Living with Nkrumahism. Jeffrey S. Ahlman
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interviews, however, are with an array of nonelite Ghanaian men and women who participated in either the CPP or opposition politics of the first decade of self-rule. Most notably, these interviews include oral narratives from and focused life histories of individuals associated with such Nkrumah-era organizations as the Ghana Young Pioneers, the Builders Brigade, and other political and social appendages of the CPP and its opposition. Most of these interviews took place in the particular individual’s home or workplace and were conducted in English, Twi, or a mixture thereof. In some cases, interviewees generously took the time to sit for more than one interview. Meanwhile, a research assistant, who had been integral in locating potential interviewees, was present for most interviews and another aided in the translation and transcription of many of the non-English interviews.
Lower-profile regional archives and those of institutions like the George Padmore Research Library on African Affairs in Accra further reinforced the project’s emphasis on the interactive relationship between the ideological and lived experiences of African decolonization and Ghanaian postcoloniality. The Padmore Library’s Bureau of African Affairs collection (GPRL, BAA/RLAA/-), for instance, not only helped outline the Nkrumah government’s pan-African agenda inside and outside the country, but also—through the personnel files it contained—provided a view into the day-to-day work life of those employed in the institution.
PRAAD’s regional archives in Sekondi, Kumasi, Sunyani, and Cape Coast—all of which contain a rich array of material on Nkrumah-era Ghana—offered similar snapshots of life under Nkrumah and the CPP. For, in these often overlooked archives, at least in terms of understanding the national political scene, we find much more than the correspondence of a set of sycophantic bureaucrats attempting to carry out the orders of the central government in Accra. Rather, the records, correspondence, and minutes of the party’s district and regional branches provide the intellectual and bureaucratic artifacts for understanding how the Accra government’s policies, orders, and ideology were both interpreted at the local level and, in many cases, haphazardly implemented. They thus offer a complicated view of both local governments’ and the populace’s day-to-day engagement with the often-changing face of Nkrumahism, as each tried to make sense of local issues, including chieftaincy, labor, land ownership, development, political representation, and state loyalty, in the context of the emergent Nkrumahist state. As a result, in combination with the amorphous set of transnational “shadow archives,” as Jean Allman refers to them—in the United States, Great Britain, and elsewhere—these regional archives represent some of the most valuable repositories for understanding the contradictions and complexities of Ghanaian political life in the 1950s and 1960s, particularly outside of Accra.57 Even with these institutions, however, the types of questions one can usefully answer necessarily face a range of constraints connected to the contemporary realities and current state of a postcolonial archive that was originally constructed within the increasingly tightening political and social arena of the Nkrumahist state, and that subsequently, over nearly sixty years, has suffered periods of governmental and structural neglect.
ORGANIZATION
The methodological challenges faced in engaging the postcolonial archive inform the organization of this book, for each of its chapters engages both the possibilities and the frustrations elicited by the archive. As a result, the book’s first two chapters reconstruct the mutually interacting local and global contexts framing both Nkrumah’s political and intellectual development and the Gold Coast’s transition to self-rule. In doing so, they place the anticolonial politics of Nkrumah and the CPP at the center of a growing set of transnational debates at the time over the structure and meaning of African self-rule. Central to this discussion is a rereading of the narratives and debates surrounding postwar pan-African anticolonial politics in relation to both the rise of the CPP and the resistance to it. These debates, however, were not just about institutional formations or territorial control. Rather, they were part of a process of contestation that integrated questions concerning everything from the ideological, civic, and moral makeup of the new Ghana to its physical and infrastructural landscape. Chapter 2, in particular, provides a framework for understanding the political, social, and institutional changes to an emergent Nkrumahism in relation to the wide array of expectations and allegiances that comprised the midcentury Gold Coast/Ghanaian political, social, and cultural scene. In doing so, it details the process by which Nkrumah and a range of other local and transnational actors set out to sketch a path for Ghana’s future and its role in an anticipated soon-to-be liberated Africa alongside a competing set of alternative visions for the new country—local, regional, and national—that challenged the young but maturing CPP.
The following four chapters detail the process by which the evolving CPP-led state aimed to instill into the Ghanaian populace the pan-African and socialist consciousness that it saw as at the heart of a truly independent Ghana and Africa. Each in turn examines aspects of the variety of paths differing groups of Ghanaians took as they navigated this emerging political and social reality. Chapter 3, for instance, with its focus on Ghanaian youth, especially those involved in state- and party-run organizations like the Builders Brigade (later, Workers Brigade) and the Ghana Young Pioneers, emphasizes the immediate postcolonial period as one of internal political construction and international redefinition and experimentation. Symbolizing the blank slate of decolonization’s “new men,” the country’s young men, women, and children embodied the hope, aspirations, and presumed malleability of the nation. As a result, the chapter shows how organizations like the Brigade and the Young Pioneers placed youth at the center of a CPP-led process of national inculcation in the values and ideals of an envisioned pan-African and socialist citizenry constructed around an ethics of discipline, order, and civic activism. The chapter also reveals the tensions and arenas of contestation that surrounded these organizations as they set off waves of popular unease—some of which became subjects of public debate, while others (out of individuals’ fears of detention) did not—over the state’s role in everything from the attempt to alter Ghanaian familial and generational relations to the regimentation and perceived militarization of Ghanaian youth.
Chapters 4 and 5 focus on themes of work, productivity, and service to the nation, each key to the Nkrumahist worldview. Chapter 4 builds upon the previous chapter’s discussion of an idealized pan-African and socialist citizenry through a social and cultural dissection of the politics of “work” in Nkrumah-era Ghana. Linked to issues of discipline, order, and productivity was to be a national conception of work tied to the collective good. In contrast to being a mechanism for personal economic gain and accumulation, work emerged as a nexus point of moral and civic discourse defined through obligations of sacrifice to the nation and the concomitant process of consciousness-building that was to follow these sacrifices. As presented within the context of party ideology, socialist work and production were thus to be a liberating experience, freeing the Ghanaian (and African) worker from real and imagined subjugation to the global capitalist system, even as the CPP used the idiom of socialist work to weaken and ultimately co-opt the country’s previously vibrant labor movement. The result was a political and social environment surrounding work, production, and development that not only increasingly demanded more from the country’s workforce, but which eventually, through many Ghanaian workers’ reactions to it, forced the CPP into reframing its relationship with the broader populace in the early 1960s.
Similar themes of sacrifice and devotion to the nation, along with those of secrecy and subversion, intersect in chapter 5. Specifically, this chapter presents an international history of Ghanaian readings of the prospects of African decolonization during and after the so-called “Year of Africa,” alongside an analysis of the institutional labor and gender politics of a specific Nkrumah-era state institution: the Bureau of African Affairs. No Ghanaian institution had a greater role in the pursuit of African liberation than the Bureau, as it bore the responsibility of collecting, interpreting, and disseminating to audiences at home and abroad news and intelligence on the advancement of the Nkrumahist revolution.