What Amiri Baraka Said About Kwame Nkrumah(IV)

“It is rare in human history that one discovers a philosopher-political leader whose voice resonates with that of his people as clearly as that of Nkrumah. He’s at once a consummate political activist and a master of the internal tensions of history and politics…His creative energy and massive range of interests were great enough to encompass the continent and the Diaspora, but also his depth in terms of philosophy, science, social development, and revolutionary anger and action was profound. I like the fact that every word, even if I disagreed with some of his words, appeared to have been thought about, pondered, and perfected by his keen Afrocentric and social sensibilities (Molefi Kete Asante, “Nkrumah Celebration,” Sept. 20, 2009).

Let’s begin from where we exactly left off the last time, “What Amiri Baraka Said About Kwame Nkrumah (4).” Interestingly, the legacy of Manning Marable belongs in this class, the class of historical revisionism and postmodernism. On the contrary, the legacies of some of our greatest leaders such as Amiri Baraka, Kwame Nkrumah, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Jr., Patrice Lumumba, and Malcolm X are implicitly antithetic to analytic structures of postmodernism or revisionism. For one, the truth about Belgian and American assassination of Patrice Lumumba, a great friend of Nkrumah’s, then soaking his body in acid and dumping it in an undisclosed location, merely for his insatiate love for Africa, is beginning to resurface in bits and pieces. The meticulous scholarship of Dr. Opolot Okia, a Wright State University professor of African History, with a special focus on Modern East Africa, is quite interesting, particularly in the area of research bordering on Belgian colonialism in the Congo.

Lumumba’s children are all over the place seeking justice for their father. “’It’s a father I am looking for, a father whom I still love, and I want to know why he was killed,’ his youngest son, Guy Lumumba, told reporters in Brussels. ‘We are targeting the assassins. In Belgium, there are 12 of them. They are alive and we want them to answer for their ignoble acts before justice,’ he said. The family’s lawyer Christoph Marchand will only reveal their identities to the investigating judge, but said the suspects include Belgian officials, police officers and soldiers,’” writes Robin van Wechem in “Sons Seek Lumumba Charges,” adding: “In 1999, a book by historian Ludo de Witte made the case that the Belgian government had played a significant role in Lumumba’s death. A parliamentary commission set up to investigate the allegations concluded in 2001 that Belgium had a ‘moral responsibility’ for Lumumba’s assassination. The government apologized to its former colony, but no further legal action was taken (See Witte’s “The Assassination of Lumumba”).

Notwithstanding the noble intentions of Lumumba’s children, this is not enough. American officials had been involved in the orchestration of disorder in the Congo as well as in the assassination of Lumumba. Besides, in a related context, Georges Nzongola-Ntalaja has written eloquently: “For 126 years, the US and Belgium have played key roles in shaping Congo’s destiny. In April 1884, seven months before the Berlin Congress, the US became the first country in the world to recognize the claims of King Leopold ll of the Belgians to the territories of the Congo Basin. When the atrocities related to brutal economic exploitation in Leopold’s Congo Free State resulted in millions of fatalities, the US joined other world powers to force Belgium to take over the country as a regular colony. And it was during the colonial period that the US acquired a strategic stake in the enormous natural wealth of the Congo, following its use of the uranium from Congolese mines to manufacture the first atomic weapons, the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs (See “Patrice Lumumba: The Most Important Assassination of the 20th Century”; see also Adam Hochschild’s “King Leopold Ghost”).

However, Nzongola-Ntalaja missed one other significant fact, that of Type llb diamond. That is, a naturally-occurring boron-infused element used as semi-conductors in America’s Cold War supercomputers, which the late Michael Crichton, an unlicensed medical doctor and a science fiction and adventure novelist, discussed in his novel “Congo.” We bring these up to show how important Africa had been and continues to be in world affairs though many of us are blinded by the trinketry of Western civilization to see the West is where it is today because of Africa as well as of Asia. In other words, Africa’s humanity, mineral wealth, and cultural intellectualism raised the edifice of Western civilization on the pinnacle of global dominance (See WEB Du Bois’ “The Gift of Black Folks” and “The World and Africa”).

