Busia And The Politics of Racial Inferiority

So, what is Ghana’s Kofi Abrefa Busia’s preference for a peaceful negotiated settlement with the vicious Aparthied government all about, if we may ask?

Of course, the Apartheid government did not have any respect for black humanity, a phylogenetic branch of the tree of humanity, of which the Eurocentric Busia himself constituted a prime example. Namely, the Apartheid philosophy of white supremacy detested the humanity of Mandela much as it did the humanities of Busia and of Nkrumah. It did not even have any respect for Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, either, the Uncle Tom of Harriet Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” a power-drunk individual who would shamelessly collaborate with the white regime of South Africa against his own people! However, regarding Busia, we can only speculate if his servile accommodationism to white supremacy directly derived from functional questions of lazy thinking, of intellectual and racial inferiority, or of a complete lack of understanding of South Africa’s convoluted political history, social complexity of Apartheid, and imperialism.


On the other hand, this servile behavior of his smacks of Hegelian dialectic, if we can put it that way, in that FW De Klerk, like many privileged whites who directly benefited from black dehumanization and inferiorization, is able to say, quite freely and without compunction, that White South Africa should not be blamed, even belatedly, for the supposed ghettoization of Black South Africa in the social and economic deserts of Bantustans because the latter pre-existed the institutionalization of Apartheid. Sadly, these revisionist frameworks of Hegelian reasoning make it possible for all kinds of people, lay and scholarly, alike, to justify the European Slave Trade and the Arab Trans-Saharan Slave Trade, because, according to them, slavery had existed as a viable indigenous institution in Africa.


Pointedly, this Busian accommodationist philosophy is no different, in essence, from Authenticité, or better still, from the philosophical Zairianization of post-colonial Congolese culture, where, nationalism, under Mobuto Sese Seko, purportedly overthrew the stilted dictatorships of regionalism and ethnic nationalism, though, technically, it merely ushered in another, if not severe, form of divisive politics known on the continent. Admittedly, Congo is still in the throes of destabilization. Essentially, the philosophical underpinnings of Authenticité, an ideological cognate of Negritude, accommodated serious considerations for modernization, yet, Mobuto, like Busia, Félix Houphouët-Boigny, and the leadership of Malawi, Apartheid-era leaders, failed to anticipate the moral and political difficulties his neocolonial and post-modernist mentality would put Africa in.


Houphouët-Boigny, a prominent proponent of Françefrique, would go on to build an estimated 300-million-dollar basilica, called the Basilica of Our Lady of Peace, in Yamoussoukro, his home town, prompting Wole Soyinka to level a belated peppery accusation against him for financial misallocation. What if this money had been spent on cutting-edge laboratories for drug discovery purposes or on scientific research institutions for tropical diseases, say? The basilica in question, recorded in the “Guinness World Records” as the world’s largest church, even incurred the righteous criticism of the Vatican for its extravagance, though Pope John Paul ll would later consecrate it upon its completion. But how much peace has this basilica given Ivoirians and Africans in general? Together, this shameful depth of social miscalculation and misplaced national priority, retroactive questions of development economics related to Houphouët-Boigny’s policy decision making strategies, are why we believe the ideological skeleton of Busia’s neocolonial and postmodernist thinking exactly matched Houphouët-Boigny’s in their unique genetic strands of inferiorized racialism.


More to the point, we also are aware of the crippling brutality Houphouët-Boigny, a darling of the West, unleashed upon non-conformist constituencies, mostly those outside his immediate Akouès ethnicity. This is also why we think Busia and Houphouët-Boigny closely epitomized the democratic authoritarianism of Okonkwo, the protagonist of Chinua Achebe’s “Things Fall Apart.” Such warped thinking, again, particularly of leaders like Busia, Houphouët-Boigny, Chief Mangosuthu Buthelezi, Inocêncio Kani, Mobuto Sese Seko, ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier, ‘Baby Doc’ Duvalier, Forbes Burnham, and the like, also reminds us of when Busia, a servile child and good valet of the West he was, appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Sub-committee on African Affairs to lobby against the subvention of Ghana’s hydroelectric project, the Akosombo Dam. Later, he, his political cronies, otherwise the ideological enemies of Nkrumah, for the most part, and his family members would rely on for economic sustenance and biological survival.


