But these challenges, those we specifically outlined in Part IV, have not prevented serious scholars from actively studying and rigorously applying his revolutionary ideas to critical questions of human suffering, development economics, political morality, human and race relations, among others. Again, as Hadjor rightly notes in the epigram of the previous essay, Kwame Nkrumah, more than any individual political thinker from Africa, past or present, has come to represent a historiographic/historical cynosure of relatively uninterrupted scholarly and scientific research on Africa anywhere in the world. This is not to imply Nkrumah did not build on or benefit from others’ legacies.
Nkrumah did in fact acknowledge the pioneering role others had played in the liberation struggles, yet his “singular” role in freeing the Gold Coast in particular and Africa in general from the prehensile grip of colonialism remains unquestionable (See Lang T.K.A. Nubour’s essay “On the Question of Who Founded Ghana: Constructing and Executing the Strategy for the Attainment of Sovereign Nation-Statehood”; read that together with Botwe-Asamoah’s “Kwame Nkrumah: The One and Only Founding Father of Ghana, l-lll,” “The Fallacies of J.B. Danquah’s Heroic Legacies, l-V,” and “K.A. Busia: His Politics of Demagoguery, National Disintegration and Autocracy”).
On the contrary, it need be pointed out as well that a precedential set of landmark constitutional (legal) frameworks from the West Africa region positively impacted John M. Sarbah, J.P. Brown, J.E. Casely-Hayford, J.W. Sey, founders of the Gold Coast Aborigines’ Rights Protection Society (ARPS), as LaRay Denzer correctly and eloquently maintains: “The ideas behind these organizations rested on a long tradition of constitution-making and protest that can be traced back to the constitutions of Sierra Leone (1787) and Liberia (1847), and the political treatises of James Africanus Beal Hurston (1835-1883), Edward Blyden (1852-1912), and their intellectual circles (See Denzer’s essay “Aborigines’ Rights Protection Society: Building the Foundation of Modern Ghana”).
In other words, proactive legal or constitutional antecedents had existed prior to the activist, political, social, and legal, birth of Sarbah and of others in the turbulent political landscape of the Gold Coast. This technically underscores the radical notion that, activist or nationalist politics in the Gold Coast did neither originate with the Gold Coast Aborigines’ Rights Protection Society nor with their founders, for J.E. Casely-Hayford, particularly, came under the heavy tutelage of the Igbo-British/Sierra Leonean surgeon, scientist, and political thinker, Dr. James A.B. Hurston!
Further, Dr. Hurston’s wardrobe of radical nationalist ideas, among which directly falls the concept of “African independence,” which he had intellectually developed a whole century previous to their actualization in Africa, consequently tricked down from Casely-Hayford to J.B. Danquah and others. In fact, others, again, like J.E. Casely-Hayford, also came under the direct influence, intellectual and political, of W.E.B. Du Bois, for instance, and even indirectly of Marcus Garvey, Booker T. Washington, Martin Delany, etc (See Profs. Hakim Aki’s and Marika Sherwood’s book “Pan-African History: Political Figures from Africa and the Diaspora since 1787”; see courtesy of Dr. Kwame Botwe-Asamoah Kwodwo Pobi-Asamani’s book “W.E.B. Du Bois: His Contributions to Pan-Africanism” and P. Olisanwuche Esedebe’s “Pan-Africanism: The Idea and Movement, 1776-1991”). These snippets of facts should help undo some of the revisionist propaganda being innocently passed around among and to the intellectually unsuspecting and historically amnesic.
Now, having said all that, it is high time we revisited “Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for Decolonization.” Regarding that, Homer Greene, the American legal and philosophical scholar, has aptly referred to the ethical dimension of “Consciencism” as “ethical consciencism,” after his painstaking study of Nkrumah’s corpus of written works, especially of the latter philosophical text, from which he cautiously developed the “ethical consciencism” system as a natural subtext of “Consciencism” (See “Ethical Consciencism” in “The American Philosophical Association,” 2009). Other scholars have equally developed whole systems of critical thought derived essentially from Nkrumah’s rich writings, recalling that Nkrumah’s depth of appreciation of “traditional” African culture penetrates the philosophical thicket of his controversial text, subterranean and not-so-subterranean ideas of which Dr. Dompere dialectically teases out of Nkrumah’s convoluted forest of science- and mathematics-driven argumentation, with their practical connotations.
