These smooth lines are compared with the exceptionally symmetrical, natural structure behind it. The seat of government was moved back to Flagstaff House in January 2013. https://www.primenewsghana.com/general-news.html, Got something to say about this story? This is the presidential palace and the office of the President of Ghana. The point is, when the the wrong people occupies the presidency, the nation automatically fails. 1909 or 1912) were born into an era when aviation prowess was the real index of national vitality and thus national destiny.60 By the mid-1930s, when Nkrumah moved to the United States and Reitsch was establishing her career as a pilot in Germany, aviation was a crucial part of the modernist experience, and air-mindedness featured centrally in the public consciousness of both countries.61 As Peter Fritzsche has written, airplanes and airships were the measure of nations at the beginning of the twentieth century, distinguishing not only European genius from an African or Asian mean, but also the truly great powers among the European nation-states.62 That flight would therefore become central to Ghana's modernization discourse should come as no surprise. Again, the transnational shadow archive offers some interesting answers. All rights reserved. Previously, Ghana's seat of government was the Osu Castle, until Former President John Kufour re-constructed and inaugurated the Flagstaff House, and renamed it Golden Jubilee House in November 2008. His story can contain no sadness, no desire, no longing or loss. The story sits right above another miracle-of-modernization talethat of The Man-Made Volta Lake and Its Benefits.. Several boxes in the collection, for example, 130/112, 114, 115, and 116, were made available to researchers only in 2009. 44Ibid., 163164. And when it would be possible, put in it some fotos from you. 11See, for example, David William Cohen, The Combing of History (Chicago, 1994); Frederick Cooper, Africa's Pasts and Africa's Historians, Canadian Journal of African Studies 34, no. The published version is brief and heavily edited; we are presented with three short paragraphs that describe Reitsch's reaction to the news that the Portuguese had invaded Guinea from Guinea-Bissau and her concern for Nkrumah's safety.98 No opening salutation or closing is included. 109For a very different set of questions, see Mbembe, The Power of the Archive and Its Limits, 23. As she herself opined in the postscript to her memoir The Sky My Kingdom, The slurs continue to this day whenever my name appears in a newspaper. Reitsch's was the last German plane to fly out of Berlin in the final days of the war. I would be deeply happy to have those fotos near me. 107See, for example, Alfred W. McCoy, Policing America's Empire: The United States, the Philippines, and the Rise of the Surveillance State (Madison, Wis., 2009). Cables flew back and forth between Conakry and Frankfurt (or wherever Reitsch was at any given time), often several times a week. All rights reserved. On the head of the structure, there is an iron system which bends at the edges to give the stool its seat.The building is for the most part developed of steel and glass. The ceremony, a quarterly event, is similar to that of the Buckingham Palace. The old adage goes that "give the dog a . For Mbembe, one of the leading theorists of the postcolonial archive, the state and the archive are forever locked in an ambivalent embrace: On the one hand, there is no state without archiveswithout its archives. As it is newly reconstructed building, it is considered to be as one of the most beautiful presidential palaces in the world, and definitely is making every single list in Africa. It was renamed Golden Jubilee House by President Nana Addo Danquah Akuffo Addo on 29th March 2018. But she is only a small woman, hardly above five feet and feminine in every way Hanna has the feminine approach to her profession.2, What the journalist did not mentionnor any of her colleagues in the national news service who covered the visitwas that Flight Captain Hanna Reitsch was not just an extraordinary woman pilot, feminine in every way, in a profession dominated by men.3 In the postWorld War II era, Reitsch was best known for her very close connection to Adolf Hitler. Opera News furthermore does not condone the use of our platform for the purposes encouraging/endorsing hate speech, violation of human rights and/or utterances of a defamatory nature. Initially, model kits were imported from West Germany, but by 1965 they were being assembled locally, and the building of model gliders was fully incorporated into the curriculum.31 In addition, the school began conducting model-building workshops for other schoolsbeginning with Achimota and then Tema Secondaryand moved on from there.32 The idea behind this effort was that eventually the students would be able to instruct others in model-making, and in