Founder’s Day Debate: It’s absolute ‘rubbish’ to attempt to downplay Nkrumah’s legacy - AUCC lecturer

A senior lecturer at the African University College of Communications (AUCC), Sandy Nana Achampong says it is absolute rubbish for players from the two main Ghanaian political traditions, to make attempts to alter historical facts, and that Dr Kwame Nkrumah’s legacy can’t be downplayed, especially in the Founder’s Day conversation.

Speaking to primenewsghana.com on the importance of celebrating September 21 as Nkrumah Memorial Day, Nana Achampong, who is the head of the Ama Ata Aidoo Center for Creative Writing (AUCC) and an anthologist argued that no matter the attempts by political actors to twist facts to suit their whims, will not stand the test of time, because facts will always prevail. 

He said: “For a moment you can fool the people, but eventually the facts will prevail. Even if it’s re-written, there will be a time when the right facts will prevail. Fortunately people are researching, people are reading, people are publishing. So it’s just a matter of time, and a canon of Ghanaian history would be made available.”

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In response to whether writers and academics have a role to play in setting the records straight in the conversation over who founded Ghana, the lecturer said:

“For the good citizen, the role is to defend the facts as has been put down. Initially, the idea of the independence of Ghana has been a fact that has been there for the past ’50 how many years?’. It’s been endorsed by historians. It’s been celebrated by politicians of all sides. It’s been sang about, written about by various Ghanaian literati. It’s only recently that the revisionist approach has been taken towards changing it, and it’s obviously political. You know the Ghanaian tradition of PP and CPP.”

He added that the role of the good citizen in preserving and promoting historical facts were the same as the writer’s saying:

“It’s absolutely ‘rubbish’ for them to change anything but the attempt was made. So the role of the writer is the same role that the good citizen must have; it’s to always speak against falsehoods when they spring up no matter from what quarters they come; it’s always to preserve and promote facts as sacred, so that we can have our opinions about how things happened. But the fact that they happened we should not fight about and politics has absolutely no way and no space in deciding what history is all about.”

Nana Achampong, who has recently published ‘Larabanga: Stories from the Savanna’, and ‘Adabraka’, which are both anthologies stressed that Kwame Nkrumah’s contribution to Ghana’s history and development as a nation cannot be brushed aside easily. 

He said: “There have been too many attempts at revising history. No matter what you do, Nkrumah’s legacy can’t be downplayed.”

During the week, the government announced that Monday, September 23, 2019, would be a holiday to honour the occasion of the Nkrumah Memorial Day.

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