Put another way, the neocolonial and postmodernist politics of Africa, ideally exercised outside the immediate philosophical orbits of great leaders like Kwame Nkrumah, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Jr., Patrice Lumumba, Steve Biko, Pedro Pires, Marcus Garvey, Festus Mogae, Walter Sisulu, Joaquim Chissano, Kofi Annan, Albert Tutuli, and Malcolm X, Oliver Tambo, Desmond Tutu, Robert Mugabe, and Paul Bogle, clearly shows an oceanic state of confusion, visionary distortion, intellectual headlessness, and indirection, something asymptotically close to the doctrinal oppositionalism we find in the “Gospel of Judas” and the Synoptic accounts of the New Testament, particularly as it relates to the actual, if not alleged, role of Christ and Judas in God’s salvation plan for man.


Now, regarding the warped thinking of African leadership, of which we have briefly touched upon previously, a good situational example occurred some years ago when someone, a group, perhaps, from the scholarly community of Black America, obviously an individual(s) whose intellectual politics had deeply been informed by Eurocentric thinking, secretly went to Wellesley’s Dr. Mary Lefkowitz, one of America’s recognized authorities on Classical Civilization, to lobby her against Molefi Kete Asante and his Afrocentric theory. What was Asante’s crime? His intellectual and social activism, that is, of demanding parental responsibility, entrepreneurship, scientific innovation, economic independence, studiousness, peace, unity, etc., in the African world, diasporic and continental.

This shocking episode recalls the ideological tension that arose between Leopold Senghor and Cheikh Anta Diop, an unfortunate circumstance in which Senghor, a culturally Frenchified African of the highest order, renowned poet and French grammarian, first African member of the Académie française, President of Senegal, and recipient of the African Studies Association’s 1994 Lifetime Achievement Award and of the 1978 Prix mondial Cino Del Duca, prevented Diop, one of the world’s respected scientists, Egyptologists, physicists, and linguists, from taking up professorship in Senegal, probably for the very same reasons we have ascribed to Asante’s intellectual enemies, more so in the hegemonic interest of cultural, political, and economic whiteness. This Senghorian attachment to white supremacy is emblematic of Busia’s own political, economic, and intellectual subservience to cultural whitism. Regrettably, this represents the kind of thinking we see manifested all over Africa today. That said, we wait to see how the theory of Afrocentricity reverses this mode of thinking!


Indeed, this kind of retrogressive thinking, we argue, had underwritten, if partially, the underdevelopment, intellectual backwardness, and ethnic polarization of post-colonial Africa. However, it’s sad that South America and Asia have made conscious effort, with some positive results, to move away from the Eurocentric gravitational center of neocolonial and postmodernist political thinking, in fact, far away from the fault lines of Western political and economic hegemony, even while Africa, after decades of political independence, still fully and religiously embraces it. Moreover, we also do know how the West, principally America, managed to con Haile Selassie into having the headquarters of the Organization of African Unity situated in Ethiopia, rather than in Ghana, as part of the ideological bargaining, a process initiated by Nkrumah, to earn Selassie’s imprimatur for Nkrumahist institutionalization of political continentalism.


In fact, it was the CIA which instigated the ideological flection between Selassie and Nkrumah, this, according to the Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer of WEB Du Bois, David Levering Lewis, author of the two-part voluminous series, “WEB Du Bois: Biography of a Race, 1868-1919” and “WEB Du Bois: The Fight for Equality and the American Century, 1919-1963.” More importantly, the central motive for the CIA’s Machiavellist management of African affairs, in the hectic days of the Cold War, was to downsize the global popularity and political influence of Nkrumah. Admittedly, the West has claimed Chaka Zulu was a homosexual, despite the historical objections of Mazisi Kunene, one of Zulu’s prominent and respected poets, because of his infatuated closeness to his mother, probably allegedly, and because of his rigidly disciplined militarism, where, for instance, he instructed his soldiers, as a matter of policy, to suppress their sexual impulses by submerging their erected manhoods in the pundic softness of their inner thighs. What was Chaka’s crime?


