My thoughts of Gamal Gorkeh Nkrumah

A LITTLE over a week ago, on October 14, 2026, to be precise, I thought I had woken up to just another autumn morning with its usual grey weather in Bonn, Germany.

I was feeling apprehensive about switching on the television and watching the news for fear of seeing the same predominant images these days of continued turmoil around the world: the genocide in Gaza, the senseless bombings in Lebanon despite a so-called ceasefire, the wanton destruction and untold hardships being caused by the Russian war on Ukraine, fighting on the Arabian Peninsula and the unsafe passage through the Strait of Hormuz, among others.

So, I opted to rather swipe my mobile phone, which had the advantage of bringing me home news first from Ghana. Sadly, I was hit by bad news all the same.

The death was reported of Dr Gamal Gorkeh Nkrumah, first child of Ghana’s first President, Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah, with his Egyptian wife, Fathia. The late Gamal, who died in Cairo, Egypt, was a journalist and editor of International Affairs of the prominent Egyptian weekly newspaper, Al-Ahram. He was a staunch anti-colonialist and Pan-Africanist. He has since been buried in Egypt in accordance with Islamic traditions.

I preferred to write this tribute after his burial in order to observe the general request for privacy by his close family in their period of grief. My heartfelt condolences to them, especially to his sister, Samia Yaba, whom I have never met but with whom I know I share the same birthday — June 23.

I cannot claim to have known the late Gamal too much. However, my affinity with him compels me to write this tribute: I have always had deep sympathy for him and his siblings for the trauma and agony they may have suffered as children when their father was overthrown and publicly humiliated, vilified, denigrated, and subjected to vigorous attempts to blot his name out of history.

Besides, ever since I was elected Deputy General Secretary of the Cairo-based Union of African Journalists (UAJ) in 1995, and I paid the late Gamal an unannounced courtesy call, I have had fond memories of how affable he was, even with the little time he could spare because of other engagements that he had that day. We are also both firstborns of our parents and are journalists.

The late Gamal was the first of three persons in 1994, when I was serving my first term as General Secretary under the Kabral administration, to be made an honorary member of the Association. The gesture was unprecedented in the annals of the GJA. The other two persons are Mr I. K. Gyasi, now deceased, who was a columnist of The Ghanaian Chronicle newspaper, and Kwasi Afriyie Badu, Esq., Chief Executive Officer of KAB Governance Consult.

Last but not least, I admired so much Gamal’s father’s visionary leadership in Ghana’s independence and development, African emancipation and Pan-Africanism, which got listeners of BBC World Service in 2000 to vote him as “the greatest African of the millennium”.

A number of framed photographs and paintings hang as memorabilia on the walls of my living room. However, the smallest of them all is the most iconic and significant to me. It is my father’s membership certificate of the Convention People’s Party (CPP), which was signed by Gamal’s father, Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah himself.

That certificate was passed on to me by my dear mum, of blessed memory, when my beloved father, Mr Henry Kwaku Blewu, died in 1992. My father was once the secretary of the John Sarbah Road area cell of the CPP, in the Takoradi suburb of Esikafo Ambatem.

My father, after passing his Middle School Form Four Certificate examination, had migrated from his hometown, Alakple in the Volta Region, to Takoradi in the Western Region in search of employment at the Takoradi Harbour. He secured a job as Chief Clerk in the office of the Hamburg-based German shipping company called Woermann Line. It was while he pursued further studies at the Takoradi Workers College in the late 1940s that he became the secretary of a cell of the CPP.

My mum, Alice Afi Blewu (Mrs), was a nurse-midwife at that time; and although she was not politically active like my father, she was a great sympathiser of the cause of the CPP of “Freedom and Independence Now for the Gold Coast”.

I remember as a young child how, whenever the situation demanded, my mother elegantly dressed up in her Ghanaian women’s traditional attire (kaba and cloth) that was sewn with cloth bearing the portrait of Dr Nkrumah and the logo of the CPP.

From the Effia Nkwanta Hospital, Sekondi, where my mother worked, she was transferred to Tikobo No. 1 near Half Assini to be in charge of the health centre there. A few years later, she was posted to the Axim Government Hospital. All these areas in Nzemaland were within the vicinity of Nkroful, where Gamal’s father was born and spent his formative years as a child.

While my siblings lived with my mother in Nzemaland, I, as the firstborn, was enrolled in a boarding school in Accra. However, I came to join them in Nzemaland whenever I was on holidays. I had the opportunity to visit Gamal’s father’s birthplace in Nkroful on a number of occasions.

What struck me most was its modest and humble, if not frugal, nature and surroundings, and yet it was from there that Nkrumah had emerged to lead the Gold Coast to independence. It is simply inspirational.

So, it stands to reason that I had long been emotionally captured by the CPP spirit of “down with colonialism; and independence and self-government now for the Gold Coast as a unitary state”, even before I was born.

I was nearly 10 years old when President Nkrumah was overthrown on February 24, 1966. The antagonism that ensued and the cruelty that it spread have not been lost on me to this day, when I am now a young septuagenarian facing the twilight of my life.

Gamal, at that brief meeting during my courtesy call, I still remember the chuckle on your handsome face when I inquired from you whether Ghanaians had treated your father fairly and why, as a political scientist, you appeared to have decided to stay out of Ghanaian politics.

Your brief response was without bitterness, and the gist of it was simply that many of us at the time became gullible and easily fell prey to the propaganda of neocolonialist and foreign machinations.

You said with candour that you were still in a reflective mood and expressed confidence that karma would one day exonerate your father completely from the political vendetta he had been subjected to by his opponents, and that this was when you would consider entering Ghanaian politics.

Oh, dear Gamal, I thought just when the time appeared to have arrived, you have left unceremoniously.

The current wind of change blowing over Africa has been overwhelmingly in your father’s favour and, by extension, yours as well. Many of your father’s goals, principles and ideals have been refreshed and are likely to live on indefinitely.

But how I wished you had stayed longer to see this struggle for African economic emancipation and Pan-Africanism go much further. I guess the twists and turns, the rises and falls, the headaches and heartaches in the fight for genuine continental independence and global justice made the stress of international journalism bear heavily on you. It may all have taken a toll.

As the longest-serving and first-ever full-time General Secretary of the GJA, I shall resonate with you through the road that passes right in front of the Ghana International Press Centre, headquarters of the GJA, where I once worked for many years.

That road, “Gamal Abdul Nasser Street”, should bring back memories of you and your father’s friend and former Egyptian president, after whom you were named.

The writer is a former Ghana Journalists Association General Secretary.

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