7. The Attorney General's Office in the Republic until Nkrumah's Overthrow - The Kwaw Swanzy Era

Kwaw Swanzy came to the Attorney Generalship straight from the Bar. He had no experience of managing a large office as the size of the Department had become by this time. Apart from Accra, we had branches of the Department in Kumasi, Cape Coast (also in charge of Sekondi-Takoradi), Sunayani and Tamale. With me in the prosecution section at that time were officers like Kodwo Boison, who became a High Court judge; Dan Annan, later to become a judge first of the Circuit Court, progressing through the High Court and eventually to take early retirement from the Court of Appeal, at the time the highest court of the land; J.N.K. Taylor, who succeeded me as DPP, and later became a judge of the High Court and retired eventually from the Supreme Court; Gyeke-Dako, who succeeded Taylor as DPP, went through some difficult phase when he was assigned to the Police as its adviser, then went to The Gambia where he also became the DPP, and eventually was raised to the bench as a High Court judge in Botswana; Samuel Mensa-Boison, who also became a High Court judge; Peter Adjetey, who left the Department to go into private practice; Fred Sarkodie, who became a High Court judge and was one of the three judges murdered in 1982, Chief Sekyi, the son of the famous W. E. G. Sekyi, and a brilliant but unpredictable young man who died early; Aikins, now a Supreme Court judge, who got to that position after holding the positions of DPP, Attorney General over a long period during Rawlings' military regime; Mrs. Joyce Bamford Addo, also a DPP before being elevated to the Supreme Court; and a number of very competent young men who passed through the Department, like Kwesi Zwennis and Miguel Ribeiro. Under Johnny Abbensetts, as Solicitor General, were Chawe Dodoo who was, for over a decade, the General Legal Counsel of the African Caribbean and Pacific Group of Countries' Secretariat based in Brussels; Charles Tettey for as many years the Solicitor General and the current Solicitor General, Mrs. Grace Orleans. Lebrecht Chinery Hesse was by now the Chief Legal Draftsman, Charlie Crabbe having left by now to become a judge. With Lebrecht was Kofi Tetteh who later became the first Editor of the Ghana Law Reports and left in 1979 to draft the laws and to edit the law reports in Botswana, another Lebrecht Hesse, who became Legal Draftsman in The Gambia and is now carrying on the same duties in British Virgin Islands; Nikoi who, for many years, was the Legal Draftsman in Swaziland, Nii Aryee, who went to Zimbabwe, and another Tettteh. We had the human resources and we had the motivation. One could be forgiven for thinking, as I did, that one was building up a first class office. My friend, Kofi Tetteh, once came to tell me that he had been offered a job with the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) in Canada and asked me what I thought he should do. I told him to decline the offer. I could not bear the thought of the office I thought we were building to be destroyed by the key members abandoning ship. I did not think much of the difference in pay which the departing officer would enjoy. Money was not one of the important considerations which influenced my life then, as long as one made a decent living, which I thought we did in Government service.

With Kwaw Swanzy's lack of knowledge of the detail of administration of the Attorney General's Department, he practically left the administration to me. I was not only responsible for the prosecution section, with quite a large staff in Accra and officers in Kumasi, Cape Coast, Sunyani and Tamale, but I was also responsible for a range of administrative matters. No promotion or move was recommended in any of the other sections without Kwaw consulting me. He had been a successful practitioner, and had built a comfortable home in the Airport area where he continued to live. He invited his officers to his home often for a drink. He himself enjoyed his drink at the time. He was later to become a teetotaler. But at that time he regularly came to the office after having taken a tot of alcohol. He said, as an advocate, it loosened the tongue. He was generous with his money. Peter Adjetey left the Department because he did not want to be transferred from Accra. I had asked him to go to Cape Coast and he had a number of reasons why he should not go. His wife was working in Accra; his child was at school in Accra and the move would disrupt his life; he could not afford to run two homes. But these were problems which a large number of Government officials faced and yet they went on transfer when required. The whole Government administration had been based on this system. I admired Peter very much as a valuable member of the Department but I thought that if he did not, and I asked someone else, the news would get around that there were some officers who were being protected by the DPP from transfers. I thought that was wrong and I insisted. The next thing I knew, Peter had appealed to the Attorney General on the matter. Upon being summoned by Kwaw I explained to him the administrative difficulty I would face if Peter's transfer was countermanded. Peter was called in and Kwaw undertook to cover his extra expenses which the transfer would cause him. Eventually, Peter did not accept this offer and, instead, resigned. I felt I had lost a good colleague. But I did not feel it right, in the circumstances, to approach the next officer and ask him to go to Cape Coast.

Kwaw also had a sense of humour. I remember the advice which he gave Ben Dorkenoo, when Ben had got his first job with the United Nations and he had applied for permission to leave Ghana to take up the appointment. It was during the time that any Ghanaian leaving Ghana needed to have an exit permit. Kwaku Boateng was then Minister of Interior and, as such, was responsible for the grant of these permits. Ben Dorkenoo had made his application but had got no approval for quite some time. He was getting anxious because the time for him to assume duties was fast approaching and, if he was not able to meet it, the offer of appointment would be withrawn. He knew Kweku~[ Kwaku (Uncle Roger asks) ]~ Boateng and had asked him about it. Kwaku Boateng denied seeing the application; the implication being that the application had got caught in the bureaucratic logjam. But an enquiry from the Principal Secretary had elicited the information that the application had been on the desk of the Minister for some time. Ben came to see Kwaw in the latter's house. What Ben really wanted was for Kwaw to either intercede with Kwaku Boateng or to let Nkrumah, whom Kwaw was supposed to be close to, know about the problem to get Kwaku Boateng to act. After Ben had finished telling his story, Kwaw came up with this surprising advice. He said the best advice he could give Ben was for him to hire a gang of thugs to waylay Kwaku Boateng and to beat him up severely because that is the only way that Nkrumah would recognise that people did not like Kwaku Boateng. However much one tried otherwise to convey the message to Nkrumah, he would not hear of it. Ben left in despair. He eventually managed to get to his post at the UN through Lome and stayed a UN Civil Servant for many years thereafter.

I met quite a number of people, some of them of the intelligence fraternity, at Kwaw's house. It was there that I first met Eric Otu, then supposed to be co-ordinating security for Nkrumah. I also met the mysterious Major General Hassan from time to time at his house. These were all social occasions. Occasionally, Kwame Sarbah was present. Always, Kwaw was generous with his drinks. Sometimes my visit was for work but often not. I had an easy relationship with him. It was on one of the working sessions in 1963 that I acquired a reputation which Sarbah teased me about for years afterwards. It was about lunch-time but we were in the middle of a discussion which we could not break immediately. The earth began to rumble and the building began to shake. It was an earthquake. My first reaction was to reach for Kwaw's telephone to phone Stella at home to find out how she and Ralph were. I thought it was natural. I could never hear the end of this act,~[* fact? ]~ at least not from Kwame Sarbah.

My first appearance with Kwaw in court was in a relatively minor prosecution before E.A.L. Bannerman, then Senior Magistrate. The accused was charged with being in unlawful possession of diamonds. The exhibit of diamonds found was of some small dirty looking bits of looking like broken glass in an aspirin bottle. I do not now recall why the Attorney General or even the DPP should appear on such a case. But we did. And I there saw Kwaw display his histrionic talent as a cross-examiner and an advocate. It was very colourful. We secured a conviction.

The next time I appeared with him was in the second Treason Trial involving Tawia Adamafio, Ako Adjei and Coffie Crabbe. But before then there was the first Treason Trial involving Teiko Tagoe, Mama Tula and others, in which I led for the prosecution. That was the first case tried by the Special Criminal Division of the High Court. As I have pointed out in The Contribution of the Courts to Government, after the Akoto Case, no issue of constitutional significance came up before the ordinary courts during the first Republic. The Criminal Procedure (Amendment) Act, 1961 (Act 91) had established a Special Criminal Division of the High Court to deal with cases involving national security. The Special Division was not a continuing court but a court which was activated from time to time when the Attorney General decided to institute proceedings before it. This could be done by a fresh case being brought before it or by the Attorney-General stepping in on a case which had already started in the ordinary courts and asking for its transfer to the Special Criminal Division. Originally intended to deal with the type of cases which led to detention, it was not used until the first Treason Trial. The Court in that case was constituted by Chief Justice Korsah, Justices Van Lare and Sarkodee Adoo, the three most senior judges of the Supreme Court. The alleged treason was constituted by the accused persons' activities designed to overthrow the government of President Nkrumah. It was during the period after Kulungugu, where a bomb was thrown at the President, who was saved by the presence of mind of a security officer who forced him down on the ground when he became aware of something having been thrown. Ghana was, by now, going through a tense phase of public panic when explosives were being thrown into crowds at public gatherings. The Police were under great pressure to find those who were involved in these acts. Owusu-Sechere, the then Head of the Criminal Investigation Department (CID), was one of the senior officers involved in the investigation of this offence. Eventually, Teiko Tagoe was arrested by his men at one public gathering with a bomb hidden under his clothing. His statement led to the identification of the most colourful personality among the accused, Mama Tula, a man with a commanding personality always dressed in the flowing robes of Northern Ghana, who had a sense of humour. He gave a long statement in which he said that the bombs had been given to him by Obetsebi-Lamptey, one of the famous Six detained with Nkrumah after the February 28, 1948 riots but who had since become an implacable opponent of Nkrumah and was at the time in exile from Ghana. Mama Tula had acted as the supplier of the bombs to the boys who had been selected for the purpose like Teiko Tagoe when the bombs were to be thrown. Mama Tula's hideout was found at a village called Bawaleshi, some distance off the Accra Legon Road. The evidence against the accused was overwhelming. They were convicted.

