Living with Nkrumahism. Jeffrey S. Ahlman
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David Hilling notes, was the establishment of the city as “Ghana’s foremost industrial region, with an aluminium smelter, steel works, shipyard, oil refinery and a wide range of consumer goods industries (cigarettes, textiles, radios, soap, paints, footwear, motor vehicles, [and] foodstuffs).”44 Meanwhile, in Akosombo Township—Ghana’s other major planned city—the growth rate never rivaled that of its coastal and industrial neighbor, yet the ambitions for the township were no less lofty. The CPP envisioned a city with a population of between thirty and fifty thousand residents replete with such urban conveniences as a cinema, a hospital, an international hotel, and a community center.45 By 1963, though, the township had only one school, which, as historian Stephan Miescher relates, was primarily open only to the administering Volta River Authority’s expatriate staff and senior Ghanaian officials.46 Additional concerns over sanitation, unemployment, stray animals, squatting, and the growth of neighboring slums came to plague not just Akosombo but also Tema in the second half of the twentieth century.47 Regardless, together with Accra, both Tema and Akosombo were to help form what the CPP envisioned as Ghana’s “new Industrial Triangle.”48
With their focus on clean lines and utilitarian spaces, these new and renewed cities were to provide the physical manifestation of the Nkrumahist worldview in the construction of the new Ghana, blending what architect Jane Drew described as “a loose westernized pattern, perhaps more like that of California than Europe,” with the organic and localized ambitions of a burgeoning independent Africa.49 As art historian Janet Hess has argued, for the CPP, the Gold Coast’s urban transformation was to serve as a visible, permanent showcase of the broader social and cultural revolution of the CPP-led nation-building project.50 Ghanaian urban spaces—through their modern amenities, the designs of their buildings, their grids in the case of the planned cities, and their inclusiveness—were thus to emerge not only as icons of an emerging African modernity, but also as the transnational hubs of a burgeoning postcolonial African cosmopolitanism. These cities were very much ideological projects. As such, they were to be the sites of Ghanaian pan-Africanism, welcoming and catering to everyone from ethnically and religiously diverse groups of Ghanaians and other Africans to international dignitaries, tourists, activists, and expatriates. It was in these settings that Ghanaians and others were to create, as described by Nate Plageman, the “new shared experiences of belonging” required for independence.51
FIGURE 2.1. Marching with the times. Source: Evening News, 6 March 1957.
NKRUMAHIST MODERNIZATION AND ITS DISCONTENTS
The rising economic fortunes of the colony during the 1950s helped drive the CPP’s massive investment in educational and infrastructural development. What in the 1940s had been an economy constrained by stagnating wages and runaway inflation had, by the mid-1950s, become one reinvigorated by skyrocketing cocoa prices, which in turn injected unprecedented levels of new revenue into the late-colonial economy. By the 1954–55 fiscal year, for instance, the government-run Cocoa Marketing Board, which oversaw the colony’s cocoa sales, enjoyed export proceeds that had nearly doubled their 1947–48 levels, topping out at £G77.5 million.52 Additional contributions to the Gold Coast coffers came from the colony’s mining industry. From the 1950–51 to the 1951–52 fiscal year alone, the colony’s mining exports increased by nearly £6.5 million to a total value of £23 million.53 Moreover, as historian Robert Tignor points out, Gold Coasters themselves—who enjoyed a per capita income double that of their Nigerian counterparts—were among the wealthiest Africans on the continent.54 As a result, by the early 1950s many inside and outside of Africa had begun to argue that nowhere on the continent was there a better testing ground for the prospects of African modernization than in the Gold Coast. More importantly, such arguments, as part of the flourishing anticolonial politics of the period, not only had a receptive audience among the various stakeholders on the colony’s political scene, they also directly connected a still nascent Nkrumahist worldview to a broader transnational discourse of large-scale development, with strands connecting Afro-Asian anticolonialism, American and Soviet Cold War interests, United Nations planning schemes, and imperial decolonization politics.55 As such, for Nkrumah and many within the CPP, large-scale industrial development stood at the core of the postcolonial society they envisioned, providing the bedrock upon which all else was to be built.
However, even as the CPP-led government enjoyed this period of economic growth, concerns over the increasingly central role of foreign capital and technical expertise in the Gold Coast’s modernization agenda increasingly worked their way into segments of the party infrastructure and especially Nkrumah’s cadre of expatriate advisors. In the case of Tema, for instance, George Padmore, who had recently completed a short trip to the Gold Coast, wrote to Nkrumah in November 1951 in order to strongly caution him against putting too much faith in the British firm—Halcrow and Partners—commissioned to advance the harbor project. In doing so, Padmore resurrected the specters of the multilayered states of political and economic dependency that had marked the Gold Coast’s colonial history and, just as importantly, of the postwar economic struggles and imperial neglect for their basic needs (namely in terms of housing and water) that many Gold Coasters believed had caused them hardship. Padmore thus counseled the CPP leader that his immediate attention foremost should be in resolving these issues before embarking upon the potentially foolhardy plan to construct—via British (imperialist) assistance—something as ambitious as an industrial harbor.56 In another instance, Padmore emphasized the need for an indigenous Gold Coast production source of its own for the colony’s urban development, namely in terms of the construction and maintenance of the colony’s many new schools, dispensaries, post offices, community centers, and housing options. The “real opposition” to the CPP, Padmore advised a Nkrumah still recovering from the colony’s recent electoral battles was “not the Danquahs, who are helpless.” Rather, he proclaimed, it was “the white officials,” who he believed were constantly devising new ways to continue to exert their will on the decolonizing colony.57
The political realities that Nkrumah and the CPP government faced in the late-colonial Gold Coast were, however, much more complicated than the abstractions outlined by Padmore suggested. In practical terms, the Gold Coast simply did not have the economic and technical resources necessary to independently pursue the government’s grandiose development agenda. Just in terms of labor, the government’s development plans required a complicated mix of skilled and unskilled labor to undertake the construction phase of any particular project. Even before construction began, though, the government also required the labor, know-how, and resources of specialized architectural and engineering firms to research and design the project. No such firms with the capabilities of working at the scale demanded by the CPP’s development projects existed in the Gold Coast.58 Additionally, the CPP had to negotiate its own tenuous position within the context of the late-colonial political system. As a radical, African-led government ultimately operating within the British-run colonial state, both Nkrumah and the CPP had to balance their own anticolonial desires with their need to be seen as legitimate and responsible political actors by a colonial apparatus that, prior to the CPP’s electoral victory, had—among other things—portrayed the Nkrumah-led party as an “extreme Nationalist group” engaged in acts of “lawlessness.”59 Even more significantly, the CPP had to face a populace with often widely divergent ideas of what Nkrumahist modernization could and should mean for them, especially when its transformations encroached upon their daily lives and belief systems.
It was in Tema where the CPP faced its first major challenge to its modernization agenda following the CPP government’s proposal to relocate the current fishing town to make way for the new harbor and industrial city. As noted earlier, the Tema project was intended to be a cornerstone of the CPP’s developmentalist agenda, only rivalled by the nearly contemporaneous Volta River Project. From the perspective of the CPP, the result of the project was not simply to be the material construction of a harbor and city. It was also to embody the procedural nature of the decolonization process itself for the emergent country. At one level, it was to represent one of the colony’s pathways toward the economic self-determination demanded by Nkrumahist