Accordingly, Nkrumah was a creative embodiment of theory and praxis, a salient point we have consistently harped on in this series, as recalled here: “The Convention People’s Party is not impressed by the mere acquisition of knowledge. It is only impressed when the knowledge is applied to achieve positive and practical results for the upliftment of the people (See Nkrumah’s June 5, 1960 “Come Down to Death” Speech). Elsewhere, Nkrumah noted: “It is only through this practical union of theory and action that the life of man can attain the highest material, cultural, moral and spiritual fulfillment in the service of his fellow man. This ultimately is the only justification for the pursuit of knowledge and the discoveries of science (See E.A. Haizel’s essay “Education in Ghana, 1951-1966,” Kwame Arhin’s edited volume “The Life and Work of Kwame Nkrumah,” p. 53-82). Put differently, Nkrumah was not so much infatuated with extraterrestrial topical abstractions as he was morally pre-occupied with the immediate material, cultural, and spiritual comfort of man (See Nkrumah’s Nov. 30, 1963 “The Academy of Science Dinner” Speech).
Similarly, these factual reminiscences characterized what Alexander Smith, the 19th-Century Scottish essayist and poet, had pointedly meant when he intratextually contrasted the topical preoccupations of Michel de Montaigne’s and Francis Bacon’s essays, thus writing categorically of the former: “He values obtaining Gascon bread and cheese more than the unobtainable stars. He thinks crying for the moon the foolishest thing in the world… (See Smith’s book “On the Writing of Essays”).” Hence, in these immediate contexts, for instance, Nkrumah had cleverly worked African humanism, a concept familiarly close to Nelson Mandela’s and Desmond Tutu’s Ubuntu, into the dialectical structure of his scientific philosophizing, hoping, as it were, to invoke its internal mechanics of moral chaperonage to resolve the internal contradictions and structural tensions introduced into Africa by foreign influences, cultural imperialism, colonialism, and neocolonialism, particularly.
African humanism is part of the larger moral network which Homer Greene refers to as “ethical consciencism.” On the other hand, Nkrumah even intellectually proposed “philosophical consciencism” as the compromise between the two cultural polarities, those of “traditional” Africa and of the Euro-Christian and Islamic worlds, by, among other things, logically working it into the theoretical crystallizing of “African Personality.” And more particularly so, the junctural comity based on the philosophical theory of “consciencism,” patriotism, industry, capacity development, development economics, community, human and race relations, citizenship, self-autonomy against the backdrop of globalization, industrialization, and self-actualization found intellectual grounding and moral solace in the establishment of the Kwame Nkrumah Ideological Institute. Primarily, the central motivating factor behind the institutionalization of the Institute had to do with indigenizing capacity development in Ghana rather than in America or the United Kingdom, say.
Still, it is Nkrumah’s tactical and strategic cultural borrowing of progressive “traditional” African ideas, dialectically working them into a sophisticated theory of national development, psycho-physical de-colonization, and development economics, which would constitute the hallmark of his true genius (See Dr. Kwame Botwe-Asamoah’s “Kwame Nkrumah’s Politico-Cultural Thought and Politics”). What this also implies is that “traditional” African culture possess(ed) the necessary internal logistics for Africa’s development, a philosophical question whose instrumentalist underpinnings have been epistemologically unraveled by Molefi Kete Asante, Cheikh Anta Diop, Kwame Botwe-Asamoah, Kofi Kissi Dompere, John Mbiti, Ayi Kwei Armah, Bubabinge Bilolo, Kwame Gyekye, Theophile Obenga, and several others, though, as we have eloquently argued elsewhere, Diop and Dompere would raise it to another level, a higher level of rigorous mathematicality and scientificality.
