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The World of Kwame Nkrumah

Pan-Africanism, Empire, and the Gold Coast in Global Perspective

Many of us fail to understand that a war cannot be waged for democracy which has as its goal a return to imperialism. It is our warning, that if after victory, imperialism and colonialism should be restored, we will be sowing the seed not only for another war, but for the greatest revolution the world has ever seen.

—Kwame Nkrumah, “Education and Nationalism in Africa,” 1943¹

Brother, if any people need peace, it is Asians and Africans, as only a peaceful world will enable them to develop their countries and taste some of the good things of life which the West have long enjoyed.

—George Padmore to Kwame Nkrumah, 1957²

AT MIDNIGHT on 6 March 1957, Kwame Nkrumah stood on a stage in Accra’s Old Polo Grounds to usher in the birth of the new, independent Ghana and to announce his vision for the new nation. “Today, from now on,” he proclaimed, “there is a new African in the world and that new African is ready to fight his own battle and show that after all the black man is capable of managing his own affairs. We are going to demonstrate to the world, to the other nations, young as we are, that we are prepared to lay our own foundation.” He then continued his short celebratory speech with an all-encompassing call to action in the struggle for African self-determination: “We have done with the battle and we again re-dedicate ourselves in the struggle to emancipate other countries in Africa, for,” he emphasized, “our independence is meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of the African continent.”³

Nkrumah’s independence-day pronouncement connecting Ghana’s liberation to that of the rest of the continent remains one of the most famous declarations of Africa’s decolonization-era history. It ought to be read, though, on multiple levels—each of which reflects the intersecting array of audiences, networks, and histories of African and international anticolonialism into which the Ghanaian prime minister aimed to embed the young West African state. At one level, Nkrumah was returning to the roots of his own pan-African activism, cultivated under the tutelage of the Trinidadian pan-Africanist George Padmore in London and Manchester. In doing so, he aimed to adapt this largely diasporic tradition to the challenges facing what he and others predicted would become a rapidly decolonizing continent. At another, Nkrumah was also harkening back to the Gold Coast’s own political and intellectual tradition of anticolonial agitation. Rarely confining itself to the territorial boundaries of the colony, the political vision of the Gold Coast intellectuals and activists of the early twentieth century had taken shape as everything from nationalist to pan-West African to pan-African to even diasporic. As a result, during this period, figures including J. E. Casely Hayford, Kobina Sekyi, and J. B. Danquah, among others, positioned the Gold Coast at the political and intellectual center of early twentieth-century West African thought and activism. On yet another level, Nkrumah, with his pronouncement, sought to link Ghana’s postcolonial ambitions with a broader, indeed global history of anticolonialism extending back to at least the end of the First World War. For Nkrumah, this international anticolonialism provided a model for understanding the world and, in particular, a global political economy constructed out of the violence, iniquities, and relentless resource extraction of European capitalist imperialism.

This chapter surveys the political and intellectual world that marked Nkrumah’s growth as an anticolonial thinker and activist. It, however, does not seek to offer a biography of the future politician’s early life but, rather, aims to present a transnational narrative that encircles Nkrumah as he came of age politically. More important than Nkrumah himself in the chapter are the multiple contexts—political and social, local and international—that surrounded the Gold Coaster during the first decades of the twentieth century, along with the various political and social networks that emerged out of them. These networks were colonial and extracolonial. They were also continental and transcontinental. Moreover, they were forged through the intersecting experiences of colonial subjecthood and racial exclusion already shaped by the global reach and impact of Euro-American ideologies of race, of colonial practices in labor and resource extraction, of social and political segregation, and even of, as Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton have argued, the shifting spatial dimensions of the emergent nineteenth- and twentieth-century imperial world order.⁴ For those living within the empires of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the empires themselves were not always, or at least not entirely, mere spaces for passive exploitation. Rather, they also provided new arenas for political, social, and cultural connections, bringing together colonized peoples across seemingly disconnected spaces, as both peoples and ideas spread within and beyond the formal and informal confines of a given empire.⁵

This chapter interrogates the processes by which competing yet intersecting political, social, cultural, and intellectual worlds came together to form the lively anticolonial politics of the first half of the twentieth century. In Africa and beyond, the interwar period in particular was a heyday of African and diasporic extraterritorial imaginaries. The result was a vibrant political and intellectual environment that included, among other things, a burgeoning pan-Africanism on the continent and abroad, a push and pull of competing notions of national and colonial self-determination, and a rising critique of the liberal underpinnings of the imperial system. Together, the formal and informal movements and ideas that arose out of these contexts comprised the political and intellectual backdrop that helped mold the worldview of the future Nkrumahist state. They also provided the roots to much of the radical anticolonial politics that would come of age in the 1940s, ultimately finding, at least in the African context, their most forceful expression in the organization and demands of the 1945 Manchester Pan-African Congress. As a result, this chapter aims to contextualize the “world of Kwame Nkrumah” and what would eventually emerge as the politics of the Convention People’s Party as part of a broader, global trend in early twentieth-century anticolonial politics. Meanwhile, within the Gold Coast itself, the colony’s own political traditions had roots of their own. As subsequent chapters will show, past and contemporary protests over land, colonial policies, the operation of the local and international cocoa market, and access to resources and services would, in many cases, come to underpin future Ghanaians’ political imaginings well into the 1950s and beyond—albeit in ways that often did not fit neatly into the CPP’s worldview.

