Opinions of Sunday, 1 May 2005
Columnist: Okoampa-Ahoofe, Kwame
The Enduring Legacy Of Dr. J. B. Danquah ? Part 8
That the deleterious impact of British colonialism equally pre-determined the tragic fortunes of both the putative Doyen of Gold Coast and Ghanaian politics, as well as those of the founding premier of Ghana, cannot be gainsaid. And any study which attempts to comprehensively examine the achievements and drawbacks of either patriot cannot afford to do so without also, at least tangentially, drawing on some of the achievements and misfortunes of the other personage. For by 1950, as adumbrated earlier on, the personalities of Dr. J. B. Danquah and Mr. Kwame Nkrumah had come to singularly dominate the Ghanaian political landscape. And these two personalities would continue to dominate the Ghanaian political scene well beyond 1965, upon the death of Dr. Danquah as a political prisoner, and 1966, when President Nkrumah, who had then declared himself Ghana?s Life-President, through a bizarre, one-party parliamentary edict, was overthrown in a bloody military putsch sponsored by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) of the United States of America, with the tacit support of America?s Western allies, including the United Kingdom of Great Britain, Ghana?s erstwhile colonial suzerain.
In this segment of our series, as well as several subsequent ones, we shall examine the portrait which Sir Geoffrey Bing, a British Labor Party stalwart and former Attorney-General in the Nkrumah government, painted of the Ghanaian premier in his celebrated memoir titled REAP THE WHIRLWIND: AN ACCOUNT OF KWAME NKRUMAH?S GHANA FROM 1950 TO 1966 (MacGibbon & Kee, 1968). Perhaps of all the European expatriates, scholars and intellectuals who wrote about Ghanaian political history in the period between 1950 and 1970, none possessed the authoritative intimacy and knowledge of Ghanaian politics than Sir Geoffrey Bing. But what makes Bing?s REAP THE WHIRLWIND singularly relevant to our present discourse is the fact that the author casts Ghana within the kind of formidable global context which only the charismatic personality of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah could have induced in the manner that it did.
Bing observes that Prime Minister Nkrumah was unjustifiably mythologized by Western liberal opinion leaders into an iconic rejoinder to Apartheid South Africa and White Supremacist ideology in general. Thus the political fortunes of the Convention People?s Party (CPP) regime came to be envisaged as encapsulating the predictable fortunes and innate capabilities of the so-called Black African within the messy and chaotic context of post-colonial politics. Thus, where throughout the world even Indo-Europeans had badly acquitted themselves vis-?-vis charges of dictatorial tendencies and abject malversation, or official corruption, these were capriciously ignored even as the perceived foibles of Nkrumah and his CPP regime were magnified and distorted beyond recognition (Bing 11-39). Thus, Nkrumah became the scapegoat of the Western liberal agenda: ?Dr. Nkrumah was cast as a Messiah, but as a Messiah of orthodoxy, who, by his exercise of British political techniques would convert the racialists of Southern Africa? (Bing 16). Bing also notes that Western conservatives and racial supremacists appear to have harbored an insuperable hostility towards Nkrumah?s government because of the latter?s vocal and vehement anti-imperialist stance. Hitherto, the West had been patronizing him and hoping that the Ghanaian premier would almost exclusively concentrate his efforts on the parochial, multivaried concerns of a poor and tiny Ghana: ?To many British liberals, and to some perhaps in the United States and Western Europe also, Dr. Nkrumah was under a solemn obligation to lead Africans to their long Promised Land along a strictly constitutional path. It was only when he started marching around the walls of Jericho [Apartheid South Africa?] blowing trumpets that their faith wavered. After all[,] their kith and kin were inside the fortifications and no one knew what trumpet-blowing might lead to? (Bing 16).
