By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
From time to time, I rummage through my mounds of media printouts to see if I could, belatedly, either respond to or make at least a few passing comments on an important news item that might have slipped past my attention amidst the torrents of other happenings in Ghana and continental Africa, in particular, but the world in general. And this week, in the wake of President Ellen Johnson-Sirleaf’s two-day working tour of Ghana, I have decided to comment on a brief news item captioned “Ghana to Deport Naked Protesters” that originally appeared on the website of the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC).
The article which was published, or rather posted, to the BBC website on March 18, 2008, seemed too old and yellowed for me to do any creative analysis or commentary on it. And I almost crumpled it up and chucked it into my waste-paper bin, until it struck me that just recently both President John Evans Atta-Mills and his lieutenant, Vice-President John Dramani Mahama, have been vociferously touting Ghana’s supposedly paradigmatic democratic credentials as one that ought to be emulated by the rest of the African continent. President Mills had even officiously and unctuously gone out of his way to suggest to the Nigerians, during the 37th annual ordinary session of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS), that Ghana was poised to assisting that geopolitical behemoth in her attempt at effectively negotiating the rather unforgivably treacherous terrain of constitutional democracy.
Mrs. Johnson-Sirleaf’s visit gave me the chance to comment on exactly which ideological and/or political faction in Ghana can boast of a proud and enviable tradition of inducing a democratic culture both at home and abroad, because news reports clearly indicated that the distinguished and pioneering Liberian leader had visited the Ghanaian capital of Accra to express her unqualified gratitude for the cardinal role that the House that Danquah and Busia built played in both the stopping of the Liberian Civil War and the oldest modern African country’s return to normalcy as well as its dogged pursuit of democratic governance.
For me, therefore, it was quite a mighty shame that the Liberian premier was in Ghana expressing her gratitude to the wrongful set of leadership. For during the 1990s, when the so-called National Democratic Congress held the reins of governance, even as also for the past year-and-half, Liberians fleeing the civic mayhem and conflagration that gripped their country were not exactly welcomed by then-President Jeremiah John Rawlings. To be certain, one of the first ships carrying Liberian refugees to attempt docking at the Takoradi Harbor had been met with an unconscionable fusillade of high-powered rifle gunshots, and the latter by a group of leaders who beamed with Nkrumaist pride vis-à-vis their pan-Africanist credentials! It would, of course, take the Kofi Annan-led United Nations Organization (UN) to convince Mr. Rawlings and his minions that, indeed, the Liberian refugees were also human beings and Africans who deserved the same level of security and comfort that the Ghanaians had enviably forged for themselves. Maybe somebody had forgotten to remind the half-Scottish Ghanaian premier that the so-called Americo-Liberians, largely Karmic victims of the Liberian Civil War (LCW), together with their Sierra Leonean relatives, had immensely contributed to both the intellecto-cultural and economic development of “African Modernism.”
But that Mr. Kofi Annan, the Ghanaian-born UN Secretary-General who facilitated the temporary resettlement of the Liberian refugees at Camp Buduburam made us, his countrymen and women, immensely proud cannot be gainsaid. Still, it is of utmost significance to point out that Mr. Annan is no Nkrumaist and has, in fact, on more than several occasions emphatically observed that he has never been, in anyway, fond of the dictatorial proclivities of both Mr. Kwame Nkrumah and his so-called Convention People’s Party (CPP), the autocratic wrecking ball kind of political juggernaut that led Ghana to sovereignty from British colonial rule but only to shortly compound the socioeconomic, cultural and political misery of Ghanaians more than three-folds until its auspicious overthrow on February 24, 1966.
Anyway, in the news item hinted of at the beginning of this narrative, the then-Interior Minister of Ghana, Mr. Kwamena Bartels, was reported to have announced the massive deportation of the Liberian residents of Camp Buduburam on the purely statutory grounds that these residential guests had flagrantly and, one may also add, ungratefully flouted laws regulating decent public conduct. The refugees, largely women, had stripped themselves and paraded naked by a major Ghanaian trunk-road, or highway, in protest against the intention of the government to return these refugees to their home country with a resettlement allowance of $ 100 per head. The Liberian refugees were demanding at least $ 1,000 and to be resettled in the West, primarily the United States of America, where their ancestors had been sold and enslaved as chattel. In effect, the argument of these refugees was that the “Back to Africa” project of the American Colonization Society (ACS) had miserably failed!
What was not being directly said or read into the equation, as it were, regarded the fact that so successful had the Kufuor-led government of the New Patriotic Party (NPP) been with the promotion of democratic governance in the country as a whole and, in fact, to the wistful admiration of the Liberian refugees that, to the latter, just about the only viable alternative to continuing to reside in Ghana would be to be resettled overseas.
Furthermore, in the wake of the Liberian general election that witnessed Mrs. Johnson-Sirleaf’s becoming the first female head-of-state of any country on the African continent, it was the Kufuor-led New Patriotic Party that seminally assisted the war-ravaged and traumatized Liberians to come to terms with each other through the establishment of a Truth and Reconciliation Commission. NPP operatives would also help the Liberians to rehabilitate their civic governmental apparatus. It was thus a quite wicked twist of irony that Mrs. Johnson-Sirleaf should pay homage to Ghana through President Atta-Mills. Not that the Liberian leader had any practical alternative, anyhow, if her people and country were to continue to forge closer and mutually beneficial links with one another.
What really piqued my interest in deciding to comment on the news item captioned “Ghana to Deport Naked Protesters” has more to do with something called “The African Personality,” a mythopoeic theory originally propounded by Dr. Edward Wilmot Blyden, of the U.S. Virgin Islands and Liberia, which claims global African peoples to be uniquely possessed of certain cultural and behavioral, and even instinctual, traits and characteristics. And here, though, we must quickly point out that in its original conception, “The African Personality” theory consisted largely of a cogent and systematically articulated premise that in view of its “Triple Heritage” of Islam, Christianity and Indigenous Cultural Values, the modern African is both intellectually and philosophically, perhaps, the most cosmopolitan of the human species. Predictably, Mr. Kwame Nkrumah would plagiarize this purely organic and scholarly concept and radically “essentialize” it into an ontological special pleading for “African Exceptionalism,” a curious brand of inferiority complex self-indulgently sublimated into a culturally relativist ideology of “dictatorial protectionism,” layered with pseudo-socialist legitimation of the one-party state.
But that the forensically specious brand of Nkrumaist “African Personality” was what Mr. Bartels, the former Interior Minister, sought to effectively dispel is encapsulated in his quite poignant observation to the BBC that: “When women strip themselves naked and stand by a major [Ghanaian] highway, that is not a peaceful demonstration,” cannot be impugned. In other words, as humans and Africans, we may, perforce, share many cultural values and traits; still, using public nudity as a political weapon – as has also been witnessed in Kenya – is abominably un-Ghanaian; and this is precisely where we part ways with “African Personality.”
*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 Danquah Institute (DI), the pro-democracy think tank, and author of 21 books, including “Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana” (iUniverse.com, 2005). E-mail: [email protected].
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