NKRUMAH AND THE GOLD COAST
The political and academic fascination with Nkrumah, the Gold Coast, and the CPP began almost as early as Nkrumah’s 1947 return to the colony. Descending upon the colony in the early 1950s, prominent activists and intellectuals, including George Padmore and Richard Wright, joined early Africanist scholars like Thomas Hodgkin, David Apter, and Dennis Austin in the Gold Coast’s towns and cities as they sought to make sense of the uniquely successful message and politics of the CPP.7 Hodgkin, for his part, presented the CPP as a party of firsts, foremost emphasizing the party’s unprecedented ability to mobilize at a national level. As early as 1951 he predicted that the CPP’s success would force both Africans and Europeans to turn their attention to what just half a decade earlier colonial officials had considered to be Britain’s “model colony.”8 By the middle of the decade, Hodgkin would incorporate what he observed in the Gold Coast into his broader study of the sociology of postwar African nationalism.9 Likewise, political scientist and modernization theorist David Apter held the CPP and the Gold Coast up as models of African modernization. In one of the first monograph-length academic studies of the postwar Gold Coast political order, Apter constructed a narrative around the Gold Coast that positioned the decolonizing colony as well along the path toward a form of parliamentary democratic governance. Key for Apter was a reading of the CPP’s electoral and legislative successes that, in his mind, exemplified the Gold Coast’s gradual move away from what he presented as a complex array of ethnic allegiances and institutions, toward the national.10 The result was the emergence of a political and intellectual milieu, where an often externally driven set of narratives were infused within the particularities of the CPP and the Gold Coast political scene. Moreover, this milieu was one that Nkrumah and the CPP rarely felt shy about further cultivating themselves.
Nkrumah’s own story helped advance much of the early fascination with midcentury Gold Coast politics. Born in the far western Gold Coast village of Nkroful, Nkrumah was among the first to attend Accra’s famed Achimota Secondary School upon its opening in the late 1920s, from which he graduated in 1930. Later, he would travel to the United States to study at the historically black Lincoln University and the University of Pennsylvania before leaving for the United Kingdom in 1945. Working in the anticolonial and pan-African circles associated with George Padmore during his time in the United Kingdom, Nkrumah would play an integral role in the organization of the fifth Pan-African Congress, held in Manchester in 1945. Following the congress, he would align himself with the radicalism of the West African National Secretariat (WANS), of which he would become the organization’s secretary. Through the WANS, Nkrumah joined an array of West African activists with direct ties to the Gold Coast—most notably including I. T. A. Wallace-Johnson and Kojo Botsio, who would become the future CPP’s first general secretary—in reiterating the Congress’s call for an immediate end to colonial rule in Africa, while also putting forward their vision of a united, socialist West Africa. However, as J. Ayodele Langley points out, for Nkrumah specifically and for those aligned with him in the WANS, the foremost mission of the Secretariat rested with the organization of the masses. All else was to follow.11
Nkrumah’s ability to swiftly adapt his message and strategies to the political and economic realities of the Gold Coast following his return to the colony only further burnished his radical reputation in the late 1940s. Politically and economically, the immediate postwar years were a time of rapid transition and increasing uncertainty for the Gold Coast, both triggering and fed by widespread reforms in the colony. These reforms included the extension of male suffrage in municipal elections, an increased governmental commitment to the Africanization of the civil service, and the further centralization of colonial governance with the full integration of Asante into the colony’s legislative apparatus.12 Meanwhile, popular support for the war effort had overshadowed a volatile economy that would come to a head in the last half of the decade. Between 1939 and 1947, for instance, the urban cost of living had more than doubled, with prices for locally produced items rising to nearly twice their prewar levels. The inflationary pressures were even more extreme for many imported goods, which saw price increases in the neighborhood of five to eight times their prewar levels during the same period. As the 1948 Watson Commission reported, the bulk of these price increases had occurred in 1946 and 1947 alone, further adding to the immediacy of the economic pressures felt by the Gold Coast populace.13
In Accra, the economic pressures brought by rapid inflation raised the ire of the city’s residents throughout late 1947, culminating in a month-long boycott of European and Levantine firms in January and February 1948. Organized by Nii Kwabena Bonne II, an Accra chief and businessman, the boycott emerged independent of the nationalist activists who would later try to coopt it, as Nii Bonne and his allies mobilized against what they considered the predatory pricing practices of the colony’s foreign firms.14 As Nii Bonne reportedly explained to his audiences during the boycott, white sellers had made themselves adept at manipulating the market so as to generate profits often well in excess of what it cost to produce the goods they sold.15 Nii Bonne’s message quickly gained the support of many chiefs, who, to the frustration of colonial officialdom, constructed “a system of fines” for punishing those who broke the boycott.16 By late February 1948, just as many of the Gold Coast’s African sellers were also beginning to feel the effects of the boycott with shortages in their own shops, Nii Bonne and his allies declared victory. In doing so, they touted their success in securing (temporary) concessions from many of the colony’s foreign firms in their pricing and profit structures.17
As the boycott ended in late February, the colony’s military veterans—many of whom had been left unemployed with the Second World War’s conclusion—set out to march on the seat of the colonial government at Christiansborg Castle. As with the boycotters, it is difficult to argue that most ex-servicemen were driven by nationalist political ideals in their protests, as they too emphasized economic issues—back pay, the status of their pensions, postwar inflation, and a lack of employment opportunities—in their protests and petitions as opposed to nationalist concerns.18 The march on Christiansborg was thus foremost to be an assertion of their rights to that which was owed to them as veterans of the war effort. As the marchers proceeded to Christiansborg, the colonial police stopped the ex-servicemen and their supporters and ordered them to disperse following the protesters’ deviation from the government-approved route. After a baton charge and the release of tear gas on the crowd, the police opened fire on the unarmed crowd, killing two. Riots quickly broke out in Accra and then spread throughout the colony, with deaths and injuries reported in Kumasi, Koforidua, and elsewhere.19 Meanwhile, in Accra, many of the major European firms that had been the focus of the boycott became the primary targets of the rioters, as emotions brought on by the police killings and boycott erupted throughout the city’s commercial district.20
For Nkrumah in particular, the volatile nature of the Gold Coast’s postwar political and economic realities provided an opening upon his return to the colony. Invited back to serve as general secretary of the newly created United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC), Nkrumah attempted to bring the lessons of Manchester to the Gold Coast. Specifically, in his writings and organizing he presented the colony and its struggles as part of a larger colonized world decimated by European imperial rule and global capitalism.21 As he had pursued with the WANS, the goal Nkrumah envisioned for the Gold Coast was the organization of the masses—the colony’s youth, workers, peasants, market women, and others. Only through such mobilization, the future Ghanaian president would argue throughout the late 1940s and well into the 1950s, could Gold Coasters and Africans more broadly escape the exploitative and extractive trap of capitalist imperialism. Moreover, as his compatriots in Manchester did just a few years earlier, Nkrumah insisted that at the heart of this path to liberation had to be immediate self-government.22
Over the course of the rest of 1948 and the first half of 1949, a UGCC-affiliated Nkrumah drew support from wide-ranging groups of Gold Coasters with his message of self-government. In doing so, he and the group of young men, market women, school leavers, returnees from abroad, and others who joined his organizing efforts attracted
