“All these — his behaviour right from the time of the Party Congress at Kumasi up to the time of the incident and thereafter, his design to quash rumours when added up to the evidence of Adotei Addo and Malam Tula that in fact he was in league with Obetsebi Lamptey and had been one of the suppliers of the grenades, one of which was used at Kulungugu — are sufficient to transfix Tawia Adamafio with complicity in this conspiracy to overthrow the Government by the assassination of the President.” —  B. Kwaw-Swanzy, Attorney-General’s Opening Address

The treason trial verdict of the High Court’s Special Criminal Division[1] delivered on Monday 9 December 1963 features prominently in the story of the fall of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention Peoples Party (CPP) regime. The re-arrest and detention of Tawia Adamafio, Ebenezer Ako Adjei and Hugh Horatio Cofie-Crabbe immediately after their acquittal, followed by the dismissal of Chief Justice Sir Arku Korsah are often invoked as reflecting the dictatorial turn of the regime.

Further steps taken by the government reinforce these criticisms — nullification of the trial, a referendum to approve constitutional amendments to establish a one-party state, new powers granted to the President to dismiss judges, powers soon exercised to dismiss three more Supreme Court Justices, and a new trial presided over by a new Chief Justice producing a guilty verdict. All of these contributed to undermining the regime’s legitimacy.[2]

Defenders of Nkrumah have said his surprise at the outcome of the trial accounted for his reaction. Presumably, Nkrumah thought the case against the accused was strong and that a guilty verdict was to be expected. This was certainly the message propagated by the government prior to and during the trial, and continued in the strident government-controlled media response to the not-guilty verdict.[3]

However, a close examination of the prosecution’s case against the three men would have given an independent observer serious doubt as to their guilt. What briefings could Nkrumah have been given by the state security apparatus, the police investigation, and the Attorney-General that led him to expect a successful prosecution?

More than sixty years later, the main protagonists are no longer with us. There are few people alive, if any, with first-hand knowledge of the details of this episode. Nevertheless, this is a significant set of events worth examining. The available sources include documents from the trial proceedings, media reports of the time, published accounts by some of the actors and observers, and works by researchers. Laying out the main facts and reflecting on them should provide a glimpse of the workings of the CPP and the state apparatus, particularly  the institutions charged with intelligence, investigation and prosecution, in the last years of the regime.

The CPP held its eleventh party congress in Kumasi on 28 and 29 July 1962.[4] After the congress, President Nkrumah led a delegation north to Tenkudugu in the Republic of Upper Volta (now Burkina Faso) for a meeting with President Maurice Yameogo. In the afternoon of 1 August 1962 President Nkrumah’s motorcade, returning from Tenkudugu, was prevailed upon by the local district commissioner[5] and other persons to make an unscheduled stop at the village of Kulugungu.[6] As the President approached schoolchildren lined up to receive him, a hand grenade landed, exploding a few yards from the President. According to newspaper reports, five people including a schoolboy were killed. More than 55 persons including the President and his military and police aides-de-camp were injured. The President was treated at Bawku Hospital and spent a few days in Tamale before returning to Accra.

Within a month of the Kulugungu bombing,  Adamafio, Minister for Information and Broadcasting, Ako Adjei, Foreign Minister, and Cofie-Crabbe, Executive Secretary of the CPP were arrested and detained under the Preventive Detention Act. Other senior officials such as Mumuni Bawumia, Northern Regional Commissioner and John Tettegah, General Secretary of the Trades Union Congress  were briefly arrested but were able to persuade the powers-that-be of their innocence.[7]

