Nkrumah and Ghana’s Independence struggle

[XXPANTHAXX]

By Abayomi Azikiwe
Editor, Pan-African News Wire

Over 100 years ago on Sept. 21, 1909, Kwame Nkrumah, the founder and
leader of the African independence movement and the foremost advocate of
Pan-Africanism during his time, was born in the western Nzima region of
the Gold Coast, later known as the independent state of Ghana.

Nkrumah was the first head of state of an independent post-colonial
nation in Africa south of the Sahara, after he led Ghana to national
liberation under the direction of the Convention Peoples Party in 1957.
Educated at the historically Black college of Lincoln University in
Pennsylvania, Nkrumah became involved in the Pan-African movement in the
United States during the 1930s and 1940s as a leading member of the
African Students Association, the Council on African Affairs, as well as
other organizations.

After leaving the United States at the conclusion of World War II in
1945, he played a leading role in convening the historic Fifth
Pan-African Congress in Manchester, England—a gathering that many credit
with laying the foundation for the mass struggles for independence
during the 1940s and 1950s.

During his stay in England from 1945 to 1947, he collaborated with
George Padmore of Trinidad, a veteran activist in the international
communist movement and a journalist who wrote extensively on African
affairs. Nkrumah was offered a position with the United Gold Coast
Convention as an organizer in late 1947 and made the critical decision
to return to the Gold Coast to assist in the anti-colonial struggle that
was intensifying in the aftermath of World War II.

After being imprisoned with other leaders of the UGCC for supposedly
inciting unrest among veterans, workers and farmers in the colony, he
gained widespread popularity among the people, who responded
enthusiastically to his militant and fiery approach to the burgeoning
anti-imperialist movement. After forming the Committee on Youth
Organization, which became the best organized segment of the UGCC,
Nkrumah was later isolated from the top leadership of the Convention,
who objected to his demands for immediate political independence for the
Gold Coast.

On June 12, 1949, Nkrumah and the CYO formed the Convention Peoples
Party in Accra, Ghana, at a mass gathering of tens of thousands of
people. They were prepared to launch a mass struggle for the abolition
of British colonial rule over the Gold Coast. During this same period,
Nkrumah formed links with other anti-colonial and Pan-African
organizations that were operating in other colonies of West Africa. When
the CPP called for a Positive Action Campaign in early 1950, leading to
massive strikes and rebellion throughout the colony, Nkrumah was
imprisoned by the colonial authorities for sedition.

The executive members of the CPP continued to press for the total
independence of the colony, eventually creating conditions for a popular
election in 1951 that the CPP won overwhelmingly. In February 1951,
Nkrumah was released from prison in Ghana and appointed Leader of
Government Business in a transitional arrangement that eventually led to
the independence of Ghana on March 6, 1957.

Vision of Pan-Africanism, socialism

At the independence gathering on March 6, Nkrumah—now prime
minister—declared that Ghana’s independence was meaningless unless it
was directly linked with the total liberation of the continent. This
statement served as the cornerstone of Ghanaian foreign policy during
Nkrumah’s tenure as leader of the country.

George Padmore became the official advisor on African affairs, and was
placed in charge of the Bureau of African Affairs, whose task was to
assist other national liberation movements on the continent in their
efforts to win political independence. In April 1958, the First
Conference of Independent African States was convened, with eight
nation-states as participants. This gathering broke down the colonially
imposed divisions between Africa north and south of the Sahara.

In December later that same year, the first All-African Peoples
Conference was held in Accra, bringing together 62 national liberation
movements from all over the continent, as well as representation from
Africans in the United States. It was at this conference in December
1958 that Patrice Lumumba of Congo became an internationally recognized
leader of the anti-colonial struggle in that Belgian colony.

By 1960 the independence movement had gained tremendous influence
throughout Africa, resulting in the emergence of many new nation-states
on the continent. That same year, Ghana became a republic and adopted
its own constitution, making Nkrumah the president of the government.

However, there arose fissures within the leadership of the CPP over
which direction the new state would take in its economic and social
policies. Many of Nkrumah’s colleagues, who had been instrumental in the
struggle for independence, were not committed to his long-term goals of
Pan-Africanism and socialism. Consequently, many of the programmatic
initiatives launched by the CPP government were stifled by the class
aspirations of those state and party officials who were noncommittal
about a total revolutionary transformation of Ghanaian society and the
African continent as a whole.

Internal struggles in Nkrumah’s Convention Peoples Party broke into the
open, once even resulting in an August 1962 attempt to assassinate the
president with a bomb attack.