turn they would introduce their future student pilots to the theoretical physics of flight as well as to its application in practice by flying models.33 By the beginning of 1966, model-making had been initiated at ten secondary schools in Ghana, and an additional twenty schools were to be added in March 1966. Another notable event that took place in the Flagstaff House. Occupy Ghana also known as Occupy Flagstaff House is a protest or pressure movement in Ghana which started online as #occupyflagstaffhouse or #occupyflagstaff, and generated into an offline protest.. On July 1, 2014 protesters demonstrated at the Efua Sutherland Children's Park in Ghana's capital Accra, and subsequently moved to The Flagstaff House, Ghana's presidential palace, to present . It abuts the Gulf of Guinea and the Atlantic Ocean to the south, sharing borders with Ivory Coast in the west, Burkina Faso in the north, and Togo in the east. During his stay, Meek Mill and his team paid a courtesy call to President Akufo-Addo at the Jubilee House in Accra where he took photos and videos to share on his Instagram page. The unique architecture is said to be based on the sacred Asante Golden Stool, emblematic of the birth of the kingdom, but the cost of construction has inspired a passionate debate. Indeed, much of the official Ghana government documentation cited by Reitsch in her memoir is available in Munich; almost none of it is available in Accra.77 Admittedly, much of Reitsch's material appears to have been very carefully vetted, so that it adheres closely to the published/public narrative of institutional modernization, but it is surely worthy of some methodological reflection that the bulk of documentation for telling this particular story of nation-building is not located in the nation in question! But if we refuse to be fooled by the idea of a national archive, if we seek out those fragments of evidence not just by perusing the archival categories and lists but by scouring the strange unlabeled files, tracing the expansive and often surprising networks of people, and following the unexpected pathways through that globally dispersed shadow archive, we might catch glimpses of some of the phantoms withinfaint, but in all of their human dimensions. Copyright 1994 - 2023 GhanaWeb. It is one of the most important representations of the divine nature of the king. President Akufo-Addo is witnessing the ceremony for the first time as President and Commander-in-Chief of the Ghana Armed Forces.</ See especially box 22, Du Bois Papers. On the top of the building, there is an iron framework which curves at the edges to give the stool its seat. There are three different registers in which the story of Kwame Nkrumah and Hanna Reitsch can be told, based on three different sets of written evidence. And yet others, which would or should have been destroyed or at the very least withheld, because of their top secret classification by one set of state actors, have survived subsequent coups by other state actors and IMF-conditioned structural adjustment planshidden, perhaps, in an unmarked file in the state's national archive. The development was supported by a credit from the Indian government. It has previously been known as The Flagstaff House. The Commission began operations at Flagstaff House, Accra, on 2 April 1990. She signs off, Ever yours, Hanna. In a postscript, she sends a request: B.- I have a great burning wish: Lying here for several weeks means quite a long time. Any/all written content and images displayed are provided by the blogger/author, appear herein as submitted by the blogger/author and are unedited by Opera News. She held multiple awards in glidingfor altitude and enduranceand she was the first woman to glide across the Alps. The plush presidential palace was. //]]> Built to resemble an Asante Golden Stool, it is the office and residence of the President of Ghana. This building is made up of 4 layers. As noted above, a fairly thorough collection of Reitsch's papers is on deposit in the Archiv des Deutschen Museums in Munich (NL 130), but even among the materials made available in 2009, there are no personal letters of the type described by Milne and no post-1966 correspondence with Nkrumah. Member of Parliament for Builsa South, Clement Apaak, has stated that the seat of Ghana's presidency will revert to its original name of Flagstaff House from the current Jubilee House. The structure is the presidential royal residence and the workplace of the president. You have entered an incorrect email address! 