single Ghanaian has been subject to as much praise or vilification as Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first prime minister and president. Differing versions of Nkrumah’s legacy—visionary anticolonial icon, father of Pan-Africanism, paranoid African president, authoritarian leader—form a tangled and volatile bulk in the public sphere. From his own ideological pragmatism to the authoritarian inheritance of the British colonial state and the Cold War pressure chamber, Kwame Nkrumah’s transformation from the man deemed osagyefo, or “redeemer” in the Akan Twi language, to his pyrotechnic political demise in Ghana’s first coup d’état in 1966, is a foundational tragedy story in modern African politics.36
Pose the following question to any group of Ghanaians—did Kwame Nkrumah’s CPP government abuse peoples’ human rights?—and a volatile and protracted debate will ensue. The question is provocative because it calls for a moral assessment of the leadership of one of Africa’s most imposing thinkers, theorists, and diplomats.37 A simple label (abuser or respecter of human rights) is ill-fitting for a leader who both articulated the value of African self-determination and established himself as the head of a one-party state in which “of dissensus there was little evidence.”38 In 2012, a Ghanaian writer called for a “presidential commission involving intellectuals” who would “write the history of Dr. Nkrumah for an objective and non-partisan view.”39 Little did the writer know that such a history has already been produced. This nonpartisan accounting of Nkrumah’s legacy was not articulated by a group of esteemed professional historians; it was curated by Ghanaian citizens themselves within the national reconciliation process.
The NRC archive’s stories and petitions challenge the narrative of Kwame Nkrumah as either demagogue or savior. Ghanaians told stories establishing Nkrumah as the architect of the 1958 Preventive Detention Act (PDA), a law that empowered Ghana’s government to detain citizens preemptively and without trial. Nkrumah’s government defended preventive detention as a policy to protect the sovereignty of a lone independent nation surrounded by European colonies and in the midst of global Cold War. Over the course of eight years, hundreds of Ghanaians were swept into jail without recourse. In the NRC, Ghanaians remembered the PDA as an act of political violence; this was a policy that effectively incarcerated large numbers of citizens who, for diverse reasons, had made themselves enemies of local, regional, or national branches of the CPP government.
Indeed, there were persons like Kwablah Darquah, who participated in national reconciliation expressly to describe how people swept into prison as young men emerged years later, scarred, disillusioned, and bitter. “My being here today is to inform … about what the PDA did to a lot of able-bodied young Ghanaians and also to educate the public about the hardship we underwent.”40 Emmanuel France, arrested in 1958, explained that the “PDA had no moral roots,” that “it was just passed as a tool to turn Ghana into a one-party state.”41 Detaining people extrajudicially and indefinitely, France claimed, licensed further atrocity. There were “prison officers [who] maltreated and tormented the detainees far beyond what they could bear,” and proud Ghanaians emerged from cells damaged, plagued by “physical disability [and] emotional and psychological sores.”42 Preventing detention, many NRC participants explained, was a policy easily hijacked by those who would prosecute petty and local conflicts using state power. Petitioner Nicholas Dompreh blamed his detention on a physical altercation between himself and Kwamina Otoo, a local Akim Oda man. When Dompreh was later arrested by police, supposedly for “hurling insults at Kwame Nkrumah,” he insisted that Otoo, his rival, used the cover of the PDA to engineer his arrest.43
The violence of preventive detention is not the only image of the CPP years lodged in the NRC records. Ghanaians injured by acts of terrorism also came forward to share nostalgia-tinged stories about the days when the government cared enough about Ghanaians to provide health care for those in need. Kwame Nkrumah was “profoundly motivated by an ideological vision of radical socioeconomic development;” he recognized that human development was the necessary precondition for economic growth.44 This was part of the message of Joseph Allen Blankson, whose father was critically injured during a 1962 bomb blast. At the time, the elder Blankson was a music teacher for the Young Pioneers, a youth organization associated with Nkrumah’s CPP government. While leading a public march, a bomb exploded and Blankson was hospitalized. After he lost one of his legs, the CPP government made his health a priority and “catered to” his needs, even sending him abroad to Britain to be fitted for a prosthesis.45 With the demise of Kwame Nkrumah’s government in 1966, the health of the elder Blankson also declined. Petitions like these reveal that there are those who mourned the end of the Nkrumah era as the passing of a vision of government in which human welfare was central to the work of political independence.
Although the petition of Joseph Allen Blankson focuses on the caretaking activities of the CPP government, it also illuminates the context in which Kwame Nkrumah’s PDA was launched. This was a time of existential and physical threats to Ghanaian sovereignty. Kwame Nkrumah’s effort to remain politically nonaligned amid the Cold War’s polarization had created powerful enemies. As public places became sites of bombings and Nkrumah responded with increasingly draconian measures, Ghana’s dissidents drew on the Cold War’s inflammatory language to discredit Nkrumah’s leadership. These appeals were not lost on the US government, which began to fear that Nkrumah had taken an “ugly lurch to the left,” and expended resources to ensure that Ghana would not be “lost” to global communism.46 By February 1966, Nkrumah’s fears had become a reality: a coalition of Ghanaian police and army officials calling themselves the National Liberation Council (NLC) and acting with the support of the US Central Intelligence Agency seized power. A month after the takeover, Joseph Ankrah, one of the leaders of the NLC, wrote a letter to President Lyndon Johnson and spoke of Nkrumah as a menace to human rights and Ghana as one the USA’s proxy states. “The Army and the Police Services were compelled to intervene to stem the tide of a growing communist menace in Ghana,” Ankrah wrote. “We watched with dismay the destruction of our civil liberties. The cherished rights of the individual were contemptuously disregarded…. You can depend on me, my Government and the people of Ghana to support your democratic principles and your way of life,” Ankrah wrote.47 On both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, those who justified this interruption of Ghana’s politics depended on images of Nkrumah as a violator of human rights, and particularly the history of the PDA, to make their case.
1966–1969
On February 24, 1966, when the NLC seized control of Ghana’s government, the leadership was adamant about “liberating” the country from the grip of an authoritarian dictator. By decree, this army and police junta dismissed the president, dissolved the National Assembly (parliament), and shuffled the judiciary.48 Just like that, Ghana embarked upon a cycle of military interventionism, becoming the prototype for what would come to be called an “endemic problem … in African political life.49 Scholarly assessments of human rights in this era tend to favorably compare the NLC years to the preceding Nkrumah government and praise the NLC for returning Ghana to civilian rule.50 Not so the NRC archive, which illuminates the violence of the 1966 regime change and the subsequent years. Alongside the petitions of Ghanaians who mourned the end of the Nkrumah state’s caretaking practice and those who confirmed the existential threats to Ghana’s sovereignty, there was also a raft of petitions showing that Kwame Nkrumah’s government was not singular in using extrajudicial detention as a weapon against political dissent. In the citizen accounting, the PDA was not exceptional; rather, it was part of a broader history in which a succession of diverse governments used extrajudicial detention to express authority.
One of the first acts of the NLC was to release hundreds of Ghanaians detained under the PDA. At the same time, the NLC instituted new “protective custody” policies that detained the functionaries and attachés of the former government. Again, Ghanaians were sent to cells without judicial review, clear sentencing periods, or formal processes of recourse. As the targets of Nkrumah’s CPP were released from detention, people associated with Nkrumah’s CPP were shepherded into the newly emptied jail