It was during the emergency that my friend, Dick Wilson, paid us a second visit to Ghana. I remember the day that he had to leave, as I looked out from our bedroom window early in the morning, I saw a long line of police officers walking very slowly, combing the area where we lived. People in cars were being stopped and searched. I wondered what delays we would encounter in getting him to the Airport. Fortunately, he managed to make his plane with only a car-boot check on the way. The Second Treason Trial arose out of the arrest and detention under the Preventive Detention Act of Tawia Adamafio, Ako Adjei and Coffie Crabbe following the Kulungugu incident. How the intelligence came that they were involved in the assassination attempt, I do not know. The Police were engaged for a long time in the investigation of the affair. Then I was later handed the docket on the case to study. I noticed that n that case the evidence against all of the party functionaries arrested was of a circumstantial nature. I thought the available evidence against Tawia Adamafio was stronger than that against Ako Adjei or Coffie Crabbe. There must have been the usual exchange between myself and the Police, asking them to investigate more into certain aspects which required further investigation their coming back with more evidence or the report that they could find nothing further. About this time, I was one day asked by Kwaw Swanzy to come to see him. Bing was with him. I was told that the President was under great pressure from his fellow Heads of State to either prosecute Tawia Adamafio, if there was any evidence against him, or to release him. The view that I expressed was that if Tawia Adamafio was to be prosecuted then the others who were arrested with him also should be prosecuted. The impression given to the world was that they were in this conspiracy together and there was no reason why one of them should be selected for a judicial trial, thus giving him a chance of acquittal while the others were left in preventive detention without trial. Later on, Bing was to write in his book, Reap the Whirlwind that I had advised that Tawia Adamafio should be prosecuted although he was of the view that the evidence against him was insufficient and had therefore advised against. I also learnt that when Tawia Adamafio died, that portion of Bing's book was read out by members of his family to show that it was not Bing's fault that he was prosecuted but mine. Anybody who knew of the relative powers of the Attorney General, Bing, and myself as the DPP in the time of Nkrumah, would find that statement incredible. How my views on a prosecution of that political and security importance could have overridden the combined views of Bing and the Attorney General, is a matter which amazes me. This was no ordinary criminal case; it was a case carrying the highest political overtones. I may, in the course of our discussions, have said that the case against Adamafio was stronger than that against the other two but that was in the context of a generally shaky circumstantial case. It was certainly not a case in which a lawyer of experience would, after reading the docket, confidently predict that conviction was assured. In any case, the DPP was at no time independent of the Attorney General. The DPP took his instructions from the Attorney General. If Bing, as the Special Legal Adviser to the President, as he was at that time, had told the Attorney General that the evidence was insufficient, assuming that the Attorney General himself knew nothing about the state of that evidence, would the Attorney General meekly state that, well this matter is in the hands of the DPP, so what he says, even in such a case, goes? Anyway, I have always believed that it is better to give an arrested person a trial and have the evidence against him tested by a court rather than to keep him for years in detention on some material which nobody knows about. Therefore, the slant to the story given by Bing to exonerate himself, though untrue, gives me no qualms of conscience.

Indeed, one thing I did which caused me great satisfaction while I was the DPP was to write a homily on the consequences of indiscriminate detentions without justifiable cause. When the Preventive Detention Act was first enacted, those detained were given some notice of the grounds on which they were detained. The grounds were quite general and wide, often alleging action against the security of the State over a lengthy period of time without giving specific dates or specific actions. The Act called for this notice to enable the detained person to make representations against his detention. But the need to follow a recognised procedure must have acted as a restraint on the freedom to issue these detention orders. But by the time I became DPP the practice of serving detainees with the grounds of their detention had fallen into disuse. By then, detention without trial had become a common thing which several Police Officers, taking advantage of the lack of enforcement of the requirement for the service of grounds, indulged in, whether because they ordered the detention at a time when they thought there was a case against the detainee, or because they were acting on the instructions of a third person who had a grudge to settle. I was aware that one officer in Ashanti had developed his own system of detention which involved a common printed form ordering the detention of a person, whose name was left blank and the signature of the officer and the date were also left blank. All he had to do was to insert the name and sign and date the document and there was a detention order on which the Police of the region acted. It was not really preventive detention under the Act but that was what preventive detention, with its indefinite term and lack of judicial scrutiny had led the public to accept. It seemed to me that, even if there was cause for the detention of the person, often after investigation when it was found that the original complaint which led to the detention had no substance, instead of releasing the detained person, which probably would, in their minds, amount to an admission of error, the Police found it easier to forget about him to languish in custody. I first asked the Criminal Investigation Department with which worked I closely to supply me with a list of all persons held in Police custody, the date they were arrested, the charges against them and the status of the investigation. The returns I received was~[* constituted? ]~ an embarrassing document. A large number of persons were held in custody, some over a long period of time, against whom the charge for their detention was “unspecified”. That was the time when I wrote the homily. It dealt with the powers of arrest recognised by the law and tried to analyse in each case the procedures which ought to be followed. I pointed out the obvious that there was no recognised procedure under the law for the arrest and detention of any person for a reason that cannot be specified. I wrote about the number of people affected by illegal arrests and the disaffection which was bound to arise from such action. I later learnt that this letter had led to a number of people being released. I had written directly to the Police on what I thought was a confidential matter. But Ghana being what it is, not long after that, Victor Owusu, one of the leaders of the Opposition, told me that he had heard that I had been writing to the Police about illegal arrests and detentions. One other consequence followed from this address to the Police which I shall presently relate.

The case of Tawia Adamafio, Ako Adjei, Coffie Crabbe and others, came before the Special Criminal Division of the High Court. This time, the Court was constituted by Chief Justice Korsah, Justices Van Lare and Akufo Addo. The importance of the case was such that I was led by Kwaw Swanzy. Apart from the three CPP men, two other accused persons, Otchere, a former member of the Opposition and Yaw Manu, a messenger between the members of the Opposition outside Ghana and those within, of no great significance, were added to the accused as the treason charges were capital in nature, the accused persons needed Counsel. But the Chief Justice ruled that as they were charged with an offence against the security of the State, the State was not obliged to provide them with Counsel. The evidence was taken and the Court adjourned for judgment. Government must have felt confident that the accused would be convicted, because when the judgment was read, convicting Otchere and the other accused of little consequence, but acquitting Tawia Adamafio, Ako Adjei and Coffie Crabbe, Government's reaction was one of shock. We had a meeting in Kwaw's house. He was angry, as were other political figures present. The more they talked, the more the temperature rose. It was decided that Kwaw should hold a press conference and denounce the judgment. The press conference was arranged. Johnny Abbensetts was present and was invited to join Kwaw to the conference. I had some other engagement and was excused from attendance. Later, I was told of what happened at the press conference. Kwaw had denounced the judgment on the ground that the judges had acted iniquitously in accepting the prosecution evidence with respect to the minor accused person but rejecting it in respect of the big three. There, I thought, Kwaw was wrong because to me there was nothing wrong in what the court had done, as the evidence against each accused had to be separately evaluated. Kwaw enunciated at the press conference the rule that a court could not use the same evidence in convicting but disbelieve it in respect of other accused person.

