It is not a matter of renaming, but of restoration. The facility was originally known as Accra International Airport prior to the overthrow of the sitting President. Following the coup d’état, British influence played a decisive role in rebranding the airport in honour of General E. K. Kotoka, whose actions were instrumental in the removal of a visionary Afriikan leader.
The naming therefore reflects a post-coup political realignment rather than an indigenous or democratic national decision.
This symbolic reorientation was further entrenched through the commissioning of a monumental statue to honour Lt. Gen. E. K. Kotoka, who was killed during an abortive coup attempt on 17 April 1967 at the airport. The airport was subsequently renamed in his honour.
The nearly one-ton bronze statue was created by Sir Charles Wheeler, a British sculptor and former President of the Royal Academy of Arts, and was unveiled at the airport forecourt between 1969 and 1970.
The selection of a British artist to memorialise a pivotal figure in Ghana’s post-coup order is not incidental; it reflects the continuity of imperial aesthetics and external political symbolism within Ghana’s ppost-independencepublic space.
Beyond the naming of national monuments, there exist numerous esoteric colonial symbols embedded within Ghana’s social, economic, and political structures.
These symbols continue to shape often subtly but powerfully the social, economic, and political destiny of Afriika.
Their persistence represents not merely historical residue, but enduring frameworks of influence that affect governance, economic orientation, cultural consciousness, and national self-definition.
By Akaba-Kudo Godwin Stello K.
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