There may be those who are not satisfied with what Ghana has achieved in 50 years of independence, but Cameron Duodu, leading African journalist and a man who witnessed the independence day celebrations in his country in 1957, believes the priceless experience gained so far, will stand the future in better stead.
At midnight on March 5, 1957, I was in Parliament House in Accra, covering the speeches with which our Ministers and Members of Parliament heralded Ghana's attainment of independence.
The excitement in Parliament House was palpable. A huge crowd, estimated at over half a million people, had gathered at the New Polo Ground, just opposite Parliament House, to await the arrival of our leaders from the House, less than 20 yards away. A special dais had been erected at the Polo Ground, from which our leaders were to address the crowd.
I stayed in the House listening to the speeches, instead of making my way to the Polo Ground. The reason was that I had in my pocket, one of those most highly-treasured possessions that day - a card on which the word 'PRESS' had been emblazoned. As a reporter for New Nation magazine, I was a fully accredited member of the fourth estate and could go where others were not supposed to go. To a young man of 19, that was an intoxicating power to have.
At about five minutes to midnight, I saw Dr Kwame Nkrumah, the Prime minister, rise from his seat, followed by Komla Gbedemah, Kojo Botsio, Archie Casely-Hayford, Krobo Edusei and Nathaniel Welbeck - the leaders of the Convention People's Party (CPP) who had suffered imprisonment at the hands of the British during the independence struggle. They were known as the 'Prison Graduates' (PG) and someone had made a special beret for them, which they now wore. I made my way, along with some photographers and reporters, towards the Polo Ground, hard on the heels of this group.
As they clambered on to the dais, I crouched amongst the crowd, right at the foot of the dais. Many were the attempts made to dislodge me from my vantage position. But each time, I had to say just one magical word, "REPORTER!" and they moved back.
At midnight on the dot, the siren of the General Post Office, sited not so far away, sounded. It began in a low whine and then rose to a crescendo: WHIIINNNGGG!
And the crowd yelled: YIEEEEE!
The noise was such that I felt as if my ears would burst. As soon as the siren died down, Dr Kwame Nkrumah took the microphone: CHOOOOOOBOI! He shouted, as he was wont to do when he addressed crowds at public rallies, during the struggle for independence.
World heavyweight boxing champion Mohammed Ali (Cassius Clay) (Middle) is greeted by Ghanaian leader Nkrumah (L) during the former's visit to Africa and the Middle East in May 1964
The crowd yelled back, 'YAAAAAAAEEEEEEEEEI!
Nkrumah must have felt that his decibel level was not adequate to excite crowd, due to all the speeches he had been making earlier, and he turned to Krobo Edusei, who had a very strong voice, and whispered to him, to my hearing: 'Bepae ma me'! (Come and perform the opening salutation for me!)
Krobo Edusei did not need a second invitation. Taking over the microphone, he yelled CHOOOOOOBOI! with all his might. The crowd yelled back with tremendous gusto. Edusei repeated the CHOOOOBOI! Again. And, again, the crowd responded. When Dr Nkrumah felt that the crowd was animated enough, he took over the microphone, and in that rich voice of his, he intoned - in phrases made up of only three or four words at a time, with a slight pause in between the phrases - the immortal words:
NKRUMAH: AT LONG LAST... THE BATTLE IS ENDED... AND GHANA, YOUR BELOVED COUNTRY ... IS FREE FOR EVER.
CROWD: YIEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
If a whole nation can be said to possess one heart, and if one person can say what is contained in that one heart, Nkrumah said it that day. He told us that from that day, Africans were going to fulfill the dreams of Marcus Garvey and others, who had written about looking for an African country in which Africans truly ruled themselves. From that day, Nkrumah went on, there would be a NEW AFRICAN PERSONALITY in the world, which would show the world that the African was capable of managing his own affairs. And then, his voice changed, and he said with such animation as I had never seen before in him:
NKRUMAH: THE INDEPENDENCE OF GHANA IS MEANINGLESS UNLESS IT IS LINKED UP WITH THE TOTAL LIBERATION OF THE WHOLE AFRICAN CONTINENT!
THE CROWD RESPONDED WITH EQUAL ANIMATION:YIEEEEEEEEEEEEEE!
It was a magical moment. 37 years later, when I sat amongst the guests who witnessed the swearing-in of Nelson Mandela as the first black president of South Africa in May 1994; I realised that I had been uniquely blessed to be an eye-witness to the two most important events in African history - Ghana' s independence, which marked the beginning of the end of colonialism in Africa, and South Africa's attainment of majority rule, which spelt the absolute end of the subjugation of the African people by foreigners who had come to lord it over them.