Adamafio is undoubtedly the main character in the trial. Having left the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC) and its successor the Ghana Congress Party, he joined the CPP in 1953. He was awarded a scholarship to study law in the United Kingdom, where he continued his political activity. Upon completion of his studies, Adamafio was invited by  Nkrumah to take up the role of General Secretary of the CPP. He became one of Nkrumah’s closest advisers, with Ministerial rank and an office at Flagstaff House. Adamafio was elected member of parliament for the Ga Rural constituency in 1961. A vocal supporter of the President and seen as one of the most powerful persons of the regime,  he was, in his own telling[8], nationalist and anti-imperialist in ideology and opposed what he saw as the conservative establishment and the bureaucracy, as well as those within the CPP whom he saw as corrupt or incompetent. For him socialism and Africanization were the way forward. Building the party’s socialist cadre and consolidating its power at the expense of the other factions was his avowed agenda. In the year and a half before his downfall, Adamafio’s political fortunes  were seen as rising with the exit from government of prominent Ministers such as K.A. Gbedemah, Kojo Botsio and Krobo Edusei.

It is hardly surprising that such a person would have enemies inside and outside the party and government. It did not help matters that he was seen as cultivating an ethnic political base. His response to the September 1961 General Strike had been strident and memorable — he denounced the strikers as “despicable rats.”

Within a week of the Kulugungu bombing, rumours of Adamafio’s involvement were circulating at the highest levels of the government. First was the question where was  Adamafio when the bomb went off. For someone who relished his proximity to the President, it was considered strange that he was nowhere near the President when the explosion happened. His reactions after the bombing were also seen as suspicious — for instance, he was said to have asked more than one person whether the President was dead.[9] There was also said to have been a Special Branch report indicating that Ghanaian students in London believed Adamafio was involved in the Kulugungu bombing. Much of the evidence at the trial was based on such rumours and suspicions expressed by party insiders who testified as to Adamafio’s ambition, his efforts to control access to the President and his propensity to speak in the name of the President.[10] Adamafio was also said to have instructed that loyalists be mobilized to beat up persons found to be spreading rumours of his involvement in the bombing.

The weight given to suspicions of Adamafio’s involvement in the Kulugungu bombing is striking given Nkrumah’s previous denunciation of the spreading of rumours in his Dawn Broadcast a year and half earlier: “So, day after day, night after night, all types and manner of wild allegations and rumours are circulated and they are always well sprinkled with: they say they say, wosee, wosee, akee, akee!”  In that speech the President said all allegations against officials should go to the central committee. If there was a central committee meeting that decided Adamafio’s fate, he was not invited.

Adamafio’s alleged co-conspirator Ako Adjei[11] had borrowed 25,000 pounds from the Ghana Commercial Bank in February 1961. He was initially charged with obtaining the funds by false pretences but that trial was discontinued. According to the prosecution at the treason trial, Ako Adjei had told Ghana Commercial Bank officials that he needed the funds for secret governmental purposes. However, Ako Adjei denied having made such a claim and said it was a private loan secured with his private property. The prosecution alleged that Ako Adjei used the funds to support Adamafio’s conspiracy. Ako Adjei’s statements and testimony did not provide a credible explanation of what he did with this large sum of  money, much of which he had by then repaid.[12]

Crabbe was a close associate of Adamafio. The prosecution presented him as subject to Adamafio’s influence. It was alleged that he too had kept away from the President during the party congress in Kumasi and afterwards. In response, his counsel exhibited newspaper photographs of him sitting close to the President and dancing arm in arm with the President at the end of the party congress.[13]

In the months following the arrest and detention of Adamafio, Ako Adjei and Crabbe, there were five more bombings in Accra.  On 22 January 1963 Teiko Tagoe was found with a grenade hidden in his underwear at a CPP rally in Bukom and arrested. The ensuing investigation led to the arrest of a number of persons linked to the opposition United Party (UP). Tagoe and four others were charged with conspiracy to commit treason and treason. Two other defendants were charged with misprision of treason.  On 17 April 1963 the Special Criminal Division found all seven accused persons guilty.[14]  The bombing campaign was found to have been planned by members of the United Party in exile. Emmanuel Obetsebi-Lamptey was among UP leaders who had fled to Lome in October 1961 during the wave of arrests of opposition members following the General Strike. Having participated in meetings of the conspirators, he secretly returned to the country to implement their plans. He was detained in October 1962, released and re-arrested. He died in prison of cancer on 29 January 1963.