At this stage, it should be clear that employing the tools of science and technology to develop Africa constituted a major factor, a turning point, if you will, in Nkrumah’s general philosophical outlook, as Prof. EA Haizel notes in the following (See Kwame Arhin’s edited volume “The Life and Work of Kwame Nkrumah,” p. 71):
1. Raise the quality of and number of science graduates;
2. Raise the standard of science teaching;
3. Reach out to the mass of the people “who have not the opportunity of formal education…We must use every means of mass communication?the press, the radio, television and films?to carry science to the whole population”;
4. Mount science exhibitions, whilst the National Science Museum was to provide “this kind of exhibition in a permanent form.
Nkrumah’s creation of the University of Science and Technology, the construction of the Akosombo Dam and Agricultural Research Institutes, his 1963 “Academy of Science Dinner” Speech, his Kwabenya Nuclear Reactor Project, his general interest in nuclear science, among other science- and technology-related projects, all point irreversibly to his imaginative prowess and to his holistic intellectual preoccupation with appropriating modern instruments of science and technology for the advancement of Africa. Indeed, the non-doctrinaire Nkrumah was an avid reader, with the compass of his topical interests understandably being eclectic and wide. Political economy, sociology, psychology, historiography, philosophy, science, law, politics, pedagogy/didactics, political morality, and history, to mention but a few, consumed a substantial amount of his perusing schedule.
Furthermore, Abayomi Azikiwe, editor of the Pan-African News Wire (The World’s Only International Daily Pan-African News Source), has this to say about Nkrumah, his reading habits and literary interests, thus writing: “…He had begun to form literary societies in the Axim area, one of which became well known as the Nzima Literature Society (See “Kwame Nkrumah: The Early Years”). In fact, Nkrumah’s intellectual prowess would eventually earn him a three-year professorship stint in the Philosophy Department of Lincoln University, this, prior to his mates’ having voted him the “most interesting senior,” 1939, and “The Lincolnian” having named him the “Most Outstanding Professor-of-The-Year,” 1945, again, all for his combined exceptional leadership skills, force of personality, and intellectual brilliance. Nkrumah was indeed an intellectual and a leader par excellence (See Dr. Zizwe Poe’s book “Kwame Nkrumah’s Contributions To Pan-African Agency”; see Dr. Poe’s lecture “Ancestral Footprints: The Legacy of Kwame Nkrumah” and his essay “Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah, A Lincoln University Alumnus: His Profound Impact on Pan-African Agency”).
Consequently, K.B. Asante is right when he too writes of Nkrumah: “He came more and more to believe that action must be guided by a philosophy; but he was no slave to ideology. He was a man of ideas. He had the talent for grasping new ideas and the weakness of giving them form and calling them his own.” How so? “His ideology was tempered with pragmatism” and “enjoyed the company of intellectuals and men of ideas,” Asante again recalls of Nkrumah. Yet, that is hardly surprising given the abysmal range of Nkrumah’s innovative ideas and his consummate legacy, with Asante further maintaining: “He was conversant with the mainstream of the development theories and models in vogue and found natural sympathy with prevalent highly interventionist school (See Asante’s essay “Nkrumah and State Enterprises”).” Meanwhile, Nkrumah’s White and Black professor’s alike, as well as his academic advisors, made similar critical observations about his intellectual brilliance despite his crushing employment schedule and the sweltering recession that witnessed the political dispensation of Franklin D. Roosevelt (See Dr. Ama Biney’s “The Political and Social Thought of Kwame Nkrumah”).
Moreover, Nkrumah and his Lincoln University school- and class-mates, such as Thurgood Marshall, Langston Hughes, Cab Calloway, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Franklin H. Williams, Robert Edward Lee, J. Jeffrey Higgs, Robert T. Freeman, Horace Mann Bond, to name but a few, would become world figures in their chosen bailiwicks, an indubitable testament to their excellent Lincoln University education. Thus, Asante’s critical assessment makes Nkrumah a pragmatist, a critical thinker, if you like, not a doctrinaire. Certainly, science, not religion, became a fixture of Nkrumah’s progressive thinking on important matters of development. Obviously, he came to see science principally as the practical response to Africa’s slow growth and development and economic inertia, another practical question Dr. Dompere’s scientific and mathematical re-interpretation of Nkrumah’s “Consciencism” has a lot to say about. That practical response, of science, that is, is theoretically the vehicular impetus behind “philosophical consciencism.”
