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CHAPTER 2

Human Rights and Ghanaian History

[Ghana’s history] has been chequered with little improvement in the welfare of the ordinary people who have borne the brunt of maladministration and incompetence of their successive leaders, leaders who promised heavens but found it difficult to make even the earth a comfortable place to live in.

—Lord Cephas Mawuko-Yevugah “Who’s Playing Politics with National Reconciliation” December 3, 2001

On March 6, 1957, when Gold Coast threw off the cloak of British colonialism, the country was both harbinger and hope of what the “winds of change” sweeping across Africa might wreak.¹ Far beyond its own borders, the West African nation’s political independence was both a triumph and talisman. “Ghana tells us that the forces of the universe are on the side of justice,” thundered Martin Luther King Jr. “It symbolizes … that an old order is passing away and a new order is coming into being.”² In South Africa, antiapartheid activists looked to the newly independent country as a source of succor, both existential and material.³ If Ghana’s birth “demonstrate[d] … the ability of people born and bred in Africa and native to her ancient soil to govern themselves with efficiency and the dignity of democracy,” what should be made the country’s post-colonial political troubles?⁴ In its turbulent passage through the twentieth century Ghana has been a “particularly poignant” emblem of both the hope and disillusionment of African independence.⁵

This chapter briefly sketches the contours of Ghana’s national history. Unlike other accountings, I place the question of human rights abuse and the stories gathered by Ghana’s National Reconciliation Commission (NRC) at the center of this narration. Approaching Ghana’s story in this way seems to fly in the face of the country’s contemporary image as a place of peace and stability. As in the past, Ghana continues to be a potent political symbol—but the prevailing narrative is no longer about Pan-African liberation but about the possibility of African “success” in the global neoliberal economic order. From the New York Times’s declaration of Ghana as “a good kid in a bad neighborhood” to the World Bank’s insistence that the country is poised to join the ranks of middle-income countries to the flood of articles about Accra as a cosmopolitan, creative hub, Ghana’s star is on the rise.⁶ (Apparently, “Accra’s Jamestown is electric—it’s like Hackney Wick on steroids.”⁷) Without undermining Ghana’s considerable achievements, this praise—comparative, marked by low expectations, and based on neoliberal rubrics of progress (GDP, consumption, friendliness to global capital)—eludes the experiences of the majority of Ghana’s people. A human rights history, on the other hand, excavates the human suffering that has accompanied Ghana’s story and uses it to interrogate the national political trajectory.

Table 1. Governments of Ghana after Independence

Dates	Leader(s)	Party
March 6, 1957–February 24, 1966	Kwame Nkrumah	Convention People’s Party (CPP)
February 24, 1966–October 1, 1969	Akwasi Afrifa Joseph Ankrah J. W. K. Harlley Emmanuel Kotoka B. A. Yakubu Albert Ocran Anthony K. Deku J. E. O. Nunoo	National Liberation Council (NLC)
October 1, 1969–January 13, 1972	Kofi Busia	Progress Party (PP)
January 13, 1972–October 9, 1975 October 9, 1975–July 5, 1978 July 5, 1978–June 4, 1979	Ignatius Kutu Acheampong Ignatius Kutu Acheampong Fred Akuffo	National Redemption Council (NRC) Supreme Military Council Supreme Military Council
June 4, 1979–September 24, 1979	Jerry John Rawlings	Armed Forces Revolutionary Council
September 24, 1979–December 31, 1981	Hilla Liman	People’s National Party (PNP)
December 31, 1981–January 7, 1993	Jerry John Rawlings	Provisional National Defence Council (PNDC)
January 7, 1993–January 7, 2001	Jerry John Rawlings	National Democratic Congress (NDC)
January 7, 2001–January 7, 2009	John Agyekum Kufuor	New Patriotic Party (NPP)
January 7, 2009–July 24, 2012	John Atta Mills	National Democratic Congress (NDC)
July 24, 2012–January 7, 2017	John Dramani Mahama	National Democratic Congress (NDC)
January 7, 2017–	Nana Addo Dankwa Akufo-Addo	New Patriotic Party (NPP)

