SANF 07 No 14
Fifty years ago, Ghana became the first African country to gain independence from a colonial power, on 6 March 1957, and its new leader declared: “Ghana’s independence is meaningless unless it is linked with the total liberation of Africa”…later adding “and with the projection of the African personality in the international community.”
If Kwame Nkrumah were alive today he would be 97 years old, and he would be pleased with the recent progress toward his dream of an African Union, although he would have wished for it to happen much earlier.
A prolific writer and visionary, Nkrumah addressed most of Africa’s contemporary challenges in his books, including the classics, I Speak of Freedom; The Struggle Continues; and, Africa Must Unite.
In Africa Must Unite, he wrote of the dangers of continued balkanisation, including potential division and conflict, and the vital need for political unification and All-African economic planning.
In Challenge of the Congo, with its sub-title, “A case study of foreign pressures in an independent state”, he showed “how meaningless political independence could be without economic freedom and how necessary it was for African solutions to be found for African problems.”
Like many Africans of his generation, Nkrumah was not exactly sure when he was born as the birth was not recorded, but certain incidents in the community and the records of a local priest led him to adopt 18 September 1909 as his birthday.
One thing he was certain of was that he was born on a Saturday, for he was given the name of Saturday’s child, Kwame.
Kwame was born in Nkroful in the extreme south-west of Ghana, where his father was a goldsmith. Benefiting from both a traditional upbringing and an opportunity to attend school, he left his home in the Gold Coast in 1935, at the age of 26, to study in the United States, as did many young educated West Africans of his generation.
He remained in the US for a decade to study, work and do research, earning MSc. in education, MA in philosophy and a Bachelor of Theology degree.
In 1945, Nkrumah went to London to help George Padmore in organizing the fifth Pan-African Congress, where he drafted the “Declaration of the Colonial Peoples of the World”.
He returned home in 1947 to become engaged in active politics, and formed the Convention People’s Party in 1949. In a speech announcing the formation of the new party, he said: “In all political struggles there come rare moments, hard to distinguish but fatal to let slip, when all must be set upon a hazard, and out of the simple man is ordained strength.”
Nkrumah put a motion before parliament to seek Independence from Britain.
A general election had been held, the CPP had returned to power with more than a two-thirds majority, and the motion for Independence passed the newly elected Assembly by 72 votes to none, as the opposition members absented themselves from the debate.
“Two forces met in the Ghana revolution,” Nkrumah wrote later. “On the one side were the British colonial government, the local industrialists and merchants, and the City interests whom this government represented. Opposed to it were the vast majority of the people of the Gold Coast.”
In mid-September 1956, on the day before his birthday, he received the news of British approval for granting Independence when the British Governor allowed him to read the dispatch in advance of its announcement in London…”just a few words on paper handed over to me quietly by the man who had both imprisoned and released me and who had since afforded me every encouragement in my arduous task.
“The 6th of March, I said to myself. The 6th of March. The 6th of March…”
Nkrumah did not regard Independence as an isolated objective but as part of a historical pattern. “Nkrumah saw himself first and foremost as an African, in the widest continental sense. He thought African, lived African and died African…. He regarded the whole continent as his country; Ghana was only his constituency,” a Nigerian journalist wrote.
“The conditions under which the African people of Rhodesia lived concerned him just as much as those of the Ghanaian people. He could neither relax nor concentrate on domestic issues while Africans remained enslaved in Rhodesia, Mozambique, South Africa, Angola, so-called Portuguese Guinea, Namibia and elsewhere.”
In early 1958, just a year after Independence, he hosted the First Conference of Independent African States, of which there were eight, including Ghana. The others were Egypt, Ethiopia, Liberia, Libya, Morocco, Sudan and Tunisia, and these marked the total representation for Africa at the United Nations.
The conference passed resolutions that defined a new and positive approach to the problems of the continent, an All-African approach, embodying the determination to liberate the continent, based on the formula of “one man, one vote” as the agreed objective.
The leaders agreed on a Charter for the Union of African States (AUS) with provision for other African countries that might wish to join. At a UAS summit two years later, the leaders reaffirmed their support for the liberation movements and agreed on a common policy toward the European Common Market and for an African Common Market.
At the end of the same year, Nkrumah hosted the All-African People’s Conference in Accra, attended by men who were to become notable political leaders, including Patrice Lumumba, Julius Nyerere, Kenneth Kaunda and others.
They returned to their countries determined to end colonial rule and to make their territories base areas for the liberation movements.
