Ghana

ON MARCH 6 Kwame Nkrumah — His Messianic Dedication, Osagyefo the President — would have celebrated nine years of independence in Ghana. Following the coup of February 24 which overturned his government, there seemed to be a general feeling of relief in Accra that a nightmare was ended. For a state of only 7.5 million people, Ghana has had far more than its share of publicity.

At independence Nkrumah, in the presence of Richard Nixon, the Duchess of Kent, and a Russian minister, had quoted Burke: “We are on a conspicuous stage and the world marks our demeanour”; very true for this rich showcase and first independent ex-colony in Africa south of the Sahara. Nkrumah considered it a stage from which the liberation of Africa could be launched, a source of power from which he could unite the continent, and where socialism of some form could blossom forth to set an example for Africa, and he was impatient from the beginning with all those standing in his way.

In 1958 the first detention act was passed. By mid-1960 Nkrumah had a network of admirers throughout the continent. Among those who had their first taste of independence in Accra were Zambia’s Kenneth Kaunda, Malawi’s Kamuzu Banda, and a host of other ministers. Chief among Nkrumah’s admirers was Patrice Lumumba, who for Nkrumah was the key to the heart of Africa as a potential partner in Nkrumah’s “ union ” with Guinea. Nkrumah made the Dominion of Ghana into a republic, and in a plebescite, where the electors were hardly trusted to vote correctly, he defeated Ghana’s first nationalist, Dr. J. B. Danquah, to become, on July 1, 1960, Ghana’s first president.

Immediately after the respective republican and independence celebrations in Ghana and Léopoldville, the Congo crisis began, and for the first time, a black African state — Ghana — was playing a critical role in an international crisis. But after two months Nkrumah felt himself betrayed. He had counseled Lumumba to moderation, but Lumumba had acted rashly, was arrested, and the Accra-Léopoldville axis was broken. Secretary of State Christian Herter, in the meantime, had indiscreetly and unwisely accused Nkrumah of playing into Communist hands, an allegation which only deepened his suspicion that the West had set a trap specifically to ensnare him.

The Volta River Project

There were persisting needs for international caution and some domestic moderation, as Nkrumah required American money to finance his pet scheme, the Volta River Project (VRP), and he needed a visit by the British Queen to consolidate his own authority within Ghana itself. Yet the country’s new constitution gave him, as first president, draconian prerogatives that confirmed his power to do as he chose.

In mid-1961 he set out on a two-month trip through Eastern Europe, the Soviet Union, and China, which reinforced in him the Marxist convictions that had for so long remained dormant while he had “ played cricket” with the “ imperialists” to achieve Ghana’s independence. He ended his trip at the nonaligned-nation conference in Belgrade with a ringing attack on the West for its position toward the racialist regimes in southern Africa, toward Algeria and, more ominously, Berlin.

President Kennedy was forced to reconsider the almost finished negotiations for the halfbillion-dollar VRP. But he went ahead, despite the frightening chaos Ghana was passing through at the time, while what was left of the opposition made a last effort to stay Nkrumah’s hand, this time at least partly through violence. Shortly after, in November, 1961, the Queen came, and with that there could be no further doubt of Nkrumah’s power of survival.

Nkrumah now had his VRP, and the basis for the industrialization of Ghana was laid. From that point he intensified his drive for dominance in Africa, playing little part in the reconciliation of the radical “Casablanca” and moderate “Monrovia” groups, rather urging the former, of which Ghana was a core member, to a more intransigent stand in the various attempts other radicals were making at reconciliation.

The drive toward unity

From this time, early 1962, Nkrumah had really only one concern: African unity, or a “continental union government.” There was no denying the need of unity, and Nkrumah brilliantly diagnosed the chaos to come if the balkanization left by the colonialists were allowed to stand. Nkrumah might well have been Africa’s Bismarck and gained admiration for his dazzling, albeit ruthless, use of power if Ghana had been to Africa what Prussia had been to Germany. But Ghana was too small, and Nigeria could too easily humiliate it in the eyes of their mutual neighbors, such “client” states as Upper Volta, Niger, and Dahomey.

About this time, while he urged the voluntary surrender of sovereignty by all African states to one strong central government (and there was little doubt that he saw himself, the true prophet, ending up as the president), he set forces in motion that resulted in varying attempts at sabotage and even overthrow of the government within neighboring states.

From 1963, as a result, one can interpret movements between African nations largely as attempts to restrain and humiliate Nkrumah; for it cannot be denied that most African heads of state saw Nkrumah as a threat. Nkrumah could pull levers in some countries through the All-African Trade Union Federation, which he controlled; he could aim broadcasts at the students in others, demanding of them genuine radicalism in the name of African unity.

The Organization of African Unity was formed at Addis Ababa in May, 1963, bringing together all independent African states in a moderate organization designed to foster cooperation, not dominance. To give the devil his due, they might not have done even this but for their need to offer a response to Nkrumah’s challenge.

Nkrumah on the defensive

By mid-1964 Nkrumah began to be on the defensive. On the domestic front, his pan-African dreams and his own lack of discipline drove his economy closer and closer to bankruptcy. The half-billion dollars of reserves from Korean War cocoa profits which Ghana had possessed at independence were virtually gone; guidelines of the International Monetary Fund had been discarded long before.

In the attempt to make trade “nonaligned,” Nkrumah indiscriminately signed pacts with socialist countries with no thought to their place in the Ghanaian economy. Inferior equipment was brought in, unneeded factories set up, and to use up Eastern credits, for instance, oil had to be shipped from Russia to Ghana to a new refinery designed to be profitable only when handling nearby Nigeria’s oil. Indeed, when Russian oil was ordered, it was not realized that the plant had to be restructured at substantial expense in order to handle this different grade of oil. Other African leaders were not unaware of the downward economic spiral within Ghana; but in almost direct relation to the increasing chaos, Marxist slogans were poured out on the radio and in the press.

