waitng on God's timing: September 2014

J.B. DANQUAH (1895-1965): A POLITICAL BIOGRAPHY

September 27, 2014 at 4:23pm

Born on 21st December, 1895, at Bepong, Kwahu, to Emmanuel Yaw Boakye Danquah, an evangelist of the Basel Mission, and his wife Lydia Okom Korantemaa, Joseph Kwame Kyeretwie Boakye Danquah’s formal education began at the Kibi Basel Mission School, from where he proceeded to the Basel Mission Grammar School at Begoro. He completed this leg of his education in 1912 and soon found work as a clerk in the chambers of Vidal J. Buckle, a prominent Accra lawyer. Upon passing the Gold Coast civil service examination in 1914, the young Danquah took a position as a clerk at the Gold Coast Supreme Court. He subsequently accepted an offer from his older paternal brother, Nana Ofori Atta I, who had been enstooled Omanhene of Akim Abuakwa in 1912, to become Secretary to the Akim Abuakwa Chiefs’ Tribunal. He was later promoted Chief Clerk and Registrar of the Akim Abuakwa Native Court at Kibi. Danquah was instrumental in organizing the literate youth of Akim Abuakwa into a Scholars Union in 1916, and served as its first secretary.

Service in the court of Nana Ofori Atta, who had been appointed to the Gold Coast Legislative Council in 1916 and would gain in influence in the affairs of the Colony in subsequent years, drew J.B. Danquah into the larger orbit of Gold Coast nationalist politics at a relatively young age. When Nana Ofori Atta convened the first conference of Paramount Chiefs of the Eastern Province (which was later recognized under the Guggisberg Constitution of 1925 as the Eastern Provincial Council of Chiefs), Danquah served as assistant secretary of the Conference. In 1921, Danquah gained an opportunity to become more directly associated with the Gold Coast nationalist class when Nana Ofori Atta sent him as a delegate to the conference of the Aborigines Rights Protection Society, held at Cape Coast. Among the leading figures of the day he met at this gathering was Kobina Sekyi, a famous maverick lawyer and cultural nationalist. It was Sekyi who advised and encouraged Danquah to read law in England. Danquah had previously sought advice concerning his personal educational goals from Dr. Kwegyir Aggrey, when the latter once visited Kibi. Aggrey’s biographer recounts that, Aggrey told Danquah “to stay at home and rear pigs and poultry” because “it was wrong . . . for all the best brains in the country to be devoted to the legal profession; they should develop useful industries that would be to the benefit of the country.” Danquah took Sekyi’s advice over Aggrey’s.

Danquah was a student in England from 1921 to 1927. There, he studied philosophy at the University of London, where he obtained a B.A. Honours degree in 1925 and was elected John Stuart Mill Scholar in the Philosophy of Mind and Logic. After his bachelor’s degree, he enrolled for doctoral studies and in 1927 obtained his Ph.D., becoming the first West African to earn a doctor of philosophy degree from the University of London. His 225-page dissertation was on “The Moral End as Moral Excellence.” While studying philosophy, he also read law and was enrolled at the Inner Temple. He earned his LLB in 1926 and was admitted to the bar the same year.

Danquah was a founding member of the Gold Coast Students’ Association in the U.K. He subsequently joined with nine other students to found the West African Students Union (WASU) of Britain and Ireland and served as the Editor of the WASU magazine. WASU, which received initial support from Casely-Hayford and the National Congress of British West Africa, would come to play an important role in West African and Gold Coast anticolonial politics. Almost every Gold Coast politician of note who studied in London from 1925 onward, including I.B. Asafu Adjaye, Joe Appiah, and Kwame Nkrumah, was either actively involved or held office in WASU. Upon assuming office as Leader of Government Business in the Gold Coast, Nkrumah became one of WASU’s benefactors, sending a donation of £600 to Joe Appiah, then president of WASU, for the benefit of the association.

Returning home in 1927, Danquah thrust himself into public life and quickly achieved prominence in Gold Coast affairs and nationalist activities, combining them with a successful law practice. Together with contemporaries, most of whom had returned from studies abroad, Danquah founded and organized the Gold Coast Youth Conference, described as a “convention or convocation, the calling together, from time to time, of different societies and clubs to discuss affairs of common interest to their members and the country.” The first Conference met at Achimota in 1930 to discuss “the Essentials in the Progress and Development of the country”. It was addressed by Casely Hayford and Kobina Sekyi, among others. Danquah recalls that, “A notable recruit captured by the Youth Conference for politics from the New Achimota cadre of youth was a handsome candy manufacturer and poultry keeper called K.A. Gbedemah.” At Danquah’s invitation, Gbedemah addressed one of the year-round events organized under the auspices of the Youth Conference [possibly in 1937] at the Rodger Club, Accra.

