Remembering an unsung patriot - Anthony Kobina Woode (1923-1986)
On March 6, 2017, Ghana celebrated its 60 years anniversary since the attainment of independence from British suzerainty in 1957. Characteristic of such celebrations, as we have seen with previous momentous anniversaries such as the 40th anniversary celebration in 1997 and the Golden Jubilee celebration in 2007, Ghana was a hive of activities.
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Significant among such activities was a roll call of personalities who were instrumental in Ghana’s struggle for independence, as well as those who had played crucial roles in the post-independent era.
It is a remarkable regret, however, that in our beloved Ghana, those who get mentioned and remembered during such occasions are the so-called big men – those few who were opportune to have appeared as faces of political movements.
The memories of many others whose significant roles culminated in our attainment of independence appear to have been buried in the debris of history. The true heroes of our struggle and the many other working folks whose incessant agitations compelled the colonial administration to concede to grant us independence are mentioned but rarely.
One such towering individual who played a leading role in Ghana’s struggle for independence and thereafter continued to play a leading role as a public servant, but whose name is fast disappearing from our historical memory is Anthony Kobina Woode.
The apparent neglect of Kobina Woode and so many others like him from our historical discourse affirms Daniel T. Boorstin’s quote that, “In our world of big names, our true heroes tend to be anonymous. In this life of illusion and quasi-illusion, the person of solid virtues who can be admired for something more substantial than his well-knowness often proves to be the unsung hero…”
Anthony Kobina Woode, an astute politician, a trade unionist, a strategist, an organiser, a nationalist and a patriot is one such unsung hero whose contribution to our struggle for independence and commitment to Ghana’s development efforts, post-independence, should not be allowed to be overshadowed by the “big men” syndrome of our historical reckoning.
Who was Anthony Woode?
Anthony Kobina Woode was born on February 1, 1923. He started his adult life as a learner-typist in the Chief Accountant’s office at the United Africa Company (UAC) in Sekondi. He later resigned and joined the Oil Storage Company of Takoradi (OSCT) as an assistant stenographer secretary and later became the assistant confidential secretary to the deputy manager of the company. It was at this company, having observed the gross injustices and exploitation of his employers, that he started his trade union and political activism which would prepare him and later catapult him into the centre stage in the anti-colonial struggles of the 1940s and the 1950s.
He rose to prominence in the trade union movement through his very successful leadership role of the OSCT where he served as the general secretary of the Union of Oil Storage Workers from 1947 – having won for his membership substantial benefits through aggressive bargaining.
Political life
Influenced by the political and nationalist fervour of the 1940s, Anthony Woode, an exuberant youth in his early 20s, engaged in overt political activities alongside his trade union activism. At a time when the formation of political cells had become a popular tool for political mobilisation in the Gold Coast, Anthony Woode and his friends, E.C Turkson Ocran, Peter Agyekum and Acquah Robertson, organised a political cell in Sekondi sometime in the late 1940s where they brought together interested youth to meet regularly to discuss prevailing political and socio-economic issues.
This was about the same period that Paa Grant was nurturing the ambition of forming a mass political movement. Through his friend, Mr Odoi, an ambulance driver at the Sekondi Hospital, Anthony Woode got a hint of Paa Grant’s ambition and he and his friends approached him and had discussions with him. The first two speakers invited to address the cell, both lawyers from Sekondi, felt disappointed because of their small number.
Thereafter, Woode and his friends intensified their efforts to attract more of the youth to be part of their political cell and also to attract new speakers.
It was at this point that in one of their meetings held in the Sekondi Optimism Club, they invited Mr Budu-Arthur (who later ascended the Essikadu stool as Nana Kobina Nketsia IV), then an officer with the customs department of the Gold Coast to address them.
Through the instrumentality of Mr Budu-Arthur, Dr Nnamdzi Azikiwe, who was in transit from a trip to London back to Nigeria, was invited to give a talk to this embryonic political cell in Sekondi. News of this event spread quickly and many people from different walks of life trooped to the Sekondi Optimism Club to listen to Dr Azikiwe.
