Nkrumah's wife: A tribute
By
Adigun Orunmila
I WAS attracted to the news
report in the African news section of The Guardian of Thursday, June
14, 2007 titled: "Ghana buries Nkrumah's wife". I observed that the
report-barely one column three inches deep - is disappointingly too
terse for the personality involved. Besides, the report even though
a news item of burial, is buried too deep in the belly of the
newspaper that only a special interest eye could catch it. One had
thought that a personality of Madam Fathia's calibre whom the report
had acknowledged as wife of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, the Osagyefo and
Ghana's first Prime Minister and President, deserved much more ink
from the reporter and much more space of the newspaper.
A very quiet and retiring person who was invariably withdrawn to
the background of her husband's celebrated public life, not much is
known about Mrs. Nkrumah. We, however, recall that she was the
charming Egyptian lady whom friends and political associates of Dr.
Nkrumah provided to demystify some of the myths that had been woven
around the person of the Osagyefo in the late 1950s.
Nkrumah, it would be recalled at the pinnacle of his political
glory in the late 1950s, remained unmarried. He had been a professor
of African History at Lincoln University. He was an accomplished
politician and everything the pride of Africa and the black race.
When he formed his Convention Peoples Party and led his former Gold
Coast country to independence and emerged as its first Prime
Minister in March 1957, Nkrumah literally transformed into a deity
for many people actually worshipped him as a god.
One aspect of Nkrumah's life, however, confounding to the general
public, was his marital status. Many people could not explain and
indeed to Nkrumah's friends and associates, the oddity of his
bachelorhood was increasingly becoming too embarrassing for them to
continue to tolerate.
It was not that Ghanaian women were not falling over themselves
to woo the President. Nor that the latter was a misogynist on any
account. In fact, the contrary was the case, as Genoveva Kanu
testified in Nkrumah the Man. Veva - the sophisticated beauty from
South Africa, one of the few who rejected Nkrumah's cupid proposal
but who remained his loyal friend and confidante till the end -
wrote that Osagyefo was actually a human being who was not immuned
to any of the nuances of woman influence.
In the countryside of Ghana, Veva said that women actually
worshipped Nkrumah: They would actually kneel before him. They would
take off their white waistcloths and spread these on the ground for
him to walk on. They would dance before him, as it is said that
David (in the Bible) danced before the Ark.. "The women", Veva
further revealed, "were ever ready to assist the President: If they
could cook for him, they were glorified. If they could talk to him,
as they often insisted, they were magnified! They praised him in
song; they campaigned for him... They loved him".
However, some of these same women did actually ask the President,
"Why aren't you married?" The prototype answer to such daring
enquiry which the women liked him for but which later became
monotonous was, "but all women in Ghana are my brides".
At the time when Nkrumah was being prodded to take a wife, he was
nearly 60. Like Ted Heath, Fidel Castro and Trudeau of Canada - all
of them his friends - Nkrumah seemed to have taken the oath of
celibacy. He knew though that, as President and Head of State, he
was expected to marry, he never really - like the issue of religion
- gave it a serious thought. He was, however, not a 'chronic'
bachelor as such - for he was truly married to his pet Pan African
project of the unification of Africa.
To Nkrumah, marriage was a distraction and indeed a form of
bondage from which a man ought to liberate himself. But his close
friends and associates had a different view. Marriage may have its
own drawbacks, they reasoned that a President ought to be married if
only for political expediency. Besides, they thought and they were
able to convince their man - that a wife was essential for certain
specific duties which the Head of State should not himself carry
out. The result of their efforts was the Nkrumah-Fathia union - a
politically arranged inter-cultural marriage which left the Ghanaian
President with his three children.
For its apparent incompatible features, the Nkrumah-Fathia
relationship was not expected to succeed. Fathia, an Orthodox Coptic
and Egyptian Arab, was married to a black Akan man who simply had no
religion. Nkrumah was a communist! Although he said he believed in
God, a fact which was reflected in most of his altruistic policies,
he did not have a church of his own, having long ago yanked his
baptismal name and discarded Catholicism. At his age, he was an
aging balding man. Though still handsome in his dark shinning skin,
he contrasted in great degree the smashing beauty of Fathia whose
picture this writer saw in one of her husband's books revealing a
golden fish from the river Nile.
From Veva's account, we know that Fathia and Kwame were strange
bedfellows. Nevertheless, the Greek Orthodox priest wedded them at a
simple ceremony where people must have expressed deep apprehensions
as to the fate of the union. Fathia neither spoke a word of English
nor Nkrumah any word of French. So thick were the clouds separating
the man from the woman that it is said that Fathia received W.B. van
Lare at the airport and thought the Nkrumah's special representative
was her husband to be.
With no previous personal contacts, Nkrumah had agreed to marry
the Egyptian girl only after an exchange of photographs. In fact, he
was to marry Fathia's younger sister but, like the story of the
Laban sisters (in the Bible), the Egyptian custom forbids the
younger girl from marrying before the older. Nkrumah did not realise
his Pan African dream, but by his marriage he demonstrated his
commitment to his pet project of unification of all Africa.
Coming from a quiet, retiring and non-political background, it
was natural that Fathia became withdrawn in matrimony. The
complexity of intercultural relationship did not help. She must have
overcome daunting challenges to adjust to her new way of life and
play the official role expected of her as the First Lady of an
independent Ghana. She got involved in charity work but never in any
scandal. Following the overthrow of Nkrumah in a military putsch in
1966, Fathia, like her husband, lost face and status to a hostile
government that pulled down not just the statues of the legendary
Kwame Nkrumah but also attempted to rubbish every legacy of the
Osagyefo.
She once left Ghana following the death of her husband in exile
in 1972, but Fathia's faith in Ghana and her responsibility to her
three children made her return to continue her charity work. A
beautiful fish, she was caught from a distant foreign water of the
Nile to be dropped in River Volta, but Fathia proved book makers
wrong by surviving the difficulty of her new environment and by
swimming to glory. I am happy she slept finally beside her husband
in his beautiful mausoleum in Accra.