Adamafio, Ako Adjei and Cofie-Crabbe were charged with conspiracy to commit treason and treason alongside two UP members, Robert Otchere, a member of parliament and Yaw Manu. Otchere and Manu made statements to the police admitting their participation in the meetings in Lome where the bombing campaign was planned.[15]

What reason was there to link Adamafio a CPP stalwart and fervent Nkrumahist to the plot by UP members to overthrow the Nkrumah regime? Beyond the rumours and suspicions, what evidence linked Adamafio, Ako Adjei and Cofie-Crabbe to Kulugungu or any other bombing incidents?

It was the testimony of two of the persons convicted in the Teiko Tagoe trial, Mallam Tula and Joseph Adotei Addo, which provided the vital link. Mallam Tula, in statements made to the police on 25 and 26 January 1963, claimed to have seen Adamafio, Ako Adjei, Cofie-Crabbe, Krobo Edusei (Minister of Food and Agriculture), Kofi Baako (Minister of Defence), Kofi Asante Ofori-Atta (Minister of Justice) and Kwaku Boateng (Minister of Interior) meeting with Obetsebi-Lamptey in his hideout at Bawaleshie. At the trial he repeated the same allegation, but this time leaving out Kofi Baako. He said his previous mention of Kofi Baako was a mistake and blamed the police for including Baako’s name in his (Tula’s) later statement. It had been established that Kofi Baako was out of the country at the time he was alleged to have been at Bawaleshie.

Adotei  Addo, secretary of the Accra branch of the UP, testified at the trial that he was driven  in a vehicle with Adamafio to meet Obetsebi-Lamptey at his hideout in Bawaleshie in May 1962. A few weeks later, he saw Adamafio, Ako-Adjei, Crabbe and three other persons with Obetsebi-Lamptey at the same location. This time, he said, Adamafio introduced himself and his colleagues naming the other three persons present as Krobo Edusei,   Kwaku Boateng and  Aaron Ofori-Atta.

Adotei Addo had made seven statements to the police. In his sixth statement made on 21 February 1963, he said he met Adamafio, Krobo Edusei, Kwaku Boateng, Ako Adjei, Crabbe and Ofori Atta in Obetsebi-Lamptey’s room in his hideout at Bawaleshie. On that occasion in Addo’s account, Krobo Edusei delivered a parcel of eight bombs to Obetsebi-Lamptey together with an amount of 200 pounds to be shared to the persons who were to carry out the bombing. Addo claimed that he saw Krobo Edusei, Kwaku Boateng and Ofori-Atta at the same location a second time, after the Kulugungu bomb explosion. That time, according to him, Edusei gave Obetsebi-Lamptey another 200 pounds.

It was established in the trial that Addo’s first five statements to the police did not include the allegations of the six “big men” having visited Obetsebi-Lamptey in his hideout. Furthermore, Addo had retracted the contents of his sixth statement in a seventh statement dated  25 February 1963. In that retraction, he denied having seen any of the named persons with Obetsebi-Lamptey. He explained that his retraction was a matter of conscience and that he had written the sixth statement in order to be free from being beaten. According to him, he wrote the sixth statement  when “being asked to corroborate with Tula” by both Tula and Deputy Commissioner of Police Mr. Amaning. The sixth statement itself describes the circumstances in which it was given. Deputy Commissioner Amaning had Mallam Tula brought in during a meeting with Addo at the CID Headquarters. After both Amaning and Tula  encouraged Addo to “speak the truth as regard to [sic] the prominent men involved in this bomb incident”,  Amaning left Tula and Addo in the room for about 50 minutes. Upon Amaning’s return, Addo gave his sixth statement.

Adamafio, in his defence, denied having met Obetsebi-Lamptey as described or ever having met either Adotei Addo or Mallam Tula prior to his detention. He said he had never in his life been to Bawaleshie. He described the testimonies of Addo and Tula as manufactured. Ako Adjei and Crabbe also denied having been at any such meetings as did Krobo Edusei and Ofori Atta who were both called as defence witnesses.

