to the Human Rights Society in the U.S., I appealed to the International Commission of Jurists.”17 For Busia, the language of human rights was a way of pursuing an international community response to Nkrumah’s excesses.
Over time, Kofi Busia’s missives from abroad became more strident. No longer was human rights simply a critique of Nkrumah’s flawed rule. Now, the pursuit of human rights justified actively undermining Nkrumah’s government. In a pamphlet entitled “Ghana Will Truly Be Free and Happy,” Busia laid out the opposition-in-exile’s plan to overthrow the Nkrumah state. The fourth point of the platform was to rewrite the constitution in order to “express the people’s identity and aspirations, ensure fundamental human rights and personal freedom, and establish a truly free, independent, and respectable judiciary.” He ended his missive confidently, inviting Ghanaians to “cast away their fear and defeatism … to do their part” and know that Ghana would be free. “Be prepared. More will follow.”18 Scholars who claim that “the UN was the only real place where anti-colonialism and human rights intersected,” overlook the machinations of the Ghanaian opposition who deployed human rights, in earshot of the world, to question Kwame Nkrumah’s capacity to lead.19
Politicians in exile were not the only ones who voiced criticism of Nkrumah’s government in the key of human rights.”20 In 1959, when the famous Railway Workers Union derided the new Industrial Relations Act, which required all unions to join the government affiliated Trades Union Congress, they claimed that it “contravene[ed] the United National Declaration on Human Rights. On Ghanaian soil, critics used the idiom of human rights to describe Ghana’s increasingly restrictive laws as betrayals of the ideals that Nkrumah championed during the anticolonial struggle. “We fought for independence to be able to live as freemen governed by principles of the UN Declaration of Human Rights as well as Ghana’s own coat of arms motto: freedom and justice,” Kwow Richards, then secretary of the United Party, admonished.21
While opposition groups made their discontent known at home and abroad, Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party (CPP) government also found human rights a fertile ground for ideological battle. Human rights universalism was an opportunity to parse the hypocrisy of the global order. C. L. R. James, a vocal ally of the CPP, bristled at the audacity of European countries knee-deep in colonial atrocity presuming to criticize independent Ghana on human rights grounds. “Who are the backward ones in the Belgian Congo today? Who are the advanced and who are the backward ones?” wondered James.22
During the 1959 Nyasaland crisis, Nkrumah’s CPP again sought to use Britain’s commitment to international human rights to win concessions for Africans. In 1959, the British government sent three thousand troops to Nyasaland (now Malawi) to put down a pro-independence movement. In the resulting violence, 51 people were killed, more than 1,300 were detained, and many more were wounded.23 Ghana’s CPP organized protests in solidarity with the Nyasaland freedom fighters and marched to the UK High Commission in Accra. “We are trying to prove to the whole world that Africans are conscious of their human rights,” the general secretary of the CPP explained.24 However, pro-apartheid forces elsewhere in Africa would not cede the moral and political high ground to Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana. The Rhodesian European National Congress fired back that they too would organize a national day or mourning—for opposition activists detained without trial in Ghana.25 For some critics, the Nkrumah government’s authoritarian policies undermined Ghana’s ability to act as a credible human rights advocate abroad. “Two wrongs do not make a right,” stated one letter writer in the 1959 Ashanti Pioneer. Those speaking out about Nyasaland should also “agitate without further delay for the release of Ghana’s political detainees.”26 An editorial in the same newspaper was similarly critical. “On what grounds,” the writer demanded, “do CPP and their government stand … as champions of suffering humanity elsewhere in Africa?”27 Indeed, when the British prime minister faced questions about Nyasaland during a visit to Accra in 1960, he quickly parried, reminding the questioning journalists of their own government’s harsh emergency measures and full jail cells.28 In the early independence years, the language of human rights was a double-edged sword, used to both defend and criticize the Ghanaian government.
In this milieu, Kwame Nkrumah continued to wield human rights as a tool of African liberation, insisting that European states must live up to their own expressed ideals and clear the way for African liberation. Standing before the United Nations in 1962, Kwame Nkrumah compared South African apartheid to the towering, bright-line example of international human rights abuse: Nazi Germany. “The essential inhumanity [of apartheid] surpasses even the brutality of the Nazis against the Jews,” he explained. A state-funded political magazine, the Ghanaian, took up the cause, echoing Nkrumah’s stance about the moral hypocrisy of the “so-called free West” who “look on unaffected with only occasional protests while the lives and liberties of millions of Africans wither in the iron hands of apartheid South Africa.”29 Eventually, Kwame Nkrumah would provocatively suggest that possession of any colonial holding should disqualify countries from UN membership.30
In the first years of national independence in Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah deployed human rights to undermine the moral authority of Western nations. Meanwhile, a collection of critics including Kofi Busia insisted that Nkrumah’s government must be cried down as a human rights violator. These debates about whether rights talk would justify Pan-African liberation or apartheid and which leaders and nations might don the mantle of human rights advocate reflect the moral and political complexity of African countries’ entry into the global political order.
Following the 1966 National Liberation Council (NLC) coup d’état, with Kwame Nkrumah in exile and the CPP banished from Ghanaian political life, human rights continued to be part of the debates about Ghana’s political future. Immediately following the February 24 action, the NLC released a pamphlet entitled The Rebirth of Ghana: The End of Tyranny, which established that “Ghanaians in all walks of life have been denied their fundamental human rights.”31 Independent Ghana’s first coerced regime change was supposedly an attempt to restore human rights—or so said a number of editorials published in the Legon Observer, a University of Ghana–based publication that sprang up in the aftermath of the NLC coup.
In the Observer, Franklin Oduro described the Nkrumah years as a time of propaganda and distortion. These were days when the politician responsible for administering the Preventive Detention Act might turn around and give an eloquent public speech about “fundamental freedom, the right of men to be treated as men … the right of men and women to the serenity and sanctity of their homes and hearths, the right of children to play in safety under peaceful havens … the right of old men and women to the tranquility of their sunset.”32 “It is incredible,” Oduro quipped, “that a man who had such love for freedom would detain so many people without trial.”33 The Observer’s editorial pages were marked by such critiques about the gap between human rights rhetoric and reality in Nkrumah’s Ghana.
There were also musings about the role that the human rights concept might play in building a better Ghanaian future. Five months after the NLC coup, an Observer editorial pondered whether constitutional language about human rights might “nip an incipient dictatorship in the bud” and thus safeguard the future.34 This particular author concluded that human rights language would not guarantee Ghana’s political fortunes, noting that “no sequence of words, no matter how morally stirring or upright, could guarantee that human rights would be respected.35 Ghanaians utilized the language of human rights to describe both what had befallen Ghana and how the country might be set to rights. During the first decade of Ghana’s independence, politicians, journalists, and citizens marshaled rights talk, domesticating it for use in local political conflicts and simultaneously confronting the inequity and imbalance of the global political order. This trend would continue. By the time Ghana embraced a truth and reconciliation commission (TRC) in the early twenty-first century, a malleable human rights rhetoric had long been part of Ghanaian political life.
