and with which to also begin the process of imagining an alternative to that world order.
. . .
The world Kwame Nkrumah came of age in during the first decades of the twentieth century was ultimately one in which the colonial project of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was maturing into the international political system that would mark the world order of the first half of the twentieth century. However, from its earliest days, this was a world order that would be contested on multiple fronts within Africa and elsewhere. The wide variety of political and intellectual networks—colonial, metropolitan, and diasporic—that came to shape this opposition to colonial rule emerged as the political and intellectual training ground for the young Nkrumah. Through his readings, interactions, and at times direct participation in the interwar period’s anticolonial circles, Nkrumah came to adapt the anticolonial worldview into the vision for what would become the ethos of Ghanaian nation-building that he would cultivate in the Gold Coast after his return. Moreover, many of the ideas and assumptions of the anticapitalist critiques of the colonial system in particular and its liberal ideological moorings more broadly would continue to buttress the future Ghanaian leader’s and state’s worldview and policies for much of the following two decades.
2
From the Gold Coast to Ghana
Modernization and the Politics of Pan-African Nation-Building
The peoples of the colonies know precisely what they want. They wish to be free and independent, to be able to feel themselves on an equal [footing?] with all other peoples and to work out their own destiny without outside interference and to be unrestricted to attain an advancement that will put them on a par with other technically advanced nations of the world.
—Kwame Nkrumah, Towards Colonial Freedom, 19471
IN DECEMBER 1947, Kwame Nkrumah returned to the Gold Coast at the invitation of the prominent Gold Coast barrister and nationalist J. B. Danquah. At Danquah’s behest, Nkrumah was to serve as general secretary of the recently formed United Gold Coast Convention. However, even before Nkrumah’s arrival, the Gold Coast press had already begun preaching the Nkroful-born politician’s virtues, with the Gold Coast Independent advising its readers in October that “in him one finds all the qualities that make for greatness.” The newspaper further predicted that in the coming years Nkrumah would “play a great role in the future of West Africa, there can be no doubt.”2 The buzz around Nkrumah only intensified following his return. As M. N. Tetteh—who more than a decade later would hold a variety of positions in the Nkrumah government, including in the Ghana Young Pioneers—recalled, few things had a greater influence on his life than the enthusiasm with which people spoke of this man who had come from abroad to bring “freedom” to the Gold Coast. Tetteh explained that, for him and his colleagues, all of whom were just schoolboys at the time, “You may not know the details of it [i.e., what freedom meant], but you were happy,” for the word alone promised a better future. As a result, when Nkrumah came to Tetteh’s hometown of Dodowa shortly after his arrival in the colony, Tetteh was among the students who snuck out of school to see the new general secretary of the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC). Following Nkrumah’s speech, Tetteh claims to have declared his allegiance to the Gold Coast politician and, along with many of his fellow young people, undertook the mission of “spreading the gospel of Nkrumah’s message” to anyone who would listen. “[We were] very young,” Tetteh recounted, “without knowing much about, without understanding much about politics, but with enthusiasm, we were following him.”3
Tetteh was far from alone in offering such a reflection on Nkrumah’s impact on the Gold Coast political scene. Ben Nikoi-Oltai, who would join the CPP shortly after its July 1949 formation, presented a similar personal and national narrative. For him, the defining events of the CPP’s early years were the party’s February 1951 electoral victory and, even more importantly, Nkrumah’s subsequent release from prison. As remembered by the longtime Accra resident, the CPP victory drew a crowd of Gold Coasters to James Fort Prison, where the government was holding Nkrumah on charges of sedition and inciting an illegal strike.4 Nikoi-Oltai recalled how, after Nkrumah’s release, the crowd shepherded Nkrumah across the colonial capital to the seat of government at Christiansborg Castle, where Nkrumah assumed the newly created position of leader of government business. For Nikoi-Oltai, who would maintain a place in the CPP rank and file until the 1966 coup, this procession across Accra was a defining moment both in his life and for the nation. “That day,” the Accra shopkeeper proclaimed, “I saw whites running away for the first time.”5 Another longtime party member, Kofi Duku, echoed Nikoi-Oltai in a 2008 interview as he recounted how within “less than . . . an hour, [the courtyard in front of] James Fort Prison . . . a big space, was filled to capacity.” Upon Nkrumah’s release, Duku continued, “Men and women, children and children yet to be born, that means women carrying babies with cloth tied around their waists, [were] singing various songs [of] joy and happiness.”6
The victory that swept Nkrumah and the CPP to power was nothing short of profound. In the Legislative Assembly, the CPP won thirty-four of the body’s thirty-eight contested seats, while the imprisoned CPP leader officially received more than fourteen times as many votes as his nearest rival in his Accra electoral district.7 Following the election, control over the Gold Coast would officially remain in British hands for the next six years. However, as the leader of government business and, from 1952 on, prime minister, Nkrumah, along with the young CPP, gained wide-reaching powers over the colony’s internal affairs. This included the establishment of their own cabinet and the relative freedom to pursue a legislative agenda seen as ushering in a broader program of political, social, economic, and infrastructural modernization. At its most foundational, this program aimed to incorporate key aspects of the Manchester radicalism Nkrumah and others brought from abroad in an attempted re-envisioning of the social, cultural, and even physical makeup of the Gold Coast itself. Governmental and constitutional affairs, the CPP argued, even including self-government, could only go so far. The real issue now was how to transform the colonial Gold Coast and the people who populated it into a modern nation.
This chapter details the construction of the burgeoning Nkrumahist vision for an emergent postcolonial Ghana in the context of the 1950s independence negotiations. This was a period in which, for many Gold Coasters and especially those aligned with the CPP, eventual independence appeared a foregone conclusion. At the same time, the actual path to it remained unclear, and, by the mid-1950s, looked increasingly messy as a number of formal and informal resistance movements emerged within the colony. Key to this period, then, was a complex set of local and national negotiations in which Nkrumah, the CPP, and the British each sought to balance their own interests and ambitions for the future Ghana with those of the many competing constituencies that composed the Gold Coast more broadly. For the CPP itself, the liminal nature of this period of shared governance offered an opportunity for the new government as it sought to securely begin building its future Ghana along the lines of the modern, ordered, urban, industrial, and cosmopolitan society that would serve as the idealized hallmark of official Nkrumahism for much of the next decade and a half. As a result, on the governmental level, the early and mid-1950s were a period of near-unprecedented investment and experimentation in fields ranging from education and healthcare to architecture and urban planning as the CPP set out to define the social and infrastructural parameters of modern African life.
As this chapter also shows, the responses to the CPP’s actions were far from uniform. Rather, the CPP’s efforts ushered in a variety of complicated local and regional reactions as diverse groups of soon-to-be Ghanaians negotiated their own desires and expectations for decolonization-era modernization in relation to all that was lost in the often all-encompassing nature of the CPP’s plans and paths toward implementation. More than the remnants of an antiquated politics that most in the CPP and many outside observers presented them as, the localized and regional opposition movements (formal and informal) that arose against the CPP during the 1950s often countered the CPP’s modernist imagination with their own alternative visions for the Gold Coast’s/Ghana’s future. In doing so, they frequently drew upon a range of historical, intellectual, and cultural traditions with much deeper roots than anything