Living with Nkrumahism. Jeffrey S. Ahlman
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question that arose in the mid-twentieth century was that of what decolonization and, by extension, independence was to look like both locally and globally beyond the actual granting of self-rule. Among those who would begin to theorize the meaning of decolonization in the 1950s, decolonization and independence had to be understood not as singular events, but rather as a set of processes aimed at renegotiating the colonized’s place in the world. For some, it even included a reorientation of the colonized individual him- or herself. It was in this vein that Frantz Fanon argued in 1961 that “decolonization is the veritable creation of new men.”25 The transformation implicit in decolonization, at least according to Fanon, was as much ontological as political. It was to be a restorative process that, through the actions and mobilization of the colonized, erased the realities and legacies of the colonial situation and the epistemic and systematic violence, exploitation, and racism embedded within them. The result was envisioned to be the birth of a new civilization freed from the legacies of colonial rule and capitalist extraction; it was also to be a civilization bound to the will of decolonization’s new social order.26
Historians of decolonization have tended to shy away from the Manichean historical and theoretical models put forward by figures like Fanon.27 However, throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s, Fanon was not alone in propagating such a vision of decolonization. Neither was Nkrumah, who, not entirely dissimilar from Fanon, advocated for a theory of decolonization rooted in a dialectic of destruction and rebirth.28 Such attempts to theorize the process of decolonization in turn reoriented discussions around African anticolonialism away from perspectives that characterized independence as the imagined end result of decolonization. What was put forward instead by the likes of Nkrumah, Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, and others was a set of anticolonial imaginings that did not simply seek to replace a generically conceived colonial infrastructure with an African alternative. Much more significantly, they each sought to emphasize the emergent—incomplete, yet transforming—nature of the liberated, decolonized individual and society. For those with a state-centered orientation like Nkrumah, mass institutions like the CPP thus carried a special responsibility that extended beyond that of the organization of the populace. For, just as fundamentally, they also had the additional duty of creating the political, social, economic, and cultural conditions necessary for bringing about the process of collective growth, emancipation, and renaissance at the envisioned root of the decolonizing process. At least in Ghana, such a framework for thinking about decolonization would come to have wide-reaching effects on the lived experiences of many of the country’s peoples over the course of the first decade of self-rule.
The extended timeframe between the CPP’s 1951 electoral victory and Ghana’s 1957 independence in many ways ensured the development of a procedural notion of decolonization within the Gold Coast/Ghana and particularly in the CPP. As the CPP entered into official negotiations with the British about the transfer of power to an independent Ghana in the early 1950s, the Nkrumah-led party took to its press and public meetings in its attempts to reframe its seemingly straightforward ultimatum of “self-government now” as more than a political demand. Instead, self-government became a first step in an envisioned civic project that, at its essence, required a new type of citizen. Through such a formulation, the CPP created for itself an obligation to bring about the conditions not only for the establishment of the independent country, but, more importantly, for that country’s ability to grow and prosper in a highly competitive and often uncertain international environment. At one level, this required a commitment to such infrastructural projects as the rise of new planned cities, hydroelectric power, industrialized manufacturing, advanced communication and transportation systems, social welfare projects, and the wide-ranging extension of government-sponsored social services, most notably in education and healthcare. Each of these, the CPP insisted, was essential to the operation of a modern, independent country. Just as importantly, though, the party would argue, the citizenry itself had to be reoriented, if not modernized, so as to meet the assumed realities of the postwar world. Here, the labor movement, the nature of work itself, family and gender relations, youth culture, ethnicities, and relationships between urban and rural life, among others, all came under the purview of the CPP’s long view of decolonization. At the same time, these political and social phenomena also tended to reflect longstanding traditions of political and economic contestation within the Gold Coast. As a result, the CPP found it necessary to consistently return to and redraft as its own everything from the colony’s vibrant history of anticolonial and nationalist agitation to the colonial government’s own developmentalist ideology and traditions, to the eclectic compilation of ideas, networks, and movements Nkrumah himself had sought to connect to during his decade-plus abroad.
The CPP’s civically focused decolonization project only intensified as the party and government consolidated their power and sought to stem off an array of opposition movements over the course of the 1950s. Independence forced a slight shift in the focus of the CPP’s decolonization project and in its vision of decolonization, as it highlighted an independent Ghana’s vulnerability on the international stage. Whereas prior to 1957 the concern was how best to bring together the colony’s diverse peoples and constituencies in the shared political and social project of achieving self-government, the postindependence project was one of acceleration and adaptation to what were increasingly perceived as the dangers—internal and external—of the postcolonial condition. Here, fears of political disorder and subterfuge, neocolonial intervention in the activities of the state, and extranational allegiances threatened to cast a pall over the hopes and ambitions embodied in the sense of new beginnings—nationally and continentally—ushered in with Ghana’s independence. Nkrumah and the CPP in turn presented it as their obligation to protect Ghana and, by extension, Africa from these challenges. For them, the issue was about more than just Ghana’s or Africa’s political independence. The real concern was a potential backslide into what they perceived to be a colonial mentality that would have ripple effects on deeper issues of African social, economic, and cultural independence.
Key to this framing of both Ghana’s and Africa’s decolonization was an emphasis on the emergent or burgeoning nature of Ghana as a country and Africa as a continent. A necessary optimism was embedded in this idea of emergence. Furthermore, for many inside and outside of Africa, this view of an emergent continent in the 1950s and 1960s was not a question; as James Ferguson has suggested, it was an expectation.29 What needed sorting out, then, as Jean Allman later noted in her analysis of Ghanaian antinuclear activism, were the details. As Allman presents the expectations of the period, at the time, they did not represent the “pipe dream” they seem to do today or even did by the end of the 1960s. Rather, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, they appeared to many as simply “a plan just shy of a blueprint.”30 As Allman’s analysis illustrates, such a framework for thinking about the ambitions of the decolonization moment provides a lens through which to map the histories of Ghanaian pan-African and anti-imperial politics onto the larger landscape of transnational anticolonial and anti-imperial histories that dot the broader global historiographical terrain—many of which only pay lip service to African experiences and perspectives. Even more importantly, such a method for thinking through Africa’s decolonization opens the space through which we can begin to historicize alternative African postcolonial futures. As Allman, Meredith Terretta, Kevin Gaines, Klaas van Walraven, and others have shown, it was this sense of opportunity and innovation that, throughout the 1950s and into much of the early 1960s, drew activists, freedom fighters, journalists, and the curious, among others, to the country.31 Figures including Fanon, who had served as the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale’s ambassador to Ghana until his cancer diagnosis in 1961, George Padmore, Richard Wright, Robert Mugabe, W. E. B. Du Bois, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Patrice Lumumba, Che Guevara, Malcolm X, Félix Moumié, and many others, all, at various times, converged upon the country during the period.32 Furthermore, many of them—none more important ideologically than Padmore—played a key role in helping to shape the policies and ideological agenda of the CPP both continentally and within Ghana itself.
As Padmore would argue in his published works on the Gold Coast and in his communications with Nkrumah and others in the CPP, Ghana’s ultimate success depended upon its ability to construct a modern society independent of European imperial and capitalist subversion. For Padmore in the 1950s, this ultimately entailed a model of pan-Africanism that blended “black nationalism plus socialism.”33