1

The educated Africans feel, and they have been trained to believe that they are brands from the burning. It is almost impossible that such persons can be sympathetic with their own past, a past which after all few of them have really known, seen or clearly understand. (Rattray in Apter, 1963:146)

Africans! Our destiny is largely in our hands. If we find, we shall have to seek. If we succeed in the
race of life it must be by our own energies and our own exertions. Others may clear the road but we must go forward, or be left behind in the race of life. If we remain poor and dependent, the riches of other men will not avail us. If we are ignorant, the intelligence of other men will do but little for us. If we are foolish, the wisdom of other men will not guide us. If we are wasteful of time and money, the economy of other men will only make our destitution the more disgraceful and hurtful. Frederick Douglas

INTRODUCTION The Problem

The term Third World is not a reality but an ideology. Hannah Arendt

AFRICA, the Dark World, the Jungle, the Dark Continent, the underdeveloped, the
developing, the poor, the undeveloped, the Wretched of the Earth, the no-mans land. Its peoples -- backward, ignorant, uncivilized, barbaric, savage, and godless heathens, and the white mans burden (Schreader, 2000: 94). These are some of the most popular appellations of the Continent that remains the question mark on the globe. Quel dommage! To the European, and maybe until only yesteryear the history of Africa began with David Livingstone, just as that of America began with Christopher Columbus. Anyway, historians have long observed the changes in human existence and have labelled it Revolution. They, like Victor Hugo, believe that revolution is the larva of civilization. And that a revolution begins in a person. The theme of this essay, in retrospective, is the Revolution that was not, and the obvious implication is a bit unsavoury. History is passing Africa by. Africa is the last continent of the Third World to come to independence. She is the deepest sunk in political and socio-economic backwardness. She has the most appalling problems and yet revels in the most effusive optimism. If anything, to my best knowledge, for the most part she is wallowing in an endless web of misery and despair. It is a continent of mass poverty but the obsession of the ruling groups is with

2 luxuries and/or petit power plays. The leaders who came to power mouthing the rhetoric of change faced the critical poverty of their countries with frivolity and fickleness (First, 1972: 9). Those who are convinced that the Africans are unfit to rule themselves, that the empire opted out of Africa too quickly and that the continent was bound to go back into decline after the premature granting of independence, only succeeded in muddling the issue. The colonial era was a period of swindle and cupidity and these, any theory of conspiracy will reveal to the enquiring discerning eye. In Marxian analysis, the Great Depression of 1929 should have triggered a war of liberation for the colonised people everywhere. When the opportunity was aborted, however, the imperialists decided not to be caught napping, especially not in the shadow of their Nemesis, Communism. They decided to disengage coolly, and cunningly transferred power to stooges and collaborators who were to perpetuate the horrors and depredations of their masters. It is not only fitting but also therapeutic to give African politics a pitiless and frank analysis. Such a frank analysis will help us understand the position and behaviour of these countries in International Relations. Are they pretending in the international arena, or are they wholly integrated into it? For the purpose of analysis, the institutions and instruments of government the imperialists handed their colonies at independence, defies description, from the point of view of constitutional history. The net effect was the creation of little de Gaules, little King Leopolds and the replicas of Westminster on a continent as ravaged as its mosaic appearance would allow. The supposition that the colonial period was a period of tutelage of barbarous Africans by the civilised West is highly flawed and objectionable. It is an uncomfortable naivet. The haste with which the imperialists engaged and disengaged belies this assertion. In the words of Sir Andrew Cohen, a former colonial governor and former head of the British Colonial Office, the debauchery was planned and expedited out of premonitions of a debacle. Britain needed a new colonial policy for Africa. She should recognize that successful cooperation with nationalism was the greatest bulwark against Communism. The transfer of colonial power need not be a defeat but a strengthening of the Commonwealth and the Free World (First, 1972:42). COMMENTS ON METHODOLOGY This thesis will proceed within the context of a redefinition and challenging of theories and assumptions in view of the dyadic nature of the analysis. The key questions that guides this study can be grouped under four main headings:

3 1) Socio-political modernization and socio- political belief of the notion or law of inevitable progress). 2) The traditional web of social existence and societal order. What types of socio-political institutions existed in pre-colonial Africa? 3) The transfer of power in colonial Africa how was power transferred from the British colonial governors to African elites? 4) Is there any ideology -- intellectual renaissance in African politics? The central theme will therefore be to examine the Revolution that was not or the modernization that was not; and to consider the transfer of power from the colonial masters to the colonised, and more importantly to the grassroots level, since that is the only legitimate place where power can and should reside, in accordance with classical liberal ideals. This analysis is crucial if the dilemma of African independence and the problems that came with it can be discussed honestly. The situation is parallel to a case of Hamlet without the Prince -- a farcical drama. The chosen case study is Ghana (the old name Gold Coast is used interchangeably) and the reasons for the choice are manifold. The choice of the case study is influenced largely by the following reasons: 1) The socio-political history of Ghana, especially its relationship with Europe, which spans a period of over five centuries. Its unique historical experience affords a clear insight into the dynamics of modernization. 2) The plethora of secondary sources based on the fact that Ghana is the first country that achieved independence at least in a formal sense -- in sub-Saharan Africa. 3) Finally, the fact that I am an African (though not a Ghanaian) and thus partially familiar with the African political and social phenomena which I aspire to understand and explain. This paper is not by any means exhaustive, and for obvious reasons its many drawbacks are unavoidable, and therefore it may be found wanting in some respects. In many respects, it is a relative exercise in contemporary history of Africa, yet there is no distinct systematic chronological basis for such an exercise. A further shortcoming is the use of secondary materials for the case study. Here again this cannot be held to be a weakness in view of the lack of proximity to the primary sources. However, in the main, it offers multiple critiques of the many conceptualizations from economic determinism to historical realism. Thus it is a modest effort to reconstruct a conceptual framework for the analysis of politics in the mal-developed areasubdecay. Is Modernization a Westernization process? (This formulation of the empirical problem is coeval with the

4 Saharan Africa. The chosen method in this thesis is comparative, descriptive, analytical and argumentative. Finally, I write this thesis not to nag nor to whine, but to prod. Thus, I am keenly aware of many repetitions throughout the work, unavoidable because of comparative methods used, and others for emphasis which may have turned out to seem over-emphasis. I am hopeful that this humble effort would contribute to some illumination of the problems of socio-economic and political modernization in this part of the Third World. TOWARDS A CRITIQUE OF THE ALTERNATIVE APPROACHES Africa continues to be the workshop for political experimentations and analysis of various theories and approaches in political and social change. Third World politics presents the discipline of international relations, and even the international relation scholars for that matter, with a great challenge -- a challenge that, according to Professor Riggs (1967:317), we are indeed only numbly beginning to appreciate. These challenges and problems, it is hoped, may some day lead to a restructuring of the whole discipline. In so far as political theories and ideologies that is, an orientation that characterizes the thinking of a group or nation -- are concerned, there are none. Only a barrage of speculations and hypothesis has been advanced. Looking at the less developed regions of the globe, Huntington (1965:392) saw a deep-seated gap between political theory and reality:
Instead of a trend toward competitiveness and democracy, there has been an "erosion of democracy" and a tendency to autocratic military regimes and one-party regimes. Instead of stability, there have been repeated coups and revolts. Instead of a unifying nationalism and nation-building, there have been repeated ethnic conflicts and civil wars. Instead of institutional rationalization and differentiation, there has frequently been a decay of the administrative organizations inherited from the colonial era and a weakening and disruption of the political organizations developed during the struggle for independence.

Apter (1967:viii) puts it aptly thus: but the events are confusing. Our research ideas are similarly untidy. Quite often we are as much imprisoned in our concepts as the political leader is in his rhetoric. The trend then, for all international relations scholars (particularly those interested in African politics) is to tread cautiously and to avoid overzealous generalizations. As the most quoted scholar in African Studies, Thomas Hodgkins (Apter, 1967:viii) poignantly puts it,

5
our profound ignorance of African History, our lack of comprehension of African attitudes to the contemporary situation, our remoteness from the ideas of revolutionary democracy, the distortions in thinking produced by the colonial mythology--- these, I would suggest, are good reasons for doubting whether we are likely to have any sensible contributions to make to a discussion of the direction of social and political change in post-colonial Africa. Such questions are best left to the Africans.

Dr. Harris, in the preface of his book Studies in African Politics, 1970, seemed to have concurred with this view, as he remarked, seen through a number of diverse topics, Africas problems can best be understood, if not solved, in African terms without reference to norms and conceptions derived from other sources. For an African analyst however, these prospects are not reassuring: Schooled in Western norms and concepts, he can but grope in the dark in the dearth of Western political theories and ideologies to guide him. An interesting problem one encounters in utilizing some models (the Western Models) of political analysis is the unsavoury discovery that in Africa, politics is not policy-making, but power and commodity-fetishism. Political power is equated with acquisitive power. When for instance the Elite model is used, the answer to the question, who has power? or Who rules? appears anomalous. Power lies without rather than within the country. It is sad. But when the traditional model is used, the answers to the same question will indicate that power lies within rather than without the country. But, alas, it is not the traditional model, but the western model of rule, that governs the country. Herein comes Jean-Paul Sartre (Fanon, 1971:7), with a critique of the Elite Model:
the European elite undertook to manufacture a native elite. They picked out promising adolescents; they branded them, as with red-hot iron with the principles of Western culture; they stuffed their mouths full with high-sounding phrases, grand glutinous words that stuck to teeth. After a short stay in the mother country they were sent home whitewashed. These walking lies had nothing left to say to their brothers; they only echoed. From Paris, from London, from Amsterdam we would utter the words, Parthenon! Brotherhood! And somewhere in Africa or Asia, lips would openthenon!!therhood! It was the Golden Era.

Of late, however, efforts have been made towards a normative approach to the political problems in developing areas and it is to these approaches I owe a debt of gratitude. The first approach is reflected in Kenneth Organskis book, Stages of Political Development. He fails to provide a theory of stages in political development. He is rather concerned with a set of problems (crises)

6 faced by developing countries (Riggs, 1967:33). These problems are mostly socio-economic and they are preferred to any other, for, like Marx (1913:11-12) said: It is not the consciousness of men that determines their existence but on the contrary, it is their social existences which determines their consciousness. Organski reached the conclusion that there are essentially four stages of development: 1) political unification, 2) industrialization, 3) national welfare, and 4) abundance. During the first stages, national governments gain effective political and administrative control over their populations and territories. Without such control, all policies designed to encourage economic growth through industrialization are bound to fail (Riggs, 1967:332). However, the Organski model is not without its shortcomings. The first stage of political unification (described by Lucien Pye as the crises of identity, legitimacy and penetration) is said to have been achieved by pre-modern European societies but that non-Western societies are still struggling with this stage of development. What is not pronounced is the historical evidence (like the one given for the second stage--industrialization), of the means utilized in achieving these ends. A glaring obfuscation of such genre is an indictment of the entire model, and for that matter all approaches in the Development Theory are equally blighted. What they succeeded in blurring is the relevance of the means, and when, especially in this instance, it is the hub of the problem. The task of political unification demands a totality of efforts if stability and orderly change is intended. Hence the need for a totalitarian ideology. In retrospect, the Western bourgeois system, and for that matter any other system that ever succeeded in scaling this hurdle, did so only under the aegis of an ideology as totalitarian as it was mobilizing in kind. Where else can one put the import of the eerie Catholic Inquisition in the achievement of unanimity in pre-modern Europe? Or can it be argued that Augustinian theology, Lutheranism, Calvinism and later Puritanism, appearing in various phases of cultural changes in the West, were all totalitarian in content and scope, their other-worldly-outlook notwithstanding? The emphasis on westernization in the non-Western world, therefore, becomes a byword for a superimposition of culture. For, what inheres in this blatant and inveterate phenomenon is nothing short of the foisting of alien cultural practices on a people with a totally different cultural and historical background. In the main, this cultural superimposition is considered innocuous, yet its impact is so grotesquely repugnant to even the naive observer. It is the onus of the political

7 decay immanent in the Third World. Is not the index of politics in these areas the quintessence of cupidity of political actors? If we are to understand Western democracy as a response to the challenges of the allocation problem (in tandem with the peculiarities of Western European circumstances), tallying with the third and fourth stages of national welfare and abundance in Organskis model, then its superimposition on non-European cultures is deviously anachronistic. Thus, is not the nauseating pre-emption of the scarce resources in the Third World by political actors, in itself a distribution process of a sort? It is indeed the acme of the westernization process. However, in hindsight, when the dynamics of modernization are viewed as technological change rather than cultural, the cross-cultural transmission of the Industrial Revolution is given wings. It is in this sense that Lenins contribution to Scientific Socialism becomes monolithic. The paradox thus expressed elsewhere that modernization can thus be seen as something apart from industrializationcaused by it in the West but causing it in other areas, is as abstruse as it is hollow. Almost invariably, the tragedy of cultural superimposition, in the exogenous change process, is illustrated vividly by the case study, Ghana (the Gold Coast). In the absence of a highly disciplined revolutionary party, committed to the initial tasks of political unity, unification and ceaseless participation, political action assumed the shape of a sordid debauchery. Flung down the gauntlet the nationalist party all but withered overnight. During the second stage of economic development, i.e., the industrial revolution, governments have to make possible the accumulation of capital, which can only be done at great social cost. Organski believes that historically speaking, three different patterns of government have proven successful in solving the problems of industrialization: the bourgeois (that is, Western Democracy), the Stalinist (Communism), and the Syncratic (Fascists) (Riggs, 1967:33). This view is upheld by Professor Pares, who said: If they (the liberated peoples) insist on building their own capital the hard way, like the Russians, they will certainly have to resort to dictatorshipperhaps Communist dictatorshipsince no other form of government can easily oblige the peasant and the worker to tighten his belt for the sake of the future (Harris, 1970). Pyes approach tallies with Organskis, especially the first stage of unification, namely, the crises of identity, legitimacy and penetration (Riggs, 1967:333). In any case, however, it is David Apters complex but intriguing theory of stages and alternative paths of political development in the larger framework of modernization that provided the beacon light for this analysis. The net effect is the eclecticism permeating the paper. The pre-occupation with a critique of theories is due to the cue from Samuel Huntingtons essay on Political Development and

8 Political Decay. In it he argued that what is going on today in the third word should frequently be characterized as a process of decay rather than of development (Riggs, 1967:334).

I: ON MODERNITY
You are born modern, you do not become so. Jean Baudrillard Modernism may be seen as an attempt to reconstruct the world in the absence of God. Bryan Appleyard

This chapter is based on the rejection of the view that all human societies everywhere had to develop (if they have to develop at all) through the same or similar series of developmental stages. At this juncture, it is imperative for us to ask what is modern? The Heritage Illustrated Dictionary of the English language defines modern this way: 1) Of pertaining to recent times or the present, not ancient, 2. Characteristic of recent times or the present; modish; contemporary. The converse of this definition is the traditional. Samuel Fleischacker (1994:45) defines tradition as a set of customs passed down over the generations, and a set of beliefs and values endorsing those customs. The Ghanaian Philosopher, Kwame Gyekye (1997:221), recognizes the value of tradition, but argues that in practice tradition is often questioned and modified by its adherents over time, so that it remains dynamic. He presents a new definition of tradition as any cultural product that was created or pursued, in whole or in part, by past generations and that, having been accepted and preserved, in whole or in part, by successive generations, has been maintained to the present. Traditional institutions are not incompatible with modernity.

9 Now while traditional institutions roots are ancient, they are a repository of the history and the collective experience of a people. The history and the experience are the foundations on which solid modern institutions are built. Nothing emanates from a vacuum. Modern political ideas of democracy in Europe emanated from traditional European institutions with their systems of thought, organization and belief. Through constant re-examination and refinement of received European traditions by philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, John Locke, Adam Smith, Marx Engels, John Stuart Mill, and Machiavelli, among others, modern ideas of democracy, justice, and efficient government were devised. However, the process of modernization was not a smooth one. As Kwame Gyekye (1997:137) noted;
The development of democratic political institutions in Britain, most probably the oldest democracy in the modern west, began with the signing of the Magna Carta in 1215. But it took many centuries for those institutions to evolve into their present forms, an evolutionary process that was guided by the compass of historical and cultural circumstances. The process had to jump or knock down such hurdles as autocracies, military dictatorships, claims to divine right of power, enlightened or benevolent despotisms, strong and unyielding monarchical systems, and other impediments to the establishment of democracy.

Clearly, modernity requires more than mere institutions. It demands an evolution in the thinking of a people. Evolution in this sense is a gradual refinement of the fundamental ways of thinking and institutions of the people. African post-colonial leaders did not seem to understand this fact. They adopted colonial institutions wholesale without respect for the fact that the traditional institutions had alternative approaches to governance. These alternative approaches could form an intellectual reference point for the transition to new systems. These institutions represented an indigenous evolution of systems of governance which people related to socially, emotionally, psychologically, and intellectually. They were legitimate by virtue of history, experience and of the fact that they were indigenously conceived and had a force of the wisdom of the people. The proper approach, I submit, would have been to borrow ideas from the western political systems, modify the indigenous political systems with the assistance, and in partnership with indigenous traditional leaders, and come up with a hybrid system with local legitimacy. 1.1. THE DEVELOPING NATION-STATE: MODERNIZATION A LA MODE OCCIDENTAL The continent of Africa has been invaded many times and has suffered many a devastation.

10 It can be said that she has gained germinal ideas and techniques from these invasions. The shape of modern Africa has in a large measure been determined by the response to two of her most recent invasions that of Islam beginning in the mid-17th century A.D, and that of the Christian West beginning in the latter part of the 15th century (July, 1968:17). Of these two invasions, the one that was more consequential has been that of the West. This will be discussed shortly. The scientific-technological thought introduced from Europe seems more completely to have influenced the institutions and ideas of African politics and society (Ibid). The European impact can be summarized into three stages (especially in relation to West Africa) and this goes back five centuries. Hence the most revealing indication of the degree to which the Western way of life has installed itself in the African psyche is the thorough commitment, which the African appears to have made to acquire the advantages of this new and foreign way of life (July, 1968:458). The first stage of contact covered the longest span of time, and bore few equals in the human misery it generated. Contrary to the claims of its prophets (the modernization theorists), it was the most consequential, viewed from the overall impact on African social structures. The extraction of millions of men, women, and children from Africa in the slave trade, which dominated this period, forced the non-hierarchical African structures to affect some form of hierarchy in order to defend themselves. This period began in the 15th century, and the first Europeans who came to the West African coast, came to trade for gold, ivory, gun and other goods, and then for slaves. The traders were content to remain in their ships or at scattered coastal stations where they exchanged their goods for cargoes of slaves and then departed (July, 1968:459). In sum, however, this impact was negative and depressive. Nothing of consequence from Europes vast store of scientific and humanistic knowledge seems to have been brought by the slavers, little was left but some acquaintance with guns and a soaring appetite for European finished products (July, 1968:459). The second stage is the period during which Europe first introduced to Africa in a serious, systematic fashion the concept of the scientific-technological revolution, demonstrated the effect of that revolution in the development of modern European societies, and suggested the farfetched possibility that Africa might share in its advantages (ibid. 460). Juxtaposed with development in Europe, this humanitarian move was propitiatory. It was generated by that consciousness of guilt that triggered the scientific unsolvable dilemma which in turn produced the vogue of evolutionism a philosophy that owed its influence largely to the somewhat sensational clash between a brilliant scientific hypothesis concerning the history of the various species of animals and plants on earth, and an older metaphysical theory which,

11 incidentally, happened to be part of an 1974:106). West Africans first confronted this new world of the West, and made their first efforts to understand it and to come to terms with it. It was to prove a difficult process for many reasons, not the least of which was Europes colonial control over Africa. Nevertheless, it was during this period that the long metamorphosis towards modern Africa was begun, when pioneer West African leaders, grasping the significance of the revolution that confronted them, tried to bring their people into the brighter new world they saw before them (July, 1968:460). There appeared to be an interesting interplay of forces in this period. At the first stage of the contact, the material simplicity of African societies was taken as proof of primitive savagery, and this became the basis of the lines through which social progress allegedly passes. In fact, many European writers laboured to prove this to be so. Some declared the African to be incapable of civilized development. The root of the trouble, it was pointed out vividly, lay in the diminished frontal lobes, or in an insufficiently reliable supergrandula layer of cortex of the Africans. Others went further than this and claimed that in the Negro, we are in the presence of a being, differing profoundly not merely from the white man but also from other human types, and that the Negro has contributed virtually nothing to the civilization of the world (Davidson, 1969:2425). The Africans features, it was argued, were invariable and expressionless, their minds characterized by a dead and blank uniformity. They had not originated a single discovery nor promulgated a single thought not established a single institution not hit upon a single invention. In Africa, generation hands on no torch to generation. Left to themselves, they were beyond salvation (Davidson, 1969:45). Stereotypes like these abound in history and in real life, and they are inevitable, especially, on situations where two distinct cultures meet. Men are prone to attempt mutual characterisations of each other. But the fact of the matter is that such extreme characterization are necessitated by the phenomenon of contraction in which the screening of reality becomes a distortion and since cognition is distorted, affection the expression of feelings is repressed and suppressed, especially in dealing with the alien; and identification turns into xenophobia. However, the statement that the Africans, left to themselves were beyond salvation, definitely leads to the view that there was in the African an embryonic possibility of an era yet to come. The latest investigations respecting the early condition of the human race, are tending to the conclusion that mankind commenced their career at the bottom of the scale and worked their way up from savagery to civilization through the slow accumulations of experimental knowledge. established religious belief (Popper,

12 Thus the Africans before the European contact were developing along one of the following lines of Lewis Morgans stages of social development:
I. Lower Status of Savagery; II. Middle Status of Savagery; III. Upper Status of Savagery; IV. Lower Status of Barbarism; V. Middle Status of Barbarism; VI. Upper Status of Barbarism; VII. Status of Civilization.

