“I saw Mummy crying. Our house was full of people, some weeping, others holding up Daddy’s pictures in the newspapers. Mummy told me she didn’t expect him to be killed. She said if they had tried him, he wouldn’t have been killed.”
“He was never given the chance to defend himself. Remember, recently ministers about whom certain allegations had been made in the press got the opportunity to defend themselves. They brought in lawyers to defend them.
My father never had the opportunity to defend himself. This really hurts. Day in, day out, the government keeps stressing June 4th, and thereby rubs salt in wounds. If those killed were alive, they would at least have defended themselves. But they were gagged! Imagine the pain we have endured all these years.” That was June 1997; the words of Orphans of June 4. Nearly 20 years after June 4th, 1979, a handful of orphaned ‘kids’ told me their story; the tale of what happened that day. The chats were also around Father’s Day, and these youths had no fathers to hug. Daddies were lined up, tied to stakes and shot in cold blood. I had vague memories of the event myself. 1979, my pen had just been baptised, and I was part of the storytelling. And did the children say their fathers were not tried?
Not quite true; they were tried by ‘Kangaroo courts of unseen faces, few questions, and a final judgment by God-knows whom. I, a young man, had just been born as a writer. My anonymous pen as a baby columnist called the kangaroo courts the ‘Rapid Results Panel.’
They specialised in the quick trial of big men. The faceless ‘court’ forbade ‘booklong’ words, and long winding tales of defence: simply a panel primed to cut your long story to zero. The jail terms for economic crimes? 50 years or more. This often came with hard labour: especially publicly scooping ‘perfumed’ latrines from public sites, and carrying these across the city. Your scheduled office hours? Noon time. This horror story, part of Ghana’s unspeakable past, was the virtual product of rapid result panels that speedily pronounced ‘corrupt’ public officials guilty and handed down bizarre sentences. Was anybody returning from such a trial ever declared innocent? NO.