2013 American Historical Association. Flagstaff House Overview This is the presidential palace and the office of the President of Ghana. These qualities are vital for nation-building and especially so in a developing country and it is hoped that the Gliding School will be the nursery from which will bloom modest young men of virtue and self respect. A. Otu about selecting three young officers who could study to be gliding instructors in West Germany, at that government's expense.16 Although the initial plan for the school to open in January 1963 turned out to be overly optimistic, Reitsch was back in Ghana in February 1963, and over the next months she oversaw the construction of buildings for instruction, eating, carpentry and mechanic workshops, a hangar, and accommodations for staff and up to forty students. She did sodeparting under Soviet fire heavier than that which had greeted her two days earlier. If so, who was complicit? It was said that this money could have been better used to provide services to the many rural poor citizens. In 1957, when Ghana became independent, with Queen Elizabeth II as head of state, the fort became Government House, the residence of the Governor-General. Akufo-Addo and John Dramani Mahama at the presidency | File photo. The office of the president did not move into the building until 2013 due to political controversies. The Elephant has entered the White House let us get the elephant in the Jubilee House Ghanas seat of government, Nana Addo said during the 2016 electioneering. How did Beatz Vampire become the phenomenon he is today? The specific cables cited here are Sana to Mrs. A. Walter, October 20, 1967, box 11, file 9; Sana to Mrs. Walter, September 2, 1967, box 11, file 9; LB to Sana, March 12, 1968, box 13, file 12; LB to Sana, March 16, 1968, box 13, file 10. The buildings shape was inspired by the Golden Stool of the Ashanti people. Nonetheless, in the past when the building was built, it was officially used as administration building for the British Gold Coast Government. Flagstaff House was reconstructed and inaugurated by the government of John Agyekum Kufour with the name Golden Jubilee House in November 2008 when construction was about 70%80% completed. It is a global, transnational archive, ranging from Accra to Beijing, from New Delhi to Frankfurt, from Moscow to Bucharest, from Tel Aviv to Harlem. Thomas M. Prymak. I think Hannah Reitsch was one of the strangest of the strange people who passed through Ghana.81. 101The cables can be found in boxes 10, 11, 12, and 13, Nkrumah Papers. In a Life magazine article, she was described as Nkrumah's slender mulatto mistress; Newsfronts: Nkrumah's Friends Are All in Trouble, Life, March 18, 1966, 45. The leader of the Young Pioneers and the head of the Air Force also sat on the club's executive committee.17, Although Reitsch was in Afienya every day to supervise the work there, she was accommodated, at Ghanaian government expense, in Accra, in what was known as Asante Housethe rather infamous palatial residence built by Krobo Edusei, a former government minister whose extravagances had led to his dismissal.18 From there, she made the daily drive to the school site in a red Volkswagen Karmann Ghia lent to her by Nkrumah's wife, Fathia.19 Her work was also well-supported by the West German government, which, in the context of the Cold War, was seeking to make its development policy, as Bernhard Rieger has written, an important tool for forging ties with new states in Africa and Asia.20 As a supposedly unpolitical expert on gliding and aviation, Reitsch not only supervised construction at the Afienya site, she also gave lectures throughout the capital, speaking before Parliament, at the university, and before youth groups and women's organizations as part of her recruitment drive.21. To be always in the vanguard for the social and economic reconstruction of Ghana and Africa. Opera News furthermore does not condone the use of our platform for the purposes encouraging/endorsing hate speech, violation of human rights and/or utterances of a defamatory nature. For related sources on air-mindedness and the spectacle of flight, see Joseph J. Saturday, December 3, 2022. 5George Padmore served as Nkrumah's chief adviser on African affairs until his death in 1959; Conor Cruise O'Brien served as vice-chancellor of the University of Ghana from 1962 to 1965; W. E. B. The Flagstaff House has served as a residence and office to the President of Ghana. See especially box 22, files 15, 16, 17. In 1850 the British bought Denmarks values in what was then called the Gold Coast. But when she committed herself to any person or to any project, her loyalty and courage were limitless. The works of Cooper himself, along with historians such as Luise White and William Cohen, well demonstrate Africanists' ability to creatively read the colonial archive both against and along the grain.11 But it is also true that, as area-based scholars, Africanists have contributed far more to comparative, theoretical discussions of oral sources, voice, agency, and subjectivity than they have to critical examinations of or theoretical engagements with the colonial archive.12. the structure's shape was propelled by the Golden Stool of the Ashanti individuals. The Flagstaff house