The circumstances in which this critical testimony was obtained and the inconsistencies between the different statements of Adotei Addo and between Addo’s and Mallam Tula’s accounts should have cast doubt on their reliability. This co-ordinated but contradictory testimony came from prisoners convicted and sentenced to death and susceptible to influence by their captors. The manner in which the police facilitated the identification of the three defendants by Tula and Addo was also noted to have been irregular. [16]

The arrests of Otchere, Manu and the seven persons convicted in the first treason trial and the evidence gathered to secure their convictions give an impression of a capable and effective state security and investigative apparatus. Based on the available information, we can only guess at an explanation of the conduct of the police investigation in relation to the three CPP men charged in the second treason trial. Adamafio states in his autobiography that a police chief,  who was himself subsequently arrested and detained following Police Constable Ametewee’s attempt on Nkrumah’s life in January 1964, declared while in prison that he had fabricated the evidence against Adamafio, Ako Adjei and Crabbe at the President’s instigation.[17] By all indications, the police chief referred to was Deputy Commissioner Samuel Danso Amaning who led the investigation and was the first prosecution witness at the trial.[18] Nkrumah, after his overthrow, apparently acknowledged that Adamafio and his CPP co-accused persons were innocent.[19]

How did the three come to be charged, nearly a year after their arrest and detention, on the basis of such manifestly unreliable evidence? The Attorney-General who led the prosecution was Kwaw-Swanzy. The Director of Public Prosecutions (DPP) was Austin Amissah. Geoffrey Bing, previously Attorney General but at that time Advisor to the President, also played a role in the investigations. The Attorney-General’s Opening Statement and his subsequent public utterances projected confidence in the prosecution’s case.

Geoffrey Bing in his memoirs published in 1968 says that Kwaw-Swanzy left Nkrumah with the impression that a conviction was certain. Bing says, he had himself advised against the prosecution because he thought the evidence was insufficient for a conviction of the three persons but DPP Amissah held a contrary view.[20] Amissah in a footnote in his book published in 1981[21] quotes the relevant passage from Bing and responds in the following terms:  “the impression that the case was brought only because the DPP so advised on the strength of the evidence is misleading. Anyone with knowledge of Ghana at the time should find this hard to believe. No prosecution of such a highly sensitive political nature involving persons already detained could have been started without the President’s instructions. Constitutionally, the Attorney General, who was the immediate superior of the DPP exercised his functions of initiating, conducting and discontinuing prosecutions ‘subject to the directions of the President’ (Art 47(2) of the 1960 Constitution).[22]I was first informed that the President had decided that Mr. Tawia Adamafio be prosecuted by Mr. Bing and the Attorney-General, Mr. Kwaw-Swanzy. My contribution was to suggest that in that case whatever the nature of the evidence, all three prominent persons arrested the same day should be prosecuted together.”

Amissah argues that trying the accused persons was preferrable to keeping them indefinitely in detention under the Preventive Detention Act. He also states: The evidence against the former Ministers and party secretary was not strong, although even amongst them there were degrees of weakness.[23]

If the Attorney-General was acting on the President’s instructions, what was his own view of the strength of the case? Did he convey that view to the President prior to implementing the instructions? Did the DPP express his views about the strength of the case to his boss the Attorney-General? We may never know what specific discussions preceded the prosecution.

Given the evidence, neither the Court’s conviction of Otchere and Manu nor its acquittal of Adamafio, Ako Adjei and Crabbe should have come as a surprise. Yet in a press conference the following day, Kwaw-Swanzy expressed outrage at the  decision which he described as “a mockery of justice.” According to him it did not make sense for the Court to accept the testimony of Mallam Tula and Adotei Addo against Otchere and Manu and reject their testimony against the other three. He also complained that the Court should have given the President prior notice of its decision given the national security implications.[24]

Emergency meetings of the cabinet and of the central committee of the CPP were convened. Articles and editorials in government-controlled newspapers denounced the verdict and railed against the court. There were demonstrations across the country by CPP supporters.

