By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
Oct. 3, 2015
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net

I have never met Mr. Kwaku Sintim-Misa, except for that one mournful moment at his father’s funeral on the foregrounds of the Kyebi Presbyterian Church, either in late 1983 or mid-1984. It could even have been sometime in early 1985, the very year that I departed Ghana to join my now-deceased parents here in the United States. But even then, it was from a respectful distance. KSM was in the company of his mother and exiting from the church at the end of the funeral service. I had been a bit closer to his father, the Rt.-Rev. G. K. Sintim-Misa, who had quite a fondness for my maternal grandfather, the Rev. T. H. Sintim, who envisaged perhaps the longest-serving spiritual head of the Presbyterian Church of Ghana as his younger brother, although Rev. Sintim-Misa was young enough to have easily been the dauphin of my grandfather.

There was also something esthetically enviable about the way and manner in which these two gentlemen conducted their fast fraternal friendship. And when the Rev. T. H. Sintim peacefully transitioned on November 26, 1982 – he would be interred on January 8, 1983, it was the then-former Moderator of the PCG, in the august company of some nine or ten clergymen, who conducted the funeral and memorial service at the Akyem-Asiakwa Presbyterian Church. My grandfather, whose own father, Opanyin Theodore Adolphe Kwadwo Aboagye, had led the Basel missionaries from Accra to Akyem-Begoro in the early 1880’s, preferred to be known by two identification labels, namely, either Mr. Yaabe (Yawbe) Sintim of Asiakwa, or Rev. T. H. Sintim of the Presbyterian Church of Ghana. He proudly claimed the PCG before all else; the Presbyterian Church of Ghana was both his hometown and his primary ethnic and cultural identity in nearly every respect. The real cultural reality, though, is that my grandfather, Yawbe Sintim, or Sintim Yawbe, was a bona fide native of Akyem-Begoro and of the Asante-Mampong royal Bretuo clan via his mother, Nana Mary Akosua Baduaa Aboagye, who had been widely known to have been the blood relative of Odeefuo Nana Atakora-Amaninampong, Krontihene of Asanteman.

It may therefore not be wholly accidental that I was born early one Saturday morning at the St. Andrews Hospital, on the same day that President Kwame Nkrumah is reported to have delivered his famous Dawn Broadcast, in which the late dictator sent most of his most intimate and staunch political associates and cabinet appointees packing out of town on charges of corruption. In his biographical treatise Black Star, the legendary British Africanist historian Mr. Basil Davidson called Nkrumah’s celebrated Dawn Broadcast an edict most unfair. Well, let us leave this aspect of our country’s history to those for whom it is of prime concern.

I have not met the man personally, other than that already recalled moment at his father’s funeral, when I sat on a concrete ledge at the base of the back of a house adjacent to the old Kyebi Presbyterian Church with my eldest paternal aunt, Ms. Kate Agyepong, whom I had not recognized to be my father’s eldest sister but had, nonetheless, struck a lively conversation with. She, of course, had readily recognized her only brother’s son, perhaps because I have often been “accused” of sharing a striking semblance with the old man. Auntie Kate, as she was known and affectionately called by nearly every Kyebi resident, especially at Oburonikrom, also shared a striking resemblance with her mother, Auntie ’Kua or Nana Akua Yeboaa, my paternal grandmother, but it was not until Cousin Kwaku ’Pare came up to where we were seated and asked whether I knew the woman seated next to me, on my right-hand side, with whom I was engaged in a spirited conversation about the Mpintim drums trailing the extant Okyenhene, Osagyefo Kuntunkununku, II, out of the chapel, that I recognized my aunt. Auntie Kate would christen me “The Son of the Drum.” As to which type of drum, this aspect of our conversation never quite came up.

Anyway, what inspired me to write this rambling narrative had to do with my chance reading of an article captioned “I Was Disappointed In NPP Gov’t – KSM” (Starrfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 10/1/15), in which the renowned Ghanaian satirist was reported to have told the host of a radio talk-show that he had given off his maximum best to facilitate the political success of the Kufuor-led government of the New Patriotic Party (NPP), only to be afforded short-shrift treatment by that regime. What wasn’t clear to yours truly from the rather terse news article was whether such great disappointment as was allegedly experienced by KSM from the Kufuor government, for which he had done a remarkable volume of media publicity, was to be envisaged from a personal or public angle. I personally think that the Kufuor government had performed quite creditably, especially when one reckons what Ghanaians, as a whole, had endured under twenty years of Chairman Jerry John Rawlings’s infamous culture of silence and excruciating poverty, apocalyptically marked by what became globally known as “Mr. Rawlings’ Necklace,” a spooky protrusion of one’s neck or collar bone due to acute malnourishment.

Then KSM also claims to have closely worked with the Mills-Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress (NDC), “since [Satan’s own political party] consulted with him about their branding and communications at some point in time.” You see, no one can really begrudge Mr. Kwaku Sintim-Misa for crossing political lines to do public relations publicity for either two major political parties. It is his talent that we are talking about here, and KSM has absolutely every right to deploy the same wherever and whenever he chooses. What gets my horse, however, is when KSM also pontifically insists that he never vacated his ideological proclivity and/or affinity for the main opposition New Patriotic Party. I mean, who wants a political chameleon in their midst?

Anyway, the last time that I met KSM, it was in the personality of his son Yaw Sintim, my own son’s namesake. Yaw Sintim took a college composition course with me nearly two years ago. And then just this past summer, Yaw Sintim’s girlfriend studied Creative Writing with me. See how small this world is?