In the 1950s and 1960s, the anticolonial freedom movements of Kenya and Ghana, as case studies for the search for identity and self-government out from under white supremacy and empire, inspired many on a world scale. Kwame Nkrumah’s overthrow in 1966 and the disappointment with the post-independence politics of Jomo Kenyatta led to a consideration of the problem of neo-colonialism. But how historical events are received and recorded can lead to a distorted popular memory. This suggests that we need to seize the opportunity to re-examine past colonial freedom movements going beyond the personalities above society. But this is not as easy a task as it may first appear.
Dedan Kimathi was a major leader of the Mau Mau rebellion of 1952–1956. He faced trial in 1956 and then was put to death for his guerrilla activities, paving the way for Kenyatta to emerge as post-colonial leader. Kimathi became an icon, stirring as a bold heroic representative personality but with opaque content. What does Kimathi’s story teach us about colonial justice? The legacy of Nkrumah also became ambiguous, if not distorted. His personality was maligned by imperialists, termed a fascist megalomaniac, and his pan-African and socialist supporters, in seeking to preserve his philosophy as a guide, wished to dismiss all criticism to the left of Nkrumah. Consequently, it is difficult to find a work on Nkrumah’s Ghana that seeks to be objective and not serve empire, that diagnoses historical problems in the freedom movement, and yet does not discard Nkrumah’s dream of the total unification of the African continent. What does Nkrumah’s vision teach us about the designing of a new society? Two recent African history books take up these challenges.
Julie MacArthur’s edited volume Dedan Kimathi on trial is a collection of scholarly reflections and historical documents. The proceedings and exhibits of Kimathi’s show trial in a Nyeri courtroom in November 1956 are fascinating and allow us a window to look through on how British counter-insurgency functioned, and how the self-proclaimed field marshal of the rebel forces who fought colonialism in Kenyan forests embodied many identities marked by creative conflict: a rebel-statesman, a literate peasant, a traditionalist who was having a conversation about modern politics. Through these primary sources (including a signed arrest statement signed by the accused, the report on the interrogation of the accused, differing translations of a Kimathi letter in Gikuyu and English, a letter to a Catholic priest, and Kimathi’s appeals to courts in Kenya and Britain) we see the making of history and how Kimathi became a patriotic martyr in the court of public opinion.
The foreword to Dedan Kimathi on trial by Micere Githae Mugo and Ngugi wa Thiongo (who together wrote a famous play, The trial of Dedan Kimathi), the introductory note by Willy Mutunga, and critical essays by Simon Gikandi, John Lonsdale, David Anderson, Lotte Hughes and Nicholas Kariuki Githuku, all taken together, ask us to revisit how Kimathi’s story is still an inspiration to anti-imperialists and remind us of the impossibility of colonial justice, the conflicting political tendencies within the Mau Mau movement, and how Kimathi is a floating signifier. MacArthur underscores the irony of elevation of Dedan Kimathi as a national hero in how it fused Kikuyu nationalism with the plural Kenyan nation, and blurred rebel forces with loyalists. Kimathi as multi-vocal martyr-symbol was a tool that strengthened the retreat of Kenyatta (who came from jail to govern but, like Nelson Mandela, subverted the potential of a social revolution), and also mystified the Mau Mau heritage, obscuring that it was a leaderless movement, where the taking of oaths superseded any leadership personality. This is despite the fact that scholars now have many Mau Mau memoirs to reconsider. This edited volume is an excellent source for introducing students to the value of meditating on archival sources as we reflect on diverse interpretations of a singular historical event, personality or movement.
