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The Coup That Set Ghana and
Africa 50 Years Back
By Charles Quist-Adade
March 15, 2016
Nkrumah wanted to industrialize Ghana within a
generation, and everything was on course until the Americans and
their British cousins used some disgruntled and self-serving
Ghanaian soldiers to stage that terrible coup on 24 February
1966. It was a major setback, not only for Ghana but the whole
of Africa!
A few days after the overthrow of the
Convention People's Party government of Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana's
pioneer president, in a bloody coup d'état on February 24,
1966, our primary school teachers hurriedly organized a crash
course on public demonstration for us.
We were taught a
song, which has etched indelibly on my mind till now. The lyrics
of the song roughly translate as: "Kotoka, drive him away;
Nkrumah is coming!" We were then sent on a march through the
main streets of the town, chanting the newly-minted and
hurriedly taught song in praise of the coup plotters and in
vilification of Nkrumah.
As we sang and waved flags, I
vividly remember singing what I thought was the song we were
taught on the assembly grounds that fateful morning. "Drive him
away, Konkonte; Nkrumah is coming!" Unsuspectingly, I had
mistaken the name of the coup leader, Lt. General Emmanuel Kwasi
Kotoka with "kokonte", a Ghanaian dish, which is made from dry
cassava flour.
Like the tens of thousands of school
pupils herded on contrived demonstrations by the anti-Nkrumah
forces, my schoolmates and I were used to demonstrate to the
outside world how unpopular Nkrumah was as president and how
Ghanaians welcomed his overthrow.
Yet, I had no clue what
was going on, and I suspect most of my mates didn't either.
I conjecture this could be true for the legions of school
children across the country who were herded along dusty streets
in every nook and cranny of Ghana to greet the overthrow of
Nkrumah with pomp and celebration. And one may suspect many of
the adult demonstrators who joined the celebration of Nkrumah's
overthrow did so not so much because they were happy Nkrumah was
deposed.
As has been revealed the placards market women
from Makola, the main market in Accra, the Ghanaian capital,
were brandishing in seemingly spontaneous merrymaking in the
wake of the coup were, in fact, prepared in the US embassy.
This is not to discount the fact some of the sentiments
expressed by some Ghanaians on the news of Nkrumah's overthrow
were spontaneous. For, by the time of the coup, the Ghanaian
economy was in serious crisis. There were general shortages of
basic goods. A pervading sense of fear had enveloped the
country, as the Nkrumah government clamped down on his political
foes, who were hell bent to depose him through multiple
assassination attempts and acts of terror aimed at destabilizing
the country.
DARK DAYS IN GHANA
In his book, 'Dark
Days in Ghana', Nkrumah revealed that the coup was the handiwork
of the Central Intelligence Agency (C.I.A) of United States of
America. [1] His detractors quickly dismissed his claim as
delusional and an excuse for his mismanagement of the country
through his dictatorial leadership.
But in
1999, Nkrumah's claim was borne out when the US government
declassified the Western-orchestrated plot to get rid of the man
who was "doing more to undermine our interests than any other
black African."[2] The US government was determined to depose
Nkrumah before he managed to unite Africa under a united African
government. As it turned out, the US government and some of its
allies, including Britain, had financed, masterminded, and
tele-guided the coup. [3]
Prior to the declassification,
John Stockwell, a C.I.A officer in Africa, had recounted the
plot to undermine Nkrumah's government and to sow anti-Nkrumah
sentiments among Ghanaians. Stockwell wrote:
"Howard
Bane, who was the CIA station chief in Accra, engineered the
overthrow of Kwame Nkrumah. Inside the CIA it was quite clear.
Howard Bane got a double promotion, and was awarded the
Intelligence Star for the overthrow of Kwame. The magic of it
was that Howard Bane had enough imagination and drive to run
this operation without ever documenting what he was doing and
there wasn't one shred of paper that was generated that would
name the CIA hierarchy as being responsible."[4]
In 1957,
Nkrumah's Ghana became a trailblazer for African liberation.
From faraway Virginia, USA, at the headquarters of the Central
Intelligence Agency (CIA), eyes were trailing what was happening
in Ghana. According to Baffour Ankomah, just nine months into
independence, the CIA issued a report on Ghana in December 1957,
which was distributed within the American government and
intelligence community.[5]
Very prescient, the report:
"The fortunes of Ghana--the first Tropical African country to
gain independence will have a huge impact on the evolution of
Africa and Western interests there." [6]
It didn't take
long for that prediction to come true. Within 10 years of
Ghana's independence, 31 other African countries had gained
their own independence. And Nkrumah's Ghana (which, in his own
words: "we have got to make our little country an example for
the rest of Africa") had had a huge role in liberating Africa.
He set up training camps in Ghana for African freedom fighters,
and through financial, political and other support, Nkrumah's
Ghana kept the African liberation torch burning very brightly.
True to his electoral promises, Nkrumah went to work putting
the economic and social fundamentals in place. This encouraged
the people to work even harder. Nkrumah firmly believed that
political independence was meaningless without economic
independence.
Thus, by the time he was overthrown in the
CIA-inspired coup, Ghana had 68 sprawling state-owned factories
producing every need of the population--from shoes, to textiles,
to furniture, to lorry tires, to canned fruits, vegetables and
beef; to glass, to radio and TV; to books, to steel, to educated
manpower, virtually everything!
