This week, thanks to all the noise about airport renaming, Nii Darko Ankrah, historian and lecturer at the Institute of African Studies, has, in an interview with Bernard Avle, reminded us that the very apostles of democracy who overthrew Nkrumah for using the Preventive Detention Act to imprison his enemies without trial, turned round, when they took power, to enact a law, the ‘Protective Detention Act’, to jail “offenders” without trial.
“Offenders” were those whose crimes against the state were so terrible that they needed to be put away for a period of time to be “protected from the anger of the people”.
With this law, many were jailed without trial, including a British lawyer who was here defending a Ghanaian standing trial for a political offence.
This lawyer was arrested and deported. Word was that in court, he proved too strong for the Attorney General.
The apostles (made up of top civilian lawyers, intelligentsia, businessmen, etc), fronted by soldiers, had overthrown Nkrumah for banning all other political parties, apart from the CPP. In the democracy that they established, they removed CPP from the 1969 constitution.
Now about the airport renaming. On this page of the Daily Graphic, 10 years ago (October 30, 2016), I posed a question to Ghanaians: “Whom do we love: Kotoka or Nkrumah?”
Citing the naming of our first international airport after Lieutenant General Emmanuel Kwasi Kotoka and the existence of the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park, I went further to ask: “Is it right for us to have two memorials erected in honour of two personalities, each of whose deeds contradict Ghanaians’ love for the other?”
Immortalise
On this page ten years ago, I submitted that “by our decision to immortalise Kotoka for his involvement in the 1966 coup, Ghana is living not only a lie but also a contradiction.”
I demanded to know: “How can we sing the praise of a man whose claim to glory is that he put brakes to a nation’s aspirations; whose only national deed is that he overthrew the government of a man who (we have grown up later to discover) was our true messiah — and remains so till this day.
If we rejoiced at his overthrow in 1966, we know better now.
“How can we build a memorial park after Nkrumah and spend millions of dollars wooing tourists, especially African Americans, to the land of his birth and yet on their arrival in the land of the man they revere as their ‘god’, the first thing their eyes behold is a monument named after the very soldier who was responsible for pushing this ‘god’ from his rightful pedestal with the help of America’s CIA?
“To name a day after Nkrumah, to legislate a holiday in his honour and yet bestow honour on his detractor is a national contradiction.
“Nkrumah was no angel – on that we all agree; no human is — but we can’t sing a song that simultaneously canonises him as a saint and demonises him as a devil to the point where his enemies are elevated to the realms of angels.”
I acknowledged that “no creature of God is all saint and all demon.
That is why those of us who write Nkrumah’s good deeds on brass do so not oblivious of his sins.
But is that reason to put my hand in the gloves which his enemy is wearing?”
Account
I believe Kweku Baako’s account of the events of June 4: he was a part of it.
Even though he was not one of the plotters of the insurrection, he was an ardent supporter.
Kweku’s account is that the real reason which the architects of the June 4 uprising gave to themselves for killing the ‘Generals’ was that it was an act to eliminate all who had taken part in all previous coups in Ghana.
If that is the reason for the inclusion of General Afrifa on the list of the insurrectionists and his subsequent brutal murder at the firing range, what is the reason for honouring Kotoka, Afrifa’s accomplice?
Is it because he was killed for his part in the coup?
Well, Afrifa has also been killed for the same reason.
Kotoka was no hero; but he was also no villain.
I regret his cold-blooded murder on April 17, 1967, by Lieutenant Moses Yeboah and Lieutenant S.B. Arthur.
Naming an airport after him, however, is an overkill.
That was Yours Truly, 10 years ago in ‘The Daily Graphic’ of October 30, 2016.
In the last fortnight, Ghanaians have been blessed with some facts of history.
Yaw Anokye Frimpong, the lawyer and historian, dug into history to educate us that in looking for a personality after whom to name Ghana’s first international airport, Kwame Nkrumah applied to Asanteman Council, through Prempeh II, the 14th Asantehene, for permission to name it after Yaa Asantewaa. According Lawyer Anokye, Prempeh II was in favour but the Asanteman Council rejected it.
Imagine, dear reader, had it received, our first airport would have been Yaa Asantewaa International Airport!!!
Source:
www.graphic.com.gh