In the midnight hour: anticolonial rhetoric and postcolonial statecraft in Ghana

ABSTRACT

When Ghana gained its independence from colonial rule in March 1957, there was a midnight ceremony, and the new Prime Minister, Kwame Nkrumah, delivered a speech. Nkrumah’s Midnight Speech is an act of rhetorical invention adapted to postcolonial political foundation and, with Ghana as the first sub-Saharan African country to gain independence, an available model of transfigurative politics for decolonizing Africa and its diaspora. I use the four constituents of Ghana’s independence ceremony—the crowd, Nkrumah, the Old Polo Grounds on which they gathered, and the midnight timing—to outline salient elements of emergent Ghana’s rhetorical culture. First, I argue that the crowd was the manifestation of the mass public of Ghana and a catalyst of colonial freedom. Next, I examine how Nkrumah personified the mass state that was caught between forms of anticolonial organizing and the media of the postcolonial state. Then, I analyze the Old Polo Grounds to focus on how Nkrumah’s rededication of national becoming to pan-African union sought to avoid the perpetuation of neocolonial dynamics. Finally, I argue that the liminal potential of midnight projected a new social imaginary that transfigured both present routines and prior traditions.

KEYWORDS:

• African rhetoric
• anticolonial public address
• crowd culture
• Kwame Nkrumah
• Ghana

Acknowledgements

Thank you, thank you, thank you to Editor Kathleen F. McConnell, Associate Editor Sohinee Roy, Guest Editors Godfried A. Asante and Jenna N. Hanchey, and my anonymous reviewers.

Notes

1 I am using a text of Kwame Nkrumah’s Midnight Speech that I have compiled from a variety of archival sources and recordings, including the Special Collection Bureau of African Affairs at the Public Records and Archives Administration Department (PRAAD) in Accra, the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation (GBC) archives in Accra, and the Kwame Nkrumah Papers at Howard University’s Moorland-Spingarn Research Center. See Howard University Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Manuscript Division, Kwame Nkrumah Papers, Box 154–14, Folder 21, Midnight Speech on the Eve of Independence, 6 March 1957; Howard University Moorland-Spingarn Research Center, Manuscript Division, Kwame Nkrumah Papers, Box 154–49, Cassette 1, Independence Speech and National Anthem of Ghana, 6 March 1957. I have assembled this composite text because of discrepancies in the versions of the Midnight Speech that are widely available. The most commonly cited version is from Nkrumah’s I Speak of Freedom: A Statement of African Ideology (New York: Praeger, 1961), 106–108. However, it is neither accurate nor complete, departing from how it was delivered by omitting passages and “correcting” moments of garbled syntax and confusing phrasing. As a result, although Nkrumah’s Midnight Speech is among the landmark speeches of postcolonial public address and cited widely by scholars interested in radical and decolonial politics, no one seems to be using a credible version. I hope to bring the complete, definitive version that I have compiled to print to help correct this uneven catalogue.

2 “Native,” like “tribe,” is an identity of colonial derivation that substitutes homogenous and rigid categories for complex social dynamics active on the ground. “For it is the settler who has brought the native into existence and who perpetuates his existence,” wrote Frantz Fanon (The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington [New York: Penguin, 1990], 28). For these reasons, when I use “native,” it is to reference that category of colonial misrecognition, which I indicate with quotation marks. One analysis of the colonial construction of the “native” (and forms of agency mobilized in response) is Mahmood Mamdani, Define and Rule: Native as Political Identity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).

3 Most notably, Nkrumah worked with George Padmore to coordinate the 1945 meeting of W. E. B. Du Bois’s Pan-African Congress in Manchester, England (Marika Sherwood, Kwame Nkrumah: The Years Abroad 1935–1947 [Legon, Ghana: Freedom Publications, 1996], 121–24).

4 Kwame Nkrumah, qtd. in Basil Davidson, Black Star: A View of the Life and Times of Kwame Nkrumah (London: Allen Lane, 1973), 73. This statement is taken from the resolution of the Ghana People’s Representative Assembly, a mass gathering that Nkrumah organized in Accra in November 1949. See also Kwame Arhin, ed., The Life and Work of Kwame Nkrumah: Papers of a Symposium Organized by the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, Legon (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1993); Jeffrey S. Ahlman, Living with Nkrumahism: Nation, State, and Pan-Africanism in Ghana (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2017).

