Grammatical pragmatics: Language,power and liberty in Ghanaian political discourse

Background

In African societies there are maxims about free speech, yet speech is often costly. Indeed, in Ghanaian society, despite the Akan communicative maxim, Ananse Kokroko antɔn kasa ‘Big Spider (God) did not sell speech, i.e., speech is free’, speech can be costly, if used without attention to an appropriate interactional context. In political discourse, the restrictions imposed on speech infringe on the liberties of individuals since such restrictions prevent the verbalization of negative comments about powerful political actors. Undeniably, in developing democracies, such as in Africa, political criticism is often tabooed, given the power over life that powerful political actors sometimes wield.

In Obeng (1997a, 1997b, 1997c), I noted that avoidance of candor, especially when the topic of a discourse ‘communicates difficulty’, was the norm and an easier way to participate in a political process since indirectness helps to mitigate the hazards inherent in political discourse. Thus, there are communicative situations and a safe medium to express tabooed topics and that interactants could show usually concealed intense dislike for an opponent’s political views or actions using appropriate protective façade. I therefore espoused that any study of political discourse must give equal and appropriate weight to the differing degree of personal danger inherent in the socio-political process in which actors operate, and to the varying social conventions of the relevant culture.

In this study, I demonstrate that language, liberty, power, political identity and political course of action pull in the same direction and that through his letters to Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana’s first President), Dr Joseph Boakye Danquah, the doyen of Gold Coast (Ghana) politics (Watson Commission of Inquiry, 1948), shows the difference between his political ideology and his philosophical thinking about liberty, and those of Nkrumah. Specifically, from Danquah’s choice of linguistic and discursive markers in writing about a politically tabooed topic (criticizing Nkrumah for trampling on people’s personal liberties through unlawful incarceration and denial of their participation in Ghana’s socio-political process), we are allowed into Danquah’s view of reality; the fact that for him, his continued incarceration and exclusion from participation in Ghanaian politics was neither good for him nor for Ghana’s politics and socio-economic development. I also argue that the discursive strategies employed by Danquah to seek liberty have relevance to contemporary Ghanaian political practice, given that it paved the way for the changing political discourses and practices in present-day Ghana. Particularly, his strategy of talking back to those in power set the tone and precedence for contemporary Ghanaian political actors to rise up in opposition. To fully understand this, I briefly discuss Africa and Ghana’s liberation struggle and elucidate Danquah’s role in both efforts.

African and Ghanaian liberation struggle

With Arab occupation and European colonization of Africa came the denial of Africans of their basic civil rights, commoditization of African people and the partitioning of Africa into Arab and European colonial territories. The partitioning of Africa meant that borders created cut through African ‘nation-states’ and empires with impunity. For example, the Akan of West Africa were separated, with a part of the Akan nation going to British Gold Coast (Ghana) and the other half to French-ruled Cote d’Ivoire. Black People had no say in the running of such countries, were enslaved and relegated to society’s margins and suffered injustice, ignominy domination and mistreatment.

Immediately after World War II, Africans began to ask for civil rights and the right to self-determination. African soldiers who served in the war had been promised liberation after the war by the colonialists and therefore saw Europeans’ clinching to power as a betrayal. The African liberation struggle took place during the Cold War and was therefore couched in its politics leading to different political parties within the same country becoming either pro-Communist or pro-Capitalist. Leaders like Kwame Nkrumah (Ghana) and Patrice Lumumba (Congo Kinshasa) and others were seen as communist-leaning, whereas others like Danquah (Ghana), Nnamdi Azikiwe (Nigeria) and Kamuzu Banda (Malawi) were viewed as sympathizers of the capitalist ideology. Indeed, the Organization of African Unity that was formed by Nkrumah and others in 1962 to help cart Africa’s liberation was also caught up in the Cold War’s Us versus Them politics that plagued East versus West’s political ideologies (Birmingham, 1998).

In Ghana, the ideological differences between Nkrumah and Danquah in the direction of the independence movement led Nkrumah to break away from the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC), the main political movement fighting to liberate Ghana, to form the Convention Peoples Party (CPP) – the party that won Ghana’s first national assembly elections in 1951. The Gold Coast (Ghana) became the first British colony in sub-Saharan Africa to achieve self-governance on 6 March 1957, and Nkrumah become Ghana’s first Prime Minister. Ghana became a Republic on 1 July 1960 and Nkrumah became its first President.

After assuming office, Nkrumah’s government passed the Avoidance of Discrimination Act, 1957 (C.A. 38) that declared Ghana a one-party state, and on 31 December 1957, Nkrumah banned all the opposition political parties; something which Danquah and the rest of the opposition fiercely contested (Firmin-Sellers, 1999). Next, I present a biography of Danquah.

Danquah was born on 18 December 1895 into the Ofori Panin Royal Family, Ghana’s most influential political family. Three relatives from the family – Danquah, Edward Akufo-Addo and William Ofori-Attah – were among the ‘The Big Six’; the six leaders who led Ghana’s liberation struggle against British Colonialism. Ghana’s current president, Nana Akufo-Addo, is former President Edward Akufo-Addo’s son and grandnephew of Danquah.

Danquah was a pan-Africanist, philosopher, lawyer, a scholar of classical history and literature, historian, journalist and a statesman. In 1925, he studied philosophy at the University of London, earning his BA degree, and in 1927, he completed his PhD in Philosophy with a dissertation titled ‘The Moral End as Moral Excellence’. He was the first West African to obtain a PhD from a British university. Prior to completing his PhD, Danquah entered the Inner Temple and was called to the United Kingdom Bar in 1926.

While in the United Kingdom, Danquah felt obliged to initiate and actively participate in Africa’s emancipation, and to give a voice to the liberation struggle, he established The West Africa Times (which was earlier called The Times of West Africa) in 1931. Prior to the establishment of The West Africa Times (between 1926 and 1928), Danquah edited the West African Student Union Magazine and was the Union’s President. With his strong foundation in the African liberation movement, it came as no surprise when upon his return to Ghana (after his studies) Danquah became a member of the Ghana Legislative Council in 1946 and actively led the pursuit of Ghana’s independence. Danquah led a group of Gold Coast businessmen (led by George Alfred Grant), chiefs, academics and lawyers to form the pro-independence UGCC; the UGCC later changed its name to the United Party in 1957. Other leading members of the UGCC were R.A. Awoonor-Williams, Edward Akufo-Addo, William Ofori-Attah, Alfred Grant and Emmanuel Obetsebi-Lamptey. It was at Danquah’s invitation that Nkrumah returned to the Gold Coast (Ghana) from the United States via the United Kingdom on 10 December 1947, to become the UGCC’s General Secretary.

