those involved in state- and party-run organizations like the Builders Brigade (later, Workers Brigade) and the Ghana Young Pioneers, emphasizes the immediate postcolonial period as one of internal political construction and international redefinition and experimentation. Symbolizing the blank slate of decolonization’s “new men,” the country’s young men, women, and children embodied the hope, aspirations, and presumed malleability of the nation. As a result, the chapter shows how organizations like the Brigade and the Young Pioneers placed youth at the center of a CPP-led process of national inculcation in the values and ideals of an envisioned pan-African and socialist citizenry constructed around an ethics of discipline, order, and civic activism. The chapter also reveals the tensions and arenas of contestation that surrounded these organizations as they set off waves of popular unease—some of which became subjects of public debate, while others (out of individuals’ fears of detention) did not—over the state’s role in everything from the attempt to alter Ghanaian familial and generational relations to the regimentation and perceived militarization of Ghanaian youth.
Chapters 4 and 5 focus on themes of work, productivity, and service to the nation, each key to the Nkrumahist worldview. Chapter 4 builds upon the previous chapter’s discussion of an idealized pan-African and socialist citizenry through a social and cultural dissection of the politics of “work” in Nkrumah-era Ghana. Linked to issues of discipline, order, and productivity was to be a national conception of work tied to the collective good. In contrast to being a mechanism for personal economic gain and accumulation, work emerged as a nexus point of moral and civic discourse defined through obligations of sacrifice to the nation and the concomitant process of consciousness-building that was to follow these sacrifices. As presented within the context of party ideology, socialist work and production were thus to be a liberating experience, freeing the Ghanaian (and African) worker from real and imagined subjugation to the global capitalist system, even as the CPP used the idiom of socialist work to weaken and ultimately co-opt the country’s previously vibrant labor movement. The result was a political and social environment surrounding work, production, and development that not only increasingly demanded more from the country’s workforce, but which eventually, through many Ghanaian workers’ reactions to it, forced the CPP into reframing its relationship with the broader populace in the early 1960s.
Similar themes of sacrifice and devotion to the nation, along with those of secrecy and subversion, intersect in chapter 5. Specifically, this chapter presents an international history of Ghanaian readings of the prospects of African decolonization during and after the so-called “Year of Africa,” alongside an analysis of the institutional labor and gender politics of a specific Nkrumah-era state institution: the Bureau of African Affairs. No Ghanaian institution had a greater role in the pursuit of African liberation than the Bureau, as it bore the responsibility of collecting, interpreting, and disseminating to audiences at home and abroad news and intelligence on the advancement of the Nkrumahist revolution. As a workplace, though, the Bureau was also the locus for an evolving set of institutional norms, assumptions, and, not surprisingly, gender politics. The chapter thus interrogates the interactions between the exceptional and the banal in the day-to-day work lives of the Bureau’s employees, and particularly its female employees—highlighting the ways in which they sought to navigate their positions and interests as employees in relation to the changing institutional and political realities of employment in one of the most highly politicized institutions of the Nkrumahist state. The chapter in turn brings to the fore the growing gender, generational, and class anxieties that, by the early and mid-1960s, were often associated with the perceived stalling of the Nkrumahist revolution at home and abroad.
Issues of belonging, uncertainty, and attempted political and community self-redefinition frame chapter 6 as it unpacks the political and institutional construction of the one-party state. At the heart of the chapter are the ways in which Ghanaians sought to renegotiate their relationships with this emergent one-party state. Intellectually and structurally, the one-party state was a multifaceted and often volatile entity demarcating political, social, and economic life in the country. For Ghanaians, the political and institutional volatility that surrounded the country’s one-party politics, and, more importantly, the mechanisms for policing the country’s revolutionary purity and stability (e.g., political detention), led to the rise of an eclectic array of tools for popular self-redefinition and self-preservation. These included activities ranging from petitioning for pay raises and promotions in the language of Nkrumahism, to disengagement from politics, to even supposed displays of state and party loyalty that included reporting on one’s neighbors and others. Foremost, the chapter argues that these activities were relationship-building exercises. As such, they were methods of self-preservation and promotion through which certain Ghanaians sought out—often with very troubling effects—new ways to connect to (or, for others, disentangle themselves from) a postcolonial state and ideology that, by the eve of the 1966 coup overthrowing Nkrumah and the CPP, had, for many, become distant and alien shadows of the populist, mass movement they claimed to embody.
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The World of Kwame Nkrumah
Pan-Africanism, Empire, and the Gold Coast in Global Perspective
Many of us fail to understand that a war cannot be waged for democracy which has as its goal a return to imperialism. It is our warning, that if after victory, imperialism and colonialism should be restored, we will be sowing the seed not only for another war, but for the greatest revolution the world has ever seen.
—Kwame Nkrumah, “Education and Nationalism in Africa,” 19431
Brother, if any people need peace, it is Asians and Africans, as only a peaceful world will enable them to develop their countries and taste some of the good things of life which the West have long enjoyed.
—George Padmore to Kwame Nkrumah, 19572
AT MIDNIGHT on 6 March 1957, Kwame Nkrumah stood on a stage in Accra’s Old Polo Grounds to usher in the birth of the new, independent Ghana and to announce his vision for the new nation. “Today, from now on,” he proclaimed, “there is a new African in the world and that new African is ready to fight his own battle and show that after all the black man is capable of managing his own affairs. We are going to demonstrate to the world, to the other nations, young as we are, that we are prepared to lay our own foundation.” He then continued his short celebratory speech with an all-encompassing call to action in the struggle for African self-determination: “We have done with the battle and we again re-dedicate ourselves in the struggle to emancipate other countries in Africa, for,” he emphasized, “our independence is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of the African continent.”3
Nkrumah’s independence-day pronouncement connecting Ghana’s liberation to that of the rest of the continent remains one of the most famous declarations of Africa’s decolonization-era history. It ought to be read, though, on multiple levels—each of which reflects the intersecting array of audiences, networks, and histories of African and international anticolonialism into which the Ghanaian prime minister aimed to embed the young West African state. At one level, Nkrumah was returning to the roots of his own pan-African activism, cultivated under the tutelage of the Trinidadian pan-Africanist George Padmore in London and Manchester. In doing so, he aimed to adapt this largely diasporic tradition to the challenges facing what he and others predicted would become a rapidly decolonizing continent. At another, Nkrumah was also harkening back to the Gold Coast’s own political and intellectual tradition of anticolonial agitation. Rarely confining itself to the territorial boundaries of the colony, the political vision of the Gold Coast intellectuals and activists of the early twentieth century had