5 Philippe-Joseph Salazar, An African Athens: Rhetoric and the Shaping of Democracy in South Africa (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum, 2002), xvii. The idea of a postcolonial yet-to-come that I offer is drawn from Paul Gilroy’s articulation of a “utopian politics of transfiguration” within the Black Atlantic that constructs “both an imaginary anti-modern past and a postmodern yet-to-come” (The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993], 37).

6 For example, see Godfried Asante, “#RhetoricSoWhite and US Centered: Reflections on Challenges and Opportunities,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 105, no. 4 (2019): 484–88.

7 Kevin K. Gaines, American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006).

8 Robert Holland, Susan Williams, and Terry Barringer, eds., Iconography of Independence: “Freedoms at Midnight” (London: Routledge, 2013).

9 Brian Larkin, “Indian Films and Nigerian Lovers: Media and the Creation of Parallel Modernities,” Africa 67, no. 3 (1997): 406–40.

10 Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 37–38.

11 Jawaharlal Nehru, “‘The Noble Mansion of Free India,’” in The Penguin Book of Twentieth-Century Speeches, 2nd rev. ed., ed. Brian MacArthur (New York: Penguin, 1999), 238.

12 David Marriott, Whither Fanon? Studies in the Blackness of Being (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018), 238. Thanks to Rudo Mudiwa for first pointing me to Marriott’s work. Another analysis of Nkrumah’s use of rhetorical invention is Eric Opoku Mensah, “The Constraint of a Rhetorical Invention: Kwame Nkrumah and the Organization of African Unity,” Lagos Notes and Records 25, no. 1 (2019): 62–88.

13 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 28.

14 Ibid., 254.

15 Ibid., 255.

16 Ibid., 53.

17 On social imaginaries, see Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2007), 159–211.

18 Erik Johnson, “Nkrumah and the Crowd: Mass Politics in Emergent Ghana,” Advances in the History of Rhetoric 17, no. 1 (2014): 98–107.

19 On attitudes toward crowds within liberal democracy, see Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, “After the Fictions: Notes towards a Phenomenology of the Multitude,” E-Flux Journal 58 (2014): https://www.e-flux.com/journal/58/61187/after-the-fictions-notes-towards-a-phenomenology-of-the-multitude/. On modern dichotomies between the crowd and the public, see Samuel McCormick, The Chattering Mind: A Conceptual History of Everyday Talk (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2020), 288–95.

20 The sense of individuals being “fused and confused” within a crowd comes from Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, rev. ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 196.

21 Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 52.

22 Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 40.

23 Seyla Benhabib coined “sensuous finitude” in her critique of Karl Marx’s Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, from which she recovered a “politics of transfiguration” that transcends present conditions and provokes “the formation of radically new needs” (Critique, Norm, and Utopia: A Study of the Foundations of Critical Theory [New York: Columbia University Press, 1986], 60, 59). In my view, this vision of emancipation parallels the colonial freedom that emerged at midnight on the Old Polo Grounds. Gilroy also drew on Benhabib’s critique as a key component of the “politics of transfiguration” he elaborated in The Black Atlantic (37). Even more interesting, the first English translation of Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts was completed by the Johnson-Forest Tendency of C. L. R. James, Raya Dunayevskava, and Grace Lee Boggs in 1947, more than a decade before any widely available English translation. The fact that this multiracial group of offshoot Trotskyites, Afro-Caribbean intellectuals, and cosmopolitan activists completed the first English translation of the definitive work of the young Marx has been largely ignored and deserves further attention. Rather remarkably, Nkrumah was, in fact, among this group in the mid-1940s, as he split his time between Philadelphia and New York after graduating from Lincoln University. What a remarkable example of the way that networks of Black radicalism are simultaneously global and crowded—spanning continents with projections of solidarity and imagination while also crowded into living rooms structured by intimate relationships and cloistered conversations. Nkrumah met Dunayevskaya in the New York Public Library (the same place where she “discovered” the 1844 Manuscripts), had conversations with James (who, in turn, introduced him to Padmore and who would make his way to Ghana for the 1957 independence celebrations), and even later proposed marriage to Boggs (who declined). See Karl Marx, Three Essays by Karl Marx: Selected from the Economic Philosophical Manuscripts, trans. Ria Stone (mimeographed, Socialist Workers Party, c. 1947); Grace Lee Boggs, Living for Change: An Autobiography (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 58–59, 72.