This contention is hardly debatable. “Western multinational corporations’ attempts to cash in on the wealth of Congo’s resources have resulted in what many have called ‘Africa’s first world war,’ claiming the lives of over 3 million. The Democratic Republic of Congo has been labeled ‘the richest patch on the planet.’ The valuable abundance of minerals and resources in the DCR has made it the target of attacks from US-supported neighboring African countries Uganda and Rwanda…Coltan has become an increasingly valuable resource to American corporations,” writes Ellen Ray in “American Companies Exploit the Congo/US Military and Corporate Recolonization of the Congo,” adding: “Coltan is used to make mobile phones, night vision goggles, fiber optics, and capacitors used to maintain the electrical charge in computer chips.” Then again, why are we raising these pertinent issues? It’s to say Africa is not poor as Africa’s Eurocentric leadership and the West make it out to be. Indeed, if this is the case, then we need to look for practical answers as to why we appear poor despite being surrounded by an ocean of wealth. Granted, the legacy of Kwame Nkrumah, Africa’s greatest leader, is part of the solution!

Elsewhere Ray notes: “In December of 2000 the shortage of coltan was the main reason that the popular sale of the Sony Plat Station 2 video game came to an abrupt halt. See how powerful Africa is? She continues: “The DCR holds 80% of the world’s coltan reserves, more than 60% of the world’s cobalt and is the world’s largest supplier of high-grade copper. With these minerals playing a major part in maintaining military dominance and economic growth, minerals in the Congo are deemed vital US interests.” How come Africa’s minerals are others’ vital interests? Does Africa have vital interests as the US’s, Europe’s, or China’s? On the other hand, how are some of these minerals obtained?

Where do we look? Actually, a Ugandan-based American investigative journalist Milton Allimadi, our good friend, also founder, and publisher of a Wall Street-based newspaper “The Black Star News,” has written: “Foreign powers allow bandits financed by Rwanda and Uganda to wreak havoc in Congo’s eastern region, which contains most of its resources. Under this planned chaos, private corporations enjoy absolute rent; they siphon off Congo’s resources through Rwanda and Uganda without paying fees or taxes to the central government…(See “The Choice is Clear: Africa Must Embrace Nkrumah’s Vision and Unite”). Could it be why Paul Kagame and Yoweri Museveni are darlings of the West despite being indicted by the ICC for the “genocide” in Eastern Congo? Nkrumah, unlike both Kagame and Museveni, would not have permitted this “genocide” to take place around him in the interest of Western exploitation of Africa.

Interestingly, Dr. Kwesi Botchwey, Ghana’s former Finance Minister, from 1982-1995, has formally acknowledged the reason behind Nkrumah’s overthrow, thus writing: “He was forthright in his view about which side in the Cold War favored the conditions for the consolidation of African independence and development. Imperialism was decidedly unforgiving in these tense times and Nkrumah paid dearly for his trenchant criticism of colonial and post-colonial exploitation. The publication of his book on Neo-colonialism in 1965 met with a hostile reaction from the West. The American government withdrew $35 million in aid earmarked for Ghana, and we know that Nkrumah paid the ultimate price in Feb. 24, the following year (1966) when a Western-backed coup d’état overthrew him (See “The Relevance of Kwame Nkrumah’s Legacy in Ghana’s Contemporary Political Economy”).

How we wish contemporary Africa had a leader as powerfully great, extraordinarily intelligent, and spiritually visionary as Nkrumah! Let’s continue: “Britain was the principal slaving nation of the modern world. In the Empire Pays Back, a documentary broadcast by Channel 4…Robert Beckford called on Britain to take stock of its past. Why, he asked, had Britain made no apology for African slavery, as it had done for the Irish potato famine? Why, most crucially, was there no recognition of how wealth extracted from Africa and Africans made possible the vigor and prosperity of modern Britain?,” writes Richard Drayton (See “The Wealth of the West was Built on Africa’s Exploitation”), adding: “The G8’s debt-forgiveness initiative was spun successfully as an act of Western altruism. The generous Massas never bothered to explain that, in order to benefit, governments must agree to ‘conditions,’ which included allowing profit-making companies to take over public services.” Daryton aptly calls this sham deal between Africa’s Eurocentric leadership and Western leaders “debt-for-equity swap.”

