The Flawed Radicalism Of Kwame Nkrumah And The Opportunistic Liberalism Of Nnamdi Azikiwe. Plus Lessons For Patriotic Nigerians -By Chibuike Obi

An Indian Twitter mutual recently asked me what I thought of the Ghanaian revolutionary and political theorist Kwame Nkrumah. I freely confess that I am quite ashamed to admit that for so many years I have been putting off doing any serious and systematic reading of Nkrumah and Ghana. My minimal knowledge of Nkrumah is mainly from general reading of non-specialist and popular African history. I will try to give my necessarily very non-definitive answer on Nkrumah based on this reading. And my essay will be heavily skewed in the direction of examining Nkrumah and his legacy in Ghana from a comparative Ghana-Nigeria-West African standpoint.

In the West African region, Nigeria and Ghana are supposed to be cultural twins and rivals at the same time. And that is based solely on their shared Anglophone colonial heritage. One of the deepest and most significant evils of British and French colonialism, which directly causes many of West Africa’s intractable problems, is that the British and French divided historical African communities during their Scramble for Africa, into their separate colonial fiefdoms that later became separate countries.

This was particularly acute in the case of Nigeria and its immediate neighbours. Nigeria’s vast size implies that numerous border communities straddle the Nigeria-Niger, Nigeria-Cameroon, and Niger-Benin borders, which comprise one people divided between two countries. A further consequence of this implication is that the masses in these Nigerian border communities cannot be expected to see Nigerians from distant (both physically and culturally) communities as more of their kith and kin than their very relatives whom arbitrary borders drawn up by Anglo-French rivalry placed in a different country.

This is a solid inconvenient fact that patriotic believers in an eternal One-Nigeria ignore or rationalize away by claiming that this phenomenon of ethnic nationalities imbricating national borders is not unique to Nigeria. But this rationalization entails ignoring several crucial facts about nation-states: First, they are contingent and socially constructed (Benedict Arnold’s “Imagined Communities”), not implacable physical realities. And nationalism as an ideology has been at best a mixed blessing from the Treaty of Westphalia onwards. Second, nation-states in Europe were mostly constructed along coherent national boundaries and by Europeans themselves. For example, Mazzini and Garibaldi for Italy and Bismarck for Germany, not like Goldie and Lugard for Nigeria. Third, multi-ethnic nation states like China and India which patriotic Nigerians cite in their desperation to remain an unwieldy contraption were already long-standing historical communities existing more or less in their present form before European intervention. In addition, each of the countries of China, India, and Indonesia (another country patriotic Nigerians likes citing) has a significantly numerically dominant ethnic-nationality (Han Chinese in China-90%, Indo-Aryan in India-72%, Malays in Malaysia-50%, Javanese in Indonesia-40%), unlike in like Nigeria (combined Hausa-Fulani-29%, Yoruba-21%, Igbo-18%), which helps manage much more effectively centrifugal ethnic, cultural, religious, and social forces. Despite that, there are still legitimate movements by smaller ethnic nationalities for cultural and political autonomy and independence in these countries. 

One of the most remarkable phenomena of 20th and 21st century nationalism should be the fact that educated Nigerians, across the political spectrum from far-left to far-right, regard the existence of their country, created from the 19th century British and French national capitalist drive for raw materials and markets, as a welcome fait accompli. Their fanatical commitment to the territorial integrity of Nigeria is in the face of a consensus from foreign scholars, and at least one serious Nigerian scholar, Herbert Ekwe-Ekwe, (across the ideological spectrum), politicians, diplomats, and even the British colonialists themselves, on the sheer irrationality of Nigeria’s borders. 

In a part of the world where much attention is paid to symbolism, the dizzyingly heterogeneous range of ethnic nationalities in Nigeria prevented the national unity of purpose amongst them that would have enabled them to even change the name Nigeria to something a bit more historically or linguistically African. The kind of symbolic gesture against colonialism that Benin, Ghana, Burkina Faso, Namibia, Botswana, Tanzania, and the DRC were capable of. Mali and Senegal even had sufficient independence of mind and action from French colonial prerogatives to form a short-lived union that broke apart peacefully enough for the same internal structural reasons that patriotic Nigerians are valiantly determined to overlook in their country.

This is my tweet regarding the comments of Craig Murray, a former British diplomat on his stay in Nigeria. I made a slight error. It should have said that it took Craig Murray only one year instead of several years. 

It is important to note that educated Nigerians are typically the most vociferous in their patriotism, compared to their much less educated compatriots, and I will briefly explore what I think is the reason before returning to Nkrumah and Nigeria-Ghana relations.

