Kwame Nkrumah

Kwame Nkrumah (September 21, 1909 - April 27, 1972) was a Ghanaian politician, political theorist, and revolutionary. He was the first Prime Minister and President of Ghana following Ghana's independence from the United Kingdom in 1957. He was an advocate of pan-Africanism and a founding member of the Organization of African Unity, predecessor of the African Union. In 1962, Nkrumah was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize by the Soviet Union.

The CIA organized a coup against Nkrumah on 24 February 1966. According to a March 12, 1966 memorandum to U.S. President Johnson from U.S. security adviser Robert Komer commenting on the coup, "Nkrumah was doing more to undermine our interests than any other black African. In reaction to his strongly pro-Communist leanings, the new military regime is almost pathetically pro-Western." Komer goes on to urge the President to express "pleasure" at the coups in Ghana and Indonesia when speaking to the Secretary of State Dean Rusk, and to make it clear that "we ought to exploit such successes as quickly and as skillfully as possible" and suggests giving the regimes a small gift of surplus grain, stressing that a small rather than lavish gift will have a "psychological" effect to "whet their appetite" and enable the prospect of getting more to create leverage for the United States.

After the coup, Nkrumah lived in exile in Conakry, Guinea. He passed away from cancer in 1972.

Works

Nkrumah is the author of Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (1965), as well as various other works, including Towards Colonial Freedom (1957), Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah (1957), I Speak of Freedom (1961), Africa Must Unite (1964), Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for Decolonisation (1964), Challenge of the Congo (1967), and Dark Days in Ghana (1968).

Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism

Kwame's 1965 work, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism discusses how neo-colonialism has become the main instrument of imperialism, in place of the overt colonialism of the past, which he explains is in a period of decline. Throughout the work, Nkrumah outlines the mechanisms of neo-colonialism while also listing numerous contemporary points of supporting evidence and providing commentary. In the early chapters of the book, he also sets out an argument for African unity and its potential for destroying neo-colonialism in Africa, and notes in the book's conclusion that the foreign capitalists who exploit Africa's resources "long ago saw the strength to be gained from acting on a Pan-African scale" and that "the only way to challenge this economic empire and to recover possession of our heritage, is for us also to act on a Pan-African basis, through a Union Government."

In the work's introduction, Nkrumah describes the essence of neo-colonialism, stating: "The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty. In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside." In other words, while a state may appear to have independence in an official sense, it remains under the domination of imperialist power, primarily via imperialist control and supervision of the subjected country's economic system.

The work's introduction also describes the result of neo-colonialism, stating that the result of neo-colonialism is that "foreign capital is used for the exploitation rather than for the development of the less developed parts of the world. Investment under neo-colonialism increases rather than decreases the gap between the rich and the poor countries of the world."

According to Nkrumah, outside direction of the state by imperialist powers can be manifested in various forms:

The methods and form of this direction can take various shapes. For example, in an extreme case the troops of the imperial power may garrison the territory of the neo-colonial State and control the government of it. More often, however, neo-colonialist control is exercised through economic or monetary means. The neo-colonial State may be obliged to take the manufactured products of the imperialist power to the exclusion of competing products from elsewhere. Control over government policy in the neo-colonial State may be secured by payments towards the cost of running the State, by the provision of civil servants in positions where they can dictate policy, and by monetary control over foreign exchange through the imposition of a banking system controlled by the imperial power. [...] It is possible that neo-colonial control may be exercised by a consortium of financial interests which are not specifically identifiable with any particular State.

Toward the end of the work, Nkrumah lists several advances in the anti-imperial struggle at the time of writing, and asserts his view that neo-colonialism is "not a sign of imperialism’s strength but rather of its last hideous gasp. It testifies to its inability to rule any longer by old methods. Independence is a luxury it can no longer afford to permit its subject peoples, so that even what it claims to have ‘given’ it now seeks to take away." He then states that neo-colonialism "can and will" be defeated, stating that in the face of imperialism's divide-and-conquer strategy, "unity is the first requisite for destroying neo-colonialism." He clarifies this assertion by declaring the need for an all-union government for the continent of Africa, a strengthening of the Afro-Asian Solidarity Organisation, and seeking increasingly formal adherence to said solidarity organization in Latin America. As a final point, Nkrumah adds that "we must encourage and utilise to the full those still all too few yet growing instances of support for liberation and anti-colonialism inside the imperialist world itself." In order to achieve these factors, Nkrumah explains that national development and strengthened independence through political neutrality, or non-alignment, is key.

Finally, Nkrumah stresses the importance of political consciousness raising among the masses, stating that "the preconditions for all this, to which lip service is often paid but activity seldom directed, is to develop ideological clarity among the anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist, pro-liberation masses of our continents. They, and they alone, make, maintain or break revolutions." Nkrumah then lists progress made in this regard in Africa at the time of writing, and states: "Bolstered with ideological clarity, these organisations, closely linked with the ruling parties where liberatory forces are in power, will prove that neo-colonialism is the symptom of imperialism’s weakness and that it is defeatable. For, when all is said and done, it is the so-called little man, the bent-backed, exploited, malnourished, blood-covered fighter for independence who decides. And he invariably decides for freedom."

