Living with Nkrumahism. Jeffrey S. Ahlman
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historian Jean Allman has argued that many of these movements could even be read as nationalisms unto themselves.8 However, even more may be seen as going on within these movements when they are juxtaposed with the CPP’s developing Nkrumahist worldview. Not only did they compete with the dominant visions for the future put forward by the CPP, but they also often embedded within their own historically and culturally specific visions divergent strands of nationalism, internationalism, and modernization that at times resembled Nkrumahism, yet adapted to local realities. In this respect, the debates and often bitter and violent conflicts that emerged in the Gold Coast politics of the 1950s both challenged the CPP’s increasingly centralized vision of Ghana’s postcolonial future and represented a political eclecticism that, during the first decade of self-rule, an ever more orthodox Nkrumahism would long struggle to weed out.
MODERNIZATION AND PRE-INDEPENDENCE NKRUMAHIST COSMOPOLITANISM
From its founding, the CPP’s agenda for the Gold Coast/Ghana was by definition ambitious. As Nkrumah detailed in his 1947 pamphlet Towards Colonial Freedom, he believed that, for any colonial territory, self-government was only part of the equation. At most, it opened the path for the more fundamental emancipation that would come with economic liberation and the quest for a form of self-determination that freed the colonized from the grips of capitalist imperialism. At an even more foundational level for a party still in formation, the emotion embedded within the call for self-government offered an unprecedented tool for mobilization. For the more measured politicians of the UGCC and its successor parties in the early 1950s, the CPP’s appeals to emotion regularly proved a source of substantial frustration.9 Nkrumah and the CPP, however, saw strength in their ability to envelop themselves in the anger, enthusiasm, and anticipation of the populace as they employed the message of self-government in the task of political organization. For them, the language of self-government became a mechanism through which to channel the party’s ambitions through an array of popular aspirations and frustrations connected to Gold Coasters’ everyday struggles. In the party press as well as in rallies, meetings, and other political and social events, the CPP in turn peppered its abstract anticolonial rhetoric with reflections on the daily plights of Gold Coasters seeking such forms of relief as access to schooling, employment, and pathways out of an economic reality defined by stagnating wages and hyperinflation.10
Not dissimilar to the model employed by the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA) in Guinea, the CPP of the late 1940s and early 1950s sought to create an overarching multiethnic and socially diverse umbrella under which to organize the populace.11 Again, as with the Guinean RDA and, in East Africa, the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), women and especially market women stood at the heart of the CPP’s mass support, transmitting the party’s message via song, dance, dress, and other popular and socially democratic means of communication.12 The party, for its part, responded in kind with regular coverage in its rallies and press of issues it deemed of particular concern to women. In doing so, its women writers, especially, used the party press to gin up enthusiasm for the party around issues including market struggles, education and employment for women, and the state and quality of women’s activism within the party infrastructure.13 Meanwhile, female-centered spaces like the markets allowed for the further rapid spread of the party’s message. Reflecting back on the early years of the CPP in his Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution (1977), C. L. R. James thus recalled not simply the centrality of women in the CPP’s mobilizing efforts, but, more importantly, the power they held. “The market,” the Trinidadian recounted, “was a great centre of gossip, of news and of discussion. Where in many undeveloped communities the women are a drag upon their menfolk, these women, although to a large extent illiterate, were a dynamic element in the population, active, well-informed, acute, and always at the very centre of events.” To the Marxist James, they, not the educated of the party, drove the CPP’s agenda. As a result, he matter-of-factly asserted, “In the struggle for independence one market-woman in Accra, and there were fifteen thousand of them, was worth any dozen Achimota graduates”—of which Nkrumah was one.14
Joining the colony’s women in the CPP were similarly significant groups of youth, farmers, and workers. As with M. N. Tetteh, who joined the Nkrumahist wing of the UGCC in 1948 and later the CPP, the Gold Coast’s young people tended to be attracted to the excitement surrounding the new party. In time, they began their own deliberations on what the CPP and its message meant and promised in terms of the prospects for their own futures. As with other constituencies, this included schooling and employment following their education as well as personal and social independence from their elders. Others like Kofi Duku—who, after leaving school in the late 1940s, had bounced from one location to another in the western and central Gold Coast before settling in Accra—spoke in an interview of the sense of community and belonging that the party provided him amidst the din of the postwar colony.15 Meanwhile, farmers turned to the CPP out of opposition to many of the colonial government’s agricultural policies. For cocoa farmers specifically, the onslaught of swollen shoot disease—a fatal virus infecting cocoa trees—in the colony’s oldest cocoa-growing regions, followed by the government’s decision to cut down blighted trees, threatened the livelihood of thousands.16 The CPP, for its part, with its vocal opposition to the government’s forced eradication campaign, appeared to be a means by which the affected farmers as well as those who feared the disease’s spread could gain a voice on the national stage. As a result, historian Francis Danquah notes, farmers’ groups had by late 1950 begun sponsoring CPP candidates in preparation for the 1951 election.17
In seeking to address the concerns of nearly all of its major constituencies, the CPP positioned the colonial government as unable and unwilling to meet its obligations to its subject population. Indirect rule and similar methods of governance, the party contended, were specifically designed to leave Gold Coasters, as with other colonial peoples, in a state of dependence and unprepared for the modern world.18 The day-to-day mission of the CPP, then, at least from the perspective of the party’s local emissaries, was to establish the social and institutional framework necessary to both meet the needs and expectations of its varying constituencies and prepare these constituencies with the tools required of a modern society. When, for instance, a group of secondary school students in Cape Coast were expelled for striking in opposition to the 1948 arrest of Nkrumah and other UGCC leaders, the Nkrumahist wing of the UGCC began establishing a set of schools of its own, catering to the colony’s politically active youth. The first of these schools opened in Cape Coast in July 1948. Over the next several years, the Nkrumahist wing—over the objections of the UGCC’s broader leadership—and later the CPP would found one to two dozen similar institutions throughout the southern Gold Coast.19
For the CPP, education served both an ideological and a practical purpose. No other issue more fundamentally represented the hopes and ambitions of both the individual and the nation as a whole than education. To the CPP, though, colonial education was a sphere deeply fraught with contradiction. As articulated in 1949 by the Nkrumah-founded Accra Evening News, it was where “you see Imperialism almost at its worst.” Hailing access to schools as “the greatest liberating force,” the newspaper chastised the colonial government for what it considered to be the rationing of education. The most notable method by which this was done was through the imposition of an array of school fees on students and their families so that only a limited number of students could afford to attend. Relatedly, the Evening News also questioned the government’s decision not to make schooling compulsory for all of the Gold Coast’s children, especially at the primary level. It was these types of decisions, the newspaper insisted, that explained a literacy rate in the colony of only ten percent, and a situation where both parents and children were desperate for greater access to schooling at all levels. “Parents want to send their children to school,” the Evening News argued, “but cannot get admission for them. Children cry to go to school but cry in vain, for there is no accommodation for them. In the face of this the Education Department is absolutely helpless and hopeless in trying to cope with the position. It draws up a Ten Year Educational Development Plan and the whole thing is a complete washout.”20
Following the CPP’s initial electoral victory, the new government thus catapulted education to the top of its legislative agenda, announcing in early 1951 its plans for