The results of the case were dramatic and serious for the Ghana Judiciary and the press conference had unfortunate consequences for Kwaw personally. Not only the judgment but the whole case was nullified. It was by Act of Parliament treated as if a nolle prosequi had been entered by the AG, thus making the whole trial of no effect. Chief Justice Korsah's appointment was revoked by the President, as he had the constitutional power to do so but from a date prior to the hearing of the case. As a result, it was as if he had never sat on the case as Chief Justice at all. Technically, he was then reduced to the status of an ordinary juge of the Supreme Court. He resigned his office as a judge. So did Justice Van Lare. But Justice Akufo Addo took the view that he had done nothing wrong and had no cause to resign. The 1960 Constitution was amended. Power was conferred in the amendment on the President to remove judges for whatever cause seemed to him fit. Justice Akufo Addo was removed. Of the judges who departed from the bench after the Second Treason Trial, Akufo Addo was the one who had the greatest opprobium heaped on him. The extent of the public abuse which was hurled at him can be gauged from the parliamentary debates which I have cited in The Contribution of the Courts to Government, which for completeness may be repeated here. [Here Quote from The Contribution]

With the case nullified, all the accused were kept in custody. The Special Criminal Division of the High Court was reconstituted:~[* originally “reformed” ]~ instead of three judges, it was to have one judge who was to sit with a jury. The jury was to be specially selected. The trial judge was obliged, at the end of the prosecution case, to call upon the defence to make its case. The decision of guilt or otherwise had to be left to the jury. The court, unlike the previous one, was to sit in camera. Justice Sarkodee Adoo succeeded Korsah as the Chief Justice. The treason case against the same accused persons was brought before him sitting with the special jury. The trial was held in camera at Christiansborg Castle. Kwaw Swanzy again led for the prosecution. This time I was not called upon to assist. Kobina Taylor was his most senior assistant. All the accused persons were convicted by the jury and they were duly sentenced.

It was ironical that Chief Justice Korsah's tenure of office should have been terminated over his court's acquittal of Tawia Adamafio and Ako Adjei. Some time before then, an attempt had been made by a faction of the Government which no doubt included Ako Adjei and reputedly had the backing of Tawia Adamafio, to get rid of him. The election of a judge of the International Court of Justice normally starts by a nomination by a body called the National Committee(?)~[* consider ]~ formed by judges, lawyers and other international personalities distinguished in international affairs. The nomination is then put forward by the State which folllows up by promoting the candidature of the nominee until the elections by the United Nations General Assembly. A National Committee was formed mainly by Government nominees consisting of the Minister of Justice, the Attorney General, the Minister for Foreign Affairs, who was then Ako Adjei and the Chief Justice (Korsah). I was appointed the Secretary of the Committee. Its task was to select a candidate for election as a judge of the ICJ. When the meeting was called to order and its business was announced, Ako Adjei immediately nominated Chief Justice Korsah as the candidate. The Chief Justice protested. He had not expected to be nominated, he said; he himself had come to nominate Justice Van Lare. The Chief Justice had not planned to leave the Ghana bench at the time. His embarrassment may have been due to the fact that he had discussed the matter with Justice Van Lare before and had suggested that he was going to nominate Van Lare. So there was some difficulty over having to explain to Justice Van Lare, that instead of him, the person who was to have nominated him had rather been nominated. But Chief Justice Korsah's nomination was quickly approved. After the meeting I was seeing him off when he said, he repeated that he had not expected this result. He then asked me what the terms of appointment of a judge of the ICJ were. I told him that he held office for nine years to begin with and was eligible for re-election. The salary was by any Ghanaian standards astronomical.

Chief Justice Korsah's nomination was transmitted to our Mission in New York. There was a lot of lobbying to be done and Alex Quason-Sackey, our Ambassador to the United Nations was there to do it. He soon started sending back messages that support for Korsah was very strong. Important States were behind him. The British knew him and liked him. The Americans were prepared to support the candidature and so was the Soviet Union, which would support Ghana's candidate because of Nkrumah. But support for Quason-Sackey from home was not strong. His messages back became more frantic. He needed assurances from home that the Korsah candidature was serious but this was not forthcoming. At a time when there had been expressions of support for Korsah, his candidature was withdrawn. A new candidate, Sir Edward Asafu Adjaye, was substituted. Apparently, it had always been the plan to withdraw the candidature of Korsah, but only after he had committed himself to resigning from the Chief Justiceship. This would have left him without anything. The suport shown for him was unexpected and did not fit into the game plan. The support for Chief Justice Korsah was not transferred to Sir Edward. One question which was always asked about him was whether he had ever been a judge, which at that time the other States wanted to be satisfied on. Sir Edward, consummate lawyer and diplomat as he was, had never been a judge. That was the last chance Ghana had of having a judge of the ICJ. Others tried later to get there. Patrick Anin, when he was nominated by the Busia regime, was asked by the octogenarian Togolese judge, Pinto, why such a young man, Patrick was still under 50, wanted to join the court. Dr. Asante was put forward a few times without success. There were several promotions in the Judiciary as a result of the resignations and removal of the original judges of the nullified Second Treason Trial. I have dealt with these in The Contribution of the Courts to Government. The constitutional amendment which permitted the removal of judges by the President, for whatever cause he might think sufficient, also declared Ghana a one party State. The CPP was that party. The thesis was put forward that the tradition of Africa made the western style democracy unsuitable for African countries. In a way, I agreed with this thesis; I could not see an accommodating political process developed on the basis of the confrontational and, sometimes insulting criticisms found in western societies. You do not openly call another a fool in our society and expect to continue to be friends with him afterwards. And we tend to take the title Opposition too literally, thinking that we are obliged to oppose everything, whatever the merits because we are an opposition. But I was at the same time concerned that a one party state would not bring out the objections which people would seriously have to the policies of the dominant faction of the one party. Any criticism of declared policy would be taken as treachery. What the practical adjustment should be has always been the political problem of government in African societies.

The constitutional amendment stopped short at making Nkrumah President for Life. But he was Life Chairman of the CPP and even with a one party State, Nkrumah delayed in having an election. I do not think that until the latter part of his presidency he needed a one party state for the CPP to be the party of government. Nor do I think that his election results needed to show that he had over 90% support to convince the world that he had the support of his people. When at last in 1964 an election took place, the inevitability of the result deprived it of all interest. But by this time, other forces were at play.

The Treason Trials did not stop the attempts on Nkrumah's life. There was one more blatant attempt. That was by Ametewee, the Police Officer on guard duty at Flagstaff House.

Robert Hayfron-Benjamin had joined the Attorney General's Department as a Principal State Attorney, on the Civil side. I had known him since I joined Cadbury House at Achimota. As he was a few years ahead of me we were not that close. But I remember him well: it was from him that I learnt the word “obvious”. He used it so often in his many arguments, when he wanted to say that his opponent's view was so well accepted as not to merit being raised. As a result, I had to look up this word which became so intriguing in the dictionary. Later, I learnt that he was a grandson of the great John Mensah Sarbah, the first native of the land who was called to the English Bar and did so much to raise the awareness of his people in relations with the British administration. Robert's legal pedigree was pure; his father was a lawyer still in practice in Cape Coast when I started in the Attorney General's Department but occasionally appearing before the appellate court in Accra, where he was noted for raising obscure legal points to confuse his adversaries. Robert was to develop later into one of the most outstanding human rights judges in Africa. Robert was friendly with Eric Otu, the co-ordinator of security in Nkrumah's regime. Benjie, as all his friends from Achimota and elsewhere called him, called me at the office one day. He said he was with Eric, who wanted to see me. So following his directions, I arrived at Eric's office, which was at the back of Flagstaff House, where Nkrumah had both his office and his residence. There was only a wall dividing Eric's office from Flagstaff House. Benjie introduced the subject of our discussions by saying that I had decided views on preventive detention and, perhaps, Eric would like to hear them. In our discussions, it became clear that Eric was also disturbed by the measure. I had a theory that as long as it was available, people would be kept in prison under it because where they are arrested because of some security disturbance and the authorities felt that the situation was calm enough to order the release of the detainees, something was bound to happen which instead of allowing those in custody to be freed would rather ensure that more people are arrested and added to those already there. As a result, the detainee population kept increasing without any chance of reduction. He agreed with this thesis and we were thinking of possible ways of reducing the detainee population when his telephone rang. The message given him was coded and he, at first, did not understand it because he also made an immediate call, and then he put the telephone down in some bewilderment. He said the message given by the caller was that he should come over quickly because his baby was very ill. By accident, Eric's wife had recently had a baby, so he phoned home to her to find out what was wrong with the baby. His bewilderment was due to the fact that the wife said the baby was fine; there was nothing wrong with it. Obviously, the code had not been rehearsed. We were discussing the meaning of the message when the telephone rang again. This time, apparently, the voice was insistent. He must come over immediately. So, Eric turned to Benjie and me and said, he thought he must go over to Flagstaff House to see what was happening there. We should continue our discussions which were of great interest to him later and he added, ominously, “unless what has just happened makes it irrelevant.” So we parted company, he to go to Flagstaff House and ourselves to go back to the AG's Department. It was not long after that that I heard that an attempt had been made on the President's life. A policeman on guard duty at Flagstaff House by the name Ametewee had shot at the President at close range, missed him but killed one of the senior security officers, Salifu Dagarti. I knew I had work to do.