The mechanisms of neo-colonialism

Specific examples of neo-colonial financial institutions given in the chapter "The mechanisms of neo-colonialism" include the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the World Bank, the International Finance Corporation and the International Development Association. Nkrumah refers to the IMF as part of a "neo-colonialist trap" which uses the guise of "multilateral aid" to take a dominating role over subjected countries by "forcing would-be borrowers to submit to various offensive conditions, such as supplying information about their economies, submitting their policy and plans to review by the World Bank and accepting agency supervision of their use of loans."

In the same chapter, Nkrumah also notes the difference in aid and loan behavior between socialist countries and the West, mentioning that although aid from socialist countries may fall short of that offered from the West, it is often "more impressive, since it is swift and flexible, and interest rates on communist loans are only about two per cent compared with five to six per cent charged on loans from western countries."

Outside of the economic sphere, Nkrumah also comments on other venues through which neo-colonial dominance is perpetuated. Outright coups d'etat and political assassinations represent some of the most overt methods of neo-colonialism which co-exist along with other methods of maintaining neo-colonial dominance. Among the other methods listed are military presence in the subjected state by the former colonial power, special legal privileges demanded by former colonial powers (such as land concessions and prospecting rights for minerals and oil), dominance of information services by Western countries and exclusion of socialist information services, anti-liberation messages perpetuated through entertainment emanating from imperial centers, monopoly of news media, religious evangelism, and psychological warfare and subversion via organizations such as the CIA, the Peace Corps, and the United States Information Agency (USIA).

Commenting specifically on the pernicious influence of imperialist ideology embedded within Hollywood films, Nkrumah writes:

Even the cinema stories of fabulous Hollywood are loaded. One has only to listen to the cheers of an African audience as Hollywood’s heroes slaughter red Indians or Asiatics to understand the effectiveness of this weapon. For, in the developing continents, where the colonialist heritage has left a vast majority still illiterate, even the smallest child gets the message contained in the blood and thunder stories emanating from California. And along with murder and the Wild West goes an incessant barrage of anti-socialist propaganda, in which the trade union man, the revolutionary, or the man of dark skin is generally cast as the villain, while the policeman, the gum-shoe, the Federal agent — in a word, the CIA — type spy is ever the hero. Here, truly, is the ideological under-belly of those political murders which so often use local people as their instruments.

On the topic of the monopoly of news media, Nkrumah writes: "Within separate countries, one or two news agencies control the news handouts, so that a deadly uniformity is achieved, regardless of the number of separate newspapers or magazines" and that internationally, "a flood of anti-liberation propaganda emanates from the capital cities of the West, directed against China, Vietnam, Indonesia, Algeria, Ghana and all countries which hack out their own independent path to freedom." Regarding activities of the United States Information Agency (USIA) at the time of writing, Nkrumah explains that in Africa alone, the USIA transmitted about thirty territorial and national radio programs "whose content glorifies the U.S. while attempting to discredit countries with an independent foreign policy." He further explains:

The USIA boasts more than 120 branches in about 100 countries, 50 of which are in Africa alone. It has 250 centres in foreign countries, each of which is usually associated with a library. It employs about 200 cinemas and 8,000 projectors which draw upon its nearly 300 film libraries.

This agency is directed by a central body which operates in the name of the U.S. President, planning and coordinating its activities in close touch with the Pentagon, CIA and other Cold War agencies, including even armed forces intelligence centres.

In developing countries, the USIA actively tries to prevent expansion of national media of information so as itself to capture the market-place of ideas. It spends huge sums for publication and distribution of about sixty newspapers and magazines in Africa, Asia and Latin America.

The American government backs the USIA through direct pressures on developing nations. To ensure its agency a complete monopoly in propaganda, for instance, many agreements for economic co-operation offered by the U.S. include a demand that Americans be granted preferential rights to disseminate information. At the same time, in trying to close the new nations to other sources of information, it employs other pressures. For instance, after agreeing to set up USIA information centres in their countries, both Togo and Congo (Leopoldville) originally hoped to follow a non-aligned path and permit Russian information centres as a balance. But Washington threatened to stop all aid, thereby forcing these two countries to renounce their plan.

Nkrumah also describes the "virtually unlimited" finances of USIA, which results in extensive subversive activities, including the collection of intelligence, recruitment of informers, purchasing of space in local publications to influence their policies, bribing of public figures, and supplying of weapons to anti-neutralist forces in developing countries:

Some USIA duties further expose its nature as a top intelligence arm of the U.S. imperialists. In the first place, it is expected to analyse the situation in each country, making recommendations to its Embassy, thereby to its Government, about changes that can tip the local balance in U.S. favour. Secondly, it organises networks of monitors for radio broadcasts and telephone conversations, while recruiting informers from government offices. It also hires people to distribute U.S. propaganda. Thirdly, it collects secret information with special reference to defence and economy, as a means of eliminating its international military and economic competitors. Fourthly, it buys its way into local publications to influence their policies, of which Latin America furnishes numerous examples. It has been active in bribing public figures, for example in Kenya and Tunisia. Finally, it finances, directs and often supplies with arms all anti-neutralist forces in the developing countries, witness Tshombe in Congo (Leopoldville) and Pak Hung Ji in South Korea. In a word, with virtually unlimited finances, there seems no bounds to its inventiveness in subversion.