Living with Nkrumahism - Jeffrey S. Ahlman New African Histories

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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, Nkrumah and his new collection of ministers and advisors had little choice but to cede to the logistical and bureaucratic constraints put on them by the British and the realities of administering a modern government. Most importantly, these included an acceptance of the liberal democratic institutions celebrated by Apter, along with a slowed Africanization of the Gold Coast/Ghanaian civil service and the maintenance of a postcolonial British governor-general in the newly independent country. Outside the formal mechanisms of government, the concern over how best to prepare for self-rule moved to the qualities of the citizenry itself. Here, the CPP promoted not only a continued “mobilizing of the masses,” to borrow Elizabeth Schmidt’s phrasing, but, more importantly, the coalescence of the citizenry around a very specific CPP-defined idea of the Ghanaian nation.43 In this regard, the party press, exemplified by the Nkrumah-founded Ghana Evening News (previously the Accra Evening News and later the Evening News), sought to cultivate a sense of nationhood that civically centered on the party itself. Party rallies and public awareness campaigns further promoted such a party-centered idea of the Ghanaian nation, while, along with the press, mapping for the nation the envisioned centralization of political power in the Accra-based, CPP-run government.

      Independence and, even more so, the 1960 inauguration of the republican constitution only intensified the process of CPP centralization. Even more importantly, the freedoms manifested in independence provided the CPP with the room necessary to test and invest in new forms of institutions designed to cultivate the type of citizenry it believed was required for meeting the needs of the postcolonial world. Here, ideals of discipline, order, political and civic awareness, and collective national and continental development combined with a socialist and pan-African ethos rooted in a transnational anti-imperialism. As in the 1950s, the party press—the Evening News, the Ghanaian Times, the Ghanaian, the Spark, and other publications—took the lead in articulating and theorizing this envisioned citizenry. Moreover, as the CPP consolidated its influence over the press in the early 1960s—taking over or shuttering most newspapers that deviated from the party line—the party- and state-run press largely became the only publications in which interpretations of the postcolonial citizenry and nation could be publicly debated.44 Journalists, authors, editors, letter writers, politicians, petitioners, and others had little choice but to write within the epistemological constraints imposed on them by what was increasingly emerging, from within the party itself, as an attempt to create a sense of orthodoxy around the eclectic set of ideas broadly comprising “Nkrumahism” in the postcolonial state.

      Meanwhile, on the ground, party and governmental institutions such as the Ghana Young Pioneers, the Ghana Builders Brigade (later renamed as the Ghana Workers Brigade), the Trades Union Congress, the National Council of Ghana Women (NCGW), the Young Farmers’ League, and others set out to embed within the citizenry an emergent Nkrumahist way of life.

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