By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Significantly, the two or three brief paragraphs in which the name of Dr. J. B. Danquah appears vis-à-vis his purported dealings with the United States, make absolutely no direct mention of Danquah’s active interaction with any known operatives of the CIA whatsoever. On this score, this is what Mahoney has to say: “The matter concerned Dr. J. B. Danquah, Nkrumah’s opponent in the presidential election of 1960, who had been released from prison a few months after Mahoney’s arrival as ambassador. Danquah paid a visit one November day to the embassy to ask Mahoney why funds his family had been receiving during his imprisonment had been cut off after his release. ¶ This was the first time that Mahoney had heard of the arrangement. After Danquah left, he summoned the CIA chief of station to ask why he had not been advised of the agency’s association with Danquah. Dissatisfied with the explanation, Mahoney flew to Washington two days later and personally informed Kennedy about the matter. ¶ The President reacted sharply to the news and told Mahoney that he had sent a letter to all ambassadors in May 1961 making it clear that their authority extended to all phases of embassy decision making. Kennedy then telephoned CIA Director John McCone and told him that he was sending Mahoney over to CIA headquarters and wanted the matter resolved immediately. The understanding that emerged from the meeting at Langley was that ‘no undertakings of any kind, even remotely involving our situation in Ghana, would either be continued or launched without the ambassador’s knowledge and approval” (JFK: Ordeal in Africa 184-5).
The first factor that ought to be immediately pointed out is the fact that the author of JFK: Ordeal in Africa is relating to the reader an incident that intimately involved his own father, Ambassador William P. Mahoney. The author ought to, therefore, be envisaged, beforehand, to have a vested interest in protecting the “diplomatic” and/or professional integrity of his patriarch. Among the Akan-speaking people of Ghana, and elsewhere in the West African sub-region, there is a maxim that: “One does not point to one’s father’s village with one’s left index-finger.” We will shortly further explain why the author’s rather forceful attempt to protect the integrity of his father vis-à-vis the Danquah episode ought to be taken with a proverbial pinch of salt, if not unreservedly held suspect.
In the interim, suffice it to poignantly observe that were the alleged arrangement in which regular remittances were made to the Danquah family, while the latter was imprisoned by President Nkrumah, a perennial one made with the full knowledge of the putative Doyen of Gold Coast and Ghanaian politics, Dr. Danquah would have directly confronted the Accra-based CIA station chief, instead of Ambassador Mahoney, when he discovered to his apparent dismay, shortly after his release from prison, that the United States’ Embassy, rather than the CIA station chief, had abruptly cut off financial assistance to the Danquah family. Very likely, the decision to offer financial assistance to the Danquah family had been hatched and executed in the absence of the paterfamilias. Likewise, were Danquah a local CIA operative, the agency would have continued to remit him some form of financial relief, once he came out of prison and it was clear that he was not gainfully employed to be able to take care of his own family.
In sum, our unassailable contention here is that very likely, the decision to financially assist the Danquah family was made in Washington and over and well above the authority of the Director of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. Very likely, it was taken with the studied knowledge of either the President of the United States or a highly influential presidential aide. After all, Danquah’s fame and stature as the most feared and hated opponent of the Ghanaian dictator was not altogether lost on the Cold War-obsessed Americans.
As for the mischievous myth about Danquah’s being a “CIA Asset,” suffice it to emphatically observe here that unlike the mercurial and constantly and expediently vacillating President Nkrumah, Dr. Danquah had self-assuredly and ideologically always been pro-West and pro-democratic capitalism, and so did not need any special inducement, prodding or cajoling, whatsoever, to ideologically truck with the Americans and, in fact, the Western world in general.
