Issue 12
Ghanas 50th Birthday
By Noa YachotIllustration By Florencio Zavala
The Rise & Fall & Rise of Pan-Africanism
One day in 1961, a 93-year-old man from Western Massachusetts named W.E.B. Du Bois picked up and relocated to Ghana, a newly independent state in West Africa. Cold War hysteria had stripped him of his freedom and turned him into a pariah in his own country. Suspecting his Communist affiliations, Joseph McCarthy set his sights on Du Bois and the State Department went so far as to strip him of his passport for six years in the 1950s.
Two years after his passport was restored to him, Du Bois severed his ties to the United States. While he goes down in history as one of the most influential African-American intellectuals, he chose to die an African citizen. “I have returned that my dust shall mingle with the dust of my forefathers,” he wrote to a Ghanaian official at the time. Ghana in 1961 was still riding high on the euphoria of its liberation from Britain four years earlier.
Exactly 50 years ago, the small West African country approximately the size of Oregon was the first sub-Saharan state to achieve independence. On March 6, 1957, after some 500 years of varying degrees of European control, Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s founding father and first president, roared before an ecstatic crowd, “Ghana, your beloved country, is free forever.”
Within three years, most of Africa would follow suit. As European empires fell, independence filled Africans with a sense of solidarity. Nkrumah served as the most prominent voice of Pan-Africanism, a movement to bring Africans and the African diaspora—Africa’s descendants abroad—together in unity. This was the platform for his struggle for independence and the basis of his policies in office. The unification of the “African family” had become Nkrumah’s life goal decades earlier, as a student in the United States in the 1930s and ‘40s.
It was there that Nkrumah became acquainted with Black Nationalism, which was gaining ground in the United States and the Caribbean. Between 1919 and 1945, Du Bois was instrumental in organizing five Pan-African congresses. He wrote extensively on the need for Africa to strengthen its relationship with its diaspora. Marcus Garvey had acquired millions of followers to his Universal Negro Improvement Association, which urged Blacks to “return” to Africa. Partially inspired by Garvey, the rise of Rastafarianism in 1930s Jamaica gave a deeply spiritual dimension to Afrocentric Black pride. Civil rights leaders, among them Du Bois, were often at odds regarding the course Blacks in the diaspora should take for their struggle against oppression. However, the emancipation of Africa from White rule gave them a common objective. Africa had gained mythical and redemptive stature among the diaspora, serving at once as the source and the ultimate destination.
Nkrumah’s involvement in the Pan-African movement intensified during his time abroad, and peaked with the Fifth Pan-African Congress of 1945, held in Manchester, England. Nkrumah helped organize the meeting, in which African and Black leaders from around the world addressed problems of African colonization and racism. Following this, he returned to Ghana, where he quickly rose in the ranks of local politics. Nkrumah’s firebrand socialism spoke to the basic needs of his nation—the country wanted to control its own fate and see White rule off its shores.
It was not only the nascent Ghanaian state that embraced Nkrumah as its hero. The new Pan-African consciousness, nurtured by the U.S. civil rights movement and liberation struggles around the world, saw him as a liberator. Du Bois was just one of hundreds of African-Americans who came to Ghana in the ‘50s and ‘60s. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta King had been present at independence, where they were said to have wept as Nkrumah proclaimed Ghana’s freedom. (Du Bois was regrettably forbidden at the time from leaving American soil and couldn’t attend the celebrations.) Other visiting notables in the early years included Malcolm X, Louis Armstrong, Richard Wright and Maya Angelou. Fed up with their second-class status in the United States and fueled by ideology, Black American émigrés in Ghana believed they were reuniting the “African family,” which had been torn apart by slavery and colonization.
But the forces of disintegration that swept Africa following independence would seize Ghana as well. Veneration of Nkrumah deteriorated as the dreams that accompanied independence were shattered by tax increases, repressive decrees and the alienation of the security forces. Nkrumah had fallen out of favor with the army thanks to his keenness to deploy troops around Africa in order to assist liberation struggles. “Pan-African idealism brought Nkrumah’s final ruin,” writes historian David Birmingham in Kwame Nkrumah: The Father of African Nationalism. While on a trip to the Far East in 1966, Ghanaian army and police forces joined to seize power. Nkrumah never returned to Ghana, and died in 1972, after six years of exile in Guinea. With the end of Nkrumah’s career, Pan-Africanism lost its voice and its appeal. The defunct Organization of African Unity, which Nkrumah helped found to strengthen the continent, twiddled its thumbs while nations fell like dominoes into brutal civil wars. African leaders had traded ideology for the spoils of power, and Nkrumah’s dreams of a United States of Africa dissolved.