EMPIRE, LIBERALISM, AND ITS CRITICS

Nkrumah came of age in the Gold Coast at a time in which, in both the West African colony and internationally, European imperial powers were expanding their political and ideological reach. It was also a time when, throughout the colonial world and beyond, an increasingly sophisticated array of critics of empire were coming into their own. Key, then, to understanding the imperial world order into which Nkrumah was born is a recognition of the extent to which such a world order was at once a relatively new development on the international stage and one with deep historical roots. In real terms, the continent’s colonization was a haphazard and uneven process. Moreover, at the time of Nkrumah’s 1909 birth, in nearly all of Africa, with the exception of parts of southern Africa and certain coastal enclaves, the events that marked the onset of the continent’s formal colonization were less than a century old. In the region that would become the Gold Coast Colony, which had a long and intricate history with an array of European powers dating back to the fifteenth century, the attempted extension of formal European colonial authority into African affairs was highly incremental and even then it would not begin until at least the mid-nineteenth century. Moreover, it would take several more decades before British rule could be institutionalized along most of the southern Gold Coast.⁶ Even more troublesome for British ambitions were the Asante in the territory’s central forest region, where the British would spend much of the nineteenth century in a shifting pattern of war and uneasy peace with the Asante state.⁷ Meanwhile, in the Northern Territories, it would not be until the early twentieth century that the British would be able to bring all the region’s peoples under their administrative control.⁸ As a result, even at its most rhetorical level, the notion of an aspiring European imperial world order that would encompass the continent cannot be said to have emerged until at least the aftermath of the Berlin Conference of 1884–85. Furthermore, as in the Gold Coast, the attempted real-world, wide-scale implementation and administration of this burgeoning imperial order would not occur for another two to three decades—a time nearly coinciding with Nkrumah’s birth.⁹

Yet, the perceived European imperial world order of the early twentieth century also possessed the aura of a deeper, more overarching history in Africa and globally. Cultivated in part via the intersections between the rise of nineteenth-century liberalism and the real and perceived changes in the global political economy, notions of an age of empire would become naturalized in the global political imagination within one to two generations following the onset of colonial conquest. In Africa, the long history of the slave trade on the continent featured prominently in the political and cultural imaginations of both supporters and critics of the emergent imperial world order. For some of the most forceful early twentieth-century critics of the colonial project, Europe’s late nineteenth-century colonization of Africa had clear echoes of the violence, indignities, and exploitation of the slave trade.¹⁰ Others, however, often offered more measured analyses of Europe’s imperial ambitions in Africa, at times not only crediting the Europeans for trying to abolish the last vestiges of the slave trade on the continent, but also tying this assumed eradication of slavery to the continent’s and its peoples’ modernization. Even those who at times expressed skepticism of and disappointment with certain European imperial intentions and actions in Africa often celebrated many of the presumed values of the colonial mission, including its promised expansion of social benefits (most notably, Western education and medicine), Christianity, infrastructural development, constitutionalism, and free trade. “We are head and ears in love with the British Constitution,” the African editors of the Cape Coast–based Gold Coast Methodist Times declared in 1897. “The national greatness of the English people has been determined by their national laws and institutions,” the newspaper’s increasingly nationalist editors argued; “they have prospered, because of the humanitarian principles of their laws; because those laws are always in harmony with the genius of the christian [sic] religion. We too are anxious to march en masse after the great English nation; We [sic] want to do so willingly, voluntarily, intelligently, and gradually.”¹¹

Within Europe, questions over the purpose of and responsibilities embedded in the colonial project featured prominently in the continent’s political debates. Among British intellectuals, for instance, as political theorist Uday Mehta details, nearly every major thinker from the late eighteenth through the nineteenth centuries sought to address the colonial question in their writings at some point in their career.¹² However, in a British political and intellectual context increasingly receptive to the language of individual freedom and choice as advanced by liberal thinkers like John Stuart Mill, the realities of colonial rule—particularly what it meant for Britain to rule over other territories and peoples—challenged the worldview of many inside these political and intellectual circles. Mill, for his part, offered perhaps the most famous attempt to resolve this apparent contradiction in the mid-nineteenth century, as he proposed a tiered view of the world that positioned colonialism as a process leading to social uplift, where, through colonial rule, so-called civilized and modern Europeans were to guide the colonized—“barbarians” in Mill’s language—toward the light of civilization. Mill’s writings, among others, would in turn help lay the intellectual groundwork for a perceived progressive colonialism that, in the liberal worldview, positioned the colonized along a paternalist path leading toward a modern society.¹³

As Mill and others debated colonialism, they also began the process of reimagining their philosophical ideals in relation to world history. In doing so, they drew clear lines connecting liberal values of individual freedom, equality before the law, and utilitarian governance to the philosophical and political traditions of antiquity.¹⁴ Both politically and intellectually, the result was a naturalization of European liberal ideas within not only a particular school of European imperial thought, but also in key aspects of the global political imagination. As a result, by the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, prominent social commentators in both the colonial and metropolitan worlds turned to liberal thought and values in their political discourse. In doing so, they often projected onto colonial peoples their own assumptions concerning the enlightened human condition even as the ideal of a liberal imperialism began to fade from most colonial policy discussions in the second half of the nineteenth century.¹⁵ In 1897 Nigeria, for instance, the African editors of the Lagos Standard heralded both the uniqueness and the universality of Britain’s liberal traditions in their accounting of the promise of British colonial rule specifically. “The Natives of Africa—we venture to say all Africa, love the Queen not only for what she is,” the newspaper proclaimed, “but for what she represents—the freest and best system of Government the world has ever known.”¹⁶ Others, likewise, turned to liberal notions of free trade and commerce, as they linked (albeit not uncritically) aspects of the colonial mission to the continent’s future development.¹⁷ By the early twentieth century, the political, economic, and social relationships of colonial rule had thus become intertwined, in both the colonial and the metropolitan political imaginary, with the idealized progressivism implicit in the liberal worldview.