The NRC was not the first (nor the last) time when citizens used the language of international human rights as a lens through which to parse the substance and content of freedom in Ghana. The first part of this chapter explores the way human rights was utilized by Ghana’s government, labor unions, journalists and others during the first ten years of national independence. Human rights was and still is a mutable language deployed for myriad ends by different communities within Ghana and beyond. Its power was and still is in the attempt to mobilize a supra-national moral standard to describe, challenge, and condemn political violence. “Rights talk” in Ghana’s early independence period was inherently politically fraught; it was an invitation to consider if, when and how state violence become untenable—and what to do about it. Accordingly, a human rights history of Ghana is not a narrative of moral absolutes and bright lines; we are not entering the “world of uncivilized deviants, baby seals, and knights errant” that David Kennedy criticizes as the consequence of the human rights worldview.⁸

The second part of this chapter uses the NRC’s reports of suffering as a guide and touchstone in a brief recounting of Ghana’s journey through the late twentieth century. Encountering Ghana’s past in this way, through claims of human rights abuse, is controversial. Are these stories proven to be true? Are there other truths that are missing from citizen testimony? Can policies justified in their time now be condemned as intolerable? What separates a human rights violation from other types of violence? A human rights history of Ghana evokes uncertainty and even dispute; it is an accounting that avoids the illusion of consensus and instead magnifies the way Ghanaian political history remains unsettled.

Rights Talk and Ghanaian History

Before the NRC, Ghanaians deployed the language and concepts of international human rights in national politics. As a normative part of global, national, and local politics—indeed, as a “world-wide secular religion”—international human rights is expansive and diverse, including law, rhetoric, policy, and practice.⁹ It has the capacity to “construct a wide array of different discourses.”¹⁰ This fecundity is evident in decolonizing Ghana, where human rights rhetoric was utilized by diverse communities, for multiple audiences, and to diverse ends. In the era of decolonization, various communities marshaled human rights as the ethical ballast of diverse political agendas. Politicians, newspapers, and public intellectuals marshaled “rights talk” to discuss the global implications of Ghanaian politics, while labor unions, social organizations, and activists employed rights rhetoric to address their national government and the wider world in the same breath.

Contemplating human rights in late-1950s and early-1960s Ghana departs from the scholarship that emphasizes the waning days of the Cold War as the moment when international human rights captured the global imagination.¹¹ This study presents an earlier trajectory where human rights talk was part of mapping and pursuing freedom in Africa’s anticolonial and early independence era. Aligned with Bonny Ibhawoh’s exploration of the significance of human rights language in colonial and decolonizing Nigeria, this study traces how Africans in Gold Coast and then Ghana “appropriate[d] and deploy[ed] in diverse ways the same language of rights and liberty that was so central to the British imperial agenda.”¹² Kwame Nkrumah, the Ghanaian anticolonialist and nationbuilder, utilized the rhetoric of human rights as a pragmatic political language, alternately marshaled at opportune moments in the halls of the United Nations and then later discarded as an emblem of Western political hypocrisy. Although the historian Jan Eckel describes Nkrumah’s ambivalence as evidence that human rights was a “marginal” concept in decolonizing Africa, this study challenges the idea that human rights pragmatism signifies a limited engagement.¹³ Rights talk, whenever and wherever it has been deployed—in the post–World War I League of Nations, in Geneva in 2016, or in the colonial Gold Coast—can never be separated from its political utility. Fundamentalist notions of human rights as a language of true believers mask the ways rights talk is always and everywhere a political weapon.

Writing in Foreign Affairs as the prime minister of a newly independent country, Kwame Nkrumah explained to “American readers” that in Ghana, self-determination was an “inalienable right.” “We are more concerned with fundamental human rights than with any particular skin color,” he explained, attempting to both assuage US fears of Pan-Africanism as racial chauvinism and to criticize American Jim Crow.¹⁴ Nkrumah’s attempts to win global hearts and minds were troubled by rival Ghanaian politicians who used the language of global human rights as a weapon against him. Foremost among these was Kofi Abrefa Busia, an esteemed Ghanaian politician and social scientist who vocally criticized Kwame Nkrumah’s leadership in the global public square.

