Under the spells of Founder(s) and coups – another August of Ghanaian political metaphysics
There is, located in West Africa, a country of 32 million (or more) people, called Ghana. It is God’s own country. Except we Ghanaians do not know which God, or god exactly, we belong to.
That is a minor detail, in keeping with our preference – almost genetically so – to avoid the precise, the scientific, the exact, as much as we can in our national life.
This country, Ghana, knows who was its first head of government business, first prime-minister and first president. His name was Kwame Nkrumah. We also know that Dr. J.B. Danquah was our first leader of the organised opposition – he stood and lost many elections to Kwame Nkrumah.
Once we heard that other people referred to something they called FOUNDER of their country, in true Ghanaian fashion, we too – or some of us – decided we must have one. Or two, or six, or we do not know how many. Since then we have known no peace.
For, we want to celebrate a FOUNDER, or FOUNDERS, but have no precise definition, no notion of an exact set of principles for determining one, no idea of what the qualifying criteria for this category is. Just the wish, Ghana style – we are going, heaven knows where we are going, we know we will!
So we are stuck – is it FOUNDER’s DAY or FOUNDERS’ DAY?
It is not like me to hedge on such matters. Kwame Nkrumah emerged as the pre-eminent figure in Ghana’s decolonisation narrative. He was the dominant actor in the last stages of struggle. To many, perhaps very rightly so, he is considered peerless in his organisational and mobilisation capacity in Ghanaian politics; then and since.
For that and more, he has all those official titles and even more monikers: Osagyefo, Kwame Nkrumah Show Boy, Osuodumgya, and much more are terms of praise, even reverence to the man. Nkrumah has roads, a university, conference centres, markets, many more things named after him, deservedly, in my view. He does not need to be called Founder to be Kwame Nkrumah. He was only a man, even if a special man.
We were living quietly, celebrating our collective solidarity each year, on 6th March (our independence day) and 1st July (the day Ghana became a republic), when Nana Akufo-Addo appeared on the scene and decided to alter this. July 1st scrapped, we had to honour our Founders’.
Why we could not honour them on 6th March was never explained to everyone’s satisfaction. Akufo-Addo can make a private promise to God, and elevate it to a national priority, a cathedral project that remains a hole in ground (to the glory or mockery of God), is my tendered evidence of this claim A needless distraction in process of thought of a people, if ever there was one. So we got two new holidays, and we have been squabbling ever since, each year, in August.
This so-called Big Six
Ghanaian historiography refers, loosely at that, to six of the seven men, on the list of the colonial police officers for arrest, after a social convulsion that followed the cold-blooded assassination, of some peacefully demonstrating soldiers, as “The Big Six.” The seventh man that was thrown out by whoever decided this should be Big Six only, was Lawyer R.S. Blay, one of the prominent nationalist figures.
He was so loved by his radical residential community, that when the colonial police arrived to pick him up, the people themselves – ordinary workers and peasants – stood up and prevented them. For this, he seems not to qualify for the high honour of being called Big? Such shoddy, reactionary and sloppy historiography.
The three ex-soldiers that were killed, on February 28th, 1948, were all returnees from WII combat duties for the British imperial power – they had seen the British fear-stricken before enemy fire, they had dated British women and more. The returning ex-service-men had been significantly decolonised, mentally. These returning veterans accelerated the pace of militant resistance to colonial rule all over Africa.
The three that were shot and killed in cold blood, by a British police officer, were: Corporal Attipoe, Sergeant Adjetey and Private Odartey Lamptey. Issa Kanjanga was a Ghanaian member of the security forces at the time, he bravely and defiantly called on his colleagues to defy the orders of their colonial superior officer, and not to open fire on their compatriots.
In doing so, he averted what could have turned into a blood bath. The subjectivities for the protests had been formed largely by a boycott of European goods, called by a charismatic traditional leader, Nii Kwabena Bonnie III. The political group the arrested men, the so-called Big Six, belonged to was largely funded by George Pa Grant, a successful merchant and nationalist.
Even of more importance, I dare to suggest, was the industry, defiance, patriotism, solidarity, courage and determination of ordinary people. The market women and traders who were willing to forego their meagre revenue in boycotts to fight for freedom, the workers (unionists like the great Pobee Biney of the railways), the peasants on cocoa farms and many, many more who made great sacrifices, all these people are assigned footnote status. They are always in the majority, it is their power that propels revolutionary struggle.
The grand celebration of the Big Six is of Kwame Nkrumah, Obetsebi-Lamptey and Dr. Ako-Agyei. The remaining three are Dr. J.B. Danquah (grand-uncle of the current president of Ghana), Edward Akufo-Addo (the president’s father) and William Ofori-Atta (the president’s uncle). It is unclear whether the president made a special pact to honour them also, like the cathedral promise to God, if he ever became president. But certainly, he has tried, yes, he has tried.
They are ubiquitous, as The Big Six – in statues, on currency, mentioned in speeches and incantations, at every presidential opportunity. Perhaps deservedly. Now they are collectively referred to as Founders, and that has sparked a major shouting bout. For many in Ghana, there can only be one Founder, for like the Christian God, he is a jealous God? For others, that one Founder is the devil incarnate, he must be torn down by any means necessary.
For me, the idea of Founder is a non-starter. How does anyone person become Founder of a country? No country should have it, it is condescending, in the extreme an example of bourgeois monopolisation of places of glory in history. History is not only the history of big men, it is a complex historical process. Only the people should make their own history, for they and they alone are the motive force of history. One man does not make a country, nor do six, or twelve, in whatever foundry, or historical process.
