Living with Nkrumahism. Jeffrey S. Ahlman
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harkened back to an array of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century pan–West African political organizations, including the Gold Coast Aborigines’ Rights Protection Society (ARPS) and the West African Youth League (WAYL), as they channeled their critiques of European imperialism through a language of West African political and economic unity.64 For, as Wallace-Johnson and Nkrumah explained in the secretariat’s “Aims and Objects,” the WANS envisioned the “dawn of a new era” in West Africa. West Africans, they insisted, were now ready and committed to “combat all forms of imperialism and colonial exploitation” and, in doing so, to turn their attention to the broader “task of achieving national unity and absolute independence for all West Africa.” The success of such a project, they continued, depended upon the organization and coordination of the “economic and political ideas and aspirations scattered among West African peoples but lacking in co-ordination.”65 In the case of the WANS, these “economic and political ideas” were necessarily to be expressed in explicitly socialist terms. Bankole Awooner-Renner—who, by the mid-1950s, would become a vocal critic of Nkrumah—even went so far as to propose within the secretariat’s publications the idea of a “West African Soviet Union.”66
The WANS, however, did not limit its political program to anticolonial and pan-West African abstractions. Instead, by taking on issues such as the buying and selling of cocoa in West Africa, the secretariat also sought to integrate key local concerns affecting the region’s people into their broader critiques of the colonial system. In March 1946, for instance, an article in the organization’s flagship journal, the New African, on a proposed colonial cocoa monopoly accompanied others containing the WANS’s resolutions decrying the forced labor and land theft, among other forms of exploitation, that they associated with the colonial system.67 Wallace-Johnson and Nkrumah further reinforced these sentiments in the organization’s “Aims and Objects” as they—reproducing the Manchester resolutions on West Africa—held up the structure of the colonial cocoa market as evidence of the “incompetent” nature of colonial economic policy in the region.68 Such arguments echoed interwar critiques of the monopolistic underpinnings of the early twentieth-century cocoa industry, which had dominated the West African press in the 1920s and 1930s. During this period, radical newspapers like Nnamdi Azikiwe’s Accra-based African Morning Post not only detailed the effects of the government’s cocoa policies on West African and specifically Gold Coast farmers, they also positioned these farmers on the frontlines of the colony’s battle with “white capitalists.”69 Just under a decade later, the New African reiterated this belief, advocating for West Africa’s cocoa producers to embark on a “total boycott” in response to any attempt by the government to limit the autonomy of the region’s farmers.70
As the secretariat worked to develop its own press and publications from its British base, a set of reciprocal relationships also grew between the WANS activists in the United Kingdom and West African newspapers throughout the region. In Lagos, Nigeria, for instance, the West African Pilot—another of Azikiwe’s newspapers—regularly covered the actions and pronouncements of the organization and its members, while in Freetown, Sierra Leone, the African Standard similarly reported on the organization’s activities. Meanwhile, in the Gold Coast, the Gold Coast Observer and Ashanti Pioneer covered the secretariat and its members.71 Furthermore, Nkrumah himself found a periodic voice within these Gold Coast newspapers, advocating, for instance, in a series of 1947 articles in the Ashanti Pioneer, for an “All–West African National Congress.” In doing so, he directly referred to the pan–West Africanism of the 1920s and specifically the National Congress of British West Africa made famous by Gold Coasters like J. E. Casely Hayford and Kobina Sekyi.72 Likewise, many of the secretariat’s diasporic allies, most notably Padmore, also maintained an active presence in the region’s newspapers over the period. In the case of Padmore specifically, Leslie James has calculated that, between 1937 and 1950, the Trinidadian pan-Africanist would contribute 508 articles to the West African Pilot and, between 1947 and 1950, another 182 to the Ashanti Pioneer.73
As a result, by early 1947 anticolonial pan-Africanists and activists from both inside and outside the continent had begun to advance a radicalizing discourse aimed at transforming a state of dependency into one of political and economic emancipation. Meanwhile, politically, Nkrumah used the two years between the end of the 1945 Manchester congress and his December 1947 return to the Gold Coast as a period of consolidation, building and solidifying his inner circle. Some members of this group—most notably Kojo Botsio, who would later serve as general secretary of the CPP and, over the course of the 1950s and 1960s, hold a number of different ministerial posts in Nkrumah’s cabinet—would remain aligned with the Ghanaian president until the 1966 coup.74 Nkrumah also spent much of his last two years abroad establishing connections with a range of leftist and West African groups in the United Kingdom, among them the WASU, the League of Coloured Peoples, and individuals associated with the Communist Party of Great Britain.75 Meanwhile, Padmore, representing the PAF, sought to reinforce the Britain-based pan-Africanists’ connections to an array of Indian and other non-African anticolonial movements and organizations.76 At the same time, Nkrumah and the WANS also coordinated events in protest of colonial policies in territories like Nigeria, British Cameroons, and South African–controlled South West Africa (Namibia).77
From the perspective of the new Labour Government in London, the demands for self-determination and self-government emanating from the Manchester Pan-African Congress and beyond mirrored many of those that had long characterized the Indian political scene. India’s 1947 independence and its violent aftermath further intensified British (and other colonialist) concerns about the African political situation both on the continent and within its metropolitan expatriate communities.78 Among the British, fears of external communist subversion, potential ethnic violence, and instability catalyzed by the actions and rhetoric of a set of assumed Westernized rabble-rousers typified much of the colonial response to Africans’ postwar demands for self-government even as a reform ethos was on the rise within the Colonial Office.79 It was only after events such as the 1948 Accra riots that colonial officials inside and outside the colonies more openly began to heed prominent wartime warnings that only via significant political, institutional, and constitutional reforms could Britain avoid the prospect of both local and international opposition to its rule in Africa.80 Yet, as historian Hakim Adi has argued, Britain’s desire to reassert itself as a world power, along with the challenges of the growing Cold War, thwarted its commitment to reform—at least to the levels demanded in Africa and elsewhere—and forced it to look even more to its colonies as it sought to rebuild itself both politically and economically.81
However, for many of the anticolonial activists who came out of the Manchester congress, any talk of reform simply did not go far enough. To them, it was the colonial system itself that was the problem, and it had to be abolished. It was this perspective that Nkrumah would seek to cultivate in the Gold Coast following his return, the same perspective that would color his own and his government’s reading of Ghana’s and Africa’s place within the international community throughout the 1950s and 1960s. By 1951, as the CPP came to power in the Gold Coast’s first popular elections, the open, strategically attention-seeking activism of the CPP’s infancy appeared to give way to more deliberate and localized interventions and, increasingly, negotiations for self-government and industrial and infrastructural development, as will be examined in the following chapter. However, the sense of immediacy expressed in the postwar demands for self-government in Manchester, parts of the West African press, and the CPP’s founding mission statement continued to make itself felt in discussions of the broader questions concerning the reach and structure of what was assumed to be the necessarily transformative processes of decolonization and nation-building. If, as Richard Wright argued in 1956, decolonization offered the world’s newly independent states an opportunity to reflect on how best to reorganize the “HUMAN RACE,” it was believed in the Gold Coast that soon-to-be Ghanaians had to enter into their own debates over the goals and values engrained in the personal, societal, and international transformations forged through those processes.82 To this end, what the Manchester-inspired anticolonialism provided Nkrumah and the CPP with was a shared transnational language through which