With Casely Hayford’s death in August 1930, a void was created in the intellectual and political leadership of the Gold Coast nationalist movement. Danquah soon stepped into the void and for the next two decades became, as the Watson Commission would later describe him in its Report, “the doyen of Gold Coast politicians,” carrying on the torch that had been lit by Casely Hayford, and by John Mensah before him. Nnamdi Azikiwe, whose career included an eighteen-month stint in the Gold Coast as an influential journalist between 1932 and 1934, would later speak of “the matchless Danquah”. Danquah established the first daily newspaper in the Gold Coast, West Africa Times (later renamed The Times of West Africa), in 1931. Writing under the nom de plume “Zidig,” he maintained a column in the paper in which he wrote biting criticisms of the colonial authorities. In 1934, he was secretary of the delegation sent from the Gold Coast to London to lobby the Colonial Secretary on certain political developments in the Gold Coast. The delegation wanted the Colonial Secretary to disallow two new laws introduced in the Gold Coast—the Sedition Bill and the Waterworks Bill. It also made specific suggestions for constitutional reform, including the increase of African representation on the Legislative Council to one-half of the total and African representation on the Executive Council. Although the Colonial Secretary did not reverse the two bills, by 1942 “all the demands of the 1934 delegation had been met apart from the central one for the increased African representation on the Legislative Council.”

Danquah took over the organization of the Youth Conference, which had not followed up on its first Achimota conference with another annual meeting. He led the Youth Conference as its general secretary from 1936 to 1947, funding much of the Conference’s running costs from his personal resources. At the second Conference, held at Mfantsipim, Cape Coast in 1938, the movement’s organizers agreed to form a permanent paid secretariat for the Youth Conference and hold conferences annually. Aimed at mobilizing and absorbing “local literates and ‘all clubs, societies, associations, city and provincial” into a nationalistic youth movement, the Youth Conference, under Danquah’s leadership, also served as a bridge between the chiefly classes represented in the Provincial Councils and the older generation of Gold Coast intelligentsia represented by the Aborigines Rights Protection Society. He led a delegation of the Youth Conference to the Joint Provincial Council’s Assembly at Swedru in 1938 and managed to achieve cooperation between the chiefs and the old guard professional elites. The next Youth Conference, held in Kumasi in 1939, aimed at cooperation between the Colony and Ashanti, a matter that was of the utmost priority for Danquah and to which he would devote special effort in the years ahead. A fourth Conference met at Akropong in 1940, to discuss “The Problems of Our Social and Economic Reconstruction in War and Peace,” a theme appropriate to war period.

Under Danquah’s leadership, the Youth Conference also became active in advocating various schemes of constitutional reform. In 1940, the Conference put forward a plan, authored by Danquah, to fuse the Joint Provincial Council and the Legislative Council into a new central legislature of two: the Joint Provincial Council to become a House of Chiefs and the Legislative Council to be transformed into a Legislative Assembly of between 30 and 50 members elected by adult suffrage. Building on this, Danquah prepared, at the request of the Joint Provincial Council and on behalf of the Youth Conference, a 400-page memorandum titled “Things to Change in the Gold Coast,” which contained more fully developed and extensive proposals for constitutional change. In this document, the proposed Legislative Assembly was to include members from Ashanti, Trans-Volta Togoland, and the Northern Territories, in addition to the Colony—a highly far-sighted and advanced proposition at the time. Danquah also joined with Kojo Thompson and Arku Korsah to form a committee to draft a new constitution on behalf of the chiefs and the intelligentsia. The centerpiece of their proposals was a ministerial system in which an elected African member would become the political head of a department (ministry) while the European officer remained the ‘permanent’ (civil service) head.

Anticipating major constitutional advance after the war, in light of the changing international and domestic climate, Danquah rallied the chiefs and intelligentsia behind his various constitutional schemes, each of them designed to unify the then separately administered parts of the colonial territory under a common legislature and draw the Gold Coast closer to African majority rule and self-government. Martin Wight, who studied the constitutional and political development of the Gold Coast during the twenty year period from 1925 to 1945 for his authoritative work “The Gold Coast Legislative Council.” dubbed Danquah “the Siéyès of the Gold Coast”—after Abbe Sieyes, the influential eighteenth century French statesman and constitutionalist.

