prison. As remembered by the longtime Accra resident, the CPP victory drew a crowd of Gold Coasters to James Fort Prison, where the government was holding Nkrumah on charges of sedition and inciting an illegal strike.4 Nikoi-Oltai recalled how, after Nkrumah’s release, the crowd shepherded Nkrumah across the colonial capital to the seat of government at Christiansborg Castle, where Nkrumah assumed the newly created position of leader of government business. For Nikoi-Oltai, who would maintain a place in the CPP rank and file until the 1966 coup, this procession across Accra was a defining moment both in his life and for the nation. “That day,” the Accra shopkeeper proclaimed, “I saw whites running away for the first time.”5 Another longtime party member, Kofi Duku, echoed Nikoi-Oltai in a 2008 interview as he recounted how within “less than . . . an hour, [the courtyard in front of] James Fort Prison . . . a big space, was filled to capacity.” Upon Nkrumah’s release, Duku continued, “Men and women, children and children yet to be born, that means women carrying babies with cloth tied around their waists, [were] singing various songs [of] joy and happiness.”6
The victory that swept Nkrumah and the CPP to power was nothing short of profound. In the Legislative Assembly, the CPP won thirty-four of the body’s thirty-eight contested seats, while the imprisoned CPP leader officially received more than fourteen times as many votes as his nearest rival in his Accra electoral district.7 Following the election, control over the Gold Coast would officially remain in British hands for the next six years. However, as the leader of government business and, from 1952 on, prime minister, Nkrumah, along with the young CPP, gained wide-reaching powers over the colony’s internal affairs. This included the establishment of their own cabinet and the relative freedom to pursue a legislative agenda seen as ushering in a broader program of political, social, economic, and infrastructural modernization. At its most foundational, this program aimed to incorporate key aspects of the Manchester radicalism Nkrumah and others brought from abroad in an attempted re-envisioning of the social, cultural, and even physical makeup of the Gold Coast itself. Governmental and constitutional affairs, the CPP argued, even including self-government, could only go so far. The real issue now was how to transform the colonial Gold Coast and the people who populated it into a modern nation.
This chapter details the construction of the burgeoning Nkrumahist vision for an emergent postcolonial Ghana in the context of the 1950s independence negotiations. This was a period in which, for many Gold Coasters and especially those aligned with the CPP, eventual independence appeared a foregone conclusion. At the same time, the actual path to it remained unclear, and, by the mid-1950s, looked increasingly messy as a number of formal and informal resistance movements emerged within the colony. Key to this period, then, was a complex set of local and national negotiations in which Nkrumah, the CPP, and the British each sought to balance their own interests and ambitions for the future Ghana with those of the many competing constituencies that composed the Gold Coast more broadly. For the CPP itself, the liminal nature of this period of shared governance offered an opportunity for the new government as it sought to securely begin building its future Ghana along the lines of the modern, ordered, urban, industrial, and cosmopolitan society that would serve as the idealized hallmark of official Nkrumahism for much of the next decade and a half. As a result, on the governmental level, the early and mid-1950s were a period of near-unprecedented investment and experimentation in fields ranging from education and healthcare to architecture and urban planning as the CPP set out to define the social and infrastructural parameters of modern African life.
As this chapter also shows, the responses to the CPP’s actions were far from uniform. Rather, the CPP’s efforts ushered in a variety of complicated local and regional reactions as diverse groups of soon-to-be Ghanaians negotiated their own desires and expectations for decolonization-era modernization in relation to all that was lost in the often all-encompassing nature of the CPP’s plans and paths toward implementation. More than the remnants of an antiquated politics that most in the CPP and many outside observers presented them as, the localized and regional opposition movements (formal and informal) that arose against the CPP during the 1950s often countered the CPP’s modernist imagination with their own alternative visions for the Gold Coast’s/Ghana’s future. In doing so, they frequently drew upon a range of historical, intellectual, and cultural traditions with much deeper roots than anything the CPP could provide. Writing on the Asante-led National Liberation Movement, for instance, historian Jean Allman has argued that many of these movements could even be read as nationalisms unto themselves.8 However, even more may be seen as going on within these movements when they are juxtaposed with the CPP’s developing Nkrumahist worldview. Not only did they compete with the dominant visions for the future put forward by the CPP, but they also often embedded within their own historically and culturally specific visions divergent strands of nationalism, internationalism, and modernization that at times resembled Nkrumahism, yet adapted to local realities. In this respect, the debates and often bitter and violent conflicts that emerged in the Gold Coast politics of the 1950s both challenged the CPP’s increasingly centralized vision of Ghana’s postcolonial future and represented a political eclecticism that, during the first decade of self-rule, an ever more orthodox Nkrumahism would long struggle to weed out.
MODERNIZATION AND PRE-INDEPENDENCE NKRUMAHIST COSMOPOLITANISM
From its founding, the CPP’s agenda for the Gold Coast/Ghana was by definition ambitious. As Nkrumah detailed in his 1947 pamphlet Towards Colonial Freedom, he believed that, for any colonial territory, self-government was only part of the equation. At most, it opened the path for the more fundamental emancipation that would come with economic liberation and the quest for a form of self-determination that freed the colonized from the grips of capitalist imperialism. At an even more foundational level for a party still in formation, the emotion embedded within the call for self-government offered an unprecedented tool for mobilization. For the more measured politicians of the UGCC and its successor parties in the early 1950s, the CPP’s appeals to emotion regularly proved a source of substantial frustration.9 Nkrumah and the CPP, however, saw strength in their ability to envelop themselves in the anger, enthusiasm, and anticipation of the populace as they employed the message of self-government in the task of political organization. For them, the language of self-government became a mechanism through which to channel the party’s ambitions through an array of popular aspirations and frustrations connected to Gold Coasters’ everyday struggles. In the party press as well as in rallies, meetings, and other political and social events, the CPP in turn peppered its abstract anticolonial rhetoric with reflections on the daily plights of Gold Coasters seeking such forms of relief as access to schooling, employment, and pathways out of an economic reality defined by stagnating wages and hyperinflation.10
Not dissimilar to the model employed by the Rassemblement Démocratique Africain (RDA) in Guinea, the CPP of the late 1940s and early 1950s sought to create an overarching multiethnic and socially diverse umbrella under which to organize the populace.11 Again, as with the Guinean RDA and, in East Africa, the Tanganyika African National Union (TANU), women and especially market women stood at the heart of the CPP’s mass support, transmitting the party’s message via song, dance, dress, and other popular and socially democratic means of communication.12 The party, for its part, responded in kind with regular coverage in its rallies and press of issues it deemed of particular concern to women. In doing so, its women writers, especially, used the party press to gin up enthusiasm for the party around issues including market struggles, education and employment for women, and the state and quality of women’s activism within the party infrastructure.13 Meanwhile, female-centered spaces like the markets allowed for the further rapid spread of the party’s message. Reflecting back on the early years of the CPP in his Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution (1977), C. L. R. James thus recalled not simply the centrality of women in the CPP’s mobilizing efforts, but, more importantly, the power they held. “The market,” the Trinidadian recounted, “was a great centre of gossip, of news and of discussion. Where in many undeveloped communities the women are a drag upon their menfolk, these women, although to a large extent illiterate, were a dynamic element in the population, active, well-informed, acute, and always at the very centre of events.” To the Marxist James, they, not the educated of the party, drove the CPP’s agenda.
