Daughter’s quest to solve father’s 30-year-old murder mystery · Who killed Sylvester Kofi Williams, and why?

 

The Queen Mother says there is no closure until she know who killed her father, and why.

The Queen Mother hold vigil at the site of her father's killing.

Sylvester Kofi Williams was a distinguished lawyer and politician.

 

JACK ZIMBA

Lusaka                          

“THIS is the exact spot where my father’s body lay when he was shot dead. It was lying in its blood for three hours,” said Sylvia Golden Hope quietly, almost meditatively as if the body was still lying there.

She was wearing an ankle-length peach dress and a headdress sequinned with cowries, and a tingling miniature bell dangling on her chest, giving her an enigmatic look like a goddess. She also insisted on her official title: Saa Pog’Naa Yaa Asantewaa Ababio II or, simply, Queen Mother.

She sees herself as the reincarnation of a venerated and fearless ancient Ghanaian matriarch, Yaa Asantewaa I, Warrior Queen Mother of Ejisu in the Ashanti Empire, who fought against the British at the turn of the 20^th century.

That afternoon last year, I had joined the Queen Mother at the scene of her father’s death – No. 6 Provident Road, Rhodes Park. It was September 5, the exact date when Sylvester Kofi Williams was brutally murdered 30 years prior.

Three decades later, his daughter – the Queen Mother, that is – is still trying to make sense of the assassination, and still seeking justice that has eluded her family since the tragic event.

After we parted that day, the Queen Mother remained at the spot with her assistant, holding vigil under an umbrella tree. She had lit candles and displayed her father’s photos until about 21:00, the time when his bullet-riddled, life-drained body was picked up by police.

Apart from a plaque on the wall dedicated to the memory of Mr Williams, highlighting his distinguished service to his country and beyond, there is nothing else that tells of the gruesome event of Saturday September 5, 1992.

Yet on this very spot – No. 6 Provident Road – 30 years earlier, Sylvester Williams, a well-respected lawyer who had helped to draft Zimbabwe’s constitution in 1982, arrived in a Nissan Double Cab.

The house belonged to an Indian acquaintance of Mr Williams’, a Mr Jinwalla (the Jinwalla’s still live there).

Mr Williams would usually visit the Indians’ home on his many trips to Zambia from Zimbabwe, where he worked for the United Nations, and lived with his concubine.

In the passenger seat of the Nissan was Mr Williams’ housekeeper called Albertina, who had travelled with him from Zimbabwe.

According to Albertina, when the Nissan pulled up in front of the gate that evening, three gunmen wearing balaclava emerged from the shadows and ordered Mr Williams out of the car.

“I saw three men approach the car and they ordered Mr Williams out of the car,” Albertina told the Queen Mother in a recorded interview back in 2018.

She said Mr Williams had pleaded with the gunmen to get the car and spare his life.

But once Mr Williams had stepped out of the car, the gunmen shot him several times.

According to Rashid Jinwalla, that evening his father, who is now late, had responded to a car horn at the gate, but when he opened, he was confronted by a scary scene – Mr Williams begging the gunmen for his life.

“My Dad heard him say ‘take what you want’,” recalled Rashid.

Moments later Mr Williams was shot and killed.

“Nothing was taken. Nothing,” said Rashid, who had rushed to the house after hearing about the shooting.

But there was something bizarre about the murder – the assailants made away with Mr Williams’ heart and his private parts.

The Queen Mother was 22 when her father died, and remembers receiving a telephone call from someone from the Ghanaian embassy in Harare informing her about the killing.

“It was very shocking. I was in my house in North London, and around six, seven a.m., I got a call from a Mr Josi, a member of the Ghanaian community in Zimbabwe, and he said ‘Mr Williams is dead’,” she recalled.

“I broke down in tears. I was in shock.”

A few days later, Mr Williams’ body was flown to Zimbabwe for a memorial service before it was taken to Ghana for burial. 

After his memorial service in Harare, Rashid Jinwalla recalls being fished out by President Robert Mugabe’s secret service and taken to State House.

He said he was questioned for about an hour by Mr Mugabe himself about what he knew about Mr Williams’ murder.