Yet, in spite of our reservations about African leadership, we applaud Leopold Senghor, one of the original intellectual pillars behind Negritude, along with Léon Damas and Aime Césaire, for giving sanctuary to Apartheid activists and for providing them with Senegalese passports, to smooth out the rough edges of their passage into and out of South Africa, though Busia and Senghor would later clash over the ideological countenance of Negritude as a philosophical movement. “Ghana’s Kofi Busia dismisses Negritude as a convenient abstraction, a conceptual toll for researchers who are trying to find common cultural traits that will distinguish the Negro African from other races. According to Busia, heightened sensibility and strong emotional quality cannot be claimed as exclusive possessions of Negro Africans. Besides, race and culture do not necessarily go together, and historical circumstances have put the Negro Africans into different cultures,” reports “Identity and Change: Nigerian Philosophical Studies l,” edited by Theophilus Okere. What does “Negro African,” an oxymoron or collocation, mean?


Interestingly, Cheikh Anta Diop, Ezekiel Mphahlele, Paulin Hountondji, to name but three, raved about Negritude, openly voicing their intellectual distaste for its high-handed philosophical advertorialism in the absence of scientific affirmation. But we should admit that Busia was only partially right. Indeed, had he deeply, if, at all, read Diop, he would have recognized that “Negro,” a racist social construct, derived emotional sustenance from ideological foundations of anthropological, scientific, and racial vacuity. Plus, the Eurocentric inventions, “Negro” and “sub-Saharan Africa,” to name but two, exist only in the slivered political-cultural psychology of white supremacy and in the cultural psychologies of de-centered others, not necessarily of Westerners. Finally, Diop, himself a formidable sociologist among several other specialties, used “Negro” with scientific qualification and anthropological discretion. In fact, Malcolm X in his autobiography implied etymologically, if cautiously, that “Negro,” a derivative root of the Greek “necro,” meant “dead” or “corpse.” Richard B. Moore takes up the subject in his book “The Name ‘Negro’: Its Origin and Evil Use.”


Retroactively, the Eurocentric scholarship of African intellectuals like Busia’s made it possible for America to cage a member of the Twa, Ota Benga, a Busia “Negro,” as well as, also, to put him on public display with monkeys, in 1906, in New York’s Bronx Zoo (Monkey House). In fact, the late African-American classicist, Prof. Frank Snowden, like Busia, committed a grievous intellectual blunder when he adopted the stereotypical “Negro” label for his two influential books, “Blacks in Antiquity: Ethiopians in the Greco-Roman Experience” and “Before Color Prejudice: The Ancient View of Blacks,” in his otherwise thorough analysis of racial socialization in the classical world, both of which have, however, tasted the bitter lemon juice of Afrocentric critique against the anthropological bias of Eurocentrism. Similarly, the late Ivan Van Sertima, a linguist and anthropology, subjected the facial scarification of Snowdenian exegesis to the vigorous mirror of Afrocentric critique.


Nevertheless, a close valuation of the collective works of Abena Busia, a Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences professor (Department of Women and Gender Studies), and of Akosua Busia, an outstanding actress and writer in her own right, probably demonstrate a level of social, political, and intellectual sophistication unparalleled in their father’s work, political and scholarly. In fact, the transformative body of Akosua’s movies and of Abena’s scholarly production in the challenging fields of post-colonial and cultural studies, comparative literature, and black feminism speak for themselves. However, contrary to the factious temperament of their father’s political intellectualism, the corpus of Abena’s and Akosua’s works and sociopolitical lives, by themselves, alone, represent a uniter of oppugnant social and political forces.

More important than anything else, we could, however, forgive Busia for his intellectual miscues because he was a sociologist, a good one at that, of course, but not a scientist, a natural scientist, we mean, granted also that the sociology, a social science, of his day, even of today, was steeped in the scientific tribalism of Eurocentrism. Even the methodological tools of critical appraisal and empirical investigation known to and used by sociologists, then and now, to study societies and their continued evolution, cannot, quite objectively, be said to be totally free from the constraints of white supremacy. Seriously, though, anthropology, literary criticism, history, and literary theory, all four, are tainted with politics of cultural racialism rather than with politics of post-racialism.


In other words, we need to acquaint ourselves with these epistemological questions in order to place ourselves in a better position to appreciate the political psychology of Busia and to fathom the reasons behind some of the radical and unpopular decisions he made, for the thinking tree of an individual cannot be divorced from its cultural fruit of educationalization, psychosocialization, and decision making. For instance, Jacobus Capitein, an eighteenth-century Dutch educated Ghanaian, authored a thesis in defense of Christian enslavement of Africans, while, an European Dutch minister, Godefridus Cornelisz Udemans, his contemporary, advocated their freedom. On the other hand, Malcolm X recognized the social contrasts, a set of disturbing trends, between a “field slave” and a “house slave,” noting how the privileged psychosocial propinquity of the latter, a domesticated android, to whiteness has distorted the relative intra-racial harmony of blackness well into the twentieth century.