Much can be written about the first and second stages of European contact, but we are here interested in the third phase of contact, which I intend to discuss. Now, the third stage of the European contact is more recent and I hereby refer to it as the Era of the Developing Nation-State, or Era of Modernization. Beginning with the political independence of Ghana in 1957, African countries emerged with prehensile enthusiasm for Modernization a la mode Occidental. This process is not without the strong influence of knowledge, that is, the cumulative experiences and traditions of mankind. The first stage of contact that was characterised by the phenomenon of contraction and stagnation (of African nonhierarchical structures) elicits a xenophobic reaction because of its negative and disruptive quality. However, the second stage proved positive and congenial because of the impartation of knowledge, which created an impact on traditional structures and led consequently to their breakdown. I shall attempt a detailed analysis based on these deductions later. Intoned in the idea of African Regeneration by the colonialists is the phenomenon of elitism or the emergence of Africans trained to carry out the task of lifting their fellow Africans to civilized existence. Jean-Paul Sartre (Fanon, 1971:7) describes the emergence of this African leadership when he said, the European elite undertook to manufacture a native elite and so on and so forth see page of this paper. The African elites that emerged had established their ascendancy through a thoroughgoing western education open to a small number of urban-based professional people (July, 1968:467). This is, indeed, a fitting demonstration of the view that the rabble (the masses) must be ruled for their own benefit by the intelligent. The choice in Africa, proclaimed one African elite, was between white supremacy and black dictatorship (Harris, 1970:16). The educated Africans, according to a keen European observer, feel, and they have been trained to believe that they are brands from the burning. It is almost impossible that such persons can be sympathetic with their own past, a past which after all few of them have really known, seen or clearly understand (Apter, 1963:146). This, presumably, is a faint echo of the idea of the survival of the fittest, but here again, the prehensile influence of human knowledge on social processes becomes palpable. Social change, based on the impact of the West, begets dialectic in the Hegelian fashion. If the first reaction of the peoples on whom the West imposed itself was generally a xenophobic

13 defence of the existing order, described earlier as a manifestation of the phenomenon of contraction, the next phase was likely to be a swing in the direction of an uncritical selfhumiliation and acceptance of alien superiority. The third phase would naturally be a national synthesis in which there would be an assertion or reassertion of a community with pride in itself and in its past but still looking, at least as far as its leaders were concerned, in the direction of Westernization and Modernization, or modernization Western style. (This will be surveyed on the chapter on ideology). Those leaders were, almost without exception, men who had achieved substantial acquaintance with the West (Emerson, 1962:10-11) Between the second and third phase lies a period of awareness (growth of knowledge) first, on the part of the colonized, and secondly, on the part of the imperialist. This mutual awareness dove-tailed into the problem we are concerned with here the Developing Nation-State. At the base of the African awareness was the dilemma of acceptance and rejection. At the points of European contact, the African response reflected a desire to absorb the standards, the values, and the institutions of the West, which unfortunately is a common problem in the context of oppression. Paulo Freire (2000) and Chancellor Williams (1987:331), long observed that the ideologies and value system of the oppressors quite unconsciously become those of the oppressed, even when the result is demonstrably against them. The prevailing tone in the new settlements was that of assimilation of European culture the close attachment of the mulattoes in Senegal to France, the American orientation of the negro settlers in Liberia, the westernized flavour of the European enclaves on the Gold Coast, and particularly the emergence of the recaptives of Sierra Leone as African prototypes of British mid19th century bourgeois respectability (July, 1968:461). However, these people did not take easily to the concept that they were second-class human beings unable to rise above the limitations of their skin colour. Such notions were contrary to the Christian principles they had been taught. The more the African struggled to improve his lot, the more he was engulfed; the more he turned away from the old Africa, the more he was obliged to protect his African identity (July, 1968:463). Unwilling and unable to return to a traditional Africa he no longer respected, he rose to its defence in part through loyalty and in part as an expression of national sentiments learned from the West. In the Gold Coast, for example, the educated community supported the traditional authorities as the locus of legitimate power wherein effective opposition to outside pressures could be concentrated. Men like John Mensah Sarbah and J. E. Casely Hayford were not in essential sympathy with chiefly rule they were Europeanized Africans who wanted to be sure that their countries would emerge as modern self-directing communities; yet they were forced by

14 the colonialist to resist the very civilization that substance of African thinking today (ibid). They had been taught to believe that African self-improvement could be realized only through adoption of western standards of technology, economic development and education. The problem that confronted them was how to introduce civilized development into Africa without admitting European superiority. This was the full measure of the crisis of identity. Withal, the African dilemma was concurrent. Self-improvement, after all, requires tutelage or colonial paternalism. Thus it was that the African peoples were ushered during colonialism into the era of The Developing Nation-State. During this era, the nation-states were exported to Africa, and colonial administrators replaced indigenous African governments, for the sake of modernization. Charles Tilly (2003:2) defines a nation-state as, a state whose people share a strong linguistic, religious, and symbolic identity. Born out of the premonitions of Communism, African nation-states have no sense of direction except for the dual purpose of becoming milking cows for their colonial powers, and for subjecting their own citizens to a razor-edge of survival. 1.2. MODERNIZATION-WESTERNIZATION DEBATE REVISITED
All truly historical peoples have an idea they must realize, and when they have sufficiently exploited it at home, they export it, in a certain way, by war; they make it tour the world. Cousin Victor

was pressing in upon them. The net result was

ambivalence towards the West, and an acceptance-rejection, which in varying forms, forms the

Modernization is a global process that all social systems are experiencing. Modernization theory began in the 1950s mainly amongst American development sociologists. It is referred to as the applied enlightenment (Pieterse, 2001:42-43). Unlike the evolutionary theory, which conceives human and societal development as being natural and endogenous, the modernization theory considers both endogenous and exogenous forces in their development paradigm (ibid, 43). The endogenous changes are: social stratification, rationalization, the spread of universalism, achievement and specificity, while the exogenous change are: the spread of market relations or capitalism, industrialization through technological diffusion, Westernization, nation-building , state formation (as in postcolonial inheritor states) (ibid, 43). According to the theory of dualism within the modernization literature, the traditional sector represents endogenous growth and the modern sector represent exogenous growth (the interaction with outside forces, in terms of production techniques, trade, values an aid (ibid, 43).

Modernization

increases

levels

15 of asymmetrical interdependence and integration

across state frontiers and between different peoples. On the individual, institutional and the group levels, these changes appear to have the most impact upon elites and leadership groups, [and the masses] (Evans and Newnham, 1998:336).

Level 1
Modernizing Institutions (Schools, factories, Mass Media)

Level 2
Modernized Individuals (Modernized Elites)

Level 3
Modern Institutions (Banks, shops, hospitals, clinics, nightclubs, etc)

Level 4
Sociop o li ti c

LEADERSHIP (ELITE) AND MASSES CHASING THE GOALS Figure 1. The Diagram of modernization Process.

GOALS

As figure 1 illustrates, modernizing institutions are necessary but not sufficient conditions for modernization economic development. To realize economic development as a goal, there must be interplay between all the three levels (1, 2 and 3). The leader must identify his or herself with the masses in order to achieve socio-political and economic development. Modernizing institutions such as the schools, factories and the mass media create modern individuals -- the educated elites -- who staff the modern institutions (banks, hospitals, clinics, etc) that are necessary for economic growth. Modernizing institutions are prior causers to modernized individuals and modern institutions. As such, traditional individuals must be modernized before they can create and staff modern institutions. The strength of the modernizing institutions should be the most policy-relevant. If a modernizing elite attempts to foster economic development directly by creating modern institutions without first cultivating the necessary human capital (modernized individuals), the modern institutions are likely to be abortive. Modernizing institutions such as the school and the media are typically State sponsored, controlled, and influenced. Political elites may seek to diffuse modern values and attitudes through these institutions in order to prepare the work force for the staffing of modern institutions in the production realm and elsewhere. They may also use these institutions more directly to promote the mobilization of the population in support of national programs of economic

16 development. The reach and influence of modernizing institutions is the starting point in modernizing a society. The process of modernization therefore, is a universal phenomenon, which all social systems experience. It is the burden of our age. It is an objective that is not confined to a single place and region, to a particular country or class, or to a privileged group or people. Modernization, and the desire for it, reaches around the world (Apter 1967:1). Individuals, institutions and nations are bound to modernize. The right to modernize is God-given and no man or nation is chosen by God to determine the direction of modernity of other men and/or nations. Aplenty eminent scholars blatantly equate modernization in the non-European world with westernization or Europeanization. This drives us to the most pertinent debate: Is modernization a westernization (Europeanization) process? (For a detailed discussion on this question see: Ndoh Nsoh, Alphonsus Johns, The Leviathan that was not: Explaining African Cosmopolitan NationStates, Malm University, IMER, Malm, 2005, Page 25-29). The use of the term Westernization or Europeanization to denote the economic, political, social and intellectual transformation of African countries can be logically dismissed. The logic for the dismissal are manifold: 1) the rising communalistic and solidarity sentiments of the African peoples opposes western individualism and discord; and 2) westernizations inadequacy in improving the standards of living of the westernized is proven -- glance at the low estate of the underdeveloped three-quarters of mankind as the imperialist era draws to a close (Emerson 1960: 7), and the failing African nation-states, illustrates the point. There is no gainsaying the fact that modernization first occurred in the West through the twin process of commercialization and industrialization (ibid 43), yet simply regarding it as westernization is to commit a faux pas, disdainful enough in these modern days. What is modernization? What is westernization? The Marxian definition will be preferred in this paper: modernization, in this view, can be understood as a series of altering material relationships out of which a more abundant and kindlier world will eventually emerge(Apter 1967:6). Modernization can be seen as something apart from industrialization caused by it in the West and causing it in other areas (Emerson, 1960: 44). It is a complex process. As a revolution, it predates the Industrial Revolution. Its origins lie beyond the Renaissance since as an innovation process it is as old as man. Thus, modernization as the process leading to the state of modernity begins when man tries to solve the allocation problem (ibid 9). It employs roles that have been drawn from various industrial societies (and ordinarily associated with Western industrial society, although modernization can no longer be claimed as peculiarly Western) (Emerson 1960: 60). How does one explain away

17 the paradoxes above? Firstly, there is the case of the cart-before-the-horse-situation that cannot be overlooked. Secondly, modernization is considered to be a relative term. The overtones of racial supremacy and arrogance which the term westernization, embodies are based on the notoriously false assumption that, but for the West, the world would not have experienced an industrial revolution. Now, Westernization, on the other hand, is defined as the conversion to the ways of Western Civilization. Europeanization is defined by dictionary.com as assimilation into European culture, or to make European. Westernization and Europeanization will be used here interchangeably. Before I proceed, I shall here make a passing remark on the term Western Civilization. Correct me if I am incorrect -- Europe reads with letters and counts in numbers that come from the crossroad of Africa and Asia. Civilization, if anything, is composite, an accretion of experiences and ideas beyond race or region. The process of transformation or conversion that connotes the term westernization consists of the adoption of forms of life and production which were first developed among western European intellectual classes and bourgeoisie in the eighteenth century. The new forms of life, thought and production can be summed up as follows: rationalism, individualism and industrialism. The dynamic forces of westernization undermined, underdeveloped and revolutionalized the intellectual attitude, the social life, and the economic structure of African countries. These new ways of life and production is referred to as modern civilization. It spread from the intellectual classes of the west to African countries and classes. As it penetrated, it destroyed the traditional structures of African society. This expansion was immanent in its very nature. The forms of adaptation to western civilization vary from country to country, and from class to class. In African nations, as it were in European nations, all kinds and degrees of transition and fusion, of the traditional and modern, can be observed. The tempo of the transition process depends upon the government: where national governments promote it, it is faster; it is slowest where colonial government unconsciously impede its development. It springs from the blatant misinterpretation of the tendencies of history, from a bias belief that modern civilization is reserved for, or beneficial to, certain races and classes only. Westernization in Africa has failed to encourage change, and individuals, states and regions are regressing into a cul-de-sac of traditionalism. Modernization through westernization, instead of liberating Africans has become a veritable instrument of socio-political and economic blackmail. This treachery sadly belies social change in Africa. The problem of identity begets dialectic in the Hegelian sense:

18
there was an almost universal tendency within a newly rising leadership to accept the conquering Western civilization as superior and in itself desirable. If the first reaction of the peoples on whom the West imposed itself was generally a xenophobic order, the next phase was likely to be a swing in the direction of an uncritical self- humiliation, and the acceptance of alien superiority. The third phasewas a nationalist synthesis in which there was an assertion of a community with pride in itself and its past.

(Emerson 1960:10-11). The west, which first experienced modern civilization, wished to exclusively reserve its advantages, but because of the appeal to reason, individuality and progress (as opposed to traditions and precedents), the western civilization initially had a universal scope and meaning for all classes and nations. Its spread from the elite classes of the west to African societies was an uneven process. Today in Africa there are individuals, groups, localities and ways of life less integrated than others into modern (western) civilization. Thus said, westernization in Africa is like drops of water in the Sahara desert. This diffusion of western culture has given an unmistakable stamp on Africa traditional structures. Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx clearly foresaw and interpreted this tendency in their 1848 Communist Manifesto:
In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrowmindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures, there arises a world literature. The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production, by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into civilization. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it forces the barbarians' intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst, i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.

Marx and Engels prophecy has been fulfilled. All truly historical peoples have an idea they must realize, and when they have sufficiently exploited it at home, they export it, in a certain way, by war; they make it tour the world. The West has proved by the superimposition of western-imposed cultures on non-western cultures.

19 In the world of the westernization of international space, or the world revolution of westernization, cultural pluralism still is a key factor. Whatever their disorientation, non-western cultures persist underneath the surface of western-imposed universals their languages, historical memories, religious convictions, and their quest for self-assertion, are still very much alive, and are sources of endless hostility. The anthropologist, Edward T. Hall (1966:188), says, no matter how hard man tries, it is impossible for him to divest himself of his own culture, for it has penetrated the roots of his nervous system and determines how he perceives the world. In every cultural system, there is information that is transferred in and out which, for the sake of this paper, can be call "A". Plus there is information that is permanently stored in the system that can be call "B" that is the groups collective consciousness. It takes A and B to make meaning. It takes the information that is transferred in and out and the stored information, the information in the context, to make meaning. See figure! Western-imposed

B
A Meaning

Culture

A2

Indigenous Culture

A1

In order for A 2 to understand B it must first understand A. That's very helpful because it really gets at the person who is part of a culture who has the stored information, the memory "B". Another culture A 2 that comes in from outside the culture A doesn't have the stored information the memory B, and therefore, cannot make meaning in accordance with the culture A. Herein lies the source of the conflict between western-imposed culture and African traditional culture. The west has become a cultural hothouse in which all human accomplishments can be achieved at a force clip. The reality is that modern civilization, which the western bourgeoisie exploited for their own purposes, has unevenly spread to the non-western countries. Europeanization of Africa can be characterised under the following traits:

20 1) the penetration of western values from a narrow stratum of upper middle class intelligentsia to the broad masses of African people; 2) the realization that the modernization of the political and intellectual life of African countries, that equality with western nations, is entirely impossible without a thorough reorganization of economic life; and 3) the ready acceptance of modern civilization, not only because there is danger of extinction without it, but because its potentialities for higher standards of life for the masses are recognized. These nouveau trend demands a concentration of all the intellectual and moral resources of the African nations in order to transform the traditional social and economic order. It goes along with the awakening of the masses from their age-old lethargy; it creates new problems for education, for agriculture, for labour problems which western nations faced a century ago. Africa and other non-western countries now find themselves in what can be called a semicolonial dependency relationship or cognitive imperialism. Thus we find today in all African countries stages of transition similar to those witnessed by Europe in the 19 th century the growth of industrialism, the emergence of the individual from the traditional restraints of family, the urbanization of the country-side, the spread of modern education, transformation of religion under the impact of rationalism. Now, the question is: was such expansionism a unique peculiarity of the West? No, there have been other expansions before. African has known great conquering empires before. Western expansion begun as response to the rise and expansion of the Arab and Turkish civilization. The west was faced with a challenge to its system, so it had to respond. The west was not unique in its expansionist appetite. They merely excelled in their capacity to carry it into practice. According to the historian Arnold Toynbee's (Marwick 1970:85), all civilizations are faced with a crisis (a challenge), which is either one of ideas, or one of technology. How they respond determines whether they will survive or not. An example is the Fall of Rome. Toynbee points out, as we shall discuss below, that the Byzantine Empire (the Eastern Roman Empire) used Christianity to revitalize and reform the Roman Empire for another thousand years. Toynbee (Marwick 1970:85) asserts:
When civilizations rise and fall and in falling give rise to others some purposeful enterprise, higher than theirs, may all the time be making headway and in a divine plan the learning that comes through the suffering caused by the failures of civilization may be the sovereign means of progress.

21 His concepts- Challenge and Response- are of special interest here. Their application to the study of history is not only entertaining but also highly rewarding. They afford a rare insight into human affairs. Now, for an interesting study of a topic in history through the application of these concepts, we shall begin with the Islamic expansion into Europe. I shall endeavour to stick to the bare outlines in a bid to refute the odious premise that Modernization is a Westernization process. We shall regard the Islamic expansion into Europe as the challenge to the European world system of the 17th century A.D. Professor Pirenne reached the conclusion that a Roman civilization, based on the Mediterranean survived the barbarian invasions, and did not collapse till the Muslim expansion of the 17th century. Medieval civilization began only with the Carolingians: without Mohammed, Charlemagne would have been inconcieved!(Marwick, 1970:63). Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire becomes the response and in time, becomes the challenge to the world system. In this vein, the Crusades mark the beginnings of Western imperialism. Okay, lets stop here to recapitulate the situation! What happened when the East met the West? The obvious reason for the chosen debate in history can now be appreciated. The Arabs (East), by virtue of their location and subsequent conquests had become the custodians of human civilization. Palmer (1967:16-17) explains:
In mundane matters, the Arabs speedily took over the civilization of the lands they conquered. In the caliphate, as in the Byzantine Empire, the civilization of the ancient world went its way without serious interruption. Huge buildings and magnificent palaces were constructed, ships plied the Mediterranean, in the sciences the Arabs not only learned from but went beyond the Greeks. The Greek scientific literature was translated: some of it is known today through these medieval Arabic versions. Arab geographers had a wider knowledge of the world than anyone had possessed up to their time. Arab mathematicians developed Algebra so far beyond the Greeks as almost to be its creator (algebra is an Arabic word), and in introducing the Arabic numerals (through their contacts with India) they made arithmetic, which in Roman numerals had been a formidably difficult science, into something that every schoolchild can be taught.

