By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
News of the sudden emergence of an alleged second-born son of the late President Nkrumah by an Egyptian woman by the historically regal and romantic name of Isis Ismail (or some such name), comes as absolutely no news at all to those of us who have studied quite a bit about the private and personal life of the man (See “Sekou Alleges Incest Against Nkrumah’s ‘Lost’ Son” Ghanaweb.com 4/5/12).
What is rather surprising is the fact that none of the full-blooded Ghanaian and Black-African children of the late dictator, other than the widely known and respected Dr. Francis Nkrumah, have come out to publicly identify themselves as such. There may, of course, be a plethora of reasons for such failure or refusal, not the least of which could definitely border on questions of jealously guarded privacy and absolute and simple disinterest. Still, contrary to Mr. Sekou Nkrumah’s rather capricious and facile argument, exactly when and just how any biological claimants of the Nkrumah legacy and heritage decides to publicly identify him-/herself, cannot be either productively or meaningfully second-guessed. In essence, there is any range of both predictable and unpredictable factors that could motivate a publicly unknown Nkrumah son or daughter to come public.
What is, however, curiously interesting is Mr. Sekou Nkrumah’s rather scandalous allegation that Dr. Nathan Kwame Nkrumah, the Show Boy’s alleged second son by another Egyptian woman to whom President Nkrumah was never publicly identified and/or associated, had actually propositioned his own half-sister – the parliamentarian and rump-Convention People’s Party chairperson – Ms. Samia Yaba Nkrumah, some two years ago. Needless to say, we simply cannot allow ourselves to be emotionally drawn into such a clearly tendentious allegation. In sum, Mr. Sekou Nkrumah’s allegation has the singular motive of seriously impugning the credibility of his alleged half-brother, and nothing else! Then also, as of this writing (4/5/12), Ms. Nkrumah had yet to publicly comment on her younger brother’s allegation. Some sections of the media have, however, slyly enhanced the stature and filial claim of Dr. Nathan Kwame Nkrumah with the report that the latter appears to have “successfully renovated the family house of Ghana’s first president[,] Dr. Kwame Nkrumah[,] at Nkroful[,] in the Western Region,” whatever the semiotic intent of the adverbial modification of “successfully” is meant to connote.
Some ardent Nkrumah partisans, largely members of the rump-Convention People’s Party, have also been reported to have demanded DNA evidence from Dr. Nathan Kwame Nkrumah to authenticate his paternity claim. Such demand, needless to say, is ultra vires, or clearly outside the bounds of the authority and/or right of any non-biological member of the Nkrumah family. For me, though, even as I publicly noted in this very forum to a faux-Nkrumah genealogist by the name of Dr. Papa Kwesi Nduom several years ago, there is more than ample evidence of Ghana’s first postcolonial premier having fathered several children by indigenous Ghanaian women. Back then, I even cited the quite authoritative example of an Nkrumah daughter by a Ghanaian woman of Akuapem ethnicity who had been my own now-late mother’s friend and a longtime resident of New York City.
For me, also, these full-blooded Ghanaian children of President Nkrumah’s are no less worth knowing and being recognized as such than the late Ghanaian leader’s half-Arab or half-Egyptian children.
Ultimately, though, there is nothing either surprising or controversial about an Nkrumah child, or even two, popping up on the country’s sunny shores once awhile to identify him- or herself as such. After all, even as the renowned British-Trinidadian Marxist scholar Mr. C. L. R. James once obliquely hinted somewhere among the humongous corpus of his writings, one of Nkrumah’s major weaknesses had to do with the sort of “off-the-books” liaisons that were indubitably capable of producing a Dr. Nathan Kwame Nkrumah. Mr. James, whose granddaughter, incidentally, was my friend and classmate at the City College of New York of the City University of New York (CCNY of CUNY), would not specifically identify the foible at issue, perhaps in a decent bid to preserving his friendship with his younger former protégé and famous Ghanaian president.
Needless to say, I am also waiting for at least a couple of Nkrumah scions to pop out of Conakry and Bamako, one of these days, to regale us with their own peculiar versions of Nkrumah’s conjugal pan-Africanism. Or is this, rather, the Nkrumaist version of Scientific Socialism?
*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 “Danquah v. Nkrumah: In the Words of Mahoney.” E-mail: [email protected]. ###