What a shame indeed and what hypocrisy.

J.Joh


 


 

-----Original Message-----
From: Kabir Njaay <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: Fri, 8 Jun 2007 2:31 pm
Subject: Fwd: Pan-African Postcard - THE PASSING OF NKRUMAH'S WIDOW









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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