For many living both inside and outside Europe’s colonial territories, rhetorical gestures toward liberal ideals offered them new pathways to political and social claim-making during the first decades of colonial rule. At the 1900 London Pan-African Conference, for instance, organizers and delegates combined a language of racial self-help and uplift with a set of claims on the British colonial administration in which they demanded the free and fair treatment of Britain’s colonial subject populations. Delegates at the conference also called for the creation of a range of protections for colonial peoples in areas including labor, politics, and property. In doing so, they charged the colonial government with an obligation for ensuring Africans gain the political, social, and economic means necessary for the continent’s fruition in the modern world.¹⁸ Likewise, in 1919, W. E. B. Du Bois, who had been present in London, sought to rejuvenate that conference’s spirit as he organized in Paris the first of four Pan-African Congresses he would plan in the early interwar period. Set to coincide with the end of the First World War and the opening of the Paris Peace Conference, the 1919 Pan-African Congress—like its 1900 predecessor—integrated a liberal narrative of racial uplift and self-help into its demands on Europe’s colonial governments.¹⁹ In doing so, representatives to the congress insisted upon a colonial system absent the exploitation, violence, and alienation that had characterized the first decades of colonial rule in Africa. This realignment of colonial rule, they argued, would ultimately require a commitment to such practices as holding African land and imperial capital investments in trust for the continent’s peoples, the regulation and taxation of extractive industries for the public good, and the abolition of forced labor in all its iterations. Even more importantly for the congress-goers, they also called for the granting of African peoples “the right to participate in the government as fast as their development permits,” and insisted “that, in time, Africa be ruled by consent of the Africans.”²⁰

Such pan-African demands for imperial reform coincided with a range of emerging international critiques of European imperialism during the first decades of the twentieth century. In Europe, debates over the wisdom, ethics, costs, and consequences of empire had long dotted the metropolitan political scene, with many worrying about the range of effects imperialism could have, and had had, on life in the metropole.²¹ Just after the turn of the century, J. A. Hobson would extend aspects of these arguments further as he sought to dissect the operation of the imperial system as a whole.²² A London-born economist who three years earlier had reported on the Boer War for the Manchester Guardian, Hobson presented a model for understanding imperialism that extended beyond the rhetoric of progress and civilization employed by colonialism’s most fervent proponents as well as by those seeking reform. Instead, he tied the imperial project to capitalism’s continuous need for expansion. Published in 1902, his Imperialism: A Study in turn detailed a political and economic process by which Europe’s colonial ambitions in Africa and elsewhere aimed to extract new wealth from colonies abroad and create new markets within these colonies for the goods it produced at home.²³

In a 1915 essay in the Atlantic Monthly, W. E. B. Du Bois published a similar critique of imperialism.²⁴ Emphasizing the colonialist roots of the First World War, Du Bois moved the economics of empire to the center of a quasi-Marxist analysis of the conflict. In doing so, he presented a picture of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a period marked by the increasing racialization of global extractive labor and of growing European consumerist demand. For him, the nationalisms that many saw as one of the war’s main causes, if not its primary cause, were in fact the direct result of a broader merging of interests between European capital and white labor over the last half of the nineteenth century. As a result, Du Bois argued that, through a period of labor reform in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, white labor had become increasingly expensive, as workers demanded higher wages and better working conditions. For many white workers, the result was the creation of new avenues through which to accumulate wealth. However, the African American intellectual also insisted that it was only through the emerging colonial system that European capital was able to fund the mounting cost of labor at home, while also meeting the rising expectations of what was becoming a bourgeois working class. To this end, the forced labor campaigns made infamous by Leopold’s Congo, but practiced to some degree in all the major powers’ African holdings, provided European capital with a markedly cheaper and almost invariably nonwhite labor force. Echoing Hobson, Du Bois contended that the emerging colonial project introduced new sites into a global economy through which European capital could extend its extractive reach for the benefit of European personal and industrial consumption.²⁵

Thus, for Du Bois, the First World War had its origins in the fragile but colonially buttressed and racialized alliance between European capital and labor. Key to the survival of this alliance was each side’s ability to cater to the other’s impulse to consume, an arrangement requiring ever more resources to sustain itself. As a result, in the decades leading up to the war, Europe’s major powers competed with one another for greater control of the world’s labor and natural resources. The Berlin Conference and the imperial pie-slicing that came out of it were but one mechanism to help temporarily regulate these impulses. For Du Bois, the war represented the inevitable breakdown of these agreements and their attempts to contain the expanding needs of imperial capitalism. To those in African and other colonies, the results were social conditions in which Africans and other colonial subjects had little choice but to serve as pawns in the fight for global control over labor and resources. Moreover, Du Bois averred that, absent the implementation of a postwar agreement rooted in a notion of democracy that could “extend . . . to the yellow, brown, and black peoples,” any postwar peace had little chance of breaking free from the rapacious nature of European capitalism. He also predicted that, in time, “the colored peoples [would] not always submit passively to foreign domination” and would eventually push back against the exploitative nature of capitalist imperialism and the world system built around it.²⁶

