By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
As I write this, my face is surfused with tears; the sort of tears which tell of the imperative need for Okyeman and Akyemfuo/Okyemfuo to amicably declare a parting of the ways with the rest of this bogus corporate political entity called Ghana whose name, by the way, was bequeathed us by one of our own. For we are the most reviled and detested among all Ghanaian ethnic and sub-ethnic polities for being who we are - a great achieving people who would not be slighted and disdained; who would not be denied justice and fair play. I am disconsolately heart-broken!
I left the shores of Ghana per a KLM flight through Amsterdam to New York City on the night of July 26, 1985. And in asmuch as I have continued to hope for a radical democratic change in Ghana, and one that was far better than the fast creeping culture of silence that I luckily and happily left behind, I have, nonetheless, been realistic enough to fully appreciate the fact that, in the prophetic words of the poet Kobena Eyi-Acquah, "Where we are going is long."
In other words, we have quite a ways to go, as it were, to reach the level of cultural maturity that many a civilized polity takes for granted. Recently, for instance, a regular hack of the so-called National Democratic Congress (NDC) who teamed up with "Justice" Francis Yaonasu Kpegah to character assassinate the presidential candidate of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), wrote and published a two-part article demanding to know what made the NPP attractive for any citizen and/or eligible Ghanaian voter to want to join.
As usual, other than glancing at the characteristically cynical caption of the said article, I decided to pass up this decidedly vapid assay at sheer annoyance. Well, my simple riposte to that popinjay of a hack is as follows: Were the New Patriotic Party to be ruling the proverbial roost, what happened to Auntie Theodosia Asihene-Okoh would not have happened; not in a thousand years! After all, was it not the Kufuor-led government of the New Patriotic Party that upgraded and named the National Hockey Stadium after Mrs. Theodosia Asihene-Okoh? For that is how her full-name ought to have been publicly recognized. She had first been born and decently raised by decent and enlightened parents before she met and married a decent gentleman by the name of Mr. Enoch Okoh.
But that the former Ms. Theodosia Asihene would achieve so much and yet be so deafeningly and embarrassingly under-recognized, bears the same striking irony that her genius kinsman and putative Doyen of Gold Coast and Ghanaian politics, Dr. Joseph (Kwame Kyeretwie) Boakye-Danquah, continues to silently suffer, even in death, to this day. Likewise, the cowardly slain man under whose progressive governance the development of Ghanaian sports reached its equivalent of a Golden Age, Gen. Ignatius Kutu Acheampong, today has his name thoroughly shrouded in obscurity. And so what is really new here, if I may humbly ask?
Anyway, the irredeemably heretical decision by Dr. Alfred Oko Vanderpuije, the former US-resident high school principal turned Accra mayor, to obliterate the memory of the woman who has been fondly called the Joan-of-Arc of Ghana Hockey (See Prof. Ivan Addae-Mensah's "Don't Deny Mrs. Okoh Her Honor" New Crusading Guide 7/26/13), by having the hockey stadium named after her changed to Prof. John Evans Atta-Mills' National Hockey Stadium, ought to serve as an eye-opener to those among the Ghanaian electorate who have been woefully misled into believing that the Mahama-led National Democratic Congress has anything meaningful to offer the country, besides the wantonly criminal "AKONFEMINIZATION" of our hard-earned national capital and monetary resources.
But that Auntie Theodosia Asihene-Okoh has yet to be fully and officially recognized for having designed our tri-colored National Flag and Black Star, says a lot about the mindset of the people who have occupied the helm of our national affairs since 1957. I have always known about the Asihenes, from my maternal grandfather, Rev. T. H. Sintim (1896-1982), to be a proud and high-achieving Ghanaians; but until very recently, that is within the past eighteen or twenty years, I had not known our consanguineal affinity, on my agnatic familial side to be that proximate. This too, I would learn from my mother shortly before her death in conversation.
But that such criminally brazen and public attempt should be made to so violently dishonor a 91-year-old woman whose only crime clearly appears to be that she is biologically related to three of Ghana's celebrated Big Six, irreparably breaks my heart. I feel deeply violated and heart-broken, especially when Auntie Dosia, reportedly, asks to be allowed to kiss the feet of a man far less deserving of the presidency than she is deserving of the honor of the National Hockey Stadium named for her, (whose landed property she is also known to have personally acquired from some Ga traditional chieftains for the purpose), for cynically reversing a mnemonically murderous process which, for all we care to know, may well have been instigated by himself.
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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
July 28, 2013
E-mail: [email protected]
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