The latest work by celebrated Ghanaian playwright Chief Moomen had its main preview at the National Theatre on Friday, October 16th, a month after an initial preview at NkrumahFest ’26 in Nkroful.
The production, Nkrumah Showboy Part 1: The Boy from Nkroful, offers a portrait of Ghana’s first President, Osagyefo Dr Kwame Nkrumah, drawing substantially on the experiences and influences detailed in his autobiography to explore his formative years.
The Boy from Nkroful takes root in one of the statesman’s own observations, “so much to do, so little time,” which becomes the theatrical refrain on which the entire production takes form. At the preview, the motif first emerges when a young Nkrumah, then a trainee teacher, is informed of his father’s passing. It recurs with far more palpable disorientation following the death of Dr Kwegyir Aggrey, his teacher and mentor at Achimota, then the Government Training College. The difference is deliberate, as the account depicts him as significantly more shaken by Aggrey’s death than by his father’s. The staging ingeniously reinterprets this second loss as cumulative grief: so much of it, in so little time.
It is bolder than it sounds, because Nkrumah’s haste already has a public form. “Self-Government Now” was the slogan of the Convention People’s Party (CPP), formed in June 1949 after he broke away from the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC), whose own stated aim was self-government in the shortest possible time. The Boy From Nkroful is interested in an earlier version of the impulse, tracing it back twenty-two years to 1927, the year he lost both his father and his father figure.
Some accounts have Nkrumah vowing afterwards to dedicate his life to education and the nation. Whether bereavement fully explains a politician is a question for biographers, but the celebrated playwright and poet Chief Moomen has found a compelling way to put the question on stage. At the National Theatre, an audience that applauded every scene change fell silent after each death, just as the hometown crowd in Nkroful had a month earlier. At both shows – despite performing to two vastly different audiences – the auditorium was raptly attentive to the refrain underpinning the production, responding with audible heaves as the actor playing Nkrumah slowed and faltered.
The show belongs to the company’s wider historical storytelling initiative ahead of Ghana’s seventieth anniversary of independence. Its main premiere is set for March 2027, when Parts 1 and 2 will be staged together as a single event, Part 1 having by then completed a run of its own by then. While Part 2 will explore his activism, the fight for independence, the era of governance, his eventual overthrow and his death, Part 1 concludes with his return to the Gold Coast in 1947.
The two-hour production is brought to life by a company and crew of approximately 55, comprising 30 actors and an eight-member band. Chief Moomen wrote, directed, and produced the piece – his latest effort following Mansa Musa and the Trail of Lost Gold to “bring Ghanaian history to life through compelling cultural experiences.” It indubitably features the sensibilities of the performance poet he started as; at its best, the production plays like a long poem rendered by an ensemble cast.
Some accounts have Nkrumah vowing afterwards to dedicate his life to education and the nation. Whether bereavement fully explains a politician is a question for biographers, but the celebrated playwright and poet Chief Moomen has found a compelling way to put the question on stage. At the National Theatre, an audience that applauded every scene change fell silent after each death, just as the hometown crowd in Nkroful had a month earlier. At both shows – despite performing to two vastly different audiences – the auditorium was raptly attentive to the refrain underpinning the production, responding with audible heaves as the actor playing Nkrumah slowed and faltered.
The show belongs to the company’s wider historical storytelling initiative ahead of Ghana’s seventieth anniversary of independence. Its main premiere is set for March 2027, when Parts 1 and 2 will be staged together as a single event, Part 1 having by then completed a run of its own by then. While Part 2 will explore his activism, the fight for independence, the era of governance, his eventual overthrow and his death, Part 1 concludes with his return to the Gold Coast in 1947.
The two-hour production is brought to life by a company and crew of approximately 55, comprising 30 actors and an eight-member band. Chief Moomen wrote, directed, and produced the piece – his latest effort following Mansa Musa and the Trail of Lost Gold to “bring Ghanaian history to life through compelling cultural experiences.” It indubitably features the sensibilities of the performance poet he started as; at its best, the production plays like a long poem rendered by an ensemble cast.
Teleology is notoriously seductive to any drama about a figure as consequential as Nkrumah: the child is often written to resemble the statesman because the audience is all too familiar with the story’s destination. The Boy From Nkroful is far more interesting when it resists the temptation. It allows the younger Nkrumah a sense of humour, uncertainty, defiance, grief and occasional impetuosity, a choice that invites genuine admiration for Moomen’s writing. Much of the night’s laughter belongs to the boy, including his first act of revolution, staged in primary school. It is a humanising grace that statues and street names have rarely extended to him.
Only at training college, once Dr Kwegyir Aggrey enters his life, does Asamoah begin to play the man the audience came to see, and he gets there by thoughtful degrees. The band plays with the assured dexterity that only years of practice can produce, contributing synchronous sound to the immersion the show seeks to achieve. The scores are curated to differ with period and geography: predominantly highlife for his time in Gold Coast, where the genre was then rising, and an intriguing amalgamation of Western styles for his years abroad.
The soundtrack for those overseas years breaks from anything strictly period-accurate, featuring covers of Beenie Man’s “Gospel Time”, a short rendition of Shaggy’s “It Wasn’t Me” and Michael Jackson’s “They Don’t Care About Us.” The anachronism is, on reflection, deliberate and largely justified: Jackson’s title is a fair summary of how America treated a young African labouring in its shipyards and kitchens. Moreover, because these songs belong to the audience’s own youth, they draw the viewer into a narrative they might otherwise observe from a distance.
The crowd at the National Theatre, drawn largely from the capital’s theatre, creative and media circles, could almost all relate, with scores singing and dancing in their seats. Nkroful proved starkly different. There, a comical divide that would befuddle any millennial: the songs were favourites of older members of the audience, who noticeably sang along to Meiway’s 200% Zoblazo and Wizkid’s Ojuelegba in what looked like nostalgic euphoria, while younger patrons, unable to connect to the tracks in quite the same way, were beside themselves at the choreography on stage. The contrast highlights who the show resonates with the most: its musical memory belongs to adults who came of age on these songs, while for the young, it plays primarily as a spectacle. Regardless, audiences at both previews embraced the scores. If anyone felt aggrieved, it was only by the brevity of the musical numbers, which ended just as they began to warm to them. But the show, as ever, must go on.
The most solemn scene in the production stages dominant political ideologies as reverse puppetry, an intellectual inquiry into the truest form of governance that clears the ground for Nkrumah to declare his stance. It bears a heavy thematic load, complementing an earlier lighthearted scene to account for how a trainee teacher became a political theorist, slowing the tempo in the process. Only then does the staging move him to London a second time. The scene makes room for Pan-African activists in conversation, Nkrumah among them as a secretary to the Fifth Pan-African Congress. It closes with a letter from the United Gold Coast Convention inviting him home.
Its ending is brilliant: a consecutive staging of Osibisa’s “Woyaya” and “Welcome Home” to represent Nkrumah’s departure from London and return to the Gold Coast, respectively. The choice of ensemble is precise: Osibisa was founded in London by Ghanaian expatriates, the exact voices needed to sing a Ghanaian home from that city. In the space of two songs, twelve years abroad are put on and taken off in front of us.
On the evidence of this instalment, the production’s central thesis is that the haste came first, before it acquired a formal political vocabulary. Showboy is one of the epithets Nkrumah accumulated; thus, a production that sets out to demystify the man clearly borrows its title from the myth’s own lexicon. An impending challenge awaits in Part 2, when the humane portrait painted here collides with the realities of political power. Yet, the audience seems to understand the proposition already, falling quiet at the refrain, having sung, clapped and laughed until then.