He adds: “The sweetest bit of the deal was that the money owed, already more than repaid in interest, had mostly gone to buy industrial imports from the West and Japan. Here is the sensational part: “Only in bookkeeping had it ever left the rich world. No one considered that Africa’s debt was trivial compared to what the West really owed Africa.” He explains further: “Beckford’s experts estimated Britain’s debt to Africans in the continent and diaspora to be in the trillions of pounds. While this was a useful benchmark, its basis was mistaken. Not because it was excessive, but because the real debt is incalculable. For without Africa and its Caribbean plantations, the modern world as we know it would not exist.” In fact, Africa’s role in the Britain’s Industrial Revolution is not in doubt (See Inikori’s “Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: A Study in International Trade and Economic Development” and Williams’ “Capitalism and Slavery”). In another place Drayton quotes the political economist Malachy Postlethwayt, saying: “British trade is a magnificent superstructure of American commerce and naval power on African foundation.” What, then, is the fuss about Western aid to Africa all about?

That is not all, however. Likewise, Prof. Clarence Lusane has made a strong case for Black victims of Nazi Holocaust (See his book “Hitler’s Black Victims: The Experiences of Afro-Germans, Africans, Afro-Europeans and African During the Nazi Era”). It’s surprising that historical focus has almost always been on white victims of the Nazi Holocaust though others, such as Romas, who are not necessarily white, are sometimes de-emphasized in historical Holocaust accounts. Let’s also remind ourselves that the Nazi Holocaust did not begin in Europe; it actually began in Southwest Africa, present-day Namibia (See Olusoga’s and Erichsen’s “The Kaiser’s Holocaust: Germany’s Forgotten Genocide and the Colonial Roots of Nazism”). In fact, the Nazi Holocaust in Southwest Africa is the first of its kind, genocide, that is, in modern history (See the 1989 United Nations’ Whitaker Report). This information is still not part of our educational system as Jewish Holocaust is studied all over the world.

We cite these cases as a philosophical reference to Nkrumah’s groundbreaking ideas that Africa put its house in order. Other ingenious leaders like Marcus Garvey, Steve Biko, Patrice Lumumba, and Malcolm X, unlike the beggary philosophy of Nkrumah’s local enemies, advanced the same philosophy of self-reliance. Meanwhile, let’s have recourse to Alex Haley and Malcolm X as far as historical revisionism and postmodernism go, not forgetting that there appears to be a tacit consensus of historical revisionism, in Africa and America, overturning the rich legacies of our outstanding leaders. Thus, according to Jack Kerwick, Murray Fisher, a white man, authored the “Roots: The Saga of An American Family.” Likewise, Harry Courlander, another white man, sued Alex Haley for allegedly plagiarizing 81 passages from his fictional work “The African”(See Kerwick’s “Alex Haley’s Fraudulent Roots”). Could this be why Henry Louis Gates, Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay, two distinguished scholars in the field of literary criticism, completely ignored Haley in their edited volume “The Norton Anthology of African American Literature”? Anyway, who is telling the truth—Gates and McKay versus Kerwick and Courlander? Are there possible ulterior motives feeding the concerted posthumous assaults on Malcolm X and Alex Haley?

But then again, as if that is not enough, Thomas Sowell, the infamous African-American conservative economist, and Stanley Crouch, a jazz critic and a columnist for “New York Daily News,” have both joined the bandwagon of uncritical revisionism and postmodernism. The point is that no leader, political and religious, is perfect, not excluding those in the so-called liberal West. It’s a fact that Africans are quick to criticize their creative and visionary leaders like Nkrumah, Garvey, or Mandela, while praising and idolizing Western leaders who have consistently worked against the progress of Africa, mostly in conjunction with Western-trained Africans. In fact, Western leaders clandestinely, and, occasionally publicly, self-righteously denounce progressive leaders like Nkrumah, Garvey, and Mandela, even while subverting democracies, homegrown and abroad, without shame. The presidencies of George W. Bush and Richard Nixon are prime examples.

