that did the trick. And while there is apparently no incontrovertible evidence linking Mr. Ako-Adjei to any key CIA operatives, Mahoney’s reference to the Kennedy administration’s assay at “damage control” may well point to the fact of the CIA having been involved in the Kulungugu Affair.

In the paragraph immediately following the two detailing Mr. Ako-Adjei’s alleged connection to the Kulungugu assassination attempt, this is what Mahoney has to report: “By this time, according to Carl Kaysen, the President was convinced that ‘damage control’ was our only real option in trying to coexist with nonaligned charismatics such as Nasser, Sukarno, and Nkrumah. Public pressure by the U.S. would only produce more coups de theater. The lesson of the Volta Project was that the certain cost of withdrawing had always been higher than the risk of going ahead. With misgivings, the President authorized Volta disbursements to proceed and asked the State Department to provide him henceforth with a monthly review of the situation in Ghana” (231-232).

In other words, for Mahoney, while the viability of the Volta River Project was well beyond question, in business parlance, Nkrumah’s ideological and temperamental volatility constantly provoked the United States into having grave doubts about the wisdom of supporting the industrial development agenda of a thoroughgoing dictator and a megalomaniac. But what we learn here that is even more important is the fact that like Mr. Komla Agbeli Gbedemah, Mr. Ako-Adjei was clearly and evidently dead-set against Nkrumah’s communist proclivities. Unlike Gbedemah, however, Ako-Adjei does not appear to have been desperately willing to appropriate any violent or forcible means in defense of his ideological convictions. As to whether Messrs. Gbedemah and Ako-Adjei collaborated with known operatives of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency is beside the point. What is significant is whether their evidently unwavering and passionate proclivity towards Western capitalist democracy was either more progressive or less so than the Marxist-Leninist stance and agenda doggedly pursued by President Nkrumah. For as Dr. Danquah once had the occasion to emphasize, Kwame Nkrumah was not, in anyway whatsoever, synonymous with the State and Republic of Ghana. On that occasion, the Doyen of Modern Ghanaian Politics had alluded to France’s King Louis XVI’s imperious equation of himself with the French nation: “L’état Cést Moi!” And as subsequent polling returns steadily indicated, by the eve of his overthrow, most eligible Ghanaian voters had long gotten tired and fed up with their neo-imperial “Osagyefo.”

If in 1958, during his first official visit to the United States as Ghana’s premier, Nkrumah had woefully failed to speak out against the patently inhuman policy of racial segregation, confronted with the problem in a television talking-heads program, by early 1963, the Ghanaian leader had fully become convinced that African-Americans did not have the interests of continental Africans at heart, the active and historic participation of the distinguished likes of Rev.-Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in Ghana’s independence celebrations notwithstanding. On this score, this is what the author of JFK: Ordeal in Africa has to report: “Nkrumah’s suspicions appeared in more vituperative form in the party press. The Ghanaian Times charged that American Negroes were providing the raw material for ‘subversion and neocolonial interference in Africa.’ The Spark[,] which had acquired the habit of reprinting editorials from the Soviet press in unattributed form, came to the point more bluntly, claiming that President Kennedy had taken office with the plan to recruit Negroes ‘for ugly purposes in Africa’” (232).

Nkrumah’s vitriolic tirades would not be allowed to slide by without riposte. The younger brother of the American president and his Attorney-General, Robert Kennedy, would caustically accuse Nkrumah of running a roguish political machine that strikingly operated like the white racist regime of South Africa. An infuriated President Nkrumah would shoot back mordantly: “In whatever ways we may be lagging behind [as a poor and newly-liberated country], I think that on the question of racial toleration[,] we have established a standard[,] during our short period of independence[,] which can be regarded as a shining example for the rest of the world” (Mahoney 232).

Needless to say, a rabidly anti-racist Nkrumah, at least as evidenced from the quite remarkable corpus of his writings, knew exactly what he was talking about: after all, was he not married to a white (Arabo-) Egyptian woman, nearly half his age, who neither spoke English, Ghana’s official language of instruction, professional and business protocol, nor the Nzema language of her husband; and whose Arabic native tongue and academic French language her husband neither spoke? Indeed, no practical example of racial tolerance could be either more picturesque or edifying.

