Samia, Your Father "Found" Your Mother

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

I was pleasantly amused to learn about Ms. Samia Nkrumah's obstinate insistence on her father and first prime minister and president of Ghana, Mr. Kwame Nkrumah's having founded the modern nation-state of Ghana (See "Samia: My Father Founded Ghana, Period!" Radioxyzonline.com 8/23/13).

Rather than indulge in a bitter and fruitless exchanges with the chairperson of the so-called Convention People's Party (CPP), I prefer to refer Ms. Nkrumah to the celebrated and classical Encounter magazine article authored by the Oxbridge-educated late University of Ghana political scientist and scholar Prof. Kweku G. Folson. In his landmark article, Prof. Folson meticulously details the insolent implications of what it means for anybody to describe President Nkrumah as "The Founder of Ghana."

Needless to say, Dr. J. B. Danquah had far, far more to do with the naming, constitutional, intellectual, cultural and geopolitical development of modern Ghana than the much younger man who did not even know his own date of birth, and had a piddling little to reveal about the identity of his fatherhood. It was, indeed, ironic to read, actually skim, an article recently penned and published by an exuberant and grossly misguided "Ghanaian" who heretically presumed to tag the celebrated Doyen of Gold Coast and Ghanaian politics as a "CIA Agent."

I am quite certain about the inspirational sources of that urchin for such blasphemous insolence. Interestingly, that little clown also had the temerity to describe the present writer as "acidic" in literary tenor, without having to demonstrate in even a single sentence precisely what he meant by his incoherent and gratuitous tirade.

Yes, Nkrumah played quite a significant role in the epic anti-colonial liberation struggle of modern Ghana, but by absolutely no stretch of the imagination can Mr. Nkrumah be put on the same pioneering pedestal as Messrs. Joseph Ephraim Casely-Hayford, John Mensah-Sarbah, George Ekem Fergusson, George Alfred "Paa" Grant, Otumfuo Nana Agyeman-Prempeh II, Osagyefo Ofori-Atta I, and, of course, Dr. J. B. Danquah! I prefer not to talk about some protean, dated and tired faux-ideological concept called "Afrocentricity," falsely paraded as a "theory," except to riposte with Prof. Wole Soyinka's Senghorian back-handed rhetorical slap that: "A Tiger Does Not Need To Proclaim Its Tigritude."

I have already been there and done that; so really, what is new, constructive, instructive and even edifying here? I have also, regretfully, trucked with these largely well-meaning albeit morally reprobate intellectual con-artists; so why should I oafishly back-track to re-gorge my own expectoration? About all I can say is that the objective criteria for determining what constitutes the salient characteristics of an authentic "Founding Father" ought to first be established before anybody can meaningfully discuss such an epic subject.

At any rate, with the preceding having been foregrounded as being the real constructive, and progressive, test of "Founding Fatherhood," let me simply leave the dear reader with this cognitive grist: And it is veritably that the only incontestable truth worth recognizing is the fact that it was President Nkrumah who found the remarkably young and pretty but largely anonymous Egyptian Coptic-Christian, Fathia, and made her the meteorically legendary Mrs. Fathia Nkrumah that she subsequently became, Period! No, "Fool"-Stop!

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*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Department of English
Nassau Community College of SUNY
Garden City, New York
Sept. 9, 2013
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
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