The docket on the Ametewee case got quite soon to me. The evidence was straight forward. All expected that there would be another charge of treason for trying to overthrow the established government by force. But I thought that we had had enough of treason trials for a while. This was a case with no obvious political overtones. True a charge of treason could be made but I thought it would continue to increase the political polarisation of the country. But here was the simplest case of murder. Ametewee had killed Salifu Dagarti intentionally. Of course he did not intend to kill Salifu Dagarti, he intended to kill Nkrumah. But in law this was no defence. You cannot escape a conviction of murder on the ground that, oh I intended to kill but not the one who was actually killed. Whether Ametewee was charged with treason or murder, the punishment was the same. It was the death penalty. I reduced tensions considerably by charging him with murder. Ametewee was furious; he had intended to make a political speech. He intended to derive the maximum political benefit from his act. He wanted to be acclaimed through his trial as the hero who had tried to rid Ghana of Nkrumah. Now he found himself charged with the murder of someone whom he considered as a nonentity. To the murder charge, he had no real defence. There were witnesses who had seen him fire within the Flagstaff House compound at Nkrumah. They had seen Salifu Dagarti fall as a result. Salifu Dagarti died as a result of the gunshot wound. Ametewee's conviction was quick and sure. On appeal, he dismissed his lawyer, and started on his political speech. But the Court told him that he was not charged with a political offence. He was enraged by this. His conviction was confirmed and he was led away protesting.

The procedure after a conviction for a capital offence was that after the judicial process was through, i.e. the trial and any appeal thereafter had ended, the trial judge submits a report of his view of the case. Sometimes, although the legal conditions which constituted the offence had been satisfied, the judge may make a recommendation for mercy because, although there had not technically been evidence which would amount to provocation at law, yet the convicted person may have been moved by insufferable conduct on the part of the deceased which morally reduced the responsibility of the convicted person. It may be that the act was not planned or premeditated over any appreciable time before the act, but was an act of the moment. The judge on the other hand may say that there was nothing which could be said in favour of the convicted person; the law should, accordingly, take its course. A conscientious judge may want to write this report as soon after the trial as possible otherwise, he may have forgotten the details of the trial by the time the appeal process is finished. But writing the report before the appeal is through may result in the trial judge writing a report which is never submitted, if the appeal were to be allowed. Most judges leave writing this report until after the appeal. Apart from the trial judge, the prosecuting Attorney would also write his views. There would be reports from the Director of Prisons and the prison doctor, the latter dealing with the physical and mental fitness of the convicted person to undergo the sentence of death. All these reports are collected and collated by the senior lawyer in the Attorney General's Department responsible for prosecutions. After the creation of the post of the DPP, it was he who finally put the reports together with the various recommendations and submitted them to the President. The President would then, on the basis of these reports decide whether to grant a reprieve or let the law should take its course. Nkrumah never signed a death warrant in my time as the DPP. In fact, I do not recall him signing one during the time that I was in the Attorney General's Department, except in the case of Ametewee. That warrant came very quickly and he was executed.

Eventually, an election was called based on the one-party State introduced by the amended Constitution. The CPP fielded all the candidates. Some of them were nominated for constituencies with which they had nothing to do. It was like having a list system in a constituency context. The Party was now supreme. But the economic situation was now fast deteriorating. There were shortages of imported food items and materials. This was partly due to the fact that, in an egalitarian and more educated Ghana which Nkrumah's Government had developed, there was a great increase in the number of people consuming imported items like imported milk and butter than the colonial peoples had done. But it was also due to the rapidly deteriorating terms of trade against Third World countries and, unless the economic base and production were expanded, foreign exchange for imports became increasingly scarce.

I had a wretched feeling of inability to help improve the lot of the common man. But personally, it was not all doom and gloom. In 1964, I had an invitation from the German Government to visit Germany. This was organised by Count Dietrich von Bruhl, who was then the Counsellor and Charge d'Affaires at the West German Embassy. There was always some competition between the West and East Germans in the days of Nkrumah. The West Germans operated a policy of severing relations with any country which recognised East Germany. Ghana did not go as far as recognising the East German Government but we flirted as near as we could with it. There was a Trade Mission in the country, which for all practical purposes behaved like an Embassy. Ghanaian officials visited East Germany often. Nkrumah was proud of Humboldt University and other institutions in East Germany. I do not know whether an invitation from East or West during the heyday of the ideological divide meant that the invitee was excluded from invitations from the other side. But I know that my first invitation to visit a country came from West Germany and I had other invitations from Western countries afterwards. No invitation ever came to me from the East.

For my visit to West Germany, there was an elaborate programme prepared. My tour covered visits to Munich, Stuttgart, Karlsruhe, Frankfurt, Bonn and Berlin. In each place, I went on a tour of the sites and learnt of the culture of the place. In each place, I had a guide-cum-interpreter, who took me round and interpreted conversations. I tried to learn as much about the German legal and constitutional system as I could. Germany is the country of beer-drinking, with the beer of each of the places which I visited being different from the other. I was delighted to sample them, except in Karlsruhe, as I went around. While in Munich, I was taken to Landsberg Prison, a few kilometers away, where Hitler had written Mein Kampf. I was quite attracted to the openness and apparent easy-going nature of the people of Munich. When told that I was visiting Stuttgart next, they thought I would meet a people, the Swabian people, who had no fun in life except work. I found when I got to Stuttgart, that included in my itinerary was a visit to the local prison, this time for youths. Karlsruhe was the seat of the Constitutional Court. Unlike the other cities, I did not stay there but paid a day's visit while I was staying in Stuttgart. Unfortunately, I did not see the Court in session, which I would have loved to. My visit to Frankfurt included a call on the equivalent of the Attorney-General, Dr. Wolff, who had a reputation for having resisted Hitler. But again, I was scheduled to visit a prison. It was a prison for women. My host, the Attorney General, told me that I would find that there were more women convicted of homicide in there than I would find in the men's prison. As he jokingly put it, that shows that homicide was a woman's offence. But at this stage I asked why it was that I was being shown prisons everywhere I went. My hosts looked surprised at the question. They had thought that I was interested in seeing the prisons because they had assumed that, in Ghana, the DPP was in charge of prisons. I quietly disabused their minds. They were profusely apologetic. What then, would I like to see? I said I would appreciate it very much if I was to sit in on a court in session. That was easy to arrange. I spent the next day in court at a small trial with my guide interpreting the proceedings for me. But it was too late and my stay ended before I could see the end of the trial.

Next, I went to Bonn, where I was to see the Ghana Ambassador. It was Lawyer Doe, whom I knew. He graciously entertained me. I had been dealing with a criminal case in Ghana which had a German dimension, and I discussed it with him. I stayed at the Hotel Dreisen, a beautiful hotel by the Rhine and a favourite of Hitler. But I was shown a place across the river where Adenauer, the current West German Chancellor, hailed from. From Bonn, I was flown to West Berlin, a visit to which I looked forward because my brother, Ambrose, whom the family called “Sonny” was studying veterinary surgery there. He had been in Germany since 1960. My last exchanges with him had not been too happy, and before I left for Germany, I was not sure how he would receive me. But he had phoned me in Bonn and asked where I was staying in Berlin, so from then on I was not so apprehensive of our meeting. I was staying at the Hotel Am-Zoo, and we met there. My guide and interpreter was the interpreter of Willie Brandt, then the Mayor of the western part of the divided city. I would have liked to meet him but, unfortunately, he was not in town the day that I was to meet him. My guide, Miss Amersdinck, was an impressive interpreter, without doubt the most accomplished that I came across. She also had a peculiar interest for a German; she was a fanatic cricket fan. When I found that I could not match her knowledge of the game, I began to avoid the subject. A funny incident occurred at that hotel. She left me at the hotel when she first took me there to rest and to freshen up. She was to call back for me in about two hours for lunch and to begin with my programme. Soon after she left, Ambrose arrived and came up to my room. When Miss Amersdinck returned and gave me a call from the hotel lobby, Ambrose took the call. Both of my brothers are supposed to have indistinguishable voices on the phone as myself. Ambrose spoke to her in fluent German. Miss Amersdinck had a shock. When did I become such a fluent German speaker? In the Berlin of that time, I am sure she must have started thinking that I was some sort of agent, when my brother and I came down to the lobby, then she realised that I had a German speaking double. Ambrose was better to carry on her cricketing conversation because he was more knowledgeable about the subject than I. I had the customary visit to the Berlin Wall. The City Council gave me a lunch at which the apologies of Willie Brandt were conveyed and I was given a valuable coin, a Maria Teresa “taler” as a memento. Ambrose and friends threw a party to which I was invited. Of the friends, the one I remember was a Namibian (then still called South West African) girl by the name of Nora Schimming. I should be forgiven for remembering her because she was Ambrose's girl-friend at the time and I thought their friendship would develop into something more permanent. In any case, I liked her. But I heard later that they had broken up. She became a freedom fighter for her country and suffered persecution from the hands of the then apartheid South African government in power. The next time I met her, nearly twenty years later, she was Nora Schimming-Chase, married and divorced, with grown up children. By then, Namibia was independent. She was in Paris to set up her country's first Embassy in France. She later became Namibia's Ambassador to Bonn.

