Review: Nkrumah, who fought the wind

This book troubles the record of the larger-than-life liberator of the Gold Coast from the clutches of Britain, also reminding us how important he was on the world stage.

Could this be the definitive biography of Nkrumah and analysis of his impact on the world? Howard W. French’s brilliant and thoroughgoing treatment of the life of Francis Nwia Kofi Nkrumah very well might. From the vantage of southern Africa, I knew nothing about how complex Nkrumah’s legacy is in his home country of Ghana.

Nkrumah was once extolled by his party’s newspaper as the “Man of Destiny, Star of Africa, Hope of Millions of downtrodden Blacks, Deliverer of Ghana, Iron Boy, Great Leader of Street Boys, personable and handsome Boy from Nzima”.

French says he is remembered in his home country as someone who became dictatorial in the later years of his rule, suppressing dissent and using lawfare against his opponents. Ghana’s economy also suffered greatly from his ill-conceived attempts to use its major commodity at the time, cocoa, to fund his government’s plans.

For many people on the continent, for whom this will no doubt be a revelation, Nkrumah remains a hero and towering legend (making me reconsider even Robert Mugabe’s continuing lionisation in some African quarters). So it is: one man’s liberator is another’s dictator.

Human memory is lamentably short. That’s why this book is important: it’s an excellent corrective for Nkrumah’s tarnished legacy and a primer on mid-century Africa and colonial crimes you can point your Western friends to.

French lays out an excellent case for why Nkrumah was the most consequential leader of the century. He made Africa matter to the world, French says. But it was his “precipitous drive for African unity” that consumed him – leading, as French argues, to his downfall when he was famously removed from power in a coup in 1966.

Nkrumah spent a decade studying in the United States (a fascinating choice over Britain), which was pivotal to his trajectory. There, he obtained two masters degrees, worked odd jobs, and even became a preacher-for-hire in Black churches.

He met CLR James, who introduced Nkrumah to George Padmore, and it was Padmore who had the biggest impact on Nkrumah’s life, mentoring him in Britain and later moving to Ghana to act as his advisor. Also in Britain, Nkrumah met and first worked with WEB Du Bois to organise the Fifth Pan-African Conference in Manchester.

Up and away: Allies lift Kwame Nkrumah aloft after Ghana wins independence from the UK in 1957. (Photo: Bettmann)

Nkrumah’s story is only one of self-invention insofar as his life was full of serendipity – and he a man who took full advantage of this. He was a self-mythologiser: he published his autobiography on the very day of Ghana’s independence, giving out copies at the celebrations and so ensuring he had control of the story of his rise to power.

French refers at various points in The Second Emancipation to Nkrumah’s accounts of his life and compares them to the recollections of interlocutors or archival records. Nkrumah did not lie, precisely, but his belief that he was a man of destiny apparently made him always see those events through that lens.

Nkrumah was a true believer in independence for all Africans. But his pan-Africanist ideas built on the work of forerunners such as Du Bois, James Kwegyir Aggrey, Africanus Horton, Martin Delaney, Marcus Garvey, and JE Casely Hayford, with Nkrumah more of an “evangeliser”, according to French.

In pursuit of his perhaps somewhat misguided vision and attempt to create a “United States of Africa”, Nkrumah recruited Guinea under Ahmed Sékou Touré; Mali was onside for a while, then not; his plan for the Democratic Republic of the Congo was doomed from the start.

Incidentally, The Second Emancipation is incredibly illuminating on Patrice Lumumba’s rise and how he sealed his fate with his ambition – or alternatively, how his fate was sealed by the greed of the Belgians colluding with a US made antsy and paranoid by the Cold War.

French’s text shows lineages and links between Africa and its diaspora, particularly across the Atlantic. He illustrates how Nkrumah’s diaspora influences (Padmore and James high on the list) – as well as his later political successes and Ghana’s independence – had an impact on the self-image of Black Americans in the lead-up to the intense years of the US civil-rights movement.

Although Nkrumah’s downfall was due to multiple factors, per French, his fixation with his pan-Africanist vision led him to take his eye off the ball domestically. Perhaps the dreams of his foreign policy were more appealing than the failure of Ghana’s economy.

Here is French’s central argument: Nkrumah’s dream was valid and he deserves much more recognition for what he represented, not least to have his place in the pantheon of great African heroes restored.

Pointing the way: The statue of Kwame Nkrumah at the Nkrumah Mausoleum in Accra, Ghana. (Photo: Francis Kokoroko /Reuters)

He knew Africa’s newly independent nations would struggle unless they united economically against their former colonisers. He told them, too, saying: “Independence must never be considered as an end in itself but as a stage, the very first stage of the people’s revolutionary struggle.”

Instead, they formed the Organisation of African Unity (now the mostly ineffectual African Union) – a body very far from Nkrumah’s confederate dream, that struggles with what Nkrumah, the prophet, foresaw: the scourge of neocolonialism.

Nkrumah fervently believed a new world was possible for Africa and its diaspora. Perhaps he had feet of clay. Perhaps he was a man out of time, someone against whom the winds of the Cold War blew so strongly that he never had a chance. French presents intriguing evidence for both in The Second Emancipation.