Dr Jasper Tamakloe, RIP: An overlooked hero
Dr Jasper Lemuel Korbla Tamakloe, the well-known Takoradi-based medical practitioner, died in January this year, and was buried about three weeks ago in the Tamakloe Royal Cemetery at his ancestral home town Whuti in the Volta Region. He was 90 years old.
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I am very certain only a few of the present generation of Ghanaians remember anything about this man, or the fact that he was the head of one of the most prominent families in this country, in all aspects of national life, at the time of his passing.
Lack of family history
It is strange that only a few prominent families in this country have had their histories chronicled by our academics, and indeed, the one on the influential Kufuor family was done by a foreign academic, presciently, years before President Kufuor was elected as our Head of State.
We are still to have a detailed examination of the family of Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah, for example, for reasons which are a sad reflection on our claims to scholarship.
I am convinced that uncovering the layers of family connections in a society flooded in familial and kin considerations may help us to, at least, understand ourselves better, and appreciate how we do things the way we do.
More than 30 years ago, I took part in a heated argument in the Department of History at the University of Ghana about the most important reports emanating from commissions of enquiry set up by our governments from colonial times to the time we were arguing.
The point of the lively discourse was to settle on those reports which, in spite of being ignored as has been the practice, still managed to influence events, or presage future events.
Those of us who can recall will remember that this was the time of the release of the report of the Special Investigations Board, set up to investigate the abduction and killing of three High Court judges and a retired army officer.
We agreed that only three reports fit our stringent standards, the Watson Report of the 1948 disturbances, following the Christiansborg crossroads shooting incident of February 28, 1948; the Awhaitey Report otherwise known as The Granville Sharp Report on the attempted coup of December 1958, and the SIB Report already adverted to.
We also agreed that the most ridiculous report was the Abraham Report on the GNTC Passbook system, which was published without the government printers making sure to re-page the document after two chapters had been excised for political reasons!
I do not intend to dwell much on these reports, and their impact on our politics, society and development, but how a particular one, throws up in sharp relief, the life of a single Ghanaian who has just passed on, without a single mention in any media of his role in our history as a nation.
The man Jasper Tamakloe
The saliency of the life and work of Dr Tamakloe is bound up with the seminal aftereffects of the Watson Report of 1948. Jasper Tamakloe was 24 years old in 1948, and the Head Prefect of Mfantsipim School in Cape Coast.
He had gone to secondary school quite late even for those days, after he had been told by his employers in Kumasi that he could not expect promotion unless he had had secondary education.
He topped his class till he left in 1948. Let me quote the testimonial of Headmaster Francis Bartels in full, to expose to us how a document can hide as much as it can reveal the real person behind the fine words used. It was numbered 2382, dated July 11, 1950, and went thus;
“Jasper Lemuel Korbla TAMAKLOE entered the School at the beginning of 1944. When he left in December 1948, he had completed the course. In the same month, he sat for the Cambridge School Certificate Examination. He was successful in obtaining his School Certificate with a pass in Grade 1 and complete exemption from London Matriculation.
His detailed results are given on a separate sheet. He was the best scholar of the year 1948. He played football for the School and cricket and hockey for his House. He was awarded Full Colours for football.
In his final year, he was appointed the Head Prefect of the School and he served well. His disposition was pleasant and his conduct and character were good. I have much pleasure in recommending him.’’
The question is, how could such a testimonial have been written about a person who boldly led the students version of the 1948 disturbances in Cape Coast schools, and which demonstrations led to the expulsion of many students?
In fact, the affected schools were closed for the “Monsoon Holidays’’ by the educational authorities. Let me quickly add that this was the second time a head prefect had led demonstrations against school authorities, Joe Appiah being the first in 1936. But Jasper’s was more serious, and infinitely more dangerous to him and his mates than Joe Appiah’s had been.
The dismissed students later that year had Ghana National College in Cape Coast founded for them by Dr Kwame Nkrumah, which school the clever Accra lawyer Egbert Faibille attended several decades later.
Jasper Tamakloe was neither dismissed nor removed from his position for this obviously dismissible offence because of several factors which all come together to explain the deep shock of the colonial power at the unheard-of rebelliousness of the citizens of the “Model Colony’’, the Gold Coast.
The General Secretary of the Ex-Servicemens’ Union, BEA Tamakloe, an unabashed principal in the disturbances, was a cousin of Jasper. His relatives had distinguished themselves in World War 1 by assuming leadership of the Gold Coast soldiers who went to German Togoland and to capture and destroy the naval transmitters in Kamina used by the Germans to communicate with their submarines in the Atlantic via another one in Windhoek in Namibia, then South-West Afrika, also a German colony.
Childhood friend
One of his best childhood friends was Victor Owusu, with whom he slept on the same bed in the latter’s parents’ home in Kumasi in the 1930s. He was the uncle of the late Joyce Tamakloe, who was the mother of the justifiably famous brother of President John Mahama, Ibrahim.
Dr Tamakloe worked at Komfo Anokye and Konongo as a general practitioner till he moved to Takoradi to set up his own practice, becoming a pillar of Takoradi society for over 50 years before he passed away.
For several decades, he was the unstinting pillar of all Voltarians in the Western Region, in addition to his leadership of the Tamakloe Family nationwide. His passage has robbed all of us of one of the building blocks of a free and independent Ghana. May he rest in peace.