The visit to West Berlin was the end of my tour. But I did not leave Germany immediately. I had official business to transact on behalf of Ghana. I went back to Stuttgart because of the famous case known as the Djaba Case. Charges of conspiracy and fraud by false pretences were brought by the State against Henry Kwadjoe Djaba, James Quartey, who was also known as Kwesi Kota, and the former Minister of Agriculture, F. Y. Asare. The charges arose out of a tender for mist-blowers used for spraying the cocoa trees as protection against disease. Government from time to time asked for tenders for the acquisition of these mist-blowers for supply to the farmers. About a couple of years before the charges, such a tender had been advertised. In competition for the award were three types of mist-sprayers: one produced by a Dutch company, a second produced by a British company and a third produced by a German company. Apparently, to the initiated, the German product stood head and shoulders above the competition. It was produced by two German brothers, Hans and Heinz Emmerich, who had started their factory, Solo Kleinmotoren GmbH, near Stuttgart from very small beginnings. One of the brothers was the engineer and the other dealt with the books of the company. By the time the case came up, they were in a flourishing way of business. Their product was called Solo. By all accounts, on any fair competition, it had to win the tender. But, what happened was not so simple. Djaba, then a young businessman and member of the CPP, was the agent for Solo. According to the evidence, he had approached James Quartey, who was the Government examiner for such machinery and come to an arrangement with him whereby Quartey was to recommend the product as the best and the two would obtain a part of the price which they would share equally between them. Hans and Heinz Emmerich were then persuaded to add to the price they required for their product, a certain figure which was to be passed back to Djaba and Quartey to share. It was alleged that F.Y. Asare, the Minister, was part of the arrangement. The Solo machine was duly recommended by Quartey and approved by the Minister. A couple of bulk orders were made by Government which were duly fulfilled by Solo Kleinmotoren and the extra money was passed back through Djaba for distribution. The newspapers occasionally showed Djaba as making contributions to the CPP at rallies. As long as the Emmerich brothers got the orders and the price that they asked for themselves, they were happy to see the arrangement continue. But matters took a different turn when Djaba managed to entice one Gaede, the chief engineer of Solo Kleinmotoren, from the company in order to form a rival company of their own to continue the exploitation of this arrangement to the exclusion of Solo. The Emmerich brothers then decided to report the whole matter to President Nkrumah. The President decided that Djaba and his associates should be prosecuted. I had the task of advising on and heading the prosecution. Geoffrey Bing, now Legal Adviser in the President's Office, was providing support to ensure the success of the prosecution.

On my return visit to Stuttgart, one of my tasks was to persuade the Emmerich brothers to come to Ghana to give evidence. Without their evidence, there was no chance of securing a conviction. But they were so impressed with the importance of Djaba that they were afraid of coming to Ghana. The other assignment was to find out about the accounts into which the moneys paid over to Djaba and James Quartey had been deposited with a view to their recovery. On both aspects, my visit was quite successful. I left Germany for Finland where Stella and Ralph already were, having managed to convince the Emmerich brothers that it was the President who had ordered that Djaba and his associates be prosecuted; that their evidence in the court in Ghana was essential to the prosecution case; and that nothing untoward would happen to them if they came to Ghana to give this evidence. I also got the particulars of the accounts of Djaba and Quartey into which payments had been made and put a stop order on those accounts. Later on, Dan Annan visited Germany to ensure that the Ghana Government recovered the moneys still in those accounts.

I took the opportunity of being so close to Finland to visit Stella's family. Stella and Ralph had already gone ahead of me, so I joined them for a holiday. I knew that the Djaba trial would take a little time to mature for trial. Finland, as usual, was restful. Stella's father, Pa Ejnar, had died in the earlier part of the year. So we were unable to renew our relationship established in 1960. Stella's mother, Ester, was kindness itself. It was amazing the infinite trouble she and Stella's invalid sister, Nora, went through to learn enough English to be able to speak to me. Walking Nora in her wheelchair was one of the relaxing exercises of the holidays. We visited Stella's brother, Rainer, who was then working with the dairy company, Enigheten, in Vasa which was my first visit up north in Finland. Helsinki we visited to see Nina and her husband, Bjarne who had a sharp and inquisitive mind. He would want to inquire into anything about a person. He was trained as a forester but a disability with his lungs caused him, in later life, to qualify as a lawyer. By this time, he was working in an international debt collection agency. He enjoyed seeing me in Helsinki as it gave him the opportunity for an evening outing to show me around. We would leave Nina and Stella at home and he would give me dinner at some good restaurant, then perhaps visit other night spots.

With Pa Ejnar's burial in the Kimito churchyard, I learnt an aspect of Finnish life which was so different from what I knew in Ghana: the frequency with which people visited the graves of family and friends to see that the graves were cared for and decorated with flowers. Cemeteries in Ghana for me had been places which one avoided except for those anniversaries or days of remembrance on which one must visit and pay respect to the dead. In Finland, it is a neatly laid out place which one visits often to see how the dearly beloved departed are faring. The cemetery thus invites no reluctance nor fear from its visitors.

On our return to Accra, Stella and I were invited to a concert at which Marijote von Bruhl, Detriech's wife, sang classical songs to the piano accompaniment of Henry Sekyi. It was more or less the farewell of the von Bruhls as they were being replaced in the German Embassy by Dieter and Hildergarde Schaad, who were introduced to us at the concert. Also at that concert was a new couple who had come to join the American Embassy, Bill (a name which stood not for William but Willard) and Beppy De Pree. When we were introduced during the interval, Beppy, who was born Swedish said she had heard so much about Stella and how she, Beppy, looked like Stella that she was quite fed up with the comparison. They did have a certain Scandinavian likeness. We all went to our place for a drink after the concert. We got to know both the Schaads and the De Prees very well. Dieter was the number 2 in the German Embassy after the Ambassador; Bill was the head of the political section of the American Embassy. It turned out that the De Prees and we were married on the very same day and in the same year as we were. They became good friends almost immediately. Bill, being a kind and reflective person who loved books and enjoyed cultivated conversation, it was not difficult for the four of us to get on well. We often went together to the beaches at the Panagiotopulous salt flats at “Mile 7”, which was on the Winneba Road, seven miles east of Accra, at Teshie/Nungua and other places. We sometimes played tennis. We attended each other's parties and the parties of friends. We did not know then that this was a friendship which was going to last for the rest of our lives. When the whole of our family visited the United States in 1973-74, they were most kind and helpful to us. We spent our fortieth wedding anniversary together in Bermuda in August 1996.

Ghana was of some importance in the calculation of the international community around this time because it was then full of young diplomats who later rose high in the service of their own countries. It must have been taken as the training ground for promising young diplomats. Bill himself became Ambassador to Mozambique and later to Bangladesh, where he won the presidential order of merit in the service twice and, for many years later, the chairman of the Inspector~[* Inspectorate? ]~ of the US Embassies. He was unlucky to have been adversely noticed after Mozambique by the ultra-right Senator Jesse Helms, who was for many years a power in the Foreign Affairs Committee of the Senate responsible for approving ambassadorial appointments. Under Bill in the Political Section of the American Embassy served Jack Matlock, who later became the US Ambassador to Yugoslavia and then for many years the Ambassador to the Soviet Union, followed by a seat in the National Security Council advising the President of the US. Jack's and Rebecca's parties were characterised by games requiring a high degree of intellectual concentration. The Dutch sent a succession of young diplomats who occupied very high positions in later life. There were Wim and Aneke van Ekelen, who staged a memorable treasure hunt; Wim later rose to become his country's Minister of Defence, followed by the Secretary General of the Western European Union. They were soon succeeded by Joris and Yvone Vos; Joris later became Ambassador to Australia, to the Soviet Union followed by an ambassadorship to Russia and a number of the successor States of the disintegrated Union, and later of the United States. Dieter and Hildegard Schaad were in the German Embassy; they hosted the fancy dress party at which General Ankrah appeared some five days before Ankrah became Head of State; Dieter later ended up as Ambassador to the International Organisations in Austria. Mahen and Mona Mahendran were in the Sri Lanka High Commission; Mahen became his country's Ambassador successively to China and Japan and was, afterwards, adviser to the President on Foreign Affairs. The Ambassadors themselves were often people of quality. There was Franklin Williams, the American Ambassador who later took on the task of black education with the Phelps-Stokes Foundation. Jamsheed and Diana Marker represented Pakistan. Jamsheed was later Ambassador in Switzerland, then the United Nations and the US. Over thirty years later, he was still active as the UN Secretary-General's special representative on East Timor on its relations with Indonesia. Unfortunately, the Australian High Commissioner of the time, John Ryan, who was in Ghana with Pat, his wife, and who, after being among other things, High Commissioner to Canada, became head of the Australian intelligence services, died early after some of his staff had bungled a sensitive mission. Sending people of high quality to serve in the diplomatic corps in Ghana continued for some time after this.

