K.A. Busia to African-American writer Richard Wright: “I AM BRITISH…I AM A WESTERNER…AND WAS EDUCATED IN THE WEST.”
K.A. Busia to the London Times: “OXFORD HAD MADE ME WHAT I AM TODAY. I HAD ELEVEN YEARS CONTACT WITH IT AND CONSIDER IY MY SECOND HOME. MOST OF MY FRIENDS ARE THERE.”
K.A. Busia: “At the end of my first year at secondary at secondary school [Mfantsipim, Cape Coast], I went home to Wenchi for the Christmas vacation. I had not been home for four years, and on that visit, I became painfully aware of my isolation. I understood our community far less than the boys of my own age who had never been to school. OVER THE YEARS, AS I WENT THROUGH COLLEGE AND UNIVERSITY, I FELT INCREASINGLY THAT THE EDUCATION I RECEIVED TAUGHT ME MORE AND MORE ABOUT EUROPE AND LESS THAN MY OWN.”
At this juncture, we will crave the indulgence of readers as we take another brief detour from our general topic. It regards the question of making informed, scientific decisions and conclusions based on an individual’s grasp of the history of science, history of scholarship, intellectual history, history of knowledge, and history of philosophy.
Namely, the origination, movement, and impact of the geographic and temporal spread of ideas. This is what we mean: Einstein did not originate or single-handedly develop relativity; Darwin did not originate evolution; Marx did not originate socialism; America or the West did not originate democracy; Molefi Kete Asante did not originate the words “Afro-centric” and “African-centered”; Pythagoras did not originate Pythagoras Theorem (Pythagoras studied in Ancient Egypt and Babylon where the “theorem” was known thousands of years before his birth); Ancient Greeks did not originate “philosophy”; Gandhi did not originate the philosophy of non-violence (see Leo Tolstoy and David Henry Thoreau); Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu did not originate ubuntu; Bob Marley did not originate reggae; Michael Jackson did not originate pop; Aretha Franklin and James Brown did not originate soul music; Elvis Presley did not originate rock ‘n’ roll; George Clinton did not originate funk…
Why then are Einstein associated with relativity; Marx with socialism; Bob Marley with reggae; Darwin with evolution; Gandhi with non-violence philosophy; Aretha Franklin and James Brown with soul music; Michael Jackson with pop; Pythagoras with the Pythagoras Theorem; the West with democracy; Ancient Greeks with “philosophy”; Asante with “Afro-centric” and “African-centered”; Mandela and Tutu with ubuntu; Elvis Presley with rock ‘n’ roll…? Clearly, answers to the afore-cited questions explain why Nkrumah stands tallest in human history as a pre-eminent theoretician of Pan-Africanism and why Pan-Africanism is associated with his nonpareil legacy.
But then again, we can stretch the argument to how Leibniz’s, George Boole’s, and John von Newmann’s works on “African Fractals” led to the invention of today’s computer (see the works of the American mathematician, cyberneticist, and systems engineer Dr. Ron Eglash).
Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and John Adams brought many ideas from Europe, France specifically, to strengthen American democracy just as Solon, the Athenian lawyer and statesman, visited Ancient Egypt and appropriated ideas from their priest-professors to better his country, Greece. Also Europeans did not originate the concept of “constitutional monarchy,” for the latter had existed in ancient Africa a thousand years prior to the first of its kind in Europe (see the works of Dr. Cheikh Anta Diop).
Yet, the attention of many an individual is drawn to Britain when the phrase “constitutional monarchy” reaches that individual’s ear.
And so, while Nkrumah sharpened his Pan-Africanist political philosophy abroad, brought it home, and used it to unite Africans, to decolonize Africa, and to free themselves from colonial tyranny, what did Busia and Danquah do with what they brought from Europe apart from the Edmund Burke political ideology, elitism, terrorism, secessionism, ethnocracy, regionalism, collaborating with Western intelligence communities, sabotage, subversion, and ethnic politics?
