Following the publication of my column titled “Anlo-Ewes Voted Against Incorporation of Volta Region into Ghana in 1956,” and my follow-up rejoinder titled “Andy CY Kwawukume Is a Self-Proclaimed Impostor,” an apparent supporter of the eponymous subject of the latter column wrote and published a criticism of my previous column, demanding that I both retract and apologize for my purported error in judgment and the basic facts of the canonical history of the landmark UN-sponsored 1956 Plebiscite (See “Comments” section of my rejoinder captioned “Andy CY Kwawukume Is a Self-Proclaimed Impostor,” Ghanaweb.com 12/30/18).
Now, I find such request to be inexcusably disingenuous for several reasons. The first of these is the fact that there is incontrovertible evidence suggesting that quite a remarkable percentage of Anlo-Ewes resident in the southern-half of the Volta Region crossed over the boundary up-north into the Trans-Volta Togoland area to illegally cast their ballots in the 1956 UN-sponsored Plebiscite, in much the same way that until the last election cycle in the country, or Election 2016, a sizeable number of Togolese citizens are known to have crossed the border between Ghana and Togo to illegally exercise their franchise in favor of the Ewe-dominated and Rawlings-founded National Democratic Congress (NDC), the current main opposition party in the country.
Even more telling is the fact that traditionally invested and prominent Ghanaian Anlo-Ewe citizens like Togbe Afede, XIV, of the so-called Asogli State, in the Volta Region, which encompasses much of the region’s capital, Ho, had vehemently insisted on having Anlo-Ewe citizens resident outside the recently created Oti Region to be permitted to cast the ballot in the region’s most recent referendum, although Ghana’s 1992 Republican Constitution clearly and expressly prohibits any Ghanaian citizen resident in the Oti enclave, so-called, of the Volta Region and, to be certain, the rest of the country, from participating in the just-concluded referendum.
It ought to be clear to all my readers and critics, by now, that received and/or canonical records to the contrary notwithstanding, logic and uncontestable historical evidence vis-à-vis the 1956 UN-sponsored Plebiscite and electoral events since that epoch-making referendum and fundamental logic are squarely on the side of yours truly. We also need to take signal cognizance of the fact that the entire push for the TVT, or the Trans-Volta Togoland region, to be definitively severed from the erstwhile Gold Coast – and soon-to-be renamed Ghana – was religiously championed by Keta-Anloga-born Anlo-Ewe leaders like the half-Togolese and half-Ghanaian poet-scientist Dr REG Armattoe, who had been placed on the “Most Wanted” list by then Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah.
In other words, even the inhabitants of the non-TVT Anlo-Ewe parts of the southern Volta Region were equally active agitators for secession which, by the way, had been wisely and perspicuously supported by the visionary likes of Dr JB Danquah, the putative Doyen of Gold Coast and Modern Ghanaian Politics. Danquah’s opinion was primarily based on his erudite scholarship and in-depth appreciation for the organicity of Ghanaian and African cultures. Nkrumah, on the other hand, obsessively fixated on the largely polemic ideology of Pan-Africanism, was far more interested in Africa’s geographical and geopolitical unification than the practical reality of the continent’s chaotic ethnic and cultural diversity, a critical existential factor or phenomenon which continues to seriously and significantly impact both the rapid unification and development of the second-largest continent in the world.
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