The intercourse that took place when East met West (first, by the Islamic expansion and later the Crusades) made the Arabs, as well as the Europeans, some centuries later, mere transmission belts in the process of modernization. Wherein lies the overstatement and fly your own kite that Modernization is a Westernization process?

22 The product of this intercourse, the Renaissance or Humanism, nurtured in Italy and later unleashed on the decadent and backward tribes beyond the Alps created the conditions necessary to open the floodgates of modernization to the entire human race. Thus, employing the principle of the diffusion of culture, we can grasp the proper historical position of Africa as a full participant in the development of human civilization, as a continent that has contributed much of its own to other cultures, as well as one whose cultures received ideas and artifacts from outside. It thus becomes pointless to speak of Africa as moving into a wider world. As a matter of fact she was never out of it (Herkowitz, 1962:6). 1.3. A CRITIQUE OF THEORIES OF IMPERIALISM Colonialism and imperialism may indeed be a lopsided partnership, but one thing is certain: one do not invade and occupy, enclose and dispossess the socio-economic, cultural and political history of races, and then sit back and compose hymns of praise in their honour. Imperialism is a policy of extending the control or authority over foreign entities as a means of acquisition and/or maintenance of empires, either through direct territorial or through indirect methods of exerting control on the politics and/or economy of other countries (Evans and Newnham, (1998:244). It is the policy of a country in maintaining colonies, for example, the subjugation by Europe of most of Africa (and part of the Far East between) 1870-1914, in what is known as the Scramble for Africa. Imperialism, results from the wish for power by leaders of a country. The ends of this wish are often an attempt to gain more land, resources, or people. 'Theories of imperialism' differ in slight ways, but the underlying premise is the same. According to P. W. Preston (1997:139), imperial or European capitalist expansion to encompass large areas of the globe can be understood in terms of the expansion of one form-of-life at the expense of other long established local forms-of-life. The consequence of this invasion is the radical restructuring of the indigenous patterns of economic, social, political and cultural life (Preston, 1997:139). In what follows is the application of the Hobson-Leninists theories in explaining the European scramble for Africa. In December 1958, Ghana served as host to the All-African Peoples Conference, which made the unification of Africa one of its central themes. Chairman Tom Mboya of Kenya boldly proposed the slogan, Europeans, scram out of Africa in explicit refutation of the European scramble for Africa (Emerson, 1960:5). This is not anymore strange since historic African nationalism can be dubbed the crybaby of the century. The ardour and gusto with which the colonialists were excoriated betray the consternation and despair of the nationalist leaders, who

23 had themselves, achieved substantial acquaintances with the West (the base of their popularity). Its sonority reached an all-time high in the writing of the late Kwame Nkrumah, the eminent African statesman. For those who fail to fathom this quixotic exercise in exorcism, I do not hesitate to point out that Mumbo Jumbo is an African word, and the exercise is of tremendous import to the mind of the African. It is scapegoating. Or is it? (Lloyd, 1971:253-258). Beyond the hullabaloo, however, the reactions of the imperialists were palpable. It was a mixture of collective remorse and indignation. In a rare outburst of temper, the late Professor Richard Pares asked: what answer are we to make to the revolt of three-quarters of the human race against colonialism? Obviously we shall not say to the liberated peoples: Come and stamp on us for a hundred and fifty years; then we shall be all square and you will feel better(Harris, 1970:16). It is obvious that of the plethora of theoretical arguments put forward in a bid to explain the European scramble for Africa in the late 19th century, the only one the African nationalists found clinching is the Hobson-Leninist thesis. Lenins argument is basically simple and it rests on the notion that the poverty of Africa is a direct result of external exploitation. If the advanced economic countries of the world were relatively rich this is because those countries had exploited colonies (Harris, 1970:12). This argument, wholly true, will be dismissed here on two grounds. First, the denunciation of imperialism in terms of its primary purpose is considered insufficient. Sure enough, imperialism promotes the interests of the few advanced powers, but the real weakness of the argument is that it obscures its principal role as a necessary condition for revolutionary change. The Marxian dialectics considers imperialism crucial, and as one Soviet ideology phrases it, Imperialism itself is the stimulator of revolutions(Emerson, 1960:7). I am not by any means absolving the Imperialists from its remorse and infamy. In trying to accentuate the role of colonialism as a modernizing factor, par excellence, I run the risk of being branded an apologist. But far from me be it. If it is flattering to the ego of the Western world to be ascribed the role of modernizers, then the sarcasm here is that they did it the Western-wayhaphazard, as it were. The balance sheet shows more debit than credit. The records are sullied by the inhuman traffic in slaves, the decimation of Indian populations in the Americas, the disintegration of the peoples in the South Pacific and the atrocities of King Leopold in the Congo. Who holds brief for such notorious crimes against humanity? Without losing track for the second reason for rejecting this thesis, I shall here digress to expatiate at length about the Spirit of Imperialism. Professor Emerson (1960:7) summed up the epic thus, the entire process appears to be far less the product of conscious human intent than of

24 the working of forces of which men were only and progress. Imperialism, by definition, involves the domination of one people over another, of a stronger over a weaker community; yet it would be grossly improper to assume a universal identification of greater strength with loftier culture(Emerson, 1960:6). Professor Carlo Cipollas (1972:26) theory of the Two Revolutions offers some relief here. He says that the
Agricultural Revolution which occurred in the Near East some time around 9.000 B.C. spread all over the world. By A.D. 1780 the hunting stage had long since been abandoned by nearly all mankind and the last strongholds of the hunters were being invaded by the triumphant farmers. Then, late in the eighteenth century, the second Revolution was born: the Industrial Revolution. England was its cradle. Its diffusion was Wherever the Industrial Revolution penetrated, it brought into the entire structure of agriculture the dominant productive sector of the society.

dimly aware. In sum, it is human development

and progress coming to roost. The Western world was just a cog in a big wheel of development

This is the closest that one can come, to an analysis of the situation. It is the allocation problem, once again being modified. Cipolla (1972:109-110) likens the two revolutions to muscle power and machine power in his evaluation of the energy sources of man. He shade more light on the point in these words:
The Industrial Revolution is spreading all over the world. We witness that the changes are not merely industrial but also social and intellectual A new style of life has to be emerging, as another disappears forever. Every aspect of life has to be geared to the new modes of production. Family ties are on the wane and give way to broader perspectives for larger social groups. Individual saving gives way to collective social services, undistributed profits and taxes. The rounded philosophical education of the few is set aside in favour of the technical training of the many. Artistic institutions must give way to technical precision. New juridical institutions, new types of ownership and management, different distributions of income, new tastes, new values, new ideas have to emerge as an essential part of the industrialization process

I have here quoted quite extensively from Cipolla for two main reasons: First, it saves the trauma of describing the traditional African existence all over again. I do not mean to deny the developmental aspects of pre-colonial systems. Traditional societies were not all subsistence economies various forms of money were in use long before European intervention. Ports and markets were very elaborate(Apter, 1967:50-51). But these did not preclude modernization.

25 Does it matter if it came at the point of a gun? The second reason for quoting him extensively is that we find in his resume a blueprint for social and political change. And precisely to the point, my views about the Hobson-Leninist thesis being the cause of nationalists penchant to inveigh and berate the imperialists is given eloquent proof. The disequilibrium created by the inroads of modernization a la Western Imperialism, coupled with the paucity of resources to resolve the pressing issues made the quixotic exercise in exorcism ineluctable. It must be remembered that at this stage, most of the nationalists had inherited the garb of governance of their own people. A little gift of hindsight will convince the observer that most of the invectives had to do with what Colonialism failed to do and not what it did. The suspicion does not unnaturally grow that in the garrulous nationalist, the exploitation that mattered was not the pre-emption of the natural resources but the failure of the imperial powers to devote themselves to the social welfare and advancement of the alien communities overseas which they had come to dominate in a generally haphazard process of expansion(Emerson, 1960:9). To posit such an argument is to lose the real substance of imperialism. The passion to plunder is what kept the imperialist going. The imperialist, out for the profit, strategic advantage, or glory of his own people(ibid) was not likely to fulfil the divine role of modernizers. We here run into a headlong collision with historical reality. What was the fate of the common masses in Europe during the imperial epic? Were they not being exploited too? With the Hobson-Leninist thesis out of the way we shall now consider another thesis, which is of thunderous importance to African politics and society. This is the role of the missionary in the modernization process. The missionaries were in effect auxiliaries of the colonial administration(Crowder, 1968:1,13). They sanctified the activities of colonial governors. Their complaisance is variously in toned in the imperialist triad, Gold, God, and Glory (GGG) or better still, the three Cs: Colonization, Commercialization, and Christianization (CCC). Hobson had admitted the importance played by missionary idealists, but dismissed them as the tools of economic interests(Marwick, 1970:233). Without indulging in value judgment, I see the role of the missionary as vital in the modernization process. In a bid to save benighted souls, he provided education for the colonized people. It is a fact of African life that almost all the westernized elites including the nationalists were products of mission schools. The answer to the question why African nationalism never became revolutionary can now be formulated. Robert Merton (1967:42) explains:

26
The social role of religion has of course been repeatedly observed and interpreted over the long span of many centuries. The hard core of continuity in these observations consists in an emphasis on religion as an institutional means of social control whether this be in Platos concept of noble lies or in Aristotles opinion that it operates with a view to the persuasion of the multitude or in the comparable judgement by Polybius that the masses can be controlled only by mysterious terrors and tragic fears. If Montequieu remarks of the Roman lawmakers that they sought to inspire a people that feared nothing with fear of the gods and to use the fear to lead it whithersoever they pleased, then Jawaharlal Nehru observes, on the basis of his own experiences, that the only books that British officials heartily recommended (to political prisoners in India) were religious books or novels. It is wonderful how dear to heart of the British Government is the subject of religion and how impartially it encourages all brands of it

True to form, the onus of the westernization process rested on the missionary. He benumbed the African mind with noble lies, in a gist he offered him a better life after death and the present was denied him. The importance of this assertion will be seen in the chapter on ideology in this essay. However, before any inconsistency charge is levelled at me, I must explain that the contradiction in the missionaries role in modernization is not my fault. The cue lies in the unholy alliance between priest and pirate. The Historian Palmer (1967:622) couches the entire drama in such beautiful language: Imperialism would bring civilization and enlightened living to those who still sat in darkness. Faith in modern civilization had become a kind of substitute religion. Imperialism was its crusade. To assess the effects of imperialism one must take the wider context and the universal meaning. Karl Marx, who was of course on the side of the march of history noted the modernizing effects, as well as the evident exploitation, inherent in imperial rule(Marwick, 1970:235). Thus, the history of colonization is the history of humanity itself(ibid). 1.4. PATTERNS OF COLONIALISM Colonialism is a variety of imperialism it involves the settlement of foreign territories, the maintenance of rule over a subordinate population and the separation of the ruling group from the subject population. And the relationship between the mother country and the colony is usually exploitative (Evans and Newnham, 1998:79). Viewed from the perspective of a transformation process, Westernization, (Modernization, Western-Style) was and is a failure. Three-quarters of humanity, variously referred to as: the Third World, or the Wretched of the Earth, still scratch a precarious survival from the obstinate earth. The modernizers have returned to their bastions priding themselves with the sloppy way in

27 which they accomplished their task. The imperial mystique, so passionately propagated to excuse colonial control, has been relegated to the reference shelves of history. The French, who spoke once as if a separation from any part of their empire was an ultimate drain of their blood, see now a closer community of interest with Holland [and the rest of European nations] than with Senegal. The British, so much of whose past was invested in colonial expansionism, search for their future in Germany [and the rest of Europe] rather than in India or Nigeria(Segal, 22-23). It is nothing short of a palpable sense of collective paranoia forcing them to club together. Now, let us survey how the task of modernization was carried out by the various colonial powers. Of special interest here are the British, French and the Belgians. The colonial attack on African traditional systems had different patterns. For the French, and in different fashion, the British, the key point of attack is the elite which can serve as the link between the colonial power and the native masses, for the Belgians, it is the mass itself, or at least a substantial middle class, which must be raised as a whole without thrusting a Europeanized few above it(Emerson, 1960:8). How far the colonial stereotype of the African shaped these patterns is a matter of conjecture. The French for example, believing fervently in the idea that the Africans lacked any future or history worth calling such, were convinced that the only salvation for the African was his assimilation into French civilization(Crowder, 1968:22). The qualification for assimilation was a mastery of the language, history and art of Metropolitan France. In reality, not more than 10% of the population of the so-called French-speaking African countries have a working knowledge of the French language. Even more elitist perhaps is the search for the black soul, which is made in terms of French philosophy, French education, literature and modes of thought. French models are the accepted models (even perhaps the ubiquitous negritude), although in practical terms this may seem no more than the pursuit of the baccalaureate as the key to a job. Indeed the baccalaureate has been described as the superior fetish, the most powerful of fetishes in modern Africa(Harris, 1970, 22). Recalcitrant and dissenters were ostracised. There was the case of French Guinea; she was dewesternized overnight for refusing to toe the line. Guinea has clearly been an exception to the usual francophone rule. When de Gaulle returned to power in 1958, the Guineans rejected the referendum. The new French President decided that if the Guineans wanted disengagement they should have it. Within days French civil servants withdrew. Out of four thousand of these civil servants, all but fifteen had gone in three weeks. Cash registers were ripped out, the weapons of the police were withdrawn and even the library of the Ministry of Justice was removed. The Governor was ordered to remove the furniture from Government House and strip all fittings,

28 movable and immovable and ship them back to France. Fruit trees were cut, walls were torn down, gardens decimated, telephone wires were cut, and a ship bringing five thousand tons of rice was re-routed(Harris, 1970:22-23). This was the modernization a la mode westernization project at its best. One cannot withstand the glamour of comparing this phenomenon with President Nixons decision to bomb North Vietnam back to the Stone Age. The glamour lies not in the comparison but in the inference -- to dewesternize. A sad realization indeed. Strictly speaking then, in terms of decolonization, it was only Guinea that experienced this. The rest of the Francophone African countries went into a new stage of colonialism. The object of the Belgian colonial policy was to create a prosperous black working class (sociologically undefined) which would be content with wages rather than votes. It was felt unnecessary to provide freedom of the press, and the Belgian Charte Coloniale omitted these rights(Harris, 1970:24). The administrative policy here was to remove the Congo from politics. Another effort was to prevent the growth of a landed European class. In the social sphere, Belgiums policy involved a step-by-step preparation of Congolese nationals as they evolved into Western civilization. The number of evolues were small, for the implementation of this policy called for mass primary education rather than the production of a highly educated elite(Apter, 1963:34). This deliberate policy of holding back the appearance of a Western-educated African elite was responsible for the ghastly carnage that marked Congolese independence. The importance of the elite can be seen when we turn to the British pattern. British colonial pattern evades definition. With slight modifications, the objective can be described as follows: Britain pursued a settler form of colonization. South Africa, Rhodesia (present day Zimbabwe) and the frustrated efforts in East Africa are eloquent proofs. Western Africa seems to have been the exception and here, the efforts were frustrated by the obduracy of the climate. Administrative policy took various turns, from the very inception of British rule. A combination of commercial and political administration formed the classic British pattern (Apter, 1963:34). They claimed only a limited jurisdiction, and that in a circumscribed area. The climatic conditions were described as the miasmic marshes and poisonous mists. Reason enough to fall on local material for administrative purposes. The first political development was the indirect rulethe administration of the country by the British in cooperation with the chiefs. At this stage the climatic conditions had assuaged and the senior posts in the administrative system and legal services became the preserve of the Europeans, thus while in 1883, nine out of forty-three senior posts were held by Africans by 1908, only 5 out of 278 and by 1919 only 2 were held by Africans (Crowder, 1968:22).

29 In a way the westernized elite appeared only in West Africa during the colonial era because of the above-mentioned reasons. British colonial pattern generally, is a reflection of the social stratification that characterizes English life. In the colonies however, race is the determinant.

2. THE GHANAIAN TRADITIONAL SCENE AND THE IMPACT OF THE WEST

If a race has no history, if it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated Carter G. Woodson

This chapter offers a brief excursion into the historical background of our case study the Gold Coast. First, it is intended to provide some background of the legal definition of the people of the Gold Coast as they moved from independent tribal status into colonial status. Second, it is intended to point out the impact of colonialism on the Ghanaian traditional socio-political scene. And third, it is intended to point out some of the traditional patterns of political institutions and elites, and show how the British authorities met (and altered) such institutions. The definitions of tradition (see page) are very important for therein lies the key to understanding the importance of traditional leaders and institutions. Traditional leaders are the guardians of traditional norms that are respected in particular communities from generation to generation. These norms could be outlooks on life, ways of relating or of resolving disputes, institutions etc, and as such traditional leaders and institutions are an important channel through which social and cultural change can be realized. In traditional societies, individuals develop what David Riesman, in his modal personality typology, calls a traditional-oriented personality a personality that has a strong emphasis on doing things the same way that they have always been done. Individuals with this sort of personality are less likely to try new things and to seek new experiences.