Interestingly, however, as Bing eloquently relates, Ghana?s foreign and domestic policies were just as ordinary and mundane as those of other global sovereign states; in other words, Ghana was more typical of the average country than the exception or the aberration: ?Ghanaian policy had many facets. There was the advocacy of African unity and the campaign against racialism, colonialism and neocolonialism. There was the belief in a ?Third Force,? a grouping of non-aligned states which would not depend on [the] East or [the] West and which would yet have a definite and concerted policy of its own. There was theoretical support for socialism but acceptance in practice of a mixed economy. There was, at the United Nations and elsewhere, an assertion of international equality and at home a Government press which, at times, violently and rudely questioned Western policy. But in all such things Ghana was by no means alone. These may have been the outward features of Ghanaian policy, but in total, it must have amounted to more than this to produce such sustained hostility? (Bing 19).
While he admits of Nkrumah?s intellectual prowess, vis-?-vis the latter?s ideological appreciation of Ghana?s neocolonial status in the post-colonial era, nonetheless, Bing notes that the problem with many a pioneering post-colonial African leadership is the problem of apparent pathological fascination with the most deleteriously far-reaching aspects of the old colonial regime:
?Both the hostility to Ghana and the interest which it aroused, sprang in part from its [i.e. Ghana?s] attempt [at] build[ing] a new edifice on the colonial foundations. The old building was not destroyed but, in particular after particular [or detail after detail?], it was remodeled. Often the featured [which was] altered was the one most admired by those who had inhabited the original colonial mansion. To them it was an ancient monument in which they still had a sentimental, if not a proprietary interest. Internal modernization they accepted as necessary but to destroy the British fa?ade they had so laboriously erected was another matter entirely.
?We are all victims of our subconscious presumptions. When independence came, both Britain and Ghana assumed that they had entered into a Commonwealth partnership. What neither did was to examine the partnership deed or even to look to see if there was one. Each presumed that it existed in the form in which they had imagined it. Britain, on its side, presupposed that Ghana had undertaken to behave like a Commonwealth country in that it would preserve the outward semblance, at least, of what was always supposed, in Britain, to be the colonial heritage, the rule of law, a two-party system and the like. Ghana, on the other hand, regarded itself as the inheritor of the methods of government in practice used in the past by the British colonial administration and it considered [that] it was now fully authorized to employ them for its own national purposes. The two beliefs were incompatible.? (Bing 25) In other words, Bing, in the above, is implying that while Britain, Ghana?s erstwhile colonial suzerain, pretended to have governed its former African colony by a democratic culture as then prevailed in the proverbial Mother Country, in reality, British colonial administration was prosecuted more along the lines of a stratocracy than classical, or a typical, Western democracy. In sum, unlike the government of London, that of Accra, during the colonial era, was operated by edict rather than parliamentary or civic consensus. Unfortunately, observes Bing, it was the former praxis which pioneering leaders like Dr. Nkrumah were made privy to or experienced, rather than being proactively exposed to the culture of democracy as it prevailed in Britain. Paradoxically, however, upon assuming the historic reins of governance in Ghana, Prime Minister Nkrumah would be rather unjustifiably judged according to the remote and alien standards of British democracy by both Western ideological liberals and their conservative counterparts. Such gross error in judgment, Bing poignantly notes, was largely due to the fact that these armchair critics had, naturally, not been on the proverbial grounds, as it were, to be able to personally witness for themselves the travesty of democratic culture which their countrymen had bequeathed the erstwhile Gold Coast, as well as other similarly operated former colonial possessions.
The preceding notwithstanding, Sir Geoffrey Bing, former attorney-general in the Nkrumah government, does not appear to have envisaged socioeconomic relations between the former British colony and England beyond the tired neocolonialist ? or self-interested ? terms of the proverbial industrialist and raw-material supplier. In other words, like his colleagues of the British Labor Party (BLP) ? among them, Ernest Bevin, R. H. S. Crossman, Fred Lee, George Wigg, J. P. W. Mallalieu, Harold Davies and Stephen Swingler ? Bing envisaged the development of African democracies and economies along purely agrarian lines.
