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

I am going to be unusually brief in this response to Mr. Ekow Nelson’s article titled “Dr. Danquah’s Goebbels Debunked” (Ghanaweb.com 10/13/11). The fact of the matter is that in Ghanaian and African politics, it is only the communist-leaning Nkrumah-led Convention People’s Party (CPP) that heavily invested in the ungodly portfolio of “Propaganda Secretary,” largely occupied by the likes of Mrs. Hannah Kudjoe, axe-man Twumasi-Ankrah, Ebenezer Adam, and so on. Thus it is unforgivably insulting and immitigably depraved to presume an incurably democratic leader like Dr. J. B. Danquah to have the least bit fathomed the appointment of a propaganda secretary among the ranks of the membership of either the seminal United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC) or the National Liberation Movement NLM/United Party (UP), whose latter helm the Doyen of Gold Coast and Ghanaian politics only assumed by default, Dr. K. A. Busia having wisely fled into exile to avoid the fate that ultimately befell the intrepid Dr. Danquah.
At any rate, my grave suspicion that, indeed, Mr. Nelson’s Goebbels article is really the sordid handiwork of the entire UK and Ireland Branch of the CPP is clearly confirmed by the shameless contradiction by the writer of his own initial assertion that Mr. Ako-Adjei had been conferred with the Honorary Doctorate by Lincoln University in absentia in 1962. In a Ghanaweb.com chat-room comment to his own article, this is what Mr. Nelson writes: “I never suggested [that] Ako-Adjei received his award in absentia. I categorically stated that he received [it] in person in JUNE 1962 before he was arrested din [sic] AUGUST 1962.”
In his article proper, this is what Mr. Nelson writes: “To cover our bases, again[,] we asked Lincoln University whether – to the extent that there was one – “the award was made in absentia,” because all credible sources, including Ako-Adjei’s own biography suggested he was[,] indeed[,] awarded an Honorary Doctor of Laws degree from [sic] Lincoln University in 1962. Again[,] this is what the Office of the President of Lincoln University wrote in response: ‘Honorary doctorate degrees [sic] from Lincoln University are rarely granted in absentia.’ Clearly [writes Mr. Nelson], Ako-Adjei’s detention later in 1962 could have been one of those rare exceptions implied in Ms. Brunner [sic] response[;] and so we are left with examining and scrutinizing the exact dates of the award and his arrest [,] as any careful research would do.”
Well, the fact of the matter, rather unfortunately, is that the Ade Sawyer Group of CPP propagandists are no “careful researchers” at all, but pathological charlatans who cannot even objectively deal with established facts of their own discovery, even when glaringly confronted with genuine errors in factual data, such as committed by me in my original rejoinder to Mr. Nelson! In other words, congenital liars like Messrs. Nelson and Sawyer (need I also add “Uncle” Cameron Duodu?) are simply morbidly incapable of dealing with incontrovertible evidence gleaned from their own purportedly meticulous research efforts.
Anyway, since Mr. Ade Sawyer, a presumable fast friend of Mr. Duodu’s asked to know about the same, kindly let me regale these grizzled and jaded Nkrumacrats holed up in London (one would have thought it would rather be Moscow) with a few of the known sterling achievements of Nana Theodore Adolph Kwadwo Aboagye of Asiakwa and Asante-Dwaben, and the Sintim-Aboagyes of Asiakwa, Asamankese, Osino and Begoro, among a plethora of other locations. It is a fact that the very Asiakwa Presbyterian Primary (and Middle) School which Mr. Duodu attended was introduced to the town by the reputedly “European- and Stranger-loving” Nana Aboagye. I am also quite sure that Mr. Duodu’s father attended the same school. Nana Aboagye, as I recently had occasion to point out, also introduced the Basel missionaries to Akyem-Begoro and elsewhere. Nana Aboagye was also one of the biggest farmers in Akyem-Abuakwa, having owned large tracts of rubber, cocoa and oil-palm plantations. The Sintim-Aboagyes also ran the erstwhile Okyeman Court from Asiakwa in the early twentieth-century (See Roger Gocking’s “Facing Two ways”). The first African ever to pilot a train, in 1931, Mr. Samuel Nicholas Adu (Opanyin Kwaku ’Osi) was also my real uncle! And the man that Mr. Duodu lodges with whenever he is in New York City, Mr. Samuel Kwadwo Adu (Wofa Adu), former West African Table-Tennis Champion in the 1950s, is also my second cousin! In other words, the Sintim-Aboagyes are no slavocratic remnants looking to make history on the shores of Ghana!
Now, isn’t it rather amusing that Mr. Nelson would, on the one hand, inform his readers that information garnered from a Ms. Jodi Brunner of the Office of the President of Lincoln University clearly indicates that, indeed, Mr. Ako-Adjei was awarded his Honorary Doctor of Laws degree “in absentia” and then, turn around, in the same breath, to quote Mr. Cameron Duodu [in the Ghanaweb.com chat-room] acrobatically claiming that, indeed, Mr. Ako-Adjei had arrived in person at Lincoln University, in 1962, to accept his honorary doctoral degree?!
Anyway, what started all this deliberately criminal massaging of factual data by Mr. Ekow Nelson regarded whether, indeed, it was tantamount to abject disrespect on my part to prefix former President Nkrumah’s name with the polite title of “Mr.” rather than the honorific of “Dr.” And my simple riposte is: “Hell, No!” Besides, nobody could realistically secure any worthwhile or viable employment by passing off what is routinely assumed to be “an unearned degree” as a mark of his/her professional competence.
The problem here, though, is that it is utterly pointless to argue with personality cultists and impenitent fanatics like Messrs. Sawyer and Nelson. And on the preceding observations, I rest my case. Suffice it to also observe in passing that Mr. Sawyer’s apparently acute case of migraine is one that may never find a cure – and it is simply the fact that, somehow, Mr. Sawyer’s disease is one that is evidently and primarily provoked by the fact that Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe has an obnoxiously insufferable way of “glorifying” Dr. Danquah, a decidedly fallible human being (See Ghanaweb.com chat-room comment under Mr. Nelson’s Goebbels article). Except, of course, the equally incontrovertible fact that Mr. Nkrumah was, indeed, even more irreparably flawed as a human political animal.

*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 “Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana” (iUniverse.com, 2005). E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net.
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