speaks to the official part of the administration and the most persuasive individual in Ghana. News Ghana is a premier news source that covers daily news of Ghana, Africa and the World over. Located in the Greater Accra Region, the Jubilee House was built on the site of a building that, was constructed and used for administrative purposes by the British Gold Coast Government. The West German ambassador, on behalf of his government, presented a glider, christened Akroma (The Hawk), to President Kwame Nkrumah, and Nkrumah, in turn, dedicated the glider to the youth of Ghana and wished all those who would fly in it many hours of enjoyment, recreation and spiritual upliftment.23 As a Ghana newsreel reported live, after the dedication of the glider, spectators were treated to a magnificent aerobatic display by the woman responsible for the establishment of the school, that famous German air pilot Flight Captain Hanna Reitsch. With the establishment of a national gliding school, the newsreel continued, one can be sure that the youth will pick up the challenge and head for the sky.24, Over the next three years, the school's achievements were chronicled in the papers (often on the front page or with a center spread and multiple photos)from construction of the new hangar, to graduation ceremonies, to the visits of various foreign dignitaries.25 By the time of the school's first anniversary in May 1964, it was training future flight instructors, as well as flight students, and had established a program with the Ghana Air Force to train officer cadets.26 In fact, at the first-anniversary celebration, the school coordinated with the Air Force in presenting an elaborate air show featuring gliders, as well as planes and jets, that flew to the program site from the International Airport in Accra.27 It was on this first anniversary that Nkrumah provided the school with its motto: To dare, to do, to serve.28 It was clear to everyone, Reitsch remembered, that the gliding school was Nkrumah's pet project.29 The press at the time certainly agreed. I remember so well the very first time that I walked into "Flagstaff House" - it was in August 1979, as a Lieutenant in the Ghana Army, to start work as . Of course, there are countless collections of private papers held by Ghanaians in Ghana, but these remain in the hands of family members and have yet to be put on public deposit. She was able to land safely, but I myself was paralyzed by pain, the audience by fear. Ibid., 157. It is also judged by the quality and character of its citizens and that is exactly the aim of the Gliding School. President Akufo-Addo Warns Against Voting for Candidates with Legal Issues, They Will Lose: Ghanaian Lawmaker Predicts Tough Contest in 2024 Election, Untold Truths About Ghana's Leaders: From Nkrumah To Mahama's Corruption Scandals And Akufo-Addo, Opera News is a free to use platform and the views and opinions expressed herein are solely those of the author and do not represent, reflect or express the views of Opera News. Colonel-General Robert Ritter von Greim (reputedly Reitsch's longtime lover) had requested that she fly him to a meeting with Hitler, who intended to make von Greim the head of the Luftwaffe. A few nights later when Shirley telephoned Ana Livia [Mayfield's wife and a physician] to say that her house guest, Hannah, had a terrible headache and was there anything my wife could do, she answered, I don't treat Nazis, and hung up. 67M. 3 (2008): 383405. https://www.primenewsghana.com/general-news.html, U-23 AFCON: Morocco annihilate Black Meteors to reach semis, NDC's Gyakye Quayson wins Assin North by-election, Assin North by-election: Police arrest military impostor (video), Ghana faces imminent power crisis as IPPs threaten shutdown over $1.73bn debt, Nigeria: Man sells 9-year-old son for N400,000 in Akwa Ibom, Bayern Munich bid 70million for Harry Kane, Wagner to hand over heavy weapons, Russia says, Skit maker Trinityguy remanded in prison for allegedly sexualising minor in video, MTN reverses decision to increase Mobile Money withdrawal fees. 21The phrase supposedly unpolitical expert is Rieger's; ibid., 404. CEPAL, the International Monetary Fund of the Left? 72Antoinette Burton, Introduction: Archive Fever, Archive Stories, in Burton, Archive Stories, 124, quotation from 9. 