But who wanted Sylvester Williams dead, and why?

Ever since Mr Williams’ brutal killing, the Queen Mother, who lives in Britain, embarked on a quest for answers and would later manage to meet and interview those that were connected to her father – Albertina, Rashid Jinwalla and two police officers who handled the case.

She says there is no closure to the case, not if her father’s killers and their motive are still unknown, and she is determined to find answers.

“I can’t let my father die in vein, I need to know who did it, and why,” she told me sombrely.

“It’s heart-breaking but I can’t feel that heartbreak because it’s been going on for so long – the fact that people can organise at a high level to just kill someone in cold blood like that in the middle of a residential neighbourhood…,” she said, shrugging her shoulders.

Apart from the autopsy report, there was no police report about the killing of Mr Williams. The case simply grew cold – dead.

The Queen Mother has a lot of questions.

“Why was there no investigation?”

She also wonders why her father’s body was released without a police report.

“You can’t release the body to the family without saying what happened,” she said.

Albertina, the only witness to the killing, said she was only interviewed once by the police after the incident.

How did the killing of a high-profile figure like Mr Williams not receive a lot of attention?

But more importantly, why was Mr Williams targeted?

Sylvester Williams was born as an Ahanta prince and a descendant of the Ahanta King Badu Bonsu II, but it is in law and politics that he made his mark.

He had co-founded the Progress Party, which ruled Ghana during the Second Republic (1969–1972).

In fact, the Queen Mother thinks her father, who was also a close associate of former Ghana President John Kufour, should have become Ghana’s president.

Then he got embroiled in the murky politics of post-independence Ghana – coups and power struggles.

Political partyin Ghana

Mr Williams left Ghana after a military coup in 1972, and sought asylum. He would then live between England, Zimbabwe and Zambia.

While living in exile in Zambia, Mr Williams served as a parliamentary draftsman for 10 years before joining the United Nations.

His recommendation letter as a parliamentary draftsman, dated February 7, 1980, was written by the country’s prime minister at the time, Daniel Lisulo, SC.

Then he was engaged to help write the constitution for newly-independent Zimbabwe.

The Queen Mother also thinks his father might have had links to the Free Masons because of his close association with John Kufuor, who is senior Grand Warden of the United Grand Lodge of England.

But, again, she does not see how that could have led to his brutal murder.

Or perhaps it is something more complicated than religion or politics, something to do with his bloodline.

The Queen Mother thinks the killing might have had something to do with the fight over the Holy Golden Stool – a covert century-old rivalry between the Ashanti Empire and the British Empire.

She thinks her father might have been targeted because of his connection to the Ashanti throne.

She is very suspicious of the British government and the royal family.

“He was targeted because he was my father,” she said matter-of-factly.

 But it is hard to prove that conspiracy.

The fact is that Sylvester Williams had made political enemies back home in Ghana.

The Queen Mother thinks someone from the Jerry Rawlings government or the president himself might have wanted him dead.

The Queen Mother has also been fighting over her father’s estate in Zimbabwe, where he lived with his concubine, and in Ghana, including his benefits from the UN, amounting to several thousand dollars.

In Ghana, the case has become active again.

Early this year, the Queen Mother called me from Ghana after winning a case to take possession of her father’s estate, a bungalow.

“Police investigations led to the arrest of Esther Nyarko, the woman falsely claiming to be my father’s wife but in fact was his concubine,” she told me.

Esther Nyarko was arrested for defrauding by false pretences.

The Queen Mother also questions the transaction concerning her father’s land in Zambia which he allegedly sold.

A contract of sale for the land was entered in 1998, six years after his death. So who signed it?

Besides the tragic event that ended her father’s life, the Queen Mother also has beautiful memories of the man whose influence she only fully understood after his death. 

“When I lived with him in Zimbabwe from 1983 to 1987, he would always be on the move; he would get up at five in the morning and he was working really hard,” says the Queen Mother.

“He was always reminding us about the importance of being hard-working and the problem of being lazy,” she says.

The Queen Mother also recalls living with her father on Leopards Hill Road in Kabulonga, Lusaka, in the 1980s.

The last time she saw him alive was a week before he died, when he visited London.