from these challenges. For them, the issue was about more than just Ghana’s or Africa’s political independence. The real concern was a potential backslide into what they perceived to be a colonial mentality that would have ripple effects on deeper issues of African social, economic, and cultural independence.
Key to this framing of both Ghana’s and Africa’s decolonization was an emphasis on the emergent or burgeoning nature of Ghana as a country and Africa as a continent. A necessary optimism was embedded in this idea of emergence. Furthermore, for many inside and outside of Africa, this view of an emergent continent in the 1950s and 1960s was not a question; as James Ferguson has suggested, it was an expectation.29 What needed sorting out, then, as Jean Allman later noted in her analysis of Ghanaian antinuclear activism, were the details. As Allman presents the expectations of the period, at the time, they did not represent the “pipe dream” they seem to do today or even did by the end of the 1960s. Rather, in the late 1950s and early 1960s, they appeared to many as simply “a plan just shy of a blueprint.”30 As Allman’s analysis illustrates, such a framework for thinking about the ambitions of the decolonization moment provides a lens through which to map the histories of Ghanaian pan-African and anti-imperial politics onto the larger landscape of transnational anticolonial and anti-imperial histories that dot the broader global historiographical terrain—many of which only pay lip service to African experiences and perspectives. Even more importantly, such a method for thinking through Africa’s decolonization opens the space through which we can begin to historicize alternative African postcolonial futures. As Allman, Meredith Terretta, Kevin Gaines, Klaas van Walraven, and others have shown, it was this sense of opportunity and innovation that, throughout the 1950s and into much of the early 1960s, drew activists, freedom fighters, journalists, and the curious, among others, to the country.31 Figures including Fanon, who had served as the Algerian Front de Libération Nationale’s ambassador to Ghana until his cancer diagnosis in 1961, George Padmore, Richard Wright, Robert Mugabe, W. E. B. Du Bois, Shirley Graham Du Bois, Patrice Lumumba, Che Guevara, Malcolm X, Félix Moumié, and many others, all, at various times, converged upon the country during the period.32 Furthermore, many of them—none more important ideologically than Padmore—played a key role in helping to shape the policies and ideological agenda of the CPP both continentally and within Ghana itself.
As Padmore would argue in his published works on the Gold Coast and in his communications with Nkrumah and others in the CPP, Ghana’s ultimate success depended upon its ability to construct a modern society independent of European imperial and capitalist subversion. For Padmore in the 1950s, this ultimately entailed a model of pan-Africanism that blended “black nationalism plus socialism.”33 Over the course of the 1950s, aspects of this message seeped into the CPP’s own local imaginings as it was framed and reframed by Nkrumah himself, contested in the CPP-led government’s various development projects, and reflected in the expectations and ambitions of those Ghanaians responding to the promises of decolonization’s new society. Here, the CPP rooted its political, social, and economic programs in a midcentury modernism that held up the industrialized West—absent its capitalist extravagances—as the developmental model toward which a decolonizing Africa should strive. In at least one sense, Nkrumahism was very much a form of anticolonial modernism. It was also not alone in promoting such an ideal, with similar ideological projects playing out in Egypt, India, and elsewhere.34 At the root of such thinking, Donald Donham has remarked in reference to revolutionary Ethiopia, was a teleology that placed countries, continents, and peoples on an imagined ladder of modernity.35 Ferguson goes even further in his reflections on midcentury modernism, as he argues that such teleological thinking not only infected governments and politicians, but also the social scientists and technocrats brought in to study and interpret the successes and failures of African postcolonial modernization.36 Likewise, political scientist Leander Schneider, writing on Tanzania, emphasizes the importance of the machinations of government, at least in its imagined state, in guiding a particular country up this ladder.37
In the Ghanaian case, Schneider’s emphasis on the centrality of government in the modernizing process is particularly instructive. For Schneider, working with the Foucauldian notion of governmentality, it was through an intricate analysis of the practices of government—the actions, decisions, and logics—that scholars could come to understand not just the objectives of the development enterprise, but also how the practices themselves produced and reproduced the authority of the government.38 The specificities of the Tanzanian experience with villagization frame Schneider’s analysis. In important ways, though, the concerns driving the Tanzanian government’s and specifically Julius Nyerere’s advocacy of villagization were similar to those guiding Nkrumah and the CPP in Ghana. For both Nkrumah and Nyerere, the exploitative and extractive dimensions of colonialism were undeniable. Moreover, they insisted that the effects of colonial exploitation had major political, social, and cultural ramifications on African life. Self-government thus unleashed for both leaders and their governments a responsibility for, in Schneider’s words, creating “a free, egalitarian, and more prosperous society” in colonialism’s wake.39 Whereas Nyerere focused on an updated, rural communalism in Tanzania, Nkrumah and the CPP emphasized the urban, industrial, and mechanized in Ghana’s postcolonial development. However, as in Tanzania, Nkrumah and the CPP viewed it as the obligation of the government and party in Ghana to create the conditions necessary for this developmental and liberation model to come into being. In doing so, though, they did not simply seek to reinforce the power and authority of the emergent state. Rather, at the same time, they also sought to create an environment where all other alternatives could be cast as unmodern, un-African, or neocolonial.
Yet, at least in the Ghanaian case, it is too simplistic to merely frame the Nkrumah-era decolonization and postcolonial projects, if not worldviews, as another example of what James Scott has referred to as the high-modernist view of “seeing like a state.”40 In contrast to Scott’s model, the Nkrumah-era programs and worldviews were historically contingent and site-specific. In other words, they necessarily reflected the changing realities of a world in transition and the wide-ranging aspirations and anxieties of an independent Africa’s place in that world. The postcolonial imaginings and projects coming out of Ghana during this time—in all their inconsistencies, incongruities, and, at times, seeming pie-in-the-sky nature—cannot be taken out of this context. Fears of neocolonialism were real. Anxieties over the implications of the country’s and continent’s continued dependency on foreign markets were also real. Similarly, concerns over the solidification of African backwardness in relation to the Global North weighed on those inside and outside the CPP government committed to envisioning Ghana’s and Africa’s postcolonial future. Moreover, deep-seated questions existed as to what forms of governance were wanted and needed in order to meet the realities of the postcolonial world. For Western scholars like Apter in the mid-1950s, projecting negotiated constitutional formalities onto the society writ large, the apparent answer was an African-born parliamentary democracy.41 Three decades later, Michael Crowder would ponder the implications of assuming that what Africans strove for with independence were such liberal democratic institutions.42 A historicized emphasis on Nkrumahism ultimately allows for reflection on what the alternatives may have looked like at the time and how they may have changed and been contested over the course of the 1950s and 1960s, linking both local and international idioms of nation, nationalism, modernity, development, decolonization, and liberation, among others, into a vibrant analytical framework.
VISIONS OF NKRUMAHISM
The challenge of writing such histories of Nkrumahism rests in the nature of the CPP’s decolonization project itself. Few things did more to cloud the political, social, and cultural dynamism of Nkrumah-era Ghana than the actions and rhetoric of the Nkrumahist state. Like the nation the CPP viewed itself as representing, the state as the governmental embodiment of the nation was also envisioned as an entity under constant construction. In the 1950s, as the CPP and the British entered into a period of shared governance, the key question facing the CPP was how best to create the institutions, policies, and procedures necessary for a burgeoning Ghana to ensure a smooth transition to self-rule. As alluded to earlier, in their negotiations with the British,
