TO MOVE A CONTINENT Kwame Nkrumah's Role in African Affairs 1957-1966 by Robert Moss

397 Pages·2017·32.38 MB·English

TO MOVE A CONTINENT
Kwame Nkrumah's Role in African Affairs
1957-1966
by Robert Moss
Presented for the Degree of Master of Arts
to the Australian National University.
1970
CONTENTS
Introduction j_
List of Abbreviations v
Part I THE WATERSHED
1. The Moment of Independence 5
2. from Gold Coast to Ghana 18
3. The Road to the Kingdom. 4-3
Part II 'OPERATION ROOF-TOP'
1. The Continental Vision (1938-1960) 73
2. Enemies in Africa (1960-1963) 110
3. Nkrumah and the O.A.U. (1963-1963) 144
4. From Macro-Nationalism to World Revolution
Part III SHADOW OF THE CONGO
1. The Link with Lumumba 179
2. Katanga's Crime 220
3. Tshombe's Fifteen Months 235
4. Reflections on an African Antihero 270
PART IV BACK AGAINST THE WALL
1. The Politics of Cocoa 275
2. Birth of a Spectre 306
3. Poor Man's Warfare 321
4. The Loss of Ghana 341
Bibliography 366
i
Introduction
Ghana under Kwame Nkrumah played a part in African affairs
that was disproportionate to its diminutive size and strength.
Thus, Accra became a Mecca for Pan-Africanists and
revolutionaries; almost the entire Ghanaian Army served
in the Congo; the public treasury was raided so that loans
could be made to impoverished friends like Guinea and Mali;
and Nkrumah's own \roice echoed through the conference-halls
of the continent. Ghana's foreign policy during these
years baffled those who believed that a small state must
accept a quiet waiting role in international affairs.
When Nkrumah finally aspired beyond continental leadership
and set out to end the Vietnam war and rouse the "fallow
world" against the dominance of the great power-blocs, many
observers thought that arrogance had ended in illusion.
Certainly, the man who began by exploring the possibilities
open to a new nation ended by sacrificing the interests of
his people to a chimaera.
But those who would understand the history of black
Africa since independence must come to terms with Kwame
Nkrumah. He voiced the ambitions of many of his fellow-
Africans. He inspired the great inter-African debates,
about unity, and the response to foreign intervention;
about economic independence, and solidarity with the peoples
of Asia and South America. Since his fall, he has enjoyed
the privilege of all broken prophets: the slackening of
criticism. He was the man of an idee fixe (continental
union) that is by no means a spent force in Africa today.
His call for African political union finds audience among
a new generation of students and intellectuals, as among
Black Power groups in the U.S.A. who regard him as one of
those who taught the black man how to do without the white
man's favours. But the impact of his message on the real
masters of power in contemporary Africa will continue to be
conditioned by a principle that the Duc de Rohan discovered
long ago: "Eloquence which does not touch the interests of
those one wishes to convince usually has little effect on
them."
This study attempts to follow the course of Kwame
Nkrumah's participation in African affairs. It necessarily
involves some discussion of Ghana's relations with countries
outside Africa. Ghana was dependent on a semi-luxury crop,
cocoa, that finds markets only in the industrial nations.
Nkrumah's diplomacy had to respond to the fact that the fate
of the economy hung upon price fluctuations in the markets
of Washington and London, and political decisions taken in.
Moscow. Similarly, Ghana was powerless to act effectively
in a crisis like Rhodesian U.D.I. Nkrumah's hopes for a
settlement acceptable to him rested mainly on his public
appeals to a non-African nation.
It would probably be ingenuous to write a study of
Harold Wilson's, or President Nixon's, foreign policy -
as opposed to a study of British or American diplomacy
during their tenure of power - since, in a complex society,
foreign policy is determined not by one man, nor even by a
cabinet, but by the interaction of pressure groups, business
interests, idealogues, parliament, and the men on the ground
the diplomatic corps. In the case of Ghana, however, it
iii
makes more sense to write of Nkrumah1s role in African
affairs than to write of Ghana's. The reasons apply to
most new nations in Africa where the civil service, and
especially the diplomatic corps, is novel and inexperienced,
the leader indulges in a personality-cult and frequently
ignores the customary ambassadorial channels,in order to
deal with fellow heads-of-state in person. Add to this
the fact that Nkrumah was a propagandist quite as much as
a politician, and that his letters and speeches were the
main instrument of his Pan-African purpose.
This study has been divided into four parts.
The first discusses the problems and the situation of Ghana
at independence; and the aspects of Nkrumah's personal
experience that influenced his course of action as an African
statesman. The main issue in these chapters is nationalism.