Two years later, in 1917, V. I. Lenin would offer an even more famous exegesis of imperialism in Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, which would influence anticolonial thought across the world well into the twentieth century. In significant part an addendum to Hobson, Lenin’s text centered on the growth and development of global finance capital and its role in the creation of the early twentieth-century world order.²⁷ Like Du Bois, Lenin rejected the predominant interpretations of the First World War as arising from nationalism—or what Du Bois called “sentimental patriotism.”²⁸ Lenin viewed such narratives as political distractions emerging out of a broader process by which global capital had begun to consolidate itself through the monopolization not only of markets, but also of industries and institutions. The goals of expanding finance capital went beyond merely exporting goods to new markets, according to Lenin. They included controlling “spheres of influence” whereby global markets could become key drivers of the systematic redistribution of wealth to the imperial metropole. As outlined by Lenin, banking institutions in particular were leading global capitalism beyond the struggle for resource control to an increasing reliance on the mechanisms of finance. As such, Lenin outlined an early twentieth-century world system founded upon the accumulation, control over, and continuous reproduction of profit.²⁹

What Lenin sought to detail in Imperialism was a historical and theoretical model of an imperialism that had loosened the imperial powers of Europe from many of their liberal moorings. In doing so, he—like Du Bois—situated the violence of the First World War as the natural outgrowth of the global rise of European finance capitalism. Imperialism, as understood by Lenin and later returned to by many subsequent anticolonial intellectuals, thus served little purpose but to divide the world among its various capitalist powers. Europe’s African and Asian colonies were thus not only constructed to provide the labor, resources, and markets necessary for capitalist expansion. They also represented a new territorialized framework through which to manage each colonial power’s expansion in relation to the others. The stakes of this arrangement for the various powers, Lenin argued, were immense, in that they sought to control that which, much as Du Bois had noted two years earlier, was uncontrollable. “The more capitalism develops,” Lenin explained, “the more the need for raw materials arises, the more bitter competition becomes, and the more feverishly the hunt for raw materials proceeds throughout the whole world, the more desperate becomes the struggle for the acquisition of colonies.”³⁰ As with his American contemporary, Lenin insisted that herein lay the roots of the instability of the twentieth-century world order, as global capital continued to mature out of its nineteenth-century adolescence and needed new spaces to grow on a map in which nearly all of the world’s land had already been partitioned.³¹

For colonized intellectuals and others, Lenin thus provided a model by which to both analyze and critique the liberal and capitalist underpinnings of the early twentieth-century international system. He also offered them a mechanism through which to internationalize Marxism, taking it beyond the confines of societies with already established industrial proletariats. In Central Asia, for instance, Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev turned to aspects of Lenin’s theoretical model in an attempt to extend the idea of the proletariat beyond social classes to entire dispossessed “nationalities,” arguing that all Muslim peoples should be regarded as part of the proletariat.³² For Sultan-Galiev, a Tatar who until his 1923 arrest was the most influential Muslim within the Soviet Union, such a framework allowed for the integration of Islam into the Marxist worldview on its own terms.³³ Moreover, it also offered a model in which, on the international scale, “nations” themselves had characteristics of social classes as described in Marxist theory. In this light, he insisted in 1918 that there were different types of proletariats based upon the relative wealth of the nations they inhabited, and that certain national proletariats would be more revolutionary than others based upon the level of oppression they had historically faced.³⁴

Likewise, in Europe’s colonies, figures like Jawaharlal Nehru broadened their intellectual framework in the 1920s as they too looked to Lenin and the Soviet Union for alternative models for interpreting the colonial system and the imperial world order. Nehru, who toured the Soviet Union with his father in 1927, used his reflections on his experience to compare and contrast the rapidly industrializing revolutionary society he witnessed there with an India that he viewed as comparatively much more conservative and set in its ways. Writing in 1928, Nehru stressed that, “for us in India the fascination [with Soviet Russia] is even greater [than elsewhere in the world], and even our self-interest compels us to understand the vast forces which have upset the old order of things and brought a new world into existence, where values have changed utterly and old standards have given place to new.”³⁵ A little more than a decade later, in his 1941 autobiography, Nehru again returned to the subject of the Soviet experiment as he recalled with wonder how the interwar Soviet Union, during a moment in which much of “the rest of the world was in the grip of the depression and going backward in some ways,” was able to overcome these trends as it redefined the Soviet place within the international community. Shifting to the subject of Marxism itself, the future Indian prime minister ultimately presented the “theory and philosophy” as a vehicle for providing new pathways to a “future . . . bright with hope,” regardless of the bleakness of the past or present.³⁶