Possession of intelligence, wisdom, and vision is when one strategically and tactically uses ideas, borrowed or not, to better society as well as to make it worth living in!
In fine, it is clear from our end that certain individuals want to come across as authoritative on the subject matter of Pan-Africanism and Nkrumah’s role in the Pan-Africanist Movement, yet are intellectually clueless about the subject matter. We will thus not waste time discussing this question regarding the projects Nkrumah, WEB Du Bois, and others did in the US before his [Nkrumah’s] relocation to England, and then what the latter and others also did in England before his final relocation to the Gold Coast.
Dr. Botwe-Asamoah reminds us that “THE HARDSHIPS OF THE DEPRESSION YEARS FORMED THE SOCIAL AND INTELLECTUAL FABRIC OF THE SOCIETY OF PHILADELPHIA, WHERE NKRUMAH SPENT MOST OF HIS TIME. HIS SOCIO-HISTORICAL EXPERIENCES IN THE UNITED STATES WERE BASED ON HIS INTERACTION WITH THE AMERICAN SOCIAL ENVIRONMENT. IT WAS THIS DIRECT EXPERIENCE, FORMAL AND INFORMATION, WHICH BECAME A MAJOR FACTOR SHAPING NKRUMAH’S INTELLECTUAL FOUNDATION AND FORMING THE BASIS OF HIS CONCEPTUAL VIEWS OF COLONIALIS, SOCIALIST DEVELOPMENT AND AFRICAN UNITY. THUS, THESE EXTERNAL ENVIRONMENTAL FACTORS AND HIS EARLY UPBRINGING IN GHANA INFORMED ‘HIS HOLISTIC OUTLOOK ON LIFE” (see Carlos Nelson’s “Kwame Nkrumah: A Study of His Intellectual Development in the United States, 1935-45”).
In a nutshell, Dr. Botwe-Asamoah is in effect saying that Nkrumah’s ideological association with Pan-Africanism was borne out of the despair of poverty (and racism as he says elsewhere). That is, to understand Nkrumah’s intellectual marriage with Pan-Africanism one must dig deep into the vortex of “his socio-historical experiences in the United States.” The vortex of social and political actualities, where the situational underwriting of the ossification of Nkrumah’s psychological or intellectual development took shape and moral definition in the Gold Coast and America, is, in principle, where the quest for an effective analytic archeology of his evolving political philosophy must begin! Undeniably, no human being can fully develop with the potential to cope with the vicissitudes of nature independent of the contextual pressures of his or her environment and the process of psycho-socialization.
Simply, one person cannot effectively appraise the achievements of another by taking the subject under evaluation out of the social context of the environment he or she interacts with and his or her cultural conditioning!
This is why serious scholars cannot and should not overlook Dr. Botwe-Asamaoh’s implied endorsement of the concept of sociology of knowledge as a useful investigative tool for plumbing how the interactions between the environment (culture, etc) and psychosocial adjustments mold an individual’s temperament and personality. Caleb Carr’s novel “The Alienist” describes this phenomenon so well. For instance, Albert Einstein probably learned more about the intricacies of physics as a clerk in a Swiss Patent Office than he probably did as a science student. Thus, an assessment of his intellectual profile will not be complete without considering the cumulative impact which his official clerical responsibilities contributed to his grasp of the complexity of nature.
What is more, better and more formidable mathematicians like Karl Schwarzschild and Marcel Grossman, to name but two, either solved for or helped him with his [Einstein’s] mathematical problems. And, finally, Einstein did not mint the words “theory” and “relativity,” and actually more importantly, the latter concept and its seminal development owes more to the earlier works of Henri Poincare and Hendrik Lorentz than to Einstein himself.
The crux of our thesis is that the example of human beings’ influencing each other and learning from each other is practically unavoidable or inevitable, and more than that, a normative feature of the human experience. We know a partial list made up of John Locke, Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, Nicolo Machiavelli, Voltaire, Thomas Paine, James Harrington, Adam Smith, and Charles de Montesquieu (and Ancient Greek thinkers) influenced America’s Founding Fathers!