Interestingly enough, both Dr. Danquah and Prime Minister Nkrumah envisaged Ghana?s socioeconomic development along industrial lines. Thus, to those who speculate over the likely outcome of a Danquah administration, gauging by the prevailing Western attitude, a Danquah administration would likely have come into a similar disfavor as experienced by the Convention People?s Party (CPP). And we are convinced of the preceding because Sir Geoffrey Bing quotes the extant British Foreign Secretary (1948?) as articulating the collective ideological stance of the Labor Party in the following patently eerie terms: ? ?Europe,? he [Bevin] told the House of Commons, ?has extended its influence throughout the world, and we have to look further afield. In the first place, we turn our eyes to Africa, where great responsibilities are shared by us with South Africa, France, Belgium and Portugal?[.] The organization of Western Europe must be economically supported. That involves the closest possible collaboration with the Commonwealth and with overseas territories, not only British but French, Dutch, Belgian and Portuguese. Those overseas territories are largely primary producers?[.] They have raw materials, food and resources which can be turned to very great common advantage?[.] If Western Europe is to achieve its balance of payments and to get a world equilibrium[,] it is essential that those resources should [ought?] to be developed and made available, and the exchange between them carried out in a correct and proper manner. There is no conflict between the social and economic development of those overseas territories to the advantage of their people, and their development as a source [or sources] of supplies for Western Europe.? (Bing 25) Needless to say, part of Bing?s excruciating attempt at understanding unmitigable and inexorable Western hostility towards Nkrumah?s CPP is put paid, or fluently resolved, by the preceding x-ray of the intransigent agenda of the West vis-?-vis the collective destiny of Africa and the rest of the non-European world. And if the preceding picture looks rather unbearably grim, it is readily countervailed by recent phenomenal, industrial development in erstwhile colonial polities like India, China, Indonesia and the southern Asian geopolitical landscape in general. In sum, ultimately, Africa?s socioeconomic development will be squarely determined by the inalienable desire or zeal, on the part of Africans, not the hermetic and patently intransigent will of Western Europe towards the perennial enforcement of a master-servant regime on Africans, as well as on other non-Western polities and peoples. The preceding state of affairs is what many a progressive political theorist has labeled as ?Western Liberalism,? a veritably pernicious but, nonetheless, well-calculated attempt at holding non-Western peoples to a regime perennial socioeconomic subjugation, even as the West also pretends to be constructively facilitating a global partnership or developmental parity. Here, what we have is the pontifical promulgation of a caste system parading as divine edict. This, indeed, is what former British colonial governor of Nigeria, Lord Frederick Lugard, of Abinger, disingenuously termed as ?The Dual Mandate.? And it is quite edifying to learn that Dr. Danquah fully appreciated this patently repugnant and pathological dimension of European imperialism. Indeed, in his review of the activities of the Gold Coast Youth Conference, as noted in the last segment of this series, the Doyen of Gold Coast and Ghanaian politics registered the following rather profound observation: ?Only free men can live in an expansionist world. Colonial status is not a free status. Nor, like slave status, is it a natural or Christian status. At least, if St. Paul is any [significant] guide, God who made of one blood all nations of men [and women] for to dwell on all the face of the earth, decided and determined what were to be the bounds or limits of each nation?s habitation. If for a country to be a Great Power is a good thing, then for a country to be a Colony or settlement of emigrants from another country, is an evil thing, for said Lord Cranborne in the House of Lords on December 4, [1943?], ?A Colony in that truest sense almost inevitably involves the gradual extinction or serious disturbance of the indigenous population.? Colonial status is not an expansionist status. It is the [abject] status of a subject, not of a citizen; of subjection, not of citizenship; of extinction, not of expansion? (Self-Help And Expansion 20). Needless to say, it indisputably appears that in the contemporaneous Western mind, an ?expansionist world? precisely denoted a global economic order so structured as to subordinate all non-Western economies to the marginal status of raw-material supplier, or the proverbial hewers of wood and drawers of water (Bing 25). But that a global economic order predominantly and almost exclusively crafted by the West is inherently unequal and self-serving, is deftly articulated by Dr. Danquah in the following terms: ?Colonel Oliver Stanley [the extant British Colonial Secretary] tells us that Britain has never in the past and shall not in the future desire to see economic development from purely selfish motives or on purely selfish lines [or grounds], but Colonel Stanley is a Minister and not an industrialist (at least, I think so), and one never can tell what the industrialists or capitalists can do, when it comes to this matter of who first? The Colonies or Lancashire? If it is a question of ?Paramount interest,? we know what happened in Kenya? (Self-Help And Expansion 20). And in his more ideologically vehement and trenchant classic titled Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, Kwame Nkrumah, Sir Geoffrey Bing recalls, concluded with ?the assumption that the growing disparity between rich and poor [both nations and individuals] has set the world on [a] collision course[,] and unless [constructive and productive] action is taken[,] civilization is bound to be destroyed? (Bing 22).