I recall that on my return to Ghana from Germany and Finland, I had to visit London with the necessary papers to secure Djaba's extradition because he was there at the time. The affidavit of the law of Ghana, that I drafted and swore to for the English courts with the advice of Bing was a voluminous printed book. It gave me the experience for the next important extradition exercise when I did a similar document for the extradition of Kwesi Armah, the former High Commissioner to the United Kingdom and Minister of International Trade at the fall of Nkrumah, whom I tried to have extradited from the United Kingdom after the 1966 coup d'etat when I was acting as Attorney General. In the case of Djaba, on the advise of Geoffrey Bing, we had employed the services of Joynson-Hicks, the solicitor firm established by the one time Home Secretary in Britain. However, when I got to the Magistrate's Court in London and Djaba was brought in, he undertook to return voluntarily to Ghana to stand trial. An order was made accordingly and so there was no further need for a fight in the English Courts to secure his return to Ghana.

The trial was before Justice A. A. Akainyah, who had been appointed a judge in 1964.~[* fixed by Uncle Roger from note 127 at p.195 of “Contribution of the Courts to Govt.” ]~ I remember clearly when he returned from England as a qualified lawyer, because I was then in 1949 about to leave to England for further education and my father bought his black and grey herringbone great coat second-hand for me to take. Unfortunately, Akainyah was a much larger man than myself and I was saddled with this ill-fitting coat for a while. The defence was led by Victor Owusu. The original charges which came before the Magistrate's Court for committal had been drafted by me. But by the time the case came for trial these charges had, on the advise of Bing, been referred to the lawyers in England for review and they had made some modifications to the substance of the charges. Victor knew how this had come about and he paid me a compliment by saying that he was going to challenge the new charges and, in an aside, said the charges I had originally drafted were the correct ones.

The case was quite controversial because a number of people thought that the accused persons had done nothing wrong as what they did was business. I found this strange. I could understand that Djaba as a private businessman would come to an arrangement with the Emmerichs to charge a price, including an element over and above what the Emmerichs themselves wanted, which would be passed on to him as his profit. What I failed to understand was that it was considered acceptable business practise to corrupt a public officer to one's advantage. That Djaba should go out of his way to agree with the government official responsible for the testing and approval of the machines that, if the latter recommended the Solo machine and Government bought it, they would share the element of the price which he has caused the Emmerichs to add on to their price, was to me not mere business but a conspiracy to corrupt a public officer. I must say that this argument was more in the public domain than in the trial court. Victor did not use it as his defence.

The trial resulted in the conviction of the accused. Just before the conviction, the law was changed to make the penalties for the type of offences for which the accused had been charged much stiffer. Upon conviction, the trial judge sentenced the accused not for the penalties in existence at the commencement of their trial but those imposed by the amendment. The learned judge took the view that the sentence was a procedural matter and, in law, although a substantive provision could not be amended to adversely affect an accused, a procedural matter could be changed at any time and be made to apply immediately. There was an appeal against the conviction and sentences which had a curious history. But by then I was no more in the Attorney General's Office, and not responsible for representing the State in criminal cases.

I also visited Australia in August, 1965. The Commonwealth Law Conference that year was held in Sydney. The Ghana Government was prepared to sponsor the Chief Justice, the Attorney General and a practising member of the Bar. But, Justice Sarkodee Adoo, the Chief Justice, did not want to go and chose Fred Apaloo to represent him. Kwaw Swanzy did not want to go either and so he asked me to go in his stead. Stella, whom I had tried to teach how to drive in Kumasi, without success, insisted that if she did not get a driving licence, I would not be able to travel for the conference. She was then carrying our second child, Tonesan, and did not like the idea of being stranded in my absence. We had to get down to serious driving lessons and, fortunately, she had enough time to try a second time and pass before my time of departure.

David Effah was the member of the Bar chosen. He turned out to be a congenial travelling companion. David and I flew from Ghana first to Rome, where we joined a flight from London to Australia on which Fred was. It was a long flight which we broke in Singapore. We arrived in Australia on the morning the conference started. Lord Gardiner, the Labour Lord Chancellor, was most impressive in his opening address, as indeed was Sir Elwyn Jones, the Attorney General. Among the dignitaries who then spoke was Sir Samuel Quashie-Idun (Uncle Okai). He was then on the East African Court of Appeal. Through him, I got an introduction to the Chief Justice of Nigeria, Sir Adetokumbo Ademola, and to Justice Udo Udoma, who was also on the East African Court. The Australian organisers, led by John Kerr, had put on an impressive programme of discussions and entertainment, which went off very well. I believe he was knighted afterwards. He later became Governor General of Australia and made history by sacking Gough Whitlam, the Labour Prime Minister. The conference organisers assigned groups of foreign Commonwealth lawyers to Australian lawyer hosts. Mine was Biddulph, who went around in very simple clothes but had a home which exuded wealth. He and his wife were most generous hosts. The name Biddulph was not common but I had been at St. Bees School with one Jim Biddulph and I asked my host whether he was connected. Of course, it was a wild enquiry; he thought their name was so unusual that they must be distantly related but he did not know my school-mate or his immediate family. Years later, Biddulph was to act as an equally generous host to my brother, Sonny, when he visited Australia. I was also invited by Justice and Mrs. Fox for dinner. Mrs. Fox had the practice of making her dinner guests sign their names on the table cloth used, which she afterwards embroidered. I had the good fortune to be invited by them again ten years later and was surprised to be shown the table cloth which we used in 1965. My pupil-master, Tom Kellock, wrote a paper and participated in the panel discussion arising from it, which made me quite proud by association. The Ghanaian contingent were put up at a motel in Wolomoloo, which apparently is not one of the best areas of Sydney. But the organisers must have been pressed to find sufficient accommodation for the large number of participants who turned up. I was dumbstruck by the breakfasts served at the motel. It consisted, among other things, of a large plate of lamb chops every morning. Obviously, the Australians being hard-working outdoor people, needed a hefty breakfast in the mornings. But such a hearty breakfast came as a surprise for someone who had been led to believe that eggs and bacon or kippers were the heaviest meal that a person should endure early in the morning.~[* sentence modified ]~ I was, however, taken by the general beauty of Sydney, especially the Middle Harbour area and its architecture, and wondered why my friend Winky Scott, the architect, had left the city for Ghana as a young man.

We called on the Australian Chief Justice, Sir Garfield Barwick, who delighted us with his common touch. He took us outside his French window to show us the Sydney Opera House then under construction. At that time, the raging debate was whether it was worthwhile having regard to the fact that it had overshot its budget by several million dollars. Sir Garfield thought the complaints silly because all that was needed to meet the rising cost was a lottery which people would happily indulge in. One of the highlights of the Conference was a dinner in which Sir Robert Menzies, the Australian Prime Minister, was the guest of honour. Around him were legal personalities like Lord Parker, then Chief Justice of England, who with other luminaries around had been Sir Robert's juniors when he used to appear before the Privy Council.

