By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
The Nkrumacrats must be desperate, indeed, to publish a children’s book on their hero’s life and, of all wonders of wonders, invite unarguably the most culturally polarizing Ghanaian to launch it (See “New Book About Nkrumah Launched” MyJoyOnline.com 3/25/10). Needless to say, in the wake of President Nkrumah’s overthrow, Professor Kofi Nyidevu Awoonor, who now curiously doubles as both chairman of Ghana’s Council of State and a firebrand Nkrumaist propagandist, wrote and published a novel titled “This Earth, My Brother” (Heinemann/African Writers’ Series) in which the former University of Cape Coast don depicted the retchingly intolerable, untold and rank corruption that, in the imagination of the author, epitomized the Convention People’s Party (CPP) regime and its pathologically autocratic chieftain.
To be certain, if any well-meaning Ghanaian and/or African craves a truthful narrative account on the life and personality of Mr. Kwame Nkrumah, as envisaged by those closest to the man, one book to read is Professor Awoonor’s “This Earth, My Brother,” after Ayi Kwei Armah’s “The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born,” of course. Needless to say, it is the Awoonor novel, once required as a GCE “A”-Level literature textbook, that the Socialist Forum of Ghana ought to have caused/commissioned to be simplified and published for the unvarnished edification of young Ghanaian readers itching to learn all about the concupiscent obscenity and abject decadence that characterized the entire political landscape of our country from 1957 until Nkrumah’s auspicious ouster in 1966.
And so it is rather amusing that the sometime studious Nkrumah disciple who penned easily the most treacherous literary artifact about the very dictator who named a wet-eared and flagrantly unqualified Kofi Awoonor director of the Ghana Film and Television Institute, the very first of its kind in our so-called Black Africa, should be slyly, shamelessly and deviously attempting to indemnify himself in the sunset of his career and life. In “This Earth, My Brother,” the now-chairman of the Council of State tells the reader that “women, sex and booze” are the most plentifully produced commodities in Nkrumah’s Ghana, readily beating the production of cocoa onto the margins of oblivion. And so whatever happened to Professor Awoonor who, by the way, fervidly claims to be unabashedly “First and Foremost an Ewe before a Ghanaian,” to be presently unctuously holding himself off to his countrymen and women as a nonesuch avid and ace ideological adherent to the tenets of Nkrumaist pan-Africanism?
Needless to say, where I come from in Ghana (which is most of Akan territory) we call such seasonal tendency “Plain-Jane opportunism!” For that is what Professor Awoonor’s career and very existence appear to have been about. Thus in the wake of Nkrumah’s auspiciously historic overthrow, it became expedient for the “Wheta-Virus” to cash in on the Nkroful Show Boy’s misfortune by ingeniously and quite successfully playing Ghana’s “Literary Judas.” And now, somehow, recognizing the fact of the corporeal demise of many of those who could have promptly called him to order, or the fact of either their abject and deliberate abetment or virtual disinterest, “Notsie Kofi” springs out of the proverbial woodwork proclaiming himself to be the “Unimpeachable High Priest of Nkrumaism, Plenipotentiary and Extraordinary” to Ghana’s latest generation of innocents.
Wa-wa-wa-laa…hi-hi! God save us from ourselves!
*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 policy think tank, and the author of 21 books, including “Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana” (iUniverse.com, 2005). E-mail: [email protected]. ###