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Obituary: JJ Rawlings (1947-2020) Part 1
Nov 24, 2020
JJ Rawlings
On May 16, 1979, I was in Copenhagen, Denmark, visiting Scandinavia when I went into a news-stand and bought a copy of the New York Herald Tribune – one of the few English-language newspapers that regularly carried news about Africa and which I therefore never failed to peruse when I was abroad.
On an inside page of the paper, I saw a one-paragraph story reporting that “an Air Force officer” had been arrested in Ghana for attempting to overthrow the military government of General F W K Akuffo.
I was extremely disturbed, for I was a member of a Constituent Assembly that had spent months writing a new constitution, under which Ghana was to be returned to civilian rule. What was going on in Ghana? I wondered.
So off to the Ghana Embassy in Copenhagen I went. Fortunately, I knew the Ambassador there – Mr Frank Boateng, who, at an earlier time, had been Secretary to an organisation – one of the many formed by the Nkrumah Government and some of its allies – whose name WAS “World Without The Bomb”. Whenever I had met Frank in those days, I had – in sheer mischief – changed his organisation’s name to “Bomb Without The World!” Frank had a good sense of humour, and so he used to laugh and say, “You’re a bad boy!”
So I had no hesitation in approaching him for information. Unfortunately, he had very little knowledge of what was happening in Accra.
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