In 1947, Nkrumah would publish his own Lenin-inspired treatise, Towards Colonial Freedom. In this relatively short pamphlet, Nkrumah detailed what he saw as the systematized ways in which imperialism created and maintained an imbalance of trade between Europe and its African colonies. For Nkrumah, as with both Lenin and Du Bois, capitalism could not function without imperialism. Instead, capital could only fleetingly sustain the pressure from its own persistent need for growth before it had to look elsewhere, or cannibalize the most profit-sucking element in the production process, namely labor. As with Lenin and Du Bois, Nkrumah maintained that the colonial system provided European capital an alternative by opening up a new set of unfettered arenas for labor and resource extraction, while at the same time guaranteeing markets for the sale of the colonizers’ goods. The future Ghanaian president thus opened his 1947 text with a forceful declaration: “The aim of all colonial governments in Africa and elsewhere has been the struggle for raw materials; and not only this, but the colonies have become the dumping ground, and colonial peoples the false recipients, of manufactured goods of the industrialists and capitalists of Great Britain, France, Belgium and other colonial powers who turn to the dependent territories which feed their industrial plants. This is colonialism in a nutshell.”³⁷

MANCHESTER AND THE AFRICAN ANTICOLONIAL IMAGINATION

In terms of Nkrumah’s intellectual development, Towards Colonial Freedom did not have its direct origins in the political and intellectual traditions of the Gold Coast. Instead, the pamphlet represented a coming together of a broader set of transnational anticolonial traditions and experiences in the future Ghanaian politician’s thinking. In fact, what makes the text significant is not particularly its originality, but rather the diversity of political and intellectual influences—pan-African, Marxist-Leninist, and anticolonial revolutionist, among others—embedded within it. Nearly all of these influences found their most prominent expression in the diasporic radicalism of the 1930s and 1940s, culminating in the 1945 Manchester Pan-African Congress. In the United States, for instance, where he spent the decade between 1935 and 1945, Nkrumah lived, worked, studied, and organized in locations ranging from rural Oxford, Pennsylvania, to major American cities and black internationalist hubs like New York City and Philadelphia. As a result, at the center of Nkrumah’s American experiences were the political and economic realities of being black in the Depression-era and wartime United States as he embarked upon a number of economic endeavors outside of his schooling, including hawking fish, laboring in a shipyard near Philadelphia, and working in a soap factory, before waiting tables on a shipping line running between New York and Vera Cruz, Mexico. Even more importantly, for Nkrumah, this was also a period of political experimentation in which he sought to embed himself into an eclectic array of pan-African political and social networks, including black churches, the Garvey movement, Paul Robeson’s Council on African Affairs, and others.³⁸

Aided by a letter of introduction from Trinidadian pan-Africanist C. L. R. James addressed to George Padmore, Nkrumah continued his political maturation after leaving the United States for Great Britain in early 1945. His only previous experience in the imperial metropole was a short layover in 1935 while waiting for his visa to the United States. As detailed in his autobiography, though, that moment had served as a political awakening. Arriving in London and learning of the invasion of Ethiopia by Benito Mussolini’s Italy, Nkrumah reported how he had stood in shock at the British passivity to the news of this blatant transgression of African independence and international law.³⁹ Implied in the narrative Nkrumah presented in his autobiography was an understanding that the mission underpinning his return to London was an upending of the colonialist status quo, which had seemingly made the Italian invasion possible a decade earlier. Upon arrival, Nkrumah quickly joined Padmore in helping organize a new pan-African congress in the English industrial city of Manchester. Convened in October 1945, the Manchester Pan-African Congress brought together pan-African and labor activists to debate Africa’s place in the postwar international community. In contrast to the Pan-African Congresses organized by Du Bois in the 1920s or the 1900 London Pan-African Conference, the Manchester congress offered a clear rebuttal to the rhetorical progressivism of the liberal imperial order, arguing for the first time for an immediate end to colonial rule in Africa and elsewhere. As stated in the congress’s “Declaration to the Colonial Workers, Farmers, and Intellectuals,” its delegates insisted upon “the right of all peoples to govern themselves” and “control their own destiny.”⁴⁰ Furthermore, the declaration presented the struggle for self-determination as a mass project of “complete social, economic, and political emancipation” from the exploitation of capitalist imperialism.⁴¹

The Manchester congress thus provided its participants with a collective outlet for expressing their discontent not only with colonial rule, but, more significantly, with even the prospects for colonial reform. Reminiscent of both Lenin’s and Du Bois’s early twentieth-century interrogations of the colonial project, the congress’s speakers and delegates focused their attention on the uniquely exclusionary and extractive nature of colonial rule, highlighting such issues as land alienation, forced labor, and inequalities in pay. In one of his addresses, for instance, Jomo Kenyatta, who nearly twenty years later would become Kenya’s first president, contrasted a rapidly growing Ugandan colonial economy based upon cotton production with a colonial social reality in which “there [was] not a single African doctor.”⁴² Similarly, G. Ashie Nikoi, chairman of the West African Cocoa Farmers’ Delegation (Gold Coast), painted a picture of British colonial rule in West Africa founded upon “broken . . . homes” and “natural leaders” alienated from “their rights.”⁴³ Meanwhile, fellow Gold Coaster J. S. Annan—a trade unionist whose talk was covered by the Lagos-based West African Pilot—challenged the congress to address not only the problems of imperialism, but also the need to “set up administrative machinery to cope with the difficulties which lie ahead of us.”⁴⁴

