I wrote on this subject some 10 years ago, and so would not attempt, or bother, to belabor any points here. Those who are interested may track down my long series of polemical articles/essays titled “When Dancers Play Historians and Thinkers.” If you, the dear reader, are reasonably intellectually inclined, then I should gladly refer you to an authoritative biographical booklet – it is actually much more than a booklet, in evaluative terms – authored by, perhaps, Ghana’s foremost modern classicist of the 20th century, namely, Professor Lawrence Henry Yaw Ofosu-Appiah (1920-1990). Most of us know the first African ever to read the classics at the University of Oxford, or any flagship British academy, for that matter, as Professor L. H. Ofosu-Appiah. The book in question is titled The Life of Lt-General Emmanuel Kwasi Kotoka (1972). The author knew his fairly distinguished subject quite intimately, and so there are no questions of hearsays or secondary sourcing here. The book is almost entirely based on first-hand facts and little on speculative abstractions or anecdotes.
What ought to also be made clear, beforehand, and emphatically so, is that nowhere in this most authoritative book is Maj-Gen Akwasi Amankwaa Afrifa fingered as the traitorous mastermind behind the 1967 brutal assassination of this most patriotic of Ghanaian soldiers in the immediate postcolonial era. And for those of our readers who may not know this, the wife of the famous gangly Sandhurst-trained Asante-Mampong native, Mrs. Afrifa, was of Ewe ethnicity.
Indeed, legend has it that it was this “pleasantly surprising” discovery by the Anglo-Ewe architects of the 1966 coup d’état – and some have even claimed to their “incontinent delight” – that recommended the future Gen Afrifa, the third leader of the famous National Liberation Council (NLC) junta, into the impregnable confidence of Messrs. J. W. K. Harlley, the conscientious police chief who handled most of the intelligence aspects of the putsch, and the then-Lt-Col E. K. Kotoka, the Chief Architect and Master-Strategist of the coup. For a long time, I was personally heavily invested in learning the truth of this most horrifying episode, because Gen Kotoka has always been one of my national heroes ever since I can remember.
And so this entire apocryphal idea that has been made into a fetish by which many a desperate Trokosi Nationalist routinely swears, that is, the idea that, somehow, Gen Kotoka’s ethnicity fanned some flames of latent animus to cause the immortalized heroic junta leader’s demise at the patently ungodly hands of Gen Kotoka’s right-hand man, or Brigade Major, at Ghana’s 4th Battalion of Infantry, headquartered in the Asante regional capital of Kumasi, reeks of nothing short of the inexcusably malicious. Put in another more poignant manner, whoever fashioned and hatched the morally barbaric decision to corporeally liquidate the enigmatic genius who therapeutically broke the myth and legend surrounding Mr. Kwame Nkrumah, definitely bore absolutely no resemblance to the either the personality or the name of the cowardly slain Asante-Mampong native. We shall deal with the most widely received reason for the summary execution, by firing squad, of Gen Afrifa by the Rawlings-headed junta of the so-called Provisional National Defense Council (PNDC) in due course. It is quite obvious that much of what I have termed as The Attivor Myth devolves from the various competing narratives of this most unfortunate and tragic era of postcolonial Ghanaian history and politics.
For now, we turn our attention to a recent incident involving the alleged slugfest, or physical fisticuffs, between some supporters of the Vice-Presidential Candidate of the country’s main opposition New Patriotic Party (NPP), Dr. Mahamudu Bawumia, and some National Democratic Congress’ apparatchiks and hired thugs in the Tamale-Central Constituency of a suburban district called Tsangli (See “Tamale: Bawumia Toilet Project Sparks NPP, NDC Fight” Classfmonline.com / Ghanaweb.com 4/29/16). The incident is widely known to have originated in an earnest request that the Chiefs, Elders and the people of Tsangli put before the then-newly elected National Democratic Congress’ government of President John Evans Atta-Mills some time in 2009. That was some 7 years ago, if my elementary arithmetic serves me accurately. Tsangli’s main place of convenience, we are told, had lapsed into abject disrepair and was spreading a foul smell across the otherwise quite descent suburban community, and threatened the latter with the imminent possibility of an epidemic.
Well, as was all to be expected from a government that falsely claimed to be socially democratic but whose forensically verifiable track-record traumatically pointed towards the unabashedly narcissistic and pathologically megalomaniacal, absolutely nothing came out of this pressing request from the leaders of Tsangli, until sometime late last year the recently “Alhajified” Dr. Bawumia decided to facilitate the actualization of the request by the “Tsanglians,” in much the same way that many a denizen of the Volta Region and a Ghanaian politician or heavily partisan citizen might perform a rhetorical acrobatic display over the nominal identity of a resident of that strip-mall enclave of our country, namely, Button-A, a “Voltarian,” or Button-B, a “Voltaian” or “Voltaic,” by having sand and gravel transported to the location earmarked for the project by the truckload. This, of course, is what the “Konongo Kaya” operatives of the National Democratic Congress resent the most. Which was why they hurriedly dispatched a brigade of hired goons and thugs to, literally, checkmate the Bawumia group.
And for about three hours, we are reliably told that a savage slugfest ensued between some staunch supporters of both major parties, until local police personnel stepped in to part these two groups of inveterate ideological enemies. The lesson learned here is simple, and it is one that I have repeatedly counseled time without number in the recent past. Which, of course, is the fact that one language that the key operatives of the Mahama-led government of the National Democratic Congress fear the most is a political opponent who knows how to do things right and better than themselves, and would not hesitate to opportunely step up to the proverbial plate and give them a stiff run for their money.
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