However, through much of the 1950s and even into the 1960s, few inside or outside the country took such a narrow view of the country’s independence and the experiences of self-rule. Both locally and internationally, Ghanaian independence came to represent more than the simple addition of another nation-state to a rapidly growing postwar international community. Rather, to many, Ghana was to be the harbinger of the next phase in Africa’s political, social, and historical development. For them, the Ghanaian path to self-rule and postcolonial development was often envisioned as the African path. Describing this sentiment in a circa 1957 essay, for instance, the American journalist and novelist Richard Wright portrayed the newly independent Ghana as “a kind of pilot project of the new Africa.”4 Ghana’s status as the first postcolonial state in sub-Saharan Africa was of particular importance in cultivating such an image. In breaking the country’s bond to Great Britain, Ghana was perceived as leading the way for the rest of the continent. In doing so, many viewed the new country as unleashing a wave of transformation in Africa that would guide the rest of the continent not only to independence, but, just as importantly, to a seat at the table in the emerging postcolonial international community. This transformation, however, was not simply to be political, but rather was to effect a wholesale political, social, cultural, and economic revolution in Africa. Moreover, it was also to be as much a personal project as it was to be a national or continental one, for at its core was a consciousness-raising enterprise guiding Ghanaians and Africans individually and as a whole toward a shared nation- and continent-building project.
Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, the figure of Kwame Nkrumah as an individual and as a symbol stood at the center of these imaginings in both Ghana and Africa at large. Drawing on his organizing experience in the United States and Great Britain, Nkrumah—starting even before he came to power in 1951—had long celebrated both what he and others viewed as the shared struggle of African liberation and the Gold Coast’s/Ghana’s perceived leadership role in that struggle. In 1957, independence would offer Nkrumah and the Convention People’s Party (CPP) government he led new opportunities for exploring this shared struggle, providing them with the political and institutional space from which to advance their own continentally collaborative model for African anticolonial activism. By early 1958, the exploration of this space had come to include the convening of the first of a series of pan-African and intra-African conferences in the Ghanaian capital of Accra. These conferences both revived and redefined the pan-African tradition of the early twentieth century by providing a space in which African politicians, activists, and others could adapt this early pan-African tradition to African postcolonial realities. Likewise, as 1958 came to a close, Ghana would again take the lead in the testing of African postcolonial possibilities as it came to the aid of Sékou Touré’s fledgling republic in weeks-old independent Guinea. Albeit fraught with its own set of contradictions and administrative inconsistencies, the resultant Ghana-Guinea Union represented independent Africa’s first postcolonial, supraterritorial confederation, a confederation whereby each member state was to cede portions of its sovereignty to the greater union. By the end of 1960, the union would also include Modibo Keita’s Mali, while Nkrumah claimed that he had also signed a similar agreement with Patrice Lumumba prior to the Congolese leader’s assassination.5
In Ghana itself, Nkrumah and the CPP positioned decolonization and the mechanisms of postcolonial rule at the center of both a new type of disciplined, socialist, modern, and cosmopolitan citizenry and the “Nkrumahist” ideology constructed to support it. In doing so, they simultaneously, and often contradictorily, looked back to and distanced themselves from a long tradition of anticolonial agitation with deep roots in the Gold Coast and elsewhere, as they turned to a range of party- and state-sponsored institutions in the cultivation of this Nkrumahist ideal. For many Ghanaians living in the heady days of the 1950s and 1960s, this experiment in postcolonial reinvention became a defining part of their political and social lives. Not only were they asked to join—or, in some cases, charged into—the civic initiatives of the Nkrumahist government; but, more importantly, their experiences—as interpreted by the CPP governmental apparatus—became the vehicles through which the CPP and its allies inside and outside Ghana read the successes and shortcomings of the Nkrumah-led postcolonial project on the Ghanaian and continental stage. If, for the CPP and its allies, Ghana was to be Africa’s “city upon a hill” replete with modern cities, rapid industrialization, and a politically and ideologically disciplined citizenry, this book argues that Nkrumahist ideology and the massive changes that followed from it emerged as terrains of negotiation in themselves for those living through this transition. Moreover, the book also argues that these terrains of negotiation were fundamentally tied to the intersections of both the citizenry’s aspirations, ambitions, and frustrations with the promises of life in a new world partly forged by an independent Africa and the often tragic realities of a world the CPP itself understood as still intimately rooted in the legacies of capitalist imperialism. The result was a state-citizenry relationship, premised on hope and ambition, that was often constrained by and filtered through the realities and politics of the postcolonial state itself. It was also a relationship that, over the course of the 1950s and 1960s, became increasingly uneven.
This book is about postcolonial visions and the popular reactions to them. The book thus counters a literature on African decolonization overrun by the pessimistic hindsight of the last four to five decades of African self-rule. The pessimism of this literature is not unique to the Ghanaian case, but instead has framed much of the way that both scholars and the public have engaged with the idea of an independent Africa. In contrast, Living with Nkrumahism celebrates the ambiguity and contradictions surrounding the continent’s transition to self-rule, as it centers the tenuousness of the decolonization process and Africa’s uncertain place in the postcolonial Cold War world in a broader reflection upon, to borrow from Frederick Cooper, the “possibility and constraint” that characterized the first decade of African self-rule.6
In this respect, “Nkrumahism” plays multiple roles in the text. Foremost, it stands as a philosophy of decolonization developed out of a worldview blending ideologies of African socialism, global anti-imperialism, and the promises of African unity—a version of pan-Africanism. However, within this book, Nkrumahism also acts as a historically contingent term, one rooted in a shifting array of contested, experimental, and often contradictory ideas, practices, and policies put forward by Nkrumah and the CPP—a term that therefore belies a consistent and, at times, even clear definition. Historically, it is a term that, throughout the decade and a half of CPP rule, was in constant development and continuous negotiation among individuals and groups, including Nkrumah, local and national party officials, the intellectuals and journalists operating the state-run press, the diverse community of expatriate activists who made Ghana home during the 1950s and 1960s, and even segments of the populace at large, albeit most often filtered through the instruments and discourse of the state.
More than a term, “Nkrumahism” provided a language with which Ghanaians and others could talk through and proactively and reactively address the changing role of Ghana and Africa in the construction of the postcolonial international community. As such, threats of neocolonial subversion, Cold War intervention, alternative nationalisms, and internal dissension were much more than challenges to a particular set of political ambitions in midcentury Ghana within the CPP imagination. They imperiled a worldview. They also reflected the intrinsic diversity of the political, social, cultural, and economic realities in which that worldview operated. Living with Nkrumahism thus offers a historical deconstruction of this particularly vibrant moment in Ghana’s recent past. However, it does so by framing its analysis of Nkrumahism not simply as an intellectual history of Nkrumah’s and the CPP’s thought. Much more importantly, the book argues that Nkrumahism served as the epistemological backdrop for many of the contestations surrounding Ghanaian political and social life in the Nkrumah era. To this end, I take seriously the aims of Nkrumah and the CPP, on their own terms, as well as the interpretations of those aims on the popular level. As a result, in a political sphere in which Nkrumah and the CPP ultimately saw themselves as creating a new world, one in which Africa and the rest of the formerly colonized peoples of the world would have an equal seat at the table in the emerging postwar community of nations, key aspects of everyday Ghanaian life—work, family, community—became subsumed in the transformative
