Who threw the bomb at Kulungugu? Ghana's oldest open question

The grenade went off a few yards from the President. Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah was returning from a meeting in Upper Volta on 1 August 1962 when his motorcade stopped at Kulungugu, a border village near Bawku, so schoolchildren could greet him. A young girl stepped forward with flowers. Then the blast: shrapnel in the President's back and side, treated at Bawku hospital. A child did not survive — by some accounts, the girl who brought the flowers.

The police came for the men standing closest to him: Tawia Adamafio, his Minister of Information; Ebenezer Ako-Adjei, his Foreign Minister and one of the Big Six; and H. H. Cofie-Crabbe, the CPP's Executive Secretary. For a year the country watched the treason trial. In December 1963 the Chief Justice, Sir Arku Korsah, read the verdict: not guilty, for lack of evidence.

Nkrumah's answer was to dismiss the Chief Justice, wipe the verdict from the books and put the same men before a new court, which found all three guilty and sentenced them to death in March 1964. He later commuted the sentences to life. When he fell in February 1966, the three walked free. Nobody has ever been convicted of throwing the bomb — and sixty-three years on, accounts still conflict on whether it was thrown at all or hidden in the bouquet.

The new SANKOFA film tells the story as a silent documentary mystery: every photograph a real archive print, the words landing on screen as the film reads itself out — and the roadside monument that still marks the spot carrying both the opening and the final question.