?By Cameron Duodu
WHEN I wrote a column in early? February 2014, calling on the deputy minister of information and media relations,? Ibrahim Murtala Mohammed, to do his homework before speaking about sad matters such as the death in detention of Dr J B Danquah in February 1965, I was not in a quarrelsome mood.
If I had been, I would not have spent a lot of time trying to flatter? Mohammed over the awesome names he bears, and of his responsibility, therefore, to be careful not to bring himself — and thereby those great people — into disrepute.
Unfortunately, I was too subtle for Mohammed. For rather than take my play on his names as a compliment, Mohammed, in a reply published on 17 February 2014, accused me of personalising my argument by dwelling on his names!
Mohammed also took issue with me on my understanding of the relationship between Ibrahim (Abraham) and? Almighty God. Again he misfires: I am not an Islamic scholar and cannot therefore enter into an argument about Ibrahim with Mohammed. Indeed, there are several interpretations of the Holy Islamic texts. Arguing about them would be irrelevant to my purpose, in any case. For all I wanted to say was that Ibrahim was a great Prophet and that Mohammed should try not to disgrace such a name by exhibiting callousness.?
There are other elements in Mohammed’s reply which I could pick on ? his statement, for instance, that although he was born in 1974, he has not yet reached age 40 and so I made a mistake in saying that he was 40 years old. Does he really think I have time to calculate his age to the exact month and day? He must thank Dr J B Danquah for having existed at all, for I am sure that had it not been for Dr Danquah, Mohammed’s achievements, great as they may be, would have fallen entirely? beneath my radar.
What more is there to say? Expatiate on what Mohammed says Mr Deku told Mr Pratt or whether there was a commission or committee and what year it was? Of what use would that be to the bones of poor Dr Danquah?
I am filled with grief on being forced to reflect on these things. For what Mohammed’s attitude makes clear to me is that this is a country in which some members of the youth?still?do not want to be corrected when they make mistakes. The CPP youth used to do that, but they have toned down these days, because they have observed the political fallout, which has gone grossly against them.
It is fatal for NDC officials like Mohammed to refuse to heed what philosophers ? from Aristotle and Socrates down to Santayana ? have advised mankind, namely, that nations that do not remember their past are condemned torelive?it.
Now, even if the details of Dr Danquah’s political activities were to justify the two terms of preventive detention that he suffered, his?age and background, at the time he died in detention in 1965, were such as would have evoked pity, if not sympathy, amongst people in many societies.
More so in Africa, for we in Ghana and other African countries pride ourselves in our cultures, which oblige us to show respect to the elderly, and even ? to our own children and grand-children.
Respect to our own offspring? Yes!! In many areas of Ghana, for instance, children are not named after their own fathers or mothers, but after revered familial forebears who once graced this earth. One’s father would name one after?his?own father, or his mother, or his grand-mother or grand-father, or his uncles and his aunts ? depending on whether he had been blessed enough to have enough children to do the rounds, in terms of names.
That is why so many people bear the sobriquet, ?Nana? before their own given names. It is done to remind family members that these ?children? are not just themselves but?an instrument of remembrance?of the dearly departed and should therefore be accorded due respect. When they misbehave, they must, of course, be admonished. But with pain, not only anger. One should be saying to them, ?How could you, my own father/grandfather/mother/
The naming mechanism also makes it easier for other members of a family, who are not a child’s own parents, to feel responsible in helping to bring a child up. When one hears a name that once commanded respect in one’s ears being bandied about? with scorn because of the naughty deeds of a child, one becomes sub-consciously outraged. ?What? Is it my grandpa’s name that is being shouted across the streets like this?? And one may take it upon oneself to educate the wayward child in good behaviour.
Even if one is met with disrespect whilst doing this, one accepts it: one has done one’s duty by one’s departed elders, and nothing is more important than that. For the elders taught us, so that we, in our turn, may teach the young. In teaching the young, we have no guarantee that we shall not be bruised. But if we are bruised, so what? The elders did not mind being bruised when they went into the forest to grow food and trap game for our parents to eat and survive. If they had been fearful of getting bruised, would we be here today?
I wrote my column only to alert my readers to the self-defeating nature of the politics of revenge and callousness. For I am convinced that the one person who suffered most, through the introduction of the vindictive Preventive Detention Act into Ghana, was Dr Kwame Nkrumah himself. Why?
Because Nkrumah was one of the wittiest politicians in Ghana during his reign. Once, at a CPP rally in my home-town, Asiakwa, he asked those who wanted to ask him questions to write their questions down on a piece of paper and submit them. One questioner asked him, point-blank, whether he did not ?stow away to America!? Another questioner asked whether he had not been arrested in America for stealing money!
Instead of getting angry, Nkrumah laughed heartily. He said, ?I have done politics from America to Britain and throughout the length and breadth of this country. But never have I seen such?nkwasea?(stupid) politics as this?.
Nkrumah then tossed the questions over to his Propaganda Secretary, N A Welbeck, to answer them. Welbeck swerved the questioners completely by asking, ?Even if Kwame Nkrumah did some bad things overseas, have you heard, since he came back home, that he has done anything bad here?? The crowd shouted back: ?No!? And Welbeck won them over to Nkrumah’s side.
But had there been a PDA at the time, the people who asked those irreverent questions would have been detained. And the public’s sympathy would have been with them, and not with Nkrumah.? Nkrumah would have come across as a coward and a criminal,? who detained people whose questions he could not answer.
In the Parliament of 1957-58, whose proceedings I reported first-hand for Radio Ghana, Nkrumah, aided by such stalwart CPP Ministers as K A Gbedema, Kofi Baako and Kojo Botsio, could hold his own against the wittiest wisecracks of Joe Appiah, Victor Owusu, R R Amponsah and other brilliant spokespersons of the Opposition.
But the moment the PDA became operative and the Opposition spokespersons could be jailed without trial, the standard of debate ? and consequently of Government performance ? plummeted downwards. Even former Government front-benchers, like Mr P K K Quaidoo, got into trouble for arguing against what they thought were policies pursued by ‘their own side’.
Eventually, some of the most ardent Nkrumaists, such as Tawia Adamafio, experienced detention. K A Gbedema himself, the man who saved the CPP from extinction when Nkrumah was in jail,? had to escape from Ghana secretly to avoid arrest.
An then,?karma?struck! Even as Nkrumah was using?the power of a bad law?against his opponents,?a greater powerwas readying itself to bring him down ? the power of the gun. He got to know about this power on 24 February 1966, as nhe touched down? in the land of the man who said, ?Power comes out of the barrel of a gun?– Chairman Mao Tse Dong of the People’s Republic of China! How ironical.
Relatively young people like Ibrahim Murtala Mohammed should learn to eschew the attitude of intolerance that made Nkrumah shoot himself in the foot and end up the way he did. I wrote about Dr J B Danquah’s sad death in detention in 1965 solely to make that point. Obviously, Mohammed didn’t get the message.
For Ghana’s sake, I hope others in his age group would like listen to lessons drawn from real-life experience ? and not only from books. That would only help them to avoid repeating the mistakes others made before them. It would be to their own advantage ? as Kwame Nkrumah would admit today, were he in a position to be advised by those more experienced than himself.