Nkrumah, who accepted credit for writing some of the congress’s most powerful declarations, adopted a similar reading of the event’s current and future objectives. Even more importantly, he also viewed it as part of a broader radicalization of anticolonial politics globally and of a transnational rethinking of the role of empire in the postwar world. For instance, just weeks before arriving in London he had taken part in a similar conference in New York featuring approximately sixty representatives from locations including Uganda, India, Burma, Indonesia, the United States, and the West Indies.⁴⁵ As in Manchester later in the year, the Colonial Conference challenged colonial rule in Africa and elsewhere as the delegates connected imperial failures to extend to colonial peoples the right of self-determination to the perpetuation of the poverty, illiteracy, famine, and disease which characterized the social and economic conditions of the vast majority of those living under colonial rule. Furthermore, just as Du Bois and Lenin had done with the First World War, the delegates in New York insisted that European imperialism lay at the heart of the twentieth century’s global wars, and, should it continue, only promised more violence to come.⁴⁶

In his Manchester address on West and North Africa, Nkrumah would again pick up on many of these themes. According to the congress’s minutes, Nkrumah reminded the delegates that “six years of slaughter and devastation had ended, and peoples everywhere were celebrating the end of the struggle not so much with joy as with a sense of relief.” He, then, went on to warn that, given the inherently violent and rapacious nature of capitalist imperialism, this relief was sure to be short-lived “as long as Imperialism assaults the world.”⁴⁷ The longtime Sierra Leonean trade unionist and activist I. T. A. Wallace-Johnson, who earlier in his career had written regularly for Gold Coast newspapers, echoed his younger Gold Coast colleague. In his speech, he rejected the arguments of those within Europe’s empires who suggested that colonial rule served as a protection against “the tribal wars which took place in bygone years, and which might break out again if they [the Europeans] left West Africa.” Perhaps waxing a bit too romantically about Africa’s precolonial past, Wallace-Johnson, then, insisted that “Africans had been living in peace until the Europeans taught them to fight.”⁴⁸ Others, likewise, returned to the necessarily undemocratic nature of the colonial system. In doing so, they presented a call to action in Africa, with the Gambian newspaper editor J. Downes-Thomas—whose address also gained the attention of the West African Pilot—asserting that “history shows that independence always has to be fought for.”⁴⁹

The Manchester Pan-African Congress culminated with a direct assault on the fundamental ethos underpinning the European imperial system, particularly in its African and West Indian manifestations. The congress’s cadre of diverse delegations, with origins ranging from the continent itself to the West Indies to Europe and to North America, undertook a systematic dissection of nearly every official and popular justification of colonial rule—both contemporary and historical. Questions of African and other colonial peoples’ suitability or preparation for self-government or self-determination were met with comparisons to the global violence Europe had just inflicted upon the world.⁵⁰ Meanwhile, promises of political reforms and technical and infrastructural development at best faced skepticism in light of the colonial powers’ past record on the continent and elsewhere.⁵¹ At worst, delegates depicted them as new examples and tools for the colonial powers’ future exploitations.⁵² Others took direct aim at the relationship between the European liberal ideals of individual freedom and democratic governance and the necessarily undemocratic and racially exclusionary nature of colonial rule.⁵³ Pointing to a problem that had long vexed European thinkers dating back to at least the nineteenth century, the Manchester delegates thus presented the political and philosophical gymnastics undertaken to justify the colonial project as more than mere hypocrisy. Instead, they viewed the contradictions embedded in European justifications of colonial rule as mechanisms designed for the colonized’s continued subjugation.⁵⁴

The world powers’ own wartime rhetoric only provided further ammunition for the congress’s critiques of the imperial system, most notably in regard to Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt’s 1941 signing of the Atlantic Charter. For Manchester’s delegates, the charter’s proclamation of the universality of a people’s right to self-determination supplied a language with which to challenge Europe’s imperial powers on their own terms. Even more significantly, with Churchill’s clear refusal to acknowledge the possibility that such a universal right could extend to colonial peoples, the charter created a vehicle for the Manchester delegates and others to make clear the contradictions and double standards embedded within the imperial system.⁵⁵ As the Nigerian F. O. B. Blaize, representing the London-based West African Student Union (WASU) at the congress, is reported to have argued in his address before the congress, “British democracy seemed designed only for home consumption. Nigeria has been given a new Constitution, but her people cannot accept it because it is undemocratic. They demand that if the Atlantic Charter is good for certain people, it is good for all.”⁵⁶ Speaking on the West Indies, J. A. Linton—reading a memorandum from a group of workers’ organizations from St. Kitts and Nevis—also turned to the charter. In doing so, he noted how Great Britain’s failure to recognize the rights of all of those living on the islands had led to a range of political and economic policies—such as a forced mono-crop economy and a property-based suffrage system—that had been detrimental to the islands’ peoples. In response, the St. Kitts and Nevis workers’ memo explained that what the Atlantic Charter provided them was the inspiration to begin exploring “greater unity, which can be attained only by a federation of the islands.”⁵⁷