In 1948, Danquah, Nkrumah, Akufo-Addo, Obetsebi-Lamptey, Ako-Adjei and Ofori Atta were jailed for a month by the British colonial authorities for leading the boycott of European imports and ‘inciting’ riots in Accra. During their incarceration, Nkrumah’s CPP won the first parliamentary elections; Nkrumah was released from jail to become Ghana’s first Prime Minister in 1957 and later, President in 1960 after Ghana became a republic. After independence, the enmity between Nkrumah and Danquah became very pronounced; an enmity caused in the main by the ideological differences and by Nkrumah’s malicious imprisonment of members of the opposition United Party. Ideologically, whereas Nkrumah advocated for the socialist-communist ideological orientation, Danquah advocated for a free market capitalist ideology. Most importantly, Nkrumah and his Convention People’s Party (CPP) declared Ghana a one-party state immediately after coming to power, thereby making the United Party and the other minor political parties in opposition illegitimate. By turning Ghana into a one-party state, Nkrumah, by default, attempted to silence his critics; something Danquah opposed vehemently resulting in his imprisonment together with other opposition members who Nkrumah viewed as threat to his presidency. Specifically, on 3 October 1961, Nkrumah threw Danquah into jail on trumped-up charges of subversion under the CPP’s Preventive Detention Act. This parliamentary law empowered Nkrumah to jail, without trial, persons whose actions he considered subversive and a threat to state security. After his release from jail on 22 June 1962, Danquah was rearrested on 8 January 1964 for an alleged implication in a plot against Nkrumah.

Danquah’s resentment at his unlawful imprisonment was due in part to the enormous role he played in Ghana’s independence and his understanding of negative liberty (freedom from imposition) and positive liberty (freedom to participate in Ghana’s political process and in his family and communal life). It was Danquah who proposed the renaming of the Gold Coast as Ghana based on his research that showed inhabitants of modern-day Ghana as having migrated from the Ancient Ghana Empire. Furthermore, Danquah was the de facto leader of Ghana’s political liberation and the chief architect of Ghana’s first constitution. Indeed, as noted earlier, the Watson Commission of Inquiry (1948) named him the doyen of Gold Coast’s politics and the Encyclopaedia Britannica (2018) refers to him as the dean of Ghanaian nationalist politicians.

Danquah’s political power and leadership was dual in nature – a prominent politician and a traditional chief. Thus, besides being the main opposition leader in Ghana’s parliament, Danquah was also a traditional ruler, a chief, in his native Akyem Abuakwa Kingdom in Ghana’s forested eastern province. As a chief, he exercised political leadership over his people in the context of Ghana’s dual political system (one fashioned after the British parliamentary political system, and the other, after Ghana’s indigenous or traditional political system run by chiefs (male and female)). To understand the significance of chiefs in Ghana’s political ecology, it is important to note that during the colonial era, the British administered the Gold Coast through indirect rule via kings/chiefs and the indigenous Ghanaian elite. Important Kings such as the Kings of Asante and Akyem (both Akan) who the British felt were aligned with the liberation movement were excommunicated to the Seychelles and others were jailed. After independence, Nkrumah also jailed chiefs who did not support him.

Given Danquah’s political power and leadership status and his training as a lawyer, he viewed his subjection to detention without trial as an intrusion on his constitutional right and civil liberty and as a travesty of justice. He therefore saw the need to communicate his views and displeasure about his incarceration and denial of freedom to Nkrumah via his letters even if such letters would cause Nkrumah to be angry. As a student in the United Kingdom, Danquah used The West Africa Times as the African liberation movement’s mouthpiece for the liberation struggle. When he returned to Ghana, he continued to publish and edit this newspaper and used it as a tool of resistance. Being a journalist, Danquah believed in the power and effectiveness of written communication and this most certainly contributed to his use of the written medium (letters) to communicate his resistance to and against oppression and the flouting of his liberty. Danquah died of a heart attack in detention on 4 February 1965 at Ghana’s Nsawam Prison. It was widely viewed by the general Ghanaian public that it was Nkrumah who caused his death since a doctor’s warning to Nkrumah to release him from detention and send him to the hospital for medical care was ignored by Nkrumah.

Data and theoretical framework

The data for this study are made up of two letters written by Danquah to Nkrumah and reproduced in Akyeampong (1970). The letters were chosen from several other letters written by Danquah. The reasons for choosing the two letters are as follows: the author, Danquah, was no ordinary politician. He was a leading Ghanaian politician; the opposition leader in Ghana’s parliament immediately after independence. Note that although the letters may not look like the typical political discourse genre in the global North, in the African context, they qualify as political discourse because they are political in content and discursive in nature. They constituted an important way for Danquah to politically communicate with Nkrumah since Nkrumah ignored Danquah’s pleas to meet and communicate face-to-face with him. Danquah’s lawyer and his wife (Mrs Elizabeth Danquah) acted as pseudo-epicenters (persons who received messages from Danquah and transmitted them to Nkrumah and in return received messages from Nkrumah and relayed them to Danquah) in the triadic interaction that took place. It is important to note that triadic, and sometimes polyadic, interaction is common in the African traditional political (especially royal) communication where messages are communicated through orators and interveners. Many a time, speaking to authority directly is often tabooed and prevented, so the use of intermediaries is highly encouraged and writing letters is sometimes considered an acceptable way if the message content is communicatively difficult or face threatening.

Also, the data had strong political content on governance and the rule of law; they contained speech acts like complaint, criticism, disagreement and request that were political in content. Most importantly, the data were selected because of their richness in demonstrating how, through the appropriation of fitting linguistic and discursive features, Danquah was able to communicate about his negative liberty and positive liberty and to ask for a restoration of both liberties. The first letter was written on 21 May 1964 and the second on 23 January 1965.

