1909-1972
Kwame Nkrumah, the first head of state of independent Ghana, was born on September 21, 1909, in Nkroful in what was then the Western Province of the Gold Coast, later to become Ghana. He was a Pan-Africanist, a nationalist, and a crusader for decolonization whose political ideologies and cultural canons not only empowered Ghanaians, but also molded the antiracist and anticolonial ideas of other Africans, including those in the diaspora.
Nkrumah was the prime minister of Ghana from 1957 to 1960 and the president from 1960 to 1966. No matter how he is assessed, there can be no doubt that he was a visionary whose ideas and achievements were far ahead of his time. Indeed, so long as there is a history of African nationalism and decolonization to be told, Nkrumah would forever remain the great frontispiece that unfolds that epic.
Nkrumah was self-disciplined and lived an ascetic life. His father was a goldsmith and his mother was a trader. He attended the local Catholic primary school in Half Assini, his father’s community, then qualified in 1926 to attend the Prince of Wales College at Achimota, near the colonial capital of Accra. Having being trained as a teacher at Achimota, he taught at a Catholic primary school and later became the headmaster of a school in Axim, near his place of birth. Nkrumah inspired his students by forming literary clubs and academic societies for them.
In 1935 he traveled to the United States to study. He earned a bachelor of science degree from Lincoln University in 1939 and a bachelor of theology from Lincoln Theological Seminary in 1942. In 1945 he obtained master of science degrees in education and philosophy from the University of Pennsylvania. He also took courses at the University of Pennsylvania toward a doctoral degree in philosophy, but moved to London in 1945 to study law. Overall, Nkrumah was a dedicated intellectual devoted to the cause of African liberation. A voracious reader of socialist and Marxist literature, Nkrumah wrote some fifteen books that diagnosed the African condition with timeless prescriptions.
Nkrumah’s sojourn overseas is crucial to understanding his maturation as a Pan-Africanist and a vigorous anticolonialist. While in the United States, he experienced firsthand a systemic racism that shaped his views about white domination. He experienced acute poverty, and did several menial jobs to survive. He also acquired organizational abilities when he joined the African Students Association, which sought to empower black students.
Nkrumah sharpened his oratorical skills by preaching in African-American churches and speaking at gatherings. Involved in the West African National Secretariat in London, he became acquainted with the larger quest among Africans for decolonization. He also joined the socialist and Marxist clubs and attended lectures on political ideologies, especially socialism, at the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Nkrumah became involved in the Pan-Africanist movement under the authoritative leadership of W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963). Nkrumah served as a co-secretary of the last major Pan-African meeting, held in Manchester, England, in 1945, and, with the West Indian socialist and anticolonialist George Padmore (1903-1959), Nkrumah drafted the declaration of decolonization that was issued by the conference. He also interacted with future African leaders, including Dr. Hastings Kamuzu Banda (1898-1997), Kenneth Kaunda (b. 1924), Jomo Kenyatta (1891-1978), Joshua Nkomo (1917-1999), Juluis Nyerere (1922-1999), and countless others. These undertakings and peer associations convinced Nkrumah about the need for African liberation. By 1947 he had helped produce a number of Pan-Africanist publications, including the African Interpreter, New African, and Pan African, using them to agitate for African liberation.
During the post-World War II period, revolutionary nationalism gripped Africans as much as it had shaped the consciousness of peoples under European imperialism. In the Gold Coast, nationalism crystallized into the formation of a political party known as the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC), led by Dr. J. B. Danquah (1895-1965). The leadership of the UGCC invited Nkrumah to become the general secretary of the party. As a result, Nkrumah returned to the Gold Coast on December 10, 1947, establishing a turning point in African nationalism and liberation. On January 20, 1948, Nkrumah was appointed the general secretary of the UGCC.
In 1948 several ex-servicemen, protesting for end-of-service benefits, were shot and killed, leading to several days of anticolonial protests throughout the Gold Coast. Panic-stricken, the British colonial government passed the Riot Act on March 1, 1948, with Governor Gerald Creasy declaring a state of emergency. Eleven days later, Nkrumah and other leaders of the UGCC were arrested and sent to the faraway Northern Territories, where they were detained until April 12, when Creasy bowed to popular demands and released them.
Within a year, ideological problems arose between Nkrumah and the UGCC. Nkrumah wanted to shift the reformist and elitist bent of the UGCC toward a path of revolutionary politics that would involve and empower the masses to seek the complete overthrow of colonial rule. Nkrumah also wanted immediate self-government, unlike the UGCC, which favored a gradual pace toward independence. Consequently, on June 12, 1949, Nkrumah broke away and formed the Convention People’s Party (CPP).
The CPP used a series of strategic nonviolent actions, including strikes, boycotts, and protests, which Nkrumah referred to as ”Positive Action.” He also established the Evening News, a newspaper that became the voice of the party, enabling the CPP to engage in populist politics. The CPP was a broad-based party: it successfully recruited women, rural dwellers, and the youth, groups that had been marginalized by the elitist posturing of the UGCC. Nkrumah’s formation of the Committee of Youth Organization (CYO) on February 26, 1949, energized young people throughout the country who embraced his populist ideas.
