established their own schools, “party” offices, newspapers, and, ultimately, a radical wing—the Committee on Youth Organization (CYO)—under the UGCC umbrella. By July 1948, historian Richard Rathbone argues, Nkrumah and his allies had become so emboldened by their successes that the Nkrumahist wing of the UGCC increasingly operated as its own “party within a party.”23 The formal break between Nkrumah and the UGCC would occur nearly a year later in the coastal town of Saltpond. There, before a purported crowd of sixty thousand, Nkrumah announced the inauguration of the Convention People’s Party under the uncompromising banner of “Self-Government Now.”24 By 1951, the CPP would win its first major electoral victory, nearly sweeping the colony’s first popularly contested election and taking control of its Legislative Assembly. In doing so, the CPP formed the Gold Coast’s first African-led government, with Nkrumah taking the mantle of “leader of government business.” By 1952, he would gain the title of prime minister, while he and the CPP maintained wide-reaching powers over the colony’s internal affairs in a diarchic CPP-British power-sharing agreement at a time in which the details of the colony’s transition to self-rule were being worked out.
As will be seen, the realities Nkrumah and the CPP confronted in the Gold Coast were much more complicated than both the future president’s worldview and even the CPP’s organizing successes indicated. Throughout the decade and a half of CPP governance, competing loyalties of class, ethnicity, generation, and occupation simmered underneath the popular responses to the anticolonial imaginings articulated by Nkrumah and the party he led. Moreover, even as wide-ranging groups of Gold Coasters gravitated toward the CPP’s message of self-government, tensions quickly arose within the colony surrounding not only the mechanisms by which to formally achieve and then administer the CPP’s proclaimed goal of self-government, but also the long-term meaning of self-government itself. For many of those scholars and activists writing about the Gold Coast experiment in the 1950s, it was this tug-of-war—often cast as a struggle between the “modern” and the “traditional,” in the case of modernization-minded figures like Apter and Wright, or as one of revolutionary versus reactionary, as portrayed by individuals like Padmore—that drew them to the Gold Coast. To them, the Gold Coast and the successes and pitfalls of the CPP provided the means for understanding the prospects for Africa’s decolonization as a whole. Even more importantly, it would give others a narrative through which to theorize the decolonization process itself.
DECOLONIZATION, MODERNITY, AND POSTCOLONIAL IMAGININGS
Among scholars and activists at both the local and global levels, decolonization was envisioned as a moment of opportunity and redefinition. The question that arose in the mid-twentieth century was that of what decolonization and, by extension, independence was to look like both locally and globally beyond the actual granting of self-rule. Among those who would begin to theorize the meaning of decolonization in the 1950s, decolonization and independence had to be understood not as singular events, but rather as a set of processes aimed at renegotiating the colonized’s place in the world. For some, it even included a reorientation of the colonized individual him- or herself. It was in this vein that Frantz Fanon argued in 1961 that “decolonization is the veritable creation of new men.”25 The transformation implicit in decolonization, at least according to Fanon, was as much ontological as political. It was to be a restorative process that, through the actions and mobilization of the colonized, erased the realities and legacies of the colonial situation and the epistemic and systematic violence, exploitation, and racism embedded within them. The result was envisioned to be the birth of a new civilization freed from the legacies of colonial rule and capitalist extraction; it was also to be a civilization bound to the will of decolonization’s new social order.26
Historians of decolonization have tended to shy away from the Manichean historical and theoretical models put forward by figures like Fanon.27 However, throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s, Fanon was not alone in propagating such a vision of decolonization. Neither was Nkrumah, who, not entirely dissimilar from Fanon, advocated for a theory of decolonization rooted in a dialectic of destruction and rebirth.28 Such attempts to theorize the process of decolonization in turn reoriented discussions around African anticolonialism away from perspectives that characterized independence as the imagined end result of decolonization. What was put forward instead by the likes of Nkrumah, Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, and others was a set of anticolonial imaginings that did not simply seek to replace a generically conceived colonial infrastructure with an African alternative. Much more significantly, they each sought to emphasize the emergent—incomplete, yet transforming—nature of the liberated, decolonized individual and society. For those with a state-centered orientation like Nkrumah, mass institutions like the CPP thus carried a special responsibility that extended beyond that of the organization of the populace. For, just as fundamentally, they also had the additional duty of creating the political, social, economic, and cultural conditions necessary for bringing about the process of collective growth, emancipation, and renaissance at the envisioned root of the decolonizing process. At least in Ghana, such a framework for thinking about decolonization would come to have wide-reaching effects on the lived experiences of many of the country’s peoples over the course of the first decade of self-rule.
The extended timeframe between the CPP’s 1951 electoral victory and Ghana’s 1957 independence in many ways ensured the development of a procedural notion of decolonization within the Gold Coast/Ghana and particularly in the CPP. As the CPP entered into official negotiations with the British about the transfer of power to an independent Ghana in the early 1950s, the Nkrumah-led party took to its press and public meetings in its attempts to reframe its seemingly straightforward ultimatum of “self-government now” as more than a political demand. Instead, self-government became a first step in an envisioned civic project that, at its essence, required a new type of citizen. Through such a formulation, the CPP created for itself an obligation to bring about the conditions not only for the establishment of the independent country, but, more importantly, for that country’s ability to grow and prosper in a highly competitive and often uncertain international environment. At one level, this required a commitment to such infrastructural projects as the rise of new planned cities, hydroelectric power, industrialized manufacturing, advanced communication and transportation systems, social welfare projects, and the wide-ranging extension of government-sponsored social services, most notably in education and healthcare. Each of these, the CPP insisted, was essential to the operation of a modern, independent country. Just as importantly, though, the party would argue, the citizenry itself had to be reoriented, if not modernized, so as to meet the assumed realities of the postwar world. Here, the labor movement, the nature of work itself, family and gender relations, youth culture, ethnicities, and relationships between urban and rural life, among others, all came under the purview of the CPP’s long view of decolonization. At the same time, these political and social phenomena also tended to reflect longstanding traditions of political and economic contestation within the Gold Coast. As a result, the CPP found it necessary to consistently return to and redraft as its own everything from the colony’s vibrant history of anticolonial and nationalist agitation to the colonial government’s own developmentalist ideology and traditions, to the eclectic compilation of ideas, networks, and movements Nkrumah himself had sought to connect to during his decade-plus abroad.
The CPP’s civically focused decolonization project only intensified as the party and government consolidated their power and sought to stem off an array of opposition movements over the course of the 1950s. Independence forced a slight shift in the focus of the CPP’s decolonization project and in its vision of decolonization, as it highlighted an independent Ghana’s vulnerability on the international stage. Whereas prior to 1957 the concern was how best to bring together the colony’s diverse peoples and constituencies in the shared political and social project of achieving self-government, the postindependence project was one of acceleration and adaptation to what were increasingly perceived as the dangers—internal and external—of the postcolonial condition. Here, fears of political disorder and subterfuge, neocolonial intervention in the activities of the state, and extranational allegiances threatened to cast a pall over the hopes and ambitions embodied in the sense of new beginnings—nationally and continentally—ushered in with Ghana’s independence. Nkrumah