2.1. THE AKAN MATRIARCHY The Ashanti, occupying the central area of Ghana, once held sway over most of the territory that make up modern Ghana. They were industrious in pursuing attacks and forays against the Fanti

30 who occupied the western coastal area. The Fanti were quick to ally themselves with European outposts and settlements along the coast, such alliance after European intervention being manifest in collaboration with the British in wars against the Ashanti Confederacy. The Ashanti Confederacy, a federal grouping of Ashanti states under the control of a paramount chief (Asantehene), was an elaborate military hierarchy with powerful armies, a bureaucracy, and a taste for imperialism which brought them into immediate conflict with the British, often to the latters temporary demise. The particular circumstances surrounding the formation of the Ashanti Confederacy reveal a good bit of the myth and history found in the Gold Coast traditional wisdom. It is worthwhile to spell out the formation of the Confederacy in some detail since it does indicate the formation and institutionalization of certain traditional norms and beliefs, which survive in contemporary Ashanti custom. The Confederacy began with a temporary Ashanti alliance against an invading state, Denkyera. The war, which broke out in 1699, gave a landslide victory to the Ashanti at the battle of Feyiase. It was a significant victory since a curious series of events had preceded success. An alliance between Osei Tutu, the Kumasihene (the chief), and Anokye, a priest, played an important preliminary part. Since the five most powerful chiefs of the Ashanti divisions were of the same family as Osei Tutu, they already had certain types of social obligations towards one another. This made possible the frequent, albeit temporary, alliances of the past. In order to formalize their unity, Anokye made some medicine mixed it with palm wine, and all the Ashanti chiefs drank it; under his instructions, Osei Tutu made new swords for his army officers, and each swore to fight to the end. Shortly afterward, in Kumasi, Anokye brought down from the sky, with darkness and thunder, and in a thick cloud of white dust, a wooden stool adorned with gold, hence the Golden Stool. The stool floated to earth and alighted gently on Osei Tutus knees. This stool, Anokye announced, contained the spirit of the whole Ashanti nation, and all its strength and bravery depended on the safety of the stool. Shortly thereafter, the war with Denkyera ended in victory for the Ashanti. The Golden Stool became enshrined as the most sacred object of the Ashanti peoples. All Ashanti chiefs owed allegiance to it, and therefore to the Ashantehene. This myth, essentially, is a main derivation of legitimacy for the Ashanti Confederation. Having its non-empirical as well as its historical aspects, to deny it is to deny the traditional religion as well. As a result of this series of events the foundation of a national solidarity emerged (Apter, 1963:102-103). With this introductory myth, we enter into the world of the arational a world in which problems of race, religion, and social structure are intertwined. It is a complex world, and an extremely adult world, which had weathered many storms over many centuries

31 (ibid, 81). Thus the Akan Matriarchy, which of thought and social organization. 2.2. THE TRADITIONAL WEB OF SOCIAL EXISTENCE Norms and goals cluster around the major, recurrent activities in which its members are involved. Such norms are often called social institutions. For instance, what is called the family is in actuality a complex set of norms that regulates between the sexes, legitimizes children, prescribes methods for the socialization, provides for division of labour, and guides the complexities of everyday activities. While each specific family unit may be unique in certain ways, depending on the individuality of its members and their interaction, there is an element of commonness among all families within the society. These commonalities stem from the normative prescriptions (Dinitz et al, 1969:4). The institutionalized order of human existence is thus seen as seeking to transform the basic human nature from a potentiality into an actuality, that is, predictable, by means of prescriptions and proscriptions. These shaping and moulding of character to fit into an optimum are the prime functions of kinship structures. The social relations that emerge from the kinship structures ensure the orientation of behaviour among individuals in the particular society. Men are classified into a number and kinds of relationships, and then there is the formation of fixed patterns of behaviour for each of the recognized kinds of relationships. Hence the principle of classification employed is the equivalence of brothers. (Apter, 1967:58). It has been pointed out that a peoples thought about the nature of things in general could be deduced almost with a Kantian certainty if once their way of interpreting what is right and what is wrong in the social community could be ascertained with adequate precision (Danquah, 1968:2). When the major and recurrent activities centre on the family, greater premium is placed on the ideal conduct, the optimum based on precept and example in view of the contexts of uncertainty and impossibility which characterize human existence. The Akans belief therefore that the link between one generation and another is provided by the blood (mogya) which is transmitted through the mother. An Akan therefore traces his descent through his mother. The mother-child bond makes him a member of his mothers kin group. He is a member of his mothers lineage, which consists of all the descendants of both sexes who trace their genealogy through the female line to a common ancestress. The mother-child bond confers the rights and obligations of citizenship. It also determines a mans status and his title to office or property, since succession and inheritance are transmitted in the matrilineal line. The motherwe shall analyse presently, is mainly the Ashanti Traditional Web of Social existence, in view of it being the only developed Akan system

32 child bond that makes a man a member of his 1968:196). The family is the pillar and mainstay of the Akan social organization. It has been described as a corporation; action and even thoughts were corporate affairs The routine, the half-formulated rules binding individuals in the family, rules relating to property, inheritance, ownership of land, collection of family contributions, become the customary law governing the larger group (Apter, 1963:91). Another keen observer notes: (Apter, 1963:89)
the impact of the family, as an extended unit, upon present secular government in the Gold Coast is immense. Its paramountcy [sic] in the formation of tribal political [institutions] role prescriptions is genuine. It was the basis for the continuing lineage, and as such a crucial social unit. Most important of all, perhaps, is the fact that in traditional society, particularly in Ashanti, tribal roles were family roles writ large. As the nuclear social unit within a system of ritualized politics, the family was the structural rock on which, ultimately, the state stood and fell. It was the center in which the spirit male and blood female were manifested in the procreation and perpetuation of the social unit. Out of this, the lineage was maintained, the social organization reinforced, and the solidarity of the tribal unit protected.

mothers lineage, also makes him a member of

a wider group, her clan. Every Akan lineage belongs to one of seven clans (mmsuaban) (Busia,

The family, essentially, was the foundation of political organization. It had its own priorities of responsibility. It had its own system of social security. Its legal codes were those of the tribe, binding the members by coercion as well as customs at this most local and intimate level of social life. (ibid 91) Marriage, the basis of the family is polygamous, even though monogamy is not a rare occurrence. There are many reasons for this and the most important is that it is a function of pattern maintenance, that is, men and women must come together and have children if the society is to continue. In this connection, marriage is defined as a union between a man and woman such that children born to the woman are the recognized legitimate offspring of both partners. The prime function of marriage is thus to confer acknowledged social status on the offspring, as this is a matter of great importance in regard to such matters as inheritance and succession (Beattie, 1969:117-118). Procreation is thus an obligation as well as a responsibility of every member of the society. A spinster is a social anomaly, since there is no accepted role for her. Motherhood is accorded a significance corresponding to a criterion of a womans identity and selfconsciousness. This criterion applied to men as well so that a strong incentive to polygamy

33 becomes identical with pattern maintenance. On the other hand, polyandry, plural marriage by women, is strictly tabooed. As a social relationship, marriage involves two groups and not two individuals who may just enter into an arrangement. It is forbidden, except for chiefs in some instances, to marry anyone to whom one is or believed to be related matrilaterally, or a close kin. A salient point in the marriage arrangement is that both partners maintain their ties to their matrilineal groups, even when women leave their own group and join their husbands; or when men set up houses in their wives groups. The obvious reason being that it is in their matrilineal groups that they find their individual identities, through the sets of roles they have played. Consequently, a mans authority is over his sisters and their children, who may inherit him, and not his own children. Hence the mothers brothers responsibility and obligations to her sisters children outweigh that of the husbands. This is the situation that leads to the inference that in matrilineal societies the sibling bond between brother and sister tends to be much stronger than the husband-wife bond; while in patrilineal societies the reverse is very true (Beattie, 1969:131) We discovered earlier that Akan social organization is based on the classification of individuals into a limited number of kinds on the basis of matrilineal descent, and that the mother-child bond makes one a member of a lineage and so of a chiefdom; for an Akan Division is an aggregate of social units: the lineage, the village, and the sub-division. Chiefdom is really a combination of localized lineages inhabiting a given territory and forming a political community. The Akan political organization is thus based on kinship. Each lineage is a political unit having its own headman who represents it on what becomes the governing body; that is, representation based on kinship, and each lineage head is a councillor. The adult men and women of the lineage choose the lineage head. In a similar way, the chief who rules the tribe is also chosen from a particular lineage by the other lineage. Kin-right and popular selections are thus combined in the choice of a ruler. An Akan chiefdom was administered on the basis of organized kinship groups through the lineage, the village, and sub-division by a system of decentralization. Each unit was left to manage its own affairs under its own head or council, and to provide such public services as is needed by communal labour. A tribal council of lineage heads decided issues that affected the whole tribe. The principal administrative tasks were the keeping of law and order, the defence of the tribe from attack from other tribes, the maintenance of amicable relations among persons and groups within the community, and between the community and its ancestors and gods. In the judicial system of the Akans, the central authority (the chief and his council of lineage heads) took official cognisance only of offences which endangered the good relations between the community

34 and its ancestors and gods, for, the maintenance of those relations was deemed essential for the well-being of the community. Other offences were left to be settled by arbitration, but they could be brought before the central authority by swearing the chiefs oath; that is, by deliberately uttering words that were tabooed; as this constituted a threat to the amicable relations existing between the living and the ancestors of the chief, it had to inquired into; what was otherwise a private issue was thus brought under the category of offences which endangered the well-being of the whole community (Busia, 1968: 200-201). An Ashanti chief is thus important not only as a civil ruler who is the axis of the political relations of his people and the one in whom the various lineages that compose the tribe find their unity; he is also the symbol of their identity and continuity as a tribe and the embodiment of their spiritual values. An Ashanti chief fills a sacred role as the one who sits upon the stool of the ancestors. That Golden Stool, the symbol of his power, is what the famous Ashanti priest, Anokye, described as the soul of the nation. It is the sacred emblem of the tribes permanence and continuity. The chief as the occupant of the stool represent all those who have occupied it before him. He is the link, the intermediary, between the living and the dead; for according to the conception which the Ashanti share with other Akan tribes, the dead, the living, and those still to be born are all members of one family, and it is the Golden Stool that binds that family together (Busia, 1968:202). In the main, therefore, a chief is selected from royal lineages. The successor to the chief can never be his son among the Akan peoples, but can be his sisters son. The lineage has its mystical totem which cannot be changed and which supports the pattern of matrilineal descent. Blood deriving from the particular totem having mystical powers is ancestral blood. To counter it by behaving outside lineage limits is to commit heresy. The ancestors of the lineage are believed to act instrumentally in favour of the living lineage member if he behaves properly or against if he does not (Apter, 1963:87). As a sanctional source, therefore, lineage and its religious aspects is an important control feature in traditional society. Where it is obstructed or modified, disturbance usually follows (Apter, 1963:87). Religion pervades everything: everything social is religious, (Apter, 1963:117) this is how Durkheim saw the situation. It has been said of these systems that they are democratic, yet a democracy very different from those of modern Europe. In one sense, it is a communistic body, yet in another sense, the rights of each unit to individual enjoyment of property are absolute during his actual enjoyment thereof (Apter, 1963:95). In sum, every Akan town or village is made up of several clans. Each town or village constitutes a political unit. A great number of such towns and villages form a paramountcy, a state (oman)

35 such as the Asante state. Each town or village has a chief and a council of elders, these elders being the heads of clans. The chief presides at the meetings of the council. In the conduct of its affairs, each lineage in a town, or each town in a paramountcy, acts autonomously, without any interference from either the chief (in the case of purely lineage affairs) or the paramount chief (in case of purely town affairs). A decentralized political system is thus an outstanding feature of the traditional Akan political culture. Just as each town or village has a council, so does the state have a state council. The state council, presided over by the Omanhene, draws its membership from the chiefs of the towns and villages constituting the state (Gyekye, 1997:121). This view of the Akan traditional institutions re-enforces an important point: even the most sophisticated African traditional political systems have kinship units --such as the family, the clan, and the lineage at the core of their organization and authority. And since Africans sense of identity and their early socialization are a function of these kinship units, traditional institutions are potentially among the most useful instruments through which policy makers can effect social change in Africa.

2.3. THE IMPACT OF THE WEST: THE BIRTH OF THE DEVELOPING NATION-STATE The history of Gold Coast peoples, before European contact, was a mosaic of recent migrations, strife, settlements, and traditionalism. The scene was motley, with many tribal groupings, many religions, isolated groupings all sharing one element in common -traditionalism, a basic commitment to the past, to time immemorial. The best way to act, in traditional systems, is the way our fathers have ordained. That which is legitimate is that which has been enshrined in the past (Apter, 1963:83). This contraction of tradition into traditionalism is a corollary of the great rhythms of history invasions, conquests and migrations. However, the height of traditionalism was attained with the emergence of centralized states as a response to the imperial designs of European merchantmen on the West African coast. The centralization of traditional societies involved a conflict of principles which generated further dissonance, that is, further contractions and migrations. In the light of this state of affairs, the second phase of European contact was a tremendous relief, as far as traditional Africans were concerned. Africans, of their own accord transferred their judicial allegiance from the native courts to the British courts. Indeed, the Africans response, at the point of European contacts, reflected a desire to absorb the standards, values, and the institutions of the

36 West. Thus, except for the skirmishes and the Pax Britannica was achieved with relative ease. In spite of French and German ambitions, by the time of the Scramble for Africa, the British were firmly planted in the coastal area of the Gold Coast and with the subsequent annexation of the Northern Territories and Ashanti, Britain produced from the small colony of the Gold Coast a sizeable unit, which in the event turned out to be rich (UN Year Book, 1972:537). However, as an impact on contracted systems, colonialism was not a deliberate European effort to civilize benighted Africans. As a matter of fact, the rehabilitation programme which was captioned African Regeneration was swept aside by the unbearable desire for profit, for strategic advantage, or the glory of his own people which kept the imperialist going. Indeed, colonialism stems from that passion to plunder. According to Rupert Emerson (1962:10), the entire process appears to be far less the product of conscious human intent than of the working of forces of which men were only dimly aware corresponds to the phenomenon of goal-involvement. The goal of imperialist expansionism is the expansion of the economic system. Africa was considered a vitally important market and a source of raw materials for the expanding system. To wit, explorers were sent scuttling the length and breadth of Africa to assess the commercial potential of the area, long before the Scramble. The historian Palmer (1967:622) couched the epic in the following words: imperialism would bring civilization and enlightened living to those who still sat in darkness. Faith in modern civilization had become a kind of substitute religion. Imperialism was its crusade. Much has been written about the causes of the rapacity with which European colonialists swallowed up and divided the continent of Africa into colonies. The oft-harped explanation is that the Scramble for Africa took place when it did because the mutual suspicions of the interested European colonialists of each others intentions had reached such a pitch that none of them was willing to hold off the undesirable for fear their own interests might be pre-empted by another. Hence the Scramble constitutes one of the important causes of the First World War. In spite of protests and reservations by the African elite, however, the colonization of the Gold Coast by the British was very swift. The period between the wars marked in Ghana the inception of British Indirect Rule; its main thesis was that except for extreme practices contrary to British standards of morality, traditional social life should continue unimpaired (Apter, 1963:120). Indirect rule is an omnibus term, which covers a considerable number of colonial policies by various British authorities in their different areas. It is not a precise term; it is considered one of the most confusing expressions in the colonial lexicon. It is associated particularly with Sir Francis Lugard, who devised the system for ruling the newly conquered Moslem Emirs in long obduracy of the Ashanti, the imposition of

37 Northern Nigeria while having only a small 1963:120). Lord Lugard lays out three alternative conceptions of indirect rule. The first is the ideal of selfgovernment by evolution, as in the case of Europe and America. This Lugard rules out for Africa because of the diversity of the groups, and the unevenness and primitiveness in stages of evolution represented by Africans. Further, Lugard felt that educated Africans, particularly those clamouring for self-government, tended to seek monopolization of power in their own hands, as against the natural rulers or chiefs. This would tend to destroy the old system, which Lugard holds to be an undesirable eventuality. In fact, he quotes a famous Gold Coast chief, Nana Sir Ofori Atta, to the effect that the claim of a handful of educated lawyers and doctors to represent the people instead of their chiefs, was a base attempt to denationalize the institutions of the country. Evolution to self-government is therefore ruled out. The second alternative noted by Lugard is the notion that every advanced community should be given the widest possible powers of self-government under its own rules, and that these powers should be rapidly increased with the object of complete independence at the earliest possible date in the not distant future. Lugard indicates that his position is a deception since underlying it is the assumption that attempts to train primitive tribes in any form of self-government are futile, and administration must be wholly conducted by British officials. In other words, while this proposal intends self-government, in actual fact it seeks to isolate traditional authority from colonial rule and thus provide a completely unreal form of self-government in which direct and autocratic British government would actually make important decisions. The alternative, which Lugard considers the best, is based upon the presumed and enforced inferiority of the black race to the white, at least, as regards the arts of government. The third conception is that of rule by native chiefs, unfettered in their control of their people as regards all those matters which are to them the most important attributes of rule, with scope for initiative and responsibility, but admittedly so far as the visible horizon is concerned subordinate to the control of the protecting power in certain well-defined directions (Apter, 1963:120). Indirectly rule, thus directly understood, shifted the source of traditional power to British law. Attacks against duly constituted traditional authorities were a punishable offence. This was an attempt to retain the organizational structure of traditional social life without impairing its efficiency (Apter, 1963:121). The conception of indirect rule in terms of the political prescriptions, which it involved, was, therefore: a belief in colonial government through the principal chiefs as agents, with residual and force of officers. The emirates were preserved as administrative units and the Emirs kept on in their traditional leadership capacities (Apter,

38 plenary powers reserved for the colonial authorities. The objective was a promotion of a system of law and equity in which slavery and the worst effects of tribal insobriety and licence were abolished and a Pax Britannica let loose upon the land (Apter, 1963:121-122). More than anything else, the residual authority of the Crown was the ultimate destructive factor in indirect rule. Chiefs whose power were traditionally kept in balance by a continuous process of consultation and whose source of authority affected the maintenance of lineage, kinship, and clan integrity, suddenly became figures whose ultimate legitimacy derived from British law. No chief could be considered a chief unless gazetted as such by the governor. The most destructive element of all was introduced by transmuting traditional legitimacy derived from Great Britain (Apter, 1963:123). However, it is worth stressing that indirect rule, as conceived and developed in Northern Nigeria was not fully applied in the Gold Coast. The Gold Coast system was designed to show the greatest respect to the position of the chief as representative of the Golden Stool. But this in itself made it impossible to exert that control which was demanded of native institutions to be effective agencies of local government. In practice the Gold Coast system has been described as a mixture of direct and indirect rule with a steady bias towards the latter. Administrative difficulties in the Gold Coast have centred on the position and powers of the chiefs do the chiefs and native administration derive their powers from the government? Is the government the sole source of authority without whose recognition and approval they cannot legally function? (Apter, 1963:124). Indirect rule, as the basis of a particular form of administration, provided substantial modification of the traditional system of authority occurring within a framework of British law and order. Its intent was not major social change, but modified adjustment. The net result was major social change, within an administrative scheme, which sufficed until new organs of authority were required, on a basis deemed somewhat less than satisfactory in the light of the problems involved. The British ideal was the ideal of a good African, pagan or mahomedan, weaned from savage and cruel practices, humane to his fellow creatures and to animals, but otherwise staunch to his attachment to African traditions and institutions (Apter, 1963:124). The attempt was thus made to blend traditional authority by maintaining as much as possible of traditional social organization compatible with consular secular structures. Indirect rule provided new and wider functions for chiefs. It initiated in this fashion the process of institutional transfer by demanding Western-type standards of behaviour and secular norms in the performance of predominantly Western-type role structures. It sought to endow chieftaincy with a supporting cloak of secular authority, and to endow secular authority with the traditional participation of

39 traditional authorities. Out of such a pattern, most British leaders felt that a new structural synthesis would emerge, close to the public, and in that sense, indigenous. Rattrays (Apter, 1963:140-141) warning is an effective pointer to what followed:
In introducing indirect rule into this country, we would therefore appear to be encouraging on the one hand an institution which draws its inspirations and validity from the indigenous beliefs, while on the other we are systematically destroying the very foundation upon which the structure that we are striving to perpetuate stands. Ts shell and outward form might remain, but it would seem too much to expect that its vital energy could survive such a process.

We thus enter into the process of societal breakdown and our working hypothesis here is the input that creates an impact and thus releases the contraction, that is, from nomocracy a state of affair where norms are socially constructed and imposed on the society, to anomie -- the disintegration of the artificially imposed norms. In anomie, group solidarity and normative consensus become disorganized at different rates of speed. The basic assumption here is that human behaviour is shaped and determined to a large extent by previous learned experiences. These learned experiences, which we have called tradition, include values, beliefs, attitudes, and expectations that are transmitted from generation to generation through language and symbols to all new members of the group. This tradition moulds and tones the individual into a particular form. Erik Erikson (1964:161) said the following about tribal societies:
Systems of child training.represent unconscious attempts to creating out of human raw material that configuration of attitudes which is (or once was) the optimum under the tribes particularly natural conditions and economic historic necessities. Thus each society develops its dominant social and cultural patterns, and upon this are imposed the variation of the individualized character permitted in that society.