Jeffrey S. Ahlman’s Living with Nkrumahism is a strange title for a book that has some merits. In the name of establishing a new consensus among professional scholars on African decolonisation and post-colonial politics, it has a tone that suggests that Nkrumah was someone the ordinary people of Ghana, at least at certain junctures, had to put up with. Ahlman’s study is a part of a genre, a ‘social history’ that is not quite a social movement history. It seeks to reconstruct what ordinary people were thinking in past freedom movements but it is a narrative disciplined by an objectivity that assumes historical defeat and doesn’t take seriously that liberation struggles may produce an archive of ideas and methods that in certain respects transcend its time. It is within this context that, among certain scholars of Africa, Ahlman can be said to be an ‘optimist’ who wishes to reconstruct the legitimate excitement inside Nkrumah’s Ghana at one time but tempered by contingency. Underscoring the Cold War context of past historical receptions of Ghana, the author does not condemn scholars sympathetic to empire for distorting for many years what Ghana meant to Africans and the world. Still, Ahlman asks the reader to reconsider ‘Nkrumahism’ as a protean concept. The reader may find this useful.
First, ‘Nkrumahism’ stands for a philosophy of decolonisation, a version of pan-Africanism, and socialism in Africa. Second, it is a programme of contradictory ideas, and contingent policies, by Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party (CPP) from 1951 to 1957 (the period of transitional government) and from 1957 to 1966 (‘independent’ Ghana). Third, it was a language which allowed Ghanaians, people of different national and ethnic communities within Ghana, the autonomous forces of labour and women, to talk about the transformative aspects and discontents with that society. In hindsight, Nkrumah’s Ghana was less a romantic or utopian movement than a pragmatic blueprint for the reconstruction of society. Ahlman argues that Nkrumahism, like much politics emerging in the age of Third World national liberation, was very much an anticolonial modernism. It had a certain technology of governing that, while fusing Black Nationalism and socialism, held up the economic achievements of the industrial West (with a critique of its capitalist extravagances). We need to recall Frantz Fanon’s mistake in critiquing the African and Third World national bourgeoisie: he underscored that they don’t even do for African countries what the Western bourgeoisie did for Europe – this expresses a capitalist mentality by Fanon, but few notice.
Is Nkrumah the national bourgeois who genuinely wished to serve the people from above society professionally and efficiently? Nkrumahism desired to create a free, egalitarian and more prosperous society. That empire’s exploitation was undeniable didn’t mean that labour and capital relations had to be abolished, but instead Nkrumah’s plan was to shift toward a project of sovereign national development. In the light of this creative conflict, ordinary Ghanaians wrote to state-run media under epistemological constraints in an environment of emerging ideological orthodoxy but programmatic contradiction.
As Nkrumah and the CPP wished to steer the populace consistent with the mission of the nation-state, strange formulations emerged. The idea of ‘work and happiness’ accompanied state planning of the economy that was forged hand in hand with the suppression or purging of independent trade unionists and toilers. Young Pioneers and Building Brigades were social formations that inspired with a patriotic nationalism and radical internationalism but also divided families. The daily life of wage-earning women was marked by conflicts between society celebrating women’s power, and potential, gendered and generational prejudices in the workplace.
Ahlman’s Living with Nkrumahism productively draws on some of the better recent scholarly theory on the crafting of post-colonial African histories found in works about Tanzania and Ethiopia. Consequently, the author is convincing that the creative conflicts or contradictions in Nkrumah’s Ghana were not peculiar to Nkrumah’s personality – the author does not dismiss him as a unique autocrat – but can be found on a world scale when mining and reconsidering the Third World national liberation epoch. Nevertheless, the reader will have to draw their own conclusions about how seemingly revolutionary socialism and national liberation against the empire of capital could be advocated, while shifting the masses to a conception of a new society based on the search for the sovereign accumulation or defence of national capital, where toilers are policed and disciplined to such a project. Is this what the old and dusty critique of neo-colonialism makes unintelligible as it bedazzles? When the post-colonial state has the outward trappings of sovereignty but is undermined by the former coloniser or multi-national corporations, is the self-determination being subverted actually a state-centred project of Black capitalist development? Living with Nkrumahism can help us meditate on these unresolved historical problems should we have the courage to inquire about them. These are not simply problems of how history of past social movements is crafted, but how we will refashion the future, overcoming mistaken ideas that some may still maintain as a guide to liberation.