By Kwame Okoampa-Ahoofe, Jr., Ph.D.
Garden City, New York
August 13, 2015
E-mail: okoampaahoofe@optimum.net
Davidson raises some critical psychological questions about the character of the man whom Senegal’s President Leopold Sédar Senghor once described as a “mad man” who needed prompt psychiatric examination and treatment (See Mahoney’s JFK: The Africa Ordeal). Casting Kwame Nkrumah as one who was temperamentally volatile, this is what Davidson has to say about the protagonist of his Black Star, among others: “Head and shoulders above all rivals on the scene, whether for courage or capacity, he still suffered from the unresolved confusions of his time and place. Highly intelligent, he could be intellectually shallow; ruthlessly clear on many things, he could be quite the reverse on others. It was a very human situation, with pettiness and grandeur marching hand-in-hand” (Black Star 186).
He may have detested the guts of Dr. K. A. Busia, to whose charge that Nkrumah was using Ghana for subversive activities against other African countries and their leaders, Davidson retorted by saying that Busia was being patently absurd and downright preposterous. Quite intriguingly, though, this is what the liberal Africanist author of Black Star has to say about his hero’s ideological flirtation with Marxism and the eastern-bloc countries: “He enjoyed his isolation, but he also tried to work his way out of it. He launched an Ideological Institute at Winneba, a small town westward along the coast from Accra. This was designed to train party workers as socialists, though for the most part it did nothing of the kind. In December 1962 he founded a fortnightly journal, The Spark, named deliberately after Lenin’s Iskra of revolutionary times in Russia long before. He welcomed the aid of non-Ghanaians who would help to form the Ghanaian revolutionaries without whom, as he certainly understood, he could not hope to succeed. One of these was a distinguished Nigerian exile, S. G. Ikoku. Others of communist persuasion came from England and elsewhere. Later he found a powerful publicist and constructive critic in a former radical senator from South Africa, H. M. Basner, whose articles in the Ghanaian Times were to be a fund of good sense and information. He took to lecturing himself. He tried hard to find responsive students who would enliven the CPP” (Black Star 186).
Interestingly, in his zeal to defending his subject against charges of dictatorial tendencies, Davidson ends up being disingenuous and practically and psychologically as confused as Mr. Nkrumah. Take the following short reading from Black Star, for example: “By 1964, with these and other efforts at breaking from his isolation clearly of no avail, there were many who began to think that the final act in the tragedy [that was Nkrumah’s opportunistic rise to power and fame] could not be far ahead. Like it or not, he had become the sole decider of what was done in terms of policy and government action. Was he therefore a dictator? He was anything but a dictator by intention, or in his general attitude to those who opposed or tried to kill him, or in his political and social beliefs” (187).
This paradoxical attempt by Davidson to humanize the virtual political monstrosity that was Nkrumah in the last couple years of his rule, seriously undermines the credibility of this otherwise quite fair-minded British-Africanist historian of the first order. For barely a year later, Dr. J. B. Danquah would be deliberately and systematically assassinated on the instructions of President Nkrumah (See The Asafu-Adjei Commission Report on the Death of Dr. J. B. Danquah at the Nsawam Medium-Security Prison). That Nkrumah was politically subversive of several of his fellow African leaders, even while pontifically calling for the immediate and total unification of the African continent, is unmistakably attested by the following quote from Davidson himself: “Many resented him, if for a diversity of reasons. Some, like Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, chastised him for his interference. East Africa, Nyerere believed, could best contribute to continental unity by moving first towards regional unity. Although knowing little of East Africa, Nkrumah not only disagreed but actively interfered to obstruct the East African Federation proposed by Nyerere to other East-African leaders. It was one of Nkrumah’s worst mistakes” (Black Star 188-9). Legend has it that Nkrumah had been the brain behind the1964 foiled military coup against President Nyerere. Nkrumah would pooh-pooh Mr. Nyerere for soliciting Britain’s military assistance to put down the military uprising.
If he understood the need for all African countries to throw off the slavo-colonial yoke, it is equally clear to the leaders of the erstwhile colonized countries that the leader of newly-independent Ghana, the first to be liberated or decolonized, did not understand the practical need for the colonized to liberate themselves. Once again, Davidson, perhaps inadvertently, contradicts himself, for such patronizing proprietary attitude reflected the temperament of at best a “benevolent” dictator: “Others were hostile for other reasons. Among these were the more conservative leaders of the French-speaking states, closely under the jealous wings of Paris. Still others found his [Nkrumah’s] appointees dishonest, or his policies misguided. Among these were some of the leaders of the newly-emerged liberation movements in countries that were still colonies. They considered that he had failed to understand that a people which does not liberate itself cannot be liberated by any other people, at least in any worthwhile way. They saw this failure to understand their needs and aims in his projects for military intervention by independent [African] states. Such intervention, even if it could have any practical effect, was the last thing they could want” (Black Star 189).
