Geoffrey Bing, Ghana’s first Attorney General, on PDA and Dr. Danquah’s detention

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The Granville Sharp Commission was, in another way, equally a watershed in Ghanaian politics.
Until now the Government had been sensitive to overseas opinion and particularly of criticism
on the BBC and in the British press and policy had very often been modified in the light of the
effect it might have on Western opinion.

The Awhaitey Enquiry was, in a sense, a world propaganda move. It was an effort to explain
why Ghana was forced to use preventive detention. In the Government’s view the Tribunal’s
Report showed that they had attempted to examine objectively, within the accepted legal
conventions of the Western world, the application of preventive detention in two key cases. It
was true that the full Proceedings of the Commission were of enormous bulk but great trouble
had been taken with the typography and layout. The document was readable, and in circulating
it, the Government accompanied it with a summary and with a White Paper explaining its point
of view. The unanimous, majority and minority Reports were each fully cross-indexed and any
competent lawyer would have had no difficulty in following the argument where the majority
differed from the minority and forming, on the basis of the evidence cited, his own opinion.
Despite the fact that even the paper-backed edition of the Tribunal Proceedings weighed over
four pounds, they were sent individually by airmail to every jurist throughout the world who was
known to have criticized the use of preventive detention in Ghana or to have expressed concern
about Ghana’s denial of civil liberties. So far as I know, the only reply received was from a
Japanese member of the International Commission of Jurists who wrote to congratulate the
Government printer on his choice of type and on his method of printing. It made the
Proceedings, he said, a pleasure to read but he gave no indication of the conclusions to which
reading them had led him. The Proceedings were, so their title page claimed, ‘to be purchased
from the Crown Agents for Overseas Governments and Administrations at 4 Millbank, London,
S.W.1′ but the Crown Agents, it would seem, considered it outside their duty to advertise them
or send them for review even to learned journals and, so far as I can recall, they sold less than
half a dozen copies.

The British and American press which had been so critical of events in Ghana scarcely referred
to the Commission’s findings, though all the usual steps to call their attention to salient
passages of the Proceedings had been taken. A special analysis for the press was made and
the issue to the public in Ghana and elsewhere of the Tribunal’s report were delayed two weeks
or so to provide serious journals with advance review copies so that they could make an
objective study of it prior to the official publication date. None did.

The treatment of the Granville Sharp Tribunal, perhaps more than anything else, I think,
convinced Dr Nkrumah and the Government generally that the attack on the absence of Civil
Liberty in Ghana, was not motivated by genuine concern for the rights of the individual but was
the result of a deliberate policy of denigration of everything that Ghana did, whatever it was.
Preventive detention had been established in India before it was introduced into Ghana without
resulting in any denunciation of the type which its establishment and use in Ghana had aroused.
It was accepted in Accra that it might be mistakenly but genuinely argued that the reason for the
difference was that Ghana was thought to employ the Act unjustly and India justly. The
Awhaitey Tribunal Proceedings were offered to the world as an example by which it might be
judged whether this was so. The world was not interested in making the adjudication. Ghana’s
test case was entirely ignored. This was the turning point. Thereafter, in Ghana, international
protests came more and more to be written off as biased and world press criticisms
disregarded.

One final example will perhaps illustrate this feeling that we all had, that whatever we did it
would be misunderstood and mis-reported. ‘Amnesty International’, an organization for whose
work in South Africa and elsewhere everyone in Ghana had the highest respect, issued, two or
three years later, a Christmas card on which they listed some twelve prisoners in various
countries for whom prayers were asked since they had been ‘imprisoned for their political
opinions’. Among them was Modesto Apaloo. If such an organization as ‘Amnesty International’
misunderstood the Granville Sharp Tribunal’s findings, what hope was there of obtaining
sympathy or understanding elsewhere?

It could have been argued, of course, by ‘Amnesty International’ that Modesto Apaloo should not
have been imprisoned at all, in that he had never been convicted by a Court or stood trial in the
ordinary way. The organization might have contended, though it is difficult to see on what
grounds, that the Tribunal was biased against him. It might have argued that the Tribunal’s
unanimous findings, in Apaloo’s case, that he was engaged in a conspiracy to carry out an act
for an unlawful purpose, revolutionary in character, and its majority Report, which held that the
act in question had been a conspiracy to assassinate the Prime Minister and carry out a coup
d’etat, were both insufficiently supported by evidence and could not therefore be accepted.
What could not possibly be argued was that his political opinions had anything to do with the
matter one way or another. Nowhere did they arise at the Commission. The reason for his
detention had been advertised by the Ghana Government in every way that it could. He had
been placed under detention because a quasi-judicial body had decided unanimously that he
was engaging in revolutionary activities and, by a majority, that these included murdering the
head of the Government.