This study was done within the frameworks of language and power (Fairclough, 1989) and language and liberty (Obeng, 2020). It is important to state from the outset that both theories are interconnected. Regarding language and power, Fairclough (1989) notes,

. . . an understanding of the social order is most conveniently and naturally achieved through a critical awareness of the power of language. More directly, even, that access to and participation in the power forums of society is dependent on knowing the language of those forums and how using that language power enables personal and social gains to be achieved. (p. ix)

Fairclough emphasizes the extent to which language, power and ideology inform each other by indicating that power is achieved through ideology and the ideological workings of language, and that language is also ideologically shaped by power relations in social institutions. Fairclough warned that underestimating the significance of language in the production, maintenance and change of social relations of power can distort our understanding of how power and language affect each other. For Fairclough, power is exercised, sustained and lost in politics and language plays a central role in uncovering individuals’ roles, power, stance-taking and so on. Powerful politicians have more interactional power due to the political import of their words; they therefore use language to control and limit the socio-political and economic contributions of non-powerful actors (p. ix).

Working within the framework of language and power suggests that in interpreting Danquah’s letters, besides their socio-political contexts, attention will be paid to the letters’ texture, and how Nkrumah interpreted the texts via his inferencing or gap filling, especially how he responded to Danquah’s messages through Mrs Elizabeth Danquah, the pseudo-epicenter in their triadic communication.

In the analysis, I will identify and analyze the content and grammatical values in Danquah’s texts by inspecting the letters’ ‘usages or collocations’ and ‘relational values’ (i.e. whether the words showed relationships between him and Nkrumah). I will also examine how claims to knowledge were made and how the letters fitted the conventional content and structure of one writing to a President.

In working within the theory of language and liberty, it is important to establish the fact that liberty is a philosophical, legal and political concept, and that language is used to express liberty and its associated concepts just as liberty depends on language to become a reality. Following Berlin’s (1960) work on liberty, I take it that liberty should be viewed from two perspectives – liberty from (negative liberty, which involves the protection of individuals and minorities from the intrusions of the government and others into their fundamental freedom) and liberty to (positive liberty, which guarantees the right of individuals to participate in governance and to share in the political power of their communities). Thus, positive liberty includes the right to self-determination at the various levels of a polity.

To ensure that individuals are guaranteed liberty, it is essential for governments to put in place the material conditions for maintaining liberty (Date-Bah, 2008). There is the need for a legal framework (which will protect individuals’ liberties and thus guarantee liberty in both the negative and positive senses) to be enshrined in a nation’s constitution and in judicial precedent (i.e. on past decision on cases that the courts can refer to in making informed decisions/judgments about liberty in the future when the acts of the case are similar to those of the previous one). Failure to enshrine a Bill of Rights in a constitution creates a situation in which people in power may not be subjected to the law and may therefore infringe on individuals’ negative and positive liberties with impunity, especially when such individuals hold divergent views. In the case of Ghana, it must be established that the absence of a tradition of subjecting government to law at that time enabled Nkrumah to engage in human right abuses through parliamentary supremacy that was provided for in Ghana’s Independence Constitution of 1957 (Date-Bah, 2008). Furthermore, the absence of a Bill of Rights enabled the CPP to pass the Avoidance of Discrimination Act, 1957 (C.A. 38). Nkrumah’s action of seeing those with dissenting views as subversive and detaining them led to a broken-down liberty and made him tyrannical (Date-Bah, 2008). It is important to note that in Ghana’s case, the courts may have thought that they were implementing a law left for Ghana by the British constitutional law; however, as Date-Bah notes, the British Parliament tolerated divergent views, the Ghanaian Parliament did not.

Through his incarceration, Danquah saw both his positive and negative liberty trampled upon. He did not see why exercising his negative and positive liberty should embolden Nkrumah to incarcerate him. As demonstrated in his letters, Danquah, who during the liberation struggle emphasized the need for liberty, found himself being denied liberty, the very thing he and Nkrumah stood for. He was surprised that as President, Nkrumah did not see that he was trampling on his (Danquah’s) liberty, and that Nkrumah’s position of power gave him authority to infringe upon others’ liberty. In an earlier letter addressed to the Speaker of Ghana’s Parliament, Danquah had expressed similar concerns by alluding to the Bible, given that Nkrumah, The Speaker of Parliament and many parliamentarians called themselves Christians and yet failed to see their behavior as oppressive and un-Christian (Obeng, 2016). It is important to note that Ghana is often referred to as a Christian country, so it is expected, in principle, that political actors’ Christian identity will be pertinent to their political actions; however, in real life, there is no such connection. This does not, however, stop or prevent the public from calling out political actors on their behavior if such behavior is found to be contrary to the political actor’s professed religious identity.

In working within the framework of language and liberty, we must answer questions such as: (a) What kind of language do discourse participants seeking liberty use? (b) What sentence types (active-passive; command, statement or questions) are one’s request for liberty couched in? (c) What specific content and grammatical words do interactants seeking liberty from and liberty to use? (d) What pragmatic markers, especially, inferencing, speech act types and politeness markers are used to ensure the attainment of liberty from and liberty to? (e) How strong is the bond between language and liberty? Answering the above questions will unearth how language and liberty impact one another.

Aims

In this article, I show that an attention to Danquah’s letters sent to Nkrumah suggests that Ghanaian political actors in opposition, by being candid, risked their political careers and possible death. Also, according to Harris (1995), in asymmetrical (or non-congruent) interactions, there is a disproportionate distribution of speech acts as a mode of strategic communication, and this prevents validity claims from being raised or challenged except by powerful institutional representatives. However, I show that an observation of the data for this study (Danquah’s letters addressed to Nkrumah) points to the fact that in Ghanaian political discourse, political actors without power, including those in jail (such as Danquah), have strategies for raising and challenging the validity of claims and actions made by those in power despite the discourse being asymmetrical. Thus, I argue that contrary to Harris’ (1995) claim, non-institutional representatives (members of the opposition) find ways to do the contrary by speaking back to and challenging those in power. Finally, I demonstrate that language, power and liberty are interconnected and that political actors have communicative strategies for ensuring that their positive and negative liberties are protected.

Results and discussion

The first observation I put forward relates to asymmetrical/non-congruent Ghanaian (African) political discourse and is stated as: in asymmetrical political discourse, actors without power have linguistic and pragmatic strategies for challenging the validity of claims and political actions of those in power. Extracts 1 and 2 below (contiguous paragraphs) are representative of the many cases that help illustrate the above-mentioned observation.