But then again to reinforce one of our earlier contentions, we will admit that Vladimir Lenin borrowed from and practicalized the philosophical ideas of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels; both Nkrumah and Martin Luther King, Jr. learned from Gandhi and Gandhi, in turn, appropriated some useful ideas from Leo Tolstoy and Henry David Theory; James Brown, one of the Founding Fathers of funk, took the stylistic elements of the genre “funk” from the rhythmic formula of Little Richard’s rock ‘n’ roll; Shakespeare literally took the material for “Othello” from Cinthio’s “Hecatommithi (1565)” and Leo Africanus’ “A Geographical History of Africa”; Wole Soyinka’s liberal deployment of mythic symbolism in his corpus of literary works derived from the professorial mentorship of Knight Wilson, an expert well-known for his exegesis of mythic subject matter in literature; Moses’ 10 Commandments came from Ancient Egyptian’s so-called 42 Confessions, and so on.
And we also forget that the guitar (and other instruments) that gives us the rich signature guitar sound threading through traditional Highlife tunes of Koo Nimo, Eric Agyemang, Nana Ampadu, Goerge Darko, Obuoba J.A. Adofo, E.K. Nyame, Smart Nkansah, etc., and Palm-wine music is not an African invention!
The question is: Was Nkrumah the only human being in man’s entire history that came under the influence of other human beings? Did Busia not call himself British and Westerner? How did he come under the influence of the British and the Westerner, if not the alienation which Eurocentric education gave him? Well, it is a verifiable fact of history that Alexander the Great got to Egypt and suddenly wanted to be treated and idolized as a Pharaoh, and even buried as one. Then also, what the professional Confederate haters of Nkrumah are missing out is that, Nkrumah, like the American Founding Fathers, Vladimir Lenin, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., Nelson Mandela, and every other great leader appropriated and settled on ideas he taught were worth the social, political, and economic costs of improving the human condition. And as a matter of fact, a group of individuals can develop the same idea(s) independent of each across space and time, as happened in the development in the germ theory and several others throughout human history.
That was why after closely studying Marx, Lenin, and Engels Nkrumah wrote to tell his African-American friend Dr. Ralph Bunche, a recipient of the US Medal of honor, a Nobel Laureate, a key player in the founding and administration of the United Nations and the authorship of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, an Under-Secretary-General of the United Nations, and a trustee of Nkrumah’s alma mater Lincoln University, that he wanted to develop a political system to rival those of Marx, Lenin, and Engels. This is a hallmark of a true genius. The state under Abraham Lincoln used the Civil War to purposefully keep America together, just as the state under Nkrumah used the Preventive Detention Act (PDA) to keep Ghana together, though scholars, researchers, and historians are beginning to understand that one of Lincoln’s real motives behind and designs for the Civil War was to secure the geopolitical integrity of the country first and then from there build an empire to rival that of Great Britain. This interpretation does not represent a marked detour from Nkrumah’s own progressive vision for Africa, his African Union or continental unification.
Untimely death and sabotage prevented both great leaders, Nkrumah and Lincoln, from accomplishing their noble goals.
Assume, for the sake of argument, that African Americans persuaded Nkrumah to apply the theory of Pan-Africanism to the “African Condition,” what is wrong with that? Did Nkrumah not influence Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and the US Civil Rights Movement? Simply put, did King not admit that Nkrumah’s successful use of non-violence to secure independence for the Gold Coast meant that, following Nkrumah’s example, he too could use the same philosophy to secure social justice for many Americans and African Americans’ liberation particularly? And did America not use the so-called Marshall Plan to bring their brothers and sisters in Europe together through reconciliation and reconstruction of their ruined nations and cities and the revival of their broken industrial economies, and dignity as a race? Did Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin, and Franklin Roosevelt not collaborate to defeat Hitler? What about the French aiding America in the American War of Independence? Or, France collaborating with Britain and America to topple Gaddafi in their strategic interests? What is the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) for?