The Burns Constitution of 1946 brought the Colony and Ashanti together in one legislative council for the very first time, meeting a priority objective and demand of Danquah’s. Danquah considered the political and constitutional unification of Ashanti and the Colony as a necessary condition for advancing the Gold Coast toward self-government. Also for the first time the Legislative Council had a non-official African majority, and Danquah was elected to the Council for the first time, a fact that apparently did not please Governor Burns, who remarked thus: “The Joint Provincials elected seven Chiefs, one clergyman and one lawyer; the clergyman [Rev. C. Baeta] was an excellent choice. The lawyer was Danquah.” Danquah had certainly not endeared himself much to the Governor by his incessant demands and push for greater constitutional advance as well as, latterly, by his role as defense counsel in the Kibi ritual murder case, which caused a delay in the execution of the condemned defendants, much to the consternation of Governor Burns. At any rate, despite what appeared to the colonial authorities as unprecedented advances in the political and constitutional evolution of the Gold Coast, at a pace further than any of Britain’s other African colonies, Danquah persisted in his push toward self-government. In his view, “a people who controlled the unofficial majority in the Legislative Council would be better governed if they were given also the power to shape and to control policy.” This was not the case under the Burns Constitution, which still kept policy in the hands of the Governor and his Executive Council, making the Legislative Council consultative or advisory, at best.

On August 4, 1947, following discussions in February with Sekondi businessman George Alfred "Paa" Grant, Danquah, together with other founding members comprising a Working Committee, launched the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC) at an event in Saltpond. Paa Grant was elected President and Danquah the vice president of the organization. The UGCC considered itself not party but a national movement whose principal objective was “to ensure that by all legitimate and constitutional means the direction and control of government should pass into the hands of the people and their chiefs in the shortest possible time.” As Dennis Austin notes in his Politics in Ghana 1946-60, the UGCC was “the first major association to talk in these terms [self-government].” The UGCC included in its Aims and Objects the clause that “persons elected to represent the people and their natural leaders in the present Legislative council shall be elected by reason of their competence and not otherwise.” When the Working Committee of the UGCC met for the first time in September 1947, they expressed opposition to the dominant position of the chiefs on the Legislative Council, although Danquah favored a two-chamber legislative assembly with a House of Chiefs as a second chamber with limited powers.

The UGCC wanted a full-time, paid general secretary to run the Convention, as all of the organization’s founding leaders had other vocations in addition to their civic and nationalist engagements, which they attended to with varying degrees of commitment. Of the lot, Dr. Danquah was easily the one who was most constant in his political involvements. Ako Adjei, a young lawyer who had recently returned from England, mentioned a Francis [Kwame] Nkrumah to Danquah as a suitable choice for the job of general secretary. Nnamdi Azikiwe, who knew Nkrumah, also recalls that, Danquah had asked him about this young Gold Coaster who was then editing the New Africa in London and that he had assured Danquah that “this budding leader [Nkrumah] was wasting his talent in London and that his services could be of invaluable help in the struggle of Ghana for a place in the sun.”

Nkrumah had then been away from the Gold Coast for nearly 13 years, spending the first 10 years in the United States, where he completed undergraduate and post-graduate (master’s) degrees at Lincloln University and University of Pennsylvania, respectively, before heading to England in 1945, intending to read law at the London School of Economics. Ako Adjei first met Nkrumah when the two were students at Lincoln University, and the two met again in England.

On behalf of the Executive Committee of the UGCC, Danquah wrote to Nkrumah to offer him the general secretary position. The offer included a salary of £100 a month and a car, plus and a one-time payment of £100 to cover travel and relocation. Nkrumah accepted the offer, though, as he recalls in his autobiography, less for the money than for “the opportunity that I had been waiting for, the chance to return home and actively help my people by the experience I gained in party organization abroad.”

Arriving in the Gold Coast in December, 1947, Nkrumah dutifully reported for work as General Secretary of the UGCC in January 1948, accepting to take a substantially lower monthly salary (£20) than the £100 he had been offered. He soon set down to work and quickly demonstrated his political and organizational genius by submitting to the Working Committee of the UGCC a set of proposals for their consideration. Among other things, he suggested the “formation of a shadow cabinet . . . composed of individuals selected ad hoc to study the jobs of the various ministries that would be decided upon in advance for the country when we achieve our independence”; coordination of all the civic, political, occupational, educational, farmers’ and women’s organizations under the umbrella of the UGCC; consolidation of the branches already formed and opening of new branches in every town and village of the country, with the chief or odikro of each town or village persuaded to be the local patron; establishment of Convention weekend schools in all branches for purposes of mass education for self-government.