These philosophical questions are contextually relevant given the rate at which religious dogma has totally taken over the critical-thinking facilities of African leadership. As a matter of fact, “Consciencism” encourages critical thinking in decision-making processes at the individual, community, national, and continental levels, though, sadly, if unfortunately, African leadership has consistently failed to avail itself of the book’s transformative power. Why does African leadership choose religious dogmatism over critical thinking, science, and technology in matters of development, an implicit or hypothetical question posed by “Consciencism”? Why have African leaders refused to see a positive correlation between Research & Development (R &D), innovativeness, enabling environments, and development, if conditionalities of accountability, probity, and transparency can be met by the private sector, researchers, universities, and national governments?
Yet, those relatively successful economies from without which African leadership blindly imitates had and continue to follow radically different paths of national development, of development economics. For instance, the State of Israel, the alleged autochthonous home of Moses and Jesus Christ, no longer relies on “manna from heaven” to feed its population, but rather on science and technology, which she has successfully employed to turn the environmental vicissitudes of nature in her favor, by converting unfriendly deserts into arable lands. Again, the State of Israel uses critical thinking, science and technology, not fasting and prayers, to defend itself against attacks from perceived and real enemies, internal and external. This is why Daasebre Oti Boateng’s call for community prayers and fasting will practically amount to nothing as far as effectively addressing Ghana’s problems go.
It is also why Bishop Duncan Williams’ comic intercession in behalf of the Cedi’s declension has still not abated for obvious reasons, an expectation improbably actualizable in the foreseeable future, if, in principle as is in theory, policy decisions are not laced with the philosophical aroma of critical thinking, science and technology considerations, and patriotism. Actually, the Bible-driven Pentecostal era of handling poisonous serpents where some Christians are bitten to death in the name of Christological beliefs, as introduced by the American-based Church of God Holliness’ George W. Hensley in 1910, is past and long gone (See Acts 28:1-6, Mark 16: 17-18, and Luke 10: 19 for additional information).
For one thing, Nkrumah’s “Consciencism” has no legroom for religious dogmatism and stilted allegiance to superstition. Again, soliciting divine intervention, as had happened and continues to happen in Botswana, Ghana, and elsewhere on the African continent, by both Moslems and Christians alike, for rains, for instance, will come to nought if African leaders and the people of Africa continue to neglect the practical needs of the environment and man-driven destruction of the environmental. Rather, the African world needs the revolutionary scientific thinking of women and men, such as Tebello Nyokong, Ave Kludze, Patience Mthunzi, Cheikh Anta Diop, Victor Lawrence, Kwame Nkrumah, Ashitey Trebi-Olennu, Isaiah Blankson, Yaw Nyarko, Thomas Mensah, Francis Allotey, etc., to move the continent forward.
In consequence, “Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for Decolonization” provides a philosophical and scientific roadmap for Africa’s yet-unrealized dream of de-colonization against the political collage of globalization. “Thus, “Consciencism” morally and politically points the way forward for Africa. In that context, Nkrumah’s “categorical conversion,” which can otherwise be likened to political, economic, technological, psychological, cultural, and scientific revolution, a view already noted, has its role in realizing this noble goal! Technically, Nkrumah’s statement, “Revolutions are brought about by men, by men who think as men of action and act as men of thought,” directly speaks to the moral urgency of “categorical conversion” in moving Africa forward, given that Africa today lacks “men of action” and “men of thought.” Most importantly, quality mass education, social justice, ethno-regional integration, ethnocentrism/ethnic nationalism eradication, intra-continental unification, reversing Africa’s dependency complex, promoting internal national cohesion, and raising the people’s material standard of living, are implicit hallmarks of the kind of revolution “Consciencism” advances.
