Kaye Whiteman considers the centenary of Ghana’s founding father and first leader Kwame Nkrumah who was born on September 21,1909

It is with deep respect and a certain amount of wonder that we should mark the hundred years since the birth of Kwame Nkrumah, pioneer Pan-Africanist, creator and first ruler of independent Ghana and one of the most celebrated Africans of the not just the 20th century, but any century. Although for a time after his fall in 1966 there was an attempt to besmirch his name by pointing up his failings, the legend of Nkrumah as African hero on a par with Mandela has grown and grown until it is now unassailable.

In Ghana his rehabilitation began not long after his death, when a mausoleum in his memory was built in Accra, and although the old opposition to Nkrumah still likes to insist on the role of the ‘big six’ (the political figures, including him, who were detained at a crucial moment in the independence struggle), there is a wider acknowledgment of Nkrumah’s central role in Ghana’s independence. More than that, there is wide satisfaction at the former leader’s pre-eminence in the now-achieved struggle for continental liberation and the longer term drive to African unity.

Nkrumah’s pan-Africanism, which once animated the Organisation of African Unity(OAU), was invoked as a driving force in its successor the African Union, and the current drive there to give new momentum to continental union is spearheaded by the current Chairman Muammar Qadhafi in Nkrumah’s name. And of the two African leaders named by US President Barack Obama, the first was Kwame Nkrumah (the second, in a nod to the country of his father, was Jomo Kenyatta). And although the official reason for the choice of Ghana as the first African country for Obama to visit was its recent exemplary democratic record, it was impossible not to look back fifty years to Ghana’s role as the pioneer of independence. Once again Ghana is arousing admiration and envy in Africa.

What are the reasons for Nkrumah’s remarkably durable reputation, indeed his greatness? It may in part simply be the single-mindedness with which he articulated the twin dreams of continental liberation and unity. It is the latter, the great project for the formation of a united Africa, with which his name will forever be associated. But one also has to look at the story of his life, with its remarkable vicissitudes, to understand how the magic lingers. In the story of the boy from a small fishing village in the far west of the then Gold Coast colony, who sought to educate himself, first within the country and then in the USA, inspired by the Nigerian nationalist Nnamdi Azikiwe, who had earlier followed the same course.

In so doing he developed a great sense of self-belief, allied to an ability to seize the time. Detractors called this opportunism, especially when, after his hard-line campaign against British colonialism after his return to Ghana in 1947, he out-manoeuvred his more conservative colleagues such as J B Danquah and compromised with the British, in order to enter government. His strength was that he had won an election in 1951 based on huge popular support. It was said at the time that it was the victory of the ‘verandah’ over the ‘lounge’, the latter essentially describing his essentially middle class predecessors in the nationalist movement.

In his sympathetic but balanced appreciation Black Star: A View of the Life and Times of Kwame Nkrumah published in 1973, the eminent writer and historian Basil Davidson quotes one of Nkrumah’s main intellectual mentors, the Trinidadian George Padmore as saying the CPP consisted of  “the plebeian masses, the urban workers, artisans, petty traders, market women and fishermen, the clerks, the junior teachers and the vast farming communities of the rural areas who are the makers of Gold Coast history”, Nkrumah’s mass support was why the British had no choice but to hand him power, bringing him straight from prison in Ussher Fort to ‘the Castle’ (the seat of government in Accra). It was, says Davidson “perhaps his greatest hour”, even if later there would be “more obvious advances and more imposing moments of success”.

Those who knew him, at the time (and this is echoed by historians) emphasise his great charm and charisma, rather than the quality of his intellect. Indeed he was a walking illustration of the political value of charm, which he found could move mountains. He could captivate an audience, and articulate his strongly felt beliefs, but Nkrumahism as such never really gained conviction beyond the simple tenets with which he is associated. He once described himself as “a non-denominational Christian and Marxist socialist”, and certainly later in his political career as he met more and more travails, he tried to develop his own creed of scientific socialism, believing erroneously that only more revolution could save him politically. This was perhaps an illustration of the deep contradictions in his personality, which helped encompass his own destruction.

In an attempt to understand this complexity, Basil Davidson writes:
His weaknesses were never in much doubt. He was a man of soaring vision more often than of calculating thought. This vision could obscure his understanding of what was possible and what was not. He was an insistent optimist; this optimism could mislead him badly. Though he believed firmly in organisation, he had little patience with humdrum detail, was quickly bored by routine, and preferred to contemplate the distant summits of his vision rather than inspect the immediate soil beneath his feet….His vision called for nothing less than a revolution that should lead to socialism and unite a continent; but he came to power in a colony where a gentle process of reform was accepted by nearly all his fellow-countrymen as being quite enough.

