Profile of Captain Kojo Tsikata (1936-2021)

An alumni of Achimota College and a graduate of Sandhurst Military Academy, Kojo Tsikata was involved in many of the tumultuous events in Ghana's political history: From the Congo to abortive coups and the era of the PNDC government led by Flt. Lt. Jerry Rawlings.

His ideological influences lay in Nkrumaist Pan-Africanism and Socialism. As a young man he had a political relationship with Dr. Kwame Nkrumah who sent him on special missions to the Congo and Angola. In the early 1960s, he served as Nkrumah's military envoy to Patrice Lumumba in the Congo. And in May 1965, Nkrumah sent him to Angola to serve as a military adviser to the nascent MPLA (Movimento Popular de Libertação de Angola). He arrived in Cabinda a few weeks before the arrival of the first six Cuban advisers.

He would go on to develop political ties with the likes of Fidel Castro, Thomas Sankara and Muammar Gaddafi.

But in the later part of the 1960s Tsikata faced obstacles. The military regime which had overthrown Nkrumah in February 1966 would the following year declare him a wanted man. Tsikata was thus forced into exile where he remained until the return of civilian rule under Dr. Kofi Busia.

In the interim period, he was persuaded to attend a meeting in Guinea in November 1968 at which the discussion was about bringing Nkrumah back to power. He arrived in Conakry with plans for removing the Ghanaian junta from power. However, Nkrumah refused to see him because he believed that Tsikata had been involved in a pre-1966 plot to overthrow his Convention People's Party (CPP). Suspecting that he was embarked on an enterprise to assassinate Nkrumah, the Guinean government detained him and threatened to execute him. It is claimed that the Mozambican guerrilla Samora Machel, then a rising commander in FRELIMO (Frente de Libertação de Moçambique), interceded on Tsikata's behalf and Tsikata was expelled from Guinea.

At some point after his return to Ghana from exile, he left for Angola where he served as a military adviser to President Agostinho Neto's MPLA forces under the assumed name of Carlos Silva Gomes. His role in Angola was interrupted by health problems which necessitated travel to the United Kingdom where he received treatment at London's Brompton Hospital for fibrotic pulmonary sarcoidosis i.e. non-malignant but severe growths in the lungs.

On November 29th, 1975, when he was working as the general manager of the Ghana Diamond Marketing Board, Tsikata was arrested and went on trial for his alleged involvement in the "One man, One Machete" coup against the Acheampong government. He was severely tortured and later convicted by a military tribunal which sentenced him to death. The sentence was later commuted. As a prominent Ghanaian newspaper editor told the New York Times in 1976, the Acheampong regime which had previously prosecuted three subversion trials since its coming to power had an unwritten policy: “if you don't spill blood, you won't pay with your blood.”

Tsikata was a key member of the PNDC during which time he served as the National Security Advisor. Tsikata's legacy was severely tarnished by the circumstances surrounding the kidnap and murder of three Ghanaian High Court Judges and a retired Army Officer in 1982.

A Special Investigation Board chaired by a former Chief Justice of Ghana recommended that Tsikata and nine others be prosecuted for the murders. However, the serving Attorney General of Ghana concluded that there had been "insufficient evidence" to prosecute him. Further, the sole witness against Tsikata subsequently withdrew his accusation just before his firing squad execution.

Tsikata died on November 20^th, 2021 at the age of 85.

© Adeyinka Makinde (2024)

Adeyinka Makinde is a writer who is based in London, England.

“Ode To The Wind” By Danny and The Counts (1966)

Walk down that glory road

Don't you turn back
All the things you’ve left behind 
Are painted black

And the things you thought were real
Have put you down
La la la la la la
When your body and mind are weak
You'll hear this-
La la la la la la

At the end of each weary day
As the sun goes down
Look to the sky and say:
"Oh Lord, I feel down" 

All the things in life, you see
Cannot be found 
La la la la la la
When your body and mind are weak
You'll hear this-
La la la la la la
La la la la la

All the things in life, you see
Cannot be found 
La la la la la la
When your body and mind are weak
You’ll hear this-
La la la la la la 
La la la la la

Band Members.

Danny Parra – guitar and lead vocals
Javier Valenzuela – lead guitar and vocals
Eric Huereque – bass and vocals
Joe Huereque – drums
Joe Martinez – tambourine and vocals

 

A potted history of the shifts in mercenary loyalty in the former Belgian Congo from 1960 to 1967

An early memoir published in 1969 by "Black Jack" Schramme which translates to "The Leopard Battalion: Memories of a White African".