All humor aside, Nkrumah appears to have had quite a remarkable impact on the Black Civil Rights Movement of Kennedy’s America, essentially because in both direct and oblique ways, he had made his revulsion at the spectacle of racial segregation in America clear in his heated exchanges with key members of the Kennedy administration. He would, literally, jump for joy when Kennedy issued his executive edict ordering the immediate desegregation of the University of Alabama, Tuscaloosa, in June 1963 (Mahoney 234).

Strangely, though, those of his critics who have accused President Nkrumah of envisaging something akin to a role model, or even a hero, in Germany’s Chancellor Adolf Hitler may have a modicum of sustainable forensic evidence on their side. On this score, this is what the author of JFK: Ordeal in Africa, who is also a former secretary-of-state for Arizona, has to report: “The [American] produced an unusual assessment [of the Volta River Project] drawn from a series of conversations with Flight Captain Hanna Reitsch, a former test pilot for the Third Reich and intimate of Adolf Hitler, whom Nkrumah had invited to Ghana to train his air force. Miss Reitsch was housed in one of Nkrumah’s mansions and, according to Ambassador [William P.] Mahoney, gave ‘every appearance of having a deep, platonic attachment to Nkrumah” (233).

Once again, Mahoney puts paid to the faux-epic claim of those fanatics who accuse the Johnson White House of having instigated Nkrumah’s ill-fated Hanoi-Beijing trip in the Ghanaian leader’s rather outsized and quixotic bid to resolving the Vietnam War: “For all the political fury in Ghana, work on the Volta Dam proceeded smoothly. In January 1966[,] the dam was dedicated – a year ahead of schedule. At the dedication ceremony[,] Nkrumah was gracious to those assembled, but it was clear that his mind was elsewhere. He told [Ambassador] Mahoney that he wanted to fly to Beijing and Hanoi to put a stop to the Vietnam War. He needed American endorsement of the peace effort. Washington responded that it was not interested in his mediation. The Americans now knew through their covert sources that it was simply a matter of time before the conspirators – chiefly, General J. A. Ankrah, Colonel E. K. Kotoka, and Police Commissioner J. W. K. Harlley – made a move against Nkrumah. ¶ Nkrumah’s advisors urged him to postpone the trip to Asia. The rumors of a plot had the ring of authenticity, they said. Nkrumah told his trusted aide, Michael Dei-Anang, that he had never allowed ‘small things’ to stop him. If he had, where would Ghana be today? He spent the remaining days before his trip in his study reading histories of Vietnam and preparing for his talks with Mao Zedong and Ho Chi Minh. On February 18, 1966, he composed his final will. The following day, he left Ghana for the last time. He was deposed on February 24, 1966” (JFK: Ordeal in Africa 235-6).

If the Kennedy administration could be aptly said to have been far less forthcoming in its generally progressive foreign-policy agenda on Africa than it practically could have been, then in the well-informed opinion of Mahoney, perhaps the most regressive and immitigably unrepresentative U.S. administration of the period, vis-à-vis America’s constitutionally and globally stated aspiration of “freedom and the pursuit of happiness” for all humanity, was the government of Mr. Richard Milhous Nixon. Regarding the latter’s policy towards the white-racist Apartheid regime in South Africa, the author notes: “Several years – and some 100,000 casualties – later, the Nixon administration reached a different conclusion with regard to the role of the United States in Southern Africa. Under National Security Advisor Henry Kissinger, the National Security Council staff developed a statement of policy known as ‘The Tar-Baby Option.’ It concluded that ‘the whites are here to stay and the only way [that] constructive change can come about is through them. There is no hope for the blacks to gain the political rights they seek through violence. ¶ President Nixon stated his preference more plainly. At a White House reception on April 10, 1969 marking the twentieth anniversary of the founding of NATO, he took Portuguese Foreign Minister Franco Nogueira aside. ‘Just remember,’ Nixon said, ‘I’ll never do to you what Kennedy did’” (JFK: Ordeal in Africa 243).

