Living with Nkrumahism. Jeffrey S. Ahlman
Читать онлайн книгу.
both revived and redefined the pan-African tradition of the early twentieth century by providing a space in which African politicians, activists, and others could adapt this early pan-African tradition to African postcolonial realities. Likewise, as 1958 came to a close, Ghana would again take the lead in the testing of African postcolonial possibilities as it came to the aid of Sékou Touré’s fledgling republic in weeks-old independent Guinea. Albeit fraught with its own set of contradictions and administrative inconsistencies, the resultant Ghana-Guinea Union represented independent Africa’s first postcolonial, supraterritorial confederation, a confederation whereby each member state was to cede portions of its sovereignty to the greater union. By the end of 1960, the union would also include Modibo Keita’s Mali, while Nkrumah claimed that he had also signed a similar agreement with Patrice Lumumba prior to the Congolese leader’s assassination.5
In Ghana itself, Nkrumah and the CPP positioned decolonization and the mechanisms of postcolonial rule at the center of both a new type of disciplined, socialist, modern, and cosmopolitan citizenry and the “Nkrumahist” ideology constructed to support it. In doing so, they simultaneously, and often contradictorily, looked back to and distanced themselves from a long tradition of anticolonial agitation with deep roots in the Gold Coast and elsewhere, as they turned to a range of party- and state-sponsored institutions in the cultivation of this Nkrumahist ideal. For many Ghanaians living in the heady days of the 1950s and 1960s, this experiment in postcolonial reinvention became a defining part of their political and social lives. Not only were they asked to join—or, in some cases, charged into—the civic initiatives of the Nkrumahist government; but, more importantly, their experiences—as interpreted by the CPP governmental apparatus—became the vehicles through which the CPP and its allies inside and outside Ghana read the successes and shortcomings of the Nkrumah-led postcolonial project on the Ghanaian and continental stage. If, for the CPP and its allies, Ghana was to be Africa’s “city upon a hill” replete with modern cities, rapid industrialization, and a politically and ideologically disciplined citizenry, this book argues that Nkrumahist ideology and the massive changes that followed from it emerged as terrains of negotiation in themselves for those living through this transition. Moreover, the book also argues that these terrains of negotiation were fundamentally tied to the intersections of both the citizenry’s aspirations, ambitions, and frustrations with the promises of life in a new world partly forged by an independent Africa and the often tragic realities of a world the CPP itself understood as still intimately rooted in the legacies of capitalist imperialism. The result was a state-citizenry relationship, premised on hope and ambition, that was often constrained by and filtered through the realities and politics of the postcolonial state itself. It was also a relationship that, over the course of the 1950s and 1960s, became increasingly uneven.
This book is about postcolonial visions and the popular reactions to them. The book thus counters a literature on African decolonization overrun by the pessimistic hindsight of the last four to five decades of African self-rule. The pessimism of this literature is not unique to the Ghanaian case, but instead has framed much of the way that both scholars and the public have engaged with the idea of an independent Africa. In contrast, Living with Nkrumahism celebrates the ambiguity and contradictions surrounding the continent’s transition to self-rule, as it centers the tenuousness of the decolonization process and Africa’s uncertain place in the postcolonial Cold War world in a broader reflection upon, to borrow from Frederick Cooper, the “possibility and constraint” that characterized the first decade of African self-rule.6
In this respect, “Nkrumahism” plays multiple roles in the text. Foremost, it stands as a philosophy of decolonization developed out of a worldview blending ideologies of African socialism, global anti-imperialism, and the promises of African unity—a version of pan-Africanism. However, within this book, Nkrumahism also acts as a historically contingent term, one rooted in a shifting array of contested, experimental, and often contradictory ideas, practices, and policies put forward by Nkrumah and the CPP—a term that therefore belies a consistent and, at times, even clear definition. Historically, it is a term that, throughout the decade and a half of CPP rule, was in constant development and continuous negotiation among individuals and groups, including Nkrumah, local and national party officials, the intellectuals and journalists operating the state-run press, the diverse community of expatriate activists who made Ghana home during the 1950s and 1960s, and even segments of the populace at large, albeit most often filtered through the instruments and discourse of the state.
More than a term, “Nkrumahism” provided a language with which Ghanaians and others could talk through and proactively and reactively address the changing role of Ghana and Africa in the construction of the postcolonial international community. As such, threats of neocolonial subversion, Cold War intervention, alternative nationalisms, and internal dissension were much more than challenges to a particular set of political ambitions in midcentury Ghana within the CPP imagination. They imperiled a worldview. They also reflected the intrinsic diversity of the political, social, cultural, and economic realities in which that worldview operated. Living with Nkrumahism thus offers a historical deconstruction of this particularly vibrant moment in Ghana’s recent past. However, it does so by framing its analysis of Nkrumahism not simply as an intellectual history of Nkrumah’s and the CPP’s thought. Much more importantly, the book argues that Nkrumahism served as the epistemological backdrop for many of the contestations surrounding Ghanaian political and social life in the Nkrumah era. To this end, I take seriously the aims of Nkrumah and the CPP, on their own terms, as well as the interpretations of those aims on the popular level. As a result, in a political sphere in which Nkrumah and the CPP ultimately saw themselves as creating a new world, one in which Africa and the rest of the formerly colonized peoples of the world would have an equal seat at the table in the emerging postwar community of nations, key aspects of everyday Ghanaian life—work, family, community—became subsumed in the transformative and disciplining project of creating this postcolonial world.
NKRUMAH AND THE GOLD COAST
The political and academic fascination with Nkrumah, the Gold Coast, and the CPP began almost as early as Nkrumah’s 1947 return to the colony. Descending upon the colony in the early 1950s, prominent activists and intellectuals, including George Padmore and Richard Wright, joined early Africanist scholars like Thomas Hodgkin, David Apter, and Dennis Austin in the Gold Coast’s towns and cities as they sought to make sense of the uniquely successful message and politics of the CPP.7 Hodgkin, for his part, presented the CPP as a party of firsts, foremost emphasizing the party’s unprecedented ability to mobilize at a national level. As early as 1951 he predicted that the CPP’s success would force both Africans and Europeans to turn their attention to what just half a decade earlier colonial officials had considered to be Britain’s “model colony.”8 By the middle of the decade, Hodgkin would incorporate what he observed in the Gold Coast into his broader study of the sociology of postwar African nationalism.9 Likewise, political scientist and modernization theorist David Apter held the CPP and the Gold Coast up as models of African modernization. In one of the first monograph-length academic studies of the postwar Gold Coast political order, Apter constructed a narrative around the Gold Coast that positioned the decolonizing colony as well along the path toward a form of parliamentary democratic governance. Key for Apter was a reading of the CPP’s electoral and legislative successes that, in his mind, exemplified the Gold Coast’s gradual move away from what he presented as a complex array of ethnic allegiances and institutions, toward the national.10 The result was the emergence of a political and intellectual milieu, where an often externally driven set of narratives were infused within the particularities of the CPP and the Gold Coast political scene. Moreover, this milieu was one that Nkrumah and the CPP rarely felt shy about further cultivating themselves.
Nkrumah’s own story helped advance much of the early fascination with midcentury Gold Coast politics. Born in the far western Gold Coast village of Nkroful, Nkrumah was among the first to attend Accra’s famed Achimota Secondary School upon its opening in the late 1920s, from which he graduated in 1930. Later, he would travel to the United States to study at the historically black Lincoln University and the University of Pennsylvania before leaving for the United Kingdom in 1945. Working in the anticolonial and pan-African circles associated with George Padmore during his time in the United Kingdom, Nkrumah would play an integral