Often referred to as “the world’s second oldest profession”, appraisals of the role of the mercenary often veer from the sort of romanticised fiction portrayed in the 1978 movie The Wild Geese to that of the amoral “soldier of fortune” who profits from the human misery which accompanies war. It is the latter view which has tended prevail so much so that the term “mercenary” has been rebranded in recent decades. Today, they are often politely referred to as “military contractors”.

The activities of mercenaries in Africa’s post-independence civil wars of the second half of the 20^th century arguably provided the basis through which the mercenary was defined in the popular imagination. And no where else was the role of the mercenary as hero and brigand more explored than the wars waged in the former Belgian Congo. It was there that mercenaries rescued nuns who had been kidnapped and defiled. It was also there that they tortured and murdered native Africans with impunity.

It was also in the Congo that the white mercenaries, who often came from countries such as Belgium, France, Rhodesia and South Africa, demonstrated that most predictable trait of this ignoble profession: the primacy of personal profit over notions of idealism and loyalty.

This is a potted history of the shifts in the allegiance of white mercenaries while fighting in the war which engulfed the Congo after Belgium granted it independence in June 1960.

The first mercenaries fought for secessionist Katanga when the policies of the soon to be assassinated Congolese Prime Minister Patrice Lumumba were perceived by the West as an open invitation to the USSR to expand its sphere of influence into central Africa. This was unacceptable to the Western powers during the ideological Cold War. The mercenaries fought to enable the Belgians to retain their influence on their former colony by aiding the attempted secession of the minerally rich Katanga province which was led by Moise Tshombe. Although the recruitment of the mercenaries was reported to be done by shadowy, independent actors, Siegfried Muller, a South Africa-based West German mercenary, whose subsequent notoriety earned him the sobriquet "Kongo" Muller, admitted in the East German-made 1966 film Der lachende Mann – Bekenntnisse eines Mörders that mercenary recruitment was a "NATO operation".

Major Siegfried Muller AKA “Kongo” Muller

When Tshombe became part of the national government, the mercenaries were tasked with fighting against the anti-Mobutu Lumumbist forces and others during the Kwilu Rebellion of 1963 to 1965, and the Simba Rebellion of 1964. Pierre Mulele, a Lumumbist, led the Kwilu rebellion. Both Kwilu and Simba rebellions were an attempt to dislodge the Western-backed central government led by Joseph Kasa-Vabu (who was backed by Mobutu) and create a socialist state.

Belgium, along with the rest of the West, had gravitated towards Mobutu who had taken over most of the Congo, because they saw in him a man who would protect their collective interests. This meant that Tshombe, who as with other Katangan elites, had been encouraged to secede from the Congo, had effectively outlived his usefulness. This state of affairs was underlined by Tshombe’s dismissal by Kasa-Vabu from the cabinet of the central government in 1965.

Mercenaries such as the Belgian Colonel Jean "Black Jack" Schramme were up to this period still fighting on Mobutu's side. He had been personally recruited to fight for the central government by Tshombe but began to have second thoughts because of Mobutu’s misgivings over continual reliance on mercenary staffed units of L'Armée nationale congolaise. Mobutu began disbanding these units and in June 1967, the Frenchman Bob Denard warned Schramme that the last of the units would be imminently dissolved. Things came to a head when Tshombe's plan to return to the Congo from Spanish exile in 1967 was frustrated by an airplane hijack over the Mediterranean and he was incarcerated in Algeria.

Schramme and his men foreswore their allegiance to Mobutu's national army and issued an ultimatum to Mobutu to hand over power to Tshombe by August 20th, 1967. Mobutu himself issued a counter to the mercenaries’ ultimatum by giving them 10 days to surrender or "face spectacular punishment."

Despite their bravado, the mercenaries were by this time already on the verge of defeat, and they made their last stand at Bukavu where they began to be overwhelmed by Mobutu's forces. Many of them planned to flee across the border to Rwanda.

Anticipating this, the Rwandan government issued the following statement in Paris:

"Rwanda will welcome in a humanitarian spirit the black and white refugees coming from the Congo and will close its frontiers to the mercenaries and Katangan troops who have betrayed their people and the incontestable Congolese authority established by General Mobutu."

