History Has Absolved Me! (1)

The words were thrown “away” at me; like some unimportant information which is idly tossed into a conversation by an interlocutor who has no real interest in what he’s Saying. These were the words: “have you read Joe Appiah’s autobiography?”

Answer: “No! Why do you ask?” “Because he writes that when Acheampong overthrew Busia and appointed him, Joe Appiah, as an Ambassador Extraordinary, Acheampiong gave him a copy of a letter he had found in the papers Busia had left in his desk before travelling to the UK.”

“Oh! What was in the letter?” “It was a letter from the South African Prime Minister, Mr Vorster. It thanked Dr Busia for the help he had been giving Vorster in his campaign to recruit African Governments to accept his (Vorster’s) invitation to carry out “DIALOGUE” with Vorster’s Government, in order to persuade the black population of South Africa to stop their armed struggle against the apartheid regime!” “You must be joking?”

“No! It is there in the book! Joe Appiah says it was a shock to him to find that Dr Busia, a man they in the opposition against Kwame N~krumah respected so much because of his learning, could stoop so low as to assist Vorster in his campaign to fool black African Governments into undermining the struggle of their own black brothers, against the racial discrimination and oppression which Vorster’s Government was practising against South Africa’s black population.” I was struck dumb by this information. I needed to et Joe Appiah’s book as early as yesterday! “What is the title?” I asked. ‘It is T HE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF AN AFRICAN PATRIOT”, the guy said.

I saved the title in the back recesses of my mind. First bookshop I saw, it would be my most important purchase. I felt slightly angry that General Kutu Acheamping had not shown je Vrster’s letter but had rather given it to Joe Appiah. That was because I’d had a raging quarrel, in 1970, with Dr Busia about his “dialogue-with-South-Africa” policy.

My opposition to that policy, expressed in the pages of the newspaper I edited at the Time, the DAILY GRAPHIC, had caused me my job as Editor! Naturally, when Col. Acheampong (as he then was) overthrew Busia on 13 January 1972, I had approved of his Action, for I knew he would change Ghana’s foreign policy without any doubt.

And indeed, when Acheampong followed up his coup with a brave announcement that Ghana would repudiate its debts to the Western countries, because many of the debts were “tainted with bribery and corruption”, I went on Radio Ghana and broadcast a news commentary in which I used the term, “YENNTUA!”, which immediately became the rallying cry of the supporters of Acheampong’s new regime.

He had welcomed me to his house after my YENNTUA broadcast, and, in fact, I met Joe Appiah there.

Joe suggested, seriously, although I thought at the time that it was in jest, that I should ‘GO BACK TO BATAAN!’

Now, ‘Back to Bataan’ was a cinema-inspired expression I had used as the main headline on the front page of the Daily Graphic, after some trawlers belonging to the Ghana Fishing Corporation, were sold to a British businessman, who sold them, at a nice profit, to the Brazilian Government.

In editorials in the Graphic, I questioned the logic of selling our trawlers to the Braziians, while we needed fish as much as the Brazilians did, had caused the Government to recall the trawlers from the high seas, back to Ghana!

I had dramatically gone in a dingy boat to meet the Ghana Navy warship that was escorting the trawlers back to Tema. The next day’s Graphic showed a photograph of me in the dingy, under the banner headline, “BACK TO BATAAN!”

Joe Appiah was now using the memorable headline to convene a political message to me.