I was in Ghana recently for a peace forum. I made new friends and reconnected with old ones. Coming from a continent that has been mired in all sorts of ethnoreligious conflicts for decades, it was an opportune event for me to learn more about peacebuilding. The forum couldn’t have come at a better time as I’ve just completed my postgraduate research on international conflict bargaining techniques used in addressing secessionist agitations in Ethiopia and Cameroon. The forum also gave me the gratuitous opportunity to conduct a comparative gustatory analysis between Ghanaian Jollof and Nigerian Jollof – you know the puerile culinary battle both countries have fought online for years.
By a long stretch, the highlight of my short stay in Ghana was visiting the Kwame Nkrumah Mausoleum. Kwame Nkrumah led Ghana to independence in 1957 (contrary to popular belief, Ghana is not the first African country to gain independence. Sudan gained independence in 1956, a year before). He had a vision of coalescing African nations, as we know them today, into a single republic. He was a dyed-in-the-wool Pan-Africanist. I have my criticisms of Pan-Africanism but if I’m being honest, Kwame Nkrumah is arguably one of the best leaders we’ve had in modern African history.
Touring the mausoleum was a spiritual experience for me – spiritual, not in the sacred sense of the word but more in the subliminal sense. There’s a feeling you can’t shrug off when you are surrounded by the relics of a great man. You almost want to be sentimental and touch some of the things he used when he was alive perhaps it would serve as a conduit into his mind and psyche. Everything from the Cadillac he was gifted by John F. Kennedy to the mattress he used when he schooled at Lincoln University in the U.S. was well preserved.
Before the visit, I knew very little on how loved Nkrumah was in Africa. It was interesting to learn that after he was ousted by a coup in 1966 reportedly masterminded by the CIA, Sékou Touré offered to step down as President of Guinea-Conakry for Nkrumah to rule in his stead. This is despite the fact that Guinea-Conakry is a Francophone country and an English-speaking Nkrumah would have had a hard time functioning as president. Nkrumah declined and only accepted to be an honorary co-president to Sékou Touré. Few people in life get the chance to be the president of their country. Even fewer people get the chance to be the president of another country in the same lifetime they had become president of their country. During the tour, a fellow participant claimed Nkrumah was also offered to be president of Somalia after the coup.
One of the major things that stood out for me during the tour was some of the contradictions in Nkrumah’s legacy. Like most Pan-Africanists, he flirted with Marxism and Leninism using the rationale that traditional African societies were socialist in orientation. To be fair to him and his fellow Pan-African liberators, they had very few incentives at the time to be enamoured with the West given how synonymous capitalism had become with exploitation, slavery, and colonialism. It was also the age of the civil rights movement in the United States. The plight of black Americans was seen as enough proof that the West was not an ally any right-thinking African leader should seek. But I could not help thinking about the contradiction in how a Western-educated African like Nkrumah sought ideological refuge in Marx and Lenin.
Jonathan Haidt argues in The Righteous Mind that morality binds and blinds. By cosying up to the East, Kwame Nkrumah knowingly or unknowingly blinded himself to the atrocities of communism in the USSR, China, Cambodia, and every other place it was experimented on in the 20th Century. It’s particularly interesting when you learn that he earned a degree in economics at Lincoln University. The nostalgia for a romanticised traditional socialist African economic system rebranded under Marxism is one of the flaws of the Pan-African movement. And Nkrumah played a huge role in that movement even though he could not actualise his dream of a continental republic of Africa.
That dream died in 1963 at a conference in Addis Ababa, which had in attendance leaders of freshly independent African nations. The two major factions were the Monrovia Group and the Casablanca Group. Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana was part of the Casablanca Group which advocated for an immediate actualisation of Pan-Africanism. Again, Pan-Africanism in this context would mean a single republic of Africa. The Monrovia Group, which Nigeria was a part of, advocated for a gradualist approach to actualising Pan-Africanism. The gradualists won. Their recommendation was adopted. But if anyone knows Africans at all, postponing something is as good as forgetting about it. Gradualism killed Nkrumah’s Pan-African dream.
Even if the recommendation of the Casablanca Group had been adopted in 1963, I can’t help but wonder about the sheer impracticability of trying to pull it off. And I have serious misgivings about the almost certain adoption of a neo-Marxist economic policy that would have been applied for the entire continent. Some Danshiki-wearing cowrie-beaded chesting-thumping Pan-African warriors often claim that the failure to actualise Pan-Africanism in 1963 is what is responsible for the gross failure and poverty we have in individual African states today. It’s very easy to argue for what could have been theoretically. I respectfully disagree with my Danshiki-wearing crusaders because I don’t see how a Marxist-driven Pan-African agenda would have worked, having not seen anywhere in the world where something similar has been successful, especially in the USSR that largely inspired the agenda.
But if I’m being intellectually honest, I’ll admit that there have been a few African leaders who were influenced by Marxism yet had amazing records. Thomas Sankara and Obafemi Awolowo (a self-styled democratic socialist) readily come to mind. Most Africans idolise Muammar Gaddafi, another Pan-African warrior in his own right. But the problem with Sankara and Gaddafi is they were both dictators. And that gets to the heart of the matter. A Marxist-led Pan-African agenda would have required some kind of dictatorship to work, if at all it worked. Also, I doubt that Africans would be comfortable if proceeds from exploring resources on their land were used to develop other regions. I wonder how DR Congolese would feel if proceeds from cobalt exploration on their land were used to develop, say, Mauritania under a Pan-Africanist agenda. These are some of the likely contentious issues I suspect Nkrumah and his fellow Pan-African ideologues did not consider.
Beyond the (im)practicality and (in)viability of Pan-Africanism, Kwame Nkrumah represents a generation of African leaders that was driven by ideology, a total contrast to the crop of leaders we have today. I may not be a fan of Marxism, but I sure admire the Awolowos, Nkrumahs, and Sankaras of this world. In Africa today, what you have are those who are only interested in power by any means necessary because they are driven by all the perks it confers. I once bemoaned the lack of ideology in Nigerian politics in an article I wrote in 2022. I argued:
This lack of ideology in our politics has led to an amorphous structure which makes parties open to every Tom, Dick and Harry even if it means they are — as we like to say — defecting from another party because of their vested interest to attain power at all cost. But it is important for parties to be ideologically driven instead of merely being aspirationally driven. Having an ideology makes you fecund with ideas (no pun intended) through a particular worldview. It helps you theorise and proffer solutions to societal problems based on a set of core values.
Nkrumah left a legacy of ideology we should be inspired by today. By being inspired, it does not mean we must replicate what he did and believed. It could mean avoiding what he did and believed and look for an alternative. I see the contradictions in his legacy as a cautionary tale. For someone who gave his all for a united Africa, it’s interesting to learn he died in Romania of prostate cancer. Seeking medical treatment abroad is an indictment on the Pan-African ideal. His failures and contradictions notwithstanding, he will continue to go down in history as one of Africa’s greats.