The mercenaries who fled to Rwanda were held in a camp and forced to sign a pledge not to return to any part of the African continent.

Each man signed and swore to the following statement:

"I solemnly undertake towards the OAU and every individual state in Africa to cease definitely any activity as a mercenary and never to return to Africa or associate myself directly or indirectly in any action harmful to the stability and peace of any independent African state."

While the likes of Schramme abided by the terms of the pledge, it did not end the scourge of mercenary activity on the African continent.

© Adeyinka Makinde (2024).

Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England.

The Legacy of the Algerian War (1954-1962)

Photo montage credit: Top by Phillip Jones Griffith and bottom by UIG.

The Algerian War lasted from November 1^st, 1954, to March 19^th, 1962.

Today marks the 70th anniversary of an anticolonial war, the significance of which cannot be overestimated:

. It was arguably a continuum of the genocidal series of wars undertaken by France between 1830 and 1875.

. It directly led to great military and political upheavals: the military coup led by Brigadier General Jacques Massu brought down the 4th French Republic in 1958 and brought about the return of General Charles de Gaulle to the centre of power as the first President of the 5th Republic. De Gaulle's subsequent "betrayal" of the promise to keep Algeria a part of France ("Algerie Francaise") led to the "Generals Putsch" in Algiers in 1961 and after its failure, the formation of the O.A.S. (Organisation de l'Armee Secrete), the underground movement of French military personnel which sought to assassinate de Gaulle on numerous occasions.

. It formed the backdrop to the theories on counterinsurgency devised by the French military officers Lieutenant Colonel David Galula and Colonel Roger Trinquier.

. It led to the creation of "La Main Rouge" ("The Red Hand"), a covert arm of the state which used terroristic methods to wage war which was arguably a forerunner of the MRF (Military Reaction Force) run by the British Army during the Troubles in Northern Ireland and the FLLF (Front for the Liberation of Lebanon from Foreigners) run by the Northern Command of the Israeli Defence Force in Lebanon during the Lebanese Civil War.

. It formed the background to a body of literature produced by Frantz Fanon who was arguably the most influential anti-colonial thinker of his time.

. It was immortalised in popular culture by the 1966 Gillo Pontecorvo film The Battle of Algiers.

© Adeyinka Makinde (2024).

Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England.

Yoruba voices in Grenada

Map of Grenada (left) and Yoruba artwork titled The Spirit of the Warrior by Twins Seven Seven.

As the beginning of the commentary within the discography “Grenada: Creole and Yoruba Voices” states, Grenadian affairs have rarely come to global media attention save the Maurice Bishop-led New Jewel Movement era of the late 1970s to the early 1980s which culminated in Bishop's violent overthrow and the invasion of American armed forces in October 1983.

I would add that there were episodes during the tenure of Sir Eric Gairy when Grenada gained some measure wide attention.

Anyway, the commentary refers to the Yoruba influence on Grenadian music, music which is far removed from the cabaret style songs of Leslie "Hutch" Hutchinson, the Grenadian-born singer and musician whose global fame was at its peak in the 1920s and 1930s.

This is all very interesting to me because my Mother was born in Grenada and my Father was Yoruba. I have been aware of Yoruba culture in the Atlantic in the southern United States, Brazil, Cuba, Puerto Rico and Trinidad, but not explicitly in the context of Grenada.

Excerpt from GRENADA: CREOLE AND YORUBA TRADITIONS By Kenneth Bilby and Morton Marks: "What sets Grenada off from the other Franco-English islands, though, is the presence of a third language, the ritual Yoruba of the Shango religion, also called African Work.

Grenadian Shango is probably the least known branch of the Yoruba diaspora in the Americas, and these recordings may be the only documentation in existence of its music. During the slave trade, many thousands of Yoruba from the Ijesha kingdom of Nigeria were sent to Brazil and Cuba, where they became known as ijexá and yesá, respectively.

But the Yoruba in Grenada are part of the history of Africans in the post-emancipation Caribbean. In 1849 (eleven years after full emancipation in the British colonies), about one thousand Ijesha Yoruba workers arrived in Grenada, becoming part of the indentured workforce that replaced former slaves who had migrated. The Grenadian Yoruba formed closely knit communities in particular villages, including Munich, Black Bay, Laura, and Rose Hill, and their influence then spread to other parts of the island."

© Adeyinka Makinde

Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England.