Less than six months before Ghana’s independence in 1957, Busia urged the British government to compel Nkrumah’s party to include the European Convention of Human Rights in the new Ghana Constitution.¹⁵ Binding the newly independent Ghana’s constitutional order to the European Convention, according to Busia, was a necessary “safeguard.” He continued along these lines even after independence. In London in 1961, Busia criticized Europeans for failing to speak out against Nkrumah’s government in Ghana. “Is the cause of democracy served,” he admonished, “by accepting different standards of tolerance, or freedom, or veracity, or human rights?”¹⁶ Three years later, in another speech, this time to the Ghanaian Students Association, Busia again railed against Nkrumah’s leadership, specifically focusing on the cause of political prisoners and using the language of human rights. “We’ve got so used to it we don’t even stop to ask what it means to be inside a prison in detention,” Busia exhorted the students. “Do you know how they are being fed? Or when they sleep? Or what happens to them? We don’t. I have tried to get reports, I appealed to the Human Rights Society in the U.S., I appealed to the International Commission of Jurists.”¹⁷ For Busia, the language of human rights was a way of pursuing an international community response to Nkrumah’s excesses.

Over time, Kofi Busia’s missives from abroad became more strident. No longer was human rights simply a critique of Nkrumah’s flawed rule. Now, the pursuit of human rights justified actively undermining Nkrumah’s government. In a pamphlet entitled “Ghana Will Truly Be Free and Happy,” Busia laid out the opposition-in-exile’s plan to overthrow the Nkrumah state. The fourth point of the platform was to rewrite the constitution in order to “express the people’s identity and aspirations, ensure fundamental human rights and personal freedom, and establish a truly free, independent, and respectable judiciary.” He ended his missive confidently, inviting Ghanaians to “cast away their fear and defeatism … to do their part” and know that Ghana would be free. “Be prepared. More will follow.”¹⁸ Scholars who claim that “the UN was the only real place where anti-colonialism and human rights intersected,” overlook the machinations of the Ghanaian opposition who deployed human rights, in earshot of the world, to question Kwame Nkrumah’s capacity to lead.¹⁹

Politicians in exile were not the only ones who voiced criticism of Nkrumah’s government in the key of human rights.”²⁰ In 1959, when the famous Railway Workers Union derided the new Industrial Relations Act, which required all unions to join the government affiliated Trades Union Congress, they claimed that it “contravene[ed] the United National Declaration on Human Rights. On Ghanaian soil, critics used the idiom of human rights to describe Ghana’s increasingly restrictive laws as betrayals of the ideals that Nkrumah championed during the anticolonial struggle. “We fought for independence to be able to live as freemen governed by principles of the UN Declaration of Human Rights as well as Ghana’s own coat of arms motto: freedom and justice,” Kwow Richards, then secretary of the United Party, admonished.²¹

While opposition groups made their discontent known at home and abroad, Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party (CPP) government also found human rights a fertile ground for ideological battle. Human rights universalism was an opportunity to parse the hypocrisy of the global order. C. L. R. James, a vocal ally of the CPP, bristled at the audacity of European countries knee-deep in colonial atrocity presuming to criticize independent Ghana on human rights grounds. “Who are the backward ones in the Belgian Congo today? Who are the advanced and who are the backward ones?” wondered James.²²