Of course, there have been difficulties on the way for both Ghana and Africa. In Ghana, Nkrumah soon got tempted to take too much power for himself and began to jail his opponents in the same way Nelson Mandela and others were being jailed by their white oppressors in South Africa. In many parts of the continent, the sweetness of independence was marred by instability and economic mismanagement. Nkrumah himself was overthrown by his own army in 1966 - just nine years after Ghana's independence.
Kwame Nkrumah, newly installed first President of the Republic of Ghana speaks in Parliament in July 1960 on world and domestic affairs. A Pan Africanist, Nkrumah said Ghana would be embarrassed to remain in the Commonwealth indefinitely with South Africa whose government practised apartheid and racial discrimination
But what counted was that the journey to African nationhood had begun. There is no journey on which there can be no untoward incident. The journey itself is the thing, and in Africa's case, it was easily predictable that the journey would not - could not - be smooth. When someone comes to your house and installs himself in it as your overlord for a hundred years or more, using the income from the house to employ his own servants, including armed watchmen (soldiers and policemen) as well as servants specifically trained only to serve his own interests (civil servants) and then hands the house back to you after you've fought him to a standstill, you are bound to encounter difficulties in running the house. The civil servants may disrespect you and ignore your instructions; the soldiers and policemen may be helped by their departed master to develop an agenda by which they can translate their monopoly in the use of armed power to grab political power for themselves.
More important, if you are locked into an economic production system under which your exports fetch fluctuating earnings whilst your imports keep rising in cost, you will face the occasional swing of your economic barometer towards the level marked 'bankruptcy'. And as instability in economic performance undermines the smooth-running of your political and administrative status, an even more insidious disease begins to gnaw at your psyche - namely, self-doubt. Imagining that your systemic failures are in fact, subjective defects on your part, you begin to wonder whether it was such a good thing for the Europeans to leave at all. If those in power do not ask this question, those over whom they rule will ask it. Even today, 50 years after independence, there are people in Ghana who, upon the country running short of electricity or water (for instance) will ask themselves: 'Did we go or did we come'?
Ghana's Parliament today
It is sad that some of our countrymen have been disillusioned enough to ask such a question. What they ignore, though, is that the country of the past to which they sometimes bitterly compare the present, is not the same country at all. The British may have been able to keep the main cities and towns - Accra, Kumasi, Takoradi or Cape Coast - well supplied with electricity and water. But these amenities were denied to the people of the rural areas, who form the majority in the country, and who produce its wealth with their cocoa, their timber, gold, diamonds, manganese and bauxite. Today, many villages are supplied with electricity and water. And this is in spite of the fact that the population of Ghana has at least trebled between now and 1957. The number of Ghanaians in higher educational institutions today would have been unimaginable in 1957. We have had as many solutions as we have had problems. Yes, it has taken time. But if we had not started on the journey and someone was always doing things for us, we would never have gained the priceless experience that we have today.
Ghana's economy at independence in 1957 was extremely fragile. Like that of many colonies, it had been designed almost entirely to serve the interests of the colonial power, Britain. Although the Gold Coast (as Ghana was known as a British colony), was the world's largest producer of cocoa, its citizens could not order motorcars, for instance, and other desirable goods, from outside the 'sterling area', especially the United States, without first obtaining a 'permit.' Yet the British companies from which Ghana imported goods, had their own local 'agents' (of course, they were European firms, such as the British-owned United Africa Company (UAC), and others like Paterson Zochonis (PZ), R T Briscoe, A G Leventis, Busi and Stephenson or the Lebanese-owned Glamour Merchants) to which they sold their products on monopoly basis and to whom they paid a commission on each importation.
Even though these agents were paid a commission, they would still add a 'mark-up' to what they sold to us. So they profited twice from our purchases. Some of the agents, like UAC, also doubled as export merchants, and they bought our cocoa, timber, gold etc and sold these overseas "for us." There were no African competitors in either the import or exports trade, only a few 'sub-agents.' This constituted such blatant cheating that in 1948, a chief called Nii Kobina Bonney of Osu Alata, in Accra, organised a 'boycott' of all imported goods sold by the 'AWAM' group of companies.
The boycott coincided with agitation, by Gold Coasters who had fought for the British during the Second World War, to obtain improved pensions - which they said they had been promised - from the British. They could not understand why they had faced the same bullets from the Germans and the Japanese as British soldiers, and yet were discriminated against when it came to pensions, with a Gold Coast private soldier receiving less than a tenth of what his British counterpart received.
Now, both the boycott and the ex-servicemen's agitation were embraced by the only political movement in the country, the 'United Gold Coast Convention' (UGCC). Formed by lawyers and merchants, prominent among whom were Dr J B Danquah (legal practitioner), Pa Grant (timber merchant) and Edward Akufo Addo (legal practitioner) the UGCC had long been a thorn in the flesh of the British administration. It had been demanding constitutional reform, leading to self-government from Britain, within the Commonwealth, along the lines of the independence granted to India in 1947. Many of the ex-servicemen had fought in Burma and were fully aware of developments in Britain's Asian possessions. They worked together with the UGCC and infused its demands with references to India and Burma.