Between the International Slave Plantation and BRICS

Cartoon captioned “On the International Slave Plantation” on the front page of the Daily Worker, June 27, 1925. (Credit: Robert Minor).

A cartoon drawn by Robert Minor, a political cartoonist who was also a member of the American Communist Party, has been rediscovered by a new generation who have avidly shared it various social media platforms. It portrays three hulking figures representing China, India and Africa who tower over three cowering, horsewhip-wielding figures who represent US, French and British imperialism. A Soviet soldier can also be observed grinning in the background. Considered an incendiary image in its time for inciting hatred against “the white race”, many of those who share the image today are not invoking the original intended goal of international communism liberating oppressed non-whites, and instead are drawing parallels with the developing multi-polar world envisioned by BRICS which seeks to break free from the neocolonial stranglehold held by the West on the conduct of international trade and development.

When the cartoon appeared on the front page of the Black American newspaper The Negro Champion, which dubbed it "The Big Three", Joseph Wise, the Staff Correspondent of the International Labor News Service, referred to it as a "vicious cartoon" and Minor as "the notorious communist cartoonist".

Wise complained that the "entire contents of the publication are designed to arouse race prejudice and antagonism and to array the peoples of China, India and Africa against the white race."

The editor of The Negro Champion, Lovett Fort-Whiteman (1889-1939), was a functionary of the Communist International (Comintern) who was the lead organiser of the American Negro Labor Congress. Fort-Whiteman would die from malnutrition in a Stalinist gulag in 1939 after he was accused of being a Trotskyist.

Victor A. Olander, the secretary-treasurer of the Illinois State Federation of Labor, to whom Wise would refer to in his syndicated article, saw Fort-Whiteman as a Soviet proxy whom he likened to a man "carrying a flaming torch through dry grass." Yet, while Olander criticised the cartoons which appeared in The Negro Champion of ignoring "economic and political issues almost entirely" while making "a direct appeal to racial antagonism", he was ignoring the fact that race lay firmly at the heart of economic relations in the United States, a state of affairs which applied to the globe because the Chinese, Indians and Africans were at the time victims of long-term colonial exploitation of their lands and human resources.

In 1925, China was still in its "Century of Humiliation" which lasted from 1839 to 1949. India was Britain's most prized colony, and most of Africa was ruled by the French, British and Portuguese.

Even after the ostensible process of decolonisation, the Western-run global economic institutions have maintained a grip on the economies of the Global South through the Bretton Woods institutions. The policies of the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund have typically indebted nations regardless of whether those policies were encouraging of socialist-orientated development economics or were inspired by neoliberalism.

Former colonial powers also continued to wield economic power in regard to their former vassal states. The economic relations between France and its former colonies, as well as the extractivist rationale for the creation of the European Union in relation to the minerally-rich African continent affirm the racial context of global economic relations.

The quest of the Western world to maintain global economic hegemony is no less the case when it comes to post-Soviet Russia and China.

There has been an enduring project aimed at pressuring Russia to surrender its sovereignty so as to enable the West to have unfettered access to and control of its vast resources, while China’s rise in economic power has caused apprehension on the part of the United States.

A closer examination of the relations between the West and these two powers reveal a racial subtext which few are willing to admit.

In the provocatively titled “Slavs and the Yellow Peril are ‘niggers, brutes and beasts”, in the eyes of the Western Empire”, Jeff J. Brown explained that:

Westerners cannot write about their racial superiority and the perceived subhumaness of non-Westerners, like they were able to do so freely until the 1950s. But it is still manifestly the fundamental principle that drives America’s “exceptionalism” and the West’s “shining beacon on a hill” superiority, thus legitimizing ongoing Western genocide, wars, government overthrows and economic and resource exploitation, through the “benign, invisible hand” of capitalism, across Planet Earth.

This attitude was reflected in the writings of the late Zbigniew Brzeziński, a hugely influential US foreign policy theoretician, who wrote the following in his 1997 book The Grand Chessboard: American Primacy and its Geostrategic Imperatives:

To put it in a terminology that harkens back to the more brutal age of ancient empires, the three grand imperatives of imperial geostrategy are to prevent collusion and maintain security dependence among the vassals, to keep tributaries pliant and protected, and to keep the barbarians from coming together.

Japan may once have had the opportunity of breaking away from Western economic domination through its Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, a plan which boldly proclaimed "Asia for the Asiatics". But the extreme cruelty and intense chauvinism that it deployed in its quest to expand its empire alienated its neighbours in east Asia and the Pacific.