EXTRACT 1 (From the First Letter Dated 21 May 1964)

Use of factivity formulae, such as ‘as you know’, ‘we all know’ and ‘you will recall’ presuppose the truth of a complement clause that follows them (Kiparsky and Kiparsky, 1979). For example, in the sentence, ‘We all know that Mr. Simpson is a liar’, the expression, ‘We all know’, presupposes the truth of the following complement clause, that Mr Simpson is a liar. In Extract 1, the factive, ‘you will recall’, presupposes that Nkrumah must be aware of the truth of the complement clause, ‘that when in 1948 we were arrested by the British Government and sent to the North for detention they treated us as gentlemen, not as galley slaves . . . ’. Thus, Danquah’s sentence presupposes the truth of the statement about Nkrumah, himself, and others being ‘well cared for’ by their common oppressor, Imperial Britain, during their detention. The factive helps remind Nkrumah that Danquah’s statement and the truth in it are shared by Nkrumah and him. This helps maintain equality of power and protects Danquah from taking absolute responsibility for the complaint he was making, the intrusion on his liberty, the denial of him of access to justice, and hence the flouting of his negative liberty.

Second, the facts expressed in the two paragraphs – Paragraph A referring to ‘treatment of them by the British colonial authority’ and Paragraph B referring to Nkrumah’s treatment of Danquah – constitute a contrastive pair. Danquah is inferring that if the Colonial authority that they both agreed had unjustly infringed on their liberty saw it fit to treat them as ‘gentlemen, not as galley slaves’ and provided them with some basic necessities of life, then how come Nkrumah, a person who had suffered injustice and loss of liberty with him and knew how wrong it was to be denied these necessities turn around and treat him (Danquah) as a galley slave and deny him access to his books and the opportunity to communicate with his wife, Elizabeth.

Danquah’s use of the first-person singular pronoun, ‘I’, when he was referring to his treatment at the hands of Nkrumah helps to draw attention to him, his person, and which liberty of his had been flouted. In the excerpts,

‘I have not been allowed access to my books and papers’,

‘I have not, . . . received any reply’

Danquah appears to be suggesting that it was his right to be allowed access to his books and papers, things a free citizen must have but which his unlawful incarceration and hence being denied liberty was causing him to not possess. He was also entitled to interact with his wife (a positive liberty of his) and yet he was being denied this basic right and liberty. Thus, we see Danquah contesting the unlawfulness of being imprisoned as well as a depravation of his rights even while imprisoned. He also appears to be pointing out that his right to have access to his books and papers, and a receipt of a response to his letters were allowable under British rule, yet denied him by Nkrumah. Put bluntly, Danquah appeared to be suggesting that even though he and Nkrumah enjoyed certain rights under colonial rule when in jail; yet Nkrumah was denying him those rights within the de-colonized practice.

Furthermore, although Danquah uses the passive voice without mentioning the agent in referring to not being allowed access to his books, one can easily infer that he was referring to Nkrumah as the one who was denying him access to what any person of his caliber needed to function as a normal person. Danquah’s use of ‘they’ and ‘we’ in Paragraph A above is also insightful. The third person plural pronoun, ‘they’ (and the associated pronoun, ‘them’), is associated with out-group and, like in other political discourse-types, refers to that which is ‘bad’, whereas ‘we’ (and ‘us’) is associated with in-group and that which is often considered ‘good’. Thus, Danquah wants Nkrumah to know that the ‘they’, who were supposed to treat Nkrumah, others, and him badly, treated them better than how Nkrumah, who was part of the ‘us’, was treating him. Danquah is suggesting that any unjust incarceration violates one’s negative liberty, but the violation is felt more if it comes from within one’s group.

EXTRACT 2 (From the First Letter Dated 21 May 1964)

In Extract 2, Danquah once again uses the factive, ‘you will recall’, to presuppose the truth of the following complement, ‘that barely a month after our detention in the North in 1948 we were brought down to Accra and released to appear before a Commission of Enquiry set up to investigate the justice or otherwise of our arrest of our arrest and detention’. The expression, ‘In the present case . . .’, in Paragraph B, presupposes that what follows the factive contrasts the complement clause in Paragraph A. Specifically, Danquah contrasts Nkrumah’s denial of him of his day in court with the British Colonial authority giving Nkrumah and him their day in court when they were detained in Ghana’s Northern Region. Here, we see Danquah using the syntactic feature, factive, an antithetic construction and the pragmatic feature of presupposition to criticize Nkrumah and to show how his negative liberty had been flouted.

In addition, by using the passive voice in the expression, ‘I have not been asked to appear before any Judge, or Committee, or Commission and all I have been told is contained in a sheet of paper’, Danquah is able to criticize Nkrumah without mentioning his name. It is Nkrumah who denied him his day in court and the necessary information he needed to defend himself.

From Extracts 1 and 2, we observe how Danquah used language to challenge power (Nkrumah’s unjust action), and to express the violation of his liberty. Thus, we observe how language was used to index power and liberty and how power and liberty shaped the kind of language used.

The second observation I put forward is that Ghanaian (African) political actors who are not in a position of power and who resort to candor risk severer consequences such as having extended imprisonment or death. Two extracts are cited as part of the many cases found in the data in support of the above observation.

EXTRACT 3 (From the Second Letter dated 23 January 1965)

Danquah, in Extract 3, candidly expresses his wrongful detention with the collocation, ‘absolutely baseless’. Prior to categorizing his detention as absolutely baseless, he expresses his loss of negative liberty by showing the extent to which his lifelong career (69 years) of seeking liberty for Ghana had been put to naught by his detention. In legal parlance, the expression ‘baseless’ denotes inattention to facts and an action done without merit or justification. With the collocating expression, ‘absolutely baseless’, Danquah expresses the extent, the lack of justification and the unreasonableness of his detention. The second sentence is equally candid like the first. The word, ‘defend’, as used in this sentence presupposes the fact that he had been encumbered by Nkrumah and that the only option left him was to openly and vigorously defend himself. By that sentence, Danquah is implying that his action of seeking to free himself went beyond personal selfish motive; he saw Ghana and his family also ‘imprisoned’ with him and implied that all needed to be freed.

