Keypoints:
- Ghana marks 60 years since Nkrumah’s overthrow
- Airport renamed Accra International Airport on February 23
- Ekow Nelson revisits political violence of the 1960s
SIXTY years after soldiers seized power on February 24, 1966, Ghana is still arguing about Kwame Nkrumah — not simply as a historical figure, but as a reflection of the country’s unresolved anxieties about power, democracy and historical truth.
The timing is striking. On February 23, 2026 — one day before the coup’s 60th anniversary — the government officially renamed Kotoka International Airport as Accra International Airport, ending decades of controversy over a national landmark named after a leading figure in the 1966 coup. Rather than settling the issue, the decision has intensified debate about how Ghana remembers its past and who defines the meaning of its founding story.
Writer and commentator Ekow Nelson has become one of the most prominent voices challenging prevailing narratives. Ghana, he argues, has grown comfortable repeating inherited versions of history without scrutiny, warning that ‘we confidently repeat stock fairy tales about our history without bothering to validate the stories we were taught as children’.
The forgotten violence of the early 1960s
Nelson’s intervention centres on a dimension of the First Republic often absent from popular discussion: political violence. Drawing on archival material and international reporting from the period, he argues that Ghana in the early 1960s was confronting far more than ideological disagreement.
Between 1961 and 1965, the country experienced bomb attacks, assassination attempts and acts of sabotage targeting both state institutions and civilians. Explosives were thrown into crowded public gatherings, including a dancing crowd of roughly 2,000 people in Accra. Children were killed, dozens were injured, monuments were dynamited, and multiple attempts were made on Nkrumah’s life.
‘Where in our history books,’ Nelson asks, ‘have we ever read about a bomb thrown into a dancing crowd?’ The absence of such events from collective memory, he argues, has allowed a simplified narrative to flourish — one in which ‘the bombs vanish, the bodies disappear, and what remains is a cartoon villain.’
The question he raises cuts to the centre of the anniversary debate: when does political opposition cease to be dissent and become organised violence?
Security, liberty and the liberal dilemma
That question reshapes how Nkrumah’s most controversial policy — the Preventive Detention Act — is interpreted. Critics present it as evidence of authoritarian ambition. Nelson instead frames it as a response to escalating instability.
‘At what point,’ he asks, ‘does a state stop pretending it is dealing with good-faith dissent and recognise that it is facing organised political violence?’
The dilemma is hardly unique to Ghana. Financial Times columnist Martin Wolf described terrorism as creating a ‘classic liberal dilemma’: how societies committed to freedom defend themselves against those willing to destroy it. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the American Civil War under similar reasoning, while Singapore’s Lee Kuan Yew argued that order must precede law if legal protections are to survive.
Within this context, Nelson contends that Nkrumah’s emergency measures were preventive rather than vindictive — aimed at preserving public safety rather than extinguishing political competition. In modern political language, he concludes, Nkrumah ‘had a right to defend himself’ and the state he governed.
Opposition, legitimacy and historical imbalance
The anniversary also revives scrutiny of Ghana’s opposition traditions. The United Party lost successive elections to Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party under colonial supervision, during a period when the British Governor-General retained authority over defence, finance and foreign affairs.
Nelson argues that later portrayals of this tradition as the uncontested custodian of democratic virtue overlook a more turbulent reality. Political memory, he suggests, has selectively elevated some actors while minimising their role in destabilisation, allowing certain traditions to ‘pass themselves off as unquestioned custodians of democracy’.
The 1981 overthrow of President Hilla Limann’s government — itself rooted in Nkrumaist political lineage — ushered in revolutionary rule that exercised sweeping authority over life and property. Yet these years rarely attract the same sustained moral scrutiny directed at Nkrumah.
Memory, symbols and the meaning of February 24
The renaming of Accra International Airport underscores how history remains politically alive. National symbols are not passive memorials; they reflect evolving judgments about legitimacy and identity.
Nelson does not argue that Nkrumah was beyond criticism. Rather, he insists that judgment must be historically symmetrical. ‘If after innocent men, women and children were killed or maimed,’ he argues, commentators cannot ignore the security context without distorting history itself.
Acknowledging context does not absolve Nkrumah’s concentration of power or the democratic costs that followed. But excluding that context risks misunderstanding the pressures facing a fragile post-independence state.
A past that still governs the present
Six decades on, February 24 remains unfinished business. The coup that claimed to rescue democracy instead inaugurated decades of instability and recurring military intervention. The leader removed as an authoritarian endures simultaneously as national icon and contested figure.
Perhaps the deeper lesson is that Ghana’s history resists simplicity. Nkrumah was both visionary and flawed; his opponents both defenders of pluralism and, at times, agents of destabilisation.
As Nelson suggests, the real struggle is not over monuments or anniversaries but over honesty itself — whether Ghana is prepared to confront its past without selective amnesia.
Until that reckoning occurs, February 24 will remain less a date concluded than an argument still unfolding, shaping how Ghana understands power, democracy and its own national story.