By 1964 the First Republic of Ghana had held an election that mandated
the adoption of the one-party state form of government. During this
period, the CPP was attempting to restructure the country’s economy from
dependence on trade with and investment by the capitalist world. This
proved to be a formidable task due to the legacy of colonialism in the
country and the relative weakness of the Soviet Bloc and China, which
limited their ability to provide economic assistance to newly
independent African states.

Nkrumah in 1963 identified neocolonialism as the major impediment to the
genuine liberation of Africa. At the founding meeting of the
Organization of African Unity in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, he released his
book entitled “Africa Must Unite,” which provided a proposal for the
adoption of a continental union government as the only means of
countering the development of the new form of colonialism on the
continent.

At the OAU conference in Egypt during July 1964, Nkrumah pleaded for the
adoption of a United States of Africa by the heads of state. This
proposal was not accepted despite apparent problems associated with the
legacy of colonialism on the continent. The Congo crisis and the
economic stagnation of many of the newly independent states illustrated
that these nations were not viable as economic and political entities.

At the October 1965 OAU Summit held in Accra, many of the heads of state
from other nations did not attend because they opposed the CPP
government’s foreign policy. At this conference, Nkrumah issued his book
entitled “Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism,” which
condemned the United States as the principal imperialist power behind
the new form of hegemonic rule, which was designed to maintain Western
control over the newly independent states in Africa and throughout the
so-called developing world.

This book so infuriated the U.S. government that its Undersecretary of
State for African Affairs G.M. Williams wrote a memorandum of protest to
Ghana’s Embassy in Washington, D.C., saying that Nkrumah was working in
contravention to the interests of the U.S. government in Africa.

Just four months after the release of his book on neo-colonialism,
Nkrumah was overthrown on Feb. 24, 1966, by a coup d’etat led by
lower-level military officers and police in Ghana. Since they perceived
Nkrumah’s policies as a threat to the economic and political interests
of the Western powers, the U.S. government and the imperialist world
united behind the coup.

At the time Nkrumah was in China en route to North Vietnam. He was on a
mission to bring about a peace settlement in the U.S. war against the
peoples of Southeast Asia when Chinese officials informed him of the
events in Ghana.

Aborting his mission to Vietnam, he returned via the Soviet Union to
Africa, traveling to Egypt and eventually settling in Guinea-Conakry.
Nkrumah remained in Guinea until he was flown to Romania to undergo
treatment for cancer in 1971. During the period following the coup from
1966 to 1971, he continued to write on the history of Africa and the
revolutionary movement for Pan-Africanism and world socialism.

The legacy of Kwame Nkrumah

Despite the coup, Nkrumah’s legacy in Africa and throughout the African
world continues. His view on the necessity of coordinated guerrilla
warfare to liberate Africa was realized in the subcontinent during the
1970s and 1980s when the settler-colonial regimes of Rhodesia and
eventually South Africa were defeated. Cuba’s role in the liberation and
security of Angola was clearly in line with Nkrumah’s ideas, which
argued that until settler colonialism was destroyed, the entire
continent of Africa would not be secure.

Though the realization of a United States of Africa is still far away,
this issue continues to be discussed broadly on the continent and in the
Diaspora. The Organization of African Unity was transformed into the
African Union in 2002 in order to increase efforts aimed at the
unification of the continent. A Pan-African Parliament was formed and is
now housed in the Republic of South Africa.

The current chairman of the African Union, Libyan leader Muammar
Qaddafi, has continued to stress the necessity of forming a continental
government along the lines Nkrumah advocated during the 1950s and 1960s.

In Ghana Nkrumah’s legacy was utilized in both a positive and a negative
manner by the successive regimes that took power after his departure.
These regimes are compelled to use his image and legacy, despite their
refusal to adopt the CPP program in its totality.

In the United States and throughout the Diaspora, increasing
identification with Africa has occurred over the last forty years. The
African community in America and the Caribbean played an instrumental
role in the solidarity struggle with the national liberation movements
in southern Africa during the 1980s and 1990s. Nkrumah’s views on the
necessity of African unity have been prophetic in light of the
continuing underdevelopment of the continent and the phenomena of
domestic neocolonialism in the United States and the Caribbean.
Consequently, the legacy of Nkrumah is still relevant to the present-day
struggle of African and other oppressed peoples around the world.

A greater understanding of Nkrumah’s ideas and activities can only
benefit the present efforts to create a world that is genuinely
independent and self-determined.