It’s no wonder Jimmy Carter would refer to the presidency of George Bush as “The Worst in History.” Richard Nixon was impeached and then sacked! Generally, that is to say, Western leaders are not generally necessarily better than their African stooges, like the enemies of Cabral, Malcolm X, Nkrumah, Garvey, or Lumumba. Also, Western intelligence organizations, Western Presidents, and Western multinationals have their hands soiled with the blood of their own people as well as those of the non-West. Noam Chomsky has painstakingly catalogued America’s active involvement in subverting democracies and supporting brutal dictatorships around the world (See Chomsky’s “Failed States: The Abuse of Power and the Assault on Democracy,” “Hegemony or Survival: America’s Quest for Global Dominance,” “Profit Over People: Neoliberalism & Global Order,” “The Washington Connection and Third World Fascism”; see also Qureshi’s “Nixon, Kissinger, and Allande: US Involvement in the 1973 Coup in Chile,” Schmitz’s “Thank God They’re on Our Side: The United States and Right-Wing Dictatorship,” Robinson’s “Promoting Polyarchy: Globalization, US Intervention, and Hegemony”).

Let’s conclude with a critical observation made by Dr. Botchwey regarding Nkrumah’s signal achievements: “On the positive side, we need to recognize that very major gains were made in the Nkrumah period in the social sectors, in the provision of social services, especially, portable water, and in health. In education, the period witnessed a dramatic rise in school enrolment rates, with the introduction of free and compulsory elementary school education and the abolition of tuition fees in 1965; University level education also saw a huge expansion (See “The Relevance of Kwame Nkrumah’s Legacy in Ghana’s Contemporary Political Economy”). Why do modern economists still think Nkrumah’s Seven-Year Development Plan, for instance, is still relevant to Ghana’s, even Africa’s, growth and development, as was yesterday as is today? Respectively, didn’t great leaders such as Mao Zedong and Jawaharlal Nehru have similar plans for China and India? If in fact they did, why are they where they are where we are not?

Did Nkrumah do more for Ghanaians than their colonial masters and his local enemies combined? Why do Nkrumah’s name and his progressive ideas draw global attention of renowned scholars, freedom fighters, writers, Garveyites, philosophers, Afrocentrists, researchers, Nkrumahists, policy makers, sociologists, development economists, NGOs, civic society organizations (CSOs), ambassadors, presidents, representatives of the African Diaspora Association of Canada (ADAC), professors, scientists, teachers, religious leaders, lawyers, etc? Why did Africans vote him “the man of the millennium”? What is in that great name and those great progressive ideas of his? Why are there academic departments all over the world devoted to research and study of his transformative ideas and positive contributions to human freedom? Why did his great ideas threaten his enemies, both local and the West, as to overthrow him? Why were his enemies afraid of his philosophical corpse or his ideational shadows?

Finally, why are there international conferences, as the “Biennial Kwame Nkrumah International Conference,” overseen by Kwantlen Polytechnic University, Vancouver, Canada, where one of the finest scholars of Nkrumah and Nkrumahism, Dr. Charles Quist-Adade, is ensconced, named after him? Why does his name carry the same weight as any respected leader in human history? Ironically, how can a mortal like Nkrumah, with all his faults, command global respect as well as enjoy intellectual deification, even as his contemporaneous local enemies singe in scholarly conflagration of historical oblivion? Why did the Journal of African Civilizations (“Great Black Leaders: Ancient and Modern”), edited by the late Ivan Van Sertima, rank Nkrumah as one of Africa’s greatest leaders, along with Queen Tiye, Marcus Garvey, Queen Nzingha, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King, Jr., Ramses ll, Toussaint L’Ouverture, Shaka Zulu, Hannibal, Malcolm X, Imhotep, and Queen Hatshepsut?

We shall return…