During the 1959 Nyasaland crisis, Nkrumah’s CPP again sought to use Britain’s commitment to international human rights to win concessions for Africans. In 1959, the British government sent three thousand troops to Nyasaland (now Malawi) to put down a pro-independence movement. In the resulting violence, 51 people were killed, more than 1,300 were detained, and many more were wounded.²³ Ghana’s CPP organized protests in solidarity with the Nyasaland freedom fighters and marched to the UK High Commission in Accra. “We are trying to prove to the whole world that Africans are conscious of their human rights,” the general secretary of the CPP explained.²⁴ However, pro-apartheid forces elsewhere in Africa would not cede the moral and political high ground to Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana. The Rhodesian European National Congress fired back that they too would organize a national day or mourning—for opposition activists detained without trial in Ghana.²⁵ For some critics, the Nkrumah government’s authoritarian policies undermined Ghana’s ability to act as a credible human rights advocate abroad. “Two wrongs do not make a right,” stated one letter writer in the 1959 Ashanti Pioneer. Those speaking out about Nyasaland should also “agitate without further delay for the release of Ghana’s political detainees.”²⁶ An editorial in the same newspaper was similarly critical. “On what grounds,” the writer demanded, “do CPP and their government stand … as champions of suffering humanity elsewhere in Africa?”²⁷ Indeed, when the British prime minister faced questions about Nyasaland during a visit to Accra in 1960, he quickly parried, reminding the questioning journalists of their own government’s harsh emergency measures and full jail cells.²⁸ In the early independence years, the language of human rights was a double-edged sword, used to both defend and criticize the Ghanaian government.

In this milieu, Kwame Nkrumah continued to wield human rights as a tool of African liberation, insisting that European states must live up to their own expressed ideals and clear the way for African liberation. Standing before the United Nations in 1962, Kwame Nkrumah compared South African apartheid to the towering, bright-line example of international human rights abuse: Nazi Germany. “The essential inhumanity [of apartheid] surpasses even the brutality of the Nazis against the Jews,” he explained. A state-funded political magazine, the Ghanaian, took up the cause, echoing Nkrumah’s stance about the moral hypocrisy of the “so-called free West” who “look on unaffected with only occasional protests while the lives and liberties of millions of Africans wither in the iron hands of apartheid South Africa.”²⁹ Eventually, Kwame Nkrumah would provocatively suggest that possession of any colonial holding should disqualify countries from UN membership.³⁰

In the first years of national independence in Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah deployed human rights to undermine the moral authority of Western nations. Meanwhile, a collection of critics including Kofi Busia insisted that Nkrumah’s government must be cried down as a human rights violator. These debates about whether rights talk would justify Pan-African liberation or apartheid and which leaders and nations might don the mantle of human rights advocate reflect the moral and political complexity of African countries’ entry into the global political order.

Following the 1966 National Liberation Council (NLC) coup d’état, with Kwame Nkrumah in exile and the CPP banished from Ghanaian political life, human rights continued to be part of the debates about Ghana’s political future. Immediately following the February 24 action, the NLC released a pamphlet entitled The Rebirth of Ghana: The End of Tyranny, which established that “Ghanaians in all walks of life have been denied their fundamental human rights.”³¹ Independent Ghana’s first coerced regime change was supposedly an attempt to restore human rights—or so said a number of editorials published in the Legon Observer, a University of Ghana–based publication that sprang up in the aftermath of the NLC coup.

In the Observer, Franklin Oduro described the Nkrumah years as a time of propaganda and distortion. These were days when the politician responsible for administering the Preventive Detention Act might turn around and give an eloquent public speech about “fundamental freedom, the right of men to be treated as men … the right of men and women to the serenity and sanctity of their homes and hearths, the right of children to play in safety under peaceful havens … the right of old men and women to the tranquility of their sunset.”³² “It is incredible,” Oduro quipped, “that a man who had such love for freedom would detain so many people without trial.”³³ The Observer’s editorial pages were marked by such critiques about the gap between human rights rhetoric and reality in Nkrumah’s Ghana.