Contemporaneous developments outside the UGCC created a major political opening for the organization and, in retrospect, for Nkrumah. Nkrumah’s assumption of duty as General Secretary of the UGCC coincided with Nii Kwabena Bonne’s ongoing Anti-Inflation Campaign and the related call for a mass consumer boycott of European and Levantine shops if the sellers did not drastically reduce their prices by a specified date. The boycott went into effect on January 24, and after agreement was reached on February 20 between the Anti-Inflationary Campaign and representatives of the chamber of commerce and the Joint Provincial Council of Chiefs, Nii Bonne announced that the boycott would end on February 28 immediately the new reduced prices were introduced.

The UGCC seized the moment to popularize its cause and build up its support base across the country. During the latter half of January and throughout February, 1948, while the boycott was in progress, Danquah and Nkrumah travelled the Colony and Ashanti, preaching self-government. Before the boycott was over, the UGCC was presented with another political opportunity in the form of a planned protest by the Ex-Servicemen’s Union. The ex-servicemen, who had fought in the Second World War on the side of Britain and its allies, planned to march to the Castle on February 28 to present a petition to the Governor demanding action of specified welafre-related grievances. On February 20, the same day agreement was reached to end Nii Bonne’s boycott, Danquah and Nkrumah addressed a large crowd at the Palladium Cinema in Accra. The meeting had been called to rally support for the ex-servicemen’s upcoming march. Both Danquah and Nkrumah pledged their support for the ex-servicemen’s cause. The march, which took place on February 28, turned tragic when the police commander shot and killed three of the leaders of the protest, injuring many more. News of the incident quickly provoked unrest across the country, resulting in several days of rioting and looting of shops.

Danquah, Nkrumah with him, was in Saltpond when the riots broke out. The two immediately returned to Accra, hoping, as Danquah put it, “to take advantage of that day’s tragic events and use that advantage as a fulcrum or lever for the liberation of Ghana.” After consulting other leaders of the UGCC, it was agreed that Danquah and Nkrumah will send telegrams to designated international audiences. In a lengthy telegram addressed to the Colonial Secretary, Danquah claimed that “Civil Government . . . had broken down . . . Working Committee . . . prepared to take over interim government.” He demanded “the dispatch of special Commissioner . . . to hand over Government to interim government of chiefs and people and to witness immediate calling of a Constituent Assembly.” Nkrumah’s much shorter telegram in similar vein was addressed to the UN and selected foreign press. Danquah followed this up with the publication in the local press of a manifesto under the title, “The hour of liberation has struck.”

On March 11, Danquah and Nkrumah and four other leaders of the UGCC (Obetsebi Lamptey, William Ofori Atta, Edward Akufo Addo, and Ako Adjei) were ordered arrested. The six, who became famously known as the “Big Six”, were placed in detention. Danquah recalls that, it was while the six were in detention, that “the present colours of the Ghana national flag were decided upon (initially for the use of the UGCC).” The six were held in detention until early April, 1948, when the commission appointed under the chairmanship of Aiken Watson to enquire into the February “disturbances” and the ensuing riots (the Watson Commission) commenced its work. Both Danquah and Nkrumah testified before the Commission.

Although the Gold Coast authorities believed the UGCC leadership, and in particular Nkrumah, were complicit in the ex-servicemen’s fateful march, the UGCC, in fact, merely capitalized on the opportunity. In its report, the Watson Commission could not assign responsibility for the riots: “the disturbances were planned but . . . there is no evidence to show by what persons or organizations they were planned.” Nonetheless, the UGCC did benefit, at least in the immediate term. On the eve of their riots, the UGCC had a total of 13 branches and 1,765 paid-up members nationwide. By August 1948, the number of branches had increased to 209. Of course, Nkrumah's exceptional organizational skill and energy contributed greatly to this outcome.

