(Tuesday 21st April 2020 Issue)
Excerpts
from the Preface
Dr.
J. B. Danquah, dubbed “the doyen of Ghanaian nationalism” almost epitomizes the
fate of post-colonial Africa. Exuberant and full of ideas, he first got into
trouble with government as one of the Big Six arrested by the colonial
authorities after the Accra riots of 1948. Elected to the Legislative Assembly
in 1951, he failed to get re-elected in 1954 and 1956. In 1960, he took the
courageous decision to contest the presidency against Kwame Nkrumah and lost.
In 1961, he was first arrested under the Preventive Detention Act (PDA), 1958. The
PDA was enacted barely ayear after Ghana attained independence in March 1957,
and gave Prime Minister, later President Nkrumah the power to have anyone
arrested and detained for up to five years, later increased to seven, upon
suspicion of posing a threat “to the security of the state.”
Released
in 1962 after a series of petitions to the government, J. B. Danquah was
re-arrested under the same PDA in January 1964. As he describes them, the
grounds for his detention were at best spurious. He died in his cell at what
was called “the Special Block” at Nsawam prisons, after writing a series of
petitions that went totally unheeded. . . .
The
prison letters of Dr. J. B. Danquah are a painful plea for sanity, a plea for
reason and humaneness. A cry of wonder at how humans could be so unbelievably
unreasonable and in some cases, deliberately cruel to their fellow human
beings. In the name of what, he silently wonders as he delivers protest after
protest at the injustice of his incarceration.
Throughout his incarceration at Nsawam and Usher Fort prisons, Danquah
remains defiant and painstakingly argues his case, like the brilliant lawyer he
was, convinced in the righteousness of his cause, strengthened by the knowledge
of his innocence. . . . In the end, he
literally drops dead from a standing position in his cell at Nsawam prisons.
Dr.
J. B. Danquah was a lawyer, but above everything else, he was a great
philosopher. His letters from prison are rendered in the voice of a cultured
man of God who, because he sees so much beauty in the reality of Ghanaian life
and society, feels so much pain in the absurdity of his extrajudicial
incarceration, in the fickleness of the human mind under the influence of power
and privilege. He extols the beauty of the Ghanaian spirit, and affirms again
and again, the absolute centrality of man, of humanity, and of “man’s permanent
motive forces and commitments” to God, to family, and “to the dignity of man as
man”. To read Danquah’s letters is to undertake an odyssey into the depths of
human nature through the mind of a great African philosopher whose traces it
will be impossible to obliterate.
In
petition after petition, Danquah resolutely demands respect for the Ghanaian
constitution and the rule of law. He sounds flabbergasted that the Ghanaian
constitution and the laws of the land, at least in so far as they guaranteed
the rights of citizens were ignored and abused with such reckless abandon. He
mobilizes the forces of history and the law, and invokes the beauty of and
righteousness of what he calls the “Ghanaistic” outlook on life to wage a
relentless losing battle against Nkrumah’s Preventive Detention Act, 1958. From
the extremely uncomfortable confines of his prison cells at both Nsawam and
Usher Fort, Danquah unleashes volley after volley of brilliant legal,
philosophical and religious arguments against the blatant injustices of the
Preventive Detention Act.
The
Prison Letters of Dr. J. B. Danquah is available at Timbooktoo Bookshop.
Because they are not opening regularly, interested persons should please email
timbooktoo@timbooktoo.gm or call 993
5915 or 449 4345.
Read Other Articles In Article (Archive)
