After serving as vice president since 2009. John Dramani Mahama became president of Ghana in July, following the death of President John Atta Mills in May. A general election is set for December. Mahama’s recently-published memoir, My First Coup D’Etat tells the story of his childhood and adolescence in Ghana during 1960s and 70s. The book has received widespread praise, including from novelist and poet Chinua Achebe who described it as “A much welcome work of immense relevance.” The Financial Times singled out Mahama’s ability to weave “small slices of history and culture into a family narrative so rich in colour it at times feels like magical realism.” Here Mahama remembers when as a young boy, he heard rumours of a military coup and went in search of his politician father.
It happened on February 24, 1966. I was seven years old, a class 2 pupil in the primary division of Achimota, an elite boarding school in Accra, Ghana’s capital. That day there was a lot of commotion; teachers rushed about in a noticeably scattered fashion and huddled in corners whispering. It did not take long for the news to spread, first through the upper school’s student body, then down to the younger pupils.
The words I heard people speaking that day seemed to hold a certain air of mystery and urgency, especially the phrase coup d’ état, which was being repeated like a mantra. I had never heard it before. Yet I knew, without having to be told, that it did not belong to any of the six languages I spoke: not Gonja, not Twi, not Hausa, Dagbani, or Ga; not even English. To my child’s ear, the phrase sounded exciting, like a game that all the upper-form students would soon be playing; and from the moment I first heard it—coup d’état—I wished I could learn how to play this new game as well.
The day after the coup, once the initial flurry of fear and excitement had passed, our teachers explained that it wasn’t a game after all; the phrase coup d’état apparently meant the government had been overthrown. Even in plain English the concept seemed nonsensical to me. How can you overthrow an entire government? And what exactly are you throwing it over?
Days passed. The news became more precise and I began to piece bits of information together. While our president, Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, was on an official visit to North Vietnam, the military had seized control of Ghana.
Dr. Nkrumah was Ghana’s first president, and he was a true visionary. At the time it was fairly commonplace for Ghanaian intellectuals to travel to Europe to complete their education and receive their advanced degrees. Dr. Nkrumah opted instead to attend institutions in the United States, receiving his undergraduate degree at Lincoln University and graduate degrees at the University of Pennsylvania.
Dr. Nkrumah’s return to Ghana upon the completion of his studies added more steam to the struggle for independence. He, along with Dr. J. B. Danquah, Dr. Ebenezer Ako-Adjei, Mr. Edward Akufo-Addo, Mr. William Ofori-Atta, and Mr. Emmanuel Obetsebi-Lamptey, became affectionately known as “the Big Six” for their frontline role in the fight against British colonialism. They were victorious in that fight, and on March 6, 1957, the British colony called Gold Coast became Ghana, an independent self-ruled nation. As a result, Ghana was and still is the country heralded as the trailblazer of the African liberation movement.
Ghana’s freedom sparked a chain reaction in sub-Saharan Africa, with at least sixteen nations becoming independent in 1960 alone. Dr. Nkrumah, who was a leading Pan-Africanist and also one of the founding fathers of the Organisation of African Unity, which in 2002 became the African Union, was a dynamic and controversial figure with a far-reaching vision for Ghana and for Africa. He was revered by many, but there were some who either did not share that vision or did not approve of his methods for making it a reality. The transition from having been a colony to becoming a country had been relatively smooth for Ghana, especially when compared with other fledgling nations that were rife with rebellion. Conditions did not seem at all ripe for a coup, not in Ghana. Three years prior, there had been a coup in the neighbouring country of Togo, during which the president, Sylvanus Olympio, was assassinated. That was the first major coup of its sort in contemporary Africa, and it left the continent shaken. Still, the political climate in Ghana was not as hostile as it had been in Togo, and Ghanaian citizens seemed less inclined toward violence; this is why our first coup d’ état was such a shock to everyone.
