So who will save Ghanaian history from the Anokye guy? Hardly anything the man says is true. They’re either exaggerations or outright fabrications.
Want examples?
He says the United Party (UP) was formed to contest the 1956 election with a promise that those who wanted to break away would be allowed to do so after independence. The UP, in fact, was formed AFTER independence – November 1957, to be exact – a month ahead of Nkrumah’s Avoidance of Discrimination Act, which aimed to ban secessionist, tribalist, religious and other divisive political parties or groups, like the Ga Shifimo Kpee, which joined the UP when it was launched on 3rd November 1957 at Bukom Square, Accra. Ghana attained independence on 6th March 1957. Aloo?
He claimed on another occasion that Ako-Adjei dictated the petition for the ex-servicemen (“a bunch of drunkards”, he said) to Kwame Nkrumah, who wrote it down on a piece of paper he placed on somebody’s back. After the disturbances on 28th February, 1948, according to this “historian”, the “white people” noticed that the petition was in Nkrumah’s handwriting, and so they arrested him and others, who denied any knowledge.
This NEVER happened. Nkrumah’s only comment about the event, in his 1957 autobiography, was that he was aware of the association and had been contemplating getting them to associate with the CPP. His political advisor, George Padmore, says in his book, The Gold Coast Revolution, that no one in the UGCC helped “initiate” (his word) the demo, the closest they had come to the Ex-servicemen’s Association being a time before the demo when Nkrumah and Danquah addressed them at a rally.
Who then signed the petition, you may ask? That credit goes to Mr B. E. A. Tamakloe, leader of the (very sober) ex-servicemen, supported by his executive. The response to the petition from the governor was addressed to Mr Tamakloe as was the permit for the demo.
This is all public knowledge from the proceedings of the Watson Commission. Why would anyone tell such a gratuitous and gargantuan lie?
His biggest lie that got me recently as an avowed Garveyist, with some 40+ years of Garveyism under my belt, was his claim that Anton Wilhelm Amo, a Gold Coaster who became a prominent German philosopher in the 1700s, coined the name Black Star, and Marcus Garvey later adopted it (in the 1900s). Nothing could be further from the truth.
For one thing, Europeans typically called Africans Africans, not Blacks, which was and is more common in the Americas, taken from its Spanish cousin, Negro (meaning Black). Amo himself wrote primarily about Africans and Moors, and while he might have been a good philosopher in his time, his work in German might have limited his exposure in the Americas.
According to Tony Martin, the foremost authority on Garvey, after touring the Americas and realising that Black people (including those in Africa) were always at the bottom of the economic pile, whether they were in the majority or minority, Garvey pledged that he would not rest until he made Africa “the Black Star among the constellation of nations. “That’s the first time the term was used.
He would go on to found the Universal Negro Improvement Association and establish the Black Star Line, Black Cross Auxiliary, and other Black empowerment efforts, including the promotion of a Black God and Black Jesus.
Nkrumah, who states in his autobiography that the book “Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey” did more to “fire [his] imagination” than any book he read during his days abroad, honoured Garvey’s memory by establishing the Black Star Line for an independent Ghana and gave it the ubiquity that it occupies in our lives today.
It is only recently that German historians, in a patronising nod, have taken to calling Amo “the Black Star of German philosophy” (not Africa).
I can go on and on, but let the record show that most of what our “historian” friend palms off as history is Toli Pro Max. Media houses should host professional historians to save Ghanaian history.
Development is history. Our very development is at risk, especially on those occasions when his fabrications create needless disaffection towards certain ethnic groups. It’s bad for Nkrumah’s nation-building agenda. Lloyd Amoah Nana Fredua-Agyeman Ofori-Atta, Amos Safo, and Theo Acheampong Kari Bannerman Francis Eshun-Baidoo, Adams Bodomo Ras Mubarak Gabriella Tetteh Franklin Cudjoe Edward William Bruce-Lyle