On February 28, 1948, Nii Kobina Bonney's boycott was in full swing throughout Ghana when an ex-servicemen's delegation tried to march to the offices and residence of the British Governor at Christiansborg Castle, Accra, of the Gold Coast to present a petition. A British police officer opened fire on the ex-servicemen, killing three of them. When news of these killings of unarmed ex-servicemen reached Accra, the anger of the populace was fierce. How could Britain, for which the ex-servicemen had been ready to sacrifice their lives, now turn its own guns on them? Looting of European shops and residences broke out in Accra and soon spread throughout the country. A general strike also took place, almost spontaneously.
As usual, the British, instead of laying the blame at the door of their own incompetence, sought to make scapegoats of the leadership of the UGCC. It arrested six of the UGCC's executive members - Dr J B Danquah, E Akufo Addo, E Ako Adjei, William Ofori Atta, E Obetsebi Lamptey and Kwame Nkrumah - and deported them to the Northern Territories of the Gold Coast.
The British could not have served the UGCC better. The arrested leaders were immediately anointed by the Gold Coast populace as the 'Big Six', and stories of their 'heroism' began to filter to every corner of the country. Eventually, the British were forced to release them and appoint some of them to a constitutional committee they set up to draw up a new constitution for the Gold Coast, under which the British would eventually allow the Gold Coast to become an independent country.
Unfortunately, the spectre of power on the horizon of the Gold Coast, far from uniting the leadership of the UGCC, created rivalries amongst them. Dr Kwame Nkrumah, who had been invited by the other leaders to become the General Secretary of the UGCC, broke away from the Convention in 1949 to form his own Convention People's Party (CPP). He took a huge chunk of the youth section of the UGCC with him. The bone of contention between Nkrumah and the other leaders of the UGCC was supposed to be the pace at which independence was to be attained - the Nkrumah faction advocated "Self-government Now" whereas the UGCC was in favour of "Self-government in the shortest possible time." These two attitudes did not constitute such an irreconcilable difference as to cause a permanent split in a nationalist movement, and it is often surmised that the real cause of the split was a hidden agenda that Nkrumah was pursuing and which, when discovered by the other members of the UGCC leadership, gave them quite a fright.
These other leaders were largely 'conservative' or 'bourgeois' politicians, who merely wanted to replace the British at the top of the administration. Nkrumah, on the other hand, was a firebrand socialist who had dabbled with radical politics, including communism, while studying in the United Kingdom. Backed by the youth, Nkrumah wanted a complete transformation of Gold Coast society and he began to confront the British authorities with a series of strikes and demonstrations as part of a programme of 'Positive Action' that would force the British to relinquish power totally to his CPP. The British themselves became frightened of Nkrumah when in the 1951 general election held under partial universal adult suffrage Nkrumah's CPP trounced the UGCC. Nkrumah was in jail at the time the CPP won the election and won the largest majority of votes in the country - without being able to campaign at all because he was in jail.
The British Governor, Sir Charles Arden Clark, released Nkrumah from jail, named him Leader of Government Business, and asked him to form the first-ever African Cabinet in the Gold Coast. This romantic development in the fortunes of Nkrumah - from jail to Leader of Government Business (essentially Prime Minister under a different name) caught the imagination of all Africa. And that was how Ghana immediately became the beacon of light for all African nations under colonial rule. Within a year, the Mau Mau rebellion, for instance, had begun in Kenya, and its leader, Jomo Kenyatta, was to follow Nkrumah's path - from jail to Government House.
But in Ghana itself, the UGCC would not lie down and die, and it tried to win back the political initiative from the CPP by demanding that Ghana should be split up into a 'federation' of states. The UGCC feared that the CPP would use Ghana's export revenue, which was largely obtained from the cocoa, gold, timber, manganese and other minerals in the south of the country, in any way it liked, whereas under a federation, those whose soil produced the resources would be able to control the money derived from them. This was an attractive proposition, especially to the people of Ashanti and Akyem Abuakwa, two of the richest states in Ghana. But their populations formed a minority in the country and the CPP was able to defeat an alliance of parties that had sprung from the remnants of the UGCC - the largest of which was the National Liberation Movement (NLM) - twice in general elections held in 1954 and 1956.
It was the CPP's victory in the July 1956 general election that convinced the British that Nkrumah had the support of the majority of the people of Ghana. In October of 1956, they named March 6, 1957 as Ghana's Independence Day. The rest, as they say, is history. Ghana may have disappointed the hopes of some of its people. But it is a continuing project and one need not be unduly optimistic to forecast that it will continue to surprise those who have written it off once or twice in the past 50 years.
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