A driving force behind the Organisation of Africa Unity, formed on 25 May 1963, Nkrumah hoped it would become the foundation for an African Union government, and it did – almost 50 years after he led the former Gold Coast to independence as the new Ghana.
The African Union is now established with a permanent Commission to run its operations, a development arm called the New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), and a Pan-African Parliament.
Nkrumah was active in the Non-Aligned Movement with India, Yugoslavia, Cuba and others, which he described as “political neutrality” in the days of the Cold War between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).
In Ghana’s new role as a member of the Commonwealth, Nkrumah played an active role in the decision to expel apartheid South Africa, and to insist on universal suffrage in then Rhodesia and unimpeded progress toward majority rule.
Three main themes show Nkrumah’s fundamental objectives.
- First, the total liberation of the African continent;
- Second, political unification and establishment of an All-African Union government; and
- Third, the complete transformation of society to end exploitation and oppression.
“His aims were constant; his principles unchanging; his methods flexible to meet the needs of differing situations. In other words, the strategy was the same, only the tactics changed.”
Moves were made immediately after independence to begin the process of uniting Africa. Ghana and Guinea united in 1958 to form the nucleus for a Union of West African States, later expanded to include Mali, as Nkrumah wanted to give practical and visible expression to the concept of African unity.
The Prime Minister of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, signed an agreement soon after the Congo’s independence to bring his country into the union.
Nkrumah said later that, “Lumumba was not killed because he was thought to be a Communist, but because he was a nationalist leader threatening the monopolies of the Union Munière.” He called for an All-African force to take over the task of freeing the Congolese people.
Nkrumah was on his way to Hanoi at the invitation of President Ho Chi Minh with proposals for ending the war in Vietnam, and had landed in Beijing, China, when his hosts gave him the unbelievable news of a coup d’etat in Ghana.
He could not return quickly enough and to avoid bloodshed, he decided to oppose the action from African soil, and was offered sanctuary in Guinea by President Ahmed Sékou Touré, who declared Nkrumah his co-president
During the rash of military coups that continued in West Africa, he wrote a penetrating analysis of the 24 February 1966 coup in Ghana in one of his last books, Dark Days in Ghana.
Published in 1968, it described his country’s post-coup experience as “costly but priceless” viewed in the context of the Pan-Africanist struggle for freedom.
He listed the 25 coups d’etat that took place 1963-1969, 20 of them in West Africa, starting with Togo on 13 January 1963 up to the Kingdom of Lesotho on 30 January 1970, as well as army mutinies in east Africa and attempted coups elsewhere.
He wrote about the armed phase of the African struggle for independence, in Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare, first published in 1968, and a little black pocketbook of Axioms of Kwame Nkrumah in a Freedom Fighters Edition.
The handbook (a Guide to the Armed Phase of the African Revolution) was dedicated to the African guerrilla and contained the Rules of Discipline, which included:
“Obey orders in all your actions; Do not take a single needle or piece of thread from the masses; Turn in everything captured; Speak politely; Pay fairly for what you buy; Return everything you borrow; Pay for anything you damage; Do not hit or swear at people; Do not damage crops; Do not take liberties with women; Do not ill-treat captives; Keep your eyes and ears open; Know the enemy within; Always guide and protect the children; Always be the servant of the people.”
One of the founding fathers of the idea and the fact of the Organisation of African Unity, he was almost immediately critical of the follow-up to its successful creation, saying “appearances are sometimes deceptive”.
He listed four “explosive issues” discussed at the OAU conference in Accra in 1965, which he said should alert the continent to the dangers of compromise: “the crisis in Rhodesia; the struggle in the Congo; the treatment of African political refugees; and the problems of South West Africa.”
‘With many different kinds of political social and economic conditions in Africa make it difficult to generalize, but certain common political, social and economic conditions and problems could be discerned.”
Nkrumah died on 27 April 1972 and 10 days later, on 13 May, in Guinea, President Ahmed Sékou Touré made the opening remarks at Nkrumah Day:
“The personality of Nkrumah shaped the destiny of Ghana from 1957 to 1966 and played a most decisive role not only in the history of his own country but also throughout the African countries struggling for their liberation.
“He is first and foremost a Pan-Africanist. If Dr Dubois, the late illustrious Afro-American may be correctly considered as the father and apostle of Pan-Africanism, Nkrumah was its militant, its man of action.
“After the idea of independence, the idea of continental unity was Nkrumah’s second obsession. Moreover, a close link exists between both ideas.”