With the ‘Amnesty International’ Christmas card I, for my part, abandoned any hope, even with
the most liberal organization, of explaining or justifying what was being done in Ghana.
Whatever evidence to the contrary might be put forward whenever someone was detained, it
would, to the outside world be ‘for his political opinions’, no matter what effort was made to show
that this was not so. Preventive detention might be accepted as a legitimate security
precaution elsewhere but it would always be a stick with which to beat the Nkrumah
Government.

As a result of this type of controversy the actual facts of Ghana’s Preventive Detention
Act have tended to be overlooked. It was first suggested in the National Assembly by
Krobo Edusei, acting without any Cabinet authority for doing so, in December 1957 as a
result of his being shown a copy of Indian legislation then being enacted in that country.
Krobo Edusei, in fact, threatened to introduce a measure based on the Indian Act when
Parliament resumed in February, but he was overruled in the Cabinet and at that time it
seemed the Government had definitely decided against it. It was not until after the
discovery that Amponsah was purchasing military accoutrement and that the Ga Shifimo
Kpee had set up a secret organization, that the proposal was revived and a somewhat
restricted version of the Indian Act was enacted in July 1958. As I have mentioned
previously, it was then intended as a precaution only. Certainly at the time there was no
intention that it would be used against leading figures in the opposition. For example, although
the facts of Amponsah’s purchase of accoutrement were known when the Bill was passed, there
was no suggestion at the time of using it against him on this account.

The Act which was drafted and redrafted several times, in the end provided for detention up to
five years. The detainee had to be served with written details of the grounds of his detention
within five days of it taking place, and was given an opportunity to appeal against them but the
appeal was to the Cabinet and the machinery did not work well in practice. A detainee could
also always bring his case before the courts by way of habeas corpus proceedings, and a
number of such actions were taken but the courts held that they could not examine the merits of
a detention and this remedy was thus of little practical value.

The Attorney General’s office was only concerned with the administration of the Act, in that we
advised whether, on the face of it, it appeared to us that the evidence put up by the Minister of
the Interior was strong enough to warrant detention, and that what was alleged came within the
provisions of the Act. Our views were annexed to the Cabinet paper proposing the particular
detention or detentions and only very rarely would I, or anyone from my office, attend at the
Cabinet when a particular case was being discussed. Sometimes the Government proceeded
with the proposal in the Cabinet paper despite our doubts, in other cases our views were
accepted and the order was not made. In all cases, the Cabinet was the final arbiter.

By the end of 1960 three hundred and eighteen detention orders had been made. In the
majority of these cases the detained persons were at that time still in custody, though it was not
unusual for detainees to be released after only a short period of detention. However, of these
three hundred and eighteen detention orders, two hundred and fifty-five were made in 1960,
after the Act had been extended, at the urgent request of the police, to cover gangsters whose
activities were of course quite non-political. It can be argued, as I in fact did, that it is much
worse to use preventive detention against a criminal with a long list of convictions than it is
against a political offender. A political detainee will always find someone to plead his case. With
a hardened criminal it is otherwise and the very fact of his many previous convictions makes it
difficult for the issue to be looked at on its merits. However, the police argued that, in the same
way as it was impossible to prove in court a political offence, so it was equally impossible by
way of the Courts to deal with the new type of gangsters who were then, it was said, beginning
to organize themselves on an American pattern.

At the time of the coup in February 1966, some seven hundred and eighty-eight detained
persons were released, of whom some three hundred and fifty to four hundred seemed to
have been criminal detainees and were apparently let loose for the purely propaganda
purpose of increasing the total number freed. Since the police were a party to the coup and
it was entirely on their responsibility and through their initiative that the ‘gangsters’ had been
detained in the first place, it is difficult to see why else they should have been let out. As
predicted by the police, when arguing the principle of using the Act to detain them in the first
place, their being now at liberty has, according to the Ghanaian Government press, resulted in
an increase in crime. However, whether or not ‘criminal detention’ was a necessity or otherwise,
its existence does not enter into the general argument. World opinion was aroused by the
existence of the ‘political detainees’. The question is thus whether the four hundred or so of this
class released after the coup, should have been imprisoned.

