Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana

Copyright © 2005 by Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr.

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Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

PREFACE

INTRODUCTION

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

20

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Other Works by Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr.

Ama Sefa

Atumpan

Dorkordicky Ponkorhythms

Mmaa

Nananom

Obaasima

Odo Ye ‘Wu

Paa

Sororoscopes

Sounds of Sirens

The New Scapegoats

For Dr. J. B. Danquah, Doyen of Gold Coast and Ghanaian Politics;

For my Unborn Son, that he may grow up to understand the true meaning of leadership, and become one himself;

And to the good-natured people of Ghana:

That they shall learn to count their blessings in the near future.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I sincerely wish to acknowledge the following people, not in any particular order:

Kwasi Sarkodie-Mensah, Duke (Kwaku Duah) Danquah, Kwabena Akyeam-pong, J. Ofosu, Vincent B. Thompson, Karl Botchway, Eric Bottah, Stephen Wiafe, Adwoa and Dolly Okoampa-Ahoofe, Abena Boakyewaa and Nana Yaa Agyeiwaa Amoh, A. R. Harruna Atta and Ayesha Harruna Atta, Francis Akoto, Miatta Hai and Walter Smith, William Egyir, Kwasi Ohene, Kwasi Siaw-Lattey, Hippolyt A. Pul, Appiah Debrah, Kwadwo Owusu-Addo, Baiden Sintim-Danso, Derick Oppong-Agyare, Yaw Sappong-Kumankumah, Sean Fanelli, John Ostling, Reginald Tuggles, Harold Bellinger, Evans K. Owusu Nyamah, Abu S. and Nana Q. Abarry, E. P. K. Mensah-Brown, Fred Yarney, Charles Owusu, Mike Altman, Samuel K. Adu....

PREFACE

A countless number of Electronic Mail (E-mail) greeted this volume when it originally began as a series of newspaper articles in March 2005. The series, titled The Enduring Legacy of Dr. J. B. Danquah and ran in twenty parts, elicited strong reactions from Ghanaians and non-Ghanaians alike. Naturally, such sentiments ranged from the highly positive to the criminally negative—criminally negative because the latter sought to incriminate the subject of this volume without systematically offering any forensic evidence.

Even so that was to be expected since, until very recently, the identity and significance of the man who has been variously called the Doyen of Gold Coast and Ghanaian politics and the Constitutional Architect of Modern Ghana were virtually shrouded in mystery.

This volume, which began as a series of articles—published on Ghanaweb.com, in the Accra Daily Mail and the New York Beacon, among other newspapers and websites—in commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the death of Dr. J. B. Danquah, as a political prisoner in Ghana’s notorious Nsawam Medium-Security Prison, in February 1965, calls for the immediate rehabilitation of Dr. Danquah as a phenomenal human monument of both colonial and post-colonial Ghanaian history. Specifically, we herein call for the re-naming of the University of Ghana for the man who almost singularly championed the cause and establishment of Ghana’s premier and flagship academy, even as we also note the fact that a similar honor has already been bestowed on ex-President Kwame Nkrumah, the man whom Dr. Danquah personally introduced into the mainstream of modern Ghanaian politics.

As we noted earlier, the name of Dr. Danquah is often met with two diametrically opposite reactions, either of them equally vehement. Below are two such representative reactions. For purposes of authenticity, we have decided to also provide the full names of the E-mail letter writers, though we have withheld their addresses in order to protect their privacy.

The first of these is from Mr. Francis Akoto, who vitriolically writes: Schemes and spins from people like you who want to twist [the] facts of history will not work. Recently[,] [the] Okyenhene called for the [re-]naming of [the] University of Ghana after J. B. Danquah. I see. A CIA Agent and bomb throwers[sic] have suddenly [turned] heroes. Lord help us. We will resist such moves.

The second E-mail comes from Mr. Stephen Wiafe, who happily writes: This [the first installment of the series] was sensationally educative[,] especially for our younger folks who knew nothing about Dr. J. B. Danquah. He deserves his rightful accolade [which was] robbed him by Dr. Kwame Nkrumah. The University of Ghana should be renamed after him.

For our part, we leave our readers to make their own judgments, fully hoping that in the end they would come away feeling that their time and energies have been profitably engaged.

Sincerely,

Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr.

Bronx, New York August 24, 2005

INTRODUCTION

It is almost pleonastic to assert that Dr. J. B. Danquah was foremost among the ranks of twentieth-century Ghanaian political and philosophical theorists. One gets a poignant sense of the preceding from the Doyen’s classic treatise titled The Akan Doctrine of God (1944), one of a trilogy most of which manuscripts were gutted in a 1941 fire that engulfed the author’s residence. Even so, Danquah’s Akan Doctrine of God, originally titled Gold Coast Ethics and Religion: A Theory of Morals and Religion in the Akan Tradition, singularly and authoritatively establishes the phenomenal and subliminal essence of Akan Philosophy, particularly the Doyen’s famous ideology of Ghanaism."

