By: Moses Desire Kouyo
In the grand pantheon of African letters, few voices have thundered with the clarity, wit, and moral authority of Ama Ata Aidoo. A novelist, poet, playwright, and public intellectual par excellence, Aidoo spent her life refusing silence, refusing, too, the comfort of neutrality in the face of historical violence and intellectual dishonesty. In 1967, she demonstrated this refusal with fierce elegance when she penned a blistering open letter titled “Thank You, Mr. Howe,” a caustic rebuttal to a wave of anti-Nkrumah revisionism then gathering steam in the influential African journal Transition. Her response was more than a defense of one man; it was a defiant call to arms against neocolonial arrogance, historical distortion, and the persistent infantilization of African political agency.
Aidoo’s letter remains a vital artifact in the archive of Pan-African resistance, a reminder that the battle for Africa’s dignity is as much about narrative as it is about policy or power. It was, and still is, about who gets to speak for Africa, about Africa, and to what ends.
The Neocolonial Assault on African Memory
If colonialism, as Frantz Fanon argued, relied on the erasure and degradation of African histories and cultures, then neocolonialism has perfected the art of replacing those histories with convenient fictions. In the aftermath of formal independence, a new ideological front was opened, not with rifles and chains, but with pens and pulpits, funded foundations, and editorial desks.
Nowhere was this clearer than in Transition magazine. Founded in 1961 in Kampala by Rajat Neogy, Transition was once an esteemed platform for African intellectual and cultural discourse. But following the 1966 CIA-backed coup that toppled Ghana’s first President, Kwame Nkrumah, the magazine became a mouthpiece for counter-revolutionary revisionism. The CIA, it turns out, was not only invested in removing Nkrumah from power but also in erasing the radical legacy he represented.
Ali Mazrui, the respected Kenyan political scientist, opened fire in Transition with an article disingenuously titled “Nkrumah: Leninist Czar.” In a bizarre ideological contortion, Mazrui painted Nkrumah as simultaneously a Soviet autocrat and a self-obsessed monarch—a caricature that betrayed more about Cold War hysteria than historical reality. He even parroted racist analogies from American history, comparing Nkrumah’s supposed excesses to the “decadence” of freed African Americans post-emancipation.
Russell Warren Howe, a white journalist writing for the Washington Post, followed closely behind with “Did Nkrumah Favour Pan-Africanism?”, a sneering piece that dismissed Nkrumah’s continental vision as paranoid narcissism. For Howe, Ghana under Nkrumah was not just misguided—it was a “fascist state,” a term used so casually it belied the brutality of actual fascism and insulted the intelligence of his African readership.
This was not critique. It was ideological warfare, disguised as intellectual rigor but steeped in condescension, historical amnesia, and racial paternalism.
Ama Ata Aidoo Strikes Back
Enter Ama Ata Aidoo. With razor-sharp irony and blistering sarcasm, she delivered what can only be described as a literary knockout blow.
Writing from Stanford, California, Aidoo titled her open letter “Thank You, Mr. Howe.” But the thanks were dripping with disdain. “On behalf of Africans dead, alive and unborn,” she began, she extended gratitude to Howe for his “fresh analysis” of Nkrumah, an analysis, she wrote, that had illuminated the ignorance of Africans who had dared to respect their own leader.
With the precision of a satirist and the fury of a patriot, Aidoo dismantled every accusation levied against Nkrumah. Was he anti-Western? Perhaps—but only in the sense that he refused to “lick pale Western feet” like some other African leaders. Did he implement preventive detention laws? Yes—but so have “respected” Western democracies, often under the same guise of national security. Was he the subject of a personality cult? Perhaps—but is that a reason to diagnose psychosis in a man leading a newly liberated state under siege by Western intelligence and local elite betrayal?
Aidoo reserved particular venom for Howe’s moral hypocrisy. Here was a white journalist from a nation embroiled in the Vietnam War, plagued by child poverty, and home to the Ku Klux Klan, lecturing Africans on democracy and governance. She eviscerated his paternalistic tone, noting that while America’s own house was on fire, its “big white fathers” were busy dictating how Africans should sweep their courtyards.
And she didn’t stop there. In her postscript, she sarcastically thanked Professor Mazrui and the other “objective and non-partisan” African intellectuals who made such anti-African propaganda possible. The real enemy, she seemed to imply, was not just the outsider who misrepresents, but the insider who enables.
