Edward Akufo-Addo was, by any fair measure, one of the most formidably gifted legal minds that the Gold Coast — and subsequently Ghana — produced in the twentieth century. Advocate, judge, constitutional architect and ultimately Head of State, he moved through the defining episodes of his nation’s history with a quality of intellectual distinction that commanded respect even from those who found him personally remote or politically inconvenient. His was a life of genuine consequence, though not, it must be said, entirely without its shadows.
He was born on the twenty-sixth of June 1906, the eldest son of William Addo and his third wife, Theodora Amoafi. His boyhood was spent in Dodowa, which was at that time a town of some commercial vitality, where his father — a merchant of substance and standing — conducted business alongside that most distinguished of Gold Coast figures, John Mensah Sarbah. William Addo died before his son was grown, a circumstance that would prove to be among the first of several early trials that quietly forged the man’s character.
At the age of six, Edward was put down at the Methodist School in Dodowa, where he received his first formal instruction. His recollections of those early years were vivid and rather charming — the interminable walks that were the common lot of everyone in the absence of motor transport, and the memorable spectacle of the akyiakyi, those remarkable fellows who rolled barrels of oil all the way down from Dodowa to Accra on foot.
His ancestry was of a particularly distinguished order. As great-grandson of Nana Addo Dankwa I — who had received the Basel Mission into Akuapem with singular generosity, granting it the very land upon which its work was founded — and a kinsman of several eminent clergymen including the Reverends Sampson, Opoku and Asante, it was altogether natural and proper that in 1917 the young Edward should be sent to the Basel Mission Seminary at Akropong to be prepared for holy orders. He was the youngest member of his class and reputedly the most argumentative — a quality which, in retrospect, one might consider an early indication of his future vocation at the Bar. Mathematics captivated him entirely and would remain a passion to the end of his days. More profoundly, the Seminary impressed upon him those quintessentially Calvinist virtues — relentless industry, rigorous self-discipline, scrupulous personal honesty and an unshakeable Christian faith — which came to form the very bedrock of his character and upon which every subsequent achievement rested.
He was scarcely thirteen when his mother died, leaving him quite alone in the world without either parent. He pressed on with his theological studies at Abetifi with the kind of quiet stoicism one might expect of a boy formed in such a tradition. At eighteen — an age at which many a young man has not yet determined upon his direction in life — he was appointed headmaster of the Otumi Basel Mission School, situated deep in the Akim Abuakwa forest. The journey to take up his post demanded two full days of walking from the Asamankese Post Office. The older presbyters at the school received him with undisguised scepticism, as well they might; but his energy, capability and evident seriousness of purpose disarmed their reservations entirely, and he was in due course all but adopted by the Reverend and Mrs Sam, towards whom he retained a warm and permanent affection. He was later transferred to Nyakrom.
Throughout his years in the teaching profession, Akufo-Addo was engaged in the steady and determined business of educating himself further. In 1929 he won a scholarship to the newly founded Achimota School, where he distinguished himself academically and rose to the office of senior prefect — no small distinction in an institution that was already beginning to produce men of mark. Together with his lifelong companions Modjaben Dowuona and Daniel Chapman Nyaho, he was awarded an Achimota Scholarship to St Peter’s Hall — now St Peter’s College — at Oxford, where he went up initially to read Mathematics. The widening of his intellectual horizons and a deepening absorption in public affairs soon drew him towards the Modern Greats — Philosophy, Politics and Economics — in which he took a third-class honours degree. From Oxford he proceeded to the Middle Temple, one of the great Inns of Court, to read for the Bar.
He returned to the Gold Coast in 1941 and was called to the Bar on the first of April of that year — a date which prompted a characteristically dry observation from the then Chief Justice, Mr Justice Petrides, who professed to find it rather singular that a young man who gave no impression of being a fool should elect to be enrolled on April Fools’ Day. It was, as events would demonstrate, an apposite joke at the very threshold of a most distinguished career. Even Geoffrey Bing, then Attorney-General and by no means a sympathetic observer, was compelled to acknowledge — grudgingly, one imagines — that Akufo-Addo was the most able advocate then practising in the Gold Coast. He served his pupillage in the chambers of Mr Awere, who would later be installed as Nana Kwadede II, Omanhene of Akuapem, and he studied assiduously under the most celebrated advocates of the day — Akilagpa Sawyerr, Henley Coussey, Emmanuel Quist, Kwabena Sekyi and Francis Dove — a roll-call that reads like a Who’s Who of the Gold Coast Bar.