Meanwhile, the outcome of the 1948 revolution forced the British government to rethink the political future of the Gold Coast. It appointed A. K. Watson to investigate the revolution and make recommendations. After a thorough investigation, the Watson Commission recommended that a constitution be drafted as a prelude to independence. The drafting of the constitution was chaired by Justice Henley Coussey, a highly respected jurist of the Gold Coast High Court.
On November 7, 1949, the Coussey Committee released its constitutional report. Nkrumah found the committee’s work to be woefully inadequate because its prescription for self-government was limited. Disappointed, Nkrumah organized a nation-wide strike, scheduled for January 1, 1950. Fearing the whirlwind of populist action being unleashed by Nkrumah, the colonial government arrested about two hundred CPP and CYO leaders.
Even though Nkrumah was in prison, the CPP won a landslide victory in municipal council elections held in 1950 in the principalities of Accra, Cape Coast, and Kumasi. Consequently, Governor Noble Arden-Clarke freed Nkrumah and others, and Nkrumah became the leader of government business in a government dominated by Africans. Nkrumah became the prime minister in 1952. He led the Gold Coast to independence in 1957, attaining a republican status in 1960.
Apart from his role as the agent of Gold Coast independence, Nkrumah championed the liberation of the continent by organizing a series of Pan-African meetings in Accra. These were attended by future African leaders, including Robert Mugabe (b. 1924) of Zimbabwe. Nkrumah wanted to unify the continent into a sovereign state. But the emergent neocolonialism and exclusivist nationalism of some African leaders derailed his ideal of a united Africa. All the same, he was able to forge organic political unity with Guinea in 1959 and Mali in 1960; he was also instrumental in the formation of the Organization of African Unity in 1963.
Clad in kente cloth and a batakari smock, powerful symbols of Ghanaian culture, Nkrumah’s ideas of cultural renaissance incubated the popular ideologies of “African personality,” “Black is Beautiful,” and “I am Black and Proud”; indeed, he inspired the empowerment and re-conscientization of blacks all over the globe. Apart from his autobiography, Nkrumah wrote a number of books that deal with the postcolonial political economy of Ghana and Africa as a whole and offer a cultural prognosis of the African condition in the context of neocolonialism. That Nkrumah’s Ghana became a site of political pilgrimage in the 1960s is not in dispute. Overnight, his political magnetism attracted stalwart pilgrims, including W. E. B. Du Bois, Malcolm X (1925-1965), and Martin Luther King (1929-1968), to Ghana.
Nkrumah is also the “father” of Ghana in the sense that he provided Ghana with infrastructure that no Ghanaian leader has been able to match. Without Nkrumah’s foresight, Ghana would be a provincial backwater today. Nkrumah built several industries based on the country’s natural resources. To harness the rapid industrialization of a newly independent Ghana, he built the industrial township of Tema and the dam at Akosombo to supply power and water. Numerous roads were constructed to link different parts of the country, and the country’s colonial-era railway system was improved to facilitate the transportation of produce, especially cocoa, from the interior to the coastal ports.
Nkrumah also built hundreds of educational institutions, including elementary schools, secondary or high schools, teacher training colleges, technical schools, and research institutes for the sciences and humanities. He established two new universities—the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology and the University of Cape Coast—and expanded the University of Ghana. In order to make education universal in Ghana, Nkrumah provided free education for the inhabitants of the Northern Region, an area that had suffered from underdevelopment during the colonial period. Nkrumah also established scholarships for overseas higher education to train personnel to assist in the country’s educational endeavors. In addition, adult and civic education were introduced nationwide to complement literacy and the civic duties of the citizenry. Mobile vans fitted with public-address systems also disseminated information on public health, etiquette, and social mores.
Historians disagree on the events that led to Nkrumah’s overthrow. Certainly, his political demise was due in part to his authoritarian tendencies, including his declaration of a one-party state and the imprisonment of his political opponents. This tendency is best exemplified by Nkrumah’s response to his opponents efforts immediately after independence in 1957 to either kill him or remove him from power. Nkrumah used state instruments to marginalize them, an action that troubled a section of the Ghanaian population. In addition, his internationalization of Pan-Africanism, his outspoken championing of socialism, and his political flirtations with the Soviet Union at the peak of the Cold War helped bring about his political downfall.
On February 24, 1966, a group of elite officers of the Ghanaian armed forces and police—sponsored by the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA)—staged a coup while Nkrumah was in Vietnam attempting to broker peace between warring Vietnamese factions. After the coup, Nkrumah lived in exile in neighboring Guinea, where he spent his time writing about anti-colonialism and neocolonialism. Afflicted with cancer, he sought medical help in Romania, where he died in 1972.
