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
