Living with Nkrumahism. Jeffrey S. Ahlman
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would, in many cases, come to underpin future Ghanaians’ political imaginings well into the 1950s and beyond—albeit in ways that often did not fit neatly into the CPP’s worldview.
EMPIRE, LIBERALISM, AND ITS CRITICS
Nkrumah came of age in the Gold Coast at a time in which, in both the West African colony and internationally, European imperial powers were expanding their political and ideological reach. It was also a time when, throughout the colonial world and beyond, an increasingly sophisticated array of critics of empire were coming into their own. Key, then, to understanding the imperial world order into which Nkrumah was born is a recognition of the extent to which such a world order was at once a relatively new development on the international stage and one with deep historical roots. In real terms, the continent’s colonization was a haphazard and uneven process. Moreover, at the time of Nkrumah’s 1909 birth, in nearly all of Africa, with the exception of parts of southern Africa and certain coastal enclaves, the events that marked the onset of the continent’s formal colonization were less than a century old. In the region that would become the Gold Coast Colony, which had a long and intricate history with an array of European powers dating back to the fifteenth century, the attempted extension of formal European colonial authority into African affairs was highly incremental and even then it would not begin until at least the mid-nineteenth century. Moreover, it would take several more decades before British rule could be institutionalized along most of the southern Gold Coast.6 Even more troublesome for British ambitions were the Asante in the territory’s central forest region, where the British would spend much of the nineteenth century in a shifting pattern of war and uneasy peace with the Asante state.7 Meanwhile, in the Northern Territories, it would not be until the early twentieth century that the British would be able to bring all the region’s peoples under their administrative control.8 As a result, even at its most rhetorical level, the notion of an aspiring European imperial world order that would encompass the continent cannot be said to have emerged until at least the aftermath of the Berlin Conference of 1884–85. Furthermore, as in the Gold Coast, the attempted real-world, wide-scale implementation and administration of this burgeoning imperial order would not occur for another two to three decades—a time nearly coinciding with Nkrumah’s birth.9
Yet, the perceived European imperial world order of the early twentieth century also possessed the aura of a deeper, more overarching history in Africa and globally. Cultivated in part via the intersections between the rise of nineteenth-century liberalism and the real and perceived changes in the global political economy, notions of an age of empire would become naturalized in the global political imagination within one to two generations following the onset of colonial conquest. In Africa, the long history of the slave trade on the continent featured prominently in the political and cultural imaginations of both supporters and critics of the emergent imperial world order. For some of the most forceful early twentieth-century critics of the colonial project, Europe’s late nineteenth-century colonization of Africa had clear echoes of the violence, indignities, and exploitation of the slave trade.10 Others, however, often offered more measured analyses of Europe’s imperial ambitions in Africa, at times not only crediting the Europeans for trying to abolish the last vestiges of the slave trade on the continent, but also tying this assumed eradication of slavery to the continent’s and its peoples’ modernization. Even those who at times expressed skepticism of and disappointment with certain European imperial intentions and actions in Africa often celebrated many of the presumed values of the colonial mission, including its promised expansion of social benefits (most notably, Western education and medicine), Christianity, infrastructural development, constitutionalism, and free trade. “We are head and ears in love with the British Constitution,” the African editors of the Cape Coast–based Gold Coast Methodist Times declared in 1897. “The national greatness of the English people has been determined by their national laws and institutions,” the newspaper’s increasingly nationalist editors argued; “they have prospered, because of the humanitarian principles of their laws; because those laws are always in harmony with the genius of the christian [sic] religion. We too are anxious to march en masse after the great English nation; We [sic] want to do so willingly, voluntarily, intelligently, and gradually.”11
Within Europe, questions over the purpose of and responsibilities embedded in the colonial project featured prominently in the continent’s political debates. Among British intellectuals, for instance, as political theorist Uday Mehta details, nearly every major thinker from the late eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries sought to address the colonial question in their writings at some point in their career.12 However, in a British political and intellectual context increasingly receptive to the language of individual freedom and choice as advanced by liberal thinkers like John Stuart Mill, the realities of colonial rule—particularly what it meant for Britain to rule over other territories and peoples—challenged the worldview of many inside these political and intellectual circles. Mill, for his part, offered perhaps the most famous attempt to resolve this apparent contradiction in the mid-nineteenth century, as he proposed a tiered view of the world that positioned colonialism as a process leading to social uplift, where, through colonial rule, so-called civilized and modern Europeans were to guide the colonized—“barbarians” in Mill’s language—toward the light of civilization. Mill’s writings, among others, would in turn help lay the intellectual groundwork for a perceived progressive colonialism that, in the liberal worldview, positioned the colonized along a paternalist path leading toward a modern society.13
As Mill and others debated colonialism, they also began the process of reimagining their philosophical ideals in relation to world history. In doing so, they drew clear lines connecting liberal values of individual freedom, equality before the law, and utilitarian governance to the philosophical and political traditions of antiquity.14 Both politically and intellectually, the result was a naturalization of European liberal ideas within not only a particular school of European imperial thought, but also in key aspects of the global political imagination. As a result, by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, prominent social commentators in both the colonial and metropolitan worlds turned to liberal thought and values in their political discourse. In doing so, they often projected onto colonial peoples their own assumptions concerning the enlightened human condition even as the ideal of a liberal imperialism began to fade from most colonial policy discussions in the second half of the nineteenth century.15 In 1897 Nigeria, for instance, the African editors of the Lagos Standard heralded both the uniqueness and the universality of Britain’s liberal traditions in their accounting of the promise of British colonial rule specifically. “The Natives of Africa—we venture to say all Africa, love the Queen not only for what she is,” the newspaper proclaimed, “but for what she represents—the freest and best system of Government the world has ever known.”16 Others, likewise, turned to liberal notions of free trade and commerce, as they linked (albeit not uncritically) aspects of the colonial mission to the continent’s future development.17 By the early twentieth century, the political, economic, and social relationships of colonial rule had thus become intertwined, in both the colonial and the metropolitan political imaginary, with the idealized progressivism implicit in the liberal worldview.
For many living both inside and outside Europe’s colonial territories, rhetorical gestures toward liberal ideals offered them new pathways to political and social claim-making during the first decades of colonial rule. At the 1900 London Pan-African Conference, for instance, organizers and delegates combined a language of racial self-help and uplift with a set of claims on the British colonial administration in which they demanded the free and fair treatment of Britain’s colonial subject populations. Delegates at the conference also called for the creation of a range of protections for colonial peoples in areas including labor, politics, and property. In doing so, they charged the colonial government with an obligation for ensuring Africans gain the political, social, and economic means necessary for the continent’s fruition in the modern world.18 Likewise, in 1919, W. E. B. Du Bois, who had been present in London, sought to rejuvenate that conference’s spirit as he organized in Paris the first of four Pan-African Congresses he would plan in the early interwar period. Set to coincide with the end of the First World War and the opening of the Paris Peace Conference, the 1919 Pan-African Congress—like its 1900