By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Sept. 20, 2014
E-mail: [email protected]
Ms. Samia Yaba Nkrumah, one of the several known daughters of Ghana's first president, Mr. Kwame Nkrumah, can keep fooling herself with endless yarns of urban myths about her father's having singularly championed the glorious cause of Ghana's sovereignty from British colonial rule when "every Ghanaian believed the country's struggle for independence to be an epic impossibility" (See "Obama Borrowed 'Yes We Can' Slogan from Nkrumah - Samia" Adomonline.com 9/20/14).
Those of us who know the unalloyed truth of the exact lineaments and contours of Ghana's liberation struggle, shall continue to counter Ms. Nkrumah's impenitent and unconscionable mendacities with the incontrovertible truth. The fact of the matter is that by December 1947, when a cash-strapped and London-stranded Kwame Nkrumah was invited by the leaders of the seminal United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC) to assume the paid general-secretaryship of the UGCC, Ghana's independence struggle from British colonial domination was in full-blast (See Dennis Austin's Politics in Ghana: 1946-1960).
Predictably like his daughter today, Nkrumah would proceed to thoroughly rewrite the history of Ghana's independence struggle by craftily aligning the latter faux-prophetically with his rather imperious and fast-and-loose-playing autobiography, even as poignantly exposed by Dr. Joseph (Kwame Kyeretwie) Boakye-Danquah in a searing letter-review of Nkrumah's Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah.
Indeed, while I generally tend to unreservedly agree with those who claim that President Nkrumah had every right to celebrate his historically unknown birthday, by mere virtue of the incontrovertible historicity of his birth, the equally incontrovertible fact remains that Mr. Kwame Nkrumah could not have been born on September 21, 1909. For even as a young Ghanaian scholar recently pointed out, the date in question did not even fall on a Saturday, the officially assumed birthday or day-name of Mr. Nkrumah. Of course, yours truly is fully aware of the fact of our subject of present discourse's having been born on a Friday, even as Nkrumah himself attests in his own quite remarkable corpus of writings.
We are also well aware of Nkrumah's claim of having renamed himself after a heroic and beneficent maternal grandfather. At least that is what some versions of the Show Boy's biography allege. Now, what we are presently concerned about is Ms. Nkrumah's whole-cloth, or totally mendacious, allegation that, indeed, the 44th President of the United States of America, Mr. Barack H. Obama, was studiously plagiarizing Ghana's President Kwame Nkrumah when in the lead-up to the 2008 U.S. presidential election, the Obama Campaign came up with the memorable and evergreen or immortalized slogan of "YES, WE CAN!"
This allegation is very fascinating because President Nkrumah was, himself, widely known to pontifically appropriate the ideational and intellectual properties of his predecessors without any acknowledgment of the sources of the same. A typical exampled is the late Ghanaian leader's use of the term "African Personality," which is widely on record to have been coined and first appropriated by Dr. Edward Wilmot Blyden of Liberia and the United States' Virgin Islands, well before the birth and political ascendancy of the Ghanaian leader.
We have absolutely no reason to doubt the fact of President Obama's having been significantly influenced by his voracious readings on the political career of President Nkrumah, as well as those of equally significant African leaders like Messrs. Jomo Kenyatta, Julius Nyerere, Kenneth Kaunda and, of course, the globally celebrated and immortalized President Nelson Mandela. But at least Ms. Nkrumah could have dignified her father's memory by directly ascertaining from the most powerful African-descended global leader in the twenty-first century whether, indeed, President Obama was thinking about Mr. Kwame Nkrumah when he came up with the contextually timely and indisputable electioneering campaign slogan of "YES, WE CAN!" in the lead-up to the 2008 U.S. presidential election.
I must also quickly point out that yours truly voted in that momentous election and had been qualified to do so since 1993. And I vividly remember that this slogan was in reference to a heated debate on policy approaches towards the most rapid and effective resolution of the Stygian socioeconomic mess created by the grossly incompetent George W. Bush (or the Bush II) administration (2001-2009).
In the past, Ms. Samia Yaba Nkrumah had hot-headedly insisted against common sense and incontrovertible historical evidence that her father had graciously granted audience to an Apartheid-hunted Mr. Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela in early 1962, when the then-leader of Umkhonto-We-Sizwe (Spear of the Nation) or military wing of the African National Congress (ANC) arrived in Accra in dire need of material assistance. The truth of the matter, however unpleasant this may be deemed by ardent Nkrumacrats, is that their icon had back-handedly snubbed Mr. Mandela and even accused postcolonial Africa's greatest leader of having been in cahoots with the very Apartheid regime that the ANC leader had spent most of his adult life scheming and fighting to overthrow.
The grim irony of the entire situation is that even as President Nkrumah virulently and self-righteously attempted to demonize and thoroughly humiliate Mr. Mandela, the Ghanaian leader was also busy, albeit secretly, trading with the key operatives of the Apartheid regime (See Kwame Arhin's Kwame Nkrumah: His Life And His Work, especially in the section dealing with Nkrumah's Trade Policy on the African Continent).
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