By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
In Chapter Six of Richard D. Mahoney’s JFK: Ordeal in Africa (New York: Oxford UP, 1983), which is comprehensively devoted to Ghana’s turbulent political climate under Kwame Nkrumah, the author recalls: “News of worsening relations with Ghana moved Senator Dodd to launch a Senate subcommittee investigation to determine whether U.S. money was aiding another communist state. Professor Busia (recently of Lomé and other exile staging grounds) provided the testimony Dodd needed: ‘Ghana is the Center for subversive Communist activities in Western Africa.’ Mahoney appealed to Washington to stall the appearance [publication?] of the Dodd report, but this, of course, was not possible. Nkrumah found Dodd’s wide-ranging accusations [to be] galling in the extreme, and the fact that the Senator was a senior member of the President’s own party was not lost on the Ghanaians”(185).
Once again, it is indubitably clear here that the primary concern of the author of JFK: Ordeal in Africa is to studiously and, perhaps, also dutifully, protect the “diplomatic” integrity of his own father, Ambassador William P. Mahoney, and hope that the latter would be kindly depicted by history as having definitely stood on the right side of a “progressive” African dictator like Ghana’s President Kwame Nkrumah. Otherwise, how could the critical reader plausibly account for Ambassador Mahoney’s rather outrageous and flagrant attempt to muzzle, or stall, the issuance of the Dodd Senate subcommittee report, in whose hearings the highly respected and credible Dr. Kofi Abrefa Busia had participated, and which systematically and comprehensively had catalogued the wanton human rights violations and Soviet KGB-sponsored reign-of-terror unleashed on Ghanaian citizens? On a more intimate and personal level, the author also appears to be somewhat grateful that Nkrumah was invariably willing to make an exception of his U.S. Ambassador to Ghana father, whenever the rabidly pro-Nkrumah and pro-Soviet Ghanaian news editors went on the attack against the imperialist West and its “reprobate agents” on the African continent.
In one such instance, this is what the author has to say: “Nkrumah’s dread suspicion of Western complicity [in the assassination attempt on his life] appeared in broadside form in the daily editorials of the Ghanaian press. Great Britain and the United States were accused of ‘murderous conspiracy’ and the clandestine use of ‘local bastards’ in furtherance of their interests. In reference to his Arizona origins, Ambassador Mahoney was routinely identified as ‘the cowboy nuclear imperialist.’ When Mahoney went to Flagstaff House to protest the press attacks, he found Nkrumah in a ‘volcanic’ mood – deeply disturbed, but willing to issue a formal retraction of the press charges on the basis of his ‘trust’ in President Kennedy”(183-4).
Earlier, Mahoney describes his father as being so influential over Nkrumah that barely three months after the Ghanaian leader had signed “a major aviation assistance agreement with the Russians,” Ambassador Mahoney, nevertheless, successfully prevailed on President Nkrumah to summarily breach the agreement by flatly refusing the Soviets landing rights to enable Russia to strategically counter the United States in the wake of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Needless to say, in earnestly portraying his diplomat father as a professional practitioner of genius, the author ends up conversely depicting the flamboyant and tough-taking Ghanaian leader as a veritable paper tiger of mercurial temper who clearly did not deserve to be trusted by the Russians or any serious global politician/statesman, for that matter: “Armed with the photographic blow-ups used with such effect by Ambassador Stevenson before the UN Security Council, Mahoney met with Nkrumah and asked him to deny the Soviet Union all over-flight and landing rights in Ghana. Nkrumah acceded categorically to the request, despite the fact that he had signed a major aviation assistance agreement with the Russians only three months earlier. Attwood duplicated this success with Sékou Touré the next day. The strategy of staying in close, working hard, and waiting for the breaks seemed to be paying off” (181).
Finally, in the following quote, one gets an unmistakable sense of the reverence, almost verging on awe, which the author had for his “non-careerist” diplomat father, who also appears to have done all the right things at just the right moments in his diplomatic career, and of whom whatever foibles appeared to exist were mainly and readily attributable to either the professional incompetence and/or sheer indiscretion of someone else: “The communist powers had their best men in place in Accra. Chinese Foreign Minister Zhou Enlai had sent his most gifted deputy (and later successor) Huang Hua as ambassador to Ghana. Khrushchev’s envoy, Mikhail Sytenko, enjoyed what one Western diplomat called, ‘instant access’ to Nkrumah. Now Kennedy decided to send one of his own political collaborators, William P. Mahoney, Jr., to make sure that the U.S. would at least break even politically on its Volta commitment. Mahoney’s civil rights background was not lost on Nkrumah, who told the head of the Rockefeller Fund in West Africa that he fully approved of the appointment”(179).
Ultimately, if, indeed, Dr. J. B. Danquah was “a CIA Asset,” as one pathologically cynical Nkrumaist blogger slyly put it, the prime and primary beneficiary, definitely, was the sovereign state of Ghana, for the dogged maintenance and preservation of whose integrity, as a functional democracy, the Doyen of Modern Ghanaian Politics paid the ultimate price.
*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community of the State University of New York, Garden City. He is Director of The Sintim-Aboagye Center for Politics and Culture and author of “Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana” (iUniverse.com, 2005). E-mail: [email protected].
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