British and French deculturization and assimilationist colonial policies created educated and deracinated middle and upper-class class-natives who internalized the colonialist logic of the desirability, rationality, and beneficence of their national boundaries. This is in contrast to the less educated masses who generally retained a commonsensical view of internal and external boundaries. This was especially pervasive in Nigeria except for Northern Nigeria where British colonial policy co-opted a feudal Muslim aristocratic class that overlapped the borders of Nigeria, Niger, Chad, and the Northern Cameroons as their comprador agents but left enough of their culture intact that all the social classes in these Northern Nigerian border communities identify with their kin in Francophone Niger, Chad, and Cameroon.

That’s why the immediate past president of Nigeria, Muhammadu Buhari, from the northern Nigerian border state of Katsina never hid his allegiance and preference for his cousins, as he called them, in Niger over his fellow Nigerians, especially Southern Nigerian Christians.

In southern border communities in Nigeria, the reverse obtains; with the middle and upper classes, like their counterparts in the interior, culturally detached from the lower classes. That’s why the educated classes in Southern Nigeria will identify with Ghana, two countries (Benin and Togo republics) away, because of the shared English language while the masses in the border communities of southern Nigerian states like Ogun, Oyo, and Lagos, less uprooted from their native cultures and languages will identify more with their Yoruba kin in the adjoining countries of Benin and Togo, than even with their supposed fellow Nigerian citizens.

Coming to the little I can say about Kwame Nkrumah; he was light-years ahead of all pre- and post-independence Nigerian national leaders combined. He was perhaps in the class of African leaders like Amilcar Cabral, Thomas Sankara, and Patrice Lumumba. And that’s the reason why he was, like them, ousted in a Western-backed coup.

The writer Chinweizu, though not always a rigorous thinker himself in his later years, felt that Nkrumah didn’t always think through or deeply enough about some of his positions. For example, Chinweizu wrote that Nkrumah’s approach to continental African unity was hasty and ill-thought in comparison to the more considered and measured approach of Amilcar Cabral of Guinea-Bissau.

Chinweizu may have been right in this case because subsequent events seem to have vindicated Cabral’s approach. Because Western imperialism easily co-opted the first and only continent-wide African body, the OAU (Organization of African Unity), now the AU (African Union), which Nkrumah championed tirelessly. 

I have not read the book Ghana: End Of An Illusion, which has been forever on my reading list, by the admirable socialist couple, Bob Fitch and Mary Oppenheimer. But I understand that they analyzed the Nkrumah era from a leftist perspective and yet criticized Nkrumah’s many limitations and shortcomings, the most serious of which was Nkrumah acting, sometimes unwillingly, within the ideological framework and in the interests of the petit-bourgeois faction of the anti-colonialist movement that he led.

Chinweizu, Fitch, and Oppenheimer, rightly deplored the tendency of some well-meaning leftists to engage in Nkrumah hagiography.

The great Trinidadian Marxist thinker C.L.R. James also apparently didn’t consider Nkrumah a consistently deep or careful thinker. But to introduce the other great West African nationalist, Nnamdi Azikiwe, who was both one of Nkrumah’s early influences and his contemporary; it is reasonably certain that James didn’t hold Azikiwe in any higher regard considering that Nkrumah’s leftism was more ideologically aligned to that of James than Azikiwe’s ideological farrago of tepid parliamentary socialism, liberalism, welfarism, and philantrocapitalism.

I think it is a safe bet and a testament to the quality and permanence of Nkrumah’s body of work that anyone with a leftist bent who is mildly interested in West African political history would have heard more of Nkrumah than Azikiwe.

Nnamdi Azikiwe, known as Zik of Africa, one of the fathers of Nigerian nationalism, the first black governor general and the first and only ceremonial president of Nigeria, was an early and significant influence on Kwame Nkrumah during Azikiwe’s career as a journalist in Ghana. The influence was such that Nkrumah decided to attend Azikiwe’s alma mater, Lincoln University in the US, after his setback with the University of London.

But the paths and trajectories of the two men could not have been more different. Nkrumah went on to become a genuinely radical Pan-Africanist and respected political theorist of neocolonialism and imperialism. While Azikiwe, even early in his career, had already begun showing signs of the opportunism, philistinism, and near-consistent shallow thinking that would be a staple of his long life.