103Hanna Reitsch, Rome, to Kwame Nkrumah, August [n.d.], 1965, SC/BAA 402, PRAAD. Also On 24 February 1966, soldiers stormed Flagstaff house as part of a military coup. 106Mbembe, The Power of the Archive and Its Limits, 23. It is not a national archive. It does not reside in one place, or even two or three. Yours. What will happen to the previous seat of government, Christianborg Castle, is still unknown, but there is talk of turning it into a museum. A prominent headline and accompanying photo announced her as The Woman Who Dares the Heavens.1 And who was this daring woman? Reitsch explained that her plan was for youth leaders from throughout the continent to have the opportunity to experience gliding for themselves, as well as to try out model-making.43 She attended the opening of the OAU and in her memoirs writes of the profound impact of that experience: Deeply impressed, the words of Dr. Du Bois, the great Pan-African fighter who died in Accra in 1963, came to me as I drove home after the ceremony. I extend a special thanks to Bernhard Rieger and Matthias Rschner for helping me navigate Hanna Reitsch's papers in Munich. Ghana's seat of government, which was built and meant to house great, quality and successful leaders; who's main aim is to develop the nation, and create great living conditions for its citizens, is today being occupied by a 'group of real failures'. Copyright If colonial archives, as Stoler has argued, are products of state machines technologies that reproduced the states themselves, do the national archives of Africa's postcolonial states simply reproduce or mimic those originary colonial archives?13 Are they, to borrow from Nkrumah, essentially neocolonial archivesthe public buildings and the files within, which, according to Achille Mbembe, are the organs of a constituted state?14 Or are they a beast of a very different order, presenting both new possibilities and new challenges for the writing and the teaching of African history? It was built on the site of a building that was constructed and used for administrative purposes by the British Gold Coast Government. A nation is not judged only by its fortifications, its material resources and skyscrapers. This building serves as a residence and office to the President of Ghana. [CDATA[ As importantly, it appears to be either unable to do so or uninterested, especially compared to its predecessor, in the archives' panoptic potential. The palace, which serves as a residence and office for the sitting President of Ghana, was built on the site of a building, which was constructed and used for administrative purposes by the British colonial government. A substantial fort was built by Denmark-Norway in the 1660s, thereafter the fort changed ownership between Denmark-Norway, Portugal, the Akwamu, Britain, and finally post-Independence Ghana. The NDC government sworn into office on January 7, 2009 has refused to utilize the Flagstaff House preferring Osu Castle as the seat of government. Images Images home Curated collections Photos Vectors It is currently being renumbered as RG 17/2. Clearly bits and pieces of documentation such as these, dispersed across the globe in shadow archives or randomly batched in mislabeled or unlabeled files in Ghana's national archive, raise certain kinds of questions that we will likely never be able to answer: Were Reitsch and Nkrumah lovers? so that Ghana could affiliate with international pilot associations. As for the origin of the nickname Bush, there are not many clues. We can surmise, then, from Milne that there was an extensive correspondence between Nkrumah and Reitsch (and we can infer the same from references in Shirley Graham Du Bois's correspondence with Nkrumah), and yet there are also strange inconsistencies in Milne's story and in the evidence that, as literary executor, she has left us. The previous seat of the President of Ghana was in the Osu Castle, which seat have moved all the time as the ruling political party took over the power in the country. The plush presidential palace was re-built in 2008 during the tenure of former President John Agyekum Kufuor. The building complex is situated on Liberation Road and has monumental gardens surrounding it. Part of the problem is the loss of the official records and correspondence that were destroyed in the wake of the 1966 coup. All rights reserved. From these sources we learn that Nkrumah first heard of Reitsch from the Indian prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, under whose patronage she had set up a gliding school in India in 1959. The true history of Ghana will be reinstated under JM, be rest assured.https://t.co/JPsgUy8rY2. 80For an excellent account of this community, see Kevin K. Gaines, American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2006). 51Reitsch, Ich flog fr Kwame Nkrumah, 16. Du Bois's autobiography. Reitsch's account of the visit in Ich flog fr Kwame Nkrumah, 217218. 102See especially Bush to Reitsch, July 30, 1966, box 10, file 55, Nkrumah Papers; Sana to A. Walter, March 20, 1967, box 11, file 4; Sana to A. Walter, July 12, 16, and 20, 1967, box 11, file 7. 105Hanna Reitsch, Frankfurt, to Kwame Nkrumah, September 2, 1965, ibid. If the content contained herein violates any of your rights, including those of copyright, and/or violates any the above mentioned factors, you are requested to immediately notify us using via the following email address operanews-external(at)opera.com and/or report the article using the available reporting functionality built into our Platform JM will govern Ghana from Flagstaff House not Jubilee House! 