The absence of this shaping and moulding led to the hierarchical structure, which emphasises unity of command on account of imposed norms. On the other hand, the presence of this shaping process leads to non-hierarchical structures, as individuals appear to function as if self-propelled on account of internalized norms. Thus it is easier to conclude that culture and not unhappy fate afflicts certain groups. The Greeks had a word for the previous learned experiences, which we have called tradition and it is nomos, the hallowed ways of the ancestors, like the Chinese li. (Friedrich, 1972:20). It is

40 the behaviour of this nomos, which gives culture that inclination to progress and to regress to the degree where the inclination becomes determination. We shall henceforth equate nomos with the cluster of norms, which becomes internalized in the individual. It is custom and it reconciles man internal stability with his external adaptability. In a nomos society, individuals develop what David Riesman(ref) in his modal personality (the most common personality type within a society) typology called an inner-directed personality this is a personality that is guilt oriented. The behaviour of individuals with this sort of personality are strongly controlled by their conscience. As a result, there is little need for police to make sure that they obey the law. However, when a disturbance situation arises in the system of nomos, it changes to disanomie the state of affairs wherein some substantial number of persons who are members of the community are attached to a given value a, while a substantial number of others insist upon the devalue of a, and cherish the opposite.(Friedrich, 1963:145). Disanomie as a stimulus arouses nomocracy as a response. Nomocracy is the state of affairs where everything is judged in terms of traditional values and beliefs, where the nomos become the tyrant of the community and forestalls all forward movements.(Ibid). In order to continue this exercise on nomos, we shall take recourse to how Emile Durkeheim and Thomas Maine conceived of societies. For Durkheim, the differences between primitive and modern societies are to be found in the differences between repressive and restitutive law. In primitive society, which he called mechanical, there is a high degree of repressive law, in which similarity of conduct is ensured by the authorities classifications of any significant departures from custom as crimes. The crimes, symbolic acts against community solidarity, exact the most extreme penalty (mainly death). Organic solidarity, that is modern society, on the other hand, is characterised by complex forms of interactions between individuals and groups. Functional interdependence is the key to this solidarity. Repressive law is only a small part of the juridical system. Restitutive law is the main part. Like Maine, Durkheim gives us a concept of social systems from lower to higher forms. The deux ex machine that provides the transition from one form to the other is the division of labour (Russels, 1974:14). Maines repressive law, which characterizes primitive societies, is the quality of demarcation rigid conformity otherwise known as keeping the middle of the road or staying within known maps. The fiction or reality of blood-relations is the limitations put on identifications in order to ensure the survival of the group. Evidently, this is a reaction-state since it takes a negative, disruptive input to alter the pristine of nomos. The only input that can release the contraction of nomos is a positive one.

41 When thus a positive input creates an impact on the contracted nomos (nomocracy), nomos disintegrates and a state of anomie results, that is, there being no longer any sacred custom to bind individuals together. Anomie is that state of social disorganisation in which established social and cultural forms break down. (Friedrich, 1972:20). There are two aspects of this breakdown. There is, 1) loss of solidarity -- old groups in which individuals find security and response tend to break down; 2) loss of consensus -- felt agreement (often only semi-conscious) upon values and norms, which provided direction and meaning for life, tend to break down. These two aspects could be disorganized at different rates of speed, and individuals experience relative isolation and normlessness a condition in which there is an absence of any organized system of social norms or values that would allow an individual to choose the most appropriate action in a given social situation. In anomie societies, individuals develop what Riesman (ref)calls other-directed personality a personality that is shame oriented. People with this type of personality have ambiguous feelings about right and wrong. When they deviate from a societal norm, they usually don't feel guilty. However, if they are caught in the act or exposed publicly, they are likely to feel [crying] shame. Furthermore, it is normlessness; Durkheim felt that led to deviant behaviour. It is a very painful experience in that there is no longer any solidarity and any consensus; men live their lives in a state of alarm and absolute normlessness, that is, in a sort of Hobbesian existence of bellum omnium contra omnes -- war of all against all. Whereas, in modern societies we have latent (psychological) warfare, in traditional societies (particularly some parts of Africa) we have noticeable systemic warfare. Furthermore, what the experience of anomie means, literary, is to be without a name, identity or nationality. It is also like being placed in a situation of not knowing what ones social character is supposed to be or more subjectively, it is similar to the feeling that comes when one is supposed to go some place but has no man to tell him how to get there. This is a frustrating experience, and men may seek ways out of their predicament out of the confusion and anxiety, which result. This frustration situation may force men to go over to aggression against real or imagined sources of their difficulties. Moreover, they may in other to find temporal happiness -- try the various means of escape (mainly through vices), which the situation dictates to them: pleasure-seeking, dipsomaniacs alcohol, drugs, perverse habits and behaviour or similar things. Finally, men may engage in a quest for community, and a search for

42 new meaning. From such quests, (social) less-than-ultimate values and relationships. (14) As a result of the impact, the more the British sought selective recruitment on the basis of skill the more were valuations on kinship and lineage factors inhibited. Where such inhibitions were present, motivation to leave the tribal scene was more acute. Not only did education promote this tension, but the work of the missionaries as well. Tribal politics was, as has been indicated closely linked with tribal religious elements. To undermine the religious sanctity of the chief drastically reduced the effectiveness of his sanctional control. With traditional normative restraints vitiated, and his other ultimate weapon, force, battened down firmly by British authorities, the chief no longer served as a central orientational and authority figure (Apter, 1963:125). The respect for age, which in some areas reached the proportions of a semi-gerontocratic political hierarchy (in Northern territories) and in the south required certain types of obedience, was vitiated by the diminished prestige attached to certain positions. Under the traditional pattern of authority when a conflict developed between a youngman and an elder, it was difficult for the youngman to protest. Such a protest is almost an admission of guilt, demanding an apology in elaborate and ritualized form particularly degrading to the Youngman. At the head of the system is the chief. Any chief is called nana, even if he is a boy, so that he goes to the top of the agegrading hierarchy. Part of the system of government is based on respect due to age, and the formal authorities are men of considerable age, like the elders who are the councillors of the chief. The impact of differential non-traditional roles affected the younger elements particularly, therefore. As roads, schools, lorries, and other tangible evidence of the material culture of the West filtered into the tribal village, even the nuclear family suffered (Apter, 1963:125-126). The beginning of a stratification system based on economic class rather than on ancestral prerogatives rapidly conflicted with the traditional, providing a permanent source of tension, which continues until the present (Apter, 1963:126-127). Evidently, these new solidarity units could only offer less-than-ultimate values and relationships, as they were responses to social disintegration. The new solidarity units on the whole adopted, in tentative and preliminary fashion, the standards and symbols of Western clubs. Boy scouts organization fostered by the missionaries played their part. As time goes, anything African was looked upon by these educated youth movements develop which offer new values and new solidarities. Such movements may be religious, or they may be quasi-religious, offering

43 groups with a measure of embarrassment or even 1963:127-128).

contempt

and

negligence

(Apter,

Thus at this stage of European contact, there was an almost universal tendency within a newly rising leadership to accept the conquering Western civilization as superior and in itself desirable. (Emerson, 1962:10) This will be surveyed on the topic of Ideology. The variety of solidarity units, which emerged during the period of indirect rule, however, provided the first bases for political institutional transfer. They represented groupings whose sustaining strength was their common adherence to Western political and social standards. These earlier more secular solidarity groupings represented for the most part intellectuals, siphoned off the main stream of rural tribal life. Wooed and accepted by liberal British educators, they discussed Gold Coast problems long and earnestly. An intellectual elite emerged, often divorced, as far as traditional social habits were concerned, from the less well-educated youth and the larger social organization of the tribe. Two sets of authority patterns were therefore visible in the period of indirect rule. These patterns were manifested in two sets of role clusters, integrated into a formal organizational network, which can be called Gold Coast colonial government. One, the British administrative service, was supported by norms of rationality and acceptance based upon criteria indigenous to the British themselves. Two, the native authorities found themselves deriving effective legitimacy at least in part from the British source. To the degree that such effective legitimacy derived from British sources, traditional authority weakened and waned (Apter, 1963:130). Consequently, for increasing groups in the population, indirect rule was viewed as government by seduction. Orders, knighthoods, and political and governmental posts awarded to the chiefs were seen as a kind of payoff. It was argued that some chiefs paid little attention to local affairs, so concerned were they with cutting a large political sway through the Colony. Therefore, it was not unnatural for the chief to be identified with British imperialism. For, lo, they donned traditional robes (regalia) and business suits with equal dispatch, without realizing the inconsistencies in these positions. They duly modified the traditional system to accommodate these aspirations whilst carefully preserving the fiction of ultimate traditional legitimacy. But the very language of chieftaincy natural rulers indicates a condition of cultural orientation, which is basically unstable, once the natural order as conceived in traditional society is subverted (Apter, 1963:140). The only other group which effectively challenged the leadership of the chiefs, and who also were encouraged by the British, were educated and responsible elites. Mostly trained in Britain, or else professional men of one sort or another, they formed a group attempting clearly to play

44 roles assigned in terms of Western education, dress, behaviour patterns, values, and religion. There were the people whose affiliations were to the municipalities, the de-tribalized, urbanized, restive, and westernized societies of the coast. Where the chiefs retained in form, but less in substance, their old associations and reference orientations, the educated group had to create their own support. Partly, they received esteem from the high prestige placed upon education. For the most part, as has been indicated, they served as orientational inspiration for younger people whose desire to emulate them turned them into unreliable, willy-nilly associates. Some of those who joined the youth movements received support from civil authorities, the schools (particularly Achimota), the churches, and most of the other responsible segments of the population (Apter, 1963:148). They considered themselves logical trainees under indirect rule for positions of authority. A considerable number of these educated Africans had strong lineage and family ties to royal families. If they were layers, they received some of their income from land litigation or from professional duties, which enabled them to devote part of their time to politics. Into the comparatively open society of the Gold Coast, these new barristers, educators, and clergymen thrust a new prestige group, represented as a cluster of roles, political and social, towards which tribal youth, more and more restive under the rule of the chiefs and rural life, aspired. This new group moved with comparative ease in British social circles. By African standards they had wealth and crucial items of conspicuous consumption. This group, gradually interpreted to be a class at least by the British, who dubbed it a middle class were the business-suited professional men. They were presumed to be conservative (in the sense that they wanted no drastic or revolutionary change), responsible, and fitting products of indirect rule. They were provided places by election to municipal councils and were often nominated or elected as members of the provincial and legislative councils. The net effect was to fragmentize orientational affiliations into new social sub-groupings, marked on the one hand by a bureaucratic chieftainship, affable and able, and on the other by a new middle class which was to act as a responsible lever against the whims and fancies of the mob. Through this middle class it was hoped that a new and stable group would provide a source of recruitment on secular lines (Apter, 1963:149-150). Thus it was that the middle-class solution was applied to the problems of modernization in the Gold Coast. However, its limitations became apparent in the course of time. One effect was the widening of goal orientations towards secular, achieved and material positions which on the one hand either promoted achievement by British standards, and which involved self-images of responsibility and authority while aligning roles with significant membership subgroups in the

45 system, and on the other hand provided a source of motivation particularly for political action. Membership in this significant received support from official, educational, religious, and other groups composed of Europeans. The limiting factor remained social mobility. The evidence of a small but effective group of professional people, as well as some of the titled chiefs, served to attract larger numbers of people hitherto integrated into traditional patterns of society. Yet opportunities to enter these groups were small, often stimulating deviant and illegal efforts toward goal satiety. The changes wrought under indirect rule were therefore profound. They indicate both the astonishing resiliency and fragility of traditional societies. Indirect rule demonstrated that at crucial points of contact between European and traditional patterns of authority, the latter as an expression of social cohesiveness declined and stagnated. With its decline and stagnation, a visible source of conflict remained the question of the terms of social behaviour and group membership. Such a source of conflict is one of the prerequisites of nationalism (Apter, 1963:151). In the cities, the pattern of Christianity took hold for increasing numbers of mission school gentry whose objectives were the normal type of social intercourse, at least in for if not in substance. The manufactured middle class of intellectuals or professional men teachers, doctors, lawyers tended to be Christians, Western-oriented towards empirical (practical) rather than non-empirical ends. Christianity spread like wildfire throughout the Gold Coast. It was a fashion which proper men, responsible and upright, gave service. However, their behaviour was consciously determined by criteria of rational rather than religious or magical thought. For the rural pagan and rural messianic or nativistic groups, stick to a methodologically arational action a category of magic, abracadabra (hocus-pocus, open sesame, hey presto) or juju, and to the ultimate arational action a category into which religion would fall. The urbanized and educated Africans tend to view these positions (in which they once belong before) with contempt. Instead their standards became more logical in an empirical sense (Apter, 1963:152-153). Our focal point thus is the limitations of the middle-class-solution. The limiting factor is social mobility and this often stimulates deviant and illegal efforts goal satisfaction. Evidently, these are what constitute the indicators of social disintegration. The de-institutionalization, and bureaucratization of traditional patterns of behaviour meant that the emphasis was on material change more and bigger material goods, the flashier the better. However, another note began to make itself heard: life in cities began to seem brutish,

46 ugly, and unpleasant, and not only for reasons of poverty. Lo, social values had become money values. One authority observed that the courts were much exercised with youthful crime. And for every juvenile who is put before the court, there are probably four who are not apprehended. Prostitution had become a major problem. He concluded that the main cause lay in a breakdown of the traditional order; above all, the closely adjusted network of responsibilities in African family life. There was evident an overriding conflict of cultural values at many levels, but most prominently and most obviously of all in increased crime, prostitution, juvenile delinquency, unbridled acquisitiveness, bribery and corruption the symptoms of a mal-adjusted society and deeply flawed politico-economic system (Davidson, 1967:33). Attempts to improve the situation through politico-economic actions rather aggravated the issues. More houses were provided, primary school intakes were expanded and the more obvious needs of elementary welfare were supplied. The diffusion of modern medicine into the villages slashed the infant mortality rate and the control of endemic disease reversed the population trend. Thus the efforts proved marginal, since the basic problem, the problem of constructing a new social order was beyond the capacity of the new social system. (Davidson, 1967:33). Traditional authority was undermined by affiliations and support from British secular authorities or from others whose allegiance to traditional authorities was at best nominal. Effective authority stemmed from secular sources and operated through alien offices, filled for the most part by British Colonial personnel. Only one alternative to such effective authority remained the amalgamation of disassociated groups around a particular leader, or symbol, or set of ideas, or combination thereof. (Apter, 1963:161). Thus it was that the Developing Nation-State was born, and its urgency stems from the fact that the British had, through the imposition of indirect rule, divorced the chiefs from the intellectuals. The opportunity of creating an African elite, who could take over the government, as it later did in the French Colonies, was forever lost. Hence the Revolution that was not. The British administration could, with more foresight, have constructed in the Gold Coast the model neo-colonialist state (Bing, 1968:86-87). The turbulent history of Ghana as a Developing Nation-State derives thus from the observation that its leader, Kwame Nkrumah, was a prisoner and not a jailer of circumstances. 2.4. TOWARDS COLONIAL REFORMS By early 1948, it had become clear that the imperial mystique had run its gamut. Intense nationalism, fomented by the net effect of the Second World War echoed around the world. From

47 Morocco to China, the anti-colonialist wind fervour. The balance of power between the British and the traditional chiefs was reeling. The earlier palliative measures aimed at containing the situation had primed the political pump. The British could not stop the political boulder that was running down the hill. Intense reactive nationalism culminated into an open revolt against colonial rule. In the din of the revolt, many overtones could be heard, but all were to be muted in the quest for a united front against the British Imperialist. As for the British, the situation was more than demanding. It required all the guile and perfidy they could muster, alas! Ghana was too precious a bite to be spewed out. It was true; they were operating under the aegis of the Wilsonian doctrine of national Self-Determination for the colonized people. But they were not ready to disengage yet. Disengagement presupposed the readiness of the Westernized elites to take over from the British and this was not lacking in the Ghana situation. The Watson Commission (Emerson, 1960:41) appointed to look into the causes of the 1948 Revolt had this to say:
The moral justification for Britain remaining in the Gold Coast lies in this: out of a population of approximately four and a half million Africans, on a fair assessment, barely ten percent is literate. We have no reason to suppose that power in the hands of a small literate minority would tend to be used to exploit the illiterate majority in accordance with the universal pattern of what has happened elsewhere in the past throughout the world. His Majestys Government therefore has a moral duty to remain until: a) the literate population has by experience reached a stage when selfish exploitation is no longer the dominant motive of political power, or b) the bulk of the population has advanced to such a stage of literacy and political experiences as will enable it to protect itself from gross exploitation, and c) some corresponding degree of cultural, political and economic achievement has been attained by all three areas now part of the Gold Coast.

gathered

momentum

and

nationalists

everywhere began agitating for self-rule. The Ghana scene was rowdy and not without its

This was the voice of the colonialist at its best. He had a divine-appointed duty to civilize the African and until that was done there was no shirking of duty. From this perspective then, the desire to hand over a large share of political power to native Africans, which took place a few months later could not be considered a move towards self-

48 government and independence. It was just a ploy. The need was to modify the power balance in order to stay on. This is reflected in what Winston Churchill meant when he announced that he had not become His Majestys first minister in order to preside over the dissolution of the British Empire(Emerson, 1960:11). Here stands the posit that Kwame Nkrumah of revered memory was a British creation. Before going into the intricacies of proving this, I shall return to the 1948 situation in Ghana. It must be remembered that the British had all along been juggling a power balance of the traditional chiefscum-administrators. They had avoided a head-on collision with the traditional system and the result was manifested in the breakdown of social life. What to do? The only way to arrest the situation without betraying their nonchalance was to absorb the detribalized hoi polloi into a program of mass hysteria to ward off further disturbances that would rock the imperial mystique. 2.5. A STUDY OF THE POLITICAL ELITES Each historical situation develops its own dynamics. Elitism is an ideology that arose during the second half of the 19th century, largely as a result of the work of two Italian sociologists, Vifredo Pareto (1968) and Gaetono Masca. They wrote at a time when the middle class felt threatened by a rapidly growing working class, imbued with Marxist Ideology. Pareto and Masca aimed to refute Marx and to deny the possibility of society. Unlike Marx, they maintained that political skill determined who ruled, and the society would always be governed by some kind of elite, or a combination of elitism. Elitism is an ideology introduced to fit capitalism. It also intensifies a wide range of racism in society, since it can be used to subscribe to the myth of racial superiority and inferiority. The cohesiveness of elites constitutes their main strength. In essence, elitists assert that in practice the minority always exercises effective power, and that the majority, no matter what so-called democratic institutions are in place, can never control the dominant minority. The term political elites has been framed to accommodate the traditional chiefs who do not measure up to the requirements for attaining elite status (later, there were those among them who were more than qualified), but played a greater role in politics. There were two other groups of elite to be distinguished here. The first group was the product of indirect rule and the second group was the net effect of the nationalist fervour that was born with the war. The important element worth stressing is the diversified means of attaining elite status. In order to make this study purposeful, I shall make recourse to the imperial reaction in the fashion of the Hegel dialectic. if the first reaction of the peoples on whom the West imposed

49 itself was generally a xenophobic order, the next phase was likely to be a swing in the direction of an uncritical self- humiliation, and the acceptance of alien superiority. The third phasewas a nationalist synthesis in which there was an assertion of a community with pride in itself and its past (Emerson 1960:10-11). This problem can best be surveyed under the chapter on ideology. Around this time, the chiefs had begun losing their positions in their tribes gradually. The most ardent nationalists considered them to be traitors, and traitors they were. The tribe had become a base from which chieftainship qualified a few individuals for positions of national honour in British-inspired Councils. If this was not the beginning of tribal politics then what was it? A stretch of the imagination adds the lustre to the inference here. (When partisan politics was introduced and the local party branch was identified with tribal affinity, the successful politician usurped the role of the chief in the tribe. This fostered the further erosion of the status of the traditional chiefs). It was not unnatural for the chief to be identified with British Imperialism. For, lo, they donned traditional robes and business suits with equal dispatch, without realizing the inconsistencies in these positions. Unlike their predecessors, their behaviour, far from being inchoate, was a tacit acceptance of the second phase of imperial reaction that points to the swing in the direction of an uncritical self-humiliation and acceptance of alien superiority. Their aspirations were either to inherit political power or to continue in their partnership with the British for a long time to come. Following their heels closely in the constructed hierarchy of political elites in Ghana was the first group of educated commoners. They also extolled the second phase of the Hegelian dialectic with undiminished vigour. To wit, they were the responsible elite. Mostly trained in Britain (and the University College at Achimota) or else professional men of one sort or another, they found their affiliations in the municipalities, to the detribalized, urbanized, restive and antagonistic westernized society of the Coast. They moved with comparative ease in British social circles. The lawyer members among them were growing rich from the decomposed society (the introduction of cash-economy created a channel in the ownership of landhitherto communal-ancestrally-owned. Land litigation was thus the order of the day). By African standards therefore, they had acquired wealth and other crucial items of conspicuous consumption. Regardless of how nationalistic they sounded, in retrospect, they were identified with British custom. Their mode of life, their standard of living, and that of the average African widened. And as Nkrumah (1968:53) saw them,

50
most of the intellectual elite received at least part of their education in Britain. They returned to their native country as if in blinkers, seeing and judging everything in Oxbridge terms. They saw the liberation struggle as a movement to be conducted slowly and respectably by themselves, having nothing to do with the toiling masses, whom they regarded with a mixture of fear and scorn.

