Introduction

       Decolonization and the Pan-African Nation

      Our Independence means much more than merely being free to fly our own flag and to play our own national anthem. It becomes a reality only in a revolutionary framework when we create and sustain a level of economic development capable of ensuring a higher standard of living, proper education, good health and the cultural development of all our citizens.

      —Kwame Nkrumah, undated speech¹

      In the building of a new society on liberation socialist lines, the people must be taught to help themselves.

      —Report by George Padmore, 1952²

      IN MARCH 1957, the relatively small West African country of Ghana—previously known as the Gold Coast—attained its independence. It was the first sub-Saharan colony to emerge from European colonial rule.³ The world into which the young Ghanaian state entered was one of transition. Much as the First World War had done a generation earlier, the Second World War had had a devastating impact on each of Europe’s major powers. In doing so, it threatened an international political order constructed around European imperial power. In Great Britain and France in particular, Europe’s two most dominant imperial powers, the governments of both states struggled in the war’s aftermath to make sense of the changing political world. Burdened with the obligation of paying off their war debts and the need to rebuild, they each scrambled to find ways to balance pressures at home with the maintenance of their massive empires abroad. Furthermore, the war’s end also ushered in the seemingly unchecked rise of the American and Soviet superpowers and of the bipolar world they would spend the greater part of the next half century constructing. Meanwhile, in Africa and Asia, the postwar story has long been one of a rising set of demands for colonial reform and agitation, shifting to a period of nationalist mobilization, followed by independence and, in many cases, postcolonial decline. The narrative that arose in these world regions was therefore one centered on not only the foundation of the twentieth-century postcolonial nation-state, but, just as importantly, its political, economic, and civic demise.

      Ghana, ca. 1960. Produced by the Smith College Spatial Analysis Lab.

      In the decade following Ghana’s independence and beyond, many sought to position the Ghanaian story within this prototypical narrative structure. However, through much of the 1950s and even into the 1960s, few inside or outside the country took such a narrow view of the country’s independence and the experiences of self-rule. Both locally and internationally, Ghanaian independence came to represent more than the simple addition of another nation-state to a rapidly growing postwar international community. Rather, to many, Ghana was to be the harbinger of the next phase in Africa’s political, social, and historical development. For them, the Ghanaian path to self-rule and postcolonial development was often envisioned as the African path. Describing this sentiment in a circa 1957 essay, for instance, the American journalist and novelist Richard Wright portrayed the newly independent Ghana as “a kind of pilot project of the new Africa.”⁴ Ghana’s status as the first postcolonial state in sub-Saharan Africa was of particular importance in cultivating such an image. In breaking the country’s bond to Great Britain, Ghana was perceived as leading the way for the rest of the continent. In doing so, many viewed the new country as unleashing a wave of transformation in Africa that would guide the rest of the continent not only to independence, but, just as importantly, to a seat at the table in the emerging postcolonial international community. This transformation, however, was not simply to be political, but rather was to effect a wholesale political, social, cultural, and economic revolution in Africa. Moreover, it was also to be as much a personal project as it was to be a national or continental one, for at its core was a consciousness-raising enterprise guiding Ghanaians and Africans individually and as a whole toward a shared nation- and continent-building project.

      Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the figure of Kwame Nkrumah as an individual and as a symbol stood at the center of these imaginings in both Ghana and Africa at large. Drawing on his organizing experience in the United States and Great Britain, Nkrumah—starting even before he came to power in 1951—had long celebrated both what he and others viewed as the shared struggle of African liberation and the Gold Coast’s/Ghana’s perceived leadership role in that struggle. In 1957, independence would offer Nkrumah and the Convention People’s Party (CPP) government he led new opportunities for exploring this shared struggle, providing them with the political and institutional space from which to advance their own continentally collaborative model for African anticolonial activism. By early 1958, the exploration of this space had come to include the convening of the first of a series of pan-African