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)