There were also musings about the role that the human rights concept might play in building a better Ghanaian future. Five months after the NLC coup, an Observer editorial pondered whether constitutional language about human rights might “nip an incipient dictatorship in the bud” and thus safeguard the future.³⁴ This particular author concluded that human rights language would not guarantee Ghana’s political fortunes, noting that “no sequence of words, no matter how morally stirring or upright, could guarantee that human rights would be respected.³⁵ Ghanaians utilized the language of human rights to describe both what had befallen Ghana and how the country might be set to rights. During the first decade of Ghana’s independence, politicians, journalists, and citizens marshaled rights talk, domesticating it for use in local political conflicts and simultaneously confronting the inequity and imbalance of the global political order. This trend would continue. By the time Ghana embraced a truth and reconciliation commission (TRC) in the early twenty-first century, a malleable human rights rhetoric had long been part of Ghanaian political life.

1957–1966

No single Ghanaian has been subject to as much praise or vilification as Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first prime minister and president. Differing versions of Nkrumah’s legacy—visionary anticolonial icon, father of Pan-Africanism, paranoid African president, authoritarian leader—form a tangled and volatile bulk in the public sphere. From his own ideological pragmatism to the authoritarian inheritance of the British colonial state and the Cold War pressure chamber, Kwame Nkrumah’s transformation from the man deemed osagyefo, or “redeemer” in the Akan Twi language, to his pyrotechnic political demise in Ghana’s first coup d’état in 1966, is a foundational tragedy story in modern African politics.³⁶

Pose the following question to any group of Ghanaians—did Kwame Nkrumah’s CPP government abuse peoples’ human rights?—and a volatile and protracted debate will ensue. The question is provocative because it calls for a moral assessment of the leadership of one of Africa’s most imposing thinkers, theorists, and diplomats.³⁷ A simple label (abuser or respecter of human rights) is ill-fitting for a leader who both articulated the value of African self-determination and established himself as the head of a one-party state in which “of dissensus there was little evidence.”³⁸ In 2012, a Ghanaian writer called for a “presidential commission involving intellectuals” who would “write the history of Dr. Nkrumah for an objective and non-partisan view.”³⁹ Little did the writer know that such a history has already been produced. This nonpartisan accounting of Nkrumah’s legacy was not articulated by a group of esteemed professional historians; it was curated by Ghanaian citizens themselves within the national reconciliation process.

The NRC archive’s stories and petitions challenge the narrative of Kwame Nkrumah as either demagogue or savior. Ghanaians told stories establishing Nkrumah as the architect of the 1958 Preventive Detention Act (PDA), a law that empowered Ghana’s government to detain citizens preemptively and without trial. Nkrumah’s government defended preventive detention as a policy to protect the sovereignty of a lone independent nation surrounded by European colonies and in the midst of global Cold War. Over the course of eight years, hundreds of Ghanaians were swept into jail without recourse. In the NRC, Ghanaians remembered the PDA as an act of political violence; this was a policy that effectively incarcerated large numbers of citizens who, for diverse reasons, had made themselves enemies of local, regional, or national branches of the CPP government.

Indeed, there were persons like Kwablah Darquah, who participated in national reconciliation expressly to describe how people swept into prison as young men emerged years later, scarred, disillusioned, and bitter. “My being here today is to inform … about what the PDA did to a lot of able-bodied young Ghanaians and also to educate the public about the hardship we underwent.”⁴⁰ Emmanuel France, arrested in 1958, explained that the “PDA had no moral roots,” that “it was just passed as a tool to turn Ghana into a one-party state.”⁴¹ Detaining people extrajudicially and indefinitely, France claimed, licensed further atrocity. There were “prison officers [who] maltreated and tormented the detainees far beyond what they could bear,” and proud Ghanaians emerged from cells damaged, plagued by “physical disability [and] emotional and psychological sores.”⁴² Preventing detention, many NRC participants explained, was a policy easily hijacked by those who would prosecute petty and local conflicts using state power. Petitioner Nicholas Dompreh blamed his detention on a physical altercation between himself and Kwamina Otoo, a local Akim Oda man. When Dompreh was later arrested by police, supposedly for “hurling insults at Kwame Nkrumah,” he insisted that Otoo, his rival, used the cover of the PDA to engineer his arrest.⁴³