Concluding that changes in the Gold Coast and abroad during the war years had rendered the 1946 (Burns) Constitution “outmoded at birth,” the Watson Commission laid down a number of principles to serve as a basis of constitutional reform and suggested that the resulting constitution be tried for “for a probationary period of ten years”. The British Government accepted the recommendation of the Watson Commission that a local committee, made up entirely of Gold Coasters, should be appointed to formulate proposals for a new constitution. Among those invited to serve on the 40-member Coussey Committee were six UGCC leaders—G.A. (“Paa”) Grant, Danquah, Akufo Addo, Obetesebi Lamptey, Cobbina Kessie and B.D. Addai. All agreed to serve. Nkrumah was not invited. A fortuitous wedge was thus created between Nkrumah, on the one hand, and Danquah and the rest of the UGCC Working Committee, on the other. The politically nimble and ambitious Nkrumah played it to his personal advantage.

While the Coussey Committee was holding hearings and carrying on its mandate to formulate proposals for a new constitution, Nkrumah set about expanding his control over the youth organizations he had brought within the UGCC fold. A Committee on Youth Organization (CY0) was formed, under the leadership of K.A. Gbedemah and Botsio, two of the youth leaders closely associated with Nkrumah. A month later the first issue of a daily newspaper, the Accra Evening News, appeared. It had Nkrumah as its publisher and was edited by Gbedemah. Despite Nkrumah’s continued association with the UGCC, the Evening News combined its anti-colonial stance with a harshly anti-Coussey Committee, anti-UGCC rhetoric.

In December 1948, Nkrumah convened a Ghana Youth Congress in Kumasi. The youth delegates issued a manifesto as follows: “We demand a constitution that would give this country nothing less than FULL SELF-GOVERNMENT NOW.” In response, the UGCC Working Committee issued a statement at the end of January 1949, cautioning that, as the Coussey Committee was still deliberating on the matter of a future constitution, “there is nothing gained to fix a target date for the coming of the new constitution.” As Dennis Austin observed, “No doubt the Working Committee was right in what it said, but the youth societies were not interested in the procedure of constitutional reform: they moved in the realm of absolutes. . . . [The] lawyer members [of the Working Committee] allowed their heads sensibly to rule their hearts; the CYO followed its heart.”

The rift between Nkrumah and the UGCC Working Committee grew with time. The UGCC leaders were unhappy with Nkrumah’s use of the CYO and the Evening News to undermine and abuse them. Both vehicles were presumably “wings” of the UGCC, yet they clearly owed allegiance to Nkrumah. The UGCC suspended Nkrumah from his position as general secretary. Attempts to arbitrate the dispute on terms favorable to the UGCC leadership met with failure. Nkrumah’s CYO allies prevailed upon him not to capitulate but, instead, to resign from the UGCC and lead a new party. On June 12, 1949, before an audience at the Arena meeting ground in Accra, estimated at 60,000, Nkrumah announced the formation of the “Convention People’s Party” (CPP), with himself as chairman, K.A. Gbedemah as vice-chair, and Kojo Botsio as secretary. The Aims and Objects of the CPP included, “To fight relentlessly by all constitutional means for the achievement of ‘Self-Government Now’ for the chiefs and people of the Gold Coast.”

Danquah and his UGCC colleagues became targets of a campaign of calumny and character assassination, waged through the pages of the Evening News. In one such publication, the paper asserted that, “had the CPP not been formed, Mr. Sekyi of the Aborigines Society and Dr. Danquah of the UGCC, through Pa Grant, would have us follow them blindly and then bound hand and foot and sold to the imperialists for a pat on the back, for scholarships to their children and for subsidies to publish books. The Aborigines and the UGCC have now revealed their true colors to the people of this country.” The newspaper also fabricated and spread the vile rumour that Danquah and his UGCC compatriots had accepted cash bribes from the “imperialists” to support a sports promotion mission sent to the Gold Coast by the British government in an effort to divert the energies of the country’s youth away from anticolonial agitation Such wild allegations and malicious propaganda directed at Danquah became fairly routine. Danquah lamented the tactics of “Gbedemah and Nkrumah” in “stirring up hatred in the masses by telling malicious and libelous stories of bribery and other crimes against UGCC leaders, well knowing that the stories were false, but telling it continuously with the avowed object of discrediting and destroying such leaders and then walking over their dead bodies to climb to power and personal fame.” Sierra Leonean journalist and long-time Gold Coast/Ghana resident and Nkrumah contemporary, Bankole Timothy, recalls that, “The Accra Evening News thrived on libelous publications. . . . The paper carried out a relentless campaign of mud-slinging against all those who ventured to criticize it or its publisher, Kwame Nkrumah. And the language employed by the paper in trouncing those who fell into its clutches defied all canons of journalism.” The paper was met with numerous libel suits, many of which it lost, but it persisted in its brand of journalism.