Although in his third and last sentence, Danquah uses the speech act of apology via the expression, ‘I most sincerely and most unreservedly apologise to Your Excellency for the untoward language’, his candor is vivid (Obeng, 1999a). He candidly submits via the initial part of the sentence, ‘If therefore in the course of my demand for right, freedom and justice’, that as a free citizen unlawfully incarcerated, it was his right to ‘demand’ right, freedom and justice. The collocating expression, ‘freedom and justice’, is of political importance to Ghanaians because it has been Ghana’s national motto since independence, something all Ghanaians hold to be true and expect to be available to them without fear or favor. Thus, Danquah appears to be reminding Nkrumah of Ghana’s motto, something Nkrumah, as President ought to know. Ghanaians see freedom and justice as not being negotiable – it is their unalienable right; the word ‘entitled’ and the expression, ‘entitled to the law’, support this assertion. Finally, the expression ‘perfect pursuit’ in the cohesive expression, ‘perfect pursuit of right, freedom and justice’, suggests that Danquah viewed his course of action as flawless. It must be noted that the intent of the letter was ignored by Nkrumah who, according to unofficial accounts, got even angrier at Danquah, and hence ignored his request, leading to Danquah’s death a few days after the letter was written. As noted earlier in section ‘African and Ghanaian liberation struggle’, Nkrumah was blamed for Danquah’s death.

In Extract 4, Danquah candidly attempts further to impress upon Nkrumah to release him from jail on health grounds.

EXTRACT 4 (From the Second Letter dated 23 January 1965)

My wife paid me a visit at the Prison here on Wednesday, January 20th – the first after an absence of two months and three weeks. Naturally, I was greatly happy to see her, but she was not herself very happy. She appeared distressed over what she described as annoying letters from me to Your Excellency. . . . I tried to explain the position to her, pointing out that my letter to you in November, or just before Christmas, had been on the subject of my health and that the Medical Officer here had recommended my removal to Hospital, but that you had rejected that recommendation for my removal to Hospital, and I therefore tried to impress upon her mind that my life was exposed to the danger of death.

We observe, from the above extract, that Danquah expresses surprise at the fact that Nkrumah saw his letters requesting his release from jail as ‘annoying’; something communicated to Danquah’s wife via friends who had inside knowledge of the Presidency. What is most candid about this excerpt, however, is Danquah’s use of the expression, ‘but that you had rejected that recommendation’. Use of the active voice suggests Danquah was putting the blame of his continuous incarceration squarely on Nkrumah, given that a recommendation that he (Danquah) be released from jail and sent to a hospital had been made by a prison medical officer. The pronoun ‘you’ puts specificity on who the decision to keep him in prison rested. Finally, the expression, ‘recommendation for my removal to Hospital’, suggests that Nkrumah, in his bid to flout Danquah’s liberty, put political power over a professional opinion. If the Medical Officer who was more knowledgeable on matters of health made a recommendation, and if Nkrumah willfully ignored that recommendation, then his behavior bordered on abuse of power, possibly his ignorance of Ghanaian citizens’ negative liberty or a flagrant disregard of Danquah’s right as a Ghanaian.

The final observation I put forward is that Ghanaian political actors, in their attempt to protect their negative and positive liberty, speak forcefully about what is otherwise tabooed, irrespective of the political and personal consequences and that through their language, we can see the entwinning of language and liberty; that is, how language is used to talk about liberty and how liberty becomes a reality through language. Two extracts are cited to give credence to the above claim.

EXTRACT 5 (From the First Letter Dated 21 May 1964)

I am tired of being in prison on preventive detention with no opportunity to make an original or any contribution to the progress and development of the country, and I therefore respectfully write to beg, and appeal to you to make an order for my release and return home.

I am anxious also to establish my wife and children in a home, to develop the education of my children (ten of them) and to restore my parental home at Kibi (Yiadom House) to a respectable dignity, worthy of my late father’s own contribution to the progress of our country.

The above extract is one of the most direct ways Danquah showed his frustration at his incarceration. His choice of words directly addresses the fact that both his negative and positive liberties had been taken away. For ease of analysis, I have divided this sentence into three: (a) The part that references intrusion on his negative liberty – ‘I am tired of being in prison on preventive detention’; (b) the part that references intrusion on his positive liberty – ‘with no opportunity to make an original or any contribution to the progress and development of the country’ and (c) the part where he requests his release from detention – ‘I therefore respectfully write to beg, and appeal to you to make an order for my release and return home’.

The first part of the sentence, ‘I am tired of being in prison on preventive detention’, suggests an intrusion on his negative liberty, the right to be free from intrusions from the government. As noted earlier, the Preventive Detention Act passed by Nkrumah and Ghana’s CPP-led Parliament empowered Nkrumah to arrest and jail individuals whose actions were judged to be subversive or capable of jeopardizing Ghana’s security. Danquah saw no merit or judicial basis in that law since it curtailed free speech, so what we see from the first part of the first sentence is Danquah’s frustration at the law and his unjustifiable detention, which infringed on his desire to be free from government intrusion in his life; a desire that came from his belief in negative liberty (freedom from intrusion from the state) and his understanding of the principle of democratic rule. In Danquah’s view, the law was injurious to his person.

In the second part of the sentence, ‘no opportunity to make an original or any contribution to the progress and development of the country’, Danquah elucidates the effects of his incarceration on positive liberty – his right to participate in governance as the leader of the opposition United Party, to share in the political power of Ghana and to participate in his family and communal life as seen in the sentence:

I am anxious also to establish my wife and children in a home, to develop the education of my children (ten of them) and to restore my parental home at Kibi (Yiadom House) to a respectable dignity, worthy of my late father’s own contribution to the progress of our country.

In the third part of the sentence, ‘I therefore respectfully write to beg, and appeal to you to make an order for my release and return home’, Danquah requests his release from detention for him to return home. Several words are of communicative import and are explicated here: first, the words ‘beg’ and ‘appeal’ suggest that Danquah recognized the fact that Nkrumah was in a position of power and had the institutional authority to cause his release. In fact, the expression, ‘make an order’, legally implicates the fact that the office of the Executive had the power to pardon and that it was Nkrumah’s legal and political right to effect his release from detention.