The violence of preventive detention is not the only image of the CPP years lodged in the NRC records. Ghanaians injured by acts of terrorism also came forward to share nostalgia-tinged stories about the days when the government cared enough about Ghanaians to provide health care for those in need. Kwame Nkrumah was “profoundly motivated by an ideological vision of radical socioeconomic development;” he recognized that human development was the necessary precondition for economic growth.⁴⁴ This was part of the message of Joseph Allen Blankson, whose father was critically injured during a 1962 bomb blast. At the time, the elder Blankson was a music teacher for the Young Pioneers, a youth organization associated with Nkrumah’s CPP government. While leading a public march, a bomb exploded and Blankson was hospitalized. After he lost one of his legs, the CPP government made his health a priority and “catered to” his needs, even sending him abroad to Britain to be fitted for a prosthesis.⁴⁵ With the demise of Kwame Nkrumah’s government in 1966, the health of the elder Blankson also declined. Petitions like these reveal that there are those who mourned the end of the Nkrumah era as the passing of a vision of government in which human welfare was central to the work of political independence.

Although the petition of Joseph Allen Blankson focuses on the caretaking activities of the CPP government, it also illuminates the context in which Kwame Nkrumah’s PDA was launched. This was a time of existential and physical threats to Ghanaian sovereignty. Kwame Nkrumah’s effort to remain politically nonaligned amid the Cold War’s polarization had created powerful enemies. As public places became sites of bombings and Nkrumah responded with increasingly draconian measures, Ghana’s dissidents drew on the Cold War’s inflammatory language to discredit Nkrumah’s leadership. These appeals were not lost on the US government, which began to fear that Nkrumah had taken an “ugly lurch to the left,” and expended resources to ensure that Ghana would not be “lost” to global communism.⁴⁶ By February 1966, Nkrumah’s fears had become a reality: a coalition of Ghanaian police and army officials calling themselves the National Liberation Council (NLC) and acting with the support of the US Central Intelligence Agency seized power. A month after the takeover, Joseph Ankrah, one of the leaders of the NLC, wrote a letter to President Lyndon Johnson and spoke of Nkrumah as a menace to human rights and Ghana as one the USA’s proxy states. “The Army and the Police Services were compelled to intervene to stem the tide of a growing communist menace in Ghana,” Ankrah wrote. “We watched with dismay the destruction of our civil liberties. The cherished rights of the individual were contemptuously disregarded…. You can depend on me, my Government and the people of Ghana to support your democratic principles and your way of life,” Ankrah wrote.⁴⁷ On both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, those who justified this interruption of Ghana’s politics depended on images of Nkrumah as a violator of human rights, and particularly the history of the PDA, to make their case.

1966–1969

On February 24, 1966, when the NLC seized control of Ghana’s government, the leadership was adamant about “liberating” the country from the grip of an authoritarian dictator. By decree, this army and police junta dismissed the president, dissolved the National Assembly (parliament), and shuffled the judiciary.⁴⁸ Just like that, Ghana embarked upon a cycle of military interventionism, becoming the prototype for what would come to be called an “endemic problem … in African political life.⁴⁹ Scholarly assessments of human rights in this era tend to favorably compare the NLC years to the preceding Nkrumah government and praise the NLC for returning Ghana to civilian rule.⁵⁰ Not so the NRC archive, which illuminates the violence of the 1966 regime change and the subsequent years. Alongside the petitions of Ghanaians who mourned the end of the Nkrumah state’s caretaking practice and those who confirmed the existential threats to Ghana’s sovereignty, there was also a raft of petitions showing that Kwame Nkrumah’s government was not singular in using extrajudicial detention as a weapon against political dissent. In the citizen accounting, the PDA was not exceptional; rather, it was part of a broader history in which a succession of diverse governments used extrajudicial detention to express authority.

