state of dependency into one of political and economic emancipation. Meanwhile, politically, Nkrumah used the two years between the end of the 1945 Manchester congress and his December 1947 return to the Gold Coast as a period of consolidation, building and solidifying his inner circle. Some members of this group—most notably Kojo Botsio, who would later serve as general secretary of the CPP and, over the course of the 1950s and 1960s, hold a number of different ministerial posts in Nkrumah’s cabinet—would remain aligned with the Ghanaian president until the 1966 coup.74 Nkrumah also spent much of his last two years abroad establishing connections with a range of leftist and West African groups in the United Kingdom, among them the WASU, the League of Coloured Peoples, and individuals associated with the Communist Party of Great Britain.75 Meanwhile, Padmore, representing the PAF, sought to reinforce the Britain-based pan-Africanists’ connections to an array of Indian and other non-African anticolonial movements and organizations.76 At the same time, Nkrumah and the WANS also coordinated events in protest of colonial policies in territories like Nigeria, British Cameroons, and South African–controlled South West Africa (Namibia).77
From the perspective of the new Labour Government in London, the demands for self-determination and self-government emanating from the Manchester Pan-African Congress and beyond mirrored many of those that had long characterized the Indian political scene. India’s 1947 independence and its violent aftermath further intensified British (and other colonialist) concerns about the African political situation both on the continent and within its metropolitan expatriate communities.78 Among the British, fears of external communist subversion, potential ethnic violence, and instability catalyzed by the actions and rhetoric of a set of assumed Westernized rabble-rousers typified much of the colonial response to Africans’ postwar demands for self-government even as a reform ethos was on the rise within the Colonial Office.79 It was only after events such as the 1948 Accra riots that colonial officials inside and outside the colonies more openly began to heed prominent wartime warnings that only via significant political, institutional, and constitutional reforms could Britain avoid the prospect of both local and international opposition to its rule in Africa.80 Yet, as historian Hakim Adi has argued, Britain’s desire to reassert itself as a world power, along with the challenges of the growing Cold War, thwarted its commitment to reform—at least to the levels demanded in Africa and elsewhere—and forced it to look even more to its colonies as it sought to rebuild itself both politically and economically.81
However, for many of the anticolonial activists who came out of the Manchester congress, any talk of reform simply did not go far enough. To them, it was the colonial system itself that was the problem, and it had to be abolished. It was this perspective that Nkrumah would seek to cultivate in the Gold Coast following his return, the same perspective that would color his own and his government’s reading of Ghana’s and Africa’s place within the international community throughout the 1950s and 1960s. By 1951, as the CPP came to power in the Gold Coast’s first popular elections, the open, strategically attention-seeking activism of the CPP’s infancy appeared to give way to more deliberate and localized interventions and, increasingly, negotiations for self-government and industrial and infrastructural development, as will be examined in the following chapter. However, the sense of immediacy expressed in the postwar demands for self-government in Manchester, parts of the West African press, and the CPP’s founding mission statement continued to make itself felt in discussions of the broader questions concerning the reach and structure of what was assumed to be the necessarily transformative processes of decolonization and nation-building. If, as Richard Wright argued in 1956, decolonization offered the world’s newly independent states an opportunity to reflect on how best to reorganize the “HUMAN RACE,” it was believed in the Gold Coast that soon-to-be Ghanaians had to enter into their own debates over the goals and values engrained in the personal, societal, and international transformations forged through those processes.82 To this end, what the Manchester-inspired anticolonialism provided Nkrumah and the CPP with was a shared transnational language through which to challenge a world order founded upon the intersections of European liberalism and capitalist imperialism, and with which to also begin the process of imagining an alternative to that world order.
. . .
The world Kwame Nkrumah came of age in during the first decades of the twentieth century was ultimately one in which the colonial project of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was maturing into the international political system that would mark the world order of the first half of the twentieth century. However, from its earliest days, this was a world order that would be contested on multiple fronts within Africa and elsewhere. The wide variety of political and intellectual networks—colonial, metropolitan, and diasporic—that came to shape this opposition to colonial rule emerged as the political and intellectual training ground for the young Nkrumah. Through his readings, interactions, and at times direct participation in the interwar period’s anticolonial circles, Nkrumah came to adapt the anticolonial worldview into the vision for what would become the ethos of Ghanaian nation-building that he would cultivate in the Gold Coast after his return. Moreover, many of the ideas and assumptions of the anticapitalist critiques of the colonial system in particular and its liberal ideological moorings more broadly would continue to buttress the future Ghanaian leader’s and state’s worldview and policies for much of the following two decades.
2
From the Gold Coast to Ghana
Modernization and the Politics of Pan-African Nation-Building
The peoples of the colonies know precisely what they want. They wish to be free and independent, to be able to feel themselves on an equal [footing?] with all other peoples and to work out their own destiny without outside interference and to be unrestricted to attain an advancement that will put them on a par with other technically advanced nations of the world.
—Kwame Nkrumah, Towards Colonial Freedom, 19471
IN DECEMBER 1947, Kwame Nkrumah returned to the Gold Coast at the invitation of the prominent Gold Coast barrister and nationalist J. B. Danquah. At Danquah’s behest, Nkrumah was to serve as general secretary of the recently formed United Gold Coast Convention. However, even before Nkrumah’s arrival, the Gold Coast press had already begun preaching the Nkroful-born politician’s virtues, with the Gold Coast Independent advising its readers in October that “in him one finds all the qualities that make for greatness.” The newspaper further predicted that in the coming years Nkrumah would “play a great role in the future of West Africa, there can be no doubt.”2 The buzz around Nkrumah only intensified following his return. As M. N. Tetteh—who more than a decade later would hold a variety of positions in the Nkrumah government, including in the Ghana Young Pioneers—recalled, few things had a greater influence on his life than the enthusiasm with which people spoke of this man who had come from abroad to bring “freedom” to the Gold Coast. Tetteh explained that, for him and his colleagues, all of whom were just schoolboys at the time, “You may not know the details of it [i.e., what freedom meant], but you were happy,” for the word alone promised a better future. As a result, when Nkrumah came to Tetteh’s hometown of Dodowa shortly after his arrival in the colony, Tetteh was among the students who snuck out of school to see the new general secretary of the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC). Following Nkrumah’s speech, Tetteh claims to have declared his allegiance to the Gold Coast politician and, along with many of his fellow young people, undertook the mission of “spreading the gospel of Nkrumah’s message” to anyone who would listen. “[We were] very young,” Tetteh recounted, “without knowing much about, without understanding much about politics, but with enthusiasm, we were following him.”3
Tetteh was far from alone in offering such a reflection on Nkrumah’s impact on the Gold Coast political scene. Ben Nikoi-Oltai, who would join the CPP shortly after its July 1949 formation, presented a similar personal and national narrative. For him, the defining events of the CPP’s early years were the party’s February 1951 electoral