Regarding the latter, the John Stuart Mill scholar in the Philosophy of the Mind notes: "Many Akan proverbs, scores of them, pointed to one truth, that the family, the neighbors, were those of blood, the group held together by community of origin and obligation to a common ancestor, the Nana, and held together also by the high standard of attainment in goodness and prosperity enshrined in Nana’s memory. It was for this group that morality was of value and, for it, beneficence was truly beneficial and profitable—in both senses; in worth and increment.... He treats you like a beast who does not reciprocate your goodness.. Which is to say, where the reciprocity of beneficence is denied you, the humanity in you is denied, placing you a little lower than man—on the lower

plane of a beast Again, who is my neighbor? He whose goodness makes me

good and who, rather than place me a little lower than man, would accord me the beneficence of the good Samaritan. He is my neighbor, because neither is he a disgrace to nor does he dishonor my family or race called Akan (Animguase mfata Okanniba)" (x-xi).

And contrary to what some intellectually and ideologically addled Danquah detractors would have their unsuspecting and wet-eared disciples believe, the Doyen of Gold Coast and Ghanaian politics more than amply recognized the universality and trans-ethnic and supra-national nature, or tenor, of familial bonds. In sum, the thinker’s appropriation of the Akan theosophical frame of reference is purely a matter of convenience rather than imperative. Consequently, the uncannily pan-humanistic Danquah adds: For, it would appear, bounds cannot be set to the meaning of ‘family’ until every trace of the quality which is other than beastly is exhausted; to embrace, that is, not only the Akan, but the entire race of that quality, the manlike family of humanity. ‘To the spirit of man there are no bounds’... (xi).

Indeed, it is for a sumptuous savoring of Ghanaism, as briefly elucidated above, that the well-meaning reader is warmly invited to this celebratory and intellectual feast in memory and honor of Dr. J. B. Danquah, the veritable constitutional architect and patriarch of modern Ghana.

1

In February this year, just about the same time that many African-Americans, as well as other well-meaning Americans, were feverishly preparing to mark the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Malcolm X, another commemoration of equal significance was taking place throughout the Republic of Ghana. It was the 40th anniversary of the death, in a medium-security prison, of Dr. Joseph Boakye Danquah (affectionately and privately known to his family and closest associates as Nana Kwame Kyeretwie). Not many Americans (with the remarkable exception of Dr. John Henrik Clarke, a veritable Afrocentrist), Black or White, know much about the life and legacy of the nationally dubbed—or acclaimed—Doyen [or Dean] of Ghanaian [actually, Gold Coast] politics. He was so dubbed because until Dr. Danquah emerged into national spotlight during the mid-1920s, there was no formidably organized, broad-based political apparatus clamoring for the imminent overthrow of the British colonial regime. There had largely been ethnic groupings such as existed in Fanteland, mainly in the Cape Coast-Anomabu-Elmina district of the Gold Coast littoral, as well as several others in the central and northern halves of the country. It was Danquah who was to lead the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC) to pose a systematic and formidable counter-force to British imperialism, from 1947 onwards.

Significantly, as Mr. Ato Brown, of Cape Coast, recently pointed out ( ghanaweb.com 2/11/05), Dr. Danquah was not without his equally formidable antecedents; and in the latter regard, we hasten to mention the name of Ephraim Casely-Hayford, the man who, legend has it, summoned the younger Dr. J. B. Danquah to his death-bed and urged the latter to carry the mantle of Africa’s geopolitical emancipation. The latter would gratefully and graciously oblige. Significantly, however, where Casely-Hayford—the first continental African to publish a novel in the English language titled Ethiopia Unbound (1911)—had envisioned the total liberation of the West-African sub-region as collectively inextricable, earlier on having spearheaded the august and celebrated Congress of British West Africa, Danquah toed a path which the latter presumed to be the more pragmatic, which was the nationalist path. Such choice must have been primarily prompted by practical realities on the ground, as it were; for the four colonies which constituted the membership of the Congress of British West Africa were geopolitically inorganic. Ghana (the erstwhile Gold Coast), Nigeria, Sierra Leone and the Gambia were all surrounded and divided by some twelve French-speaking African countries whose indigenous leadership agenda was relatively more Eurocentric and conservative and patently inimical to the more Afrocentric aspirations of the so-called British West Africa. But even so, as later catastrophic events would show, among the Anglophone West African countries, there was no uniformity of national leadership, or indigenous political, agenda. And this was largely the reason why on the eve of the foundation of the Organization of African Unity (OAU), when Ghanaian premier Kwame Nkrumah called upon his fellow African leaders for immediate geopolitical unification of the more than 20 newly-independent African countries in 1961, the undisputed father of modern, continental Africa’s pan-Africanist movement could only count on the support of Ahmed Sekou Toure’s Guinea and Modibo Keita’s Mali. It would eventually take a lot of political wrangling and regressive bloc formations to precipitate the establishment of the talking-shop that became known as the Organization of African Unity (OAU). Three years ago, the latter organization morphed into something called the African Union (AU), which promised to pursue a more pragmatic course of action. And needless to say, more than much remains to be seen.