From details published by the National Liberation Council, it seems clear that, on grounds of
age, health and changed circumstances, some at least of those detained in connection with
matters in the past could have well been released earlier. No doubt also among the political
detainees were a number of persons who had done nothing wrong but who were there through
personal intrigue and victimization. Nevertheless, when it is considered that there had been two
different attempts to assassinate the President, one by a grenade thrower and one by a police
constable guarding his own office and much, presumably opposition organized, indiscriminate
murder in Accra by terrorist bomb-throwing, the total number of political detainees was not
large. The Act may have been used capriciously but it had not, even after the terrorist
attacks, been used wholesale. The one thousand three hundred political prisoners alleged by
the opposition, before the coup, to be held under the Act was clearly an exaggeration.

The original proposal that the Act should lapse after five years was discarded in the face of
the attempts on the President’s life and the terrorist bomb attacks. From time to time large
batches of detainees were released and certainly before the 1961 strikes, Dr Nkrumah
was in favour, if not of the repeal of the Act itself, at least of the release of all those then
held under it. In fact, however, it continued in use. From my own prison experience I do not
think that any detainee would have been intentionally ill-treated by the prison staff but at Ussher
Fort prison the medical facilities were bad it was, I think, possible that a prisoner seriously ill,
might easily not have had proper attention. So far as Dr J. B. Danquah, who died in prison,
was concerned, no prison official with whom I spoke at Ussher Fort, suggested that he
had been treated other than well and after the coup, if it had been otherwise there was no
reason why these officers should not have said so. Nevertheless without citing any
evidence in support, Dr Fritz Schatten, apparently an accepted Federal German expert on
Africa, has alleged that many detainees ‘were tortured to death’, ‘in concentration camps’, ‘as
happened to the “Grand Old Man” of Ghanaian Nationalism J. B. Danquah’.

In fact if one contrasts the attitude towards political prisoners in Ghana with that exhibited by
European governments in the pre- and post-war years, what stands out is the humanity of
Ghanaian behaviour as compared to that of supposedly more civilized nations. In Ghana, unlike
in pre-war and war-time Germany there were no ‘concentration camps’, let alone any gas
chambers. No detainees were beaten to death as they were in Kenya at a contemporary period
nor were they ‘tortured to death’ as happened in the last stages of colonialism in Algeria. What
is in fact remarkable is that the present military regime have been unable to dig up any authenticated case of ill-treatment or indeed any execution for treason or subversion to justify the type
of allegation peddled by those of Dr Schatten’s type.
When in May 1967 I made this comment in connection with the public execution by the rebel
regime of two young army officers convicted of treason and said, ‘During the whole period of
Nkrumah rule no single political execution took place’ the Information Officer of the Ghana High
Commission wrote to the Manchester Guardian replying:

‘This statement is simply not true. Mr. Bing, who was one of the deposed President’s advisers,
must have forgotten that in 1965 Ametewee, a police constable, was executed for allegedly
making an attempt on Nkrumah’s life. Again, among the thousands of the unfortunate
Ghanaians whom Nkrumah locked up without trial not a few lost their lives in detention. I
mention only two, Dr. J. B. Danquah. . . and Mr. Obetsebi-Lamptey . . . Nkrumah had them
arrested and locked up in prison where they died without benefit of medical care. . . .’
It is true of course that this police constable, Ametewee, did make an attempt on the President’s
life but he was never tried, let alone convicted for this offence. He had admitted to the shooting
of his superior officer in the police, Superintendent Salifu Dagarti, and it was with this that he
was charged. Since this killing was connected with an attempt on the President’s life perhaps it
might be argued that it was a political crime and he should have been reprieved when convicted
of the murder but, if, as alleged by detractors of Dr Nkrumah’s Ghana, like Dr Schatten, many
political prisoners were clone to death, it is extraordinary that, fifteen months after the rebel
regime had been in power, the Ghana High Commission were still unable to produce more
evidence than this. It scarcely lies in the mouth of the diplomatic representative of the present
regime to complain of Ghanaians ‘locked up without trial’ when at the time of the Information
Officer’s letter to the Manchester Guardian the total of persons imprisoned without trial by the
military regime far exceeded the number at any time under Dr Nkrumah’s rule. This total never
amounted to anything like one thousand, let alone ‘thousands’.