Of course, what Kennedy did, essentially, was to accord legitimacy to the African nationalist forces seeking self-determination from European colonial imperialism. On the whole, Mahoney’s most forthright American-policy treatise on Africa fairly balances the scales in squarely and objectively envisaging Nkrumah and his Third-World counterparts as largely helpless pawns in the epic game of superpower politics with little, albeit relatively remarkable, room to maneuver. Often, though, the blistering naivety of leaders like Nkrumah and Guinea’s Sékou Touré stemmed from their understandably overwhelming intoxication with Africa’s new-found freedom, which these two radical revolutionaries erroneously presumed to be equally heartily shared by the imperialist forces of Cold-War dialectics. In the process, these pioneering African leaders ended up bitterly disappointed and disillusioned by the treacherous contours of the new paradigm shift which Nkrumah, for example, earlier on properly and, perhaps, even prophetically recognized for the preemptive and stage-managed neocolonialist phase of African liberation that it indubitably was, and increasingly became.

Once again, this is what Mahoney has to report: “Kennedy arrived in the White House with his own portfolio on Africa. He brought with him a longstanding, personally held conviction on the colonialism issue. He had also attracted a popular following on the continent. The “”eager crowds shouting ‘Kennedy, Kennedy’” that Frank Church saw in Africa in December 1960, the ‘complete kinship’ Kwame Nkrumah promised him on inaugural day were all there before he had even begun. ¶ These high expectations clearly gave President Kennedy leverage with Africa’s new leaders, but they also created hopes among Africans that Kennedy was often either unable or unwilling to fulfill. When the Russians sought refueling rights in Ghana and Guinea during the Cuban missile crisis, Kennedy was able to persuade Nkrumah and Sékou Touré to reject the Soviet request. But when Nkrumah sent a personal appeal to Kennedy to intercede to save Lumumba, Kennedy did nothing and both Nkrumah and Sékou Touré were deeply disappointed. The same frustration was evident in Holden Roberto’s embittered letter to Kennedy in December 1962[,] accusing [the American president] of abandoning the Angolan nationalists in their hour of need”” (244-5).

*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.

            Significantly, the two or three brief paragraphs in which the name of Dr. J. B. Danquah appears vis-à-vis his purported dealings with the United States, make absolutely no direct mention of Danquah’s active interaction with any known operatives of the CIA whatsoever. On this score, this is what Mahoney has to say: “The matter concerned Dr. J. B. Danquah, Nkrumah’s opponent in the presidential election of 1960, who had been released from prison a few months after Mahoney’s arrival as ambassador. Danquah paid a visit one November day to the embassy to ask Mahoney why funds his family had been receiving during his imprisonment had been cut off after his release. ¶ This was the first time that Mahoney had heard of the arrangement. After Danquah left, he summoned the CIA chief of station to ask why he had not been advised of the agency’s association with Danquah. Dissatisfied with the explanation, Mahoney flew to Washington two days later and personally informed Kennedy about the matter. ¶ The President reacted sharply to the news and told Mahoney that he had sent a letter to all ambassadors in May 1961 making it clear that their authority extended to all phases of embassy decision making. Kennedy then telephoned CIA Director John McCone and told him that he was sending Mahoney over to CIA headquarters and wanted the matter resolved immediately. The understanding that emerged from the meeting at Langley was that ‘no undertakings of any kind, even remotely involving our situation in Ghana, would either be continued or launched without the ambassador’s knowledge and approval” (JFK: Ordeal in Africa 184-5).

The first factor that ought to be immediately pointed out is the fact that the author of JFK: Ordeal in Africa is relating to the reader an incident that intimately involved his own father, Ambassador William P. Mahoney. The author ought to, therefore, be envisaged, beforehand, to have a vested interest in protecting the “diplomatic” and/or professional integrity of his patriarch. Among the Akan-speaking people of Ghana, and elsewhere in the West African sub-region, there is a maxim that: “One does not point to one’s father’s village with one’s left index-finger.” We will shortly further explain why the author’s rather forceful attempt to protect the integrity of his father vis-à-vis the Danquah episode ought to be taken with a proverbial pinch of salt, if not unreservedly held suspect.