On politeness, we observe that Danquah’s use of the expression, ‘respectfully write to beg, and appeal to you’, marks social politeness (Nwoye, 1992; Obeng, 1997d). Besides being a lawyer, philosopher and statesman, Danquah was a traditional chief and politeness in the speech act of request is essential at a chief’s court/palace, so despite his frustration at what he perceived as an unlawful detention and the power he had as a chief to speak candidly, he still recognized the need to be respectful by ‘begging’ and ‘appealing’ to Nkrumah, someone he personally invited to join a political party he had formed and someone whose transportation fare he paid to enable Nkrumah to travel via boat from London to Accra to participate in Ghana’s liberation struggle. Thus, Danquah had to take cognizance of Nkrumah’s institutional standing and ‘perform’ politeness.

The final extract, Extract 6, not only shows how language and liberty inform each other; it demonstrates how a political actor may use language to talk about language to lay bare his views about an unjust action and his insistence in fighting for his liberty. Given the uniqueness of this extract, a brief context to it is in order. A reply to Danquah’s earlier letter to Nkrumah dated 21 May 1964 was read to him (Danquah) by the Assistant Director of Prisons in which it noted that Ghana’s Parliament had passed a new amendment to the Preventive Detention Act. The new amendment denied such persons or their representatives the right to make ‘representations’ to any person or persons other than the President who ordered their detention. This amendment put the focus on Nkrumah as the one who intruded on Danquah’s liberty. Danquah saw this as unlawful since power had, by that amendment, been vested in the hands of persons instead of institutions in which the persons served.

EXTRACT 6 (From the Second Letter dated 23 January 1965)

So far as I know, neither the Government of Ghana, nor the Parliament of Ghana, or the Courts of Justice are ‘persons’ in the sense in which Kwame Botwe is a person. Each of these is an institution an ‘it’ and not a ‘he’ or ‘she’, and I cannot therefore see how my letter of demand dated 8th January in the category of ‘representation’ to any person other than the President. Under the Constitution, the President has a Cabinet of persons who, together with him, constitute the Executive of the Government of Ghana, with collective responsibility, and they together, as constituting an ‘it’, are not ‘private persons’, but are parts of an institution- the GOVERNMENT OF GHANA.

In the above extract, Danquah argues that his letter of 8 January 1965 that demanded that his liberty not be flouted and that he be granted freedom to participate in governance and other activities of his community was addressed to none other than Nkrumah (the Chief-Executive at the Presidency) as required by law. Danquah engages in metalanguage by explaining who a person is and what institutions are and the need not to confuse persons with the institutions in which they serve. In explaining this, one ethnopragmatic fact that is employed, and which needs explanation, is his use of his ‘home name’, ‘Kwame Botwe’. Among the Akan of Ghana, ¹ one has several names – ‘day name’ (a name given based on the day on which one is born), ‘positional name’ (name of order of birth, first, second, etc.) and hypocoristic name (endearment name). Most Akans have several names and the choice of which name to use depends on the communicative context (Obeng, 1997d, 1998, 2001). Use of ‘Kwame Botwe’ focuses attention on Danquah in that it is the name that is used by people like Nkrumah who knew him very closely. ‘Kwame’ suggests he was born on Saturday and ‘Botwe’ suggests he may have been (or named after) an eighth-born. By using these names, Danquah is implying that given that Nkrumah knew him closely, Nkrumah’s play on words about who Danquah’s ‘representation’ or request for release should be addressed to, was unnecessary and hence a deliberate attempt to snub him and deny him justice and liberty. Danquah’s use of uppercase letters at the end of the extract is a sign of frustration and his attempt at candor and specificity. He was frustrated that Parliament was intentionally, with the President’s support, passing what Danquah saw as bogus laws with the intention to permanently infringe on citizens’ liberties. The graphological devise of using uppercase letters is widely used in Ghanaian political graffiti communication. I discovered that male college students, in communicating via graffiti, used uppercase letters to emphasize points being made when exposing and criticizing the illegal behavior of Ghanaian political actors (Obeng, 2000a, 2000b). Like the graffiti communication, Danquah’s letter is exposing Nkrumah’s illegal behavior and his use of uppercase letters is a candid way to specifically demonstrate his frustration at Nkrumah’s inattention to the liberty of others.

From the above extract, one observes Danquah’s use of candor via the employment of metalanguage in asking for non-intrusion on his negative liberty and protection of his positive liberty irrespective of the potential consequences. Via the use of this linguistic and graphological strategies, Danquah showed his frustration at the lack of understanding on the part of Nkrumah and his government, of the facts under consideration. Use of metalanguage allowed him to communicate forcefully about the tabooed topic, intrusion on people’s liberty, irrespective of the consequences that he knew would befall him.

Discussion and conclusion

Given Danquah’s desire for liberty, his background in philosophy and law and his knowledge about classical history and literature, one is tempted to draw an analogy between the concepts expressed in his letters with those expressed by Plato in his allegory, ‘Return to the Cave’, in The Republic. Like the caveman let out of the cave (European colonization of Africa) and into the outer world (an Independent Ghana that he fought for) to acquire knowledge and experience about politics, law and human society and its values, Danquah was eager to leave the new cave (Nsawam Jail) and to return to ‘normal’ Ghanaian society to take part in the society’s organization no matter how little the rewards might be. Danquah, via his letters, was willing to return to the social trenches of nation-building to help deal with its defects/problems, and unrealistic ways by which its affairs were executed, such as imprisoning political opponents with no evidence of wrongdoing.

Viewed from the point of view of Isaiah Berlin’s (1960) theory on negative and positive liberty, we hope to have demonstrated that Danquah asked for both ‘liberty from’ and ‘liberty to’. He requested the right to be free from intrusions from the State and others (liberty from) and the right to participate in the process of governance and to share in the political power of Ghana (liberty to). The substantial evidence drawn from the data showed that language, power and liberty inform each other and that through language, powerless political actors are able to demonstrate resistive practice to ‘speak back’ candidly and passionately to power about their political beliefs, criticize Power, and request Liberty.

