Ghanas 50th Birthday

By Noa Yachot
Illustration By Florencio Zavala

The Rise & Fall & Rise of Pan-Africanism

One day in 1961, a 93-year-old man from Western Massachusetts named W.E.B. Du Bois picked up and
relocated to Ghana, a newly independent state in West Africa. Cold War hysteria had stripped him of his
freedom and turned him into a pariah in his own country. Suspecting his Communist affiliations, Joseph
McCarthy set his sights on Du Bois and the State Department went so far as to strip him of his passport for
six years in the 1950s.
Two years after his passport was restored to him, Du Bois severed his ties to the United States. While he
goes down in history as one of the most influential African-American intellectuals, he chose to die an African
citizen. I have returned that my dust shall mingle with the dust of my forefathers, he wrote to a Ghanaian
official at the time. Ghana in 1961 was still riding high on the euphoria of its liberation from Britain four years
earlier.
Exactly 50 years ago, the small West African country approximately the size of Oregon was the first subSaharan state to achieve independence. On March 6, 1957, after some 500 years of varying degrees of
European control, Kwame Nkrumah, Ghanas founding father and first president, roared before an ecstatic
crowd, Ghana, your beloved country, is free forever.
Within three years, most of Africa would follow suit. As European empires fell, independence filled Africans
with a sense of solidarity. Nkrumah served as the most prominent voice of Pan-Africanism, a movement to
bring Africans and the African diasporaAfricas descendants abroadtogether in unity. This was the
platform for his struggle for independence and the basis of his policies in office. The unification of the
African family had become Nkrumahs life goal decades earlier, as a student in the United States in the
1930s and 40s.

It was there that Nkrumah became acquainted with Black Nationalism, which was gaining ground in the
United States and the Caribbean. Between 1919 and 1945, Du Bois was instrumental in organizing five PanAfrican congresses. He wrote extensively on the need for Africa to strengthen its relationship with its
diaspora. Marcus Garvey had acquired millions of followers to his Universal Negro Improvement
Association, which urged Blacks to return to Africa. Partially inspired by Garvey, the rise of Rastafarianism
in 1930s Jamaica gave a deeply spiritual dimension to Afrocentric Black pride. Civil rights leaders, among
them Du Bois, were often at odds regarding the course Blacks in the diaspora should take for their struggle
against oppression. However, the emancipation of Africa from White rule gave them a common objective.
Africa had gained mythical and redemptive stature among the diaspora, serving at once as the source and
the ultimate destination.
Nkrumahs involvement in the Pan-African movement intensified during his time abroad, and peaked with
the Fifth Pan-African Congress of 1945, held in Manchester, England. Nkrumah helped organize the
meeting, in which African and Black leaders from around the world addressed problems of African
colonization and racism. Following this, he returned to Ghana, where he quickly rose in the ranks of local
politics. Nkrumahs firebrand socialism spoke to the basic needs of his nationthe country wanted to control
its own fate and see White rule off its shores.

It was not only the nascent Ghanaian state that embraced Nkrumah as its hero. The new Pan-African
consciousness, nurtured by the U.S. civil rights movement and liberation struggles around the world, saw
him as a liberator. Du Bois was just one of hundreds of African-Americans who came to Ghana in the 50s
and 60s. Martin Luther King Jr. and Coretta King had been present at independence, where they were said
to have wept as Nkrumah proclaimed Ghanas freedom. (Du Bois was regrettably forbidden at the time from
leaving American soil and couldnt attend the celebrations.) Other visiting notables in the early years
included Malcolm X, Louis Armstrong, Richard Wright and Maya Angelou. Fed up with their second-class
status in the United States and fueled by ideology, Black American migrs in Ghana believed they were
reuniting the African family, which had been torn apart by slavery and colonization.
But the forces of disintegration that swept Africa following independence would seize Ghana as well.
Veneration of Nkrumah deteriorated as the dreams that accompanied independence were shattered by tax
increases, repressive decrees and the alienation of the security forces. Nkrumah had fallen out of favor with
the army thanks to his keenness to deploy troops around Africa in order to assist liberation struggles. PanAfrican idealism brought Nkrumahs final ruin, writes historian David Birmingham in Kwame Nkrumah: The
Father of African Nationalism. While on a trip to the Far East in 1966, Ghanaian army and police forces

