There is no doubt that professional haters and detractors of Nkrumah have made careers out of painting him as the most despicable human being that ever walked the face of the planet, in spite of the fact that he was not superhuman but human like themselves. Of course Nkrumah was “superhuman” in terms of ideational productivity, patriotism, vision, personal sacrifice, industry, love for his people, organizational adroitness and statecraft, technocratic innovation, and so forth. Similarly, none of America’s Founding Fathers, Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, and Mother Teresa was infallible. This essay draws readers’ attention to some of the key ideas they need to bear in mind while evaluating Dr. Dompere’s scientific works on Nkrumah, so as not to fall for the revisionist distortions of Nkrumah’s detractors and professional haters.
In the first place, Gandhi would not board or ride the same bus or train with Black South Africans during Apartheid, just as most White South Africans would not during the same period. Yet there is a tendency to make Gandhi a saint despite his apparent humanity, foibles, and political shortcomings. George Orwell made the following observations in his 1949 essay, titled ‘Reflections on Gandhi,” after reading Gandhi’s autobiography “The Story of My Experiments with Truth”: “Saints should always be judged guilty until they are proved innocent…Sainthood is also a thing that human beings must avoid…the average human being is a failed saint.”
Orwell came to these conclusions after reading a few surprises about Gandhi’s life in his autobiography. One of his general conclusions about Gandhi reads: “One feels that there was much he [Gandhi] did not understand…I have never been able to feel much liking for him, but I do not feel that as a political thinker he was wrong in the main, nor do I believe that his life was a failure.”
Like Gandhi’s humble or modest autobiography, Nkrumah had this to say to those who tried to make him a cynosure of historical apotheosis: “Fundamentally, I do not believe in the great men of history, but I do think that so-called great men of history merely personify the synthesis of the tangled web of the material and historical forces at play.” As the preceding statement demonstrates, Nkrumah put himself and his vision for Africa squarely at the epochal intersection of ancestral prodding, populist support, and circumstantial actualities, rather than at the center of self-adulation, narcissism, self-promotion, self-reference, and personal aggrandizement, to account for his meteoric climb on the historical ladder of greatness.
Nkrumah may not have overtly mentioned his name in the statement above, but it is there. Still, the import of Nkrumah’s periphrasis may have been lost on his audience, as it may arguably have been directed at the aggregate indictment of those in his audience who may have wished to assign Nkrumah an elevated status of greatness. Of course, it is the moment of history and hindsight and clear conscience and time that set true assessment value to the legacies of men and women, not otherwise.
Yet no one, we dare say, will argue against Gandhi’s influence on Nkrumah, as Henry David Thoreau and Leo Tolstoy both, in turn, influenced Gandhi (See Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” and Tolstoy’s “Writings on Civil Disobedience and Nonviolence”; Note: It is always the tendency on the part of Western commentators to completely ignore Tolstoy’s enormous influence on Gandhi; see also the epistolary correspondences between Gandhi and Tolstoy; see Norman Finkelstein’s work “What Gandhi Says: About Nonviolence, Resistance and Courage”). This parenthetic fact is analogous to the attempts being made to appropriate Nkrumah’s ideas for J.B. Danquah, who never measured up to the former in the realm of political sophistication, diplomacy, and statecraft.
On Mother Teresa: The late Christopher Hitchens, a British-born American journalist, criticized Mother Teresa for her religious-political hypocrisy and social shenanigans in the public eye (See Hitchens’ Oct. 21, 2003 article “Mommie Dearest: The Pope Beatifies Mother Teresa, a Fanatic, a Fundamentalist, and a Fraud”). One of Hitchens’ major criticisms of Mother Teresa stemmed from her refusal to account for money philanthropists and others gave her for her philanthropic activities, a controversial issue compounded by her order’s refusal to publish any audit. Hitchens further wrote that Mother Teresa befriended “the worst of the rich”; and that she also took misappropriated money from “the atrocious Duvalier family in Haiti,” whose rule she praised, as well as from Charles Keating. The Economist described Keating as a “moral crusader and financial snake-oil salesman” (see “Charles Keating: Crusader and Fraud” in the April 12, 2014 edition of The Economist).
Hitchens further wrote: “MT [Mother Teresa] was not a friend of the poor. She was a friend of poverty. She said that suffering was a gift from God. SHE SPENT HER LIFE OPPOSING THE ONLY KNOWN CURE FOR POVERTY, WHICH IS THE EMPOWERMENT OF WOMEN AND THE EMANCIPATION OF THEM FROM A LIFETSOCK VERSION OF COMPULSORY REPRODUCTION…THE PRIMITIVE HOSPICE IN CALCUTTA WAS AS RUN DOWN WHEN SHE DIED AS IT ALWAYS HAD BEEN…SHE PREFERRED CALIFORNIA CLINICS WHEN SHE GOT SICK HERSELF” (our emphasis). He concluded: “More than that, we witnessed the elevation and consecration of extreme dogmatism, blinkered faith, and the cult of a mediocre human personality. Many more people are poor and sick because of the life of MT [Mother Teresa]: Even more will be poor and sick if her example is followed. She was a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud…”
How then does Mother Teresa contrast with Nkrumah? Nkrumah, we should point out, rescued an entire continent and its millions of citizens from five hundred years of European slavery, colonialism, and imperialism, while dying penniless, leaving behind an unparalleled legacy on the continent, improving human relations, and being passionately hated from within and without!