Rattray (1962:87-88) comes in:

the educated Africans feel, and they have been trained to believe that they are brands from the burning. It is almost impossible that such persons can be sympathetic with their own past, a past which after all few of them have really known, seen or clearly understand.

However, they considered themselves logical trainees under indirect rule for positions of authority. Their designs were plain and presumptuous and this gave colour to the British to stay on. One of their leaders, Dr J. B. Danquah writing in July 1950 said that the choice in Africa was between white imperialism and black dictatorship(Harris, 1970:16) The second group of elites was a mixture of those siphoned off the main stream of the intelligentsia, replete with the second phase and those who embrace of the third phase of the imperial reaction in the fashion of the Hegelian dialectic was epitomized in the person of Kwame Nkrumah. It was a nationalist synthesis in which there was an assertion or reassertion of a community with pride in itself and in its past but still looking, at least as far as the leaders were concerned in the direction of Westernization and Modernization(Emerson, 1960:10-11). This group was as broad and diverse in aspirations and designs as to justify the terms omniumgatherum or hodgepodge. An interesting point here was the moving force in Nkrumah, reminiscent of his student days in America, he was imbued with a sense of mission to elevate his black brothers from the position of second class citizens of the world. But could he? This new group stood in contradistinction to the elite group we discussed earlier. Where the wealth and arrogance of the intelligentsia was a liability to them, vis--vis their relation to the masses, Nkrumahs affable manner and youthful exuberance was not only an asset but it caught the fancies of the sans-culotte the products of the enlarged primary schools, the taxi drivers, clerks, teachers and market women. They drifted to him in their numbers and he in turn fanned their frustrations and hardships into a high sense of political awareness, with simple precepts like, we have the right to live as men; and, seek ye first the Political Kingdom and all things will be

51 added unto it(Austin, 1970:17). Thus the few. His charismatic hold on the detribalized hoi polloi if not entire was to be complemented by British guile. Apter (1963:165), puts it aptly in discussing the colonial crisis,
the worst hit were the products of the newly enlarged primary school system, the Standard VII boys, who had migrated to the towns and were on the whole loathe to the jobs involving menial or degrading labour. These formed a literate and aggressive group linked to both the rural areas and the towns. Marxist literature occasionally found a ready if only partially understood response. Their partial education helped contribute to the general decay of traditional orientations, while new outlets for prestige positions and orientations were not available in the form of jobs. These were recruited by the nationalist movement.

British found their man for the second

partnership. There were many pluses for the choice of Nkrumah and we shall here consider a

When the British thus earmarked Nkrumah for the partnership, they set out to create him. They accused him of being a communist (Apter, 1963:169-170), and this charge did the trick. For as long as he wished to remain in the partnership he had to renounce any Communist ideology or thoughts he might have imbibed during his stay overseas. And this he did with considerable clat, until it was too late. He played into British hands with his adherence to the Gandhian doctrine of Positive Action. The British watched the nationalists protest with a distinct sense of dj vu -- it should be remembered that the British weathered the Gandhian storm in India. Their experience was more than adequate. The real ploy was yet to be implemented. In the main, the plan was to create a kind of psychological attachment to the person of Nkrumah in the masses, and this was based on a false sense of revolutionary martyrdom. As we shall see later, this plan more than succeeded, for it blurred the main issue, the creation of a new social order. Of Nkrumah, it has been said, he was less a jailer than a prisoner of the forces around him. He had a very restricted range of political choices(Apter, 1963:170).

52

3. AN OVERVIEW OF POLITICS IN GHANA (1951-1966)

53
Seek ye first the political kingdom and all other things shall be added unto it. Nkrumah Man is a political animal. Aristotle

Ghana led the post-World War II struggle to rid Black Africa of the colonial yoke. Two factors made this possible. She attained self-government with British oversight in 1951, followed by formal independence in March 1957. She thus became the first colony to pry open the floodgates to the independence wave that swept Black Africa in the 1960s, becoming in the process, a path-blazer and an example to other anti-colonial fighters. Ghana was blessed with an enthusiastic and radical leader, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah. His internal developmental project rapidly laid a robust foundation for economic take-off and social well-being for the dispossessed. In what follows is an overview of the political landscape of Ghana between 1951-1966. 3.1. THE RUCKUS As a result of the distinguished role played by the Gold Coast Regiment in the Second World War, the Colonial Office decided that the fruits of victory should take the form of political reform. Thus, the five years dating from the institution of the Burns Constitution were the great watershed of Ghana politics(Austin, 1970:49). For the first time in West Africa, the 1946 Constitution gave the Gold Coast an African dominated Legislative Council, and more important, a representative legislature (Apter, 1963:142). Meanwhile, the country was growing into a national unit but with no growth of any political consciousness being apparent around 1946. The only discontent was among the lawyers, teachers and merchants in the municipalities. Elsewhere, for the most, the dominant nature of the Gold Coast was a seemingly universal attachment to local chiefdoms, lineages and village groups and an absorption in local interests, which was encouraged by the decentralized nature of the colonial administration under which Commissioners controlled their districts with a minimum of independence from the capital. There seemed little danger of any sudden expression of nationalist unrest (Austin, 1970:7). The formation of the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC) in 1947, by the lawyers of the coastal municipalities was met with mild rebuke from the colonial authorities (Austin, 1970:7). The principal policy of this party was to kindle the struggle for independence or selfgovernment in our time. The leaders were liberals who wanted self-government by stages. But

54 they failed to read the political temperature of the day, and this was their doom. The social situation was highly inflammable. There were antagonisms aplenty. There was the high cost of living urged on by a spiral inflation coupled with the grievances of the War veterans. They had returned from other parts of the world with an appreciation of differing material standards of life and they not unduly felt that the post-war hardships were a malicious plan to inhibit colonial development. Therefore, the rate of change astonished even those who were actively engaged in bringing it about, at first one group and then another sought to control the direction of events and yet the process was a familiar one, whereby a period of stagnation was disturbed by a period of reform, and reform slipped into revolutions(Austin, 1970.49). The need for a political ideology to restructure the minds and attitudes of these people so as to be recipient to revolutionary change was self-evident. They indeed had chains to break. They were many and already organised identities of problems and interests had fostered common psychological and social frontiers and this had superseded tribal boundaries. Their immediate need was a leader. The British were not able to stop the political boulder that was rolling down the hill. That the situation was crying for a total revolution can be understood clearly in a Marxian (1964:179) context:
A sphere of society which has a universal character because its sufferings are universal, and which does not claim a particular redress because the wrong which is done to it is not a particular wrong but wrong in general. There must be formed a sphere of society which claims no traditional status but only human status, a sphere which is not opposed to particular consequences but it is totally opposed to the assumptions of the political system.

Perhaps, the views of the revolutionary sociologist, Tocqueville (from David Weston) run more parallel to the dictates of the situation here. The French Revolution, to him was the result of the problems posed by the movement of civil society from one of ascribed status to a new social structure founded upon individual achievement and legal equality. Hence, revolution is the result of a conflict between the changing mores of members of a society and the existing social order. A revolution comes as a result of unsatisfied social needs. Unsatisfied social needs leads to social forces. And social forces leads to the formation of social movements. And social movements bring change in a society. Continuing on the Marxian vein, a revolution is a social, an economic, a technological, a political, a legal and an ideological phenomenon furthermore, revolution means the transformation of man himself(ibid). Finally quoting Carl Friedrick, a political revolution, then,

55 may be defined as a sudden and violent order(ibid). This new group stood in contrast to the educated elite whose aim was just an Africanization of the colonial machinery. The educated elite stood for evolutionary change which in the words of Johnson (1966:56), is a kind of change, the only kind that is compatible with homeostatic equilibrium. We find a clinching argument, however, in Guessous (1967:24) view, when he defined social equilibrium as follows: a theory of social equilibrium is a theory that seeks to uncover the general conditions for the maintenance of a society in stable equilibrium and to specify the mechanisms by which that stability is reversed or re-established after the occurrence of outside disturbance. The question we must ask is: Can evolutionary change take place in a dis-equilibrated system? Evolutionary change thus precludes change from the traditional to the modern, since the force of the exogenous pressure is the determinant. In such a situation, innovation as change is wholly inadequate. It begs the question. However, this new groups quest for a leader was paramount and it found dynamic expression in the person of Nkwame Nkrumah. The budding leader had been initially invited to Ghana by the Intelligentsia groupthe UGCC to take up the General Secretaryship of the party. It was an unholy alliance from the word go. The lawyers in their fleecing spree had no time for active politics and they naturally resented the youthful exuberance of their new secretary who was stealing the limelight. There were other differences that counted too. Nkrumahs style was flamboyant, charismatic, energetic and fiery and he was eloquent, in contradiction to the phlegmatic, courtroom-mannered style of the lawyer-members of the Working Committee of the UGCC. The question then was whether he was ready to give the hoi polloi the revolutionthe total revolutionthey cried for, or was he going to give them the objective correlative of Marxs partial revolution? The answer is embodied in his Political Kingdom. Meanwhile, the consciousness of political and economic hardship and social ruckus in the Gold Coast led to a series of crisis. The crisis seemed to have been triggered off by an Accra subchief, who had succeeded with his countrywide boycott of European and Syrian merchants in order to force them to reduce the exorbitant prices of their goods. This was an anti-inflationary measure by the common people. The boycott spread to every part of the Colony and Ashanti. The urban population suffered the most as the prices of imported goods rose and wages lagged behind. There was mass hysteria (ruckus), and as the Watson Commission, appointed to inquire into the disturbances was told, the only solution lay among other things in the need to reduce the overthrow of the established political

56 prices of imported goods, for industrialization of the problem. The European trading firms who dominated the entire economy of the country did importation. These trading firms included the much-maligned colossus the United African Company, a subsidiary of one of the greatest companies in the world, the Unilever Co. Their monopoly was due to the rather questionable issuance of import licences and the allocation of supplies. They controlled prices arbitrarily and when the government took no action, the suspicion not unnaturally grew up that, at all material times, there was some private arrangement between the powerful importers and the government (Austin, 1970:69). The colonial government, having so much at stake decided to resolve the problem subtly. One can have a clever view of the need to tread softly and cunningly if one considers Britains dependence on the Gold Coast around this time. Pressures and demands on the British pound resulted in a series of post-war financial and balance-of-payment difficulties which threatened Britain with International bankruptcy and reduction to the status of a second or a third class power led to an unprecedented fleecing of the wealth of her colonies. Marketing boards were established for this task in all the colonies. Ghanas role in providing Britain with capital and especially with dollars (urgently needed to import United States capital goods to rebuild her shattered industrial plant) was larger than any other colony with the exception of Malaya. As Arthur Creech Jones (Austin, 1970:69), former Colonial secretary, remarked: I think we should be conscious of the very considerable contribution which the Gold Coast had made to the Sterling area. Only a percentage of Ghanas dollar earnings were allocated to her, making importation of consumer goods rather difficult. The impact of the boycott was unusually great in spite of the short-duration. It hit at the very foundation of colonialism the cartels and trade monopolies. At the end of the boycott, however, precisely on the same day it was called off, It so happened that there was a peaceful demonstration by ex-service men. Among their grievances were claims that promises made to them while they were away in service had not been fulfilled. That pension rates were insufficient due to the inflation, that grants had not been made to men too old to start business on their own, that Africanization of the Gold Coast Regiment was not effectively maintained and promoted (Fitch & Oppenheimer, 1966:45). The demonstration, which began as a peaceful procession, turned into a march on the governors castle at Christiansborg. Failing to halt when asked to, they were fired upon. Some of them were killed. When the news of the shooting reached the business centre of Accra where hundreds of Africans were out shopping for the first time since the lifting of the boycott, the whole town was (Austin, 1970:56). This was a clear stating

57 in a ruckus. In the melee, Europeans were (Apter, 1963:169). Some leaders of the UGCC were arrested and deported to the Northern Rerritories for a short time. The treachery of the British was particularly revealed in the motive for the arrest of the leaders. The charge was that they had incited the hoi polloi. But, the waters in which the UGCC leaders sought to fish were already troubled, thereby events outside their control, and although by their fishing they added to the turmoil, this was not to say that they ever were in charge of a master plan, or responsible for the actual sequence of events from which indeed, many of them drew back, dismayed. Factually, the British were out fishing for their man. First, the detention of the UGCC-leaders succeeded in raising their popularity to national heights. But then, for all practical purposes, this brought a schism in the party. As Nkrumah (1959:67) wrote later, there appeared to be a general belief amongst them that the whole tragedy of our arrest and suffering was my fault, and they began to make it plain that they regretted the day they had ever invited me to take up the Secretaryship of the UGCC After their release however, Nkrumah was given the boot from the party. The Watson Comission Report led to the setting up of a new commission on constitutional reform. The Commission, composed entirely of Africans, (on the whole represented by the intellectuals of the UGCC), had as its chairman an eminent African Jurist, Justice Coussey. Its members represented older and more educated professional men of the Gold Coast. In all there were 40 members of this All African Committee31 commoners and 9 chiefs, the right kind of proportion for the UGCC leaders, and from this point forward, the chiefs and the intellectuals began to work amicably together. Nkrumah was not invited to serve on the committee (Austin, 1970:81). Whilst the committee was busy on the constitutional reform, he set about consolidating his hold on the youth. Particularly in Ashanti, aggressiveness against the chiefs and British administration ran high. A committee of youth organizations was formed, composed of a variety of youth movements usually dominated by adherents of Nkrumah. They formed a powerful bloc anxious to take political action. The youth organization forced Nkrumah to form the CPP in June 1949. From this movement onwards, the struggle for the inheritance between the men of property and standing, and the young men of the CPP had been sharpened and given precise shape by the impending elections(Austin, 1970:81). The British were now the master of the situation, a new governor, Charles Arden-Clarke had arrived in August 1949a strong governor ready to negotiate but prepared to act with resolution. stoned, shops were raided and violence spread like wildfire throughout the country, with rioting and looting of European and Syrian shops

58 Both qualities were necessary as events began 1970:85). The impact of the Committees report on Nkrumah was tremendous. He moved uncertainly between the need to retain support by a bold appeal to nationalist principles and the immediate practical advantage of compromise. Thus a wavering line followed. His first reaction to the report was that expressed in the Evening News, which warned the readers that the new constitution would prove a Trojan Gift Horse. He labelled the Report bogus and fraudulent, and to talk of the need for Positive Action a civil disobedience campaign of agitation, propaganda, twofacedness and as a last resort, the constitutional application strikes, boycotts and non-cooperation based on the principles of absolute Non-violence Direct Action (NDA). (Austin, 1970:85). Nkrumahs next action was the summoning of the Ghana Peoples Representative Assembly which drew up amendments to the Coussey Report. The report proposed a form of semiresponsible government: an executive councillor, three ex-officio and eight representative ministers, and a nationally elected assembly.(Austin, 1970:87). In mid-December, Nkrumah swung back to Positive Action, and then again to Tactical Action Nkrumah talking matters over with the Colonial Secretary and governor. That failing to yield any lessening of tensions, the Trades Union forced the issue by declaring a general strike: a state of emergency was declared throughout the country and the arrest of TUC leaders followed, culminating in the arrest of Nkrumah on 21 January. It was a great mistake on the side of the British. The incarceration of Nkrumah spelled the doom of the UGCC as an effective organization, by giving the Convention Peoples Party (CPP) a cap of martyrdom. Nkrumah became a household name, in time for the elections, with a widened electorate (Apter, 1963:172). The chiefs and their cronies, the intelligentsia, their position usurped, became for the most part a frustrated lot, albeit, forever scheming. Nkrumah and his party won the elections comfortably and was co-opted into the partnership. What characterised politics in Ghana, after this was a feud between the usurped and the usurper. Herein is where I anchor my argument about the revolution that was not. If the glare of the prospects of power inheritance had not blinded Nkrumah, he would have been more realistic and instead of agreeing to go into partnership with the British, he would have gone underground like a rat mould. This was the ideal thing for him to do if he really fought shy of an open confrontation with the British. He could have found enough time to study the state of things in the country, the social decay, and devised the appropriate ideology to tackle the problem. (He had to move towards a new climax (Austin,

59 been away from home too long to understand the extent of the disequilibrium created by the colonial impact). Meanwhile, political power would have fallen in the hands of the intelligentsia and at a latter time when the British had left, he could have rat-moulded up, and bang! bang! -carried out a Castro/Guevara-type revolution. Nice and slow. He was lured and this became his undoing. By accepting the Trojan Gift Horse he eroded the very base he stood on. The peoples tacit demand for a revolution was postponed sine die. When therefore the mass hysteria wore out, and the people were faced with the grim reality once again, they lapsed into a state of lethargy. Frank Fanon (1971:59) puts it frankly, the enlightened observer takes note of a kind of masked discontent, like the smoking ashes of a burnt-down house after the fire has been put out, which still threaten to burst into flames again. Meanwhile, the Trojan Gift Horse proved equal to its name. Whist Nkrumah and his party were either engaged in feud with the Chiefs-Intelligentsia-businessmen group, or intoxicated by the miasma of material acquisition, the British unleashed a flurry of instruments of exploitation on the economy of the country.