The Sydney Conference was followed by a conference of Chief Justices and one for Attorneys General held in Canberra. Fred Apaloo attended the Chief Justices' conference and I attended the Attorneys' General Conference. Canberra was then very new. The building programme was not very advanced and the lake was practically empty. I remember pleasant walks round Canberra with Uncle Okai and Justice Udo Udoma. My main recollection of the Ministers' conference was a discussion of the possibility of broadening the base of the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council by the addition of judges of other Commonwealth countries and organising sittings of the Committee in places other than London. This was Lord Gardiner's last throw at a question which had vexed many observers of the Privy Council, especially as its jurisdiction was continually dwindling by the withdrawal of several of the new Commonwealth members. Ghana had withdrawn from it after the introduction of the Republican Constitution in 1960 and Nigeria, after the Akintola v. Adegbenro case a few years later. Several contributors who had a romantic attachment to the institution spoke positively of the suggestion. Of course, I had no mandate to speak one way or the other on this issue and, although I thought that it was too late for Ghana to come back to the fold, I held my peace. The Canadian Minister, who had been silent throughout the conference, at this juncture, read a short prepared statement. Canada had withdrawn from the Privy Council because it thought that the Privy Council was not the best judicial forum to deal with the problems of Canadian federalism. If the suggested plan of enlarging the Privy Council and making it less Anglo-centric was to attract Canada back to it, he, the Minister said, had authority from the Canadian Government to say that Canada would never come back under any circumstances. He read his prepared statement and fell thereafter into his customary silence. But the effect of his statement was dramatic. It undercut the base of the project. After it, other countries made contributions about the possibilities which the suggestion held. But there was no doubt in the minds of all that the project had been killed by the Canadian statement.

From the Canberra conference, I joined David Effah in Sydney and together we flew to San Francisco, through Pango Pango in American Samoa and Honolulu. Altogether, we had spent about three weeks in Australia and I had thoroughly enjoyed it. From time to time, we had been accosted by protesting Aborigine groups who wanted the delegates to the Commonwealth Law Conference to take note of their plight. I had great sympathy for them but, when I raised the matter with Australian friends, they admitted that the Aborigines had been badly treated but that the Government was making efforts to redress matters. We went back through Honolulu, as indeed did Fred Apaloo, because we had been invited to that year's World Peace Through Law Conference which was being held in Washington D.C. Besides, we had been awarded Leadership Grants by the American Government, under which we were to tour the United States and meet people of interest, after the Washington Conference. There was the minor additional achievement that going back through the United States would enable us to claim that we had flown right round the world.

On arrival at San Francisco Airport, I found a surprise invitation waiting for me. Just before I left Accra, I had seen Dick Davis who was with VALCO, the Kaiser Aluminum and Reynolds subsidiary, which had been established to buy the major part of the electricity generated by the Akosombo Dam in order to make the project viable. Dick was sorry he had not known earlier of my intended visit to San Francisco because he would otherwise have arranged for me to meet Virginia De Friest (nicknamed “Quig” standing for “the Quinby Girl”) as both her father and brother were lawyers in San Francisco. I regretted this fact but it was too late then to do anything about it. But there at the San Francisco Airport was a letter from Mr. James Quinby, Virginia's father, inviting me to phone him so that he or Carter, Virginia's brother could pick me up and drive me to his home in Palo Alto. I had never met Virginia but this, I thought, was an opportunity not to be missed. I had six days in San Francisco before moving to Washington D.C. for the next conference and I had no special programme for those days. So I phoned Quinby Senior, and we arranged that he would pick me up and take me to Palo Alto, which he did. I met Virginia's mother, Catherine, and later Carter and wife joined us for dinner. Carter, was in the same firm of Quinby, ***~[* missing name ]~ and Tweedt with his father, who had an admiralty practice, and was good company during my stay in San Francisco. I slept in Virginia's room, which was still furnished with her old cot and had her childhood dolls, that night. To her family, I was an old friend of Virginia's who had come visiting from Ghana and they treated me as such. Quinby Senior took me round the campus of Stanford University nearby and gave me a bit of its history. I met Virginia and her husband, Jim De Friest, who was with Mobil Oil in Ghana, when I returned from my American visit.

I had one other contact in San Francisco: that was Bill De Pree's sister, Lila. Bill asked me to get in touch with her and her doctor husband, which I did. I was under strict instruction from Bill that I should not ask for any alcoholic drink when I visited them. Bill came from a teetotal Huguenot family in Michigan. He had been corrupted by the diplomatic life into drinking alcohol but he thought from that standpoint that Lila was pure. When I went to them for dinner, I was duly asked by Lila what I wanted to drink and I started going round the non-alcoholic drinks that I knew. But I was cut short by Lila, who said, she did not know what I was going to drink but she was going to have a gin and tonic. I was staggered. Bill did not know his sister any more. I enjoyed the evening more with them after this realisation.

San Francisco was an impressive city. I came away thinking that it was one of the most beautiful cities that I had seen. I liked riding on the trams in the undulating streets. I went around for walks, in one of which I ran into Chief Justice Ademola of Nigeria. His son, Neko, also a lawyer was married to Uncle Okai's daughter, Frances, and so, apart from law and conferences, we had common personalities to talk about. He was also Washington bound and was spending some time on the way in San Francisco. Eventually, I flew east to Washington D.C.

World Peace Through Law conference idea was developed by an American lawyer by the name Jim Ryan. The idea was neatly embodied in the title. It involved the collection of a large number of judges and lawyers from all parts of the globe to talk about securing world peace through law. It was a mammoth jamboree. No doubt, learned papers were read on the subject. I confess, I retain no recollection of their importance or impact on world peace.

I stayed in Washington with my old class-mate, Kwame Boafo (M'Bro) and his wife, Diana. M'Bro was then Counsellor at the Ghana Embassy. After his degree in Politics, Philosophy and Economics (PPE) at Queen's College, Oxford, he was selected as one of the early batch of Ghanaians to be trained as diplomats. His group must have followed the first batch selected before independence which included K.B Asante, Richard Akwei, Alex Quayson-Sackey, Henry Sekyi, Ken Dadzie and Kodjo Debrah. In the course of his training, he was sent to Australia. M'Bro was later to hold several ambassadorial positions in Lebanon, Yugoslavia and the Soviet Union. His career was surprisingly cut short in the 1980s for some reason which none of my friends in the diplomatic corps was able to explain. His service was terminated together with several others all of a sudden. Several reasons were assigned generally to cover the whole group of diplomats whose services had been dispensed with. For the other persons whom I knew, I either had heard things which could identify the reasons for their termination of office and, if not, I got explanations when I enquired. For the termination of M'Bro's appointment, there was nothing. I made it a point of asking distinguished diplomat friends like Ken Dadzie and Kodjo Debrah but they had no explanation. It has always been a matter of great regret to me that such a valuable career should have been cut-off before its natural end without any explanation at all.

The Ambassador at the time was no other than my old teacher, Uncle Mike Ribeiro. After our last meeting in London when he was in charge of education and scholarship matters in the Ghana Mission, he had joined the diplomatic corps and become Ambassador, first to Ethiopia, West Germany, and was now in Washington. He was later to become Ambassador to Rome and several other States round the Mediterranean. Uncle Mike had always looked on me as a nephew and a bright old student who should be indulged. On my part, I was always grateful to him that he had set my mind at rest through his advice about choosing law as a profession. As is to be expected he entertained me in Washington. But he also invited me to accompany him to New York, where the Ghanaian representative, Alex Quayson-Sackey, had become the new President of the General Assembly. In New York, we stayed together at his hotel at the Plaza. Diplomatically, Ghana was still an African voice to be reckoned with at the time. Quayson-Sackey, whose final year at Exeter College, Oxford, coincided with my first year at Jesus College, had now reached the pinnacle of his diplomatic career. He was shortly thereafter to be recalled to be Minister of Foreign Affairs, a post which he briefly held until determined by unforeseen circumstances.

I was now to continue with a tour of the United States in the company of several other young persons from other countries who had all been awarded Leadership Grants. I had been away for six weeks and I was quite tired. I decided to apologise to my American sponsors and to return home to Ghana.

