How Kwame Nkrumah’s 80-year-old blind mother was forced to testify that he was not a Ghanaian

In his book, Dark Days in Ghana, the first president of Ghana, Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, details the hardships his family endured following the coup by the National Liberation Council on February 24, 1966.

Kwame Nkrumah, who spent all of his post-coup period outside Ghana, highlighted how his family was targeted and victimized by the military regime that replaced him.

Kwame Nkrumah noted that his mother, who was 80 years old and visually challenged at the time, was forced out of the Flagstaff House under inhumane circumstances.

Nkrumah also noted that the regime ‘forced’ his mother to make an appearance before a Commission of Inquiry to confess that she was not the biological mother of Kwame Nkrumah and that he was not a Ghanaian.

Kwame Nkrumah paid special tribute to his mother for not allowing herself to be used as an instrument of historical distortion by the regime.

“My mother, 80 years old and almost blind, who was staying at Flagstaff House, was forcibly ejected and told to go ‘where you belong.’ I understand some friends took her to Nkroful where I was born. Later, the actual house in which I was born was burnt down on ‘N.L.C.’ orders.

“My mother was forced to appear before a ‘commission of enquiry’ with the idea of making her admit that I was not her son and indeed was not a Ghanaian at all. I am proud to know that she resolutely refused to say anything of the sort and conducted herself with the utmost dignity,” Nkrumah said on page 25 of the book.

Nkrumah also detailed how his wife, Fathia Nkrumah, and children were forced out of their house and sought refuge at the Egyptian Embassy.

“In the six-roomed two-storey house where I lived with my family, troops were allowed to run riot, seizing clothes and other intimate personal possessions including rare old books and manuscripts.

“My wife and children, although not physically harmed, were not permitted to take a single thing with them when they were turned out of the house and forced to take refuge in the Egyptian Embassy,” he said.