One of the first acts of the NLC was to release hundreds of Ghanaians detained under the PDA. At the same time, the NLC instituted new “protective custody” policies that detained the functionaries and attachés of the former government. Again, Ghanaians were sent to cells without judicial review, clear sentencing periods, or formal processes of recourse. As the targets of Nkrumah’s CPP were released from detention, people associated with Nkrumah’s CPP were shepherded into the newly emptied jail cells. Philip Dade Armah, an intelligence office employed at Flagstaff House, was one such person. Armah spent almost a year in “protective custody” at Nsawam Prison. Although other former CPP security agents were released earlier, Armah noted that “those of us who did not know anybody” spent longer stretches of time imprisoned and were subjected to daily beatings with soldiers’ guns.⁵¹ Emmanuel Amartey Adjaye, another Flagstaff House guard, was assaulted, detained, and paraded before hostile crowds in Accra.⁵² At the inaugural Accra public hearings on January 14, 2003, the sixty-seven-year-old Adjaye tearfully told his story of assault and detention. The police and army men “turned our ears into drums [that they] beat at will … My testicles turned to a football” and “my lips [into] a punching bag.” Adjaye also remembered the crowds who “booed and hurled profane and unprintable words at us.”⁵³

Samuel Boadi Attafuah, also known as Nana Domena Fampong I, also described the 1966 liberation as an act of profound and indiscriminate violence. On February 24, when the radio announced the NLC takeover, a mob poured onto the campus of the Kwame Nkrumah Institute of Economics and Political Science and targeted “lecturers, students, and workers,” whomever they could find. This mob, consisting of “hefty-looking soldiers” and “irate civilian[s] … under the influence of alcohol or other strong substances” was bent on destruction. The crowd dragged Attafuah from Africa Hall and beat him within inches of his life. According to Attafuah, the violence was both ideological and opportunistic. He heard his assaulters urging each other to “hurry up to finish [him] quickly and go back to campus to join the people up there to collect some of the booty.” He also heard the mob encouraging each other to “take part in the demolition of the ‘devil’s effigy’ (apparently referring to a 30 foot bu[r]st of President Nkrumah, overlooking the Institute.)” “Divine intervention” came at the moment a soldier left Attafuah for dead after smashing his left cheek with the butt of a gun.⁵⁴

In this telling, the excesses of the NLC period are substantial and consequential. “As of now, I still suffer from severe pains in my left eye and ear as well as the joint of my cheekbones and find much difficulty even to yawn or masticate food on that side. I also experience constant headache as a result of the permanent injury on my cheek.” Beyond the physical debility, Attafuah carefully listed the possessions (seven gabardine and woolen suits, one hundred classical and local records, three quality kente cloths, and two very expensive long neck chains) he had lost due to the looting of his apartment at Africa Hall. Attafuah mentioned that he was later hired by the Labor Department to research the “large-scale unemployment” that followed the 1966 coup d’état.⁵⁵ This first military intervention, like all the others that would follow, had deleterious economic consequences.

Similarly, Emmanuel Adjaye complained of new legislation that held citizens responsible for the economic delinquencies of the Nkrumah state. Adjaye’s petition listed in succession the NLC decrees “numbers 3, 7, 10, 23, 40, 92, 111, 131, and 141,” which “further restrict[ed] [him] from enjoying [his] fundamental human right [sic].”⁵⁶ Based on the premise that Nkrumah and his attachés had looted the public coffers, these laws were ostensibly intended to recover the nation’s wealth from private hands.⁵⁷ Months after the NLC coup, the legal scholar William Burnett Harvey questioned the indiscriminate application of these restrictive laws, noting that persons ranging from “financial advisor to the Presidency” to common “Lorry Drivers” and “C.P.P. Activists” all suffered economic consequences as a result.⁵⁸ This was precisely the argument of Emmanuel Adjaye, who called these decrees “ruthless” and “unmerited.” As a guard at Flagstaff House, Adjaye insisted, he was simply doing his job. Why, then, should he be punished for working “in lawful service to the nation”?⁵⁹