Korsah’s dismissal as Chief Justice was announced on Wednesday 11 December. The following day it was announced that he had retired from the bench. Van Lare resigned shortly after. Julius Sarkodee-Addo, a senior Supreme Court justice, was appointed Chief Justice.

On 23 December an emergency session of parliament passed legislation giving the President power to nullify court decisions in criminal proceedings in the interest of state security. In presenting the amendment, the Minister of Interior Kwaku Boateng said it was intended to rectify an omission in the Act establishing the Special Criminal Division. The amendment was passed with retroactive effect from 22 November 1961.[25]The President then issued an executive instrument dated 27 December nullifying the proceedings of the Adamafio trial.[26]

As part of his response to the treason trial verdict, Nkrumah, in his New Year message, announced a referendum to be held on 24, 28 and 31 January 1964 on a proposal for constitutional amendments to make Ghana a one-party state, and to give the President new powers to dismiss judges.[27] The reported  outcome of the referendum was a 99.9% yes vote. The constitutional amendments enacted by parliament received Presidential assent on 21 February 1964. [28]

Shortly after, the President used his new powers to sack three more Supreme Court judges – Akufo-Addo the remaining one from the Adamafio trial, R.S. Blay and Adumua Bossman. Amissah says the new Chief Justice was involved in these decisions.[29]

A new trial of Adamafio and his four co-accused persons began in October 1964. The Special Criminal Division legislation had again been amended, this time to provide for trial by a jury presided over by the Chief Justice.[30] Attorney-General Kwaw-Swanzy prosecuted once again, assisted this time by a Senior State Attorney K.A. Sekyi. The accused were not represented by counsel. Part of the proceedings were held in camera. On 8 February 1965, after the Chief Justice’s summing up, the jury took 50 minutes to deliberate and find all five men guilty of treason. All were sentenced to death. Their sentences were subsequently commuted to 20 years imprisonment.[31]

Parliamentary elections were due to be held in July 1965. Upon the dissolution of parliament by the President in May 1965, the CPP, now the single national party under the amended constitution, nominated 198 candidates for the 198 parliamentary seats. All candidates were then declared elected unopposed. The new Presidential Elections Act[32] provided that only one candidate, a member of the sole authorised party, could be nominated for the Presidency. Upon the approval of the nomination by a resolution of parliament, that candidate would be declared elected. President Nkrumah was duly nominated and declared elected on 10 June 1965.

On 24 February 1966 Ghana’s First Republic was brought to an end by a coup d’etat led by senior military and police officers.

[1] The Special Criminal Division of the High Court was created by the Criminal Procedure (Amendment) Act, 1961 (Act 91) in the wake of the 1961 General Strike which was followed by allegations of a conspiracy to overthrow the government.  The Act provided that the President could refer certain matters to the new Division, from whose decisions there would be no appeal. The first trial under this legislation was the treason trial of Teiko Tagoe and others in April 1963. The  Adamafio trial was the second. For the latter trial, the court was made up of  Chief Justice Sir Arku Korsah and Justices W.B. Van Lare and Edward Akufo-Addo. Its decision is  reported as State  v Otchere and Others (1963) 2 Ghana Law Reports 463.

[2] These measures were much criticised at the time by western governments and media, the International Commission of Jurists, the Ghanaian opposition, as well as by supporters of Nkrumah such as C.L.R James. The media and prominent persons in a number of African countries including Nigeria and Kenya also spoke out. Such actions of the CPP government featured prominently among the reasons offered in justification of the 24 February 1966 coup.

