Things will not go well for Ghana

Kwame Nkrumah, the first president of Ghana, was born 110 years ago today. He led the British colony of Gold Coast to independence and oversaw his nation’s transformation into a republic. But as president, he became overly autocratic and was eventually deposed in a coup in 1966. A diary he kept in the last decade of his life found its way to the United States where it became the subject of a legal battle between its owner and a Ghanaian patriot. Although the diary was returned to Ghana in 2012 amid a flurry of publicity, there seems to be no information online about what it happened to it then, and I can only find one small tidbit concerning its contents: he wrote, ‘Things will not go well for Ghana’, and ‘[my] vision’ for the country will now be ‘lost’.

Nkrumah was born on 21 September 1909 and raised in a rural village in the British colony, Gold Coast. He was schooled at a local Catholic mission, and then at a government training college in Accra. He took up teaching at a primary school, but was then made head of a school at Axim, where he began to become involved in politics. He had heard the Nigerian president Nnamdi Azikiwe speak, and it was him that advised Nkrumah to enrol at Lincoln College, a historically black college in the US, where he himself had studied. Starting in 1935, Nkrumah spent ten years in the US, first at Lincoln, then at the University of Pennsylvania, where he received a Masters of Philosophy and a Masters of Education. At first he supported himself with menial jobs, but he also began to lecture and preach at Presbyterian churches. He was an activist student, organising a group of expatriate African students in Pennsylvania and building it into the African Students Association of America and Canada, becoming its president.

Nkrumah moved to London in 1945, with the intention of studying for a doctorate, but failed to stay more than a term or so at LSE or University College. Instead, he became very involved in organising the Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester (October 1945). In 1947, he returned home to take up a position as general secretary of the new United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC) which aimed for self-government. Following extensive riots in 1948, he and other UGCC leaders were briefly arrested. A year later, he split from the UGCC to form the Convention Peoples’ Party (CPP) which was committed to achieving immediate self-government. He initiated a campaign for nonviolent protests, strikes and non-cooperation with the British colonial authorities, but this led to him being arrested and imprisoned for a year. In 1951, though, after being elected to parliament, he was released, and he then became prime minister of Gold Coast in 1952. It would be five more years before full independence was realised and Gold Coast became the self-governed nation of Ghana. Nkrumah was hailed as the Osagyefo - meaning ‘redeemer’ in the Akan language. That same year, in 1957, he married Fathia Rizk, an Egyptian Coptic, and they had four children.

While Nkrumah set about building roads, school and health facilities, his style of leadership proved increasingly authoritarian. In 1960 he won a plebiscite for Ghana to become a republic. Nkrumah became president. However, mounting economic troubles and foreign debt (and other troubles) began to threaten his presidency. He was forced to abandon the country’s Second Development Plan; the economy contracted, and widespread unrest culminated in a general strike. An attempt on Nkrumah’s life in 1962, led to his increasing seclusion from public life, as well as to a massive buildup of the country’s internal security forces. While Nkrumah focused on the ideological struggle for black peoples, the crisis in Ghana itself worsened, until, in 1966, while he was visiting China, the army and the police seized power. On returning to Africa, he found asylum in Guinea, where he spent the remainder of his life, writing books, among other things, such as Dark Days in Ghana and Class Struggle in Africa. He died, while in Romania, in 1972. Further information is available online at Wikipedia, South African History Online, or Encyclopaedia Britannica.

In the last years of his life, from the mid-1960s onward, Nkrumah kept a diary. It was with him when he died, but then, somehow, it seems to have found its way to the US. Some 30 years after his death, the diary became the subject of a legal battle. An article to be found online at GhanaWeb describes the story of the diary as reading like ‘a whodunnit bestseller’. For 20 years, the diary was in the possession of an American, a financial consultant called Robert Shulman, but then it was tracked down by Vincent Mbirika, a Kenyan scholar and expatriate who lived in New York, and who wanted the diary returned to Ghana. A law suit followed, and in April 2012 the court agreed that the diary rightly belonged to Ghana and to the Nkrumah family (see New African Magazine, GhanaWeb or Denise Valentine’s blog.)

I have not been able to track down any online trace of the diary since 2012, nor any extracts from it. However, this GhanaWeb article (dated two weeks earlier than the one above) does give some information about the diary, as follows:

‘The diary entries start from the mid-1960s, when the Osagyefo was president, and run to the late 1960s when he had been deposed and was living in exile in Guinea as a guest of President Sekou Toure.

One entry, from 1966, the year Nkrumah was ousted by the military, mentions the purchase of military equipment from the Soviet Union. In another entry, from 1968, when Nkrumah was living in Guinea, the former president instructs his wife, Fathia, to “take care” of their children - Gamal Gorkeh, Sekou, and Samia (who is now an MP in Ghana and chairperson of the Convention People's Party founded by her father).

Possibly the most compelling entry in the diary (which is about the size of a small paperback and has a bookmark with the colours of Ghana’s flag stuffed in its pages), is one where Nkrumah, who had been Ghana’s head of state since independence from Britain in 1957, reflects on the abrupt end of his presidency. It makes clear that Nkrumah was worried about Ghana and Africa’s future. He wrote: “Things will not go well for Ghana” and said his “vision” for Ghana would now be “lost”.’