And here, one hastens to observe that Dr. Nkrumah must have unwittingly anticipated the sort of apocalyptic carnage which resulted in the toppling and conflagration of the historic twin-towers of New York City?s World Trade Center, the symbolic bastion of American civilization and capitalist economic power. And while he would almost certainly have commiserated with victims of the September 11, 2001 tragedy, President Nkrumah would almost just as well have knowingly chuckled at the dramatic expression of shock and utter disbelief by the imperious leaders in Washington, and other Western capitals, whose stolid smugness and abject and flagrant refusal to heed the humanitarian call of the world?s teeming underprivileged and woefully deprived populace partly precipitated the World Trade Center carnage.
Bing also makes a morally indeflectible case for the culture and practice of democracy which one wishes that the former British parliamentarian and Labor Party stalwart could have made to President Nkrumah, particularly during the twilight days of CPP rule, when the pioneering Ghanaian premier capriciously declared his country a one-party state. But the allusion here, however, is to the de facto laxity of political representation in the august assembly of the United Nations, an institution founded in the wake of the salutary defeat of international fascism, spearheaded by German chancellor Adolf Hitler?s Nazi Party and the Third Reich. To the foregoing effect, Bing observes: ?The United Nations? delegates are chosen, as were the members of the old unreformed British parliament, in a number of ways, many of which preclude the population whom they nominally represent having any voice in their selection. The delegate who is the personal nominee of an absolute monarch notoriously unrepresentative of his people or who is sent there by some quite irresponsible military clique precariously in power after having overthrown a popularly chosen Government, is as much a member of the General Assembly as the delegate appointed by the democratic administration of a country universally agreed to be representative of its majority opinion?(REAP THE WHIRLWIND 29).
It goes without saying that for more than the nearly half-century that Ghana has been transformed into a post-colonial sovereign state, the country?s delegates to the United Nations have largely been sent there by military juntas. In Geoffrey Bing?s well-informed opinion, the United Nations has woefully failed in its mission as a legitimate global regulator of democratic culture. Implicitly, what appears to have seriously compromised the global legitimacy of the United Nations is the expedient acceptance of political relativism, on the part of the democratic West, thereby precipitating the sordid and unhealthy condonation of regressive regimes. And the fact that the bulk of such regimes have prevailed in the largely non-European Third World, has readily ensured that the proverbial, gaping North-South economic divide would be further aggravated, even as the Northern leadership unctuously pays lip-service on the imperative need to facilitate the rapid socioeconomic and cultural advancement of the Third World. In the peculiar case of Ghana, the auspicious election of Mr. Kofi Annan, a Ghanaian national, as Secretary-General of the United Nations, has remarkably influenced the country?s political fortunes. In fact, many studious and astute commentators on Ghanaian politics have even suggested, and with good reason, that rather than unduly credit the chameleonic Flt.-Lt. Jeremiah (Jerry) John Rawlings with having voluntarily relinquished power ? for the veteran ?Benign Dictator? merely morphed himself, almost overnight, into a civilian dictator ? the incontrovertible moral capital and massive political influence of Mr. Kofi Annan may be singularly envisaged as having dramatically transformed the political fortunes of Ghana on the threshold of the Twenty-First Century. Even so, Geoffrey Bing painfully laments Dr. Nkrumah?s apparently gaping naivety in failing to recognize the fact that the United Nations was primarily established to cater to the especial and exclusive needs of the European-West, and never to serve as an impartial umpire of international justice and fair play. On this score, the raging political crisis in Prime Minister Robert Mugabe?s Zimbabwe may be seen to strikingly mirror the relationship between President Nkrumah and the Western powers during the waning years of the CPP administration. Indeed, for Bing, it was Nkrumah?s dogged zeal for justice and fair play that brought the Ghanaian leader and his country into abject disrepute in the proverbial blue eyes of the West, particularly those of Britain, Ghana's erstwhile colonial overlord. To this effect, the