In fact, prominent politicians such as Dr J.B Danquah, Dr Abrefa Busia and other important politicians from Accra, Kumasi and Sekondi-Takoradi attended this meeting. Thus, what was envisaged to be a cell meeting became more like a mass rally and that, I reckon, was indeed the first of several political rallies that would set the Gold Coast on the mass trail for political change.
Decision to merge political cells
It was no coincidence then that not long after that rally, the leading politicians in the Gold Coast would convene a meeting at Saltpond in April 1947 where a firm decision was taken to merge all the existing political cells into a political party – a decision that would give birth to the formation of the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC) in August of the same year.
Years later when Dr Kwame Nkrumah, who was invited to join the UGCC as its general secretary, broke away and formed the Convention People’s Party (CPP), Anthony Woode was among the radical youth who left with him.
Having endeared himself to the youth of Sekondi and the working class, Anthony Woode was, in August 1949 during the annual delegates’ congress of the Trades Union Congress (TUC) in Kumasi, elected the general secretary of the Gold Coast Trades Union Congress (GTUC), alongside his friend Pobee Biney, who was also elected the Vice-President. Richard Jefferies, the author of Class, Power and Ideology in Ghana: The Railwaymen of Sekondi, published in 1978 reckoned that Anthony Woode and Pobee Biney had much in common in terms of ideological persuasion – they were both radical nationalist – whatever that meant. Yet, he described Anthony Woode as the “more sophisticated thinker of the two and increasingly assumed the role of a political strategist to Biney’s man of action”.
Together, the leadership of these two men would revolutionise not only the labour front, but also stir up the political atmosphere of the Gold Coast, and in many ways, contributed to the eventual attainment of independence.
Anthony Woode had a clear vision of the potential role of the trade union in the political struggles of the period and he endeavoured to steer the TUC towards this course during his tenure as general secretary.
Anthony Woode became steeply involved in the planning and execution of the positive action which steered Ghana’s course for independence to a point of no return. In his memoir, Anthony Woode reckoned that during the latter part of 1949, few secret meetings, involving him, Dr Nkrumah and Sam of the Mine Workers’ Union, were held in Sekondi to discuss the possibility of declaring a positive action.
Thus, when in 1949 the colonial government fired about 100 workers of the Metrological Department for engaging in an illegal strike, a platform had been created for Woode, Nkrumah and the CPP to give effect to the positive action. As it turned out, however, not all members of the TUC were supportive of dragging the union into overt political activism. It also so happened that at some point, the CPP and Nkrumah were hesitant to follow through with the plan to politicise the meteorological workers’ dispute and declare a positive action.
In fact, Nkrumah met with government representatives during the heat of the moment and news was carried on radio ZOY (the station which became the Gold Coast Broadcasting station and later Ghana Broadcasting Corporation) that Nkrumah had agreed to not declare the positive action. Thus, Anthony Woode and Biney had to rely on the support of trusted friends such as Turkson Ocran – who Woode described in his memoir as his intimate link with the CPP and a confidant who could be trusted to make contacts of a delicate nature, Peter Agyekum and one J.H. Mensah, who was a staunch railway unionist, as Woode describes him.
Anthony Woode also had to personally canvass support particularly from the Mine Workers’ Union who seemed reluctant to be dragged into a general workers’ strike. Eventually on January 7, 1950, following the failure of the Provincial Council of Chiefs to persuade the leadership of the TUC, in this case, Woode and Pobee Biney, to back down on their action, a general strike was declared.
Be that as it may, Nkrumah backtracked on his earlier agreement with government not to call the positive action and announced on January 8, 1950 that the positive action had begun. Anthony Woode and his friend Biney were among the many people who were arrested following the declaration of the strike and positive action. However, unlike Nkrumah and other leaders of the CPP, Woode and Biney were not treated as political prisoners and they were both handed one-year term in the court of magistrate Vanlare who later became a high court judge.