Kafui Dey interviews Ken Bediako

The Living Archive: A Conversation with Ken Bediako

He was at the Munich Olympics in 1972 when he saw the Israeli athletes being taken hostage — he thought the men climbing the wall at two in the morning were students coming back from a disco. He was in the stadium in Seoul in 1988 when Ben Johnson ran the fastest hundred metres anyone had ever seen, and he was in his room an hour later when a colleague called to tell him Johnson had been stripped. He was in Montreal in 1976 when Africa boycotted at the last hour, and he sat for four days in the press center with nothing to cover while the athletes he had come to document were already on the plane home. He was in Los Angeles in 1975 when David Kotei Poison became Ghana's first world boxing champion, sending his report home in building blocks of cable-telegraphic shorthand because the woman on the telephone line in the press center told him she did not speak his language. He covered Mohammed Ali on a school visit to Accra. He covered Pelé's one-day exhibition match at the stadium. He helped found the Sports Writers Association of Ghana in 1968. He authored the most complete record of the Ghana football league from 1958 to 2012 ever produced. He turned 85 in January of this year, and he still wants to build a sports museum.

Ken Bediako is, as Kafui Dey puts it, Ghana's living football archive — and if Ghana football has a memory, it is stored somewhere in this man.

On the 2026 World Cup Squad and Preparation

Recording three days after the squad announcement for the FIFA World Cup 2026, Ken's assessment is measured but pointed. His core concern is the timing of the coaching change. To sack a coach two months before a World Cup and replace him with someone who had to publicly disown a preparatory match — claiming it had nothing to do with him — and who has had only one official trial match, a game against Wales, is not a preparation. It is a gamble.

He would have preferred Otto Addo to stay. Not because he thinks Otto was perfect but because changing a coach at the last minute as though the incoming man carries some magic nobody else has is a confusion he cannot understand. The new coach, Queiroz, is experienced and has a good background. He hopes it turns out well. But he does not expect miracles and says so plainly.

On the group: Panama is the realistic target. England cannot be underrated regardless of their record in finals since 1966. Croatia is formidable. Panama is the team Ghana has the best chance of beating on a good day. He notes a structural concern that goes deeper than the squad: in this World Cup squad of 26, only one player comes from the domestic league. One goalkeeper. That alone tells you what the domestic league has become.

Ghana Football's Decline: The Root Cause

He has a diagnosis and it does not change: the people running the Ghana Football Association are largely club owners, and club owners have a personal interest in which players get selected. That is the root of what is wrong. It is, he says, an open secret. He is not the right person to be shouting about it anymore — he is retired, watching from the touchline. But his younger colleagues who are still on the field should be pointing at this every single day.

He dismisses the romantic idea of these men calling themselves football people as the only ones qualified to run the game. All supporters are football people. The fact that you own a club does not make you more qualified — it makes you more conflicted. And the players feel it. Players know when political considerations are at work. They know when a teammate is in the squad because of who his boss knows. It poisons team spirit. He saw jealousy express itself in the domestic league when he was editing the Express — a top scorer being given the golden boot award, and his own teammates refusing to pass to him the following season so he would not win it again. When he and colleagues added a top-scoring club category to spread the incentive, the problem shifted. But the underlying jealousy never goes away. It has to be managed. You cannot pretend it is not there.

What Made 2006 Different

The core of the 2006 team had played together through youth football, come up through local clubs like Liberty Professionals, been polished in the domestic league, and carried genuine team spirit. They knew each other. Many of the players in the current era meet for the first time at the airport. He calls the modern diaspora-recruited player a soccer missionary — not derogatory, just accurate. They play for Ghana because they can, and because someone found their birth certificate and a Ghanaian grandparent in time. He does not want to scrap that policy. If a person has Ghanaian lineage and wants to play, that is fine. But you should not have to beg them to come. The core of any national team must want to be there with all their heart.

The women's teams and the under-17s are showing what is possible when the squad is built on local talent. Players who want to make football a career, who are proud to wear the jersey, who play with everything they have. That is the secret. The men's senior team has drifted away from that model. The women have not. The results reflect the difference.

