Living with Nkrumahism. Jeffrey S. Ahlman

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      Introduction

       Decolonization and the Pan-African Nation

      Our Independence means much more than merely being free to fly our own flag and to play our own national anthem. It becomes a reality only in a revolutionary framework when we create and sustain a level of economic development capable of ensuring a higher standard of living, proper education, good health and the cultural development of all our citizens.

      —Kwame Nkrumah, undated speech¹

      In the building of a new society on liberation socialist lines, the people must be taught to help themselves.

      —Report by George Padmore, 1952²

      IN MARCH 1957, the relatively small West African country of Ghana—previously known as the Gold Coast—attained its independence. It was the first sub-Saharan colony to emerge from European colonial rule.³ The world into which the young Ghanaian state entered was one of transition. Much as the First World War had done a generation earlier, the Second World War had had a devastating impact on each of Europe’s major powers. In doing so, it threatened an international political order constructed around European imperial power. In Great Britain and France in particular, Europe’s two most dominant imperial powers, the governments of both states struggled in the war’s aftermath to make sense of the changing political world. Burdened with the obligation of paying off their war debts and the need to rebuild, they each scrambled to find ways to balance pressures at home with the maintenance of their massive empires abroad. Furthermore, the war’s end also ushered in the seemingly unchecked rise of the American and Soviet superpowers and of the bipolar world they would spend the greater part of the next half century constructing. Meanwhile, in Africa and Asia, the postwar story has long been one of a rising set of demands for colonial reform and agitation, shifting to a period of nationalist mobilization, followed by independence and, in many cases, postcolonial decline. The narrative that arose in these world regions was therefore one centered on not only the foundation of the twentieth-century postcolonial nation-state, but, just as importantly, its political, economic, and civic demise.

      Ghana, ca. 1960. Produced by the Smith College Spatial Analysis Lab.

      In the decade following Ghana’s independence and beyond, many СКАЧАТЬ