The Prison Letters of Dr. J. B. Danquah ed. by B. G. Jallow

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Prison Letters of Dr. J. B. Danquah ed. by B. G. Jallow Hassoum Ceesay B. G. Jallow, ed., The Prison Letters of Dr. J. B. Danquah. Timbooktoo, 2020. + xii 150 pages. Baba Galleh Jallow's The Prison Letters of Dr. J. B. Danquah is quite narrow in scope. It details the two periods of detention of Joseph Boakye (J. B.) Danquah under Kwame Nkrumah's Preventive Detention Act of 1958 (PDA): from October 1961 to June 1962, and from January 1964 to his death in Nsawam Prison in February 1965. While much has been written about Danquah, the "architect of modern Ghana," (p. 3) and there are annual memorial lectures dedicated to his name and even calls for the University of Ghana to be named after him, Jallow's book is the first comprehensive compilation of the numerous letters and memorials Danquah wrote from prison to his erstwhile colleague and political opponent, President Kwame Nkrumah, asking for clemency. Danquah's letters give a graphic description not only of the mass arrests, but also of the brutal conditions that awaited detainees in prison, including chaining, deprivation of food and medical attention, and verbal assaults from wardens (Jallow, 2020, pp. 84–94). The book contains nine letters, each constituting a chapter. Three were written between October 1961 and June 1962 at Ussher Fort Prison, when Danquah suffered his first imprisonment, and the remaining letters were sent out from the Special Block at Nsawam Prison, where he was detained for thirteen months until his death on February 4, 1965. For each chapter title, the author cleverly adapted a line from the letter which best summarized its content. In Chapter 1, titled "What grounds for detention?" and dated October 13, 1961, Danquah rejects the reasons advanced by the CPP Press for his detention: that he had organized meetings with Ismaila Annan and Atta Bordor to "design subversion" and "did act in a manner calculated to endanger the security of the state and cause the overthrow of the Government of Ghana by unlawful means" (p. 5). The letters encapsulate the heavy dose of anger that swelled in the lawyer and nationalist's chest as he explained to Nkrumah that his Order of Detention "was not made in Good [sic] faith." He also chided the Ghanaian leader for making "reckless use of the PDA, 1958, (thereby) making our country the laughing stock of the world and reduces our age to an abject condition in the eyes of history" (p. 7). Danquah ended the letter by assuring "for its falsity, and for its bad faith, the Order of Detention is illegal and I therefore respectfully [End Page 112] ask you Mr. president [sic] to release me from detention . . ." In reading some of these early letters in Jallow's collection, it becomes clear that this is not the tone of a prisoner desperate for release. However, as his detention dragged on into weeks and months, Danquah began to soften his words. This desperation is obvious in chapters two to six. Defiance and audacity turned to self-pity and surrender. In the letters that compose these chapters, Danquah conjured up the image of a sickly old man afflicted with hypertension, diabetes, and asthma ready to leave politics and retire to his Yiadom Chambers (p. 85). Indeed, from the chapter eight letter dated January 8, 1965, it is obvious that Danquah had a macabre premonition that he would not come out of Nsawam Prison alive. In the middle of the forty-paragraph letter, he remarked to Nkrumah that he wanted "my heirs and successors to take up claims for (damages of 8000 Pounds) against the Government of Ghana in the event of my death" (p. 130). Several issues arise from Danquah's prison correspondence. First, he lacked empathy. Nowhere did the Akan noble aspire to understand the urgent danger to Nkrumah's life and, by extension, the threat to the peace and stability of Ghana exposed by the deteriorating security situation in the country—which was caused by attempted coup leaders, assassins, bomb throwers, and neocolonial powers eager to see the fall of Nkrumah. Second, he was eager to downplay Nkrumah's role as Ghana's founding...