Reclaiming the African Narrative
Ama Ata Aidoo’s letter was not just a defense of Nkrumah, it was a rallying cry for African intellectual sovereignty. At a time when the neocolonial imagination sought to recast African revolutionaries as villains and replace historical truths with ideological convenience, Aidoo refused complicity.
Her words continue to reverberate in our time, when the neoliberal descendants of neocolonialism still reign, and when African youth, disillusioned by corruption and economic hardship, are increasingly told, often by the same forces that underdeveloped their nations—that life was better under colonialism.
This is not just historical revisionism; it is epistemic violence.
In an era where African liberation heroes are reduced to hashtags and their ideas diluted to platitudes, we need more Aidoos, writers, journalists, and thinkers who can wield both memory and language as weapons of resistance. We need those who understand that the struggle for African freedom is as much about who writes history as it is about who makes it.
The Pen as Sword
Ama Ata Aidoo taught us that language matters. That intellectual laziness, historical amnesia, and cultural arrogance must always be met with fierce truth-telling. Her letter to Russell Warren Howe stands today not only as a classic of African political writing but as a model of how to respond to neocolonial gaslighting, with clarity, courage, and fire.
As we remember her legacy, and as the continent continues to wrestle with the ghosts of colonialism and the burdens of neocolonialism, we would do well to follow her lead: to speak back, speak up, and never, ever let anyone else define our story.
Rest in power, Ama Ata Aidoo. Your words still fight.
We reprint her letter below.
Thank you, Mr. Howe
Ama Ata Aidoo
Dear Sir,
On behalf of Africans dead, alive and unborn, “free” and enslaved, I would like you and your entire readership to join me in saying “Thank you” to our big white father [Russell Warren] Howe for an extremely illuminating and rather fresh analysis of Kwame Nkrumah (Transition 27, p. 13). Our ignorance was extreme. For instance, we knew that:
He was squeamish at the kind of unabashed licking of pale Western feet which some of our leaders find so attractive and whenever possible he denounced this and the companion sale of the future of Africa and its people; we did not know he was against Pan-Africanism;
He allowed the introduction of the Prevent Detention Bill, which couched in different words, is in operation under many respected governments: we did not know he was worse than Hitler (being black and communist);
He took exception to the somewhat patronising and always dangerous manner certain foreign correspondents handled news items from and about Africa: it interests us that such an attitude has provoked a comparison of him with Dr. Henrik Verwoerd;
He permitted a personality cult to developed round him and we are grateful to learn this was a symptom of psychosis;
He has always been extremely unpopular with all of us, especially us, the objective intellectuals and disinterested journalists; nonetheless, we are slightly surprised to learn he is being reduced to a “card.”
Mr. Howe’s efforts are all the more commendable since he happens to be a citizen of the richest and most democratic country in the world:
Whose President is waging history’s bloodiest war against a very tiny and poor country;
Where millions of children are still under schooled, underfed and are forced to share their beds with rats;
Where George Rockwell, chairman of the American Nazi Party, is a recognized public spokesman;
And where the Ku Klux Klan flies the national flag in broad daylight.
Mr. Howe is so kind that he has abandoned these pressing domestic problems to waste time, energy and genius on the ex-President of a small and insignificant “negro” country. We have many big white fathers like him who are constantly telling us what is good for us and what is not, what we must do and what we must not, but he is really priceless because he is possessed of that rare genius which can equate socialism and fascism and stretch out the errors in a foreign government’s tactics into major cries while behaving as though the crimes his own government is busy committing are acts of mercy. What is more, he seems adept at insulting foreign personalities whose political views he has reason to object to. He certainly can teach African intellectuals and journalists a lesson or two.
To show Mr. Howe that we have heard what he has recently told us, we are going to send Kwame Knrumah to Bellevue (a hospital for the criminally insane in New York) as soon as possible. We also promise that any time we want to publish the names of our “‘great’ Africans,” we shall submit the lists to him for our approval first. We further register our appreciation of his obvious concern for the success of Pan-Africanism and, therefore, our well-being.
We shall not forget what Mr. Howe and his sort are accomplishing on our behalf.
Yours sincerely,
Ama Ata Aidoo
P.S. Incidentally, we are also grateful to our own Professor Ali Mazuri and all the other objective and non-partisan African intellectuals and journalists who make the writing and publication of papers like Mr. Howe’s possible.
Stanford,
California, U.S.A.
Source: Transition, No. 29 (Feb. – Mar., 1967), pp. 5-8