pan-African to even diasporic. As a result, during this period, figures including J. E. Casely Hayford, Kobina Sekyi, and J. B. Danquah, among others, positioned the Gold Coast at the political and intellectual center of early twentieth-century West African thought and activism. On yet another level, Nkrumah, with his pronouncement, sought to link Ghana’s postcolonial ambitions with a broader, indeed global history of anticolonialism extending back to at least the end of the First World War. For Nkrumah, this international anticolonialism provided a model for understanding the world and, in particular, a global political economy constructed out of the violence, iniquities, and relentless resource extraction of European capitalist imperialism.
This chapter surveys the political and intellectual world that marked Nkrumah’s growth as an anticolonial thinker and activist. It, however, does not seek to offer a biography of the future politician’s early life but, rather, aims to present a transnational narrative that encircles Nkrumah as he came of age politically. More important than Nkrumah himself in the chapter are the multiple contexts—political and social, local and international—that surrounded the Gold Coaster during the first decades of the twentieth century, along with the various political and social networks that emerged out of them. These networks were colonial and extracolonial. They were also continental and transcontinental. Moreover, they were forged through the intersecting experiences of colonial subjecthood and racial exclusion already shaped by the global reach and impact of Euro-American ideologies of race, of colonial practices in labor and resource extraction, of social and political segregation, and even of, as Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton have argued, the shifting spatial dimensions of the emergent nineteenth- and twentieth-century imperial world order.4 For those living within the empires of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the empires themselves were not always, or at least not entirely, mere spaces for passive exploitation. Rather, they also provided new arenas for political, social, and cultural connections, bringing together colonized peoples across seemingly disconnected spaces, as both peoples and ideas spread within and beyond the formal and informal confines of a given empire.5
This chapter interrogates the processes by which competing yet intersecting political, social, cultural, and intellectual worlds came together to form the lively anticolonial politics of the first half of the twentieth century. In Africa and beyond, the interwar period in particular was a heyday of African and diasporic extraterritorial imaginaries. The result was a vibrant political and intellectual environment that included, among other things, a burgeoning pan-Africanism on the continent and abroad, a push and pull of competing notions of national and colonial self-determination, and a rising critique of the liberal underpinnings of the imperial system. Together, the formal and informal movements and ideas that arose out of these contexts comprised the political and intellectual backdrop that helped mold the worldview of the future Nkrumahist state. They also provided the roots to much of the radical anticolonial politics that would come of age in the 1940s, ultimately finding, at least in the African context, their most forceful expression in the organization and demands of the 1945 Manchester Pan-African Congress. As a result, this chapter aims to contextualize the “world of Kwame Nkrumah” and what would eventually emerge as the politics of the Convention People’s Party as part of a broader, global trend in early twentieth-century anticolonial politics. Meanwhile, within the Gold Coast itself, the colony’s own political traditions had roots of their own. As subsequent chapters will show, past and contemporary protests over land, colonial policies, the operation of the local and international cocoa market, and access to resources and services would, in many cases, come to underpin future Ghanaians’ political imaginings well into the 1950s and beyond—albeit in ways that often did not fit neatly into the CPP’s worldview.
EMPIRE, LIBERALISM, AND ITS CRITICS
Nkrumah came of age in the Gold Coast at a time in which, in both the West African colony and internationally, European imperial powers were expanding their political and ideological reach. It was also a time when, throughout the colonial world and beyond, an increasingly sophisticated array of critics of empire were coming into their own. Key, then, to understanding the imperial world order into which Nkrumah was born is a recognition of the extent to which such a world order was at once a relatively new development on the international stage and one with deep historical roots. In real terms, the continent’s colonization was a haphazard and uneven process. Moreover, at the time of Nkrumah’s 1909 birth, in nearly all of Africa, with the exception of parts of southern Africa and certain coastal enclaves, the events that marked the onset of the continent’s formal colonization were less than a century old. In the region that would become the Gold Coast Colony, which had a long and intricate history with an array of European powers dating back to the fifteenth century, the attempted extension of formal European colonial authority into African affairs was highly incremental and even then it would not begin until at least the mid-nineteenth century. Moreover, it would take several more decades before British rule could be institutionalized along most of the southern Gold Coast.6 Even more troublesome for British ambitions were the Asante in the territory’s central forest region, where the British would spend much of the nineteenth century in a shifting pattern of war and uneasy peace with the Asante state.7 Meanwhile, in the Northern Territories, it would not be until the early twentieth century that the British would be able to bring all the region’s peoples under their administrative control.8 As a result, even at its most rhetorical level, the notion of an aspiring European imperial world order that would encompass the continent cannot be said to have emerged until at least the aftermath of the Berlin Conference of 1884–85. Furthermore, as in the Gold Coast, the attempted real-world, wide-scale implementation and administration of this burgeoning imperial order would not occur for another two to three decades—a time nearly coinciding with Nkrumah’s birth.9
Yet, the perceived European imperial world order of the early twentieth century also possessed the aura of a deeper, more overarching history in Africa and globally. Cultivated in part via the intersections between the rise of nineteenth-century liberalism and the real and perceived changes in the global political economy, notions of an age of empire would become naturalized in the global political imagination within one to two generations following the onset of colonial conquest. In Africa, the long history of the slave trade on the continent featured prominently in the political and cultural imaginations of both supporters and critics of the emergent imperial world order. For some of the most forceful early twentieth-century critics of the colonial project, Europe’s late nineteenth-century colonization of Africa had clear echoes of the violence, indignities, and exploitation of the slave trade.10 Others, however, often offered more measured analyses of Europe’s imperial ambitions in Africa, at times not only crediting the Europeans for trying to abolish the last vestiges of the slave trade on the continent, but also tying this assumed eradication of slavery to the continent’s and its peoples’ modernization. Even those who at times expressed skepticism of and disappointment with certain European imperial intentions and actions in Africa often celebrated many of the presumed values of the colonial mission, including its promised expansion of social benefits (most notably, Western education and medicine), Christianity, infrastructural development, constitutionalism, and free trade. “We are head and ears in love with the British Constitution,” the African editors of the Cape Coast–based Gold Coast Methodist Times declared in 1897. “The national greatness of the English people has been determined by their national laws and institutions,” the newspaper’s increasingly nationalist editors argued; “they have prospered, because of the humanitarian principles of their laws; because those laws are always in harmony with the genius of the christian [sic] religion. We too are anxious to march en masse after the great English nation; We [sic] want to do so willingly, voluntarily, intelligently, and gradually.”11
Within Europe, questions over the purpose of and responsibilities embedded in the colonial project featured prominently in the continent’s political debates. Among British intellectuals, for instance, as political theorist Uday Mehta details, nearly every major thinker from the late eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries sought to address the colonial question in their writings at some point in their career.12 However, in a British political and intellectual context increasingly receptive to the language
