Nkrumah and the Crowd: Mass Politics in Emergent Ghana

Abstract

This article analyzes Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah, which was published to coincide with Ghana’s independence on March 6, 1957. Whereas the political and social imagination of the Anglo-American world during the postwar years was riddled with anxieties concerning the masses, the crowd scenes of Nkrumah’s Ghana elaborate the characteristics of a political community centered on mass society. The article concludes by noting the possibility of a mass civic art culled from the rhetorical tradition of Ghana.

Notes

1. As with nearly all of Nkrumah’s written works, Ghana’s authorship is of questionable provenance. Nkrumah’s (1957) opening Acknowledgment states that he dictated the text to his personal secretary, Erica Powell, in his spare time. For her part, Powell (1984) was likely being modest when she later wrote in her memoir that she encouraged Nkrumah to write his own book and that she was there to help “piece together the bits of scattered mosaic” (82–83). Most observers give Powell greater attribution for writing the book. David Birmingham’s (1998) biography of Nkrumah, for example, plainly states that Powell “was responsible for writing his biography” (37, 124). Philip Holden’s (2004) analysis supports that claim, noting that Powell read and corrected Birmingham’s original 1990 manuscript and did not see fit to redact his assertions that she was the primary author (16n7).

2. Within communication studies, Peter Simonson’s (2010) Refiguring Mass Communication provides a helpful disambiguation of the various senses embedded in mass (20–24; see also Williams 1983, 297–298; Williams 1985, 196).

3. This pronouncement of communication as valid only when one can speak back participates in the moral and normative elevation of dialogic forms of communication—what John Durham Peters (1999) calls dialogism, the “faith that conversation leads to mutual clarification” and the corresponding “vision of democracy through dialogue” (66, 22).

4. Paddy Scannell takes the “discovery of ‘people’” quotation from the introduction to Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarfeld’s (1955) Personal Influence. C. Wright Mills was involved in the fieldwork of the so-called “Decatur study” that provided a bulk of the primary data that Personal Influence relied upon (Scannell 2007, 84–90).

5. Josiah Ober’s (1989) study of the democratic culture established between masses and elites in the Athenian polis of antiquity offers a refreshing counterstatement to worries of oligarchical capture. In addition, sociology’s emergence as a discipline was centered on an interest in mass society (Borch 2012). I invite feedback providing additional examples of minor strands of Western political thought in which the mass has a favored place.

6. Nkrumah’s account of this moment is under debate. The British governor of the Gold Coast, Sir Charles Arden-Clarke, told Erica Powell that Nkrumah’s release was kept secret so that no crowd could gather and that photos of the event that exist were staged afterward (Powell 1984, 91–93). David Birmingham’s (1998) biography of Nkrumah noted that while Arden-Clarke “sincerely believed his own version of the event,” most biographers side with Nkrumah’s account (36–37). Perhaps most interesting about Birmingham’s comments, however, is his observation that, with Powell as the likely ghostwriter of Ghana, both versions of the story actually come to us from her. Komla Gbedemah was a close confidant of Nkrumah’s in the CPP who oversaw the election campaign while Nkrumah was imprisoned.

7. Interestingly, remember that although Nkrumah was overwhelmed by the expectation of greeting the mass at his prison release, he had no difficulty in his interpersonal interaction with Komla Gbedemah, his lieutenant in the CPP (Nkrumah 1957, 135). Different subject positions entail different forms of address and reception.

8. This image is from Nkrumah’s July 10, 1953, “Motion of Destiny” speech, which is excerpted at length in Ghana. In the prison correspondence that Nkrumah snuck out to fellow leaders in the CPP during his detention, he encouraged them to continue their efforts and not “under any circumstances leave the country in the midst of a stream; we must ferry it over, yes, over the shore” (qtd. in Holden 2004, 324–325).

9. The most widespread record for parliamentary speech is the Hansard, a near-verbatim system of transcription that is used around the world in parliaments modeled upon the Westminster system.

10. The Akan are centered around portions of Ghana’s southern coast and forested central region, spreading west across the border with the Côte d’Ivoire.

11. Dwamu also means “market,” which lends dwamu kasa the added sense of being “market talk.” This translation connotes the speech practices that are alive within public marketplaces, where the petty traders and common Africans who made up the base of the CPP trade gossip (nsekuo) and chatter (nkɔmmɔbo), and even engage in storytelling (anansesϵm). These informal folk and vernacular practices of “market talk” contrast with the highly routinized devices that make up the conventions of “palace talk” (ahenfie kasa) and Akan royal speech circuits.