The Real Republicans: Ghana's Most Controversial Experiment

One of the most remarkable stories Ken tells concerns Real Republicans, the club formed in the late 1950s by Oh Jan, Ghana's first Director of Sports, as a deliberate experiment in building the national team. Oh Jan's logic was simple: the national team needed players who trained together consistently, knew each other's game, and were being developed simultaneously toward a common style. The existing clubs would never give him that. So he created a model club made up of selected top players drawn from across the league — effectively a national team operating inside the domestic competition.

The clubs were furious, led by Kotoko who lost key players including Babayara. Kotoko threatened to quit the league. Oh Jan, who had the full personal backing of the president, responded by dismissing Kotoko from the league outright and quickly forming a replacement club, Kumasi United, to take their place. The stand-off became a political crisis involving CPP heavyweights and was eventually resolved when Kotoko backed down — but as punishment they were required to play their first round of home matches in Koforidua, not Kumasi.

Republicans were so strong — effectively a disguised national team — that Oh Jan eventually decided they could not compete in the league on the standard scoring basis. So they played on a non-scoring basis: other teams could still collect points by beating them, but Republicans' results would not count toward the title. This created its own problem. In a crucial match between Republicans and Hearts of Oak, if Republicans won then Hearts would lose the championship. The crowd and the analysts sensed what happened. Players seemed to hold back at critical moments. It was never proven — there were no witnesses, no confession — but Ken notes drily that it has gone into some histories as the first unofficially sanctioned fixed match in Ghana football.

The following season Republicans competed fully, won the league and the knockout, and their players formed the spine of the Black Stars team that won the Africa Cup of Nations for the first time in 1963. Oh Jan had been right. The experiment worked.

Oh Jan: The Man Who Ran Everything

Ken speaks about Oh Jan as someone who was positively authoritarian. He had the full blessing of the president, which meant he could do things no other sports official could or would do. When he wanted a player moved from one club to Republicans, he held a press conference and announced the transfer. When Kotoko challenged him, he formed a rival club the same week. When he wanted hockey to gain visibility, he scheduled mini hockey matches before football fixtures — using the crowd that had come for football to introduce them to a sport they would never otherwise have watched.

He also had a gift for identifying and nurturing talent. He brought a British coach called Ra Jacobs to help with the Olympic team in 1960 — the team that won silver in Rome — and made Ryangra the assistant, the clear succession plan. He gave running shoes as prizes to athletic school champions personally. He named the national stadium after himself — the Oh Jan Sports Stadium — and the name was later removed in circumstances Ken still cannot fully explain and cannot accept. He has written articles calling it a travesty. The response was to accuse him of tribalism. He dismissed that response at the time and still dismisses it now.

Oh Jan also authored a book — a short history of soccer in Ghana and the rise of the Black Stars, published in 1964, edited with the assistance of a young man called Nana Akufo-Addo who supervised the typing of the manuscript from his home at 11 Ringway Estate. Ken has a copy. He reads from the first line: a modest attempt has been made to chronicle, without braggadocio, the salient features in Ghana soccer history.

The 1972 Munich Massacre

It was Ken's first Olympics. He was 31 years old. Security was so lax at that point that he was traveling under someone else's press credential — his editor had originally been listed, decided not to go, and Ken used the card with his own photograph over it. The German coach spotted it and called it out with good humor. Nobody else did.

At around two in the morning he saw men in tracksuits climbing a wall near the athletes' village and assumed they were students returning from a nightclub. They were Palestinian terrorists, dressed in tracksuits, carrying grenades in their bags. The following day at a press conference he learned that eleven Israeli athletes had been taken hostage. The Germans had sharpshooters positioned at the airport to intercept the transfer. The terrorists asked for helicopters. The plan was to shoot them during the move from bus to helicopter. It failed. The terrorists threw grenades into the helicopters when the shooting started. All eleven hostages were killed, along with five of the attackers.

The IOC president — an American named Avery Brundage — gave the order: the games must go on. We will not succumb to terrorists. There was a memorial service. Then the competition resumed. Security at every subsequent Olympics was unrecognizable from what came before.

