Guitar-boy
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
"Guitar-boy" was the code-name for the attempted coup d'état of April 17, 1967, against the ruling military government of Ghana. It was also the name of a piece of highlife music. The attempted coup was led by
- Lt. Benjamin Arthur
- Lt. Yeboah, and
- 2nd Lt. Osei-Poku.
General Kotoka was shot by Lt Arthur near what is now known as Kotoka International Airport, Accra. (Life of Kotoka, pp. 118-137).
Some Nkrumaists invoked Lt. Arthur’s abortive counter-coup to shore up their dubious claim that the April 17 military action was aimed at the restoration of the deposed President Nkrumah and his Convention People's Party. However, the analysis of Professor Ofosu-Appiah, in his biographical work on Gen. Kotoka, indicate something totally different. For Lt. Benjamin Arthur was reported to have vowed that he wanted to go down into the record books as the first subaltern to have staged a successful military putsch on the African continent (Life of Kotoka 117-137). Also quite significant for the serious student of postcolonial Ghanaian history and, indeed, also the general reader, is the fact that the location of the giant pedestal on which Gen. Kotoka’s life-size statue reposes on the foregrounds of the Accra International Airport, renamed for the slain firebrand revolutionary, also marks the exact spot on which Gen. Kotoka was brutally felled by Lt. Benjamin Arthur on April 17, 1967.