When the Coussey Committee issued its Report in October 1949, Danquah joined two minority riders. In the first, Danquah and seven others, including all of his UGCC Working Committee colleagues, objected to the recommendation of the Coussey Committee that the “Executive Council or Board of Ministers which is to be the chief instrument of policy collectively responsible to the Assembly shall include ex-officio ministers.” The ex-officio ministers would be British colonial officers in charge of designated departments. Danquah and his colleagues argued that, “Since ex-officio ministers, by the very nature of their appointment, cannot be responsible to an Assembly elected by the people, the recommendation for their inclusion in the Executive Council is a patent anomaly.” In the second rider, which Danquah signed together with Obetsebi Lamptey, he opposed the recommendation of the Coussey Committee to establish, for the first time, Regional Administrations and Regional Councils as a second/middle-tier of government, between the existing district councils and the central government: “In so far as the purely local government system is concerned, it is our view that the District and Municipal Councils, together with the subordinate Rural and Urban Area Councils proposed by the Committee, should be quite adequate for the exercise and practice of local government powers.” They concluded, “This Gold Coast, or as the country is increasingly growing to be known and called, this land of Ghana, requires peace and prosperity from a simple form of government controlled by the people at the centre, and Regional Administrations controlled by civil servants not responsible to the people should be entirely blotted out of the picture.”

In his first public reaction to the Coussey Report, Nkrumah called it a “Trojan horse gift” and labelled it “bogus and fraudulent.” Subsequently, on November 20, 1949, he convened in Accra what he called a “Ghana People’s Representative Assembly,” consisting of CPP members, the CYO, trade unions, farmers’ associations, ex-servicemen, and local youth societies. The delegates adopted a resolution demanding “immediate self-government, that is, full Dominion status within the Commonwealth of Nations based on the Statute of Westminster.” They also approved, as an alternative to the Coussey proposals, a draft constitution comprising a bi-cameral legislature (an upper house of chiefs and elders), an executive of twelve ministers, of whom one would be an ex-officio Minister of Defense, and a directly elected assembly. The Governor would retain a power of certification and veto, to be exercised on the advice and consent of the cabinet. These proposals were not radically different from the main thrust of the constitution proposed in the Coussey Report: both proposed a bicameral legislature; both had an African cabinet, led by an African “prime minister” (leader of government business), that would be responsible to the legislature; both provided for ex-officio ministers (1 in the CPP alternative; 3 in the Coussey report); both gave the Governor veto powers. Nonetheless, Nkrumah and the CPP pressed their opposition to the Coussey Committee Report and announced a campaign of “Positive Action” to demand “the calling of a Constituent Assembly through a General Election to determine a Full Self-Government constitution for the country.”

With a few notable modifications (a unicameral, instead of a bicameral legislature, and the fixing of the voting age at 21, instead of 25, and rejection of property qualification), the recommendations of the Coussey Committee were accepted by the British Government. The minority riders of Danquah

and others were rejected. In the ensuing general elections, held under the new 1950 (Coussey) Constitution, the CPP, drawing massive support from the newly enfranchised youth, won a resounding victory—34 of the 38 directly elected seats; and 22 of the 37 indirectly elected seats. Nkrumah and his CPP were invited to form the new government, with Nkrumah as Leader of Government Business, a designation that was changed a year later to Prime Minister. This was a first in colonial Africa. Danquah was elected to the legislative assembly and became opposition leader, but his political career had entered the twilight. The torch had passed to a new generation and a new era, and Nkrumah was the undisputed new star in shining armour.

Danquah nonetheless continued to play his part as a legislator and opposition leader. In 1953, the Colonial Secretary invited the government to submit proposals for new changes to the 1950 Constitution. The government’s proposals included an increase in the membership of the legislative assembly from 84 to 104, all of them directly elected, the retention of the Governor’s reserved powers and of his responsibility for foreign affairs, defense and domestic security, and the replacement of the three ex-officio members in the cabinet with African ministers. These proposals were overwhelmingly approved by the CPP-controlled legislative assembly and subsequently accepted by the British Government. Danquah, who objected to the persistence of the Governor’s powers and responsibilities, introduced a motion calling for the Legislative Assembly to make a declaration of independence on March 6, 1954--a date he chose to coincide with the 110th anniversary of the Bond of 1844. Danquah’s motion was predictably rejected by the legislative assembly. In the next general elections, held under the new 1954 Constitution, the CPP won 71 of the 104 seats at stake. Danquah lost his parliamentary bid for re-election, this time on the ticket of the Ghana Congress Party, which was a consolidation of a number of parties opposed to the CPP. The UGCC was now defunct, and Danquah’s political eclipse was all but complete. The Gold Coast would gain independence as Ghana on March 6, 1957, roughly within the Watson’s Commission’s ten-year probationary period and within “the shortest possible time” the UGCC had set as its goal in 1947.