The Peculiar Ghanaian
We have created, through this love of the amorphous, a category no one can define. And yet, there is a fight to the gates of hell about who should be included. It reveals something about us Ghanaians, a love or genetic predisposition to the imprecise. A few illustrations prove the point.
When the Ghanaian wants to dismiss a person they really do not care for, “that man is too something!”, is a phrase of choice. What that something is, is left to fertile imaginations, it is just something. I have seen many people with advanced degrees in Ghana, holding the most sophisticated smartphones on earth, who even during the rainy season that causes floods in the city of Accra frequently, say they are caught by surprise by the rains. Asked whether they checked the weather forecast online, they will usually say the sky was clear when they looked at it in the morning. Finish. In 2024!
My generation grew up being told that there had once been a football batch between Ghana and India. The Indians steeped in oriental religion beat us by 100 – nil! Whenever the ball approached our goal post, it would turn into a lion (or a ball of fire, or a Bengal tiger, or anything scary, depending on the mood of the narrator). Many slightly older people related these stories to us, my hapless generation. There was only one problem. No Ghanaian knew where and when exactly the game was played. And the 1.5 billion Indians on this earth do not know too.
Once, in a collective fit of pure madness, large sections of the country came to believe that a man could lose his genitals just from shaking another person’s hands. It would have been funny had there not been fatal consequences.
It is with consternation that I recall, as a boy, seeing auto-mechanics gargle car-battery liquids, to check their efficacy and pungency! What if it was acidic? To ask that question is to be too something in Ghanaian parlance. It is not unknown in Ghana to ask when an event like a funeral or durbar of traditional chiefs begins, and to be given the sharp guidance: “3.00 – 3.30 – 4.00, even 4.30 or 5.00 pm will be alright.”
So we have now arrived at another manufactured crisis, detonated with ritual consistency each year in August, by Nana Akufo-Addo. In the middle of egregious failures of neoliberal economic planning that have wrought mass misery on the country, how can such a divisive theme be allowed to set the polity ablaze in this manner? We want to celebrate FOUNDER(S) – without definition, qualifying criteria or any means of demarcation for who they are.
Democracy itself is in danger
We face the worrying and ever-growing reality, that, neoliberal democracy has led to great disappointments in this Fourth Republic. There is growing evidence that many young people, frustrated by the lack of an economic dividend, are giving up on all democracy. They only know this democracy, a Santa Claus democracy that has given rise to a Robinson Crusoe Society, characterised by anomie conditions, and powered by an egregiously incompetent state. They think this flawed project is democracy, so some say even a coup is better than what they have today.
In true Ghanaian fashion, they do not know what a coup is, it just sounds better. Pressed to clarify, we soon arrive at a place where they want a coup that is not a coup, a democratic coup – what that is, only a Ghanaian mind can fathom! It should be a coup where the participating clique of soldiers first seek popular legitimacy. How, in an election? And if the coup succeeds the regime should be democratically accountable to the people of Ghana, and ensure transparency! Are we really serious? My people can be funny.
With such conviction and authority as my insignificant person can muster, I call on all Ghanaians, particularly Akufo-Addo, to scrap this Founder(s) Day acknowledgement by holiday. If he does not, someone else will in future, on this I am willing to predict. We do not need to have a day set aside before we can honour our heroes. 6th of March and 1st of July were for us all. This idea of honour inflation must be checked, or else it will doom us all if we do not doom it first. What will we go to next? We will dedicate a week, then a month, then a year? And after that name fruits and vegetables after them? Then make them God, by an act of parliament?
Restore knowledge/learning as the primary productive force
The whole debate, rugged and frustrating as it has been, also reveals how sloppy we have become in our knowledge and understanding of our own history. There is a thing God gave Ghana alone, called the social commentator. Where he – it is usually a he – lacks facts or rigour or analysis, he shouts. What shouting cannot solve, more shouting, louder shouting, lunatic shouting may; so he shouts like Banshee. So we now cite Marabouts, Charlatan prophets, Shamans, and pure superstition as authoritative sources, the expertise of the professoriate can go to hell.
We have collapsed the emphasis of the study of history in our education system, in aimless and meaningless reforms dictated to us by people who have no grounding in our cultural and historical circumstances. The Ghana Historical Society, a once prestigious and respected group of scholars, seems set to become history itself.
The Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, to be very, very, very, polite, is not at its peak. The universities have retreated into insularity, the commitment of revolutionary intellectuals is hard to find – indeed but for God’s Ghanaian mercies, the Big Six infection, was about to be spread to one of them, the premier one, by Akufo-Addo. One the basis of a most shaky understanding of history, a synthetic narrative. It is little wonder then that anomie conditions surround us almost completely today.
The last trumpet call
This is Ghana, in two weeks’ time, exactly 20th August 2024, the chatter would have moved on. The lessons from the reflections and shouting buried, just like in the case of the child-marriage at Nungua, like the brouhaha over the SML report, the noise about SSNIT hotels, the shrill concerns about floods, the sale of one of the last green spaces in Accra and so on. The country is what it is, because we are who we are.
Mr. President, scrap this Founder(s) Day Holiday! Big Six is a metaphysical claim, it has no solid roots in reality. We the people are the sovereign. God bless our homeland Ghana, and make her bold, strong and great.
The author, Yaw Nsarkoh is a former Executive Vice President of Unilever.