Admittedly, “Consciencism” potentially, namely, theoretically, manufactures such noble men, such progressive leaders, such “men of action” and “men of thought.” Besides, Nkrumah believed so much in the transformative power of science to underwrite the industrialization of a nation’s economy, to modernize a people’s thinking, plus their society, and to improve their material conditions, a theory which almost certainly propelled Nkrumah to elevate materialism above idealism, a positive advancement in his thinking. In theory, Nkrumah’s making materialism the focus of his philosophical scheme unavoidably relegated the political economy of superstition and religion to the psycho-social periphery of society of human psychology. Unfortunately, it still has not dawned on African leaders and policy makers, a sad irony, if you will, that, wealth generation is not necessarily a product of the vast mineral resources a country has, but of the quality of the human mind, which Nkrumah’s “categorical conversion” is fundamentally about. Fortunately, Dr. Dompere’s landmark text “The Theory of Categorical Convention: Analytic Foundations of Nkrumahism” decodes that for us. Africa, it is apparent, has not done enough to expand her manufacturing capacity and to build export-oriented industrial economies.
Instead, multi-party democracy, coupled with political ethnocentrism, greed, political polarization, neocolonialism, ethnocracy, lack of scientific, environmental, and technological consciousness, elitist pedantry, selfishness, Eurocentrism, political corruption, has virtually put Africa’s development in a quagmire. It is against this background that Nkrumah’s tactical inclusion of dialectical materialism (change) into his progressive scheme of scientific philosophizing in respect of national and continental development is technically appropriate. The inescapable truth is that Africa needs the requisite instruments of science and technology to convert her vast mineral resources into real wealth and improved standard of living, as well as to guarantee equitable distribution of that wealth accruing therefrom among the masses, granted that any decision short of these actualities may necessarily constitute an intellectual exercise in politico-economic futility. Yet again, Nkrumah’s consciencist egalitarian ideas give moral credence to the latter propositions.
Contextually, such series of critical questions of political morality are the major highlights of Dr. Dompere’s pioneering work on Nkrumah and hence Nkrumahism. In that regard, Dr. Dompere’s scientific and mathematical work on Nkrumahism is not so much about theorizing as about his work’s practical ramifications for Africa’s positive growth and development as well as about the psycho-cultural de-colonization of her people. Therefore, we caution readers to peruse Nkrumah’s and Dr. Dompere’s texts closely, because a possible misreading or cursory reading of the foregoing paragraphs may inevitably lead a reader to a path of analytic misconclusion. As a matter of analytic emphasis, Dr. Dompere’s innovative work is not so much about theorizing as about practical, namely, about mathematically and scientifically testable, solutions to problems unique to Africa, what Ali Mazrui has called the “African Condition.” Interestingly, others have taken this path of analysis as well without so much as including analytic simulation of Dr. Dompere’s mathematical and scientific rigor in their work on Nkrumah (See Charles A. Boateng’s “Nkrumah’s Consciencism: Its Relevance to Ghanaian Development”; see also Robert Woode’s “Third World to First World (By One Touch): Economic Repercussions of the Overthrow of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah”).
However, this assembly of facts invites another moral question, that the political economy of Africa cannot ignore the political pertinence of Nkrumah and his revolutionary ideas to her development, as proceedings of the 2010 international conference, “Contemporary Relevance of Kwame Nkrumah’s Contributions to Pan-Africanism and Internationalism,” and those of Canada’s Kwantlen Polytechnic-, Ghana’s Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology-, and America’s Lincoln University-organized “Biennial Kwame Nkrumah International Conference,” have powerfully demonstrated (See Rodney Worrel’s book “History has Vindicated Kwame Nkrumah”). Let us recall here exactly what Eric Walberg, the Canadian international journalist, has written about Nkrumah and the relevance of his ideas to today’s global problems: “So the words and works of Kwame Nkrumah, which inspired a generation, are worth a second glance (See Eric Walberg’s essay “Kwame Nkrumah: The Greatest African”).” Indeed Dr. Dompere’s scientific re-statement of “categorical conversion” is a philosophical cognate of Walberg’s.