Danquah’s nationalism extended beyond politics. A prolific scholar, his intellectual and political thought and his politics were, in fact, different sides of the same coin. Like Sarbah and Casely-Hayford before him, Danquah was a cultural nationalist; a man of the Enlightenment who was unapologetically African and well at ease with himself, blending what was best in his two worlds of tradition and modernity. Indeed the point of his many scholarly projects and writings, such as Akan Laws and Customs, Cases in Akan Law, and The Akan Doctrine of God, was to counter and refute European denigration of African (Gold Coast) cultural beliefs and institutions as incoherent, irrational, morally inferior, or else unusable for modern social or political organization. His political insistence on an appropriate role for chiefs in our modern secular government sprang logically from his exceptionally well informed cultural nationalism.

Danquah did not originate or invent the “Ghana myth”—the thesis that the ancient Sahelian empire of Ghana was the ancestral or genealogical home of the peoples of the Gold Coast. But he was of that school of thought and became a leading proponent of the Ghana thesis. It was he who proposed and popularized GHANA as the appropriate name to call a free and sovereign ‘Gold Coast’. He is also credited with playing an influential role in the founding of the University College of the Gold Coast (now University of Ghana). The Elliot Commission had recommended the establishment of one university for the entire British West Africa to be sited at Ibadan, Nigeria. Danquah opposed this idea and sent a memorandum to the Colonial Secretary in which he made the case for a country-specific or national university. His protest and proposal, which received strong support from the Joint Provincial Council, caused the British Government to change its mind and agree to the establishment of the University College of the Gold Coast in 1948.

Danquah’s long and illustrious political biography has tended to overshadow his equally distinguished career as a lawyer. In the years after independence, he was elected vice president and, later, president of the Ghana Bar Association. His selection by the judiciary as Editor of the Ghana Law Reports in 1963 was countermanded by then President Nkrumah, and he consequently resigned the post. As a lawyer, Danquah is best known, perhaps, as the fearless advocate of liberty and constitutionalism who fought Nkrumah’s Preventive Detention Act in the courts of Ghana, culminating in the famous Re Akoto case in the Supreme Court of Ghana. Danquah faced off in that case against Nkrumah’s Irish-born Attorney General, Geoffrey Bing. Rejecting Danquah’s submissions, the Supreme Court held in that case that, under the Preventive Detention Act, 1958, whether the charge in the “Grounds for Detention” against a detainee was true or false, the courts of Ghana, including the Supreme Court, had no jurisdiction to go into the truth or falsity of the charge. The Court further held that, nothing in the 1960 Constitution of Ghana prevented or constrained Parliament from enacting the Preventive Detention Act or the President from ordering a person detained without charge or trial, pursuant to that law. Although Danquah predictably lost that case and would himself fall victim twice to the Preventive Detention Act (the second time fatally), the lesson of Re Akoto has been enshrined in every new constitution of Ghana since then—in the form of an entrenched Bill of Rights, imposing justiciable procedural and substantive limitations on legislative and executive power, and independent superior courts with jurisdiction to entertain actions challenging the legality or constitutionality of legislation or presidential action and order appropriate relief.

Joe Appiah, one-time President of W.A.S.U. and a politicall maverick and contemporary of Nkrumah, delivering the Danquah Memorial Lecture of the Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1974, called Dr. J.B. Danquah “the first star to have illuminated the political night sky of our country in the immediate past.” Here is an extended excerpt from Appiah’s lecture: “[Danquah] trusted his friends absolutely—even in politics—and suffered for it. It was this which led “J.B.” into accepting too readily the services of Nkrumah—a man he had never met—as secretary-general of the U.G.C.C. merely on the suggestion of one with whom he was only recently acquainted. His capacity for work was amazing and his love of our country and its rich culture infectious. When I first met him in the flesh I dispelled a lot of impressions that his feudal background suggested to one like me who had fallen victim to the socialist craze of the times. . . . His personal wants were few and love of money simply nonexistent. This was the man who in August 1947, at Saltpond, had galvanized an entire nation with his ‘moment of decision’ speech on the birth of the United Gold Coast Convention, from which later sprang the C.P.P.”

