“Cowards die many times before their deaths: The valiant never taste of death but once”. On 16 December 1977, the imprisoned Nelson Mandela signed his name beside these lines from Julius Caesar in the hidden copy of Shakespeare’s works that was known as the ‘Robben Island Bible.’
That the play spoke to the Elizabethan audience of 1599 – animated by rebellion, political turbulence and the question of royal succession – is no surprise. More striking is its endurance as a text for subsequent ages, and a guidebook to power and its exercise in our own times.
To an almost uncanny extent, the great rhetorical argument over Caesar’s corpse between Brutus and Antony mirrors the fundamental divisions revealed by the extraordinary upheavals of the past couple of years in the politics of the NDC.
Specifically, the death of President Mills as replayed by Kwesi Ahwoi with his “anything can happen” hint to Mahama’s running mate speaks to the vile and vicious cycle of NDC politics.
Of course, the fact that Kwesi Ahwoi was able to suggest that the fate that befell the late president John Mills which allowed his vice-president to take over could befall John Dramani Mahama, in the event of the NDC winning the presidential election in December 2024 makes Brutus of the Shakespearian politics looks like a child’s play.
In other words, reality has become fungible, an option capriciously chosen from a buffet according to taste.
Indeed, Kwesi Ahwoi has exposed the thinking of the political cabal in the NDC. They all hatched the plot to eliminate President Mills. Mahama was the sole beneficiary of the hatchet job on Mills. And now, the Ahwois have turned their gun on Mahama. The Ahwois played him. They imposed Jane Opoku-Agyemang on him as a running mate. It was a carefully orchestrated plot. The Ahwoi’s did all that so they could manipulate the woman and to pay Mahama back in the role he played in Mill’s death.
And as the philosopher Allan Bloom puts it in Shakespeare’s Politics, that Caesar is a man who has built his palace on the ruins of the Republic”, and, “thinks too well of himself”, Mahama’s own cynical image is catching up with, and it is just a matter of time that his evil deeds catches up with him.
Certainly, the history of how Julius Caesar was assassinated by cowards looks like repeating itself in the annals of NDC politics.
Ernest Owusu-Bempah
Deputy Director of Communications, NPP