By Esther A. ARMAH
‘Sit down daughter of a murderer!’ Those words rang out in our Parliament. Spoken by a Parliamentarian to Dr. Zanetor Rawlings, an elected MP, and daughter of Ghana’s longest serving head of state, the late Jerry John Rawlings. The reaction was swift. Headlines, condemnation, shock, anger.
The words sparked outrage; they also offer opportunity to do a deeper dive.
It is beyond time for this nation to have harder, deeper conversations about Jerry Rawlings, his legacy and the lessons that leaves for a nation and those who are inheritors of his legacy.
For Zanetor as her father’s daughter, that legacy is a personal space, a sacred world of father and daughter that, for me anyway, is not up for scrutiny, dissection and discussion.
As an elected official who represents a constituency, whose words articulate a commitment to integrity and ethics, she is also the inheritor of the president’s legacy, one that she – like a whole nation – must more deeply scrutinize. That is public space, it requires public dialogue, and it requires healing.
When President Rawlings died, I wrote in this very newspaper about what loss, grief and healing can look like for his family vs for a nation. In 2021, I wrote that how a family mourns the loss of their father is indeed private, and to be respected.
However, how a now elected official deals with the legacy of a former president is a necessarily public matter. This is delicate, difficult business. But it is wholly necessary.
I am the daughter of a man whose father faced the wrath of Rawlings, and whose family was scarred by him. I lived with the bitterness and resentment of that violence and its impact for many years. Healing took years, but it changed my perspective.
It enabled me to view Rawlings’ leadership and legacy from other perspectives, in addition to my own. It meant reckoning with the complexity of legacy, something that is critical for any real healing to happen.
In a follow-up column in this newspaper, I called for a national dialogue as part of a national healing. Neither happened. The fanfare of state funeral, plentiful speeches, parades and obituaries did happen. There was little else.
Two military coups and two presidential terms make Rawlings the longest serving head of state in Ghana. The blood of those stains his legacy whose lives he and his regime took. Their rationale has dominated our nation’s narrative. Our repair and healing require a deeper narrative, one that is more complex if healing is going to happen.
2025 has been declared the Year of Reparations by the African Union and Ghana is championing that call, alongside South Africa. Repair and healing are part of reparatory justice.
Our President and the leaders across the Continent and the Caribbean are all calling for the historical brutality of colonialism and enslavement to be righted, compensation paid and restitution made. We rightly make that powerful call.
We need to look closer to home, and stare into the mirrors of our own politics, political leaders and their legacies. Ghana can champion reparations for the violence and blood spilled by those who colonized and enslaved benefitting from Ghana’s wealth and creating a legacy that shows up to this very day – that is critical. Ghana must also reckon with the violence within and the legacy of unhealed trauma from that violence.
We must equally ask ourselves: what does repair and healing look like from within our political landscape of blood, bone, violence and unhealed trauma.
I called for June 4th to be declared a national day of healing in a January 2021 open letter to civil society leaders in this very newspaper. Our polarizing political landscape will undoubtedly make any such attempt a controversy with fiercely diverse opinions. That is to be expected. It should not be the reason we as a nation shun such a critical move.
Former President Nana Akuffo-Addo’s eulogy on Rawlings spoke of adoring admirers, vociferous critics and lifelong enemies – all three were and are true. What remains is whom we become as a nation moving forward. Admirer, critic, enemy must be superseded by citizen. In addition, as citizens, we continue to need a healing, and I continue to call for that healing.
For Zanetor Rawlings, she must wrestle with how this becomes part of her political inheritance as an elected politician. It is part of a politics of integrity and ethics, something I have heard her speak about as a commitment she holds. Integrity is manifest when tested, as are ethics.
I do not believe daughters should answer for their fathers’ actions and crimes. I do believe politicians must reckon with the actions of former leaders who were presidents – and who happen to be their parent.
What if the call to healing action through hard conversations and dialogue included or were led by a politician, committed to ethics and integrity, who also happens to be Rawlings’ daughter? Some might dismiss this as naïve.
I understand. However, reckoning with the leadership legacy of a parent is about lessons in a politics that no longer centres your personal relationship, but reckons with the widest reality of who Rawlings was, what he did, and why healing is pivotal to further progress as a nation.
One of the cancers of the deeply partisan nature of our politics is our inability to navigate complexity, and to instead reduce critical issues to binary matters. Unhealed trauma metastasizes, rotting at the fabric of our society.
For our nation, Rawlings continues as a divisive and luminary figure in politics, so the courage to confront a bloody legacy, a bruised history and a burdened present is not an easy thing to do.
Nation building and healing is not about doing the easy thing, it’s a call to courage. It’s about being willing to hold hard conversations, to usher in a new era where accountability is not about the other party – but about each of us, all of us, and the necessary progress for a nation.
A truth and healing commission that leads to June 4th declared as a national day of healing is a step towards reckoning, reimagining and re-building. That is what our healing requires. It is called ‘Emotional Justice.’
We can do this. We must.
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Esther A. Armah is a former international award-winning journalist, a playwright, and a global public speaker. She is currently CEO, The Armah Institute of Emotional Justice and author of ‘EMOTIONAL JUSTICE: a roadmap for racial healing.’