magisterial author of Reap the Whirlwind observes: ?The less developed states which, like Ghana, supported the United Nations, did not do so because of any legal powers residing in the General Assembly. They well knew these, in practice to be non-existent. What they did believe was that the United Nations was a pressure organization deliberately created by the great powers as a safety valve and which, therefore, if intelligently used, could influence the course of world events. It was, once again, this attempt by Ghana to use an essentially Western institution, in an essentially Western way, in order to redress the balance in the world, which resulted in so much criticism of its activities. To the industrialized nations[,] the United Nations was a front, a fa?ade behind which real business might be transacted [just like the proverbial golf club here in the United States]. To countries like Ghana [rather unfortunately,] it [i.e. the United Nations] was a piece of democratic machinery which they were entitled to exploit for the purposes for which they believed it had been created. To them[,] the General Assembly was a world representative organization[,] despite all its limitations and lack of power. In the same way as Tudor monarchs allowed themselves to be guided by the consensus of opinion in their Parliament, when they were under [absolutely] no legal obligation [whatsoever] to do so, so the newly independent states [woefully] imagined that the developed powers would never have created an organization in which their voices were to be heard[,] unless they intended to pay some attention to what they said. It was a fatal misunderstanding?(Reap the Whirlwind 31).
Consequently, unlike Dr. Danquah, the foremost Gold Coast and Ghanaian constitutional lawyer who keenly understood the patently devious nature of a political framework hermetically crafted and stage-managed by British imperialist ideology, President Nkrumah shortly found himself tragically entrapped after naively rejecting an Afrocentric, bi-cameral legislative system in favor of a contextually alien and regressive, neocolonialist, British parliamentary machinery. The putative founding father of Ghana would also shortly realize that even his salutary pursuit of welfare-state ideology, the same school of governance endorsed and religiously pursued by Britain was deemed to be grossly unacceptable by the European-West. To this effect, Bing notes: ?British public opinion believed that Ghana should follow a parliamentary system at home of the type that existed in the United Kingdom and were shocked when it [i.e. Ghana] appeared not to do so. The same public opinion, however, did not demand that Britain should internationally pursue a policy of parliamentary democracy [particularly with regard to South Africa, Namibia and Zimbabwe], even in its Tudor form, so far as the United Nations were concerned and were [inexorably] hostile and contemptuous of Ghana when it criticized Britain for not doing so. The Western world were not even prepared to permit any political dialogue on a basis of equality between itself and the developing world. Neo-colonialism was pronounced, ex-cathedra, not to exist and socialism was ruled out as a remedy even by Western socialists writing in socialist journals?(Bing 31).
Once again, J. B. Danquah?s ?Oliver Stanley Riddle,? regarding the innately and intrinsically self-serving orientation of British, and Western colonialism, has been vindicated. Paradoxically, as noted earlier, even the astute Doyen of Gold politics, like Kwame Nkrumah, was inexplicably na?ve enough to have suggested that in the event of Ghana being granted independence by Britain in the immediate post-war era, the ?ex-colony would feel constrained to choose its representative-country in world affairs, for the new autonomous ex-colonial [country] would be singularly unprepared to meet any of the great nations on anything like equal terms ? (To start with, [we] have no diplomatic corps, and that sort of thing!?(Self-Help And Expansion iv). And as noted earlier, so precariously close had the Doyen vantaged himself vis-?-vis Britain that he woefully failed, in this particular instance, to appreciate the fundamental fact that the foremost objective of colonial imperialism is to perpetuate itself, and not help to modernize, or facilitate, the socioeconomic and political advancement, to parity, of the colonized. But, needless to say, such is the plight of many a pioneer who, lacking a viable paradigm from her or his own cultural and historical background, is often compelled, albeit reluctantly, to erroneously identify and align her or his interests and those of his or her people with that of their exploiters and oppressors.
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