Furthermore, an attention to Danquah’s letters suggests that Ghanaian political discourses are influenced by the socio-cultural and political contexts in which they take place, as well as language and cultural ideologies and participants’ goals and intended outcomes. In managing such speech acts as criticisms, complaints, disagreements and requests, Danquah employed communicative strategies that generally differed from those of the other political actors jailed with him. Thus, Danquah’ actions, compared to those of his compatriots, were at that time exceptional, given that they were not a part of the wider Ghanaian oppositional culture of giving up on words; that is, having something to say but remaining silent either out of fear of or reverence for Nkrumah, the most powerful person in the country at that time. Thus, although Ghanaian (African) communicational mores assume that political actors in opposition are not as communicatively powerful as those in power, this study proved that Danquah sometimes ignored this communicative stance and communicated with Nkrumah like someone with whom he was on equal power terms. This, I argued, may have been because having been jailed together with Nkrumah and hence knowing Nkrumah’s familiarity with the rule of law and administration of justice, Danquah expected Nkrumah to see the political world from the same camera angle as his. It is important to note that Danquah’s strategy of candor became inspirational for future political oppositional actors in Ghana; this is explicated further in this section.

An important issue discussed by Fairclough that has implications for this study is one’s use and interpretation of language in what Fairclough (1989) refers to as ‘ideological common sense’, which, according to him, affects the ‘meanings of linguistic expressions, conventional practices of speaking and writing, and the social subjects and situations of discourse’ (p. ix). Specifically, Fairclough notes that the assumptions we make in producing and interpreting a text, and the inferencing we draw and gap filling we make are based on ideological common sense and is by and large unconscious. We demonstrated, that, although Fairclough’s argument that the less conscious interactants are of the ideological assumptions the more effective they are at reproducing language and its associated power within discourse and in perpetuating the underlying relationships between language and power, the opposite is true in the Ghanaian political context. Specifically, given the stratified nature of Ghanaian society, Danquah was very much aware and especially conscious of the underlying ideological common sense and its impact on his choice of words, how these words are rendered and the nature of interpretations given to his own and others’ texts. We agree with Fairclough in arguing that variation in ideologies may restrict the scope of ideological common sense and thereby create relationships between the dominated and dominating discourses. In the Ghanaian context, Nkrumah’s discursive type, the dominant voice, made ideological assumptions associated with it to become naturalized, and consequently made it become the ‘only’ discursive option available. Also, by the passage of the Preventive Detention Act, Nkrumah attempted to control and limit the political, social and economic contributions of non-powerful actors and determined which speech counted as treasonous and of deserving incarceration. However, Danquah’s voice, the dominated voice, became contained, but continued to play a resistant role even from jail.

Furthermore, questions concerning relations of language, power and liberty arise regarding who the political actors and their political ideologies are, and the speech act(s) they are engaged. We demonstrated that language behavior in Ghana’s political ecology, as measured in terms of Danquah’s candor, is intricately coordinated with his worldview of, and stance to liberty, how strongly he viewed liberty and its relation to power and how far he was willing to risk it all by communicating candidly instead of giving up on words. However, we demonstrated that knowledge of how language relates to power and liberty is not a mere list of correlations between particular linguistic/discursive forms and power and liberty; it entails implicit and deep understanding of how particular linguistic and discourse-pragmatic forms can be used to perform pragmatic tasks like criticism, complaint, disagreement, request or apology and the norms of the discourse ecology, the goals of the political actors, and the actors’ ideological preferences and expectations regarding how such pragmatic tasks must be performed. Danquah was aware of his goals of seeking liberty and used language to show those goals. He was aware of the relationship between language and liberty, and the power relationships between him and Nkrumah and his goals impacted his stance toward Nkrumah. Also, Danquah’s strategy of linguistic performance (complaining about what he saw as wanton disregard of the rule of law by the Nkrumah Administration) contrasted sharply with that of the other political detainees who had the same issues but decided not to write to Nkrumah. Those actors’ willingness to assume a more subservient role, ‘did not make Nkrumah angry’ as noted by Mrs. Danquah; it resulted in their release from jail. Danquah, however, did not view his letters to Nkrumah as breaking a politico-juridical decorum. He saw his detention as a mistake and an unlawful act by the Executive and Legislature and therefore sought to correct it; the content and nature of his letters demonstrate the intricate and consequential pathways by which communicative strategies, the performance power and the seeking of liberty are discursively intertwined (Obeng,1999b).

Another important contribution made by this study is its attention to historical, legal, political and cultural contexts in discourse performance in the fight for liberty. Danquah appeared to be concerned about the attainment of Ghana’s welfare, which he believed could be bolstered by applying his knowledge and insights to matters of public policy. He viewed his incarceration as denying Ghana of his role in applying his knowledge and experience in the solution of Ghana’s problems and in building the young nation he had ‘founded’ with Nkrumah and others. Danquah regarded freedom from prison not as a way of getting out of confinement or of acquiring any pleasure or wealth; in one of his letters he had criticized corrupt government officials by asking for wealth to be dissociated from politics to prevent charlatans from getting into politics. He was not oblivious to the young nation’s plight; for him, being out of jail and returning to normal life meant a return to the dynamic relationship between his knowledge and the practical affairs of Ghana’s politics, law and social affairs. He viewed Ghana’s achievement of survival and the well-being of Ghanaians as a function of the exercise by its individual members contributing their unique talents and qualities to making this aim of liberty for all, a reality; staying in jail hindered the espousal of this aim, hence, his call for liberty and participation in the political process.

A very significant discovery made in this study is the fact that doing political discourse analysis in an African context could be different from studies on political discourse in the global North. As noted in the “Data and theoretical framework” section of this article, written communication such as letters was appropriately viewed as discursive, given that it was part of a triadic form of interaction. This triadic mode of communication renders the sender-receiver mode of communication too simple. Pseudo-epicenters who carry and receive messages between interactional participants make communication more elaborate with more participants each performing a unique function. Furthermore, we discovered differences regarding powerful actors’ action of seeing members in the opposition with differing views as subversive and hence detaining them; something which is rare in the global north. Most importantly, we learned how Parliaments in the global north (such as the British Parliament) tolerated divergent views, whereas those in the South (the Ghanaian Parliament at the time) did not; a situation that led Danquah to fight for the right of those in opposition, and an initiative that has had considerable impact on contemporary Ghanaian politics and jurisprudence, whereby political actors in opposition resist intrusion into their liberty.