It happens to be the case that agencies of some of the same western governments that expressed criticism of the CPP government’s response to the treason trial verdict were at least complicit in several plots to overthrow Nkrumah between 1961 and 1966. This is well documented and now hardly disputed. A number of official documents to that effect have come into the public domain. For further discussion of this see e.g. Susan Williams, White Malice: The CIA and the Covert Recolonization of Africa ( Public Affairs, 2021); Richard Mahoney, JFK: Ordeal in Africa (Oxford University Press, 1983);  John Stockwell, In Search of Enemies: A CIA Story (WW Norton & Co, 1978);  Seymour Hersh,  “C.I.A. Said to Have Aided Plotters Who Overthrew Nkrumah in Ghana,” New York Times, May 9, 1978, https://www.nytimes.com/1978/05/09/archives/cia-said-to-have-aided-plotters-who-overthrew-nkrumah-in-ghana.html. It  is also worth mentioning that government disregard of an inconvenient outcome of a political/criminal trial was not without precedent. In September 1888, the British colonial government of the Gold Coast re-arrested the elders of Taviefe who had been acquitted on treason charges by a jury, declared them political prisoners of the state, and deported them to Elmina (See  Sarah Balakrishnan, “The Taviefe Massacre 1888: Violence and Colonial Rule in British Ghana”  South Atlantic Quarterly 124:1,  January 2025: 127 at 136-137).

See also Harvey, William B., “The Judiciary in Ghana” (1966) in Articles by Maurer Faculty. 2487.

https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/facpub/2487  (address with Commentary by Conor Cruise O’Brien).

[3] The Ghanaian Times of 10 December 1963 denounced  the “shocking judgment”  and “the collusion of reactionary interests with judicial weapons of imperialism and colonialism.”  In its words the judgment did a “disservice to the rule of law.”  The Evening News devoted a week to the denunciation of Sir Arku Korsah. Its front page of  11 December 1963 featured a photograph of Korsah upside down.

[4] According to Rooney, the proposal for a one-party state was made at this party congress. See David  Rooney, Kwame Nkrumah Vision and Tragedy (Sub-Saharan Publishers, 2007)

[5] The Pusiga district commissioner M.Z. Salifu did not testify at the trial, a point highlighted by B.J. da Rocha counsel for Cofie-Crabbe.  See B.J. da Rocha (with Ayodele Kingsley-Nyinah), My Life in Law and Politics (2020)135-136

[6] The name of the site of the bombing is often rendered as Kulungugu. However, persons familiar with the region observe that the correct version is Kulugungu. Mumuni Bawumia for instance renders it as Kulugungu. See explanation in wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kulungugu

[7] Mumuni Bawumia, A Life in the Political History of Ghana (Ghana Universities Press, 2004), “Ghanaian Dismissed in Goldbed Scandal Returns to Cabinet”  New York Times, September 4 1962, https://www.nytimes.com/1962/09/04/archives/ghanaian-dismissed-in-goldbed-scandal-returns-to-cabinet.html

[8] Tawia Adamafio, By Nkrumah’s Side: The Labour and the Wounds (Westcoast Publishing House, 1982).

[9] The President’s military aide-de-camp testified that Adamafio asked him whether the President was dead. Another witness said she heard him ask Koshie Lamptey the leader of the Emmashinon group the question in Ga:“Egbo lo?” In the Attorney-General’s opening statement this is reported as “Egbo aloo?”

[10] Prominent among the party insider witnesses were Kofi Baako, Minister of Defence, Kweku Budu-Acquah, then Ghana’s Resident Minister in Guinea, and Emelia Aryee, former legal assistant to the Presidential Household.

[11] Ako Adjei knew Nkrumah from their days as students at Lincoln University in the US. He had recommended Nkrumah to the United Gold Coast Convention who employed him as their full-time general secretary. Nkrumah later left to form his own Convention People’s Party. Ako Adjei eventually left the UGCC, joined the CPP and had served successively in a number of ministerial positions in Nkrumah’s governments.

[12] Ako Adjei said he left the bundle of currency notes in a field off the Accra-Dodowa road to be doubled by a spirit named Zebus from the kingdom of Uranus.

