Nkrumah faced several assassination attempts starting in the the early 1960s and it created a dilemma on how to preserve his rule.
"On 1 August 1962, after a lull in a series of bomb explosions that rocked Accra during the last few months of 1961, an assassination attempt was made on Nkrumah. Returning from Tenkodogo in the bordering republic of Burkina Faso (then Upper Volta), the president stopped at the northern village of Kulungugu where he narrowly escaped death in a hand-grenade attack. Several people were killed. One of these was Superintendent Kosi, a bodyguard. Fifty-seven others, including the president’s ADC, Captain Buckman, were injured. Nkrumah himself received minor shrapnel wounds in the back.
Six weeks later, on 18 September, a Ga army warrant officer, Sergeant-Major Edward Tetteh, who was in charge of the Burma Camp ammunition depot and was suspected of providing grenades for the Kulungugu plot, jumped, or was pushed, to his death from a fourth-floor window whilst under interrogation at police HQ. His alleged complicity threw suspicion on the army but no further evidence emerged after his fall.
A further spate of five bombings against Nkrumah occurred between September 1962 and January 1963; however, none of them came near to success. In these attacks, more than a dozen people were killed and over 400 hurt. However, the identity of those responsible was never discovered. The immediate consequences of these events was a tightening up of security measures throughout the country far exceeding those following the 1966 coup. The government’s restrictions were taken one step further on 23 September 1962 when, following simultaneous bomb blasts in Accra and Tema, a state of emergency was declared. The army was given widespread emergency powers, conducting house-to-house searches for weapons, ammunition and explosives and manning a blockade of the capital until 1964. Over 500 persons were imprisoned under the terms of the 1958 Preventive Detention Act; and in January 1963, public meetings were banned.
Despite the clampdown, these measures failed to prevent another serious assault on the president, this time not from an anonymous figure in a public place but from a policeman in the grounds of Flagstaff House. On 2 January 1964, an armed constable with four years service, Seth Ametewee, fired several close-range rifle rounds at Nkrumah before being overpowered by his police colleagues. Yet another unfortunate bodyguard was killed; this time it was the head of a special police guard, Assistant Superintendent Salifo Dagarti. Nkrumah’s only injury was a bite on the cheek received whilst wrestling his would-be killer to the ground.
There is some evidence to suggest that Ametewee, who was hanged in 1965 for the murder of Dagarti, was in the pay of senior police officers who had him specially posted to Flagstaff House with promises of £2,000 and further education overseas if he did the job. At about the same time, news leaked to the press revealed another unsuccessful plot, on this occasion involving the officer in charge of the police band. The bandleader’s plan apparently involved shooting Nkrumah with revolvers when he came over to congratulate the musicians on their performance.
Whatever the truth about the Kulungugu and Flagstaff assassination attempts, the events convinced Nkrumah that both the army and the police harboured potential, if not actual, sources of opposition. The resulting purge of the police command, together with the reassignment of security responsibilities to National Security Service agencies, reflected one of the central dilemmas of Nkrumah’s personal rule: how to protect the regime whilst simultaneously preventing the security forces from gaining too much power."
- "The Military and
Politics in Nkrumah's Ghana" by Simon Baynham. Published by Westview Press (Boulder and London) in 1988.
© Adeyinka Makinde (2025)
Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England.
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