In the interim, suffice it to poignantly observe that were the alleged arrangement in which regular remittances were made to the Danquah family, while the latter was imprisoned by President Nkrumah, a perennial one made with the full knowledge of the putative Doyen of Gold Coast and Ghanaian politics, Dr. Danquah would have directly confronted the Accra-based CIA station chief, instead of Ambassador Mahoney, when he discovered to his apparent dismay, shortly after his release from prison, that the United States’ Embassy, rather than the CIA station chief, had abruptly cut off financial assistance to the Danquah family. Very likely, the decision to offer financial assistance to the Danquah family had been hatched and executed in the absence of the paterfamilias. Likewise, were Danquah a local CIA operative, the agency would have continued to remit him some form of financial relief, once he came out of prison and it was clear that he was not gainfully employed to be able to take care of his own family.

In sum, our unassailable contention here is that very likely, the decision to financially assist the Danquah family was made in Washington and over and well above the authority of the Director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Very likely, it was taken with the studied knowledge of either the President of the United States or a highly influential presidential aide. After all, Danquah’s fame and stature as the most feared and hated opponent of the Ghanaian dictator was not altogether lost on the Cold War-obsessed Americans.

As for the mischievous myth about Danquah’s being a “CIA Asset,” suffice it to emphatically observe here that unlike the mercurial and constantly and expediently vacillating President Nkrumah, Dr. Danquah had self-assuredly and ideologically always been pro-West and pro-democratic capitalism, and so did not need any special inducement, prodding or cajoling, whatsoever, to ideologically truck with the Americans and, in fact, the Western world in general.

At any rate, to remarkably appreciate just a little bit of Richard Mahoney’s obviously earnest attempt to protecting the “diplomatic” integrity of the author’s own father, one only need to read this deftly and subtly crafted paragraph immediately preceding the one detailing Dr. Danquah’s encounter with the newly-appointed and posted Ambassador William Mahoney: “The embassy in Accra saw no basis for operational activity and recommended that ‘we maintain our presence on a business as usual basis.’ Ambassador Mahoney was soon to find out, however, what careerists normally prefer to ignore by instinct and what political appointees usually fail to grasp through innocence – that an ambassador is seldom the master of his own house” (184).

Now, let us briefly attempt to critically examine the preceding paragraph. For instance, why, in the opinion of the author of JFK: Ordeal in Africa, do career diplomats “normally prefer to ignore by instinct” payments such as were allegedly being made by the CIA station officer to the family of the politically incarcerated Dr. Danquah? Was it fundamentally because the CIA was in the habit of financially assisting the dependent relatives of imprisoned opposition politicians, and was routinely and invariably assumed to be so engaged?

And if so, why do political appointees like Ambassador Mahoney who, by the way, often constitute the bulk of significant ambassadorial appointments, “usually fail to grasp [such an elementary truth] through [sheer] innocence” of being political appointees, rather than career diplomats? In other words, must the author of JFK: Ordeal in Africa be understood to be implying that so diplomatically and civically innocent – or naïve – of America’s foreign policy protocol was his father that his apparently sudden discovery of U.S. government-authorized financial assistance to the family of the incarcerated Dr. Danquah, which the evidently “Nkrumah-loving” Ambassador Mahoney apparently deemed as outrageous and even diplomatically flagrant, was simply that, a sheer blight of diplomatic innocence?

Needless to say, the critical reader’s guess is as good and valid as this writer’s. Anyway, what is also interesting here is that nowhere in this otherwise meticulous account does the author place Danquah anywhere near such hot spots and hotbeds of anti-Nkrumah conspiracies as Kulungugu, Lomé, London and/or even Washington, such as has been remarked about Messrs. Gbedemah and Busia, for ready examples. The fact of the matter is that the man who personally and formally introduced the future President Nkrumah into the mainstream of Ghanaian politics was simply too self-assured and fearless to resort to back-alley shenanigans, as a means of vehemently registering his unreserved disgust and abhorrence of the neo-fascist, Nkrumah-led Convention People’s Party regime (See Dennis Austin’s Politics in Ghana: 1945-1960).