While I cannot speak from personal knowledge about the treatment of Dr Danquah I can
vouch for the expert medical attention which Obetsebi-Lamptey received. I myself visited
him twice in hospital, where incidentally he was being visited by his relatives, and I
talked with his doctors. At the time of his arrest he was suffering from an advanced stage
of cancer of the liver. His death was inevitable and in no way connected with his
imprisonment. Though at the time he had been charged with organizing terrorist bomb
outrages in which thirty persons lost their lives and some three hundred others had been
seriously injured, he was placed in a private ward in the best equipped civilian hospital in
Accra and had all the drugs and attention possible provided for him by the Government.
The maintenance of law and order in developing countries is a highly complicated question. The
method by which attempts were made to solve it in Ghana was unsatisfactory certainly, in the
ultimate resort, in that preventive detention did not check the organization of a successful revolt.
In view of the various plots afoot, the number of political detainees might be held not to be
excessive but what proof was there that they were the right people?

The Ghana Courts had failed to check political conspiracy because of the rigidity of the English
laws of evidence and procedure and their, perhaps, too dogmatic enforcement in circumstances
for which they were never designed. However, the main trouble was not with the Courts
themselves but with the legal and police preparation of cases. Police methods in a developing
country of necessity are defective and, so far as Ghana was concerned, the Awhaitey Enquiry
showed that while it might be possible to unearth sufficient to prove a conspiracy of some sort
existed, whatever the effort made, it was impossible, with the existing machine, to establish all
those small points which are essential to reach definite and final conclusions.

The trouble with preventive detention, as applied in Ghana, was that its fairness or otherwise
depended upon the efficiency of the police investigation and thus the new remedy was likely to
be only slightly more effective than the Courts system so far as public security was concerned
and much worse so far as the rights of the individual were involved. Yet given the
circumstances, what else was possible? The only basis of criticism of the expedients to which
developing countries are forced, is to postulate an alternative which is workable in terms of the
resources available to them, and this is exactly what Western countries have been unable to do.
Far from preventive detention being condemned on principle and alternatives suggested, the
British Colonial Office view was that it was not only a highly necessary but also a highly moral
and reformatory instrument of government whose general use in Africa should be advocated
rather than explained away or excused as due to special circumstances in some particular
territory.

Almost contemporaneously with the publication of the Granville Sharp Commission Report the
British House of Commons debated in June, 1959, the circumstances in which eleven Africans
in preventive detention in Kenya had been beaten to death by prison warders. The Colonial
Secretary, Alan Lennox-Boyd, naturally expressed the British Government’s sympathy with the
relatives of the deceased and its profound regret that this lamentable incident should have
occurred but he strongly defended the ‘rehabilitation’ system in the over-zealous conduct of
which the men had lost their lives. Far from preventive detention being wrong, he told the
British Parliament, it was in fact the only method by which tribal conspiracies could be
stamped out and those who had mis-guidedly joined them could be trained in a way
which would enable them to return to civilian life. Progress, he felt, had been enormous.
At one time there had been 38,000 Africans in preventive detention in Kenya. Now,
thanks to the ‘rehabilitation’ policy it would be possible to reform the 13,000 detainees
previously pronounced incorrigible and therefore likely to be imprisoned for life. The
British House of Commons agreed with him and the Motion condemning the
Government’s preventive detention policy in Kenya and calling for stern disciplinary
action against those responsible for the deaths was decisively rejected.

An equally interesting explanation of the need for preventive detention had already appeared in
the London Times some two weeks before the debate on the killings in the Hola concentration
camps in Kenya. Explaining certain happenings in Southern Rhodesia, the Bulawayo
correspondent of The Times, in a two-column centre-page article, described how ‘500 members
of the Southern Rhodesian African National Congress were roped in for detention in a smoothly
executed night roundup’. The correspondent admitted that at first sight it might seem a little
arbitrary to arrest and imprison without trial the whole of the then leadership of an African Party
which it appeared represented the aspirations, however mistaken, of ninety per cent of the
population of the Colony particularly as it ‘was the proud boast’, according to him, of the
European minority ‘that no blood has been spilt in racial anger in their sunny land since 1896’.
‘In fairness to the Government,’ however, he pointed out, ‘it must be conceded that political subversion, preached to and practised among illiterate and semi-literate African masses can spread
like a forest fire unless subjected to the most strict police and governmental surveillance . . . The
normal trappings of a democratic judicial system are ill-equipped to deal effectively with such
threats to public safety.’

These views were not hastily thought-up justifications to deal with immediate situations. In
1961 the British Conservative Government presented to Parliament a four-hundred-page White
Paper dealing in detail, from start to finish, with the Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya. The argument
throughout is that the Mau Mau movement only became established because the British
Government failed to abandon soon enough normal judicial procedure and did not detain
without trial, at an early enough stage, a sufficient number of African suspects. The
Times article on preventive detention in Southern Rhodesia was quoted with approval.
From “Reap the Whirlwind,”

By Geoffery Bing pages 268-277