Pan-African Postcard

THE PASSING OF NKRUMAH'S WIDOW

Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem

The widow of Kwame Nkrumah, Madam Fatiha, passed away last week in
Cairo, her home town, where she had been living for most of the years
since Nkrumah's over throw in February 1966.

As to be expected all kinds of tributes have been pouring out from
all kinds of corners including people and institutions who have never
really cared what became of her and her three children (Gamal, Sekou
and Samia) since Nkrumah died. Many of these conspicuous mourners did
not even realize that Madam Fatiha was still alive all these years.

The worst of these hypocrites is always government. Those in power
have the power, if the will was there to have honoured Madam Fatima,
recognized her and provided for her and her family. But shamelessly
successive Ghanaian governments, at best pursued a policy of benign
neglect or even outright hostility or opportunistic association and
gestures towards the family. This is not because Madam Fatiha has
lived outside of Ghana because the same treatment was experienced by
the oldest of the children,, Dr Francis Nkrumah (the first son of
Nkrumah , from his Ghanaian first wife) or Sekou (Fatiha's second
son) who both live in Accra. This shameful conduct included
governments and regimes that claim to be political heirs of Nkrumah.

The government of Ghana immediately announced that it will provide a
state funeral befitting a former first lady of Ghana (indeed the very
first!) but of what benefit is this post humus honour when she was
neglected while she was alive? It is part of that African hypocrisy
that suddenly transforms a dead person into the friend of everyone
around with no body willing to say anything negative about the
departed. Some of this is actually due to guilt. We tend to over
compensate by making all kinds of commitments and all manner of
gestures immediately after the death of someone close or public
figures. However the guilt soon subsides and life continues very much
as before with the loved ones left behind to pick up the pieces, as
they must. Tears of some of the politically correct mourners go dry
as soon as the TV cameras are turned off.

The way we treat the family of our national and Pan Africanist heroes
cannot inspire commitment and confidence that devotion to Africa
meant anything. As with all committed, genuinely committed (not the
convenient foot lose opportunists that are so common these days),
their families suffer: absent fathers and husbands. The children grow
up feeling victimized by 'struggle' and after the hero have gone or
is no longer in power the family might as well have been dead.

Nkrumah, even his worst critics, will agree, was completely devoted
to the cause of liberating Africa. It was not for him building of
personal mansions or having secret accounts all over the world. The
struggle was everything. Madam Fatiha was much younger than the
Osagyefo when he married her in a matrimonial union that typified
Nkrumah's refusal to accept the Saharan divide of Africa. The three
children they had together were all toddlers when Nkrumah was
overthrown, and they were only young teenagers when Nkrumah passed
away in 1972. Fatiha herself was barely in her mid 30s. No husband,
no father and no state provisions the family had to survive on good
will sometimes of kind strangers who never met Nkrumah but treasured
his contribution to our liberation. They could not live in Ghana but
thanks to President Gamal Abdul Nasser (after whom Fatiha's first
son, Gamal Gorkeh, was named) the family had been given a befitting
home by the banks of the Nile. That house progressively became
damaged due to lack of maintenance support since the family could not
afford to maintain such a modest stately building.

The Ghana for which Nkrumah laboured and the Africa he toiled for
simply ignored his family.

It is an insult to now be shedding crocodile tears at the passing of
his widow. It is an insult to the family to be offering state funeral
to a person that was largely ignored in her life by the same state
that is now leading the mourning. The same Ghanaian state showed
similar hypocrisy when Nkrumah passed away in exile in Conakry and
demanded and later brought Nkrumah's body to Ghana for State
reburial! The embalmed body was for many years left to deteriorate in
his village of Nkroful before shame and political expediency and
influence of Nkrumahists in his administration forced Rawlings to
accept a Mausoleum for Nkrumah in central Accra. Even then most of
the money came from Gaddafi!

The spirit of Nkrumah continues to wonder and I hope it continues to
haunt all the opportunists, ideological parasites and political
saprophytes who continue to use Nkrumah's name in vain. It should
shame us into honouring our heroes and heroines both in life and in
death especially the widow and children they leave behind. Ask
yourself how many more widows like Madam Fatiha are abandoned to
penury across Africa? This bitter experience is even making many of
our corrupt leaders to believe that whatever the volume of our assets
they are looting now is a kind of insurance for their family against
an uncertain future.

In this fiftieth year of Ghana's independence and the inspiration for
the independence of the rest of Africa we should assuage Nkrumah's
wondering spirit by doing right by his family, not by state burial to
his widow but by Ghana's government first repaying back all the
entitlements due to them by way of gratuity to their father,
refurbishing and handing over their family home in Accra and setting
up a proper trustee body to look after, maintain and supervise the
Nkrumah Musoleum in Accra. Then the rest of us can honour Nkrumah the
best way we can. But Ghana has to lead in atoning for these wrongs.

* Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem is the deputy director of the UN Millennium
Campaign in Africa, based in Nairobi, Kenya. He writes this article
in his personal capacity as a concerned pan-Africanist.

* Please send comments to [log in to unmask] or comment online at
http://www.pambazuka.org

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