At the heart of the Manchester congress was a sense of a world in transition and a belief that Africans and other colonial peoples had an important role to play in that transition. In preparation for a volume celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the congress, F. R. Kankam-Boadu, who in 1945 was a Gold Coast delegate representing the WASU and who later in his career would direct the Ghana Cocoa Marketing Board, recounted how “without doubt all who accepted to attend the Conference must have had their minds geared to finding a new way for humanity.” As Kankam-Boadu reminded his audience in his reminiscences, the congress occurred just as the Second World War had concluded, and that this was a war that had “been fought to save the world from the ravages of racial oppression, dictatorship and all manner of inhumanities.”⁵⁸ In that light, the congress provided an opening for explorations into an alternative, and many delegates expressed a sense of personal and collective obligation in bringing forth this alternative. Writing in his 1990 autobiography, another Gold Coast WASU delegate and close Nkrumah friend—later turned bitter opponent—Joe Appiah, reflected on how “the journey to Manchester as a delegate . . . evoked in me all the emotion and sentiments of a Moslem pilgrim to Mecca.” For Appiah, as with many of the congress’s other delegates, the only answer to colonial rule had to be “force.”⁵⁹

AFTER MANCHESTER

The close of the Manchester congress left questions as to the exact actions to be taken in the months that followed. In London and Manchester, Padmore, along with the Guyanese pan-Africanist T. Ras Makonnen, undertook the task of publicizing the congress’s resolutions and declarations via Padmore’s Pan-African Federation (PAF). “After this publicity campaign has been crystallised,” Padmore explained in a 1946 letter to Du Bois, “we intend to consolidate the organisational structure of the Federation by drawing in all Colonial organisations of a progressive character as affiliated bodies.” As Padmore continued, he insisted that “objectively the task we set ourselves is fairly easy.” The real obstacle for the PAF, he anticipated, would be the unfortunate lack of “cadres in England” willing to engage in the work of the struggle.⁶⁰ Yet, as Padmore’s most recent biographer, Leslie James, has noted, more fundamental challenges afflicted Padmore’s PAF in the late 1940s, particularly relating to the organization’s funding structure.⁶¹ As James explains, the organization’s failure to secure a stable funding source not only required that Padmore write and publish the congress’s report himself, but it also forced him to establish the PAF’s headquarters in the cheaper city of Manchester as opposed to his own London base. As a result, Padmore became distanced from the day-to-day operations of the PAF as much of the organization’s work fell upon the Manchester-based Makonnen—who, like Padmore, would later become an influential advisor to Nkrumah following Makonnen’s 1957 arrival in the Gold Coast.⁶²

As Padmore and Makonnen worked to establish the administrative infrastructure of the PAF, many of the congress’s West African delegates turned their attention to the continent. For them, including a number from the Gold Coast, the congress was a moment of radicalization which they now sought to turn into a pathway toward political mobilization, a pathway that became embodied in the late-1945 formation of the West African National Secretariat (WANS). Founded by I. T. A. Wallace-Johnson, Kojo Botsio, Bankole Awooner-Renner, Ashie Nikoi, and Bankole Akpata, the organization nominated the elder Wallace-Johnson as its chairman and invited Nkrumah to serve as its general secretary.⁶³ In name and membership, the organization was foremost a West African organization. However, it was also one largely formed out of the political context and networks manifested in the colonial metropole. Yet, for the activists who formed the secretariat, the organization harkened back to an array of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century pan–West African political organizations, including the Gold Coast Aborigines’ Rights Protection Society (ARPS) and the West African Youth League (WAYL), as they channeled their critiques of European imperialism through a language of West African political and economic unity.⁶⁴ For, as Wallace-Johnson and Nkrumah explained in the secretariat’s “Aims and Objects,” the WANS envisioned the “dawn of a new era” in West Africa. West Africans, they insisted, were now ready and committed to “combat all forms of imperialism and colonial exploitation” and, in doing so, to turn their attention to the broader “task of achieving national unity and absolute independence for all West Africa.” The success of such a project, they continued, depended upon the organization and coordination of the “economic and political ideas and aspirations scattered among West African peoples but lacking in co-ordination.”⁶⁵ In the case of the WANS, these “economic and political ideas” were necessarily to be expressed in explicitly socialist terms. Bankole Awooner-Renner—who, by the mid-1950s, would become a vocal critic of Nkrumah—even went so far as to propose within the secretariat’s publications the idea of a “West African Soviet Union.”⁶⁶

The WANS, however, did not limit its political program to anticolonial and pan-West African abstractions. Instead, by taking on issues such as the buying and selling of cocoa in West Africa, the secretariat also sought to integrate key local concerns affecting the region’s people into their broader critiques of the colonial system. In March 1946, for instance, an article in the organization’s flagship journal, the New African, on a proposed colonial cocoa monopoly accompanied others containing the WANS’s resolutions decrying the forced labor and land theft, among other forms of exploitation, that they associated with the colonial system.⁶⁷ Wallace-Johnson and Nkrumah further reinforced these sentiments in the organization’s “Aims and Objects” as they—reproducing the Manchester resolutions on West Africa—held up the structure of the colonial cocoa market as evidence of the “incompetent” nature of colonial economic policy in the region.⁶⁸ Such arguments echoed interwar critiques of the monopolistic underpinnings of the early twentieth-century cocoa industry, which had dominated the West African press in the 1920s and 1930s. During this period, radical newspapers like Nnamdi Azikiwe’s Accra-based African Morning Post not only detailed the effects of the government’s cocoa policies on West African and specifically Gold Coast farmers, they also positioned these farmers on the frontlines of the colony’s battle with “white capitalists.”⁶⁹ Just under a decade later, the New African reiterated this belief, advocating for West Africa’s cocoa producers to embark on a “total boycott” in response to any attempt by the government to limit the autonomy of the region’s farmers.⁷⁰