I am an Igbo man who maintains that Nnamdi Azikiwe should be the bête noire of any right-thinking Igbo person. Azikiwe is widely acclaimed to be a great Igbo man. But he contributed significantly to the horrors that Igbos suffered and still suffer in Nigeria because of his extremely and unforgivably naïve misjudgments of the British colonialists and their Northern Nigerian compradors in the pre- and post-independence era. As the British were strategically consolidating power and political dominance in favour of their chosen Northern Nigerian oligarchic comprador class, with the compradors threatening secession unless they received more power and concessions, Azikiwe and the genocidaire Obafemi Awolowo were foolishly looking on and squabbling between themselves. 

There is a significant body of hagiography on Azikiwe, by mostly Igbo writers, which is only exceeded in its cringiness by its deeply selective reading of history that is mostly responsible for this misplaced adulation of Azikiwe. 

Another telling evidence of the effects of the separation of West African societies in French and British colonies, apart from the linguistic barrier, is that the influence of Azikiwe was not as great as in Francophone West Africa as it was in Anglophone West Africa, at least in the early days of post-World War II African nationalism. It should now be obvious in light of Azikiwe’s later career that Francophone West African nationalists, most of whom probably internalized colonial apologia more than the Anglophones (they were not regarded as interlocuteurs valables by the French colonialists for nothing), were better off for not having been influenced much by Azikiwe. 

That’s why, apart from the obvious linguistic barrier, there was no unified approach in West Africa to throw off French and British colonialism. A situation that persists till today. Hopefully, presumed radicals in Anglophone and Francophone West Africa will seriously engage with the Ibrahim Traore movement in Burkina Faso, which despite whatever issues it may have, seems sincere. But the traditional provincialism and myopia of “radicals” in West Africa, which makes them particularly resistant to and incapable of building region-wide solidarity and resistance networks, makes me doubt it.

That Nkrumah was relatively genuine and committed in his Pan-Africanism and anti-imperialism was shown in the treatment accorded to him by the West in contrast to the treatment accorded to the Nigerian rulers Ahmadu Bello and Tafawa Balewa who were his contemporaries.

Nigeria was held up as a model colony while Ghana under Nkrumah was relentlessly pilloried and demonized. The British had successfully enthroned their collaborators Tafawa Balewa and Ahmadu Bello as the prime minister of Nigeria and premier of Northern Nigeria respectively. (Nigeria was then a parliamentary democracy). Ahmadu Bello and Tafawa Balewa were the political leaders of the feudal Muslim aristocratic class in Northern Nigeria that the British co-opted as collaborators in their colonial enterprise. There was also a native aristocratic class in Ghana that was more or less British collaborators. For various historical reasons, which include Nkrumah’s brilliance and personal courage as an anti-colonial leader, the British couldn’t enthrone the leaders of this Ghanaian native aristocratic class in power and were forced to hand over to Nkrumah as the first Ghanaian postcolonial leader. And immediately after, the British with the help of the US, commenced a demonization and destabilization programme against Nkrumah which culminated in the 1966 CIA-inspired coup plot that overthrew him.

I will digress a bit here on the lessons that die-hard One-Nigeranists should learn from the history of the enthronement of Bello and Balewa by the British. Ahmadu Bello was the head of the NPC who should have been the prime minister at independence but delegated the role to his deputy Tafawa Balewa. 

This was the first clear-cut proof that the British had structured power and dominance in favour of Muslim-majority Northern Nigeria. But fanatical believers in the One-Nigeria project, from Nnamdi Azikiwe down to those of today, persist in remaining blind to the ramifications of this obvious historical and sociological fact.

A major reason, in my opinion, for this willful blindness on the part of the believers in a forever unified Nigeria in its present form is the colonial education that Nigerians received, and which because the colonial education system wasn’t meaningfully reformed after independence, they still receive.

Even when these Nigerians acquired further education in other countries or even had all their education abroad, their reading and perspective of Nigeria was internalized and shaped by this colonialist logic of Nigeria’s territorial form being self-evidently sensible and practical and hence immutable. In any case, there is a long tradition of leftist critique of the many obvious and not-so blind spots of Western education as pertains to its social sciences and humanities components. 