joined to seize power. Nkrumah never returned to Ghana, and died in 1972, after six years of exile in
Guinea. With the end of Nkrumahs career, Pan-Africanism lost its voice and its appeal. The defunct
Organization of African Unity, which Nkrumah helped found to strengthen the continent, twiddled its thumbs
while nations fell like dominoes into brutal civil wars. African leaders had traded ideology for the spoils of
power, and Nkrumahs dreams of a United States of Africa dissolved.
Pan-Africanism also dashed the expectations of a number of its earliest and most ardent admirers. Toward
the end of his career, Nkrumah turned against the African-American community in Ghana. He became
convinced the United States was seeking to topple him, and that Black Americans living in Ghana were
working as spies for the U.S. government.
When the migrs left the States for Ghana, they had felt they were returning home after hundreds of years
in exile. But Ghana wasnt the stage for the family reunion they had hoped for. Many came with the
assumption that they would be viewed as brothers and sisters returning to the motherland, embraced with
open arms, and given minimal hospitality, says Anne Adams, director of the W.E.B. Du Bois Center for PanAfrican Culture and a retired professor of African Literature at Cornell University. But for the most part they
werent. They were recognized as obruni [foreigner, or White person], as we still are. They were perceived
as foreigners who did not have as much in common with Ghanaians or with Africans as they did with people
from the western countries that they came from.
Nkrumahs replacements sought to erase his legacy; Ghanaian presidents did not mention Pan-Africanism
for years after his overthrow. But little by littleor small small, as the Ghanaians sayhis reputation has
been rehabilitated. Decades of war, famine and disease have convinced many Africans across the continent
of the need to work together to deal with an ever-growing list of crises. Crippling trade policies, imposed by
the West to guarantee African dependence, have also renewed the relevance of Nkrumahs hopes for an
Africa united against foreign exploitation.
Today, Nkrumah has reassumed his position in the canon of African heroes, and he served as the
indisputable poster boy for the independence fever that swept Ghana this past March. During the weeklong
celebration of Ghanas 50th anniversaryfor which the Ghanaian government spent some $20 million
Nkrumahs memory was invoked at virtually every event. His famous inaugural speech from 1957 was
symbolically reenacted on the eve of Independence Day. His likeness lined the streets, and hordes of
Ghanaians en route to state-sponsored performances, concerts and parties paraded the streets under his
gaze. Nkrumah was the man of the hour again.
But the scope of Nkrumahs rehabilitation goes beyond independence nostalgia. He is still credited with
keeping the country from crumbling into the ethnic conflicts that have gripped much of the rest of the
continent. To help infuse a sense of nationalas opposed to ethnic pride, Nkrumah integrated schools
and prohibited ethnic-based political parties. To this day, Ghanaians swell with pride at the mention of their
countrys number one asset: peace.
The past two decades have also seen the return of African-Americans to Ghana, with an estimated 5,000
living in the country today. Nkrumahs call for the African diaspora to return home to lend a hand in
development is now being spearheaded by the recently renamed Ministry of Tourism and Diaspora
Relations, which offers tourists of African descent a lifetime visa to Ghana. We want Africans everywhere,
no matter where they live or how they got there, to see Ghana as their gateway home, J. Otanka ObetsebiLamptey, minister of Tourism and Diaspora Relations, told the New York Times last year. We hope we can
help bring the African family back together again.

The Ghanaian reception to the new migrs is not too different than it was in the past, but AfricanAmericans moving to Ghana these days have a better sense of what to expect, Adams says. It is a sign of
the appeal of Pan-Africanism, the readiness of so many Americans to move to a developing country, where
electricity and running water count as luxuries, and approximately half the population lives in poverty.
Sometimes we are frustrated by the fact that we feel were here among sisters and brothers, and would
prefer to be treated like they treat their own sisters and brothers, and not just as Americans who have, in
their minds, a lot of money, says Adams. However, the advantages outweigh the unease. She speaks of
experiencing a level of contentment living in Africa that she has never felt in the United States.
It is apparently this contentment that brought Du Bois, and still brings his contemporaries, back to Africa. But
while Pan-Africanism has been revived in some Ghanaian and diasporan circles, it still means very little to
the vast majority of Africans. [African-American migrs] will tell you they arent liked in America, but I dont
believe theres racism there. And they dont like us here. At the end you realize they are here to make
money, says Marshall, a manager at a popular tourist resort, who comes from Benin. Tom, his Ghanaian
partner, agrees. They are rude to us, he says.
This gap between diasporan Africans expectations for acceptance and the suspicion they are met with by
locals puts into question the actual accomplishments of Pan-Africanism. To what extent are the futures of all
Africans, both on the continent and abroad, linked? According to Anne Adams, they are inextricable. The
stronger Africa is, the stronger the prospect for respect and dignity of people of African descent, she says.
W.E.B. Du Bois and Kwame Nkrumah would certainly have agreed with her. But for the African family to
reunite, those raised on the continent must embrace Adams statement as true. Whether they will join the
call, or reduce Pan- Africanism back to the history books, remains to be seen.