Nkrumah's Africa was like Richelieu's Europe: the nation-state
was emerging from a welter of existing "arrangements" and
ethnic allegiances. Its emergence was not uncontested.
Universalists, the proponents of the Holy Roman Empire or
of Pan-Africanism, opposed supra-national ideals to that of
the nation as supreme law. For Nkrumah, the nation-state
was a political experiment that had already failed.
Africa's way would be different.
iv
The second part traces Nkrumah's Pan-Africanist
initiatives through several phases: (i) the heady years
after independence when Ghana was the envied mentor of
countries awaiting decolonisation; (ii) the transition-
phase from I960 to 1961 when most of Africa was freed and
Nkrumah was forced to come to terms with a new and formidable
grouping of Prench-speaking states; (iii) the era of the
Organisation of African Unity, a miniature United Nations
that stumbled over the same obstacles as the world body and
disappointed Nkrumah's hopes of political integration.
The third part is a study in depth of Ghana's
involvement in a single crisis, civil war in the Congo,
that disturbed and divided Africa throughout the half-decade
from June, I960. Events in the Congo demonstrated that a
major African crisis could not be disentangled from its cold
war ramifications. Nkrumah's own participation exemplified
by the degree of moral persuasion that could be exercised
by the leader of a small country, and the extent to which
military and economic debility eventually placed Ghana
hors de combat.
The fourth part, finally, charts Nkrumah's decline as
man and statesman: his lapse into corruption and intrigue,
his doctrinaire self-alignment with the call for world
revolution, his indifference to the needs of his own people.
These chapters also explore the economic dimension of
Nkrumah's diplomacy, to find out whether or not he was a
slave of the cocoa statistics.
L (TU pUn*
V
List of Abbreviations
AAPC All African People's Conference
AASO Afro-Asian Solidarity Organisation
AEF Afrique Equatoriale Francaise
ANC African National Congress (southern Africa)
AOF Afrique Occidentale Francaise
CIAS Conference of Independent African States
CMB Cocoa Marketing Board (Ghana)
CNL Conseil National de Liberation (Congo)
CPP Convention People's Party (Ghana)
ECA Economic Commission for Africa (U.N.)
EEC European Economic Community
EFTA European Free Trade Association
FLN Front de la Liberation Nationale (Algeria)
FP Force Publique (Congo)
GPRA Gouvernement Provisoire de la Republique
Algerienne
NLC National Liberation Council (Ghana)
OAU Organisation of African Unity
OCAM Organisation Commune Africaine et Malgache
ONUC Organisation des Nations Unies au Congo
PDCI Parti Democratique de Cote d'Ivoire
PDG Parti Democratique de Guinee
RDA Rassemblement Democratique Africain
UAM Union Africaine et Malgache
UAMP Union Africaine et Malgache de Defense
UAMPT Union Africaine et Malgache des Postes et
Telegraphes
UDI Unilateral Declaration of Independence
(Rhodesia)
UP United Party (Ghana)
UPC Union des Populations du Cameroun
A
PART I
THE WATERSHED
"I came from somewhere
from a Nation which does not yet exist.
A man among many
citizen of a Nation which has yet to exist."
J. Craveirinha,
"Poem of the Future Citizen."
5
1. The Moment of Independence.
It has been said that the British have a special gift for
disguising their own revolutions. Certainly the crowd of
foreign Journalists and official representatives who
assembled in Ghana's capital, Accra, for the independence
celebrations of March 6, 1957? could only dimly have guessed,
shaking the sleep from their eyes, that they were witnessing
the beginnings of a radical transformation in Africa that
would affect the course of world history. Everything they
saw that day might have been devised by Edmund Burke as a
demonstration of how new fruits should ripen on old trees.
African Members of Parliament recalled their tribal origins
by appearing in broad folds of kente cloth, or in the
distinctive embroidered trousers, smocks and headgear of the
Northern Territories. The general effect, to a European eye,
was that of "a sea of gold". The chiefs of Ashanti were
carried through the town, shaded by the swaying silk-brocade
parasols of their rank and flanked by their linguists,
2
drummers, and stool-bearers. Nor did the British themselves
stand aloof from this show of tradition, except for the few
hardened expatriates who drank on in the racially exclusive
Accra Club, or coolly shot snookers with pink gins at their
elbowrs. Sir Charles Arden-Clarke, after being sworn in as
Governor-General, declared that "Here, thanks to the
statesmanship of the political leaders, particularly of the
Prime Minister, and the good sense and goodwill of the chiefs
and people, nationalism and colonialism have worked in
partnership, a genuine partnership...
1 The Times 7/iii/57* 2 The Christian Science Monitor
6/iii/57
3 West Africa 23/iii/57