Japan’s chief competitor for the allegiance of the countries in this area, the United States, militarily defeated it and incorporated it into its post-war alliance of nations. But the new global hegemon, now involved in an ideological war with the Soviet Union on a global scale inherited the attitudes and methods of its Anglo-Saxon predecessor in enforcing the compliance of states to the dictates of resource control.

An excerpt from an editorial written for the New York Times on August 5^th, 1954, the year after “Operation Ajax”, a regime change endeavour in Iran which was orchestrated by the American Central Intelligence Agency with help from the British Secret Intelligence Service, will suffice:

Underdeveloped countries with rich resources now have an object lesson in the heavy cost that must be paid by one of their number which goes berserk with fanatical nationalism.

The coup overthrew the democratically elected government of Prime Minister Mohamed Mossadegh which had nationalised its British-controlled oil industry and replaced him with the pliant Shah who ruled Iran as a dictator. It would, of course not be the last such endeavour where American economic interests were threatened by independent thinking political leaders.

Minor's cartoon may resonate strongly with those who can relate it to the growing Eurasian world and development of BRICS at the heart of which are Russia, China, and India. The developing multipolar world order which is being characterised by the phenomenon of de-dollarisation and various geopolitical confrontations such as Russia withstanding the "shock and awe" sanctions regime imposed on it by the West and the ejecting of France from a number of Sahelian countries, in a sense represent a movement away from the so-called "international slave plantation".

© Adeyinka Makinde (2024).

Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England.

General Yakubu Gowon at 90

Lieutenant Colonel Yakubu Gowon, Head of the Federal Military Government and Supreme Commander of the Armed Forces. 

Former Nigerian military leader General Yakubu Gowon is 90 years old today.

Here he is photographed while a Lieutenant Colonel after his assumption of power following the violent overthrow of Major General Johnson Aguiyi-Ironsi in July 1966.

Source: Federal Nigeria, 1966.

NB.

Born Yakubu Dan-Yumma Gowon on October 19th, 1934, to a Christian catechist father from the minority Angas group in Nigeria's "Middle Belt", Gowon was educated at Barewa College and trained at the Royal Military Academy Sandhurst from 1955 to 1956.

He emerged as the Head of State in 1966 after the overthrow of Major General Aguiyi-Ironsi and remained leader until his own overthrow in July 1975.

Gowon oversaw the defeat of the secession of Eastern Region of Nigeria in 1967 which was led by Lieutenant Colonel Emeka Ojukwu. The breakaway Republic of Biafra collapsed in January 1970, and Gowon earned plaudits for his efforts at national reconciliation.

Gowon subsequently enrolled on a Political Science degree course at Warwick University and later earned his PhD. His thesis was titled "The Economic Community of West African States: A Study in Political and Economic Integration".

He gained a reputation as a gentleman officer who ruled Nigeria in a relatively benevolent manner. He presided over the oil boom years and although never accused of personal enrichment was seen as lacklustre in tackling Nigeria's bourgeoning culture of corruption. His regime was also responsible for decrees which curbed personal freedoms and justified detention without trial.

While largely considered an upstanding military officer and a devout Christian, some critics have accused Gowon of having foreknowledge of the assassinations of both Major General Aguiyi-Ironsi in July 1966 and General Murtala Muhammed in February 1976. Many on the secessionist side accused Gowon of tolerating human rights abuses against Igbos prior to the secession of the Eastern Region and during the civil war - all of which he has strenuously denied.

Ironically, both Gowon and his arch protagonist Emeka Ojukwu would in 1979 be designated by the Federal Military Government as common criminal suspects wanted by the Nigerian Police. Both men would later be amnestied and Gowon, who had been stripped of his rank of general, would have his rank and benefits restored by the civilian administration led by President Shehu Shagari.

In his later years, Gowon grew into an elder statesman respected both at home and abroad. Among his lasting accomplishments as a military ruler was the creation of the National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) and the economic alliance of West African states through the establishment of the Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS).

While his achievement in preserving Nigeria as a united entity may have dimmed over the decades because of the country's perpetual fractiousness and economic maladies, Gowon arguably deserves the credit for building a coalition within the country which prevented Nigeria's breakup into several hostile polities each of which would have been potentially armed by various world powers.

© Adeyinka Makinde (2024).

Adeyinka Makinde is a writer based in London, England.