Pan-Africanism also dashed the expectations of a number of its earliest and most ardent admirers. Toward the end of his career, Nkrumah turned against the African-American community in Ghana. He became convinced the United States was seeking to topple him, and that Black Americans living in Ghana were working as spies for the U.S. government.
When the émigrés left the States for Ghana, they had felt they were returning home after hundreds of years in exile. But Ghana wasn’t the stage for the family reunion they had hoped for. “Many came with the assumption that they would be viewed as brothers and sisters returning to the motherland, embraced with open arms, and given minimal hospitality,” says Anne Adams, director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Center for Pan-African Culture and a retired professor of African Literature at Cornell University. “But for the most part they weren’t. They were recognized as ‘obruni’ [foreigner, or White person], as we still are. They were perceived as foreigners who did not have as much in common with Ghanaians or with Africans as they did with people from the western countries that they came from.”
Nkrumah’s replacements sought to erase his legacy; Ghanaian presidents did not mention Pan-Africanism for years after his overthrow. But little by little—or “small small,” as the Ghanaians say—his reputation has been rehabilitated. Decades of war, famine and disease have convinced many Africans across the continent of the need to work together to deal with an ever-growing list of crises. Crippling trade policies, imposed by the West to guarantee African dependence, have also renewed the relevance of Nkrumah’s hopes for an Africa united against foreign exploitation.
Today, Nkrumah has reassumed his position in the canon of African heroes, and he served as the indisputable poster boy for the independence fever that swept Ghana this past March. During the weeklong celebration of Ghana’s 50th anniversary—for which the Ghanaian government spent some $20 million—Nkrumah’s memory was invoked at virtually every event. His famous inaugural speech from 1957 was symbolically reenacted on the eve of Independence Day. His likeness lined the streets, and hordes of Ghanaians en route to state-sponsored performances, concerts and parties paraded the streets under his gaze. Nkrumah was the man of the hour again.
But the scope of Nkrumah’s rehabilitation goes beyond independence nostalgia. He is still credited with keeping the country from crumbling into the ethnic conflicts that have gripped much of the rest of the continent. To help infuse a sense of national—as opposed to ethnic— pride, Nkrumah integrated schools and prohibited ethnic-based political parties. To this day, Ghanaians swell with pride at the mention of their country’s number one asset: peace.
The past two decades have also seen the return of African-Americans to Ghana, with an estimated 5,000 living in the country today. Nkrumah’s call for the African diaspora to return home to lend a hand in development is now being spearheaded by the recently renamed Ministry of Tourism and Diaspora Relations, which offers tourists of African descent a lifetime visa to Ghana. “We want Africans everywhere, no matter where they live or how they got there, to see Ghana as their gateway home,” J. Otanka Obetsebi-Lamptey, minister of Tourism and Diaspora Relations, told the New York Times last year. “We hope we can help bring the African family back together again.”
The Ghanaian reception to the new émigrés is not too different than it was in the past, but African-Americans moving to Ghana these days have a better sense of what to expect, Adams says. It is a sign of the appeal of Pan-Africanism, the readiness of so many Americans to move to a developing country, where electricity and running water count as luxuries, and approximately half the population lives in poverty. “Sometimes we are frustrated by the fact that we feel we’re here among sisters and brothers, and would prefer to be treated like they treat their own sisters and brothers, and not just as Americans who have, in their minds, a lot of money,” says Adams. However, the advantages outweigh the unease. She speaks of experiencing a level of contentment living in Africa that she has never felt in the United States.
It is apparently this contentment that brought Du Bois, and still brings his contemporaries, back to Africa. But while Pan-Africanism has been revived in some Ghanaian and diasporan circles, it still means very little to the vast majority of Africans. “[African-American émigrés] will tell you they aren’t liked in America, but I don’t believe there’s racism there. And they don’t like us here. At the end you realize they are here to make money,” says Marshall, a manager at a popular tourist resort, who comes from Benin. Tom, his Ghanaian partner, agrees. “They are rude to us,” he says.
This gap between diasporan Africans’ expectations for acceptance and the suspicion they are met with by locals puts into question the actual accomplishments of Pan-Africanism. To what extent are the futures of all Africans, both on the continent and abroad, linked? According to Anne Adams, they are inextricable. “The stronger Africa is, the stronger the prospect for respect and dignity of people of African descent,” she says. W.E.B. Du Bois and Kwame Nkrumah would certainly have agreed with her. But for the African family to reunite, those raised on the continent must embrace Adam’s statement as true. Whether they will join the call, or reduce Pan- Africanism back to the history books, remains to be seen.