Nkrumah Was A Bad Joke!

By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.

Dr. Gamal Nasser Adams does not demonstrate a worthwhile understanding of postcolonial Ghanaian history when he regrettably faults the Kotoka-led 1966 coup against Nkrumah’s one-party dictatorship as one that “marked the beginning of imperialism over Ghana’s resources” (See “Lecturer Condemns Overthrow of Nkrumah” MyJoyOnline.com 2/25/11).

We had better point out that the government of the so-called Convention People’s Party (CPP) maintained Apartheid South Africa as Ghana’s largest trading partner on the African continent (See Kwame Arhin’s The Life and Work of Kwame Nkrumah). If the preceding foreign policy agenda does not make Nkrumah an unconscionable collaborator of Western imperialism, then fanatical Nkrumaists like Dr. Adams ought to explain to the world at large what such egregious anomaly in principle makes of their hero.

We also have to point out to unsuspecting readers and misguided self-styled Nkrumah aficionados that the very extortionate instrument of the Preventive Detention Act (PDA) that saw Nkrumah incarcerating his political and ideological opponents left and right, was a veritable weapon of British colonialism that was borrowed third-hand from Nehru’s India (See Okoampa-Ahoofe’s Dr. J. B. Danquah: Architect of Modern Ghana). And so what is all this periodically recycled nonsense about Nkrumah having epitomized an autarkic symbol of African liberation?

To be certain, what made Nkrumah’s practice of judicial and legal enforcement much worse than its British colonial prototype, inhered in the fact that under the administration of the CPP, detention without trial was more the norm than the exception (See Omari’s Kwame Nkrumah: The Anatomy of an African Dictatorship). In fact, it was the capricious and outright embarrassing nature of the preceding that prompted a hitherto staunch Nkrumah associate, Mr. Braimah, to question both the symbolic and practical significance of exchanging White colonialism for Black colonialism!

The “Show Boy” was also a thoroughgoing racist who could not contain his abject contempt for the kind of multiracial democracy that Nelson Mandela and the other progressive leaders of the African National Council (ANC) found to be at once inevitable and imperative in the “settler colony,” as opposed to a classic colonial outpost, that was southern Africa. Not only would the Pan-Africanist Congress-supporting Nkrumah refuse to meet with Mandela or even provide the ANC with modest material support, Nkrumah would also label the greatest statesman of late twentieth-century Africa an “Uncle Uncle.”

The fact of the matter, of course, is that by trading in mining equipment and even English apples (as this writer’s own Nkrumah-leaning father attested) with the odious Apartheid regime, Nkrumah gave fillip to the political intransigence of white-settler racism on the African continent. But that the “Show Boy” would covertly ratify trade agreements with Pretoria, even as he also hypocritically railed against John Vorster and even called for the driving of the white South African into the South Atlantic, rendered the African liberation struggle nothing short of the downright comical in the imagination of the Anglo-Boer regime.

And so it is rather criminal to hear many an ignorant self-proclaimed Nkrumaist condemning Dr. K. A. Busia who, as Ghana’s prime minister and one of Africa’s most astute leaders, counseled dialogue with the nuclearized Apartheid regime as the most constructive approach to resolving the southern African question, as a sellout to Western imperialism. The fact of the matter is that Nkrumah epitomized the very essence of the clinically addled neocolonialist, as is amply attested by the funding sources of his most significant and prestigious projects. The headquarters of the Ghana Cocoa-Marketing Board throughout Nkrumah’s tenure remained in London!

Even the “Show Boy’s” choice of spouse bespoke of the fetid stench of one who was mortally afflicted with inferiority complex, conveniently and cynically packaged as “African Unification.” And even as distinguished Kenyan scholar and political scientist Prof. Ali A. Mazrui had occasion to point out, one of Nkrumah’s self-proclaimed greatest achievements was having danced with Her Royal Majesty, Queen Elizabeth II, as well as being named as “Queen’s Counsel” (QC). Not only would Nkrumah rapturously speechify about the latter’s being a great honor and rarefied recognition of the “Negro” race, whose ablest representative he deemed himself, of course, he would also use this largely unearned accolade to strong-arm the Ghanaian judiciary into marching by the cacophonous music of his vindictive kettle-drums.

The paradox here is that even if one acrobatically and disingenuously attempts to “de-imperialize” or sanitize this vintage product of “Empire,” of the first rank, one is still left with Nkrumah’s 1961 conferral with the Soviet equivalent of the Nobel Prize, the Lenin Prize. Eastern imperialism’s African poster-boy? Or not so? In sum, on the question of Nkrumah’s place in the annals/pantheon of the heroes of twentieth-century African liberation struggle, the correct answer lies somewhere between Eurocentric copycat exuberance and the desperate need for this relative academic under-achiever to expediently and recklessly cannibalize his intellectuals and ideological superiors on the dubious road to canonical immortality. On the latter score, I believe the story of “Ozymandias” in the Percy Bysshe Shelley poem best encapsulates the man and what he stood for. Today, other than vacuous monuments bearing his name, almost every edifying, constructive and functional innovation taking place in the real of Ghanaian democracy has the unmistakable stamp of the eudaemonious and statsmanlike spirits of the Danquah-Busia-Dumbo Tradition.

*Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D., is Associate Professor of English, Journalism and Creative Writing at Nassau Community College of the State University of New York. He is a Governing Board Member of the Accra-based Danquah Institute (DI) and author of “The Obama Serenades” (Lulu.com, 2011). E-mail: [email protected]. ###