The citizen petitions also count collective losses that cannot be valued monetarily. “It is regrettable to mention,” remembered Attafuah, “that thousands of valuable books from the Institute’s rich library were destroyed and burned by the new principal of the Institute.”⁶⁰ By including this brief description of book burning among the accounts of past human rights abuse, Attafuah’s narrative urges us to consider the consequence of coup d’état on education, archives, and cultural patrimony. “There were many casualties of [the NLC] coup,” historian Jean Allman similarly explains, “but one that has not been fully appreciated is postcolonial knowledge production about Africa, or African Studies.’”⁶¹ By 1969, the NLC had succeeded in managing a transition back to civilian rule, including commissioning a new constitution and holding parliamentary elections. The Progress Party, led by Kofi Busia, emerged victorious and Ghana returned to civilian rule.

1969–1972

Just as Kwame Nkrumah’s government was undone by the Cold War’s exigencies, Dr. Kofi Abrefa Busia’s government also capsized on the shoals of an unfavorable global political economy. The similarities were not lost on Nkrumah, who penned an open “letter of consolation” to Busia dripping with schadenfreude. “My dear Kofi, I have just heard on the air that your government which came to power barely three years ago has been toppled by the Ghana Army…. Most of the evils of which my government and I were accused … were apparently the same reasons that motivated the army takeover of your regime.”⁶² Although Nkrumah and Busia charted entirely different courses, in the NRC archive’s narrative, they both made Ghanaian people victims of their broader economic and political agendas.

In contrast to Nkrumah, Busia unreservedly sought to work within the economic constraints set out by the Cold War’s politics. His belief that sharing the economic vision of the Western nations would translate into material support for Ghana was sorely tested during his short tenure as prime minister. When Busia attempted to service Ghana’s debt according to the stringent austerity measures imposed by the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank he “managed to alienate virtually all those groups who had first given [him] enthusiastic support: the intellectuals, the trade unions, students, wage earners, businessman, lawyers and judges, and most critically Ghana’s military officers.”⁶³ There is perhaps no clearer evidence of Busia’s miscalculation than the words of his own finance minister, J. H. Men-sah, who publicly distanced himself from the austerity policies even while signing the loan documents. “It is impossible to convince any Ghanaian that public money should be spent on paying such debt rather than on developing the country,” he stated in the closing days of the Progress Party regime.⁶⁴ As fuel, food, and transportation prices rose, Busia finally suspended the deep austerity measures championed by the global lending institutions. As the World Bank and the IMF withheld relief and limited lending, Ghana’s economic distress only increased, and Prime Minister Busia was left to twist in the wind.⁶⁵

The NRC archive’s stories about the Busia era describe the human suffering that accompanied the austerity policies of late 1960s Ghana. Joseph Broni Amponsah, a former policeman, came to the NRC to complain about forcible unemployment during the Progress Party years. Although Amponsah claimed that he was dismissed because of his hard-hitting investigation of election irregularities, legal research done by the NRC staff found that his dismissal was intelligible in much more mundane ways.⁶⁶ Amponsah was among the Apollo 568, a contingent of civil servants summarily and abruptly dismissed in 1972.⁶⁷ While the Busia government insisted these cuts were a straightforward and necessary means of cutting government expenditure, many of the victims, like Amponsah, claimed they were targeted because they acted with integrity and nonpartisanship in their respective roles.

The distress of the Apollo 568 found a voice in the court case E. K. Sallah v. Attorney General. Ghana’s highest court agreed with Sallah, a dismissed civil servant who insisted that this mass layoff was illegal. The court ordered the Busia government to rehire Sallah and pay him damages but the prime minister balked, refuting the ruling in a televised national address. “No court, no court,” an openly defiant Busia insisted, “could compel the government to employ or redeploy anyone it did not wish to work with.”⁶⁸ A government that campaigned on upholding the rule of law, accountability, and strong institutions was openly flouting Ghana’s judiciary. A public outcry ensued and Busia was criticized for abandoning liberal political principles for the sake of expediency.⁶⁹