Nkrumah’s legacy 40 years after the coup
Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem remembers the life of Kwame Nkrumah, ousted from power in a coup 40 years ago on February 24. Vilified in life, in death Nkrumah has been vindicated and many of his ideas are only now coming to fruition.
Last Friday, February 24, marked the 40th anniversary of the overthrow of the government of Kwame Nkrumah in a military coup that was inspired, orchestrated and sponsored by the combined forces of local reactionaries and external neo-colonialist powers, especially Britain and America for whom Nkrumah's militant Pan Africanism was abhorrent. It was a day of infamy that signalled the retreat of radical nationalism in Africa and delayed any hopes of uniting Africa and defending it against imperialist predators and their local agents.
But the overthrow of Nkrumah did not diminish the dream. In his exile years in Conakry, until his death in 1972, Nkrumah continued to write, speak and mobilise for a radical socio-economic and political transformation of Africa from Cape Town to Cairo.
His writings became more rigorous and programmatic because he had the benefit of having being in power before and therefore was able to critique his own experience and suggest ways of moving forward. Unlike many people who become 'pragmatic' with loss of power and advancing age, Nkrumah became even more revolutionary.
One of the reasons given for the coup was that Nkrumah was 'communist'. Another one popular among enemies of Pan Africanism at home and abroad was that Nkrumah allegedly wasted Ghana's resources on African liberation. It did not matter to his critics that this 'communist' programme was never hidden from the people of Ghana who successively voted for Nkrumah's party and their allies despite tremendous opposition from political rivals representing business and Ghana's largest nationality group, The Ashanti, and their junior partners. The 'wasted' resources they talked about included full and open support for liberation movements across Africa to free Africa from colonial rule and apartheid racism in southern Africa.
Today everybody, including our former colonisers who also kept apartheid alive for four decades, have all become 'our partners in development' and profess good will towards Africa. Yet they opposed our liberation and did not forgive Nkrumah for daring to challenge their racist prejudice and boldly doing something about it, not only in Ghana but across Africa. For this he was derided, caricatured, ridiculed and attacked even out of power and after death. After several failed attempts to assassinate him failed they got their agents within the armed forces of Ghana and the police to launch a coup while Nkrumah was out of the country.
Ghana became orphaned and did not recover its confidence as a country again for many decades. It is a testimony to Nkrumah's success that 40 years after he was overthrown Ghanaian governments and leaders will still be judged (and judged poorly) against him. Even his enemies are forced to acknowledge him as a true national leader and statesman who was genuinely committed to the welfare of the people of Ghana and Africa.
Was Nkrumah perfect? Definitely not. He did make many mistakes. As Cabral famously remarked in his tribute to Nkrumah at a state funeral in Conakry, April 1972, if Nkrumah died of cancer it was 'cancer of betrayal'. But he did not just stop at blaming those who betrayed Nkrumah he also used the African idiom, 'Food only cooks in the pot' to ask why it was possible for him to be toppled. Many people still supported Nkrumah but the party that was the organic link between him and the masses had been hijacked by cliques.
Is there any difference today? How many of our previously radical leaders are still popular with the masses? The longer they stay in power the more distanced and distancing from the people they become. They begin to consume the propaganda that 'without you the country will collapse'.
Time they say is a final arbiter. The ideas that Nkrumnah lived and died for continue to reverberate across the continent. It is clear to everybody today that Pan-Africanism is not a dream anymore but a precondition for the survival of Africa and Africans in the face of new rampaging and rapacious exploitation, packaged as globalisation. Those who had accused Nkrumah of being too impatient had the honesty to admit in public that they were wrong and regretted that they were not as radical as Nkrumah had been. Africa could have been saved the wasted decades.
History has absolved Nkrumah in many ways. At the dawn of the new Millennium the BBC ran a campaign for the African of the Millennium. There were so many nominations and it was obvious that many interests were routing for Nelson Mandela, but in the end Kwame Nkrumah was the clear choice of the majority of the listeners.
It is not only at the symbolic level that Nkrumah has been rehabilitated. Some of the important institutions created by the African Union were issues on which Nkrumah was vilified in the 60s. Examples include his call for an African High Command. Now we have a Peace and Security Council, working on a Common Defence Pact and the AU has plans for a Standby Force.
Nkrumah campaigned for one Union Government and they said it was impossible, but today we have elements in place like the Pan African Parliament and the African Court of Human Rights. There are discussions at senior levels on actualising a Central Bank for Africa. There is a standing committee of heads of state that is working on ways of accelerating the process for the creation of a Union of African States by 2009 as proposed by Libya. We may not get there that soon but that we are seriously re-engaging these issues means that Kwame Nkrumah has not died in vain.
We cannot call for his soul to rest in peace. Instead we ask that his spirit continues to haunt us so that we can realise for this generation and safeguard for the future, the United Africa for which he lived and died.
* Dr Tajudeen Abdul-Raheem is General-Secretary of the Pan African Movement, Kampala (Uganda) and Co-Director of Justice Africa
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