At Achimota we heard that all the ministers of state had been arrested. This particular titbit of information gave me pause because my father was a minister of state. Even so, I don’t think I was able to fully absorb all the implications. Not then. Perhaps it was because I had not received word from my family that anything was wrong. Or it might have been because I felt, as children so often do, that my family and I were somehow shielded, automatically exempt from anything tragic. The coup d’état became real to me, an event that constituted more than just words, in early April when my school vacated for the Easter holidays and nobody came to pick me up. I watched as all the other children left with their relations. Room after room of each dormitory was emptied of its occupants until mine were the only footsteps in the halls. And still, no one came.
At Achimota, there was an adult, a maternal figure of sorts, assigned to each dormitory in the primary school. We called them aunties. Each auntie generally had about ten small boys in her charge. The aunties looked after us. They made sure we woke up on time, had our baths, ate our breakfasts, and were not late to our studies. They saw to our overall well-being.
That night I slept at school by myself, the only child. My auntie, a stereotypical schoolmarm, was also in the dormitory. The next morning, my auntie took me to the headmistress and sought permission to leave the school grounds with me. She wanted to try to locate my house so that she could take me to my family or, more accurately, to my father and siblings. When my father took his first government post, as a member of Parliament and then as a minister of state, my mother did not relocate south to the capital with him. She remained in his family home in the town of Bole, which is in the northern region of Ghana, roughly six hundred kilometres from Accra. The arrangement whereby they were separated for the purposes of his employment was not uncommon then, nor is it now.
My auntie was granted permission for us to leave. We took a taxi from the Achimota campus to Kanda, the section of Accra in which my father’s house was located. Back then, Kanda was a solidly upper-middle-class enclave, populated primarily with ministers of state and members of Parliament.
Almost immediately after we left Achimota, I began noticing plenty of military vehicles, each packed full of men. Never had I seen that many soldiers in town, and all of them were armed. It was simply unheard of. In those days, a “soldier sighting” right in the middle of town was so rare that it made you stop in your tracks. Soldiers generally stayed in the barracks, their self-contained city within a city.
I’d been to the barracks before. They were located in Burma Camp, the main military base in Accra. My elder sister Rose lived there with her husband, a captain in the army. Our father would occasionally take some of us children to Burma Camp to spend time with our big sister. Rose, who was statuesque and as pretty as a cinema star, worked as a stewardess for Ghana Airways. She travelled often, so being able to see her was always a treat.
Somehow, driving through Accra with my auntie felt like driving through the barracks, which reminded me of those visits to Rose with our father, which in turn made me all the more homesick. As the taxi approached my home, I noticed that the house and the area immediately surrounding it was filled with police officers and soldiers. They had even erected tents in which they seemed to have taken up residence. The taxi stopped and my auntie got out. I followed sheepishly, my tiny fingers barely resting in the palm of the hand that she held out to me.
My auntie greeted the soldier who appeared to be in charge. Her tone was official and respectful. Not warm, but also not stern. It was the sort of voice she would use to speak with the parents of a badly behaved student.
“We are in search of Honourable E. A. Mahama,” she said, using the honorific associated with my father’s political position. The soldier looked at us through bloodshot eyes. His presence was imposing, a tad threatening. He sucked his teeth and then hesitated, as though he was contemplating whether or not we were even worthy of a response. When he finally did speak, his tone was gruff, especially in contrast with my auntie’s.
“He no longer lives here.”
My auntie did not need to hear any more. She knew the information would not be good. She closed her fingers around my hand, tightening her grip, then turned on her heels and rushed away. We marched hastily to the taxi, which had been waiting for us, and we got in. The driver, who had witnessed my auntie’s interaction with the soldier and sensed the possibility of danger, quickly spun the vehicle around. As he did that, I too spun around so my body was no longer facing forward. I knelt on the seat, leaned my chin and elbows against the top of its backrest, and stared out the rear window, wondering if I would ever see our home again, if I would ever see my father again.
I did not cry that day; but in the days, weeks, and months that followed there were numerous times when I would remember it all—the makeshift tents, the soldier’s bloodshot eyes, his weapon, the dirt and dust rising from the tyres and filling the air as the taxi drove me away into a cloud of uncertainty. I would remember, and I would weep.
“Where do you think your family might be?” my auntie and the headmistress asked me the morning after our fruitless attempt to find my father. It was a harrowing question, one that I was ill prepared, at seven years old, to contemplate, let alone answer.
