Review: Implicit Ideology in Africa: A Review of Books by Kwame Nkrumah

Author(s): Immanuel Wallerstein

Reviewed work(s):
Towards Colonial Freedom by Kwame Nkrumah
Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah by Kwame Nkrumah
I Speak of Freedom by Kwame Nkrumah
Africa Must Unite by Kwame Nkrumah
Consciencism by Kwame Nkrumah
...
Source: The Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 11, No. 4 (Dec., 1967), pp. 518-522
Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/173156
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Implicit ieoinology Africa: a review
of books by Kwame Nkrumah

Towards Colonial Freedom

London: Heinemann, 1962 (first edition 1957). Pp. 45.

Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah

Edinburgh: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1957. Pp. 310.
I Speak of Freedom
New York: Praeger, 1961. Pp. 291. $4.95.

Africa Must Unite

New York: Praeger, 1964. Pp. 229. $5.95.

Consciencism
London: Heinemann, 1964. Pp. 122.

Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism

New York: International Publishers, 1966 (first published 1965). Pp. 304. $7.50.

Challenge of the Congo

New York: InternationalPublishers, 1967. Pp. 304. $7.50.
IMMANUEL WALLERSTEIN
Department of Sociology, Columbia Universitt

There is a paragraph in Nkrumah's based on collective experience which affects

Consciencism which refers to psychoanalysis
and which concludes (p. 58): "Thus,
according to Freud, all our experiences are
stored up, and they affect our overt behav-
iour even if we have no conscious memory
of the experiences themselves." Nkrumah
then proceeds: "Just as a morality guides
and seeks to correct the actions of millions
of persons, so an ideology aims at uniting
the actions of millions towards specific and
definite goals, not withstanding that an
ideology can be largely implicit" (italics
added). The implicit ideology is presum-
ably, by analogy to Freud, a construct
overt behavior even if it is not conscious.
If Kwame Nkrumah has had a wide
appeal to some African nationalists for over
fifteen years (and is equally repugnant to
some other Africans), it is because his
reasoning has been rooted in an implicit
ideology which is widespread in contempo-
rary Africa (but not only there) and which
is the reflection (accurate or distorted,
according to opposing observers) of Africa's
collective experience.
For a politician, Nkrumah has been a
busy author and his corpus-no doubt un-
finished-has presented over all a consistent