Appiah continues: “Why did J.B. fail to capture the coveted prize which he so richly deserved and for which he was so eminently fitted? Was it his destiny that he should sow the seeds so others might reap the harvest? The fault was in J.B. himself and not in his stars. First, he was an ardent constitutionalist in politics and, consequently, a gradualist at a time when colonialism required sustained and incisive blows as demanded by the youth. Second, he did not recognize the need to learn to take advantage of political opportunities as and when they came his way. Third, J.B. failed to understand the true political temper of the times; he was over-cautions, legalistic though fearless. Fourth, he did not learn to wield effectively the immense intellectual and moral power at his command; political opportunism was anathema to him. Fifth, J.B. would not woo the masses with the magic of words—“scintillating nonsense,” as he himself described it. His was always the zeal for reason—anything else seemed a coronation of anarchy. He failed [to capture the coveted prize] because J.B. was first and last a statesman but never a politician. . . . It is to Ghana’s eternal shame that the fighter for freedom who fought on to his death in 1965 has had no funeral rites performed for him as yet.”

The story of the political and constitutional evolution of the Gold Coast from colony to independent Ghana spans several generations and epochs. While each epoch produced multiple actors and players of note, a few individuals often emerged or stood out as the intellectual-civic-political giants of their generation, capturing, symbolizing, representing, advocating, and leading in forms appropriate to the times, the aspirations and interests of the people for freedom and emancipation. John Mensa Sarbah and J.E. Casely Hayford were such individuals in their days. Danquah was, too, in his. And Nkrumah, after him. Even in their times, each had collaborators, allies, and sometimes rivals, yet all were devoted to the same goal. The transitions from Sarbah to Casely Hayford to Danquah were generally seamless; the mantle of leadership passed from one to the other upon the death of the former. This was not the case with Danquah and Nkrumah. The transition was messy, because this time the mantle did not pass the “natural” way; it was wrestled away. And understandably so. This was a different era than all the ones before. This was the beginning of the era of party politics and party rivalries in Ghana. In this, the winner has tended to take it all—and, tragically for our history, that “all” has included the authorship of and allocation of bragging rights in our history and, especially, in our founding narrative. Danquah’s marginalization and shoddy treatment in our “popular history” is one of the most tragic consequences of our toxic winner-takes-all political tradition. The truth, nonetheless, must stand: Dr. J.B. Danquah stands tall as a towering figure in our nation's founding; peerless in his time, as in the integrity and selflessness of his commitment to the cause of Ghana's freedom. We cannot repay the debt we owe him. But we must not neglect to acknowledge our exceptional indebtedness to him.

© H. Kwasi Prempeh. 2014

Sources: (1). David Kimble, A Political History of Ghana 1850-1928. (2) Dennis Austin, Politics in Ghana 1946-1960. (3) Martin Wight, The Gold Coast Legislative Council. (4) David Apter, Ghana in Transition. (5) Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah. (6) Bankole Timothy, Kwame Nkrumah: From Cradle to Grave. (7) Joe Appiah, The Autobiography of an African Patriot. (8) Nnamdi Azikiwe, My Odyssey. (9) K. Kesse-Adu, The Politics of Political Detention. (10) Magnus Sampson, Gold Coast Men of Affairs (Introduction by J.B. Danquah). (11) Stephanie Newell, Literary Culture in Colonial Ghana. (12) K. Donkoh Fordwor: The Danquah-Busia Tradition in the Politics of Ghana. (13) J.B. Danquah, Akan Laws and Customs. (14) J.B. Danquah, Cases in Akan Law. (15) Edwin W. Smith, Aggrey of Ghana. (16) Tawia Adamafio, By Nkrumah’s Side. (17) Report of the Commission of Enquiry into Disturbances in the Gold Coast 1948 (the “Watson Commission Report”); (18) Report to His Excellency the Governor by the Committee on Constitutional Reform 1949 (the “Coussey Committee Report”). (19) Geoffrey Bing, Reap the Whirlwind: An Account of Nkrumah's Ghana from 1950 to 1966; (20) T. Peter Omari, Kwame Nkrumah: The Anatomy of an African Dictatorship; (21) Yaw Twumasi, "J.B. Danquah: Towards an Understanding of the Social and Political Ideas of a Ghanaian Nationalist and Politician," African Affairs.

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