3.2. THE FEUD The years between 1951 and 1957, for the purpose of analysis will be called the period of the Feud. It was the period between the Coussey Commission and the attainment of independence, when self-government became the talk of the day and nationalists everywhere lusted after it ardently. The plot hatched in India and tested in Ghana had become exportable. As Nkrumah puts it plaintively, it is a standard joke in Africa that when the British start arresting, independence is just around the corner,(Nkrumah, 1964:102). In other respects too, it was the period, a critic has written, that the character and orientation of the CPP, as the movement of a petty bourgeoisie seeking to entrench itself, were indelibly fixed, notwithstanding Nkrumahs later efforts to change both party and policy. For the term Feud, it was the period when the clouds gathered and the CPP met its Nemesis in the Ashanti revolt. Above all, it was the period when Nkrumahs economic policy served to keep Colonial economic interests intact (First, 1972:170). No structural changes were made to the economy. Nkrumah was released from prison by a special act-of-grace of the governor, Arden-Clarke. He was invited to become the leader of Government Business. His first statement at a press conference later in the day, was this, I would like to make it absolutely clear that I am a friend of

60 Britain , and further that he had no intention (Fitch & Oppenheimer, 1966:36-37). Nkrumahs moral obligation to collaborate with the British forced him to expel those in his party who were radical enough as to criticize him. The remaining agitators from the city squares and market places were remoulded into practitioners of the Westminster Parliamentary System. Inside the scale modelled replica of Westminster, however, there was little actual power to exercise. The mother country still [has the monopoly of the legitimate use of force in the country]-- controlled the police and the army; the colonial Governor retained his reserve powers; British bureaucrats held most of the senior positions in the Civil Service; British stockholders owned the gold mines; over 90% of import-export trade was controlled by the Colonial Office; and the British banks continued unabated, their eternal policy of vacuum-cleaning the country, sucking up local capital without any feedback in the form of loans to Ghanaians (Fitch & Oppenheimer, 1966:38). The irony was that, while the CPP members imagined themselves getting the better of the British through tactical action, the British prided themselves on their own subtleties. The Governor, Arden-Clarke (Fitch & Oppenheimer, 1966:38), described the situation later:
We learnt for example, how effective the device of changing names could be. It is, I suppose, true that a rose by any name would smell as sweet, but we learnt that if we changed the name of leader of Government Business to Prime Minister and Executive Council to Cabinet, without in any way altering their functions and powers, or the name of Chief Commissioner to Regional Officer, or District Commissioner to Government Agent, they all seemed to smell much sweeter in the public nose. That device certainly helped us to get over some difficulties

of nationalizing any Gold Coast industry

(Fitch & Oppenheimer, 1966:38). The CPP started agitating for constitutional reform. This led naturally to adoption of Nkrumahs Constitution and subsequently the 1954 elections. This election was to mark the truly transitional aspect of the shift from traditional to secular-social-political life (Apter, 1963:297). It was intended to open the way for the final granting of independence but it resulted rather in further conflict for the CPP. There were too many groupings, who have in common more than a simple dislike of the Nkrumah regime. They also took their bearing in the sea of Gold Coast Politics. The moves towards alliance between Northern and Ashanti groups might perhaps herald the new kind of association where traditionally oriented groups themselves under the guise of a reformed chieftaincy might activate large numbers of individuals who now only dimly realize that self-

61 government and freedom are at hand and that mean changes in their lives(Apter, 1963:314). Who spoke for the opposition? No single voice or party, not even a single class. In the chorus of voices raised against the CPP, many accents could be detected (Fitch & Oppenheimer, 1966:54). The very centralization of authority allowed the Nkrumah government to exert discipline and control had integrated a far-flung range of communications and authority, has made both the Northern Territory and Ashanti more remote, almost as back provinces of Gold Coast politics. The chiefs saw their former supporters, the British leaving them at the mercy of the young men, the secularistsCPP, hence the anguish with which many Northern Territory and Ashanti groups have greeted the time-table for independence. They are perhaps less sanguine about the Nkrumah regime than the British are (Apter, 1963:316). The election was fought by an assorted collection of splinter groups including some from the CPP. However, the CPP weathered the storm and won 60% of the registered votes, losing heavily in the Northern Territories. The ominous defeat of the CPP in the North triggered the real crisis for the party. The feat could be repeated elsewhere, given the combination of educated leaders, the use of traditional authority and the appeal of regional interests. Ashanti was quick to copy. It should be remembered that at this stage, the Cocoa Marketing Board (CMB) a central body for the marketing of cocoa had been set up. This was the most obvious instrument of foreign economic control the one which had the most long-lasting and disruptive effects on the Ghanaian economy was a government agency on which the CPP duly served (Fitch & Oppenheimer, 1966:38). Earnings from the sale of cocoa by the CMB were as it was, loaned to the British and a small percentage allocated to the Gold Coast. This small percentage did not go to the producers in the country. It was used, through the auspices of the Cocoa Purchasing Company (CPC), founded by the CPP in 1952, to undermine political and economic opposition among the developing or aspirant bourgeoisie of rich cocoa farmers and merchants, and to promote support through the dispensation of benefits and patronage. The Cocoa Purchasing Company provided the party with large supplies of credit and business openings with which to consolidate its supports (First, 1972:171). As a result, the cocoa price was pegged, that is, the government paid a predetermined price, which did not vary with the world price. Nkrumah put it differently, though; about this time, it became clear that further steps were necessary to control the price paid to the local cocoa farmers. Otherwise, we would shortly be faced with inflation. Demand in the world market had far the changes taking place in the Gold Coast

62 exceeded supply of cocoa, and the price had risen to a record height: If a proportionately high prices were paid to farmers there would be an immediate rise in consumer goods followed by a demand for wage and salary increase (Nkrumah, 1959:179). A movement was thus formed in Ashanti to agitate for higher cocoa prices, (and it should be borne in mind that Ashanti was the centre of cocoa production in the country). This movement soon acquired some strange bedfellows the intelligentsia. They found in the movement a last opportunity to ditch the Nkrumah regime. This alliance is of some great interest. The aims varied from a desire to break away from the Central Government in Accra and a wish to postpone independence for the Gold Coast. The chiefs in particular had more than a bone to pick with the Nkrumah party. The party had become the one universal tribe and Nkrumah was the great paramount chief. This, to them was an affront. The cocoa movement was to become the National Liberation Movement and the appeal was to Ashanti nationalism, in the name of the sacred Golden Stool. Some Ashanti leaders in the CPP defected and the scene was set for battle. Ashanti became out of bounds for the government party for a long time. Arson, murder, kidnapping and assassination plots were the order of the day. Other regions joined in with their own brand of nationalism and the Nkrumah regime was rocked to the bottom. The British Colonial Office finally stepped in to insist on a fresh round of elections before independence was granted. In the ensuing 1956 elections, the CPP won again, smashingly. It was, however, an abysmally low poll; in fact only one in six eligible to vote actually supported the CPP, on the very eve of independence. This low level of popular mobilization was to dog the CPP in this and subsequent elections. The crisis could have been used as an opportunity to dismantle the traditional system altogether but the opportunity was wasted. Meanwhile, the opposition group had been gathered into one party the United Party (UP). On March 6, 1957 Britain granted Ghana independence. 3.3. THE PURGE The period I have just analysed marked the zenith of political opposition and disposition in Ghana. During the period, 1957 1961, however, politics reached its nadir. This was the period when the country became a neo-colony in the British sphere of interest. The country looked to the British pound as its anchor of safety, and the British looked to the Ghanaian gold for its anchor of wealth. The external reserves were reserved in London instead of in Accra.

63 Development strategy was orthodox and the balance of payment difficulties set in. Events moved very quickly after independence. The opposition attack on the government was sweeping and fundamental by the summer of 1957 bitterly anti-Nkrumah groups could be found everywhere Backbenchers of the CPP threatened to bolt to the opposition (Apter, 1963:329). The nationalist party was clearly in deep trouble. It lurched from crisis to crisis, governed by caprice and having to use the cruel weapon of Preventive Detention Act to silence its opponents (Austin, 1970:415). In 1957, the government passed a law requiring that all political parties should be nation-wide, with membership open to all, irrespective of tribe or region. Now firmly in the saddle, with independence at last, the CPP proceeded to concentrate power at the centre and to weaken the potential opposition of the regions. The regional assemblies, protected by the independence constitution were curbed, and then abolished; the powers of the chiefs were circumscribed and entrenched provisions on the judiciary and the civil service were revoked (First, 1972:173). These actions were in the right direction if looked upon as part of the process of unification. Basil Davidson delved into the situation thus, only those who prefer that Ghana should have remained a congeries of traditional little statelets with no effective central power can fairly criticize Nkrumahs policy of unification (Davidson, 1967.167). The question to be asked here is whether in the process an attempt was made at creating a new social order and if so by what means. A monopoly of the legitimate use of violence does not help in opening a new vista for any society. One factor that cannot be overlooked is the extent to which the old traditional system has been dismantled and subsumed under an imposed Western system. When the apparatus of the state finished its duty with the outside opposition (the colonial government), it was turned on the opposition pockets in the nationalist part itself. As it were, many landed in jail or snowballed out of the country. By 1961, therefore, the country had been unified but the lack of effort on the part of the government to overhaul society completely made it difficult to implement the avowed plans for industrialization-cum-modernization. Professor Cipolla (1972:110) viewed the problem this way: when industrialization is artificially speeded up, the socio-cultural environment can indeed represent a formidable bottleneck and invalidate all efforts to achieve industrialization. This is the reason why some of passive, with a total dependence on foreign capital for any projected industrialization. Meanwhile, the external reserves started dwindling and

64 those societies who want, or are forced to quicken the pace of industrialization may feel more or less emotionally the urge to resort to political and social revolutionary movements. The CPP proved wholly inadequate for the task of forging a social and political revolution, for the following reasons: the party had been organised as a vote-maximizing and mixing machine and it never really changed. It had no body of cadres at grass roots levels to stimulate popular support; instead the technique was patronage and coercion. It was not uncommon for the branch leaders of the party to be the toughest man in the area, displaying all brawns and no brains. Emotion was blended with self-interest. The appeal was to the heart to the loyalty of those who preferred self-government to servitude. An appeal to local pride and Africanism. It became, in reality, the breeding place for opportunists and adventurers. They were in effect likened to a bunch of bureaucratic gangsters, and Fanon (Caute, 1970:88) went on to describe them like this:
where decolonization has been evolutionary and relatively non-violent, the emergent nation is controlled by know-all, wily intellectuals, who resort to legal robbery, import-export combines [sic], stock exchange jobbery and so forth, to cheat their own people. Touch!

Most of the members of the CPP leadership had been the life and soul of the positive action campaign; but once the CPP was in power they had reached journeys end. They calculated on settling in office to enjoy the spoils. It was not always a matter of ideology. Ideology and ideologists were thin on the ground in the CPP. Views of socialism ranged from Krobo Eduseis description: Socialism doesnt mean that if you have made a lot of money, you cant keep it, to the finer definitions by a minute group of Marxists that was divided against itself in doctrinal polemic. The real differences within the CPP, certainly in the early days of power, were manifestations of the tug-of-war between different groups for authority and advantage. Conspiracy and manipulation asserted personal family, business, clan, community or other vested interests. The CPP became an unmanageable lobby of different pressure groups, with the struggle for power carried on at the University, in the press, in Parliament and in government ministries, as well as in the party itself (First, 1972:182). Nkrumah (1968:73-74) was to speak ruefully of this sad state of affairs after his fall:
I had for a long time the gravest doubts about many of those in leading positions in my party. Despite the establishment of the ideological institute at Winneba, which I hope, might be used to teach some general

65
understanding of what we were attempting, it was clear that many high positions still failed to understand the political and social purpose of the state the old organization was defective and that the old leadership in many cases which was inherited from the struggles against British imperialism was inadequate for its task and when put to the test of crisis failed

Sad as these words may sound, they fail to absolve Nkrumah from blame, since intrinsic to the failings of the CPP was Nkrumahs own character, with his limitations as a theoretician and a leader. He saw Socialism and economic development as a process to be promoted by edict, from the pinnacle of government, by himself, a strong man and charismatic leader. Changing Ghanas social system was a matter of his power and authority. He undertook no close analysis of Ghanaian society and instructed no one else to do so. He published descriptions of imperialism, and of neo-colonialism and thought that, having identified their purposes, he could prevail against them He lived in a world of paper plans, ministerial and presidential instructions, diagrammatic schemes for Pan-African unity, African high commands, the clandestine sponsorship of radical groups in neighbouring countries addicted to more conservative policies than his own. Many of his schemes were exactly what Ghana and Africa did need; but between the scheme and its execution was a period of woolly thinking (First, 1972:187). Frank Fanon, no doubt, had Nkrumah in mind when he described the typical African party leader as the general president of that company of profiteers, impatient for their returns, which constitutes the national bourgeoisie His honesty, which is his souls true bent, crumbles away little by little(Caute, 1970:92).

66

4. SOCIETY AND IDEOLOGY

To get to the best society nowadays, one has to feed people, amuse people, or shock people. Oscar Wilde Society is a madhouse whose wardens are the officials and the police. August Strindberg If you take away ideology, you are left with a case by case ethics which in practice ends up as me first, me only, and in rampant greed. Richard A. Nelson

Indeed, it can be said that in every society there is to be found an ideology. Also, there exist in every society at least one militant segment which is the dominant segment of that society. This dominant segment has its fundamental principles, its beliefs about the nature of man, and the type of society, which must be created for man. It will to a least extent, help in developing and controlling the type of organization which the dominant segment can use (Nkrumah, 1970:5758). In societies where there are competing ideologies, it is still usual for one ideology to be dominant. This dominancy is that of the ruling class or group the elite. The elite in African societies have not come to realize that an ideology should not seek merely to unite a section of the people, but should intend to seek unity for the whole of the society which it finds itself. These African elites are the dominant ideology within the society. For besides seeking political power, they should seek rather to establish common attitudes and purposes for the society. Ideology will give a sense of direction for African leadership. Leadership also have the sole responsibility in

67 the light of circumstances to decide what form or structure shall their respective institution have and into which direction would they be directed. When I say that in every society there exist at least one kind of ideology, I thereby want to give an understanding that in every society there is also a morality, which goes side by side with this concept. A morality is termed as a network of principles and rules for the guidance and appraisal of conduct (Nkrumah, 1970:60). It is usually upon these rules and principles that ruling elites in African societies have a constant fall back in their behaviour. There shall be in the society a body of moral principles and rules geared both from the African experience and that of their ancestors. Just as morality guides and seeks to connect the actions of millions of persons, so an ideology aims at uniting the actions of millions towards specific and definite goals. Again, I should be apt to say that ideology in this context is used to mean a group of individuals directed only at fundamental change within a society rather than an ideology which otherwise referred to be a body of writing of one individual. I have mentioned that ideology should seek to bring a specific order into the total life of its society. In order for a society to achieve this, it needs to employ a number of instruments. These instruments are centred on the society political theory, social theory and moral theory. Thus ideology displays itself in moral theory and practice. The ideology of a society is total (Carter, 1962:4). It embraces the entire class-structure, history, literature, art, religion and society as a whole. In the new African renaissance, grave emphasis must be placed on the presentation of African history. Nkrumah (1970:69) cautions, African history needs to be written as the history of our societies, and not as the story of European adventures. It is necessary that African societies must be treated to enjoy their integrity respectively. African history must also serve as a mirror of the society, and the European contact must only find its place in African history as a presentation in this way, its experience, regardless if it is even a crucial one. When history turns out in this way, it seeks to become a map of the growing tragedy and the final triumph of African society. Undoubtedly, this representation would certainly help to not only direct, guide, and serve as a pointer, but also would reconstruct African societies and give the ideology a better purpose.

4.1 ON IDEOLOGY One of the most momentous experiences that can befall any civilization is for it to break loose from its religious base. It is not to reject once ancestral religion per se. On the contrary, to

68 reaffirm it, to modernize it, to adapt it, to make be one interest among many (Palmer, 1967:329). The African traditional system described elsewhere is said to be originally religious religion pervades everything: everything social is religious and it is the crux of the matter: The basic commitment to the past gerontocracy -- and the ignorance shrouded in superstition and the morbid fear of nature is the greatest obstacles to change. The kind of worldview thus proffered by such a situation is cannibalistic in kind and genre, impeding rather than galvanizing progress. The view expressed elsewhere, that the problem in Africa is the lack of ideology is an understatement. For ideologies there are, in vast diversities and assortments when the lexical (Webster Dictionary) definition of ideology as the body of ideas reflecting the social needs and aspirations of an individual group or culture is used. It is anomalous to contend that there is a dearth of ideology in Africa. The predatory nature of the indigenous religions and ideologies are further compounded by the otherworldly view of the Christian and Islamic faith. In some areas, the orthodox of the Christian faith has been defied and an amalgam has been affected between the two. It is therefore imperative that accounts should be taken of the spiritual revolution that is taking place on the continent. This is considered by many to be the inevitable outlet for tensions emanating from the societal decomposition. Religion remains an important element of African culture and a potent force in contemporary life and thought, relevant to the search for modernization (Parsons, 1963:70). There are various kinds of world outlook calling for a rational choice on the basis of progress of reaction. World outlooks based on reactionary tendencies are those based on ancient beliefs and superstitions, and seek to persuade religious-minded people that they must remain blindly dependent upon some supernatural being and his vicars and anointed regents on earth. Other philosophies, while not openly asserting the existence of a deity and even avowing faith in science resort to subtle but false arguments in an effort to destroy mans conviction of the real world (Kuusinen, 1963). The progressive worldviews are those, which are all based, in one way or another, on a belief that life here on earth is capable of being perfected by human knowledge and effort. Since man by nature is an inventive animal, there have been significant improvements in human technology ever since that day when some caveman first began to chip flints into handy shapes. Until comparatively recent times, however, those improvements came too slowly to effect any sudden changes in the conditions of human existence. The usual expectation was that people would go on living much of their lives as their fathers and grand fathers had done, experiencing the various room for new and non-religious interests, to bring it about that religion, instead to being the womb or matrix from which all else comes shall

69 joys and privations to which, as it often seemed flesh is heir. All this has changed in the past 200 years with the industrial revolution (Watkins, 1964:2). It is abundantly clear that science has opened a new mindscape for mankind. It is in this sense that science can be said to have become an ideology. It is the ultimate talisman against cynicism. It defines its own purposes through the logic of inquiry and reason (Apter, 1967:316). A typical feature of modern ideologies is their militantly revolutionary character. This is considered to be natural though by no means necessary, consequence of their close relationship to the process of technological innovation. Whenever anticipated evolutionary improvements fail to take place on schedule it is quite natural to try to speed up the economic process by political means. The characteristic purpose of modern ideologies is to try to persuade men that it is both possible for them to further the progress of the industrial revolution by launching a revolutionary attack against the established political order. Our absolute inference from the crisis confronting the Developing Nation-State can be summed up in one, mobilization. We hereby resolve that this lack of mobilization is what smothers all efforts towards that take-off into economic growth. Further, the goal of economic growth and the norms pertaining to it being less-than-ultimate becomes an imposition, which is a source of conflict in the individual. This conflict tends to alienate leadership from the led. Figures 2a illustrates this cleft.

SOCIAL GOALS LEADERSHIP

MASSES Figure 2a. Leadership with Social Goals alienates the Masses. However, Marxism-Leninism has proved efficacious in bridging this gap, especially in situations where wars of liberation are waged against colonial domination as in China, Vietnam, and to some extent, Cuba. A relatively high degree of mobilization was achieved during the course of

70 liberation struggles; traditional structures disintegrate more rapidly and the resulting frustration is absorbed into a programmed fanned by the ideology. In fanning these aggressive trends into achievement-motivation or motivational-orientations, leadership identifies itself more and more with the masses. See figure 2b!

SOCIAL GOALS

LEADERSHIP MASSES Figure 2b. Leadership identifies itself with the Masses in chasing Social Goals. Hence the master key that unlocks the mystery of social mobilization is ideology. It is the fulcrum of modernization. But revolution is a taxing process, which imposes its own laws. Man is by nature a creature of habit, and tradition tails doggedly after habit. The way of the revolutionary then has been a hard one. To compensate his followers for the immediate risks and discomforts of change, he must inspire them with a compelling belief in the value of future rewards. In the process, he must also, in most cases, persuade them to break their habitual bonds of allegiance to established political authorities. To overcome mens fear of change, and to justify new forms of allegiance, are the central problems to be solved by any theory of revolution (Watkins, 1964:4). Watkins (ibid) continues,
whatever its ultimate advantages may be, the rapid industrialization of a country is clearly a painful process. Old and cherished ways of life must be abandoned at a time when the prospect of new and presumably better things to come is still little more than a promise. To make so daring a leap, into the future, with all its attendant dangers and discomforts, is an act that calls for no small measure of faith and determination.

