Tensions, Ambiguities, and Connectivity in Kwame Nkrumah: Rethinking the “National” in Postcolonial Nationalism

Abstract

This essay interrogates the value of reading postcolonial state projects through the lens of nationalism rather than local–transnational connectivities. Mainstream scholarship on Kwame Nkrumah, in particular, continues to overemphasize his narrow nationalism, adherence to imported “alien” ideas, and the “failures” of his state interventionist project in Ghana. As a point of departure, I argue for an alternative reading of Nkrumah within a decolonial context that centres on the tensions, ambiguities, and connectivities of his thought and action. How did Nkrumah reconcile his positionality as a “colonial student” and the selective appropriation of Marxism/socialism with his Africentric ontology of non-atheistic materialism a propos philosophical consciencism? And how does this ontology ground his politics and differ from Marxism? Further, how did Nkrumah confront the economic realities of postcolonial development and why did he integrate features of capitalism to combat neocolonialism? In conjunction with these questions, the tensions within Nkrumah’s promotion of national and continental consciousness and conception of African nationalism with Pan-Africanism is explored. Nkrumah’s navigation of these tensions reveals his thought to be a dynamic self-reflexive “living” Africentric decolonial praxis. As decolonial theorist, Nkrumah’s national imaginary for Ghana was not “national” but, rather, entwined within transnational networks of solidarity and struggle.

• anticolonialism
• decolonization
• development
• nationalism
• Pan-Africanism
• revolution

Notes

1 There is debate over whether to use Afrocentrism or Africentrism. I have chosen to use Africentrism. As Boadi (2000) argues, the term evokes historical connections to cosmologies and cultures that reorient contemporary knowledge production away from European origins to the anteriority of “Africa”.