On Nelson Mandela: Desmond Tutu once criticized Mandela for appointing unqualified persons to cabinet positions in his government, purely on the basis of a common historical attachment to Mandela, in respect of their common membership in the ANC and of their common struggles to dismantle Apartheid. A good number of Black South Africans also say Mandela sold out to Whites at the expense of their complete political and economic emancipation. These Mandela critics continue to level posthumous accusations against Mandela for his failure to nationalize South Africa’s industries and mineral wealth for reasons of equitable employment representation and wealth redistribution, where Black South Africans received their fair share of the national cake. Mandela’s failure to reclaim “black” land for Black South Africa remains a sticking point for many.
Yet, Mandela was so despicable and subversive in the eye of the Reagan Administration in that the latter blacklisted him as a communist terrorist, the National African Congress (ANC) as a communist organization. According to writer Earl O. Hutchinson, as late as 2007 Mandela and officials of the ANC had to obtain “a State Department waiver or special certification” before they could enter America. In other words, Mandela was a communist terrorist and the ANC a communist organization, and both, rightly remained so, during Apartheid and post-Apartheid South Africa. Mandela as South Africa’s President and the ANC as the governing political party made no difference in the thinking of American officials. Reagan’s main reason for blacklisting Mandela and the ANC was that both posed security threats to the government of South Africa and America’s interests.
The Bush Administration finally removed Mandela and the ANC from America’s terrorist list in July 2008, with the Congressional Black Caucus (Condoleezza Rice, John Kerry, etc) mounting political pressure on the Bush Administration to do the right thing (see Hutchinson’s article “America’s Shameful Treatment of Mandela’s Still Lingers”). In contrast, Ronald Reagan referred to Mobuto Sese Seko as “a friend of democracy and freedom” and Jonas Savimbi “a freedom fighter”; George W. Bush’s father called Mobuto “one of our most valued friends on the entire continent of Africa” (see Antoine R. Lokongo’s essay “DRC: Democracy at Crossroads,” Nov. 16, 2011, Issue 558, Pambazuka News). As well, both the Bush, Sr. Administration and the Reagan Administration gave Savimbi at least $30 million in covert military aid in the 1980s (see Shana Will’s article “Jonas Savimbi: Washington’s Freedom Fighter, Africa’s ‘Terrorist,’” Foreign Policy in Focus, Feb. 1, 2002). Then also Rev. Pat Robertson, one of America’s foremost evangelists, dined with the likes of Mobuto even as he lobbied for the later and Liberia’s Charles Taylor in Congress. Charles Taylor was a darling of the CIA in the 1980s, a secret he made public at his international court.
Nelson Mandela and ANC officials communist subversives? So too were Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, W.E.B. Du Bois, Paul Robeson, Patrice Lumumba, Kwame Nkrumah, Amilcar Cabral, Steve Biko, Stanley Levinson (one of King’s advisor), and hundreds of freedom fighters around the world, particularly in the black world, became communist terrorists. In addition to the their “communist terrorist” label, King became an “enemy of the state” just as Nkrumah became “an enemy of the state” in the British Empire! One thing is certain, and Dr. Motsoko Pheko is right about it. He writes: “In Ghana, Britain never liked Nkrumah. It was only when the Gold Coast (now Ghana) became ungovernable that Britain conceded to the demands of Nkrumah’s CPP Party” (see “Democracy and Legitimacy in Africa,” New African Magazine, Sept. 18, 2013). King did not kill any of his opponents, so too did Nkrumah not kill a single political opponent. Rather, both King and Nkrumah allowed the state, the security services, the intelligence community, and the courts to deal with their enemies according to the laws of the land, in the face of vigilante violence, terrorism, armed insurrection, and lynching carried out against their persons, their supporters, their sympathizers, their families, even the general public. Nkrumah’s and King’s intellectual and political immersion in Gandhian non-violence explained their approach to taming the fire of terrorism and violence that came their way and that of their following.