Although many of Nkrumah’s critics deplore the fact that there were too many rogues around him in his party, more solid criticism highlights more his lack of judgment of the people, especially foreigners, from, whom he took counsel – and because of his own inadequate grasp of economics he tended to be led into ill-advised projects. His application to Lincoln University in the US in the 1930s quoted Tennyson’s words “so much to do, so little time”, which seemed to be the watchword of his life – he was impatient to do so much, but had no coherent programme to begin to achieve it in is own country, and so it crumbled in his hands. For example, he could not believe that all the reserves Ghana possessed at independence could be whittled away, and it was the catastrophic fall in the cocoa price that facilitated his fall in 1966.

After the coup which brought him down, the last sad years of his life were the worst period for his reputation. Apart from the loyal Sekou Touré, who offered him sanctuary, there were few in Africa to defend him. The satisfaction in the West was matched by the indifference in the rest of the world.  He believed that the Americans and British engineered his fall. Ambassador Mahoney’s book JFK: Ordeal in Africa supports this thesis, as does ex-CIA agent John Stockwell in his book In Search of Enemies, and there was certainly considerable foreknowledge and even complicity. But some still wonder if there is a “smoking gun”. We may have to wait for more documents from intelligence organisations to be released, as was the case with the murder of Lumumba.  Nkrumah’s exile in Conakry was painful, and his memoir Dark Days in Ghana  written there indicated a tragic figure, cut off from the realities of his own country.

From the travails of defeat and death, however, sprang a growing recognition of his greatness, and an appreciation of his role in building a nation. After all the vilification which Nkrumah received after his fall, I was told, even at that time, by many in Ghana, who perhaps accepted his departure as inevitable, that “he made us feel like Ghanaians”. The unity of the country, although occasionally put to the test, as in the ethnically-dominated elections of 1969, has always been able to win through. Combined with the strong base still evident in Ghana’s educational system, in which Nkrumah built on the legacy left by the British, one can honestly say that Ghanaians today are all Nkrumah’s children.  And for an Africa that is still mesmerised by his dreams, the term ‘Messiah’, which his more devoted followers used to give him, and which once brought him to ridicule, now does not seem quite so far-fetched.

I began my career writing about West Africa late in the career of Nkrumah. It is a matter of great regret that I had never witnessed him in his prime, at the height of his success. When I came, in the early 1960s, to write regularly in West Africa magazine, he was already beset with plots and enemies, struggling with the political realities that reserves are not inexhaustible, commodity prices not always buoyant, and the tide is not always going your way. Although I had seen him, and been struck by the power of his presence at two Commonwealth Conferences in London in 1964 and 1965, it was only at the memorable OAU Summit in Accra in October 1965, that I was able to have a full appreciation of his power, and also of his tragedy.

This summit was meant to be the occasion at which his Pan-African dream would be realised. Since in his past achievements, especially in the march to independence, will-power had seemed to be victorious over often impossible odds, he believed his dream could happen. It was as if he felt that the anthem of his party, the Convention Peoples Party (CPP), with its stirring refrain “There is Victory for Us” was always going to apply. The fact that eight countries, under the influence of his neighbour and mortal enemy Felix Houphouët-Boigny of Côte d’Ivoire, boycotted the conference mattered little. The fact that exiled opposition elements from countries like Niger went to military training camps in Accra (ironically alongside militants of real liberation movements from Southern Africa) was to Nkrumah the inevitable result of the fact of what he saw as neo-colonial rule by the French in their countries. Was the summit not attended by the giants of the continent, Nasser, Haile Selassie, Sekou Touré, Modibo Keita, Tafawa Balewa, Tubman, Nyerere, and even Ahidjo of Cameroon, who had no cause to love Nkrumah? The presence of significant moderate leaders was a riposte to the absentees by those genuinely loyal to the ideals of the OAU.

As a young wide-eyed journalist, with little practical reporting experience, I witnessed a scene in the main conference chamber, in the closing plenary session, whose importance at the time I scarcely realised. It is only now that I know what was happening when, before the eyes of the public, Nkrumah, an expression of pure misery and desolation on his face, was being subject to entreaties by Emperor Haile Selassie, Sekou Touré and others. It was only when President Gamal Nasser of Egypt took him on one side out of the chamber for a little while, that Nkrumah seemed sufficiently reconciled to permit proceedings to continue. I now realise that what was being discussed was his proposal for a union government, which the Summit was supposed to approve, but which no other country than Ghana supported. At that time, one might ask, how could they? It was, however, a pivotal moment, at which his bitter chagrin was on public display, if with a certain grandeur in defeat. In a way, it was psychologically the beginning of the end, and he fell from power four months later.

There is a curious parallel with the moment at the AU summit in Addis Ababa in February, at which Muammar Gaddafy’s proposals for his own form of union government came up against the pragmatic reluctance of the majority of members, Although lacking the high drama of 1965, there was still a poignant moment when, faced with a severe setback, it was reported that the Libyan leader held his head in his hands. But would not Nkrumah be content to see Qadhafi continuing his cause? He would certainly recognise the hard and rocky road. And indeed, looking at the AU of today, whose membership covers the whole continent, including South Africa, was his belief in liberation not proved unutterably right?