As the secretariat worked to develop its own press and publications from its British base, a set of reciprocal relationships also grew between the WANS activists in the United Kingdom and West African newspapers throughout the region. In Lagos, Nigeria, for instance, the West African Pilot—another of Azikiwe’s newspapers—regularly covered the actions and pronouncements of the organization and its members, while in Freetown, Sierra Leone, the African Standard similarly reported on the organization’s activities. Meanwhile, in the Gold Coast, the Gold Coast Observer and Ashanti Pioneer covered the secretariat and its members.⁷¹ Furthermore, Nkrumah himself found a periodic voice within these Gold Coast newspapers, advocating, for instance, in a series of 1947 articles in the Ashanti Pioneer, for an “All–West African National Congress.” In doing so, he directly referred to the pan–West Africanism of the 1920s and specifically the National Congress of British West Africa made famous by Gold Coasters like J. E. Casely Hayford and Kobina Sekyi.⁷² Likewise, many of the secretariat’s diasporic allies, most notably Padmore, also maintained an active presence in the region’s newspapers over the period. In the case of Padmore specifically, Leslie James has calculated that, between 1937 and 1950, the Trinidadian pan-Africanist would contribute 508 articles to the West African Pilot and, between 1947 and 1950, another 182 to the Ashanti Pioneer.⁷³

As a result, by early 1947 anticolonial pan-Africanists and activists from both inside and outside the continent had begun to advance a radicalizing discourse aimed at transforming a state of dependency into one of political and economic emancipation. Meanwhile, politically, Nkrumah used the two years between the end of the 1945 Manchester congress and his December 1947 return to the Gold Coast as a period of consolidation, building and solidifying his inner circle. Some members of this group—most notably Kojo Botsio, who would later serve as general secretary of the CPP and, over the course of the 1950s and 1960s, hold a number of different ministerial posts in Nkrumah’s cabinet—would remain aligned with the Ghanaian president until the 1966 coup.⁷⁴ Nkrumah also spent much of his last two years abroad establishing connections with a range of leftist and West African groups in the United Kingdom, among them the WASU, the League of Coloured Peoples, and individuals associated with the Communist Party of Great Britain.⁷⁵ Meanwhile, Padmore, representing the PAF, sought to reinforce the Britain-based pan-Africanists’ connections to an array of Indian and other non-African anticolonial movements and organizations.⁷⁶ At the same time, Nkrumah and the WANS also coordinated events in protest of colonial policies in territories like Nigeria, British Cameroons, and South African–controlled South West Africa (Namibia).⁷⁷

From the perspective of the new Labour Government in London, the demands for self-determination and self-government emanating from the Manchester Pan-African Congress and beyond mirrored many of those that had long characterized the Indian political scene. India’s 1947 independence and its violent aftermath further intensified British (and other colonialist) concerns about the African political situation both on the continent and within its metropolitan expatriate communities.⁷⁸ Among the British, fears of external communist subversion, potential ethnic violence, and instability catalyzed by the actions and rhetoric of a set of assumed Westernized rabble-rousers typified much of the colonial response to Africans’ postwar demands for self-government even as a reform ethos was on the rise within the Colonial Office.⁷⁹ It was only after events such as the 1948 Accra riots that colonial officials inside and outside the colonies more openly began to heed prominent wartime warnings that only via significant political, institutional, and constitutional reforms could Britain avoid the prospect of both local and international opposition to its rule in Africa.⁸⁰ Yet, as historian Hakim Adi has argued, Britain’s desire to reassert itself as a world power, along with the challenges of the growing Cold War, thwarted its commitment to reform—at least to the levels demanded in Africa and elsewhere—and forced it to look even more to its colonies as it sought to rebuild itself both politically and economically.⁸¹

However, for many of the anticolonial activists who came out of the Manchester congress, any talk of reform simply did not go far enough. To them, it was the colonial system itself that was the problem, and it had to be abolished. It was this perspective that Nkrumah would seek to cultivate in the Gold Coast following his return, the same perspective that would color his own and his government’s reading of Ghana’s and Africa’s place within the international community throughout the 1950s and 1960s. By 1951, as the CPP came to power in the Gold Coast’s first popular elections, the open, strategically attention-seeking activism of the CPP’s infancy appeared to give way to more deliberate and localized interventions and, increasingly, negotiations for self-government and industrial and infrastructural development, as will be examined in the following chapter. However, the sense of immediacy expressed in the postwar demands for self-government in Manchester, parts of the West African press, and the CPP’s founding mission statement continued to make itself felt in discussions of the broader questions concerning the reach and structure of what was assumed to be the necessarily transformative processes of decolonization and nation-building. If, as Richard Wright argued in 1956, decolonization offered the world’s newly independent states an opportunity to reflect on how best to reorganize the “HUMAN RACE,” it was believed in the Gold Coast that soon-to-be Ghanaians had to enter into their own debates over the goals and values engrained in the personal, societal, and international transformations forged through those processes.⁸² To this end, what the Manchester-inspired anticolonialism provided Nkrumah and the CPP with was a shared transnational language through which to challenge a world order founded upon the intersections of European liberalism and capitalist imperialism, 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.