Nkrumah and the Pan-African Nation: Transnational Politics in Decolonization-Era Ghana

In March 1957, the relatively small West African state of Ghana attained its independence, making it the first sub-Saharan state to emerge from colonial rule.  At the country’s independence celebrations, the nascent nation’s Prime Minister—Kwame Nkrumah—sought to challenge an international community shaped by the experience of colonial exploitation as he used the occasion to outline a program of radical pan-African liberation and global socialist development.  By the end of 1958, Nkrumah’s commitment to this program had resulted in supra-territorial federations with Guinea-Conakry and later Mali, while at home Nkrumah and his Convention People’s Party (CPP) presented the emergent nation as a model for a new form of modern, disciplined, and continental citizenship.  This paper traces the transnational linkages framed by the Nkrumah government’s pan-African and socialist project on the continent and in mid-century Ghana.  Emerging out of the social scientific scholarship of the 1950s and early 1960s, the study of Nkrumah’s Ghana, like that of much of the rest of decolonization-era Africa, has tended to dismiss the transnational and international networks and postcolonial imaginings formed through the struggles for continental self-determination, favoring instead a scholarship rooted in the political and institutional mechanics of the territorial nation-state.  This paper challenges this scholarship as it presents the pan-African vision of Nkrumah’s Ghana as a wide-ranging arena for political and social experimentation in late colonial and early postcolonial Africa. For, recognizing the fluidity of this unique moment in Africa’s recent past, Ghanaians and non-Ghanaians alike co-opted and embedded within the internationalist agenda of the Nkrumahist state grassroots debates over everything from family and work in an independent Africa to the moral authority of the postcolonial state in an international community increasingly defined by global Cold War politics.