JJ Rawlings Dead, He was not my hero

 

Interesting seeing the tributes to JJ Rawlings who died on the 12th November 2020. I wonder about his lasting legacy. I have a biased view of his reign and find it hard to forget the pain of his coups and direction he sent Ghana in. I remember he and his soldiers  blamed Ghana's powerful market women for the country's wows and so they flogged market women in public, killed judges, locked up and tortured journalists, and shot politicians.

I was about 9 when Rawlings and his band of not so merry men took over Ghana. I don't know if Ghana was in a bad way, I was a child, but  remember that my life changed after the 1979 coup and was never the same again. My parents had lived in the UK for 10 years as was their plan and they returned home to Ghana in 1976. I was 6 years old. I loved my new home Ghana, I went to a private school and my dad worked for the timber marketing board. 

We ate breakfast and supper at the dinning table, had a house boy who swept the house and an older cousin who helped to look after my brother and I and my parents were paying for another cousin to go to medical school. When we weren't at school we collected clay from a local stream, made model animals, rode our bikes and bought fan ice cream from a man on a bike. Then one day we heard there
was a coup, a military take over. 

Military aircraft flew over head for days in a row and our corers could no longer go to the market. being a market trader or a successful shop owner now made you target for public flogging and the raiding of all your supplies.  Food at the ports were not allowed to travel into the interior of the country. Why ? I do not know.

 Suddenly petrol prices went through the roof. Soldiers broke into the warehouses of wholesalers stole their supplies. In no time at all if you didn't know a soldier you didn't eat. The grown ups queued for bread and essentials and life just stopped. In our house suddenly sacks of rice and tins of sardines were kept in my fathers room under lock and key. Food like rice was doled out by the cup full. Sugar and flour disappeared. There were no more meals at the dinning table, no more individual plates. We now shared a bowl of rice with a bit of stew between 4 in the kitchen.

One memory that stuck with me was the day soldiers came chasing students from Opokuware Secondary School who had been playing cricket into our house. For some reason Rawlings soldiers felt that arresting teenagers wearing their cricket whites on a Sunday was all part of clearing corruption in Ghanaian politics. A young sweating scared boy came running up the stairs into our house ( we didn't lock our front door in those days) He looked about 16 years old, he wanted a place to hide from the soldiers. My father quickly emptied a trunk, put the boy inside and he sat my 4 year old brother and I on the top of the trunk and told us to be quiet and not move. My father left the room and met the soldiers in the sitting room. He offered the officer a glass of whiskey and they talked and drunk and toasted the revolution. By the time the soldiers came into the room to look around, it was more like my dad was giving them a tour round the house. Tipsy and happy the soldiers left. The student was given normal clothes to wear and arrangements were made for the boy to return home, not school.

3 months after Rawlings June 4th 1979 coup, my parents decided that I needed to leave Ghana and I arrived in London wearing Rawlings chain.                                                                                          What is Rawlings chain and how do you get one?                                                                            Rawlings chain was when you got so thin that your collar bone stuck out through your skin. I was 9 years old, almost 5ft and 4.5 stones by September 1979. My mum cried like a baby when she saw the state of me at Heathrow airport. As pleased as I was to see my mum, a part of my heart broke that day. I knew returning to the Ghana I knew and loved was not going to be possible and it wasn't for 18 years.

Rawlings reigned for 20 years, closed countless factories opened by Kwame Nkrumah which were meant to lead us to self sufficiency. The saddest of which was the tomato canning factory. This they got rid of to make way for Italian canned tomatoes. Rawlings dismantled Ghana's rice growing industry. This made way for cheap rice from Asia, which we are still enjoying in Ghana even if it is making us ill and sometimes we find the new rice is even plastic. Rawlings sold off countless other Ghana government owned industries.

But it wasn't just him, all the leaders after him have continued in a similar vein. The saddest of all is the removal of indigenous Ghanaians from grass roots gold mining, but don't get me started on that. This story has been on repeat all over the world through the 80s, 90s and 2000s. The divestment of countries resources into the hands of multinationals has carried on unabated. 

You'd think the world was being run by a select group of people for only their benefit, and the we are under some kind of new world order.

In Africa the new world order has been going on for over 500 years. In Europe its been at least 1000 years. Its amazing to me that anyone can say the name of any politician in a sentence about democracy without irony.

JJ Rawlings was just another cog in the machine of extractive capitalism. He did his bit to keep the status quo and most obituaries I'm reading reveal the amnesia and lack of truthful analysis that keeps the world locked in  the status quo.                                             

The 8 Politians put  to death by JJ Rawlings.