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