Could it have been why Busia thought Nigerians, Ghanaian Nkrumahists, and Black South Africa constituted an ideologically culturalized constituency, of lowly station, if you will, quite apart from the superiorized morality of UP-affiliated Ghanaians, mostly Akans of Akyem and Asante ethnicities? We make this contextualized assessment based on Busia’s measured critique of Negritude. Understandably, Busia’s doctorate thesis, “The Position of the Chief in the Modern Political System of the Ashanti: A Study of the Influence of Contemporary Social Changes on Ashanti Political Institutions,” shares some useful philosophical pointers with Negritude. That is, the word “Ashanti” itself is a colonial linguistic artifact, much like “Negro” or “sub-Saharan Africa.” Notably, his philosophical critique of Negritude was conveniently selective at best, too. Also, both, namely, Negritude and his doctoral dissertation, sought to define the colonized African out of the emotional constraints of Eurocentrism. If so, shouldn’t he have probably used “king” rather than “chief,” since colonialism tried to reduce African kings to chiefs, merely just so it could deny them their rightful place in social and cultural history, along philosophical questions of political parity with their European counterparts?


Was it not for the same reason that colonialism sometimes reduced some African “empires” to “kingdoms”? Could it be why the West sees us exclusively in “tribal” configurations of racial inferiority while it sees itself generally in “ethnic” configurations of racial superiority? Yet, though Busia may have cited the historical redistribution of blackness, probably outside Africa, as a sociological antithesis to the collectivized oneness of racial blackness, where, philosophically speaking, race and culture co-existed in antagonistic mutual exclusiveness, it is also an acknowledged fact that whiteness, regardless of geographic redistribution, is seen as one, racially and culturally, by Eurocentrism. Even the White American, William Faulkner, one of the most influential literary figures of the 20th century and a Nobel laureate, did not publicly shy away from taking up arms to defend the white race against blacks (See Munford’s “Race and Reparations: A Black Perspective for the Twenty-First Century.”


Moreover, the 1884 Berlin Conference, otherwise called “the Scramble for Africa,” lumped the racial blackness of Africa together in the experimental dehumanization of Africans as forced subjects of colonialism! How could the glorified Busia have missed these glaring facts? This is why the West supported Apartheid as a unified bloc. This is why Europe fought Haiti as a unified bloc. This is why Europe colonized the rest of the world as a unified bloc. Of course, a few historical aberrations also exist, alongside our generalizations, such as the atrocities of Hitlerite Nazism and of British imperialism in Northern Ireland. Having said that, Prof. Theophile Obenga, a respected linguist and Egyptologist, has shown how European ethnicities whose languages are remotely related, sometimes even unrelated, are conveniently subsumed into the label “Indo-European languages,” inferentially condensing the cultural disparities of Caucasians into a unitary racial configuration.


Therefore, according to this Busian logic of historical demography, a notably feeble one, of course, it does not matter if history placed a European ethnicity in India, Iran, South America, or South Africa, as long they are Europeans or Caucasians. Yet, African scholars, like Busia, again, have created antagonistic divisions within the African family, diasporic and continental. In fact, Busia’s “The Challenge of Africa” spells out the difficulties and significance of democratizing Africa, though, to say the least, much of what he did as a politician, in and out of office, cannot be attributed to a thinker who consistently demonstrated a clear grasp of what democracy technically meant, both in theory and practice. Democracy does not necessary mean slavish accommodationism in the face of either a people’s social, cultural, economic, and political extinction or their human devaluation, or both. For instance, the Boers, architects of Apartheid, did not use dialogue when the British government extended its sovereignty and imperialism there.


