These two things are true: Ghana’s founding father and legendary Pan-Africanist Kwame Nkrumah was a bachelor when he became the country’s Prime Minister on March 6, 1957, upon its independence from Britain. Nine months later, on December 31, 1957, he married the beautiful Helena Ritz Fathia, a bank worker from Cairo.
From there, part of the story becomes sweetened a little by the narrators. It goes that Nkrumah sent his friend, Alhaji Saleh Said Sinare, one of the first Ghanaian Muslims to study in Egypt, to find him a Christian wife from there. Fathia, a Coptic Christian, was the final woman chosen. However, Fathia’s mother, a widow, refused to bless the marriage. Her son had already left the country after he married an English wife, and she didn’t want her daughter to go off to West Africa to marry a stranger. Fathia explained that Nkrumah was an anti-colonial hero and revolutionary like Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser, but her mother was unmoved.
At this point, Sinare reached out to Nasser, who was a close friend of Nkrumah, to put it in a word for the brother in West Africa. It’s claimed that Nasser persuaded Fathia’s mother to agree to the marriage, assuring her that he would open an Egyptian embassy in Ghana and buttering her with an offer of direct flights between Egypt and Ghana to visit her daughter any time she wished. Some accounts claim that Nasser and other progressives on the continent were concerned that as a bachelor, Nkrumah wouldn’t be taken seriously in traditional Africa, so he needed, to use the expression, “to settle down and become an honest man”.
Somewhere in there, is the truth. In the end, the marriage to Fathia turned out to be one of Nkrumah’s better decisions. It also did a lot of good for Ghana-Egyptian relations and the Pan-African cause, leading up to the formation of the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), the precursor to the African Union.
While marriages as a tool of diplomacy and military alliances had been common among kingdoms and chieftains in Africa, like elsewhere in the world, they fell out of fashion with the arrival of Christian missionaries and European colonialists on the continent in the 19th century. The notorious Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, at which the major European powers negotiated and formalised claims to territory in Africa with the borders that exist today, disrupted such marriages further, but they didn’t end them.
In a famous case, Omar Bongo Ondimba, Gabon’s debonaire president for almost 42 years, from 1967 until he died in 2009, married Edith Lucie Sassou-Nguesso, who was nearly 30 years younger than him, in 1989. She was the daughter of Congolese President Denis Sassou-Nguesso.
More recently in September, in a diluted version of the tradition, Eswatini’s King Mswati III, Africa’s last absolute monarch, married Nomcebo Zuma, the 21 year-old-daughter of former South African president Jacob Zuma.
Today, relations between several African presidential palaces, are watered by dollar bills. As a journalist who has tracked this says, “People think the relationship between African presidents is only driven by the public state visits and bilateral relations, but that is not the secret sauce. Several of these leaders do a lot of private financial and business, and it involves delivering suitcases of dollars to their peers from deals they have done”, he said, adding, “For some of them that is what feeds their friendship.”
He explained how it works: “President A will send a message to President C, who will give the messenger a suitcase full of dollars from a contract from which he got a cut of millions of dollars, to take back to his boss. But he will not let the messenger fly back commercial. He will give him a private jet. At a future date, President A will return the favour when he strikes gold.” This is partly how some leaders end up with US$10 million under their mattresses in the State House.
In this way, some African leaders also support their peers during elections – and also sometimes give to the opposition in other countries.
Slain former Libyan leader Muammar Gaddafi is credited with developing this method, which he carried to a high art form. Gaddafi was the guest who never travelled empty-handed, spreading his country’s oil wealth generously, especially to African leaders he thought were, like him, revolutionaries. He was a popular figure when he arrived in Addis Ababa for AU summits.
In his pursuit of a United States of Africa, and his quest to be crowned King of Kings in recognition of his role in liberating Africa from colonialism and imperialism, Gaddafi didn’t only bend ears and “talk saliva” as someone put it. He would talk in the right ear of a top African diplomat, minister, and even president while slipping a band of dollar notes in his left pocket.
There were a few leaders who were disgusted by it and found it disrespectful and counterproductive, but there was no shortage of people happy to collect. In one of the Africa meetings Gaddafi liked to hold in his home city of Sitre, a diplomat described a “long queue of African officials and leaders waiting to enter Gaddafi’s tent to pick up briefcases full of money”.
Today, beyond the transactions between leaders, the practice has been broadened to include business networks run by some First Ladies.
The journalist who tracks this ecosystem claimed that there is a First Lady who has become a leading player in the gold trade, moving vast amounts to be refined on the continent, and then exporting it, protected at every step by participating state houses.
Is it a criminal enterprise? There is no consensus. Some folks see it as the thing that waters the tree of African integration. There is the public Africa; the AU summits in Addis Ababa, the meetings of regional economic blocs, the sidelines at climate change conferences and other events like the Summit of the Forum on China-Africa Cooperation (FOCAC). However, out of sight, the secret glue that keeps African doors open, are the briefcases carried by special envoys and the largesse facilitated by the odd First Lady.
This is said to predict where an African president who has been deposed by the army (if he is lucky to escape), or ousted by militant street protestors, will flee. They are more likely to run first to the country where they gave the leader there some kola nut.
So, there is a version of modern-day Pan-Africanism that won’t show up naked or dressed in revolutionary slogans. It is decked up in dollars, Euros, and other international currencies. Nkrumah and Nasser wouldn’t understand. And even Zuma, whose rule was tainted by corruption scandals, not to mention Omar Bongo, would wonder why, in a continent full of beautiful young women and handsome men.