At any rate, to remarkably appreciate just a little bit of Richard Mahoney’s obviously earnest attempt to protecting the “diplomatic” integrity of the author’s own father, one only need to read this deftly and subtly crafted paragraph immediately preceding the one detailing Dr. Danquah’s encounter with the newly-appointed and posted Ambassador William Mahoney: “The embassy in Accra saw no basis for operational activity and recommended that ‘we maintain our presence on a business as usual basis.’ Ambassador Mahoney was soon to find out, however, what careerists normally prefer to ignore by instinct and what political appointees usually fail to grasp through innocence – that an ambassador is seldom the master of his own house” (184).
Now, let us briefly attempt to critically examine the preceding paragraph. For instance, why, in the opinion of the author of JFK: Ordeal in Africa, do career diplomats “normally prefer to ignore by instinct” payments such as were allegedly being made by the CIA station officer to the family of the politically incarcerated Dr. Danquah? Was it fundamentally because the CIA was in the habit of financially assisting the dependent relatives of imprisoned opposition politicians, and was routinely and invariably assumed to be so engaged?
And if so, why do political appointees like Ambassador Mahoney who, by the way, often constitute the bulk of significant ambassadorial appointments, “usually fail to grasp [such an elementary truth] through [sheer] innocence” of being political appointees, rather than career diplomats? In other words, must the author of JFK: Ordeal in Africa be understood to be implying that so diplomatically and civically innocent – or naïve – of America’s foreign policy protocol was his father that his apparently sudden discovery of U.S. government-authorized financial assistance to the family of the incarcerated Dr. Danquah, which the evidently “Nkrumah-loving” Ambassador Mahoney apparently deemed as outrageous and even diplomatically flagrant, was simply that, a sheer blight of diplomatic innocence?
Needless to say, the critical reader’s guess is as good and valid as this writer’s. Anyway, what is also interesting here is that nowhere in this otherwise meticulous account does the author place Danquah anywhere near such hot spots and hotbeds of anti-Nkrumah conspiracies as Kulungugu, Lomé, London and/or even Washington, such as has been remarked about Messrs. Gbedemah and Busia, for ready examples. The fact of the matter is that the man who personally and formally introduced the future President Nkrumah into the mainstream of Ghanaian politics was simply too self-assured and fearless to resort to back-alley shenanigans, as a means of vehemently registering his unreserved disgust and abhorrence of the neo-fascist, Nkrumah-led Convention People’s Party regime (See Dennis Austin’s Politics in Ghana: 1945-1960).
Then again, with Busia, also, it was perfectly understandable, especially when one contextually reckons the fact of what it really meant to be cast in the palpably scary role of main opposition leader in the dog-eat-dog world of Nkrumah’s Ghana of the early to mid-1960s. But that the youthful, astute, sprightly and nimble, albeit decidedly staid, leader of the consolidated United Party (UP) spent most of the period from 1959 to 1966, literally, dodging Nkrumah’s flying assassin’s bullets, ought to poignantly inform the objective reader as to why it became an imperative necessity for the first African to be named professor at the University of Ghana, Legon, to actively hobnob, or consort, with and seek protective cover from the indisputably deadly salvos from a Russian-KGB-fortified President Nkrumah. And here, too, it is significant to observe that unlike Mr. Komla A. Gbedemah who boldly and brazenly crossed the political divide – from pro-Soviet Communism, at least vis-à-vis his close association with Mr. Kwame Nkrumah; to American/British capitalist democracy – largely out of decided self-interest, Busia, like Danquah before him, had always been rooted ideologically to the West. And the Wenchi, Brong-Ahafo, native and Oxbridge-educated scholar/sociologist wore his unbridled disgust for Nkrumah’s brand of Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist dictatorship on his proverbial sleeves.
In other words, like Danquah, Busia felt too self-assured in his democratic quest to liberating his country from the iron grips of a Stalinist dictator, and also too confident in the righteousness of his quest, and cause, to have pusillanimously receded underground in order to carry out his mission.
*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 Director of The Sintim-Aboagye Center for Politics and Culture and author of “Ghanaian Politics Today” (Lulu.com, 2008). E-mail: [email protected].
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