[13]  da Rocha, My Life in Law and Politics 134

[14] The State v Tagoe and Others  1963 (reproduced in Kumado & Gyandoh ed, Gyandoh and Griffiths Sourcebook of Constitutional Law  Vol 2 Part 1 669)

[15] Meanwhile on 3 December 1962, Dr. K.A. Busia had given testimony to Senator Thomas Dodd’s sub-committee of the US Senate Judiciary Committee alleging that the Nkrumah regime was a communist regime, that Accra had become the centre of Soviet activities on the African continent, and that the role of Ghana “is a serious threat to World Peace.” According to him, events in Ghana showed that many people were dissatisfied with the state of affairs and would welcome change.  See “Is US Money Aiding Another Communist State? …. Testimony of K.A. Busia  December 3, 1962,” https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.$b643330&seq=5

[16] State v Otchere [1963] 2 GL 513

[17] Adamafio, By Nkrumah’s Side 131.

[18] Constable Ametewee is said to have made a statement to the police implicating Amaning as the instigator of Ametewee’s attempt to assassinate Nkrumah.  See Obed Asamoah, The Political History of Ghana  (Authorhouse, 2017) 62; Kweku Darko Ankrah, Unsung Nationalist Hero: The Bibliographical Sketch of Sir Kobena Arku Korsah (M.Phil Thesis University of Ghana December 2017)

[19]  Okechukwu Ikejiani, who had been at Lincoln University with  Nkrumah and Ako Adjei, and was visiting at Ako Adjei’s home on 29 August 1962 when Ako Adjei was arrested, communicated with both Nkrumah and Ako Adjei subsequently. He said in a letter to Ako Adjei: “Nkrumah confessed to me that he found out that it was his Chief of Police who planted the bomb and laid the blame on you.” (See “A letter from Dr. Okechukwu Ikejianni to Ako-Adjei” reproduced at https:// justiceghana.com/index.php/en/2012-01-24-13-47-17/7440-a-letter-from-dr-okechukwu-ikejianni-sc-d-m-d-f-r-c-pathology-to-ako-adjei. Ako Adjei’s own subsequent observations on his trial and conviction are captured in Kojo T. Vieta, Flagbearers of Ghana, (Ena Publications, 1999) 61. In Dark Days in Ghana first published in 1968 , Nkrumah cryptically says : “In the enquiries conducted after the bomb attack on me at Kulungugu…it was also discovered that leading police officers were closely involved.” Kwame Nkrumah, Dark Days in Ghana (KNAC Publishing 2017 reprint ) 41; Ama Biney cites June Milne as stating that Nkrumah once told her “on balance, I think [Adamafio] was not guilty”. Ama Biney, The Political and Social Thought of Nkrumah  (Palgrave Macmilla 2011) Chapter 6 footnote 111.

[20] Geoffrey Bing, Reap the Whirlwind  (MacGibbon & Kee, 1968) 410.

[21] A.N. E. Amissah, The Contribution of the Courts to Government: A West African View (Oxford University Press, 1981) 184-185

[22] This provision was removed from subsequent Ghanaian constitutions. The Attorney-General as initiator of prosecutions is no longer subject to the direction of the President. See e.g. Article 88 of the 1992 constitution.

[23] Amissah, Contribution of the Courts 184

[24] Geoffrey Bing makes a similar argument invoking the standard practice of colonial judges to give prior notice of the likely outcomes of political trials to allow the executive to decide whether or not to proceed with such prosecutions (Bing, Reap the Whirlwind 412-413).

[25] Criminal Procedure Amendment Act 1963 (Act 223)

[26] Special Criminal Division Instrument 1963 (E.I. 161)

[27] Under the 1960 Constitution, the President had the power to dismiss the Chief Justice from his position, but  not to dismiss any judge from the Supreme Court.

[28] Constitution Amendment Act 1964, (Act 224)

[29] Amissah, Contribution of the Courts 194

[30]  Criminal Procedure Amendment Act, 1964 (Act 238); A number of commentators state that the jury was made up of young men from the Kwame Nkrumah Ideological Institute, Winneba. Others describe them as CPP members.

[31] Adamafio and his associates were released in September 1966. Adamafio is remarkably positive in his portrayal of Nkrumah in his book published in 1982, which concludes with the quote from Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar: “Here was a Ceasar! When comes such another?”

[32] The Presidential Elections Act 1965 (Act 292) repealed the Presidential Elections Act 1960 (Act 1)