CONFLICT RESOLUTION VOLUMIE XI NUM/BER 4

DISCUSSIONS AND REVIEWS
point of view.' No doubt his thinking has
developed over the years in response to the
evolution of African and world politics. But
his basic view of man in the modern world
has been steady.
Nkrumah starts with the assumption that
the world -is one of differing interests in
conflict with each other, in necessary con-
flict with each other. The frontispiece of
his very first book (Towards Colonial Free-
dom, p. vii) includes quotations from Maz-
zini and Wilhelm Liebknecht. The one by
Mazzini reads in part: "Every true revolu-
tion is a programme; . . . The first thing is
to accept that principle." The one by Lieb-
knecht adds in cadence: "To negotiate with
forces that are hostile on matters of prin-
ciple means to sacrifice principle itself."
The basic struggle with which Nkrumah
is concerned is the one between colonized
and colonizers, and subsequently between
underdeveloped nations (largely formerly
colonized ones) and developed nations
(largely the former colonizers plus the
United States of America). Nkrumah "pos-
tulates as inevitable" the determination of
colonial peoples "to end the political and
economic power of colonial governments"
(ibid., p. xiii). He also postulates as inevit-
able a resistance to this determination. "The
imperialist powers will never give up their
political and economic dominance over their
colonies until they are compelled to do so."2
1There has been much attack recently on
Nkrumah'scredentials as an author. Many have
charged that he did not write much of what
appears under his name. While the truth of
this accusation might be very relevant to a
biographical assessment of Nkrumah, its deter-
mination is of virtually no concern for a con-
sideration of the contents of the arguments
found therein, particularlyinsofar as they reflect
an "implicit" ideology.
2
Ibid., p. 38. And, even stronger: "Imperial-
ism knows no laws beyond its own interests"
(ibid., p. xiv).
519
This is no easy task. "When a colonialist
country sees the advance of positive action,
it unfailingly develops a policy of contain-
ment, a policy whereby it seeks to check
this advance and contain it."3 Similarly,
he argues that "It is unreasonable to suppose
that any foreign power, affluent enough to
give aid to an African state, would not
expect some measure of consideration of
favour from the state receiving the aid"
(I Speak of Freedom, pp. ix-x; italics
added).
The inevitable conflict need not always
be fought by violent means. This is a ques-
tion of "tactical action." For example, he
records his early skepticism of Gandhi's
views of nonviolence. He thought them
"utterly feeble and without hope of success."
But after study, he "began to see that, when
backed by a strong political organization,
it could be the solution to the colonial
problem" (Ghana, p. viii). While Nkrumah
found such tactics useful in the period
1948-57 in the struggle for the indepen-
dence of the Gold Coast (Ghana), the
tactical situation subsequently changed. As
of 1966, he wrote: "The movement for total
liberation from imperialism and neo-colo-
nialism is entering a new phase, the phase
of an All-African Peoples' Revolutionary
armed struggle" (Challenge, p. xi).
Although Nkrumah's ideas are often and
explicitly consonant with traditional Marxist
and Leninist analyses, his view of the class
struggle is a particular one (if no longer
an unusual one). He scarcely ever refers
to the central nineteenth-century image of
3 Consciencism, p. 101. Nkrumah previously
defined "positive action" as "the sum of those
forces seeking social justice in terms of the
destruction of oligarchic exploitation and op-
pression" (ibid., p. 99). Positive action is the
slogan Nkrumah had given to militant but
nonviolent tactics used during the nationalist
struggle in the Gold Coast.
520
the class struggle, the factory worker versus
the capitalist industrialist. Rather it is in
terms of a world-wide conflict. European
class conflicts are analyzed within this
context. "The tribute drawn off by way of
colonial and semi-colonial exploitation en-
abled the capitalist classes of the metro-
politan countries to pass some of the crumbs
to their working classes and thereby buy
them off (especially the trade union and
political leaders) when the class conflicts
in their countries got critical" (Neo-
Colonialism, p. 39).
Nkrumah goes further. He asserts that the
strength of capitalism in developed coun-
tries today is specifically the consequence
of sacrificing the basic principles of early
capitalism: subjugation of the working class
and no state role in capitalist enterprise.
"By . . . substituting for [these principles]
'welfare states' based on high working-class
living standards and on a State-regulated
capitalism at home, the developed countries
succeeded in exporting their internal prob-
lem and transferring the conflict between
rich and poor from the national to the
international stage" (Neo-Colonialism, p.
255).
Nkrumah asserts he is an economic deter-
minist, albeit with some nuances. He uses
as a frontispiece to Consciencism (p. vi)
the famous letter of Engels to Bloch in
which the adjective "ultimately" is placed
before "determining element in history."
But although "the basis of colonial territo-
rial dependence is economic, . . . the basis
of the solution of the problem is political."4
His analysis of the obstacles to economic
4 Towards Colonial Freedom,
p. xv. There
is a virtually identical statement in Conscien-
cism (pp. 98-99) in which Nkrumah adds that
"emancipation [is] an indispensable first step
towards securing economic independence and
integrity."
CONFLICT RESOLUTION VOLUME
IMMANUEL WALLERSTEIN
development of Africa, therefore, always
concentrates on the political difficulties to
overcome. The strictly economic side is
presumed to pose only technical problems
which the underlying technological opti-
mism of this implicit ideology assumes to
be minor.
The major political weapon of the capital-
ist-imperialists is the false consciousness of
the oppressed. The principal means by
which false consciousness is imbued is
reform, or more exactly what Nkrumah
calls capitalism's "characteristic pompous
plans for niggardly reforms" (Consciencism,
p. 72). Reform is but a "lesser degree of
subjection" (p. 72), and a "tactic of self-
preservation" (p. 74). By means of it,
"psychological irritants to revolution are
