By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Ordinarily, I would not be commenting on issues of a personal nature to the Nkrumah family; and on the latter score, I use “family” in the context of kinship or the clan system, as Akans know it. I wasn’t going to comment on it because I tend to envisage Mr. Kwame Nkrumah in terms of his remarkable impact, for good or ill, on postcolonial Ghanaian society.
Two things, however, are of interest to me vis-à-vis the current subject, namely, the political party affiliation of the Member of Parliament for Evalue-Gwira, in the Nzema district; and two, the implications of the Atta-Mills government heeding the MP’s call in having the mortal remains of President Nkrumah re-exhumed, at least for the second or third time in as many decades, in the wake of his passing.
And here, we must quickly recall the fact that this is not the first time that any relative or clans-person of President Nkrumah has demanded the return of the deposed late premier’s mortal remains to his place of birth. What makes such demand, this time around, rather curious is that, if memory serves this writer accurately, Ms. Catherine Afeku ran for parliament on the ticket of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), or at least she enjoyed a remarkable material support from the latter; needless to say, hers was a quite controversial candidacy which gave her ideological kinsfolk quite a lot of headaches.
And so for the NPP-MP for Evalue-Gwira to now pretend that Nkrumah’s affairs have presently become a purely Nzema affair is nothing short of the outright disingenuous. For my part, the problem here is one of national priorities and unnecessary expenditure.
It is, however, rather risible that Ms. Afeku would invoke a phenomenon called “Nzema Cosmology” to back up the legitimacy of her call for Mr. Nkrumah’s remains to be returned to Nkroful (See “MP Wants Nkrumah’s Body Returned to Nkroful” Ghanaweb.com 9/21/09). Risible because we know for a fact that traditionally speaking, Kwame Nkrumah’s identity has been clearly established to be Sefwi/Sehwi, not Nzema; and so if Ms. Afeku insists on pressing an “Nzema Cosmology” into the service of her agenda, then she had better be certain of just exactly what she is talking about. Furthermore, the following may come as an ironic surprise, or even outright shock, to many Ghanaians, particularly the Nkrumah fanatics, but President Kwame Nkrumah and Prime Minister Kofi Abrefa Busia have long been known to be distant relatives, which likely must offer some food-for-thought to those furiously engaged in the patently primitive war-game of attempting to remove Dr. Busia’s statuary image from Sunyani’s Jubilee Park in order to replace the latter with the statuary image of modern Ghana’s first president.
On the question of the Accra-based Nkrumah Mausoleum, it bears recalling that if then-President Nkrumah had half-regarded the putative Doyen of Gold Coast and Ghanaian politics and Nkrumah’s own political mentor with half the reverence shown the latter by Ghanaian citizens at large, the mortal remains of, perhaps, the greatest Ghanaian philosopher, scholar, thinker and constitutional lawyer would not have been interred in an old, abandoned cemetery at Kyebi and out of the reach of any major highway, thanks to ex-President Kufuor, but fittingly in a mausoleum somewhere in our nation’s capital of Accra.
In other words, having the mortal remains of Ghana’s first postcolonial premier interred in a magnificently marbleized mausoleum in Accra is quite in keeping with the protocol of a civilized nation such as Ghana. What appears to be happening here, however, is a hollow attempt by the Evalue-Gwira MP and her cohorts to shamelessly cash in on the sheer accident of Mr. Nkrumah’s Nkroful birth. And here also, perhaps it needs recalling for the benefit of the woefully misguided Ms. Afeku that, indeed, even as Dr. Francis Nkrumah, the dauphin of the African Show Boy (ASB) had occasion to remind the audience at the inaugural ceremony of his late father’s mausoleum, “Nkrumah saw himself first and foremost as an African, then as a Ghanaian and then an Nzema” in exactly the preceding order.
In sum, attempting to “tribalize” the mortal remains of Mr. Nkrumah, as Ms. Afeku seems determined to doing, clearly defeats the very purpose for which the first Ghanaian president publicly stood. For his part, Mr. Jeremiah John Rawlings, who is now glibly and routinely credited with establishing the so-called Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park (actually the Old Polo Grounds), brazenly registered his active participation in the mausoleum’s inaugural festivities by highlighting some of the atrocities widely associated with the deceased honoree and his tautological Convention People’s Party (CPP). What made Mr. Rawlings’ caustic observations rather irreverent and outright flagrant, to speak much less of the unpardonably criminal, of course, inheres in the fact of Jato Dzelukope being permanently etched in our country’s history and collective memory as indisputably the most extortionate dictator ever.
At any rate, nothing prevents Ms. Afeku and the people of Nkroful from ensuring that the first Ghanaian resting place of Mr. Nkrumah’s mortal remains, as well as the rebuilt/renovated house in which he was born become lucrative tourist attractions. To be certain, were they so determined, the people of Nkroful could turn their entire village into a major tourist attraction.
For her information, Ms. Afeku needs to be apprised of the fact that the abject neglect of Mr. Nkrumah’s mortal remains by ex-Chairman Rawlings precipitated the rapid deterioration of the same, thus the necessity for the once open vault of a tomb to be permanently sealed. And so it is not clear precisely how the Evalue-Gwira MP intends to excavate Nkrumah’s tomb and re-convey it to Nkroful; certainly not at the nation’s expense! Likewise, we don’t really need the remains of Mr. and Mrs. Nkrumah to make the Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Mausoleum/Park worth its while, though unwisely attempting to exhume and re-shipping their already-interred remains back to Nkroful virtually amounts to criminal desecration. In any case, would Ms. Afeku also counsel the return of the mortal remains of Mrs. Fathia Nkrumah to Cairo, Egypt, where most of the former first lady’s ancestors are buried? In other words, what is sorely lacking in the Evalue-Gwira MP’s demand is common sense!
Perhaps somebody also needs to remind Ms. Afeku that the last time that we checked, the mausoleum’s archival building had sustained massive structural damage and was in dire need of repair funding. Has Ms. Afeku cobbled together any viable sources of funding for her rather quixotic project?
*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is a Governing Board Member of the Accra-based think-tank the Danquah Institute (DI), and the author of 20 books, including “Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana” (iUniverse.com, 2005). E-mail: [email protected]. ###