On America’s Founding Fathers: America’s Founding Fathers ruled over a vast empire of slavocracy, which witnessed women, Native Americans, African Americans, and poor whites generally sequestered from active engagement with mainstream American politics. The same founding slavocrats supervised a well-engineered, well-orchestrated seizure and outright stealing of Native-American lands across colonial America, in addition to supervising an externally-imposed starvation of Native Americans, the latter’s physical brutalization, massacre, physical dislocation, and forced relocation to “reservation.” The term “reservation” is none other than a politically correct rubric for “concentration camp.” Native Americans (and African Americans) suffered at the hand of White America, which perpetrated its train of heinous crimes against them with reckless abandon and impunity.
Successive generations of American leadership also imposed American exceptionalism and Manifest Destiny on parts of the world. Historians, writers, and journalists such as the Pulitzer Prize-winning Garry Wills have raised serious questions about America’s Founding Fathers, the American Constitution, religion (Chrsitianity), and politics regarding their combined roles in shaping slavocracy, among others (See his book “Head and Heart: American Christianities”). In fact, so many distortions and misplaced historical attributions are exposed in this well-written, well-researched book and elsewhere (See also James W. Loewen’s books “Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong,” “Lies Across America: What Our Historic Sites Get Wrong,” and “Lies My Teacher Told Me About Christopher Columbus”). We have in Ghana and outside Ghana hateful professional revisionists who are bent on distorting Nkrumah’s legacy despite the world’s moral opposition to their revisionist enterprise!
What is the moral of Orwell’s “Reflections on Gandhi”? The answer(s) should be obvious from the foregoing. Clearly, one important idea Orwell raised in his essay points to his implied admission regarding the tendency, or the instinctive nature, of human beings to “apply high standards” when evaluating the legacy of historical figures and that, in doing so, he further claimed, evaluators understandably miss out on some of the virtues of their subjects, the objects of their evaluation. Indeed, Orwell’s line of arguments, moral and otherwise, can be thinly likened to what psychologists call “moral exclusion.” We shall also loosely associate the enemies of Nkrumah with the label “déformation professionnelle,” given that they have made Nkrumah the focus of their professional hatred. As a matter of fact, there is no veil of definitional misclassifications or conundrums here. We are merely making attempts to place the professional haters of Nkrumah in their proper ideological frames to ease their critique.
We make these arguments to establish a moral basis for comparative assessment of individuals and their legacies. Alas, it is all hypocritical politics as usual when it comes to Nkrumah, his nonpareil legacy, with regard to his ideological enemies. How so? It is morally acceptable for the state under Julius Nyerere to use the PDA and the Americans the Patriot Act, but morally unacceptable for the state under Nkrumah to use the PDA, as terrorists, fifth columnists, neocolonial sycophants, CIA stooges, and ethnocentric irredentists roamed the Gold Coast and Ghana terrorizing him [Nkrumah] and members of his government, children, innocent men and women for no reason other than the people’s love for Nkrumah. It is also morally acceptable for Nyerere, Houphouët-Boigny, and Kenyatta to establish one-party states but morally unacceptable for Nkrumah to do same, as when his enemies pushed him to establish one.
On the question of surveillance and gathering intelligence on “enemies of the state” in America from the 1940s to the 1970s, Pulitzer Prize-winning Tim Weiner writes of FBI boss J.E. Hoover: “If he was going to attack the enemies of the United States, better that it be done in secret and NOT UNDER THE LAW” (our emphasis; see “The History of the FBI’s Secret ‘Enemies’ List,” Feb. 14, 2012, NPR). What is the basis or justification for these skewed assessments of historical and moral leaders, such as Nkrumah?
It is clear from the above that Nkrumah did nothing of the sort, of the historical wrongs we associate with America’s Founding Fathers, for instance. In other words, while we call for serious critique of Nkrumah’s legacy we also think it is best for those who cite the example of Western democracy as a backdrop for their moral crusade against Nkrumah and his legacy, to always bear in mind the moral utility, evaluative strength, and methodological superiority of comparative historiography. Thus, any serious attempt to decipher the labyrinthine infrastructure of leadership greatness within and outside the circumvolution of history and of historiography requires nothing short of the holistic appreciation of the aforementioned portfolios of ideas. We advance these arguments with particular reference to Prof. Dompere’s informal and formal education and his mathematical-scientific valuation of the cultural symbols and memes associated with his psychological landscape, as well as, finally, with Nkrumahism.
Was Nkrumah not the hero of Mandela and of millions of Africans! Did Basil Davidson not call Nkrumah the “Black Star”? Has Nkrumah not be ranked among the world’s greatest historical figures of the twentieth century? We shall end this chapter with a poignant quote by John A. Mooney, taken from his book “Joan of Arc”: “A SAINT, HOWEVER PERFECT, LEAVES AT LEAST ONE ENEMY ON EARTH, AN ENEMY THAT NEVER DIES, THE DEBAUCHEE, TRUE ‘DEVIL’S ADVOCATE.” We hope the professional haters of Nkrumah have taken note!
We shall return…
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