He subsequently established his own chambers — Kwakwaduam Chambers — and built a reputation of the highest order, particularly in civil litigation and advisory work. His chambers became, in the fullest sense, a nursery of legal excellence. A succession of brilliantly gifted young advocates — among them Kwabena Bentsi-Enchill, Fred Apaloo, William Ofori Atta, Victor Owusu, Johnny Quarshie-Idun, Charlie Coussey, Reggie Bannerman and Obed Asamoah — passed through his tutelage, and the quite remarkable careers that each of them went on to pursue constitute the most eloquent and fitting memorial to the standards their pupil-master demanded and embodied.
The satisfactions of a thriving practice at the Bar did not extinguish his interest in politics, which had been kindled during his time at Oxford and never entirely subdued. He became a founding member and chairman of the National League of the Gold Coast, which subsequently united with Paa Grant’s People’s National Party to form the United Gold Coast Convention — the UGCC — solemnly inaugurated at Saltpond on the fourth of August 1947. It was a moment of considerable historical significance, and Akufo-Addo was at its very centre.
Events then moved with a rapidity that left little room for deliberation. The shooting and riots of the twenty-eighth of February 1948 transformed the political landscape of the Gold Coast almost overnight. It was at Betty House — premises rented by Akufo-Addo himself — that the Working Committee of the UGCC convened and resolved to despatch a lengthy cable to the British Secretary of State for the Colonies, demanding the immediate recall of the Governor, Sir Gerald Creasy, and the appointment of the UGCC working council in his stead as an interim government. The colonial authorities were not amused. Holding Akufo-Addo and his colleagues responsible for the disturbances, the Governor issued Removal Orders against them. Akufo-Addo was first confined to Kumasi prison and subsequently removed to Yendi, where the Ya Na, Mahama II, had the gracious courtesy to send him a personal message of encouragement and support — a gesture he would not have forgotten.
Upon their release, Akufo-Addo, J.B. Danquah and Obetsebi Lamptey were appointed to the Coussey Committee, charged with deliberating upon the findings of the Watson Commission into the February disturbances. He was among those who set their names to the Minority Report, which argued with some force for the exclusion of ex-officio members from the cabinet under any proposed constitution — a position entirely consistent with his instincts regarding representative government.
He was wise enough to draw the appropriate conclusions. He retired from electoral contest and channelled his formidable energies into public service of a less combative kind, serving as chairman of the Government Scholarship Board, member of the First Ghana Building Society, chairman of the Board of Directors of the Ghana Commercial Bank, secretary of the Ghana Bar Association, member of the first Editorial Board of the Ghana Law Reports, chairman of the General Legal Council, and Chairman of the Council of the University of Ghana — a body of service that would have satisfied most men entirely.
In 1962, after twenty-one years at the Bar, he was elevated to the Supreme Court bench — an appointment largely conceived by the Chief Justice, Sir Arku Korsah, as part of a deliberate policy of reconciliation with the pre-independence opposition. Korsah had originally proposed Akufo-Addo for the office of Attorney-General in succession to Geoffrey Bing; President Nkrumah preferred, however, to offer him a judgeship, and to the bench he went. He sat on a number of cases of considerable public moment, not least the Treason Trial of Tawia Adamfio and others, the judgment in which condemned the conduct of his old associate Obetsebi Lamptey — an episode that cannot have been without its personal discomfort. The consequences of that trial were, in any event, severe. President Nkrumah, dissatisfied with the court’s determination, dismissed the Chief Justice from the bench. Mr Justice W.B. Van Lare resigned in principled protest. Akufo-Addo was himself removed in the judicial purge that accompanied the constitutional amendment of 1964, by which the President arrogated to himself the power to dismiss members of the judiciary at will. He returned, with equanimity, to private practice.