That also means the present generation of African leadership cannot afford to overlook Nkrumah’s still-relevant scholarly and scientific ideas to Africa’s development economics. Appropriately, Dr. Dompere theoretically refers to an essential segment of his larger philosophical-scientific project on Nkrumahism as “actual-potential polarity,” with “actual” conceptually standing in for practical “self-autonomy,” which Kwame Nkrumah apparently realized, and “potential” Africa’s continuing psycho-cultural dislocation, dependency complex, neo-colonialism, among others. Then, as it were, Dr. Dompere dialectically offers “polyrhythmics” as part of a radical system of holistic solutions, a concept which we may roughly define as an African-centered methodology for relevant data explication or approach for relevant data “mining” in conjunction with the logical study of and epistemic examination of seeming internal contradictions, which, again, he posits, exist in “relational continuum and unity,” in African societies (See Dr. Dompere’s award-winning book “Polyrhythmicity: Foundations of African Philosophy”; this is another intricate original scholarship on Kwame Nkrumah and Nkrumahism).
In the main, “polyrhythmics” in turn provides the necessary dialectical vista into Nkrumah’s implicit philosophical-mathematical construct, otherwise called “categorical conversion,” and its direct application to a knowledge system conducive to the political, psycho-cultural, and economic actualities of Africa’s “complete” emancipation, “rebirth,” the Scarab Beetle, if you will. It is from here that the mathematicization or equationization of “categorical conversion” directly follows, with its theoretical, scientific and mathematical, solutions philosophically addressed to the emancipatory concerns of Africa within the rigid context of her neo-colonial entanglement. Elsewhere, Dr. Dompere succinctly describes this phenomenon as “qualitative equations of motion, transient process and transversality conditions…” However, the philosophical internality of “categorical conversion” is such that it underlines a conceptual process termed “self-motion,” a natural requirement for a structurally progressive re-organization of Africa’s ostensible internal contradiction, generally, brought about by Islamic and Euro-Christian influences, as well as by negative connotations of neo-colonialism and of psycho-cultural misalignment.
In fine, Dr. Kofi Kissi Dompere’s dense textbook, “The Theory of Categorical Conversion: Analytical Foundations of Nkrumahism,” is probably the best comprehensive analysis yet, the most thorough scientific and mathematical exegesis of “Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for Decolonization,” as the following chapters practically throw some light on its implicational dimensionalities:
Chpt 1. Abstract Ideas and Practice of Ideas in Social Settings: Extensions and Reflections on Nkrumah
Chpt 2. Restructuring the Mind of Africa and the Oppressed: Defining an Initial Framework for Liberation Thinking
Chpt 3. The Intellectual Task for Africa’s Decolonization and Emancipation
Chpt 4. The Theory of Categorical Conversion: Philosophical Foundations and Extensions of Nkrumahism
Chpt 5. The Theory of Categorical Conversion: Axiomatic Foundations
Chpt 6. The Theory of Categorical Conversion: The Analytic Building Blocks
Chpt 7. The Theory of Categorical Conversion: Mathematical Foundations, Symbolic Representation and Conditions of Convertibility
Chpt 8. The Mathematical Problem and the Solution to the Categorical Conversion of Actual-Potential Polarity
Clearly, “The Theory of Categorical Conversion: Analytical Foundations of Nkrumahism” is a highly technical and sophisticated text, about which he, that is, Dr. Dompere, has written: “The central objective of the monograph is the development of the theory of categorical conversion from its analytical foundations of philosophy and mathematics…The basic objective, here, is to present a foundation and analytical morphology of a general theory of socio-natural transformations as well as to present the conditions that may be extended to a general theory of engineering science. ” In fact, Dr. Dompere ten-year scientific and mathematical study of “Consciencism” and the conclusions he derives from it, is, technically, the basis of his assertion, that many Nkrumahists and non-Nkrumahists alike who profess intellectual intimacy with Nkrumah’s text do not actually understand it. That is the consensus within academic circles, Western and African.
That said, we do, however, encourage readers to include “Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah (1957)” in their reading lists, because it provides additional general insights into Nkrumah’s thinking, which, we also believe, may necessary provide insights from Nkrumah’s intellectual progression to his thinking in the analytic consummation of “Consciencism (1964, 1970).” A span of seven years vis-a-vis the thinking of Nkrumah is the moral equivalence of generational thinking as regards the thinking of today’s African leadership. Once again, we are indeed grateful to Dr. Kwame Botwe-Asamoah for introducing Dr. Kofi Kissi Dompere and his large body of economic, scientific, historical, and mathematical works to us. We shall say more about Dr. Kofi Kissi Dompere in Part Vl.
We shall return…
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