Moreover, both the First Anglo-Boer War and Second Anglo-Boer War, collectively known as “the Boer Wars,” did not set good precedents for an accommodating dialogue between the ANC and the White Nationalist government. Anyway, why should the British and the Boers fight over South Africa when it did not belong to either of them? Is it not ironically sensitive that Vryheidsoorloë, an Afrikaan word for the Boer Wars, also means “freedom wars”? Shouldn’t these “freedom wars” have been fought on behalf of Black South Africa? Is “freedom” politically appropriate for racial whiteness but politically inappropriate for racial blackness? Which of the accommodationist dialogues worked out between Black South Africa and White South Africa since Jan van Riebeeck set his foot there in 1652? And who says the militarism and bombing campaigns of Mandela’s Umkhonto we Sizwe and of the Pan Africanist Congress (PAC) do not constitute dialogue? Who says the campaigns mounted by the Irish Republican Army (IRA), the Black Panther, the Haitian and Algerian Revolutions do not constitute different forms of dialogue?

Importantly, this philosophical controversy hanging over dialoguing, principally political, is exactly what the scholar Norman Finkelstein has successfully done via one of his most important works, “What Gandhi Says: About Nonviolence, Resistance, and Courage.” Among other things, he points out that Gandhi’s philosophical response to social injustice was exceptionally radical and went beyond the Christ-like innocence of “nonviolence.” Then again, Oliver Stone’s documentary film, “South of the Border,” which covers a partial historical appraisal of the contemporary polities of South America, shows how South America used all available resources to it, including violent revolutions, to rid themselves of the yoke of capitalist hegemony and of Western dominance. Frantz Fanon also demonstrated how “violence” produced better results in certain radical situations.


Actually, Fanon’s contribution to the success of the Algerian Revolution testifies to the moral exigencies of “violence” as a cleansing political tool. On the contrary, we do concede that other situations demand the “non-violent” philosophies of Leo Tolstoy, Henry David Thoreau, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mahatma Gandhi. In fact, “violence” ended the First and Second World Wars. Mau Mau “violence” ended British colonialism in Kenya. Robert Mugabe and Joshua Nkomo used “violence” to end colonialism in Rhodesia. America used “violence” to suppress Native American resistance to their land being taken from them by force as well as to prevent Britain from re-colonizing America, an ex-colony. We are merely implying that dialoguing does not necessarily always come in social, verbal, and epistolary packages, but can also be nonverbal, political, conventional and unconventional warfare, or even asymmetric warfare.


The problem, however, becomes more complicated when an opponent demonstrates superior military strength to and exerts the demographic power of numerical advantage, population-wise, over his subjects. These realities may have driven Martin Luther King, Jr. to choose “non-violence” over “violence.” Yet, we cannot apply this analysis to Gandhian “non-violence” in India, because, there, the British constituted a racial minority though it held superior military advantage over the militarily-less powerful Indian majority. Besides, Apartheid, as a colonial system with all the trappings of slavery, came nowhere near the effeminate oppositional politics Nkrumah allowed Busia to play in Ghana. Quite surprisingly, Busia and his Luddite supporters used bombs, rather than dialogue, to fight the incumbency and popular policies of Nkrumah.


Then also, unlike Busia who went to Britain, renowned his Ghanaian citizenship, probably because he could not bring himself to return to Ghana to face Acheampong, and even died there, the land of his White colonial masters, Nkrumah patriotically retained his Ghanaian citizenship while still in Guinea. Yet, the antagonistic forces, Western and Ghanaian, arrayed against Nkrumah would outweigh anything Busia had ever experienced in his entire life. Meanwhile, Nkrumah would overrule Kwame Toure’s (Stokely Carmichael) radical suggestion to mobilize men and artillery, for counterinsurgency purposes, just so they could go back to Ghana, overthrow the incumbent, and restore Nkrumah to the Ghanaian presidency. Again, unlike Busia, Nkrumah continued to write, publish books, critically comment on African politics, and advise Sekou Toure on matters important to national longevity.


In other words, the great Nkrumah was as intellectually and politically productive even in exile. Today, as yesterday, his transformative ideas continue to defy the political and cultural particularities of national psychologies. And it was this same Nkrumah who would exert one of the greatest ideological influences on the political novicehood of Mandela. Interestingly, regarding the ideological exigencies of armed conflict vis-a-vis dialogue, here is what Busia probably did not know: “Even though we took up arms, it was not our preferred option. It was the apartheid regime that forced us to take up arms. Our preferred option had always been to find a peaceful solution to the apartheid conflict. The combined struggle of our people in the country, as well as the growing international battle against apartheid during the 1980s made possible a negotiated solution to that conflict. The decisive defeat in Cuito Cuanavale changed the status of forces in the region and reduced considerably the capacity of the Pretoria regime to destabilize its neighbors…within the country,” Mandela told the people of Cuba.


