NKRUMAH IN THE SCALE OF HISTORY

Monday September 21, 2009

Exactly 100 years ago, a child was born to a goldsmith and a fish monger in a Western Region town of Nkroful.

He lived an ordinary life; it is even said that to travel overseas for higher education, he had to go as a stow-away.

The accounts differ as to what inspired his later course of life as a Pan Africanist. It was in giving expression to this passion that his path crossed that of Ako Adjei.

As narrated by one of our resource persons for the production of today’s Ghanaian Times Centenary Special, young Ako Adjei loved Nkrumah so much that he walked the streets of London with him looking for accommodation, not for the two of them, but for Nkrumah.

As is now widely known by most Ghanaians, it was the self-same Ako Adjei who convinced the leaders of the UGCC to invite Nkrumah to become General Secretary of the party. The rest is history.

Whatever may have dictated the path of Nkrumah, the final story has now been told: he is Africa’s Man of the Millennium, beating the living legend, the most revered Nelson Mandela to second place in a world wide poll conducted by the British Broadcasting Corporation.

The story of Nkrumah, as told by his admirers, gets to the point where it takes on the hue of a fairy tale. So huge was his personality, he was the colossus, towering above all else.

His seven-year programme to transform Ghana into an industrialised country could not have belonged to that age.

In a word, it was awesome. All of it was to prove one point: that the African was capable of conducting his own affairs.

The story of Nkrumah, as told by his enemies, makes him into something far less human than a monster.

But the Times believes that since no man has ever been without blemish, and since some of the measures he took were to ensure his own security, the man still goes into history as the most controversial African leader that ever lived.

To execute the agenda of “industrializing at breakneck speed”, he earned for himself enemies even among his closest friends.

For a man who was ahead of his time by no less than 50 years; whose projections meant Africa would be self-sufficient, and who would do anything for African Unity – all of which translates into less dependence on Europe and North America, Kwame Nkrumah earned too many enemies, some of them powerful enough to ensure he ceased to exist.

Generations later have come to understand that his fight for African unity was not just a romantic aspiration; it was to ensure that goods produced in Africa had a market within Africa, so that no power could dictate prices for our products, and also so that African factories would be perpetually in motion, producing goods which have a guaranteed market – in Africa.

For this dream, and for this fight, he had to be eliminated. With the attempted coups failing, when they dropped bombs here and there, he had to act like the human being that he was – in self-defence.

This editorial piece is no apology for Preventive Detention Act; all we are trying to do today is to situate the Act within the historicity of the context.

This is important because many many years later, when other leaders in Ghana found their lives in danger, the law shifted in emphasis from “Preventive” to “Protective” Detention Act.

In conclusion, the Times is praying that Ghanaians would judge Nkrumah as a human being who had his faults but who, placed on a scale, tilted it in his favour.

He remains the African leader whose like the world has not seen before or after.

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