“Do you have any aunties or sisters who might come for you?” I suppose because my mother was so far away, they never stopped to consider the possibility of her coming to collect me. At that time, the northern region of Ghana seemed like an entirely different country. It was the hinterland. Even I could not envision my mother making her way to Accra to find me, not without my father sending his driver, Mallam, for her.
For a moment, my mind went blank and all I could do was panic. What if there was no one left to come for me? What would I do? Where would I go? I’d barely had an opportunity to entertain the fear that had begun to slowly engulf me when all the details of what, before the coup d’état, had once been my life suddenly came rushing back to me.
“Oh,” I said, my eyes widening with the renewed sense of self. It was the first time since the day of the coup that I’d displayed anything resembling confidence or certainty. “I have a sister!” I went on to tell my auntie and the headmistress about Rose in Burma Camp. Using the telephone directory, they were able to track down Rose, who thankfully was in town and immediately came to pick me up.
Even as I waited for Rose to come for me, despite the frantic efforts of my auntie and the headmistress to find my father, we still had not received any word of his whereabouts. My auntie and the headmistress tried as best they could, with smiles and toffee, to shield me from their rising anxiety, but I could feel it bouncing off the quick sideways glances they shot each other and taking flight like some dark, winged creature on the breath of their long, exhausted exhales. It was rumoured that people had been executed. I knew the headmistress and my auntie were worried my father might have been among them. I was worried, too. It was at Rose’s that I discovered our father was not dead; he had been detained the day after the coup. My other siblings had been picked up by their mothers and various other relatives and were now scattered all throughout the country. It would be quite a while before I would see them again, but when I did, they told me what happened on the day of the coup and immediately after.
The military had taken over the Flagstaff House, which was the official residence of Dr. Nkrumah, and then they had gone on to take over the broadcasting station. It was announced over the airwaves that there had been a coup d’état. All the ministers of state, members of Parliament, district commissioners, chairmen, and secretaries of the ruling political party, as well as a long list of other people of interest, were requested to report to the nearest police station for “their own safety.” Dad gathered a few things, got in his car, and drove to the police station, where he was sent into interrogation and then, much to everyone’s surprise, placed into custody. After a night in custody at the police station, he was transported to Ussher Fort, one of the various slave forts that were built in the mid 1600s by the Dutch colonists, which was now being used as a prison.
The National Liberation Council, the name of the governing body that was instituted by the military officials who’d staged the coup, had set up a Commission of Inquiry to investigate members of Dr. Nkrumah’s government, ostensibly for the purpose of uncovering activities, acquisitions, and alliances that could be deemed inappropriate and therefore punishable. My father and his political colleagues who had also been detained were made to report to the commission repeatedly for questioning. Once the commission had obtained all the information it needed to conclude its investigations and present a report, those individuals were either released or recommended for legal action.
As coup d’états go, that first one which took place in Ghana was swift and unexpected. It is sometimes incorrectly referred to in texts as a bloodless coup, yet it was anything but. The night after the coup while my eldest brother, Peter, was being taken to his mother’s house, the taxi in which he was riding was made to stop at the Flagstaff House. Once there, the military officer posted at the entrance ordered Peter and the other children in the taxi to close their eyes while he interrogated the driver. They did as they were told, but not before Peter had caught a glimpse of the courtyard in front of the Flagstaff House, which, he later told me, was filled with rows and rows of dead bodies. It is an image that Peter, who was only ten years old at the time, has never been able to forget.
My father remained in detention, a prisoner of politics, for well over a year. Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, who’d never been able to return home after what was intended to be a brief official visit abroad, remained in exile until his death in 1972. When I was not in school at Achimota, I lived with Rose and her husband at Burma Camp. Though I loved my sister and did not associate either her or her husband with what had happened to my father, the irony of my having nowhere else to live except the military barracks because of my father’s detention after a military coup was not at all lost on me. But what could I do? What could any of us do?
By the time my father was released from prison, Ghana was a much different country. Not surprisingly, I was a much different boy, the course of my future having already been irreversibly impacted by that unspeakable period of violence.