Probably, the most important contribution of this paper to Ghanaian politics and to political discourse theory is my introduction of the theory of language and liberty into the study of political discourse analysis. This theory suggests that liberty has its roots in a nation’s legal, political and philosophical traditions and depends on language to be actualized. For example, we saw from Danquah’s treatment at the hands of Nkrumah that for developing democracies such as Ghana (Africa), for individual liberties to be gained and maintained, there ought to be legal and material conditions put in place in a country’s constitution and in judicial precedent because failure to enshrine a Bill of Rights in a nation’s constitution creates a situation where leaders may not be subjected to law and hence intrude on individuals’ liberties and also prevent them from political participation as well as participation in their families’ and communal lives, just as Nkrumah did to Danquah.

Second, this theory on language and liberty posits that although in fighting for their liberty Ghanaian (African) political actors in the opposition may put their careers and their lives at risk, several communicative strategies exist to be used as tools for seeking and protecting both their positive and negative liberty. Thus, I identified and elucidated discursive strategies employed in challenging the validity of claims and actions of powerful political actors. Through the theory, I showed that besides the socio-political ecology within which political actors communicate (such as writing of letters), the discourses’ (letters’) sentence types such as commands, statements and questions help perform unique functions relating to information seeking, asking for one’s rights and questioning another actors’ behavior. Syntactic cues such as factive formulae like ‘you will recall’, ‘as you know’ and ‘we all know’ are seen as being used to presuppose the truth of a following complement clause and to protecting powerless political actors from taking complete responsibility for a criticism or complaint regarding the intrusion on their liberty or the denial of them of access to justice. Also, elucidated via the theory was political actors’ use of contrastive/antithetic pairs to draw a contrast between their good deeds and/or ideology and their opponents’ bad deeds and ideological stance. Other syntactic signals identified as being used in seeking liberty included the use of the personal pronouns (such as the first-person personal pronoun, ‘I’, and second person personal pronoun, ‘you’) to show agency and to draw a contrast between us versus them; that is, one’s (group’s) positive actions as opposed to the negative actions by the other actors. The passive voice/sentence was identified as being used when criticizing powerful actors with the view to not naming the agent of a wrongdoing, whereas such a collocation as ‘absolutely baseless’ was used to express candor and frustration. The interconnectedness between grammar and political course of action makes this study, a study in grammatical pragmatics; the entwinning of language and human behavior, human action, human intention and human thought.

From the theory on language and liberty, we learned that besides syntax, discourse-pragmatic strategies may be employed to seek liberty. The discourse-pragmatic features identified in this study were inferencing, speech act types (such as complaints, criticisms, requests, apologies, among others) and politeness strategies like ‘His/Your Excellency’, ‘Yours Very Sincerely and Respectfully’ and ‘Yours very sincerely and obediently’ that are used by powerless political actors in their interactional (letter) openings and closings, as well as an expression such as, ‘I respectfully write to beg, and appeal to you’, used to mark social politeness.

Finally, the theory on the language and liberty suggests that the language used by political actors to seek liberty and justice is essential to determine the extent of strength of the bond between language and liberty. Thus, protesting or producing dissenting views through language amplifies the place of and for language in Ghana’s (Africa’s) political and juridical negotiations and in the political process.

This study has implications for present-day Ghanaian politics. Following Nkrumah’s overthrow on 24 February 1966, by the Ghanaian military (under the name, the National Liberation Council) during which time the coup’s leaders immediately opened all Ghanaian prisons’ gates and released all opponents of Nkrumah from preventive detention, Ghanaians followed Danquah’s footsteps of talking back to authority by speaking candidly about civil liberties. Note also that between 1969 and 1992, Ghana experienced several other military dictatorships that continued to infringe on their liberties with associated planned public and private executions, a situation that eventually led to what became known in Ghana as the ‘culture of silence’. Again, it was the adherents of Danquah’s ideological orientation, referred to in Ghana as the Danquah-Dombo-Busia Tradition, who, following Danquah’s footsteps, broke the silence and challenged the authorities through public demonstrations some named in the Akan language, ‘Ku Me Preko’, literally meaning, ‘Just Kill Me’ but idiomatically meaning, ‘We are sick and tired of your oppression and will rather die than be oppressed’. It was the desire for liberty that eventually led to Ghana’s current constitutional democracy. Like Danquah’s use of the media, the ‘Times of West Africa’, during his involvement in the African liberation struggle and during the fight for Ghana’s independence, the current Ghanaian media continue to seek liberty for Ghanaians by candidly exposing, through the media, political actors who infringe on the liberties of other political actors and the citizenry. It is quite common in Ghana these days for a political actor to be called to a radio or TV station to explain his illegal actions or to respond to an accusation. It has also become common practice for the mainstream media to question the behavior or actions of those in power; thanks to the boldness shown by Danquah in the face of oppression and death.

Finally, Danquah’s use of the courts and the academy to seek redress continues to play an important role in present-day Ghanaian governance and jurisprudence. Ordinary Ghanaians have been emboldened to take governments or Presidents to court if they feel aggrieved. A lecture series, ‘The J. B. Danquah Memorial Lecture Series’ was inaugurated in 1968 in memory of Danquah’s contribution to Africa and Ghana’s liberation struggle. Topical issues presented at the lecture series range from philosophy, politics (democratization and the constitution of order), language and the media, among many others, but the central theme is on liberty, governance and the rule of law. Another important society, ‘The Danquah Institute’, was established on 15 March 2008 in commemoration of Danquah’s work and to promote his ideas. The Institute ‘regards itself as guardians and ambassadors of the political and economic thought known as liberalism and how its promotion must benefit Africa and the African as members of the greater global community’. The Institute also seeks to ‘advance Danquah’s beliefs in individual freedom, rule of law, multi-party democracy, liberal economics and equality of opportunity and ensure they inform the actions of the democratically-elected Government of Ghana and governments of other African states’ (Danquah Institute, 2018). The Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, a watch-dog of Ghana’s governance and liberty, also organizes annual lectures to showcase Danquah’s contributions to Ghana’s democracy.

Danquah thus proved via his letters that despite restrictions on free speech and infringement on positive and negative liberties, Ghanaians must intensely participate in the collective enterprise of nation-building; this dream lives on and his methods of seeking and fighting for liberty by talking back to authority via both the written and spoken media, no matter the consequences, continue to inspire current Ghanaian political actors and the citizenry.