Ironically, those in the West who proposed dialogue as the best alternative solution to ending Aparthied did not follow that sham advice themselves. The West vigorously pursued targeted assassinations of communist sympathizers like Che Guevara in Bolivia, Amilcar Cabral, Patrice Lumumba, Walter Rodney, Augusto Sandino, Carlos Amador, Maurice Bishop, etc., and abortive ones such as those perpetrated against Daniel Ortega, Fidel Castro, Mengistu Haile Mariam, etc. Western-instigated campaign of massive bombings in Soviet- and Chinese-satellite nation-states added to the general frustration of the communist bloc. Che Guevara’s blatant failures in the Congo further added to communist frustration. The direct roles of the Vatican and Pope John Paul ll in the Solidarity-led demolition of Polish communism as well as the crushing influence of the Catholic-inspired Solidarity philosophy in destabilizing communism in Central and Eastern Europe would eventually precipitate the dissolution of the Soviet Union.


Again, Western-instigated violent coups like those masterminded against Kwame Nkrumah weakened the resolve of communist expansionism in Africa. However, this sustained violence on the part of the West would force communist leaders such as Nikita Khrushchev, Deng Xiaoping, and Mikhail Gorbachev to the negotiating table of capitalist-induced political revision. Gorbachev was even alleged to have been bribed by America’s Ronald Reagan. Therefore, in these contexts, we may argue that Nkrumah, a brilliant and keen observer of political, if labyrinthine, trends, understood the intricate dynamics of Apartheid than any leader in Ghana’s entire political history. But, seriously, then again, why have we allowed the political divisiveness of Westernism to define for us, as always, who is supposed to represent the greatest leader of the African world? Didn’t political Westernism play the same game with us when Marcus Garvey and WEB Du Bois appeared on the scene? When Molefi Kete Asante and Henry Louis Gates, Jr. appeared on the scene?

When Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. appeared on the scene? When Patrice Lumumba and Mobuto Sese Seko appeared on the scene? When Peter Tosh and Bob Marley appeared on the scene? When Notorious B.I.G. and Tupac Shakur appeared on the scene? And now it’s Kwame Nkrumah and Nelson Mandela! Haven’t we come of age to know who our “greatest” leaders already are and to acknowledge the fact that solving our many problems as a people matters more to our survival than the nonsensical talks on who is great and who is not? Must we be told that? Who is America’s greatest leader of the 20th century, Woodrow Wilson or JF Kennedy? Who is Europe’s greatest leader of the 20th century, Adolf Hitler or Winston Churchill? Who is Canada’s greatest leader of the 20th century, Pierre Trudeau or Jean Chrétien? Who is Australia’s greatest leader of the 20th century, John McEwen or John Howard? Who is Asia’s greatest leader of the 20th century, Mao Tse-tung or Mahatma Gandhi? Who is South America’s greatest leader of the 20th century, Augusto Pinochet or Hugo Chávez?


Indeed, African politics should return to Nkrumah’s “Consiencism: Philosophy and Ideology for Decolonization,” a beautiful piece of literary material which Prof. Obenga has aptly described as a creatively monumental work which occupies a high station in the pantheon of post-colonial and cultural studies, to Amy Jacques-Garvey’s edited volume “Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey,” and to Steve Biko’s “I Write What I like.” Frantz Fanon’s “The Wretched of the Earth,” Aimé Césaire’s “Discourse on Colonialism,” and Molefi Kete Asante’s “Rooming in the Master’s House” belong in this serious class of political, intellectual, and social activism. Among other things, these creative works underwrite the “psychiatric” de-colonization of the African mind. More interestingly, we now know why well-informed Africans voted Robert Mugabe as “the third-greatest African of all time,” Nelson Mandela as “the first-greatest African of all time,” and Kwame Nkrumah as “the man of the millennium.”


Admittedly, Peter Godwin’s novel, “The Fear: The Last Days of Robert Mugabe,” will fail to reverse Mugabe’s standing as “the third-greatest African of all time” in the political consciousness of Africa! Could it be that Nkrumah’s American education made him a better strategic and prescient thinker than British education did for JB Danquah, Kofi Abrefa Busia, and Julius Nyerere, three individuals whose antithetical ideologies undermined Nkrumahist continentalism?


We shall return…