appeased, and exploitation finds a new
lease on life . . ." (p. 72).
The tactics of those in power vary
according to the circumstances. During the
colonial period, the authorities enforced the
migratory quality of the urban labor force
in order to "prevent the formation of . . .
a class-conscious group," returning them
each year to their villages, "where capitalist
exploitation is indirectly exercised through
corrupted 'warrant' chiefs and a politically
sold intelligentsia," thus aborting "condi-
tions for mass organization" (Towards
Colonial Freedom, p. 15).
Once the nationalist movement is
launched, "imperialism . . . will employ
many feints. With one hand it may concede
independence, while with the other, it will
stir up the muddy waters of tribalism,
feudalism, separatism and chicanery in
order to find its way back in another
guise."5
The contemporary danger facing Africa
is summed up in the concept of neo-
5Speech to the United Nations in 1961 on
the Congo, cited in I Speak of Freedom, p. 254.
XI NUMBER 4
DISCUSSIONS AND REVIEWS
colonialism. "The greatest danger at present
facing Africa is neo-colonialism and its
major instrument, balkanization" (Africa
Must Unite, p. 173). Indeed, it is a greater
danger than had been colonialism. "Colo-
nialism is crude, essentially overt, and apt
to be overcome by a purposeful concert of
national effort. In neo-colonialism, how-
ever, the people are divided from their
leaders, and . . . leaders . . . incautiously
become instruments of suppression on be-
half of the neo-colonialists" (Consciencism,
p. 102).
Nkrumah devotes a whole book to ex-
pounding the nature of neo-colonialism,
whose essence is that a state "is, in theory,
independent . . . [but] in reality its eco-
nomic system and thus its political policy
is directed from outside" (Neo-Colonialism,
p. xi). The book seeks to document the
existence of this system by demonstrating
the extent of foreign capitalist investment
in Africa, the degree to which there are
interlocking directorates among major firms,
the hindrances to intra-African trade that
exist, and the pricing policies of interna-
tional trading systems.
The mechanisms which maintain this
system are political measures which retard
or divert consciousness of it. In particular,
military coups can be inspired not only in
countries "challenging the system" when
they become too obnoxious, but also in
"neo-colonialist territories" when social re-
volt brews. In this latter instance, the
"local neo-colonialist goverment [is] sacri-
ficed and another equally subservient one
substituted in its place" (Neo-Colonialism,
p. xiv).
The enemy is thus evident. The issue is
how to combat him. There is a clear sense
throughout this ideology of what might be
called territorialism. That is to say, despite
the emphasis on class-consciousness and
521
transnational linkages, the protagonists in
the world struggle are nations, rich and
poor. Nkrumah celebrates the great advance
of the Fifth Pan-African Congress in 1945
from black nationalism to African national-
ism (see Ghana, pp. 53-54). But the
nation of course need not be the sovereign
state as presently defined in the world
system. As is well known, Nkrumah calls
for the establishment of a pan-African state.
To emphasize the nonracial basis of this
state (for were it racial solidarity, it would
be a nonterritorial solidarity), Nkrumah
insists that the object is "continental govern-
ment for Africa" (see Africa Must Unite,
ch. xxi). He warns against the "tendency
to divide Africa into fictitious zones north
and south of the Sahara which emphasizes
racial, religious and cultural differences"
(ibid., p. 188). Similarly, in the realm of
cultural self-assertion, he speaks not of
negritude but of an "African personality"
(I Speak of Freedom, p. 98).
The oppression is one nation over an-
other. And the present disparity of power
is so great (and growing greater) that,
"unless we unite and deal with neo-colonial-
ism on a Pan-African basis, they will con-
tinue to try to undermine our independence,
and draw us again into spheres of influence
comparable to the original carve-up of
Africa arranged at the Berlin Conference of
1884."6
Ideologies that presume inevitable proc-
esses are almost invariably optimistic about
the ultimate triumph of good. This implicit
ideology is, however, less optimistic in the
short run. Nkrumah makes it very clear
that "in any territory, liberation can be won
o Challenge of the Congo, p. x. It is for this
reason that Nkrumah argues that "Ghana'sfree-
dom would be meaningless if it was not linked
with the total liberation of the entire continent
of Africa" (I Speak of Freedom, p. 133).
522
or lost" (Consciencism, p. 110; italics
added). To be sure, "neo-colonialism is a
millstone around the necks of the developed
countries that practice it" (Neo-Colonialism,
p. xvi), but this is only guaranteed by
making the costs of the operation even
higher for the beneficiaries, which involves
overcoming the false consciousness of the
oppressed.
As can be readily seen, this implicit
ideology is a simple one in the sense that
it has relatively few variables and their
relations are clearly portrayed. It does not
follow that there is a clear-cut course of
action which derives from this ideology.
Politicians who accept this ideology (not
always avowing it) have come up with
quite different strategies. Indeed, Nkru-
mah's own tactics over his years of political
power varied widely.
Nor is it argued that this ideology is
unique or original. It bears many resem-
CONFLICT RESOLUTION VOLU M E XI
IMMANUEL WALLERSTEIN
blances to ideologies extant in contemporary
Asia and Latin America and in nineteenth-
century Europe.
What is clear is that we have here a
view of the world that affords an explana-
tion of a large portion of empirical reality
in contemporary Africa, and consequently
has deep roots. How widespread an implicit
ideology is can only be measured by in-
ferring how much of men's actions can be
more easily explained if we assume they
act on this set of ideas, whether consciously
or not. My own guess is that this ideology
underlines the thinking of a very large
portion of the intelligentsia of contemporary
Africa. This does not mean they are all
or even for the most part active revolution-
aries. It does mean they view the existing
world system with discontent and will give
vent to this discontent, to the extent that
conditions permit them to do so.
NUM [BER 4