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On the 100th Anniversary of Kwame Nkrumah’s
birthday - Judging
Nkrumah, the evolver
By Kofi Akosah-Sarpong
It is gratifying to read messages across Africa
about one of Ghana’s/Africa’s thinkers’ birthday –
100th – Kwame Nkrumah (21 September 1909 - 27 April
1972). In a period where Africa had no open thinkers
to drive its development process from within its
cultural values – such as Europe’s Karl Marx or
Japan’s Kita Ikki or Latin America’s Fernando
Henrique Cardoso about its development philosophy,
Nkrumah emerged as one, with immense passion.
Fifty-two years ago, at a time of tumbling regimes,
wrong thinking, one-party fetes, military juntas and
the need for African sages, Nkrumah’s 100th birthday
is reflection for the need for grand development
thinking and philosophies that flow from Africa’s
innate traditional values in relation to the global
prosperity ideals. This is to knock off the widely
held view that Africans think well. But while
Nkrumah and his associates’ Pan-Africanism were
relevant to the African cause, it lacked original
African cultural roots, thus failing to appropriate
African values critically for the Pan-African
project. Kwame Nkrumah committed a fatal
developmental error which had had terrible
consequences on Ghana'/Africa's progress
When some years ago people in Ghana's Northern
Region told policy-makers to consult them and their
values when making policies, they were in effect
saying there are no practices in Ghana of
policy-makers consulting the very people the
policies are to affect, a terminal error dating back
to Nkrumah's era – part of Africa’s Big Man Syndrome
where the Big Men assume to know everything and
cannot be challenged and impose their will on
Africans no matter what the consequences. This, from
the inception of the Ghana nation-state, created a
huge problem of trust, a critical element in the
development process. And this also reveals that the
Ghana nation-state started on a wrong footing,
creating all kinds of unnecessary problems for Ghana
till today.
The reason is not far-fetched. The Pan-Africanism
project, which pre-dates Nkrumah, was more or less
an African diasporan vision to raise the injustices
ex-African slaves were encountering in the diaspora
and also unite them, and explore the possibility of
returning them back to Africa. Sierra Leone (the
Krios) and Liberia (the Americo-Liberians) are some
of the products. Of prominence of the diasporan
Pan-African vision was the issue of politics of skin
colour and Africa's marginalization in the
international political economy.
As a student in the United States and Britain,
Nkrumah experienced such racism and returned to then
Gold Coast with such baggage. The issue here is that
initially Pan-Africanism was more or less an
ex-slave diasporan African project, lacking a deep
sense of the continental Africa environment and
other original African home-grown developmental
nuances, a huge ingredient for progress. The
Pan-African project, therefore, didn't flow first
from within continental Africa, and this may explain
why it initially lacked the deep African cultural
orientated paradigms needed for developmental goals.
It is important to remember that Africa is the only
region in the world where its development paradigms
are dominated by foreign development values – and
that makes Nkrumah’s Pan-Africanism practically
irrelevant to the everyday life of Africans, even on
philosophical terms.
So despite much hype about African culture in the
Pan-African project, it was more or less an artistic
thing than the appropriation of African values in
policy-making. Short of this, Nkrumah and his
associates wandered around the world, like headless
chicken, looking for developmental paradigms, from
ex-Soviet Union-oriented socialism to Europe-leaning
capitalism or something in-between, as if Africa has
no history, no cultural values and no experiences in
terms of progress. Added to this is the fact that
Nkrumah and his associates overwhelmingly carried on
fully with the ex-colonialists' development
paradigms without any attempts to openly hybridize
the enabling aspects of African cultural values and
the ex-colonialists' legacies in the continent's
progress. Today, humble Botswana is the only
exception.
It is, therefore, not surprising that one the most
fatal errors Nkrumah made in his attempts to develop
Ghana was to harshly marginalize the traditional
rulers, one of the key frontline traditional
institutions for progress. Africa’s traditional
rulers, as Dr. George Ayittey, of the American
University in Washington D.C, would tell you, are
hugely untapped human resources materials in
Ghana's/Africa’s development process. This reflects
one of Nkrumah's weak grasp of Ghana/Africa
development processes. Some of these initial errors
of not fully and openly appropriating African values
in the continent's development process have made
most national development policies unrealistic in
the African environment.
The key word here is “openly,” as a reflector of
Africans’ dignity, confidence and psychology in
relation to the global prosperity ideals. The reason
is Africa experienced colonialism for years and this
saw the suppression of African values in the
continent's development process. This process
damaged the trust of African values, as a policy
thresher, and created immense psychological crises.
The colonialist suppressed African values and
imposed theirs. They thought, wrongly, as today's
international development literature would correctly
tell you, that African values were “primitive” and
that they were more civilized than Africans, and so
the Africans should be “civilized.” The French, for
instance, minted the “assimilation” project to
“civilize” the African. It failed. Then they created
the “association” one, which aimed to mix African
native culture with that of the French. That was
daisy also because it wasn’t done from African
perspectives or by Africans themselves.
In the process, both enabling aspects of African
values and the inhibiting parts was suppressed for
so long that even the earlier elites who came to
power, as their behaviour revealed, thought Africa
have no values worth appropriating in national
development. Senegal's former President, Leopold
Sedar Senghor (October 9, 1906 – December 20, 2001),
part of the Nkrumah's era, thought Africans are
better at expressing their emotions than thinking.
No doubt, some prominent Africans such as Y.K.
Amoakoh, the former chair of United Nations Economic
Community for Africa, have observed that Africa is
the only region in the world where foreign
development paradigms dominate her development
process to the detriment of its rich values.
The sense here is that Nkrumah and his associate did
not think first from within African values and any
other second, such as the ex-colonialists’, in their
zeal to develop Africa. The Japanese, like other
ex-colonies, faced similar challenges and were able
to circumvent any attempt to either fully carry on
with American foreign development paradigms or let
the foreign paradigms forced on their development
throat, as America's post-war occupying Governor of
Japan, General Douglas MacArthur, attempted to do.
Like the Southeast Asians, Nkrumah and his
associates, using their Pan-African project, should
have first envision Pan-Africanism as development
policy-maker, brewed from indigenous African values,
and mix it or juggle it, with foreign or their
colonial legacies. It is, therefore, not surprising
that Amoakoh observes that Africa is the only region
in the world where foreign development paradigms
dominate her development process.
Fifty-two years on, foreign development paradigms
dominate Africa's development scene despite lot of
energy, time, and money spent on the Pan-African
project, creating huge distortions in the
continent's progress. The disturbing implications
are that not only was the enabling aspects of
African values not appropriated openly in national
development planning but, as former Ghana’s Minister
of Health, Courage Quashigah, would tell you, they
were no attempts to refine the inhibitions within
African values that have been stifling progress for
the continent's progress.
Despite this fatal developmental error, Nkrumah’s
Pan-Africanism, in all measure, is growing,
notwithstanding the hiccups here and there. The
emerging success of the Economic Community of West
African States (and other African regional bodies),
noticeably in helping restore order in Sierra Leone,
Ivory Coast and Liberia, after years of civil wars,
is one example. The transition from the Organization
of African Unity (OAU) to the present African Union
(AU) is another in the sense of African unity. These
examples and many more reveal that Nkrumah’s Pan-Africanism
is not illusory but working, taking on new meanings
and challenges that emanate from the values and
experiences of Africans.
Kofi
Akosah-Sarpong, Canada, September 20, 2009
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