24 Vicente L. Rafael, “The Cell Phone and the Crowd: Messianic Politics in the Contemporary Philippines,” Public Culture 15, no. 3 (2003): 415.

25 Ibid.

26 Victor T. Le Vine, “Changing Leadership Styles and Political Images: Some Preliminary Notes,” The Journal of Modern African Studies 15, no. 4 (1977): 634.

27 Bankole Timothy, Kwame Nkrumah: His Rise to Power, 2nd ed. (London: Allen and Unwin, 1963), 124, 130–31.

28 For a representative scene from the CPP’s anticolonial organizing where mass embrace and address play off each other, see Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah (New York: Nelson, 1957), 134–35.

29 “Ɔsagyefo” is the Akan word for redeemer (literally, one who has been victorious in battle) that became an appellation for Nkrumah, varyingly connoting his founding father status and the authoritarian characteristics of the one-party state in the later years of Ghana’s First Republic. In Ghana today, Osagyefo is an honorific typically reserved for Nkrumah.

30 Nkrumah, Ghana, 93.

31 Kwame Nkrumah, Towards Colonial Freedom: Africa in the Struggle against World Imperialism (London: Panaf, 1973), 42.

32 Kwame Nkrumah, Africa Must Unite (London: Panaf, 1998), 55.

33 C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, 2nd ed., rev. (New York: Vintage, 1989), 397.

34 Nkrumah appears to have personally curated which speeches made their way to the print record. For one account of a CPP mass meeting, see Richard Wright, “Black Power.” in Black Power: Three Books from Exile: Black Power; The Color Curtain; and White Man, Listen! (New York: Harper Perennial, 2008), 99–105.

35 George P. Hagan, “Nkrumah’s Leadership Style—An Assessment for a Cultural Perspective.” in The Life and Work of Kwame Nkrumah: Papers of a Symposium Organized by the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, Legon, ed. Kwame Arhin (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1993), 187.

36 Ibid., 184.

37 D. Zizwe Poe, Kwame Nkrumah’s Contribution to Pan-Africanism: An Afrocentric Analysis (London: Routledge, 2003), 99.

38 Dennis Austin, “The Convention People’s Party in 1958.” in Ghana Observed: Essays on the Politics of a West African Republic (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1976), 40.

39 Apologies to Dr. Emmett L. Brown.

40 Kofi Baako, qtd. in P. A. V. Ansah, “Kwame Nkrumah and the Mass Media.” in Life and Work of Kwame Nkrumah: Papers of a Symposium Organized by the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, Legon, ed. Kwame Arhin (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1993), 89.

41 Kwesi Yankah, Language, the Mass Media and Democracy in Ghana (Accra: Ghana Academy of Arts and Sciences, 2004), 6. Conversations with Yankah were helpful on points throughout this section.

42 Ayi Kwei Armah, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (Oxford: Heinemann, 1988), 127.

43 Wole Soyinka, Kongi’s Harvest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 1, 2.

44 David Killingray, “Soldiers, Ex-Servicemen, and Politics in the Gold Coast, 1939–1950,” Journal of Modern African Studies 21, no. 3 (1983): 523–34.

45 Carola Lentz and Jan Budniok, “Ghana@50: Celebrating the Nation: An Account from Accra,” Africa Spectrum 42, no. 3 (2007): 531–41.

46 Nkrumah’s most sustained statement on necolonialism is Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (London: Heinemann, 1965).

47 John Parker and Richard Rathbone, African History: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 17–19.

48 Nkrumah, I Speak of Freedom, 67.

49 George Padmore, The Gold Coast Revolution: The Struggle of an African People from Slavery to Freedom (London: Dobson, 1953), 67.

50 Victor Turner, From Ritual to Theatre: The Human Seriousness of Play (New York: PAJ Publications, 1982), 44 original emphases.

51 Ibid., 44–45, 44.