The atmosphere in Ghana was not so rosy. Tension had been mounting since the Kulungugu bomb was thrown in 1961, the political and security tensions increased continuously. Kulungugu was followed by the throwing of bombs at public meetings to create an sense of fear and insecurity among the Ghanaian people. Komla Agbeli Gbedema, who had been one of Nkrumah's right hand men from the inception of the CPP and who had been a capable Minister of Finance in the early years of independence, had broken with Nkrumah, escaped from the country and papers were being sent through the post ostensibly under his hand denouncing Nkrumah and threatening an overthrow of the regime. Nkrumah, who must have thought that the Kulungugu bomb was inspired by Western nations who wanted to get rid of him, had dispensed with earlier security advice from the West and was increasingly relying on Soviet protection and assistance. After Ametewee had shot at the President and killed Salifu Dagarti, the top echelon of the Police was arrested and detained. This included R. T. Madjitey, the first Ghanaian Head of the Police, who was then Inspector General, S. D. Amaning, one of his Deputies, and T. O. Adjirakor. The Security Services were re-organised in order to bring about what was supposed to be a rational and unified structure. But it was difficult to bring everything under one structure. It was for example, difficult to fit in Military Intelligence with the rest of the civilian structure. Nkrumah was accused of relying mainly on people of his Nzima tribe for his protection. This was supported by the closeness to him of his eminence grise,~[* grace??? ]~ Ambrose Yankey. But there was still the group of Anlogas from the Keta area in Special Branch even after John Harlley left Special Branch to become Inspector General of Police. It is also true that Ben Forjoe (Uncle Ben), who had succeeded Harlley as the head of Special Branch, was Nzima. But he was not under the control of Ambrose Yankey. Indeed, during this time, Special Branch had information that Ambrose Yankey's son, who apparently worked in his father's outfit, was going round the Lebanese community extorting money. Uncle Ben organised the arrest of Yankey junior while he was allegedly with one of these Lebanese victims who had handed him money prepared in a parcel by Special Branch. The case was taken to court. The papers were sent to me and I was asked to depute a State Attorney to prosecute. At about this time, Nkrumah went on one of his holiday meditation sessions in Western Ghana. Ambrose Yankey was with him. Shortly after that, Uncle Ben visited me at home one morning before I left for work to tell me that he had been instructed that a nolle prosequi should be entered in the case. I did. A British MI5 agent who had been attached to their High Commission, but who had been involved in the training of Special Branch personnel for the previous 9 years or so, was withdrawn from Ghana.

Relations with the British Government itself were at their nadir because, on the declaration of UDI (unilateral declaration of independence) by Ian Smith, Prime Minister of Southern Rhodesia, Ghana had broken diplomatic relations with the British Government. The High Commissioner, Harold Smedley, had been withdrawn. British interests were being handled by the Australian Government, with Solly Gross, the former Trade Commissioner as Head of the small British interest section in the Australian High Commission.

It was not only in the Police establishment that there were changes. Changes occurred also in the Military. Generals Steve Otu and Ankrah who held equal rank at the head of the Military were suddenly relieved of their duties on the return of Nkrumah from a visit to the United Kingdom amid rumours of dissatisfaction in the Military and of security plots. General Ankrah was put in charge of one of the State corporations. General Barwah became the head of the Military, with Steve Otu's younger brother, Mike, the head of the Air Force. But the President's own favourite military unit was the Presidential Guard, which was responsible for guarding him at Flagstaff House and was also used for ceremonial purposes. This unit was under Colonel David Zanlerigu. Grumbles from the Military were to the effect that this unit was being given preferential treatment in weapons and privileges and perks.

During all this state of change and uncertainty, the Ghanaian economy was declining rapidly. There were shortages of all kinds of commodities, which the Ghanaian had come to expect with independence. This sense of deprivation was intensified by the sweep of detentions without trial, most of which were unannounced.

With the Government take-over of the Daily and Sunday Graphic newspapers, originally founded by the Daily Mirror Group in England, and the establishment of the Ghanaian Times, as well as ideological papers like The Spark, owned by the Government, and the control of radio and subsequently television broadcasting by Government, information was wholly controlled by Government. The result was the proliferation of rumours of all kinds as the source of information which Ghanaians preferred to rely on. A wag once said that one had to listen to the BBC World Service to find out whether one has been detained.

In this state of tension, the Volta River Project was given its official opening, I believe, in November with ceremonies at Akosombo and a dinner at the State House (Job 600). I recall that our friend, Jean Steckle, was visiting us in Accra on that day and we were sitting in our house behind the State House watching the lights when, suddenly, all went dark. Goodness, I thought, how could those in charge of the proceedings avoid being accused of sabotage? I was quite relieved when I found that Nee Quartey, who was then the Chief Electrical Engineer, retained his post afterwards.

Our daughter, Marianne Tonesan, was born on 8 December, 1965. She had to be called Tonesan after my maternal grandmother, Tonesan Okorodudu of Warri, Nigeria, had died three weeks before our daughter was born. Giving our daughter the name, Tonesan, pleased my mother immensely but she also noted that I had not named my daughter after my godmother, Mrs. Marion Odamtten. Stella really did not believe in naming children after others. She thought a child should have its own personality and, consequently, its own name. However, she agreed to the name Marianne as the nearest to Marion which was acceptable. Her invalid sister, Nora was also called Marianne. My mother went away to Nigeria for Grandmother Tonesan's funeral. She was greatly helped by David and Brenda Garrick; David, who was a director of Gulf Oil in Nigeria, had her flown by private craft from Lagos to Warri. When our daughter, Marianne Tonesan, was christened, her godfather was J. H. Mensah who, being a Catholic, had to be represented by a more acceptable Anglican for the occasion.

All through this period, we had kept up our arrangement whereby friends visited us for lunch and some stayed on or a new set visited for tea on Saturdays. We continued this arrangement practically every Saturday when Mungo would turn up for tea. On the rare occasion when he did not, there was concern about his health or some other disaster overtaking him but, usually, his absence was because he had travelled to Takoradi or Kumasi on a case and had not returned. The tea arrangement was tied up with a regular lunch which we had prepared by Auntie Korkoi who must have been a young woman when she became the cook of my grand Aunt, Nanaa, before I went to England. When we came back, I got my mother to agree with her on cooking for us every Saturday. I would give her the money and she would buy what was necessary and cook us the meal. It was usually either palm soup and “fufu” or garden egg stew with “banku”. It was delicious. We made it known to all friends that lunch was available on Saturdays but upon one condition: immediately after lunch, I was going to retire for a nap. Those who wanted to stay and have tea with Mungo and the rest of us could amuse themselves as they wished until then. I appeared again at tea-time. Of course, Stella often did a lot of baking for the tea. Not having been grounded properly in our customs, I found myself in trouble some time after Auntie Korkoi had started cooking for us. Her husband walked to our house. We were then living at Osu behind the State House. He wanted to see me. He made it clear that he was displeased by the fact that I had asked his wife to cook for me without his permission. Perhaps he wanted some compensation. But I told him, by way of excuse, that the whole arrangement had been done by my mother and that he should see her for the resolution of this complaint.

In January 1966, the Nigerian Government of Prime Minister Abubakar~[* check original name written was Abubakir ]~ Tafawa Balewa was overthrown by a coup. He and his Finance Minister, Chief Okotie Eboh, were killed. So was the Premier of Northern Nigeria, the Sardauna of Sokoto, who had always regarded Tafawa Balewa as his surrogate in the central government. The coup took place after a Commonwealth heads of government meeting in Lagos. There was talk of Prime Minister Wilson having information of the impending coup and inviting Tafawa Balewa to join him on his plane to England, an invitation which Tafawa Balewa declined. Nkrumah made an ungenerous remark about Tafawa Balewa being swept away by forces which he did not understand. He was to be reminded of this remark just one month later. In the unsettled situation created by the Nigerian coup, travel there was not easy. David Garrick was a director of Gulf Oil in Nigeria, and organised her transportation to Warri in the company's private aircraft. ~[* repeated a few paragraphs earlier ]~

On 19 February, Dieter and Hildegarde Schaad threw a fancy dress party at their residence in Latebiokorshie. I remember going to the party as a pipe smoking sailor. Other friends in the diplomatic world and the public service were there. So was retired General Ankrah. I did not then know that in less that a week we would be called upon to work together. In late afternoon of 23 February, there was a regular meeting in the Attorney General's Office of a committee for the control and prevention of crime, on which Kwaw Swanzy, as Attorney General, I as DPP, and Tony Deku as head of CID, served. The meeting was very ordinary. I did not know that in less than 24 hours the positions of the three of us would radically change.

At dawn on February 24, there was an announcement on the radio that Nkrumah and his government had been overthrown. The CPP had been disbanded. The Constitution had been suspended. The announcement read by an army officer by the name of Kotoka, invited Ghanaians to stay by their radios. I immediately phoned to Kwaw Swanzy and asked him whether he had heard the announcement. He had. I asked him what he was going to do. He said the announcement had asked all Ghanaians to stay by their radios and that was what he was going to do. Outside, there was already dancing and celebrations. I wondered whether the persons celebrating were not being incautious. I decided that this was a day for staying away from work. The radio, when it was not making an announcement on the coup, simply played martial music. Nkrumah was out of the country at the time. He was on his way to Vietnam to mediate in the war between the North and the South. The news was apparently broken to him when he arrived in Peking on the way. I was, however, not allowed to stay by my radio as I had intended that morning. Before 8 o'clock, a Police car drove in. When I walked out of the house to meet it, out stepped Tony Deku of the CID, unusually clad in uniform. He gave me a salute and said that I was wanted at the Police Headquarters. I quietly followed him into the car, not knowing what I was wanted for.