Living with Nkrumahism. Jeffrey S. Ahlman
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themselves had characteristics of social classes as described in Marxist theory. In this light, he insisted in 1918 that there were different types of proletariats based upon the relative wealth of the nations they inhabited, and that certain national proletariats would be more revolutionary than others based upon the level of oppression they had historically faced.34
Likewise, in Europe’s colonies, figures like Jawaharlal Nehru broadened their intellectual framework in the 1920s as they too looked to Lenin and the Soviet Union for alternative models for interpreting the colonial system and the imperial world order. Nehru, who toured the Soviet Union with his father in 1927, used his reflections on his experience to compare and contrast the rapidly industrializing revolutionary society he witnessed there with an India that he viewed as comparatively much more conservative and set in its ways. Writing in 1928, Nehru stressed that, “for us in India the fascination [with Soviet Russia] is even greater [than elsewhere in the world], and even our self-interest compels us to understand the vast forces which have upset the old order of things and brought a new world into existence, where values have changed utterly and old standards have given place to new.”35 A little more than a decade later, in his 1941 autobiography, Nehru again returned to the subject of the Soviet experiment as he recalled with wonder how the interwar Soviet Union, during a moment in which much of “the rest of the world was in the grip of the depression and going backward in some ways,” was able to overcome these trends as it redefined the Soviet place within the international community. Shifting to the subject of Marxism itself, the future Indian prime minister ultimately presented the “theory and philosophy” as a vehicle for providing new pathways to a “future . . . bright with hope,” regardless of the bleakness of the past or present.36
In 1947, Nkrumah would publish his own Lenin-inspired treatise, Towards Colonial Freedom. In this relatively short pamphlet, Nkrumah detailed what he saw as the systematized ways in which imperialism created and maintained an imbalance of trade between Europe and its African colonies. For Nkrumah, as with both Lenin and Du Bois, capitalism could not function without imperialism. Instead, capital could only fleetingly sustain the pressure from its own persistent need for growth before it had to look elsewhere, or cannibalize the most profit-sucking element in the production process, namely labor. As with Lenin and Du Bois, Nkrumah maintained that the colonial system provided European capital an alternative by opening up a new set of unfettered arenas for labor and resource extraction, while at the same time guaranteeing markets for the sale of the colonizers’ goods. The future Ghanaian president thus opened his 1947 text with a forceful declaration: “The aim of all colonial governments in Africa and elsewhere has been the struggle for raw materials; and not only this, but the colonies have become the dumping ground, and colonial peoples the false recipients, of manufactured goods of the industrialists and capitalists of Great Britain, France, Belgium and other colonial powers who turn to the dependent territories which feed their industrial plants. This is colonialism in a nutshell.”37
MANCHESTER AND THE AFRICAN ANTICOLONIAL IMAGINATION
In terms of Nkrumah’s intellectual development, Towards Colonial Freedom did not have its direct origins in the political and intellectual traditions of the Gold Coast. Instead, the pamphlet represented a coming together of a broader set of transnational anticolonial traditions and experiences in the future Ghanaian politician’s thinking. In fact, what makes the text significant is not particularly its originality, but rather the diversity of political and intellectual influences—pan-African, Marxist-Leninist, and anticolonial revolutionist, among others—embedded within it. Nearly all of these influences found their most prominent expression in the diasporic radicalism of the 1930s and 1940s, culminating in the 1945 Manchester Pan-African Congress. In the United States, for instance, where he spent the decade between 1935 and 1945, Nkrumah lived, worked, studied, and organized in locations ranging from rural Oxford, Pennsylvania, to major American cities and black internationalist hubs like New York City and Philadelphia. As a result, at the center of Nkrumah’s American experiences were the political and economic realities of being black in the Depression-era and wartime United States as he embarked upon a number of economic endeavors outside of his schooling, including hawking fish, laboring in a shipyard near Philadelphia, and working in a soap factory, before waiting tables on a shipping line running between New York and Vera Cruz, Mexico. Even more importantly, for Nkrumah, this was also a period of political experimentation in which he sought to embed himself into an eclectic array of pan-African political and social networks, including black churches, the Garvey movement, Paul Robeson’s Council on African Affairs, and others.38
Aided by a letter of introduction from Trinidadian pan-Africanist C. L. R. James addressed to George Padmore, Nkrumah continued his political maturation after leaving the United States for Great Britain in early 1945. His only previous experience in the imperial metropole was a short layover in 1935 while waiting for his visa to the United States. As detailed in his autobiography, though, that moment had served as a political awakening. Arriving in London and learning of the invasion of Ethiopia by Benito Mussolini’s Italy, Nkrumah reported how he had stood in shock at the British passivity to the news of this blatant transgression of African independence and international law.39 Implied in the narrative Nkrumah presented in his autobiography was an understanding that the mission underpinning his return to London was an upending of the colonialist status quo, which had seemingly made the Italian invasion possible a decade earlier. Upon arrival, Nkrumah quickly joined Padmore in helping organize a new pan-African congress in the English industrial city of Manchester. Convened in October 1945, the Manchester Pan-African Congress brought together pan-African and labor activists to debate Africa’s place in the postwar international community. In contrast to the Pan-African Congresses organized by Du Bois in the 1920s or the 1900 London Pan-African Conference, the Manchester congress offered a clear rebuttal to the rhetorical progressivism of the liberal imperial order, arguing for the first time for an immediate end to colonial rule in Africa and elsewhere. As stated in the congress’s “Declaration to the Colonial Workers, Farmers, and Intellectuals,” its delegates insisted upon “the right of all peoples to govern themselves” and “control their own destiny.”40 Furthermore, the declaration presented the struggle for self-determination as a mass project of “complete social, economic, and political emancipation” from the exploitation of capitalist imperialism.41
The Manchester congress thus provided its participants with a collective outlet for expressing their discontent not only with colonial rule, but, more significantly, with even the prospects for colonial reform. Reminiscent of both Lenin’s and Du Bois’s early twentieth-century interrogations of the colonial project, the congress’s speakers and delegates focused their attention on the uniquely exclusionary and extractive nature of colonial rule, highlighting such issues as land alienation, forced labor, and inequalities in pay. In one of his addresses, for instance, Jomo Kenyatta, who nearly twenty years later would become Kenya’s first president, contrasted a rapidly growing Ugandan colonial economy based upon cotton production with a colonial social reality in which “there [was] not a single African doctor.”42 Similarly, G. Ashie Nikoi, chairman of the West African Cocoa Farmers’ Delegation (Gold Coast), painted a picture of British colonial rule in West Africa founded upon “broken . . . homes” and “natural leaders” alienated from “their rights.”43 Meanwhile, fellow Gold Coaster J. S. Annan—a trade unionist whose talk was covered by the Lagos-based West African Pilot—challenged the congress to address not only the problems of imperialism, but also the need to “set up administrative machinery to cope with the difficulties which lie ahead of us.”44
Nkrumah, who accepted credit for writing some of the congress’s most powerful declarations, adopted a similar reading of the event’s current and future objectives. Even more importantly, he also viewed it as part of a broader radicalization of anticolonial politics globally and of a transnational rethinking of the role of empire in the postwar world. For instance, just weeks before arriving in London he had taken part in a similar conference in New York featuring approximately sixty representatives from locations including Uganda, India, Burma, Indonesia, the United States, and the West Indies.45 As in Manchester later in the year, the Colonial Conference challenged colonial rule in Africa and elsewhere as the delegates connected imperial failures to extend to colonial peoples the right of