In the wake of the global spirit of democratization, which actually began with the end of the so-called Cold War, most of the Arabized North African subregion of the continent remains in the unyielding grips of military dictatorship. One glaring irony inheres in the fact that President Muamar El-Qaddafy, who ascended to his country’s leadership some 36 years ago, via a military putsch, was foremost among the signatories that supposedly elevated the otiose, talking-shop status of the OAU into that of the purportedly more potent and pragmatic apparatus of the AU.

The recent decision of Egypt’s President Hosni Mubarak, largely instigated by Washington, to permit the salutary institutionalization of multi-party democracy, gives a little cause for celebration. But it is only a little cause because, as yet, no definitive guidelines—or road-map(s)—have been publicly promulgated by the Cairo government. Likewise, the decision by Col. Qaddafy to abandon his nuclear ambitions came as a pleasant surprise to those of us who had harbored grave concerns over the ulterior motives of this patently Islamo-Arabic, radical nationalist. For like Egypt, Libya persists in calling itself an Arab republic, despite the fact that, like most North African countries, it is neither a republic, in the classical sense of the term, nor an Arab nation. At best, Libya is an Arabized country, the same way the Ghana and Nigeria were once colonized countries.

Arabized because more than nine-tenths of North Africans are indigenous Africans of Berber origins; the much revered and celebrated Saint Augustine, of the global Roman Catholic Church, was of indigenous African, Berber extraction.

The tragic story of Dr. J. B. Danquah is also the story of the woeful failure of democratic governance, particularly the salutary spirit of tolerance in post-colonial Africa. For as adumbrated earlier, Dr. Danquah died as a direct result of his incarceration at Ghana’s Nsawam Medium-Security Prison, primarily because as the chief opposition leader to President Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party (CPP), and one who was inimitably eloquent, legally astute and cognitively unbested, the mercurial and visionary Ghanaian leader saw his rival as a regressive counter-force to his pan-Africanist agenda. The irony, however, lay in the fact that President Nkrumah had narrowly missed a chance of becoming a student of Dr. Danquah’s at Achimota College, the colonial forerunner of the erstwhile University College of the Gold Coast, now called the University of Ghana at Legon, located some 13 miles north-east of the Ghanaian capital of Accra. Back then, Dr. Danquah, who had not quite long before returned from his sterling pursuit of advanced legal studies at the University of London, had been offered what Joe Appiah terms as a mastership at Achimota College upon the death of Dr. Aggrey (see The Man J. B. Danquah 15). The prospect, on the part of the College’s British colonial administrators, was that Danquah would become The New Dr. Aggrey, in oblique tribute and remembrance of Africa’s outstanding philosopher and educationist (The Man J. B. Danquah 15). Poised towards unseating the exploitative and oppressive colonial regime in the near future, Dan-quah politely turned down the offer from Achimota College. Appiah believes that the Doyen’s tactical move was due to the fact that the fast-rising political star plausibly envisaged the offer as the surest way of gagging him, a budding agitator and politician (The Man J. B. Danquah 15). Danquah’s nephew, William (Paa Willie) Ofori-Atta, would also attend Achimota College and be named the latter institution’s pioneering African, Senior Prefect, the equivalent of Student Government President in an American tertiary institution. So, in a quite oblique sense, the political imprisonment of Dr. Danquah by his former political understudy (and here the allusion is to Nkrumah’s UGCC days) closely parallels the political incarceration of famed Marxist philosopher C. L. R. James by Trinida-dian prime minister Dr. Eric Williams. Alas, unlike his West African counterpart, Professor James would emerge from political confinement to pursue an enviable and productive, scholastic enterprise. To-date, the death of Dr. Danquah, in prison, remains one of the darkest splotches on the otherwise impeccable and brilliant resume of President Nkrumah. But what further complicated matters was the fact that shortly after the Convention people’s Party (CPP) government released the mortal remains of the 69-year-old Doyen of Ghanaian Politics, President Nkrumah also issued an edict prohibiting any public celebration of the life of this illustrious citizen of both his people—the Akyem-Abuakwa State—and the Ghanaian people at large.

In the preceding sense, Dr. Danquah could be aptly said to have been flagrantly denied the kind of burial and funeral worthy of a pioneering statesman and legal scholar of genius. The fact that the deceased also belonged to a 500-plus-year-old royal family, Ofori Panyin Fie, and, indeed, at one time the most powerful state in Ghana, could hardly be ignored. For the Akyem people, nothing could have been more insulting. But it was also quite understandable that President Nkrumah would impose a ban on the public celebration of