Arba
Lijoch (meaning "40 children" in Amharic)
were a group of 40 Armenian orphans who had escaped the fate of millions of
Armenians who were systematically killed and deported by Ottoman Turks.
Crown Prince Ras Tafari, later Emperor Haile Selassie I of Ethiopia,
encountered them while visiting the Armenian monastery in Jerusalem. He was so
impressed by their abilities as a marching band that he obtained permission
from the Armenian Patriarchate of Jerusalem to adopt and take them to Ethiopia.
They arrived in Addis Ababa in 1924, and Selassie oversaw their continued
education.
Led by Kevork Nalbandian, Arba Lijoch became the Royal Imperial Brass Band.
Nalbandian went on to compose the music for "Ethiopia Hoy", the
Imperial National Anthem from 1930 to 1974.
Photograph of President
Nkrumah of Ghana pressing down the shoulders of Police Constable Seph Nicholas
Kwame Ametewee who unsuccessfully attempted to assassinate him on January 2nd,
1964. Photo credit: Ian Russell.
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.