Chinweizu quoted Ngugi wa’Thiongo on Cheik Hamidou Kane’s on-point remark on the effects of a colonial education: “Better than the cannon, it (the [colonial school]) made conquest permanent. The cannon compels the body; the school bewitches the soul”

There is also willful blindness on the part of One-Nigerianists to the ramifications of the British deliberately limiting Western education in Northern Nigeria to stem notions of liberal political democracy that would have imperilled their collaborationist rulers in the North. An obvious ramification can be seen in the assiduous efforts of the majority of Northern Nigerian Muslims, including the Western educated, to ape Wahabbi Saudi Arabia in their prioritizing of conservative and fundamentalist theological Islamic education, their anathematization of the West (not the way a black African or Latin American leftist would but the way a conservative Muslim Arab would), while being cognitively dissociated enough to remain blind to the plain reality that their political rulers in both Northern Nigeria and Saudi Arabia are reliable stooges of the West that they anathematize. 

British colonial policy in Northern Nigeria simply strengthened, deepened, and intensified reactionary and extremist tendencies in Muslim Northern Nigeria. Whereas liberalizing and syncretizing tendencies were allowed by the British and the French in South-Western Nigeria, Benin, Togo, and Senegal. That’s why Benin, Togo, and even Senegal with an almost 90% Muslim population, have no home-grown Islamic terror groups while Nigeria with just an over 50% Islamic population has two and counting. The contiguity of Mali, Niger, and Chad to Muslim North Africa may account for their Islamic extremism problems.

One of the most prescient and clear-headed of foreign scholars who ever wrote about Nigeria was the American Marxist anthropologist Stanley Diamond. Diamond saw through the sham and absurdity of Nigeria’s territorial structure, and the potential adverse consequences thereof, when virtually everyone else was celebrating Nigeria as the model African post-colony most likely to achieve greatness. Diamond’s aptly titled work, Nigeria; Model of A Colonial Failure, is invaluable reading on this score.

 Chukwuma Kaduna Nzeogwu and his fellow revolutionary majors who toppled the corrupt Nigerian political leadership in 1966 would have done well to have read Diamond before embarking on their ill-fated venture. 

Coming back to Ghana, the different treatments of Ghana under Nkrumah, and Nigeria under Bello and Balewa, by mainstream Western academy and media, increasingly now belatedly realized by many to be the agents and mouthpieces of Western imperialism, could not have been more stark.

Nigeria, under the Western and self-labelled pragmatists Balewa and Bello, was hailed as a model postcolony going places, after being star pupils of wise and beneficent British colonial tutelage, while Ghana under the reckless socialist demagogue Nkrumah was doomed to failure. The Western prediction for Ghana proved to be a self-fulfilling prophecy which, with the aid of British and UK destabilization programmes, had its intended effect of causing mass impoverishment in Ghana and making Nkrumah more despotic and erratic in his rule. The Western-backed, at least Western-friendly, coup of 1966 by Ankrah, Afrifa, and company, ushered into power in Ghana a line of pro-Western rulers. Under these pro-Western rulers, Ghana rapidly spiralled into conditions much worse than anything seen in Nkrumah’s rule until the coup and the period of rule by Jerry Rawlings which halted and moderately reversed this decline. It is noteworthy that Rawlings was a Pan-Africanist in the mould of Thomas Sankara and Patrice Lumumba and claimed direct inspiration from Nkrumah. While Rawlings may have had more intellectual and ideological limitations than his claimed mentor, limitations reflected in the unevenness of his leadership of Ghana, I think a strong case can be made that his intervention may be one of the major reasons why Ghana is not a basket case like Nigeria today.

All in all, it may be fair to say Kwame Nkrumah was generally a well-intentioned and serious-minded revolutionary who seriously regressed in the later period of his rule. But the relentless destabilization programme and numerous assassination attempts by Ghanaian proxies for the imperialistic and neocolonial West could be adduced as reasons for the paranoia and eccentricity that may have caused his regression.

He may not have been a first-rate political theorist like Amilcar Cabral. Yet he was undoubtedly far better than anything that Nigeria ever produced in the likes of political leaders and thinkers like Nnamdi Azikiwe, Obafemi Awolowo, and Aminu Kano. It is doubtful whether the term political thinker can be applied to the duo of Ahmadu Bello and Tafawa Balewa.

That said, given that Nkrumah’s Neocolonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism is frequently included in reading lists worldwide, along with Walter Rodney’s How Europe Underdeveloped Africa and Franz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, for its continued relevance in understanding historical and post-colonial realities; I’m sure that any intending student of Nkrumah and his legacy should begin with it and Ghana: End Of An Illusion. And that includes me!

Chibuike Obi, a freelance journalist based in Niger State, can be reached at ojionu@hotmail.com or follow me on Twitter @chibuikeobi19 or Facebook @Chibuike.obi.5059 or YouTube @chibuikeobi8610 or Substack https:chibuikeobi.substack.com