Nkrumah wanted to
industrialize Ghana within a generation, and everything was on
course until the Americans and their British cousins (according
to their own declassified documents) used some disgruntled and
self-serving Ghanaian soldiers, staged that terrible coup on 24
February 1966 that truncated Ghana's progress. It was a major
setback, not only for Ghana but the whole of Africa!
"If
Nkrumah had been allowed to complete his industrialization plan,
Ghana would today have been another Malaysia on the west coast
of Africa, and the modern doomsayers who now mock Ghana by
showing us the bright lights in Kuala Lumpur, would not dare
show their warped tongues!"[9]
But Nkrumah was
overthrown, and we are now left with nostalgia and what might
have been. After the coup, the IMF rubbed salt into our injuries
by sending a delegation to Accra to tell the military junta to
discontinue Nkrumah's industrialization programme. And they did!
And, as a reward, some of them got airports named after them!
Today, 50 years after the coup, almost every Ghanaian
(except those still suffering from acute blindness and amnesia)
now realizes our great loss.
It has taken the country
half a century of blood and tears to hang on to the straws that
have barely kept us afloat through five turbulent decades to
arrive at the current political and economic stability achieved,
since 1992, under six terms of constitutional rule-first under
president Rawlings' NDC (1992-2000), President John Kufuor's NPP
(2000-2008), John Atta Mills and then John Mahama's NDC (2009 to
date).
Ghana has learnt its lessons the hard way
NKRUMAH: THE PAN-AFRICANIST PROPHET
When Nkrumah wrote
that long after he was dead and gone, the torch which he had lit
in Africa would continue to be held aloft to give light and hope
to his people, his detractors called him a self-delusional
megalomaniac. But testimonies since his death bear him out. How
so true the old saw: "a prophet is not unknown, except in his
own country."
Kwame Nkrumah, the visionary Pan-Africanist
who dreamt of a united, prosperous Africa, was a man of
foresight. He had a noble vision for Africa and the Black race.
He saw the metropolises of Africa becoming the headquarters of
science, technology, and medicine. He saw in Africa a giant
hypnotized, made dormant by years of foreign tutelage and
exploitation, and he sought to awaken this giant. But time and
his contemporaries were not on his side. He seems to have been
born ahead of his time and his contemporaries. As the celebrated
British historian, Basil Davidson, put it: Nkrumah lived far
ahead of his time. It is in the years ahead that people would
read about his works and wonder to themselves why such a man
should have lived at such a time
Nkrumah's and indeed
Africa's tragedy was that he came to power at the wrong time, in
the "heat" of the Cold War, a period when the bi-polar East-West
ideological confrontation made leaders like Nkrumah sacrificial
lambs on the alter of superpower chauvinism. Cold War politics
brooked no homegrown nationalists and patriots; it did not
forgive leaders who refused to worship the gods of Soviet
communism or American capitalism.
We Africans have
ourselves to blame if we continue to plough our narrow furrows
instead pooling our efforts, human and material resources in
order to compete in the globalized 21st century. If we fail to
take up the challenge of continental unity now, the continent
will inevitably be gobbled up by the colossus of capitalist
globalism this century, just as in the last century it was
enslaved, balkanized, and exploited of its human and natural
resources through the trilogy of slavery, colonialism, and
neo-colonialism.
Listen to what Nkrumah said on that
score: "If we do not formulate plans for unity and take active
steps to form a political union, we will be fighting and warring
among ourselves with the imperialists and colonialists standing
by behind the screen and pulling vicious wires, to make us cut
each other's throats for the sake of their diabolical purposes
in Africa." [10]
How so prophetic!
* Charles
Quist-Adade, PhD, is a faculty member and past immediate chair
of the Sociology Department at Kwantlen Polytechnic University
in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. He is the author and
co-author of several books--'In the Shadows of the Kremlin and
the White House: Africa's Media Image from Communism to
Post-Communism', and 'Social Justice in Local and Global
Contexts, From Colonization to Globalization: The Intellectual
and Political Legacies of Kwame Nkrumah' (with Vincent Dodoo),
'Introduction to Critical Sociology: From Modernity to
Postmodernity' (with Amir Mirfakhraie), 'Africa's Many Divides
and Africa's Future: Pursuing Nkrumah's Vision of Pan-Africanism
in an Era of Globalization'--several chapters in books, and
scores of scholarly and popular press articles and blog posts.
END NOTES
[1] Nkrumah, Kwame, 1909-1972; Format:
Book.
[2] Stockwell, John (1978). In Search of Enemies: A
CIA Story. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. p. 201n
[3]
Document: US Role in Nkrumah Overthrow
[4]
https://www.modernghana.com/news/363669/the-cia-kwame-nkrumah-and-the-destruction-of-ghana.html
[5] Ankomah, Baffour. (2007). "Ghana Celebrates, Africa
Rejoices." New African, March, Issue 460
[6] As cited in
Ankomah, Baffour. (2007). "Ghana Celebrates, Africa Rejoices."
New African, March, Issue 460
[7] Nkrumah, Kwame. (1980).
Axioms of Kwame Nkrumah. London: Panaf Books.
[8]
Ankomah, Baffour. (2007). "Ghana Celebrates, Africa Rejoices."
New African, March, Issue 460
[9] Ankomah, Baffour.
(2007). "Ghana Celebrates, Africa Rejoices." New African, March,
Issue 460.
[10] (From speech at Casablanca Conference.
7th January, 1961)
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