Then again, with Busia, also, it was perfectly understandable, especially when one contextually reckons the fact of what it really meant to be cast in the palpably scary role of main opposition leader in the dog-eat-dog world of Nkrumah’s Ghana of the early to mid-1960s. But that the youthful, astute, sprightly and nimble, albeit decidedly staid, leader of the consolidated United Party (UP) spent most of the period from 1959 to 1966, literally, dodging Nkrumah’s flying assassin’s bullets, ought to poignantly inform the objective reader as to why it became an imperative necessity for the first African to be named professor at the University of Ghana, Legon, to actively hobnob, or consort, with and seek protective cover from the indisputably deadly salvos from a Russian-KGB-fortified President Nkrumah. And here, too, it is significant to observe that unlike Mr. Komla A. Gbedemah who boldly and brazenly crossed the political divide – from pro-Soviet Communism, at least vis-à-vis his close association with Mr. Kwame Nkrumah; to American/British capitalist democracy – largely out of decided self-interest, Busia, like Danquah before him, had always been rooted ideologically to the West. And the Wenchi, Brong-Ahafo, native and Oxbridge-educated scholar/sociologist wore his unbridled disgust for Nkrumah’s brand of Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist dictatorship on his proverbial sleeves.

*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 “Ghanaian Politics Today” (Lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: [email protected].

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The word cut a like knife. What the hell are we paying this Attah Mills and his do-nothing NDC members for? This is the question every Ghanaian must ask this NDC criminal administration. It is cynically wrong that since 2009 NDC came to office the extent of bribery and corruption has been staggering throughout the nation. These criminals and the murderous NDC organization have stolen millions of dollars from the nation. As the election chaos looms, it is with a great sense of disappointment that the NPP and other opposition parties have not yet organized nationwide demonstrations to inform the public about the dubious NDC means of stealing the nation resources.

These opposition parties across the nation have written a “get out of jail free” card for this John Evans Fifii Attah Mills and his “NDC criminal mafia” administration. This hypocrite not only has a warped sense of entitlement and self-aggrandizement he also refuses to take responsibility for finding practical solutions to stop his ministers and party official on their daily basis corruption against the nation. They always kept blaming the NPP opposition for their wrong doings by saying they inherited an economic mess but that is a lie. However they are able to use any dubious methods to rob the nation especially when Ghanaians were focusing on the NDC tribalistic Ghana@50 investigation in which they think Ghanaians are foolhardy to believe that the NPP are criminals. During my covert operation last summer, an NDC “deep- throat” secretly told me that the NDC administration is paranoia of NPP. As a result of that they are trying to revive the Ghana@50 case against some NPP gurus and bring it back into public domain to embarrass the NPP before the general election.

History will justify that during the 1980s this criminal organization (P) NDC era cauterized the majority of the Akans who were successful in business under the ruse of “Class warfare”. They then claim as their principles and beliefs that there exists an eternal divide between the haves and have-note and that this is the root of all Akans evils that are afflicting Ghanaians society. The truth is that many of these Akans were richly blessed and rewarded by their life of hard work (along with a great deal of luck). For example, the late Mr siaw, who comes from a humble beginning, was a mere teacher with innovative business skills who worked hard to open the Achimota brewery, which was then confiscated by this fool John Jerry Rawlings and his criminal (P) NDC administration. They never give it back to Mr siaw’s family. Now these motherfuckers have come back to power and are acquiring properties by dubious means while these motherfucking tribalistic ethnic groups in Ghana, who continue to support this criminals NDC, and majority of Ghanaians who a paranoia are not saying anything. These NDC crooks operated under the assumption that the wealthy are a monolith, and that crime must be subjugated by the force of the state. Thus they confiscated the Akans properties and act heinously to murder them. Now these NDC criminal are robbing the nation blind and Ghanaians are not holding them accountable for their crimes. This is very sad, for those of us who love Ghana and its great people. The Akans need to open their eyes on these minorities. If not, they will continue oppress and treat them as second class citizens. Akans need to realize that when we say freedom, it does not mean freedom is a free gift. They need not to be paranoia and speak their mind on daily basis.

From: Nana Kofi Amankwah (New York)

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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