On the diplomatic front, Nkrumah was humiliated at the second OAU conference, this time in Cairo. President Nyerere made a now famous attack on the Osagyefo (the “Redeemer”), tearing apart his insensitive and unrealistic drive for “African unity,” and naming him as pan-Africanism’s first enemy because of his very tactics.

Other heads of state, privately, were hardly less cruel. Nkrumah, always inarticulate when without a set speech (a fact which may explain the gaps in logic in so much of his thinking), was the picture of pathos as he tried to get a minimal gesture from his peers toward an eventual political union of Africa. As consolation prize, Accra was chosen as location for the OAU’s third meeting.

Nkrumah ordered a monstrous building to be built, with a suite for each head of state; Accra was refurbished; and all told, perhaps $30 million of desperately needed cash was spent in a final attempt to convince his peers to give up their sovereignty for his dreams. Such actions drove the country to the final level of insolvency, and no amount of diversionary tactics could hide from the relatively sophisticated Ghanaian that under Nkrumah’s brand of socialism and panAfricanism his own standard of living had rapidly gone downhill.

For five years political scientists had been wondering why a coup did not occur. And as coups occurred in Algeria, Congo, Central African Republic, Upper Volta, and then finally, in Nigeria, Ghana’s coup seemed only a matter of time. Indeed, two attempts occurred — one on January 22 of this year, the other on February 2, but Nkrumah and his Russian security advisers outmaneuvered the soldiers.

Those claiming that the coup was an imperialist plot have lowered their credibility everywhere; no bloc technician in Ghana denied the exultation of virtually all Ghanaians at the overthrow of Nkrumah’s tyranny. One of his erstwhile advisers has already given details of Nkrumah’s $5 million fortune in Ghanaian properties, and though these have been confiscated, informed sources in Accra estimate that Nkrumah must have at least twice that amount in Swiss bank accounts.

The Ghanaian public has a large appetite for revelations of the mess left in Ghana. What it all adds up to is not pretty. Nkrumah squeezed private Ghanaian businessmen, fearing potential threats to himself, while deriding capitalism and accumulating his cuts and bribes from foreign investors. He built up a private army to be played off against the regular forces — all with Russian assistance (Russian intentions in Ghana were, in fact, the subject of a NATO discussion in Paris last year, according to one diplomat who should know). And there is incontrovertible evidence that Nkrumah led a truly sordid personal life.

The state keeps running

Meanwhile, the National Liberation Council has done an excellent job of instilling public confidence, and while its members — four soldiers and three policemen — are not experienced in public affairs, they have sought, and taken, advice from the superb British-trained civil service, which throughout the Nkrumah period kept its hands clean, and kept the state running. During the time that America’s ambassador, Franklin Williams, was arranging for a $20 million desperately needed shipment of foodstuffs, under PL 480, the NLC’s initial tendency was to rush too fast into the arms of the West. Within two weeks of the coup, however, the foreign ministry’s skilled diplomats had successfully cautioned it.

Frederic Arkhurst, Ghana’s UN ambassador, and always the most clear-sighted of Ghana’s representatives, established coherence in Ghana’s foreign policy overnight, preventing overhasty reprisals against Russian and Chinese embassies, yet making it clear that Ghana’s nonalignment would no longer be a fiction. Eleven Russians were executed in the heat of the battle (all security men), over a thousand Russian and Chinese technicians were sent out of the country, and the Chinese embassy was restricted to eighteen men; but a stratum of relations will remain.

But there are better things for the West to do than gloat over Moscow and Peking’s discomfiture. There are lessons to be drawn all around.

Africa moves to the right

A year ago, some observers thought that as the problems confronting the new African states grew in scope, radicalism might also grow as well, with new populist regimes throwing off the tired groups that had brought in independence. Rather, the opposite has happened: every coup but Nigeria’s has ushered in a more conservative regime that has sought, generally, to increase ties with the former metropole — and it is doubtful that Nigeria’s new government will lessen cooperation with the West.

Africa’s leaders are finding that they need all their links with the past while they are finding their diverse paths to nationhood. The spontaneous outburst in Accra against the Russians is not just resentment for their part in the resistance to the coup, not just a response to the fact that “they have nothing to teach us — they’re as poor as we are.” Ghanaians realize that old friendships and customs die hard, that no demagogue can change any country’s orientation in a few years unless sufficient roots exist for the new ideology or friendship and unless the new ideology is something more than the manifest nonsense “scientific socialism” was for Ghana.

Western diplomats may be congratulated for having made few of the mistakes America made with Cuba when first provoked. The “soft,” “unrealistic” liberals in America argued in 1961 that for America to cancel its aid to the Volta River Project would be foolhardy; American conservatives found it difficult to understand why a leftist dictator should be seen to be rewarded. Yet the link of the two peoples throughout is now clear, and as a result, one can anticipate warm relations between the American government and the National Liberation Council of this still important West African state. The same can be said of the British for their wise forbearance under even greater attack: the praises of the Commonwealth cannot be too highly sung in Accra today. Osagyefo might well have turned into a Castro but for such foresight.

An era has ended in Africa. The loudest of the proclamatory states has new, more cautious leaders; the incentive to carelessness and extravagance in Africa in foreign policy and on the home front will be greatly reduced. Nkrumah, if he had concentrated either on socialism in Ghana or on uniting, say, West Africa, might have become a great statesman. It was in refusing to limit his objectives that he failed. Other Africans are less likely to make this mistake in the future.