This partly emanated from Nkrumah’s megalomaniacal sense of heroism, which character flaw or psychological defect blinkered him from fully appreciating the need for the self-worth and pride of the colonized to be healthily realized through the success of their own liberation struggle. Davidson might have felt obligated to hold brief for President Nkrumah because he exuberantly tells the story of having successfully interceded on behalf of an American lecturer, presumably at the University of Ghana, who was faced with imminent deportation, for alleged subversive activities (Black Star 191). But what is important to highlight here is that Davidson was confident in his belief that the Ametewe Affair, or assassination attempt on Nkrumah, at the latter’s Independence Square office was more directly in response to Nkrumah’s passage of a law authorizing him to dismiss any judge on the high court, as well as the Supreme Court, at whim, as well as the president’s unilateral declaration of Ghana as a one-party state (Black Star 190).
Davidson also thinks that Nkrumah could have readily and handily won any electoral contest at any time during his tenure, including the 1964 election that declared Ghana a one-party state, but for some reasons best known to himself, Nkrumah unwisely permitted the ungodly use of electoral fraud as part of his power games: “The referendum gave him a huge majority: 2,773,920 votes in favor and 2,452 against. But such results do not come from an honestly conducted referendum. How improbable were these results could also be seen from the total poll that was claimed. This was 92.8 percent of the registered electorate, a far higher proportion than had ever voted at general elections [even] in times of widespread CPP enthusiasm. Would an honest referendum have still given him a majority? My own opinion, for what it is worth, is that an honest referendum would still have yielded much the same result as general elections in the 1950s: a decisive but not overwhelming majority in a poll of about three-fifths of the electorate (Black Star 193).
In the 1960 presidential referendum, only about 43-percent of the Ghanaian electorate voted (See Dennis Austin’s Politics In Ghana: 1946-1960). One can therefore reasonably conclude that by 1964, when acute disillusionment had almost totally eclipsed the excitement of independence, and Ghana’s economy was near comatose, an even less percentage of eligible voters would have flocked to the polls to vote for the de facto single party, the CPP, that was for all practical purposes in contention with itself. For Davidson, by 1964, the end of the CPP and the Nkrumah dictatorship were boldly etched in the political firmaments: “As it was, the CPP became Ghana’s only political party by the assistance of electoral fraud. And the reasons why this fraud occurred were the same reasons as would now ensure that the CPP completed its own ruin, and, with it, Nkrumah’s as well” (Black Star 193).
Finally, Davidson touches on the Report of the Commission to Enquire into the Affairs of NADECO (1966) which revealed that the CPP had instituted a grand-theft scheme as part of its political machine in which the directors of the Cocoa-Marketing Board (CMB), renamed COCOBOD by Chairman Jerry John Rawlings, were obligated to siphon nearly a half-million Ghanaian pounds annually into the coffers of the Convention People’s Party. Well, dear reader, take this reliably-sourced reading from Basil Davidson: “Party patronage had become a way of life. But patronage needs money, and the CPP took it in handfuls from the only available source, which was the State. Just how much they took became clear only in 1966, when the new military rulers set out to find the answer. Among much else, they found a directive by which the Principal Secretary of the Ministry of Finance ordered the Cocoa Marketing Board to pay to the CPP an annual subvention of £G 400,000. Duly obedient, the directors of the Board had drafted a resolution to that effect: ‘Be it resolved and it is hereby resolved by the Board,’ ran this draft, ‘that with effect from the 1st of January, 1965, the sum of £G 400,000 be granted every year by the Board as a free grant to the Convention People’s Party.’ In compliance with this directive, says the official document in which it was reported, ‘subventions are paid to the CPP up till the first quarter of 1966.’ It was only one of many such arrangements, whether for personal or collective enrichment” (Black Star 193-4).
And for the moral and psychological edification of those Nkrumacrats who vehemently insist, to the contrary, that their icon was as squeaky clean as Teflon when it came to the “Apple-Pie”/”Ofam” question of rank corruption at the personal level, this is what Basil Davidson has to report: “But a system of patronage on these lines led on to a system of personal patronage. According to evidence produced by the military rulers in 1966, Nkrumah similarly accumulated large personal assets, including some £ 454,000 in various Ghana banking accounts and £ 170,000 in Switzerland; it was also said that he had bought a handsome house in Cairo for his Egyptian wife and owned some £ 8,000 in a London account” (Black Star 194).