The Montreal Boycott: Paid and Left

The 1976 Montreal Games were supposed to be Ghana's fourth Olympics. The football team was, by Ken's account, very good — Polo and Mama were there, boxing was strong, Ghana was hoping for medals. Everything had been paid for in advance. Two weeks of accommodation, travel, everything. Ken was there. His colleagues Ben and Sam were there. The press group had already moved in, gone to the opening ceremony, seen the queen arrive.

Then Nigeria called a meeting. Africa had been wanting to protest the IOC's refusal to ban New Zealand for continuing to play rugby against apartheid South Africa. The Nigerians said they were leaving. The debate went back and forth for days — Ghana's Bob from the commission was the key figure. Eventually the African contingent departed. The press group decided to stay for four days and cover what they could. But without the Ghanaian athletes there was nothing to cover. They sat in the press center as the only black faces in the box, feeling the discomfort keenly, and eventually flew back to London to watch the rest of the games on television.

Seoul 1988: Ben Johnson

Ken had seen Johnson run in Canada in 1987 at a pre-Olympic seminar and told his colleagues: this man is great. When Johnson lined up at the Olympic final in Seoul, Ken was in the stadium, a declared supporter. He watched the race. Johnson was running, he said, as if the devil was chasing him. He noticed that Johnson's eyes were yellow, though he did not understand what that meant at the time. Less than an hour after getting back to the hotel room, his colleague — who headed the boxing delegation — called and told him Johnson had been disqualified. Positive steroid test. Stripped.

Ken says it simply: it was just too fast to be legal.

David Kotei Poison and the Tinapa Loan

He was in Los Angeles in 1975 when Kotei Poison won Ghana's first world boxing title. He covered the fight for the Graphic doing a running summary — and he spent part of the night confused about why Poison was not using his left hand, until the coach explained afterwards that the opponent had a powerful right and opening the left would have exposed him.

To send the story home he telephoned his copy in dictation. The woman on the other end of the line said she did not speak his language. Ken believed he was speaking English. He had to get a friend to do the dictation while he wrote it out by hand.

On the matter of the tinapa loan: Ken was in Montreal for the boycotted Olympics when Simpson, a colleague who had been with Poison in Los Angeles before traveling to Montreal, told him the story. The government official traveling with Poison had negotiated with the boxer to use part of his fight purse — around $15,000 — to buy tinned fish for Ghana, because there was no tinned fish in the country. Ken says the government was sponsoring Poison's hotel, training, and everything else, so it was not a robbery. It was a man using his initiative in a moment of national scarcity. The money was eventually paid back. The problem was it took too long, and by the time it was a topic, the official was dead and could not speak for himself. Ken testifies to what he knows: he was there when it was arranged, he knows it was meant to be temporary, and he believes it was repaid.

How He Got to the Graphic

He was working at ECG — the Electricity Company — as a clerk in accounts for six months, in a building near Kwame Nkrumah Circle that was the most beautiful structure in the area at the time. No dumsor. Power was flowing without interruption.

He had always wanted to be a journalist. He had been reading the Graphic obsessively, copying the writing style, absorbing the sports pages, watching how stories were constructed. When the Graphic invited young people to come and try, he wrote a review of the Founders Day Games in an hour. They published it — he went to check the paper the following day and it was there. The editor, Isaac Aban, called him in and told him: you have some talent. We will train you. If you don't work out, we show you the door. Those are the terms.

Ken went back to ECG, told his boss he was going out to buy something, went to the Graphic, and never returned. Four months later ECG posted a notice of vacation of post on their notice board. He was not bothered. He was already making more than twice his ECG salary, being paid fortnightly on Fridays — graphic paid every two weeks, without exception — and had access to a provident fund that would eventually allow him to walk into the QWE furniture store and buy a red three-piece suite from his back pay on the same day it was announced.

He named himself Kennedy in tribute to John F. Kennedy, whose oratory he admired deeply. He mourned when Kennedy was assassinated — he heard it on West Africa Radio. His official name remains Emanuel Kennedy Bediako. Almost nobody calls him Emanuel.

The Sports Writers Association of Ghana

SWAG was founded in 1968. Ken was among the originators. He declined the presidency but took the role of director of operations, which was effectively where the work was done. The catalyst came at the Munich Olympics when Bismark — a patron — suggested they make it an annual occasion with awards: best defender, utility player, to start. He would buy the first trophies.

