Living with Nkrumahism. Jeffrey S. Ahlman

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      For scholars, the question of how Ghanaians themselves engaged with and understood the mushrooming Nkrumahist state and Nkrumahism more broadly has proved difficult to answer. Scholars in the late 1960s and 1970s in particular—representing the last significant wave of scholarship devoted to the CPP—have largely assumed that most Ghanaians simply ignored the party’s rhetoric and endured its policies.⁴⁸ The bottom-up ethos of the social-historical tradition—which has fruitfully guided African historical and social scientific scholarship for at least two generations—has likely contributed to such conclusions regarding the state-citizenry relationship. Additionally, the very real disappointments of decolonization—culminating, in Ghana, with the economic hardships of the 1960s and the CPP’s establishment of a quasi-police state—further justified a way of viewing the African postcolonial experience as an experience mired in what Mahmood Mamdani has described as “decentralized despotism.”⁴⁹ Through such a perspective, however, the state and its discourse often emerge as alien forces acting upon the people, thus positioning the populace as subjects of the new state. The result in such readings of the African postcolonial state, to invoke Jean-François Bayart’s powerful idiom of the “politics of the belly,” is a vision of the state that largely exists for the sole purpose of feeding itself.⁵⁰

      Historian Frederick Cooper has pointed to the dehistoricized, if not ahistorical, nature of many of these arguments. In the case of Mamdani specifically, Cooper has accused the political scientist of “leapfrogging” Africa’s history of decolonization and early postcolonial encounters with self-rule in an attempt to show an artificial continuity from the violence and exploitation of the colonial past to the corruption and iniquities of the postcolonial present.⁵¹ However, even Cooper’s reflections on decolonization—with their tendency to deemphasize the importance of various forms of African nationalism in people’s lives—often overshadow a significant reality: the fact that, at least in the case of Ghana, Ghanaians who lived through Nkrumah have a lot to say about both African nationalism and living with Nkrumahism. Few may have become the ardent anticolonial socialists—literate in the theoretical and practical intricacies of Marxist anti-imperialism—that Nkrumah and many of the CPP’s most virulent ideologues imagined. Regardless, many welcomed and even sought the opportunity to discuss their experiences with the CPP and its ideology, reflecting on its hopes, disappointments, and, for some, oddities. Marxism, communism, and, as one man put it, the “Eastern forms of psychology” that in his opinion afflicted the CPP were prominent subjects of debate among those I interviewed.⁵² So, too, were Nkrumah and the CPP’s pan-Africanism, development projects, and extension of social services. The Nkrumahist state may not have been the defining feature of their lives, but it was one that made significant and often unanticipated incursions into those lives. Remembrances of opportunities created by the party’s and government’s various institutions and policies intersected with ones of deep-seated anxieties manifested through persistent fears of local spies, political and social backstabbing, and, most ominously, preventative detention. In this regard, Nkrumahism was something more than the systematized political and social program articulated by the Nkrumahist state apparatus: it was something that had to be lived through, negotiated, and constantly reinterpreted.

      Living with Nkrumahism argues that such a framing of Nkrumahism helps reorient how we understand Ghanaians’ relationships not only to the postcolonial state, but also to the expectations and ambiguities that characterized Ghana’s transition to self-rule. Indeed, we can begin to think of multiple “Nkrumahisms” in Nkrumah-era Ghana. Some (but only some) of these clearly had direct connections to the rhetoric and worldview put forward by the institutions—governmental, party and party-affiliated, press, and others—of the Nkrumahist state. Other individuals, meanwhile, invoked the language of Nkrumahism as a means through which to articulate their personal aspirations or frustrations with their current political, social, or economic status, often as a mechanism through which to make claims on the new state. For others, this language served as a way of connecting oneself directly to Nkrumah himself, even if only in rhetoric or performance. Still others manipulated the language of Nkrumahism, and particularly a refashioning of its symbols—the red cockerel, Young Pioneers and Builders Brigade uniforms, and CPP songs—to distance themselves from a party and government from which they felt alienated, a party and government which, to some, was actively seeking to break down the family, community, ethnic, gender, and generational relationships they so prized.

      What the archival, social-scientific, and journalistic record of the CPP era does, though, is seemingly ossify a very specific and orthodoxical interpretation of Nkrumahism that purports to explain the presumed successes, failures, and realities of the Nkrumahist project. Among the social scientists of the mid- to late 1960s and 1970s—who, in many ways, have had the last word on the CPP, at least among academics—such a perspective served to highlight both the deficiencies of the CPP government itself and the ruptures between theory and praxis. However, such a framework privileges state orthodoxy, even as it seeks to refute it, in that a state-centered image of the state-citizenry relationship emerges as the primary or even single reference point for understanding the Ghanaian postcolonial experience. This mode of analysis is not unlike the one that guided the CPP’s own quest to systematize Nkrumahist thought and politics in the 1960s. With its centralization of political and ideological power, embodied first in the republican constitution and later in the one-party state, the CPP sought to set the terms of debate, nationally and internationally, on how best to understand the process of decolonization. This included how to interpret what the party characterized as the antiquated, “tribalist” oppositions that, in the 1950s, persistently vexed the CPP, along with the potentialities and shortfalls of the decolonizing citizenry and the power of the state itself. In other words, a relatively static interpretation of the CPP’s own ambitions, aspirations, and deficiencies has often become the guiding construct through which Ghanaians’ postcolonial imaginings are not just engaged with, but understood. Living with Nkrumahism aims to contextualize and historicize the process by which this orthodoxy came together and in turn increasingly came to represent the political, social, economic, and cultural terrain of the early Ghanaian postcolonial experience.

      SOURCES AND METHODOLOGY

      The study of Nkrumah’s Ghana rests at the interstices of the colonial and postcolonial archive. In doing so, it forces the historian to confront the pronounced shift from the relative wealth of the colonial archive to, as one proceeds through the years after independence, the increasing paucity of the postcolonial archive. In the Public Records and Archives Administration Department (PRAAD) office in Accra, for instance, the pre-1957 archival record provides a relatively ordered and somewhat detailed accounting of the political actions and decision-making processes undertaken in the lead-up to independence, particularly in the form of cabinet minutes and memoranda. As with much of colonial African history, an even more robust archival record detailing the Gold Coast’s transition to self-rule exists in the colonial metropole, most notably in the British National Archives.⁵³ For researchers interested in the 1950s, the late-colonial archive thus provides insight into debates over subjects including the priorities of the CPP government (and particularly its cabinet) as the colony sought to become a country, British perspectives on Gold Coast decolonization, the changes in administrative infrastructure necessary for the soon-to-be independent state, and, to a lesser extent, the operation of several of the colony’s ministries. In some cases, these records continue into the early postcolonial period. However, increasingly as one advances through the 1960s, any semblance of a stable documentary record begins to evaporate. Files and narratives often lack context. Some are missing. Others may be dispersed or intermingled with unrelated material. Still others have found their way into catch-all collections, two of which dominate PRAAD-Accra’s material on Nkrumah-era postcolonial Ghana: the Files on Ex-Presidential Affairs (RG 17/2/-) and those of the Bureau of African Affairs Papers (RG 17/1/-, formerly SC/BAA/-).⁵⁴

      The state of the Ghanaian postcolonial archive may in part be the result of the nature and decisions of the CPP government at the time, possibly reflecting the changing priorities of the government as it confronted the prospects СКАЧАТЬ