The coup of the twenty-fourth of February 1966 restored him to the bench, this time as Chief Justice of the Republic. In that office he was charged with the uncomfortable duty of removing seventeen judges considered unfit for continued service — described, in the blunt vernacular of the moment, as “dead wood.” The dismissals attracted criticism from those who considered them politically motivated, observing that a good number of those removed had, at various junctures, given judgment against interests associated with the UGCC/GCP/UP tradition to which Akufo-Addo openly belonged. It was, to put it charitably, a situation that invited scrutiny.
He also presided over the National Liberation Council’s Political Committee, conducting extensive tours of the country and delivering notably vigorous denunciations of CPP ministers who had abused public office for private enrichment. The irony of these pronouncements was to become apparent in due course. When the full record of his own presidential tenure was examined, it emerged that he had established a private company whilst in office — in plain violation of the 1969 Constitution that he had himself helped to draft and promulgate — concealing his interest through a surrogate. The property litigation that ensued when his surviving wife sought to recover the assets after his death became a matter of considerable and thoroughly deserved public embarrassment (Akufo-Addo v Cathline — 1991 2 GLR 292). One need not dwell upon the point; but neither, in good conscience, can one pass over it in silence.
His most lasting and honourable contribution to the constitutional life of his country was as chairman of the NLC’s Constitutional Commission, whose deliberations and proposals formed the foundation of the Second Republican Constitution. The framework he crafted provided for a multi-party democracy governed by a Prime Minister drawn from the majority party in parliament, with a ceremonial President elected by an electoral college. It accorded formal recognition — and a salary — to the Leader of the Opposition; it set out, in language of admirable clarity, the fundamental rights of citizens and charged the courts with their enforcement; and it vested in the judiciary the power of judicial review. These were provisions of enduring constitutional importance, and they bear his intellectual imprint unmistakably.
When the Constitution he had helped to fashion was brought into force, he was put forward by the Progress Party and duly elected President of the Second Republic on the twenty-eighth of August 1970. Ill-health, regrettably, prevented his formal inauguration in September of that year; he was obliged to travel to Britain for surgery and did not return until 1971. He served for rather less than eighteen months before the Progress Party government of Dr K.A. Busia was overthrown in January 1972 by the National Redemption Council under Lieutenant-Colonel Ignatius Kutu Acheampong — an end to constitutional rule that must have been peculiarly galling to a man who had given so much of himself to its establishment.
In retirement, he devoted himself with evident pleasure to music and gardening — the graceful occupations of a man of cultivated taste who had earned his repose. He remained a faithful and active communicant of the Presbyterian Church, attending services in the company of his wife, Adeline Yeboakua Akufo-Addo, daughter of Nana Ofori-Atta I, and their children: Nana Addo Dankwa, Mama Amoafi, Marigold Oye and Edward Akuffo. It had long been his private intention, in deference to the wishes his parents had cherished for him, to serve as a lay preacher in his final years. Failing health denied him that fulfilment, and with it something that clearly mattered to him a great deal.
He died on the seventeenth of July 1979.
Edward Akufo-Addo was a man of the old school in the very best sense of that phrase — formed by missionary discipline, Oxford rigour and the demanding practice of the common law, and animated throughout his public life by a genuine and serious commitment to the rule of law and the cause of constitutional government. That his record was not without its inconsistencies, and that he did not always meet the exacting standards he was so ready to prescribe for others, is a truth that a fair-minded biographer is obliged to acknowledge. It diminishes him somewhat, but it does not diminish him entirely. He remains a figure of genuine historical stature — jurist, patriot, and one of the principal architects of the nation his generation brought into being.
Reference:
The flagbearers of Ghana, Kojo T. Vieta
The author, V. L. K. Djokoto (b. 1995), is a financier and gallerist. He leads D. K. T. Djokoto & Co — an old-fashioned top-tier multi-family office, established in 1950 — which is deeply anchored on residential real estate; steers the wheels of rural banking across coastal Ghana; revived the Accra Evening News, established in 1948, delicately rebranded into a post-partisan cultural newspaper; and finances a cultic arts and culture department intensely focused on engineering a radiant legacy. Through expertly crafted artistic experiences, Djokoto seeks to mobilise Ghanaians weaving African music, literature and art.
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