The first ceremony was a near-disaster. They invited top people, judges, officials. The top people largely did not show. Empty seats everywhere. Later they learned to invite working people, people who would actually come and eat and drink and celebrate. When KBL — now part of Guinness Ghana — came on board as sponsors, the event was transformed. Free beer. Free food. Come and enjoy. The function ran long and people grumbled about that, but it was credible, it was celebrated, and it gave sports people a moment of annual recognition that had not existed before.

SWAG also bought a clubhouse. That is a source of quiet pride.

The National Soccer League Book

His second and most complete book is the National Soccer League of Ghana, 1958 to 2012 — over 300 pages, a complete record of every season of Ghana's domestic football league. He wrote it while waiting for Kotoko to win the championship so the timing would be right for the launch. He waited four years. They won. He launched. His wife had told him he would never finish the book. He told her to wait.

He wants it updated. He has the data, the records, the photographs. He needs young researchers willing to sit in archives and read. He will tell them what to look for. He does not think SWAG will do it. He thinks if he finds some money he will hire three or four young people and give them the task himself.

He also has a photographic history — Black Stars, the Long Road to Greatness — which was printed in substantial quantities before 2010. A contact gave copies to a woman at an embassy. The woman was supposed to take them to South Africa to sell during the World Cup. They ended up in a garage somewhere. He did not pursue it. He did not want the relationship to become adversarial.

The Sports Museum

He saw his first sports museum in Berlin in 1966, his first trip abroad. Later he saw the Olympic Museum in Munich. He has been advocating for a Ghanaian sports museum ever since. He has the photographs. He has the scripts. He has the records. A building at the Borteyman Sports Complex has been identified as part of the plan. The chief executive of the Sports Authority is involved. There is an official commission pending. Ken says he is prepared and has been for years.

Ali, Pelé, and the Great Visitors

He spent a full day accompanying Muhammad Ali around Accra — to the old CPP headquarters building at the Ministry of Information, to schools, to venues. Ali was performing throughout: standing on the balcony saying he was going to jump because he had been jumping like this in America, challenging the boxers in the room, declaring that there is a girl in the United States who wants to fight me, she will fall in four. He had this gift of prediction — he would say which round and then make it happen. He was, Ken says, uncontrollably entertaining.

Pelé was a one-day visit. Santos had a match in Lagos and a smart promoter arranged a stop in Accra. Ken covered the game but did not get to speak with him. Pelé played exhibition football — relaxed, controlled, showing rather than competing. Real Madrid also came. They did the same thing: when Ghana scored, they equalized easily. You could see they were going easy but people said they were serious. Ken remains skeptical.

The May 9th Disaster

He was in Kumasi the day of the May 9th 2001 stadium disaster. A doctor friend invited him to attend. He declined at the last minute — he said he had left his card at home. In truth he felt uneasy and did not want to go. He was in Accra when the news came through.

He was subsequently appointed to the investigation committee as the only non-professor among the members. The committee's recommendations led to significant changes: the national ambulance service was born out of those recommendations. Armed police with tear gas were banned from football stadiums — the gas had caused the panic and the crush that killed 127 people. Financial support was provided to surviving families, including education packages that some beneficiaries used all the way to PhD level.

He is careful not to speak as a committee spokesperson. The chairman is the right person for that. He knows what the committee found and what it recommended. He is satisfied that some good came out of it, even at such terrible cost.

His Legacy

He does not frame it as legacy. He frames it as love. He has spent over sixty years trying to make sure that what Ghana's athletes did on fields and in stadiums and rings was written down, was photographed, was counted, was preserved. He knows that if you don't write it down, it disappears. He knows that younger generations watching empty domestic league stadiums have no frame of reference for what it was like when people begged for tickets, when they stood on pylons to see over the walls, when the stadium was full and the atmosphere made you feel that something real and shared was happening.

He hopes the sports museum comes. He hopes someone updates the league book. He hopes the FA is one day run by people whose first loyalty is to the game rather than to their own clubs. He hopes Ghana beats Panama.