By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

It is not clear to whom the 2008 New Patriotic Party presidential candidate “sent” his felicitations vis-à-vis the non-birth centenary birthday celebration of Mr. Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first president (See “Nana Akufo-Addo Celebrates Nkrumah’s Birthday” Statesman 9/17/09). What is clear, however, is that the dauphin of former President Edward Akufo-Addo avidly desires that the celebrants, largely Nkrumah fanatics and sympathizers, overcome their apparently pathological state of denial in order to honestly, albeit even wistfully, accept the insuperable fact that Kwame Nkrumah was hardly the most ideal personality to have led Ghana into independence and thus served as a beacon of inspiration to the rest of the African continent.

Consequently, Nana Addo-Dankwa Akufo-Addo, in his alluded to message, poignantly observed: “But we should also use this opportunity for sober reflection on our painful past, for purposes of strengthening our faith in the principles of development in freedom, individual liberty, individual prosperity, the rule of law, and respect for human rights and the [august] institutions of liberal democracy.”

For Nkrumah, it ought to be observed in no uncertain terms, Ghana was merely a staging theater for the onslaught of African unification. And the latter largely explains why the salient principles of citizenship on the national front, such as civil liberties and protected speech and freedom of the press were deemed to be, at best, peripheral and, at the worst, simply inconsequential.

As to whether the mere unification of the African continent could bring about the expected rapid industrial development of African peoples and their societies does not seem to have seriously factored into the pan-Africanist agenda. At best, the pan-Africanist agenda was quixotically “Garveyite,” in the messianic sense of one man, an imperial figure of sorts, unilaterally dictating both the nature and terms of the same. Under the preceding agenda, the African as an individual did not exist; only the African as a part of an undifferentiated communal entity docilely shepherded by the solitary messianic figure existed.

If the foregoing observation has validity, and there is absolutely no reason why it should not, then, needless to say, it could not be integral to the realm of practical reality, or even common sense, that the rapid unification of the continent was apt to logically inducing a state of collective prosperity.

We know the foregoing to be true because even as Nana Akufo-Addo implied in his congratulatory message, the sort of pan-Africanism aimed for by the Nkrumaists is, paradoxically, intolerant of the progressive achievements of the collective being logically attributed, or credited, to the same. In other words, Nkrumaist pan-Africanism only admits of the achievements of the collective being unilaterally, unreservedly and exclusively credited to the solitary messianic figure, the life-president and/or founding-father of the ruling party, who is “religiously” (or slavishly) recognized as infallible and essentially sublimated into the preternatural status of an immortal. Thus Nkrumah is unquestionably envisaged as temporally unbound, for like the Biblical messiah, “Nkrumah Never Dies.”

Indeed, it was in unmistakable riposte to President Atta-Mills’ crude attempt to exclusively institutionalize the non-birth birthday of Kwame Nkrumah as a national holiday that Nana Akufo-Addo made the following remark in his congratulatory message: “Let us use this event to honor the collective contribution of our forebears, including Kwame Nkrumah, to Ghana’s independence struggle and the inspiration that [struggle] gave to our brothers and sisters in the rest of colonized [sic] Africa.”

Furthermore, in his congratulatory and “celebratory” message, Akufo-Addo does not let go of the prime opportunity to emphasize the incontrovertible fact of Nkrumah not having been, in anyway, unique in the annals of seminal and progressive continental African leadership: Nkrumah, of course, was “one of Africa’s most important and celebrated personalities, who contributed significantly in shaping the direction and destiny of the continent and its people in the twentieth century.” He was not the only one, the foregoing quote seems to adumbrate; and neither was Nkrumah, in any way or manner, foremost among the ranks of African nationalist leaders – the loudest and most histrionic, perhaps.

*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 Danquah Institute (DI), the Accra-based pro-democracy think-tank, and the author of 20 books, including “Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana” (iUniverse.com, 2005). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@aol.com. ###