Living with Nkrumahism. Jeffrey S. Ahlman
the populace. Together, these institutions were thus to provide the discipline, regimentation, and foresight needed to embark upon not only the complicated infrastructural task of nation-building, but, more foundationally, the much deeper, ontological burden of creating new, decolonized citizens. As a result, those involved in institutions such as the Ghana Young Pioneers and the Builders Brigade engaged in a range of activities including drill instruction, athletic competitions and displays, marching in public parades and rallies, self-help projects, and citizenship classes and lectures. From the late 1950s on, nearly all of these activities—either overtly or covertly—aimed to position the individual, through his or her performance of Nkrumahism’s pan-African and socialist anti-imperial ideal, as the embodiment of the new Ghana and Africa. Moreover, together with the time investments required of their members and the relationships forged through participation, the practices and programs put forward by the Young Pioneers, Builders Brigade, and similar organizations pressured, if not challenged, longstanding notions of belonging in midcentury Ghana—including family, chieftaincy, community, gender, and generation—as the CPP sought to reorient the populace’s worldview toward the mission of the state.
Through the enactments of the Nkrumahist way of life exhibited in the formal and informal rituals of the CPP’s various wings and institutions, the Nkrumahist state therefore emerged as much as a performative enterprise as a conventional instrument of governance. Moreover, the Nkrumahist state was not alone in such a construction, for the rituals and expectations of what postcolonial life should be in Ghana shared many similarities with several other midcentury socialist and postcolonial states, including those of the Guinean state as studied by Mike McGovern and Jay Straker. Examining the Guinean Demystification Program, McGovern describes a political and cultural initiative specifically and necessarily designed to reach into the most intimate aspects of Guinean forestières’ lives, including family relations, spirituality, and ethnic belonging.45 At least in terms of intention and philosophy, the program would not have looked unfamiliar in Ghana, as Guineans—willingly and semi-willingly—incorporated aspects of Guinean revolutionary ideology into their lives in both the public and private performance of what McGovern describes as a state-sponsored cosmopolitanism. Here, an uncomfortable merging of a pan-African gesture toward Africa’s precolonial past with scientific socialism’s anticapitalist modernism culminated in an iconoclastic program that at once positioned the country’s forestières as “negative examples, stereotypes of savagery” and emergent “modernist national citizens.”46 Straker, also writing on the Guinean forestières, similarly relates that it is impossible to understand “the complexities of life histories, political sentiments, and cultural imaginings” in postcolonial Guinea without centering “the workings of state power in the cultural realm.”47
In Ghana, for the thousands formally integrated into the party apparatus and the many more who had little choice but to live alongside it, party activities and pressures became a key component of their daily lives and relationships. As we will see in the third chapter in the case of the Ghana Young Pioneers, the national organization for school-age children, its time commitments, teaching, and leadership structure severely strained relationships within families and communities. As a result, in certain instances, parents, elders, and other community members came under the suspicion of some of the Young Pioneers in their lives, while many Young Pioneers themselves were similarly held in suspicion by the adults around them. At the same time, the movement also—both in reality and perception—held the potential for opening new pathways to political and social mobility for both its members and possibly their families. The Builders Brigade, with its built-in public employment program, offered even greater potential for mobility for its membership. However, in many cases, it also catalyzed increasingly caustic relationships with the communities that lived alongside the Brigade’s many camps. In such communities, the granting of local lands for Brigade use, the supposed unruliness of brigaders, and the Brigade’s (real and perceived) influence in local and national politics roused significant tensions. Yet, as we will also see, for many of the brigaders and their family members with whom I spoke, their experiences in the Brigade were defining moments in their lives, opening up new avenues for their transition into a socially recognized adulthood.
Similar stories played out in other CPP organizations as well. In the Trades Union Congress (TUC), for instance, workers encountered an institution that, over the course of the 1950s and 1960s, would transform its mission from worker advocacy to the state organization of labor. Guiding the TUC and the CPP’s labor politics more broadly was a calcifying socialist ideology of work that sought to decenter the individual’s personal ambitions in favor of the assumed shared goals of the nation. As a result, ideologically, productivity reigned supreme. This not only alienated many workers from an institution ostensibly established to serve their interests, but also distanced them from the fruits of their labor as they were increasingly asked to do more for less. Likewise, in the Bureau of African Affairs (BAA)—the most important of the CPP government’s pan-African institutions—the party’s expanding ideology of work, with its celebration of productivity and sacrifice, was embedded in the daily work lives of the Bureau’s employees. Among those most affected were the many young female employees who made up the Bureau’s typing, bookbinding, telephony, and clerical staff. The result was the emergence of an often turbulent workspace in which the party’s modernist celebrations of women in the workplace collided with the gendered and generational prejudices of the government officials and high-ranking administrators put in place to run the Bureau’s operations at home and abroad.
For scholars, the question of how Ghanaians themselves engaged with and understood the mushrooming Nkrumahist state and Nkrumahism more broadly has proved difficult to answer. Scholars in the late 1960s and 1970s in particular—representing the last significant wave of scholarship devoted to the CPP—have largely assumed that most Ghanaians simply ignored the party’s rhetoric and endured its policies.48 The bottom-up ethos of the social-historical tradition—which has fruitfully guided African historical and social scientific scholarship for at least two generations—has likely contributed to such conclusions regarding the state-citizenry relationship. Additionally, the very real disappointments of decolonization—culminating, in Ghana, with the economic hardships of the 1960s and the CPP’s establishment of a quasi-police state—further justified a way of viewing the African postcolonial experience as an experience mired in what Mahmood Mamdani has described as “decentralized despotism.”49 Through such a perspective, however, the state and its discourse often emerge as alien forces acting upon the people, thus positioning the populace as subjects of the new state. The result in such readings of the African postcolonial state, to invoke Jean-François Bayart’s powerful idiom of the “politics of the belly,” is a vision of the state that largely exists for the sole purpose of feeding itself.50
Historian Frederick Cooper has pointed to the dehistoricized, if not ahistorical, nature of many of these arguments. In the case of Mamdani specifically, Cooper has accused the political scientist of “leapfrogging” Africa’s history of decolonization and early postcolonial encounters with self-rule in an attempt to show an artificial continuity from the violence and exploitation of the colonial past to the corruption and iniquities of the postcolonial present.51 However, even Cooper’s reflections on decolonization—with their tendency to deemphasize the importance of various forms of African nationalism in people’s lives—often overshadow a significant reality: the fact that, at least in the case of Ghana, Ghanaians who lived through Nkrumah have a lot to say about both African nationalism and living with Nkrumahism. Few may have become the ardent anticolonial socialists—literate in the theoretical and practical intricacies of Marxist anti-imperialism—that Nkrumah and many of the CPP’s most virulent ideologues imagined. Regardless, many welcomed and even sought the opportunity to discuss their experiences with the CPP and its ideology, reflecting on its hopes, disappointments, and, for some, oddities. Marxism, communism, and, as one man put it, the “Eastern forms of psychology” that in his opinion afflicted the CPP were prominent subjects of debate among those I interviewed.52 So, too, were Nkrumah and the CPP’s pan-Africanism, development projects, and extension of social services. The Nkrumahist state may not have been the defining feature of their lives, but it was one that made significant and often unanticipated incursions into those lives. Remembrances of opportunities created by the party’s and government’s