Former President of the Ghana Journalists’ Association (GJA), Ajoa Yeboah-Afari, has launched a book entitled, “Conversations With My Father.”
The 300-page, 12-chapter book is a biography of her late father and Ghana’s first Agriculture Minister, Kwame Boahen Afari.
She said she promised her father when she was only nine years old that one day she was going to write a book about him.
Mr. Boahen Afari, a founding member of the Convention People’s Party (CPP), was born on November 13, 1920 and passed away on May 22, 1996.
“As the son of a rich paramount chief, Kwame Boahen Yeboah-Afari could have lived a life of entitlement. Instead, he chose a different lifestyle that initially led to hardship, but later privilege of another kind: He became a founding member of the CPP and a government minister,” an excerpt from the book reads.
Ms Ajoa Yeboah-Afari, former editor of Ghanaian Times, had the privilege of having the book launched by former President John Agyekum Kufuor at the African Regent Hotel in Accra on Monday, November 13, coinciding with the day her father passed away.
She said the choice of Monday for the unveiling of the book was primarily to honour the memory of her dad whose political career spanned between 1950 and 1962 and is credited with the creation of the Brong-Ahafo Region.
Kwame Boahen Yeboah-Afari was the first regional minister or regional commissioner of the region under Nkrumah’s socialist administration.
In spite of his radical support for socialism and his appeal to Nkrumah to exit the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC) in the heat of the liberation struggle, Mr Yeboah-Afari’s cousin and ex-Commissioner of the Electoral Commission (EC) in recounting their days together, said the late Boahen Afari later realized after the death of Nkrumah that socialism was not the best for Ghana and that the death of Nkrumah marked the end to a leader who could use socialist ideology to develop the country.
“Ajoa’s book for her father is a masterpiece of journalistic work and we must all applaud her for it,” said Professor Kwame Karikari, Board Chairman of Graphic Communications Group Limited, who reviewed the book on the night.
The book was hugely patronized and its first auctioned copy was bought by former President Kufuor at GH¢10,000, with the second copy going for GH¢5,000.
BY Melvin Tarlue