What is the source of this intra-black racism coming from? Nkrumah went about trying to bring Africans together for a common cause, namely, improving their general conditions and developing the continent, yet his shallow-minded and visionless enemies said he wanted to be the president of Africa. This, in spite of the fact that he had told African leaders in no uncertain terms that he did not want the Organization of African Unity (OAU) headquartered in Ghana, and also that he wanted the Secretary-Generalship of the OAU outside Ghana. Not even Ebenezer Ako-Adjei could bring himself to say Nkrumah wanted to be the president of Africa, for he knew Nkrumah as a genuine person and a man whose words one could take to heart, in spite of their later political tensions. Yet, the CIA got to influence Haile Selassie to agree to Nkrumah’s proposal of a continental body on condition that the OAU would be headquartered in Ethiopia. Selassie did not know he was being used to reduce Nkrumah’s global influence!
For all these reasons, we ask those individuals not familiar with the general outline of colonial and postcolonial African politics and their connections to Nkrumah to upgrade their knowledge on the history of Pan-Africanism by reading the following works: “Pan-Africanism: The Idea and Movement, 1776-1991” (Olisanwuche Esebede); “Black Nationalism: The Search for an Identity” (E.U. Essien-Udom); “Pan-African History: Political Figures from Africa and the Diaspora since 1787” (Hakim Adi/Marika Sherwood); “Kwame Nkrumah: The Years Abroad, 1935-1947” (Marika Sherwood); “Kwame Nkrumah’s Politico-Cultural Thought and Policies” (Kwame Botwe-Asamoah); “Kwame Nkrumah’s Contributions to Pan-Africanism: An Afrocentric Analysis” (Zizwe Poe).
Finally, Nkrumah chalked up the following six major achievements for the African world:
1) Nkrumah linked the traditions of West Africa nationalism and Pan-African nationalist
2) Nkrumah initiated and developed the first Pan-African liberated state in modern history
3) Nkrumah elevated Pan-Africanism movement to the level of nation-states
4) Nkrumah developed the notion of socialist African union as the optimal zone for the African personality, genius.
5) Nkrumah offered a formal philosophy to defend the ideology of the African revolution
6) Nkrumah initiated the first African state-sponsored effort for African research
This is what an October 2012 FRENCH DEFENSE REPORT has to say about Pan-Africanism: “FRANCE VIEWS PAN-AFRICANISM AS A THREAT TO WESTERN INTERESTS IN AFRICA IN GENERAL AND FRENCH INTERESTS IN AFRICA IN PARTICULAR” (see Antoine R. Lokongo’s “Central African Republic: The Hidden Hands Behind ‘Yet Another Good Day,’” Pambazuka News, April 17, 2013).
Technically this French Defense Report is nothing new. In retrospect, Nkrumah encountered fierce resistance to his development agenda from his myopic local Confederate enemies and their Western sponsors. US declassified documents capture (Document 260 Memorandum) Komer W. Robert, Acting Assistant for National Security Affairs, telling US Pres. Lyndon Johnson: “The coup in Ghana is another example of a fortuitous windfall. NKRUMAH WAS DOING MORE TO UNDERMINE OUR [AMERICAN] INTERESTS THAN ANY OTHER BLACK AFRICA.”
Put simply, the basis for this indictment was Nkrumah’s sustained pursuit of his Pan-Africanist project! Former CIA agent John Stockwell in his book “In Search of Enemies: A CIA Story,” Richard Mahoney’s “JFK: Ordeal in Africa,” Hersh Seymour’s 1978 “New York Times’ article CIA Said To Have Aided Plotters Who Overthrew Nkrumah in Ghana,” declassified documents in the US and the UK, and Yoweri Museveni’s autobiography “Sowing the Mustard Seed: The Struggle for Freedom and Democracy in Uganda,” among several other works, shed light on these questions and more.
We shall return…
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