74The two new series are RG 17/1 and RG 17/2. 108See, for example, Christopher J. Lee, ed., Making a World after Empire: The Bandung Moment and Its Political Afterlives (Athens, Ohio, 2010), especially James R. Brennan, Radio Cairo and the Decolonization of East Africa, 195364, 173195. To come back to you and to all my so deeply beloved work for you, is my only burning wish.104 In a letter dated September 2, 1965, she thanks him for his unexpected phone call and promises to listen to the doctors. The technology and civilization in the U.S., as well as the exposure to the people and their customs, bestowed upon [Kwesi] qualities that we found lacking in the Ghanaians who came to us for instruction. See also Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, 1995); and Achille Mbembe, The Power of the Archive and Its Limits, in Hamilton et al., Refiguring the Archive, 1926, here 23. 86Shirley Graham Du Bois, Frankfurt, to Kwame Nkrumah, July 29, 1969, box 3, file 58, Nkrumah Papers. Alas. 40Reitsch, Ich flog fr Kwame Nkrumah, 152158, quotation from 152153. Peter Fritzsche, A Nation of Fliers: German Aviation and the Popular Imagination (Cambridge, Mass., 1992), 2. 97Genoveva Marais, Kwame Nkrumah: As I Knew Him (Chichester, 1972), 80. Yet those individuals, for the most part, seemed to share at least some part of Nkrumah's nationalist and pan-Africanist dreamGeorge Padmore, Conor Cruise O'Brien, W. E. B. and Shirley Graham Du Bois, Geoffrey Bing, and Maya Angelou, to name just a few.5 How do we fit Flight Captain Hanna Reitsch into this list? Search for other works by this author on: Compliance with permission from the rights holder to display this image online prohibits further enlargement or copying. 30Ghanaian Times, May 23, 1964. I have not been able to trace the source of the quote or to check its accuracy. Now here she was in black Africa, a little over 15 years later, about to take over the training of some of Ghana's youth. It would be easy enough to accept Milne's characterization of this relationship, or at least the evidence she has left us of the relationship, if it were not for the files and files of cables, also now on deposit at Howard, that catalogue a very close, ongoing relationship right through to 1971the year before Nkrumah died in Romania. Thousands of new, high-quality pictures added every day. Flying is her life. The Flagstaff houserepresents the executive branch of the government and the most influentialperson in Ghana. The presidential building has been moved many different times for various reasons but for now it seems as if there will be no changes in the near future. From the beginning, Reitsch's work was closely tied to powerful figures in the government and military. (LogOut/ As it is newly reconstructed building, it is considered to be as one of the most beautiful presidential palaces in the world, and definitely is making every single list in Africa. The construction of this unique building was overseen by the Indian government and cost 30 million dollars to build. 81Julian Mayfield, Tales of the Lido, 7475, box 14, file 11, Julian Mayfield Papers, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. 26Reitsch, Ich flog fr Kwame Nkrumah, 82. By FirstNews_GH (self media writer) | 3 years ago. When Ghana became a republic in 1960, it became the residence of Ghanas first president, Kwame Nkrumah. 1992. He once wrote: There can be no doubt that Kwame Nkrumah is, more than anyone alive at present, the voice of Africa. She herself was arrested shortly after the coup. In November 2008 , The Flagstaff House was reconstructed and inaugurated by the government of John Agyekum Kufuor, President John Kufuor ( argued that his government should not use Osu Castle due to its previous association with slavery. Beyond the question of how an infamous Nazi pilot could animate Ghana's early nation-building and modernization initiatives, there is the labyrinth of postcolonial documentary evidence that is exposed by the search itself: the layers and locations of evidence, the traces, the silences, and the dead ends. Featured Image Source: Dylan Walters, Under Creative Commons, Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window), Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window), Robert Gabriel Mugabe InternationalAirport, https://www.flickr.com/photos/dylwalters/4351369771/, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:The_Childrens_Museum_of_Indianapolis_-_Queen_Mothers_stool.jpg, https://pixabay.com/nl/vlaggemast-huis-accra-ghana-915749/, Walking The Streets Of Accra, Ghana The Gaborone Runner. The Flagstaff House and Presidential Palace is the same place, the government of John Agyekum Kufour with the name Golden Jubilee House but it current known as Flagstaff House or the.
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