71 We are therefore right in supposing that ideology is closely connected with the problems of industrialization. He continues, of all ideologies available, Communism is the one which would seem to have the likeliest prospects of mobilizing the have-not nations (Watkins, 1964:106). That this is a Hobsons choice for Africa is doubtless. But the annoyance is the charge that even Communism is an unusual Western thought. This elicits no small a measure of hesitance in African minds. The hitch can be scaled when once the Industrial Revolution, in spite of its origins, is considered a human heritage other than exclusively Western. Scientific alias Marxism is the ideology of the industrial revolution equally a human heritage. The Dialectical Materialism or Marxian dialectic offers an explanation of everything that had ever happened or could happen on earth. It possesses the universal aspect of a religion. Marxian socialism is a dogma and a faith transcending the borders of race and region. It is a strong compound of the scientific, the historical, the metaphysical and the apocalyptic (Palmer, 1967:499). Hence what began in liberated areas as natural development devolves into imposed development with leaders relying more and more on force, both internal and external, to implement policies. In a larger sense therefore, the crisis of identity, which begets the authority, and legitimacy crisis, which begets the penetration crisis, which begets the leadership crisis, is, indeed, a problem of meaning. Taking the cue from the leadership crisis, we will discover that policies and decisions concerning economic development prove increasingly difficult at the implementation stage. Effective leadership demands individual allegiances and confidences of those being led, and the sum total of these individual allegiances and confidences creates legitimacy of the leadership. In other words, leadership becomes charismatic by being able to make people to do what they would not normally do without any use of force. In this connection, we define charisma (gift of grace) as the embodiment of the groups values, goals and aspirations in one person who is acclaimed as a leader by the others. His authority over the group derives from the fact that he possesses the right answer. Two types of leadership charisma can be differentiated: 1) Unethical/issue-dependent Charismatic Leader -- Uses power only for personal gain or impact; promotes own personal vision; censures critical or opposing views; demands that own decisions be accepted without question; one-way communication; insensitive to followers' needs; relies on convenient external/imposed moral standards to satisfy self-interests. An example is what we see in liberation wars, and in Rambo-type action movies.

72 2) Ethical Charismatic Leader -- Uses power to service others; aligns vision with followers needs and aspirations; considers and learns from criticism; stimulates followers to think independently and to question the leader's view; open, two-way communication; coaches, develops, and supports followers; shares recognition with others; relies on internal moral standards to satisfy his followers interests and societal interests, and can turn followers into leaders. The behaviours of an ethical charismatic leader include: high self-confidence, competence, serve as role models, communicate high expectations, have strong power needs, engage in effective argumentation and create transcendent goals. The followers look to the charismatic leader to fulfil hopes, frustrations and fears. The charismatic leader creates a sense of adventure and excitement. New visions are seen within the group and widely shared beliefs, values, and goals help to promote the charismatic visions. Real/ethical charisma or moral-dependent charisma is the product of nomos (norms) defined as that state of affairs wherein the individuals inner stability is reconciled or harmonized with his or her external adaptability so that both vectors, value-orientations and motivational-orientations, are at the required operational level. To attain this, the emphasis should be on the restructuring of the family. For, the family is the psychic agency of society. As such, it occupies a strategic position in the process of ultimate rationalization. It is the producer of character and charisma direction, order and stability which are the necessary conditions under which human derive energy finds expression, discharge and pleasure and like a factory, it produces characters according to definite specifications supplied by the society within which it is functioning. When this requirement is met, physical coercion is replaced by inner compulsion, internalized behaviour, and the particular kind of human drive energy, which is channelled into character traits (Brown 1964:161). Finally, when social change is considered to be imperative, especially in the African context, the presumption is to orderly change. It is only possible under Marxism, interpreted to suit African needs and conditions. The arguments over the interpretation of Marxism as obtained in Nkrumaism and the other versions of African socialism will now be surveyed. 4.2. AFRICAN SOCIALISM: African socialism (Communalism and Collectivism) is the belief in the doctrine of sharing economic resources in a "traditional" African way, as compared to classical socialism. African Socialism should NOT be interpreted to mean Russian communism. Proponents of African

73 socialism were: Tanzanias Julius Nyerere, Ahmed Sekou Toure, etc. The one feature common to colonial Africa was the predominance of the rural population. There were regions of African territories where the colonial administration was absent and where control was maintained through indirect rule. There were other districts in which the heavy hand of Commissioners was always apparent. But few regions were insulated from the needs and demands of the cash market, and there was widespread discontent in almost every colony. It is not always clear whether the aspiring leaders set out to capture the rural constituencies, or whether the process was reversed. To attract the rural constituency national leaders adopted tribal dress, used ceremonial libations, shook flywhisk, sang tribal songs, adopted tribal titles. They preached the virtues of the African rural communalism or African collectivism: Tanzanias Julius Nyerere extolled the mutual security of the rich and the poor, in which the community ensured the welfare of its members. This was supposed to have pre-existed colonialism and he called it the communitary society. Guineas Sekou Tour spoke of the communaucratic society with a 'unique humanism...in collective living and social solidarity. In regions 'contaminated by colonialism, personal egoism abounded, but otherwise 'an individual in Africa cannot conceive of the organization of his life outside that of the family, village or clan. The voice of the African is faceless and nameless (Carter, 1962:193). Nkrumah harked on the same theme. Communalism, he assert, involved the African:
as primarily a spiritual being, a being endowed originally with a certain inward dignity, integrity and value...[Socialism] includes the restitution of the egalitarian and humanist principles of traditional African life within the context of a modem technological society serving the welfare needs of its people

Senegals Leopold Sedar Senghor, Guineas

(Miliband and Saville, 1974:232). The worker in African societies was viewed differently. Fanon, Senghor, Mboya, Tour and others inveighed against a privileged minority, a selfish privileged group, who played little part in overthrowing colonialism. Nyerere said of them that after independence they displayed a capitalist attitude of mind demanding a greater share in the general income because of the contribution they made. (Miliband and Saville, 1974: 245). Attitudes differed, but African leaders were agreed that socialism did not involve working class control of production: some because they said the working class was minute (and in this they were often factually correct) or because they claimed that the workers were selfish. Behind much of this rhetoric came the claim that there

74 were no class divisions in Africa, and no class struggle. Tour claimed that his party had 'adapted from Marxism everything that is true for Africa' and had 'excised' the class struggle 'to permit all Africans regardless of class to engage in the anti-colonial struggle. (Carter, 1962:189). Elsewhere he said that the party had 'formally rejected the principle of the class struggle...' as a European inspired doctrine that was not relevant to Africa (ibid). Leaders in east and in central Africa repeated these arguments. I have not been concerned with the truth or falsity of the claims for `traditional society', but with the fact that African leaders rested their cases on such statements. Such fantasy led Nkrumah to the conclusion that capitalism was too complicated a system for a newly independent nation. Hence the need for a socialist society. Others were more cavalier in their discussion of economic problems: You cannot be a capitalist when you have no capital. It was in this tradition that Nkrumah was to write in Consciencism the presuppositions and purposes of capitalism are contrary to those of African society. Capitalism would be a betrayal of the personality and conscience of Africa (Miliband and Savile, 1974:221-2). One of the viewpoints constantly expressed is that ideology is a veil for untidy motives and appearances (Apter, 1967:314). The efforts in the previous chapter were directed at an identification of the ideology of Science with Marxian Socialism. In this chapter, however, the emphasis will be on the basic differences between African Socialism and Scientific Socialism. By African socialism, I mean African communalism or collectivism. The first observation is however disturbing. African Socialism is another name for African nationalism and this is its principal weakness. Nationalism may be a revolutionary ideology vis--vis colonialism but it is not normally so with respect to other aspects of social life. It is largely silent on the forms of economic organization (Apter, 1967:314). African Socialism integrates the contribution of European socialism with African nationalism and with Negritude defined as the common denominator of all Negro Africans whatever race, religion or country (Lloyd, 1971:283). It is the last phase of the imperial reaction in the fashion of the Hegelian dialectic all over again. A clear understanding of the ramifications of the African Socialism is only possible when the ubiquitous slogan African Personality is fully surveyed. It is the umbilical cord between ideology and reality. Basil Davidson says it has a dual content: The African Personality emphasizes African particularity over against the rest of the world (or therefore of African equality with other major human groupings), but it also affirms a basic unity within the countless diversities of African

75 life (Davidson, 1967:79). In this sense, African Socialism looks backward and forward at the same time. As far as its proponents are concerned, there are no class antagonisms in African society. Nkrumah described traditional society as communistic and rejected the notion of a class struggle in African society (Lloyd, 1971:285). This is sheer duplicity; since aside from the elites manufactured by the colonial powers, it is anybodys guess that African Society is a slave society. This characterization includes the classical and spiritual forms of slavery. The very imperial presence was enough to point out this to any well-meaning analyst. It was the secular (material) approach to the environment that made for the success of imperialism. In the process the African was dominated politically, exploited economically, and socially, his human status has been demoralized and debased (by courtesy of the slave trade). In his book, Consciencism, Nkrumah affirmed this fact when he alluded to racial discrimination as the product of the slave trade, and it was not to be expected that he should turn round to deny the Africans status (proffered by the Capitalist system) in the world. If most of these African leaders (Presidents, Ministers, Governors, etc) would look around them, they will find that they are merely promoted slaves overseeing slaves. Hence, the greatest omission in African Socialism is the lack of emphasis on the role of property. It is the prerogative of the overseers. They still revel in the need for religion for the masses. It is a foregone conclusion that the quintessence of African tradition and culture are no more. What obtain in the name of culture and tradition are the gangrenous remains of the Western impact. What with social values having become money values, human right values having become property values (the preference to property rights over human rights), and the extended family brimming with pests and parasites. Lest I be charged for being pessimistic, it is foolhardy to build anything upon this. African Socialism is not only a travesty of the Scientific Socialism but also a caricature of it, if it is supposed that Socialism as an ideology defines modernity and social discipline as manifested in solidarity groupings whose raison detre is the functional quality of their roles for development. This functionalism, in turn, sets down the terms of individual identity and establishes a new system of motivation that emphasizes achievement (Apter, 1967:330). When it is thus exposed as a sham, African Socialism becomes the political religion of the janus-faced Westernized elites. Indeed, they need an ideology, which will provide them with an identity a defence-mechanism against assimilation to white society and to legitimize their rule. No traditional sanctions exist by which they may justify their rule. The elite must espouse a doctrine that purports to explain and justify its leadership, converting political power into political authority, and the ideology must find acceptance not only among the elite but also

76 among the masses. For the alternative to a general acceptance of the legitimacy of government is rule by coercion (Lloyd, 1971:270). A thick blanket is African Socialism, and under it the dictators (presidential monarchs) hide and perpetrate their evil machinations, horrors and depredations.

5. CONCLUSION: Comments and Indications Comments

You do not, simply because you are unable to uproot mistaken opinions and correct long established ills, abandon the State altogether. In a storm you do not desert the ship because you are unable to control the winds you must try to use subtle and indirect means and what you cannot turn you must make as little evil as possible. Moore Thomas, Utopia

In order to conclude this brief and interesting study in African Political Decay, I shall return to the use of the Challenge and Response model. We left off where as a result of the Carolingian response to the challenge of Muslim expansion, Western Imperialism was born and it in turn became the challenge to the world system. This challenge is, in a way, an epic, in that the entire world had become its scope, through the sheer force of colonization. In the evolution of a response to this challenge, however, there must be a precondition, a dyadic conflict between systems and structures. As the rhythms of history conflicts, struggles, colonization and displacements indicate, the polarization of structures emerged to alter the character and, in some ways, the composition of the structures such that one structure became subsumed under the other. To illustrate this point, I will employ a dialectical interplay between the two types of structures, as follows:

77

Primitive Society P(s+p) + S(p+s) = Human and Social Progress (HSP) (nomos )

POLARIZATION
Disanomie Feudal Society = P(-s) Hierarchical (Anomie)
Production(P) without socialization (s)

Disanomie Tribal Societies = S(-p) Non-hierarchical (nomocracy)

Socialization(S) without production(p)

Figure 3. The dyadic conflict between systems and structures. As figure 3 above shows, in the wake of this polarization, the dialectical interplay between the original structures of the primitive community is terminated by courtesy of the rhythms of history. The outcome, very simple and logical, is that the feudal hierarchical production-oriented structures will prevail over the tribal. Hence we have the clash between traditionalism and modernity. It is this clash that can open the floodgates of modernization to the entire human race. In the absence of this head-on collision, what prevails is westernization. Thus modernization becomes the preserve of a few the westernized elite. What happens after can only be viewed from the point of view of the imperial reaction, in the fashion of the Hegelian dialectic, which has been an undertone of tremendous importance in this study. The last two stages in this dialectic are the watermark in African politics (if politics is to be construed as the ascription of roles and values in a changing polity). The first stage of xenophobic defence vanished a long time ago in the light of the military superiority of the invading colonial forces. The second stage, the assimilation stage, or in the words of the dialectic, the swing in the direction of an uncritical self-humiliation and acceptance of alien superiority has a portent of change, but in the wrong direction and at the wrong tempo. This stage is the elite stage and the particular emphasis is on the preservation of colonial legacies. Only lip-service is paid to modernization, in so far as socio-economic change is concerned. The third stage marks the resurrection of the first the xenophobic defence of the existing order and this was married to the second phase with the blessings of nationalism. It is the nationalist synthesis according to

78 the dialectic, in which there was an assertion or reassertion of a community with pride in itself and in its past but still looking, at least as far as the leaders were concerned, in the direction of Westernization and modernization. Thus, instead of the dyadic conflict we get a two-way pull to the past and to the future. If there is any political development (institutionalization) therefore, it will be synonymous with political decay. That is mirroring the decadence of African society. Modernization is a multifaceted process involving change in all areas of human thought and activity. It is a frontal attack on poverty, ignorance, disease and squalor. Modernization is seen as supplementing rather than supplanting traditional society and there is considerable evidence, particularly from the Third World, of modernity and tradition coexisting in the same social system (Evans and Newnham, 1998:336). In these societies, modernization through westernization has failed to encourage homogenous change, and individuals, states and regions are regressing into a cul-de-sac of traditionalism. On the psychological plane, modernization involves a fundamental shift in values, attitudes and expectations. Traditional man expects continuity in nature and society and does not believe in the capacity of man to change or control either. Modern man in contrast accepts the possibility of change and believes in its desirability. Sociologically, modernization tends to supplement the family and other primary groups having diffuse roles with consciously organized secondary associations having much more specific functions. In many traditional societies the most important social unit was the extended family which itself often constituted a small civil society performing political, economic, welfare, security, religious and other social foundations functions. Under one impact of modernization, however, the extended family begins to disintegrate and is replaced by the nuclear family (Huntington, 1968:37). Thus, the decaying familism prevalent in African societies is typical not of a traditional society but of a backward society in which the traditional institutions of the extended family has disintegrated under the impact of the first phase of modernization. Modernization thus tends to produce alienation and anomie, normlessness generated by the conflict of old values and new values. The new values/structures undermine the old bases of association and authority before new skills; motivations and resources can be brought into existence to create new groupings. The break up of traditional institutions may lead to psychological disintegration and anomie [the disintegration of the artificially imposed norms], but these very conditions also create the need for new identifications and loyalties (Huntington, 1968:37). Simple sets of internalized and integrated norms may break down and be replaced (partially) by imposed ones, but there is no law in the world that says that this break down will

79 evolve inevitably into a modern industrial state, except that the norms are reconstructed, providing men with the necessary and sufficient conditions for progress. To wit, African tribal consciousness was almost unknown in traditional rural life. Tribalism was a product of modernization and the western impact on a traditional African society. African Socialism, with its total commitment to the past, fails as an ideology to lead the way to a better tomorrow. Its inadequacy is unfortunate. It blurs the vision splendid, and social change becomes a mad circus. On the other hand, Scientific Socialism is the consummate of the New Concept of man mentioned earlier in the study. The new concept of man, institutionalized in the Renaissance, boosted the Industrial Revolution and the Imperial Mystique. Taken as a simple communication model, from an ideological point of view, imperialism is justified so far as its exploitations and oppressions can be viewed as the message to the traditional system. The message is the old maxim: change/adapt or perish. A feedback is called for. Otherwise the message continues unabated. The feedback must be based on social and distributive justice. Intoned in the imperial message is the measure of the feedback: Man has conquered nature through science. The yoke of slavery is broken, both classical and spiritual forms of slavery no longer hold sway over man. (Though, it can be argued that slavery is still very much alive). Man today can live better and happier than the generation of yesteryears. The feedback should therefore have been a colonial war. This would have been a revolution, changing man and his institutions. What was an ideology based on a future state of things, and it came in company of imperialism. It is only in this sense that one can consider Communism (Scientific Socialism) as the response to Capitalism (Western Imperialism), the challenge to the world system. From this perspective, the concept third world is a theory which is derogatory. It connotes failure. It is a phenomenon that jolts even the annals of human history. Human existence, and, for that matter, human history are dualistic, to wit, the bipolar system. The transfer of colonial power is nothing short of a swindle. The African leaders, saddled with the weight of the decomposed states, sadly lacking a world-view to guide their efforts, regressed into the traditional exercise of exorcism (call it mumbo jumbo if you like). The anti-colonial tirades that mark(ed) the careers of most African leaders are the classical examples of this exorcism. It is a shame African elites and leaders lack original ideas and cannot use their imagination to craft authentically African solutions to African problems. If all they can do is to imitate the colonialist, then they might as well bring back the colonial governors to rule Africa. At the very least, they could copy or improve Africa's own indigenous systems if they were bereft of original ideas. This issue is important. Before long, most of these foreign imitation projects began collapsing because they had no roots in the indigenous culture. Political oppression, civil war,

80 ruinous strife, and chaos have ravaged Africa, people on behalf of foreign ideologies. Indications In the Third World, modernization can only be achieved under Socialism. It has a special meaning for the nations, born out of that swindle. It becomes the ethic for a system of political discipline emphasizing science science for its own sake as a symbol of progress and as a form of political wisdom. In keeping with this aim, socialism offers a set of unified development goals that stress roles functional to modernization and the achievement of a workmanlike/workwomanlike rational society in which people lend one another a helping hand because they feel themselves a part of the community effort toward industrialization. In the dearth of such an ideology, the polities are infested with the cupidity of irresponsible pre-emptors (of scarce resources) of the second and third phases. What is nauseating about these is their opulence. Their conspicuous consumption, standing as it were, in weird contrast to the most debasing poverty, disease and squalor, immanent in the term third world, the Wretched of the Earth, or underdeveloped world, is obviously frustrating to the political analyst. Such a subject matter belongs to the realm of another analyst: the psychoanalyst, as opposed to, the political analyst. It is the crisis of identity, legitimacy and penetration that make such an analysis imperative. This dismal picture (that aptly depicts the predicament of the modern nation states of Africa (and African societies) whose mode of production and socialization were subsumed under the triple trajectories of colonialism, and now smarting under the yoke of the globalization process) is analogous to the concept of folie a deux, used in psychopathology, where it presents the interesting picture of two persons sharing the same delusional beliefs. Norman Cameron (1968:499-500) runs it thus:
One of the two is usually a dominant paranoid with more or less fixed delusions. The other is likely to be a suggestible, dependent person who takes over the dominant ones delusions intact. In the final reconstruction of reality, which constitutes the folie, the two participants will share a common pseudocommunity. The dominant paranoid is its major architect, while the dependent person does little more than agree with the delusional reconstruction.

leaving the continent littered with human

carcasses. Armed with a few imported bazookas, "useless idiots" blew up their country and

Nonetheless, to prove that African freedom is not a forlorn hope, let us now have recourse to how such psychopathological cases are treated. According to the intrinsic logic of the

81 concept folie a deux, when the dependent person is separated from the dominant person and is given therapeutic help, he gradually gives up the dominant persons delusional beliefs (Cameron, 1968:499-500). The dependent person is not only healed, but also freed from the virtual prison of superimposed endogenous and exogenous norms, which blocked him from seeing realities fullness. However, for this humble exercise to be anything purposive, it must end on a sanguine note. There are prospects for development. The Wretched of the Earth situation, fraught with SOCIAL INJUSTICES, is a nursery for a SOCIAL(IST) REVOLUTION. And this cannot be overlooked. This will put the modernization process in gear, reversing the present situation where it is like drops of water in the Sahara desert. African societies will need to be jet-propelled into the modernization age. Modernization shall be like a spring of water, flowing in a desert, whose waters fail not. But when? When exactly? When the cumbersome bullet-proof vest of African monocrats (the little de Gaules, king Leopolds, and the replicas of Westminster) is rejected, then the Goliath of survival will be ultimately subdued. And the cure for the Wretched of the Earth situation? It is quite simple, really. Only get rid of imperialism, and, what comes to the same thing, see to it that people freely determine their own history. TOUCH

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