7 - Prometheus Unbound: Nkrumah’s Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah

Summary

The times are changing and we must change with them. In doing so we must combine the best in Western culture with the best in African culture. The magic story of human achievement gives irrefutable proof that as soon as an awakened intelligentsia emerges among a so-called subject people, it becomes the vanguard of the struggle against alien rule. It provides the nucleus of the dominant wish and aspiration, the desire to be free to breathe the air of freedom.

—Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana

Here is a man of great magnetic force, evoking love and sympathy wherever he goes. But he is a mere man. The corresponding force which he attracts and calls into play here and there becomes created entities, begging for life and claiming the right to live. Tell me, what is the duty of the giver of this life? … Must he allow free scope to the play of sympathy, or must he ruthlessly set to work to destroy the hope of light which he bids spring up in a human soul?

—Casely Hayford, Ethiopia Unbound

Even his most severe critics have not thought this claim to be excessive: “To the black man in all parts of the world Nkrumah gave a new pride.” His admirers have thought it certain: “He was above all … the strategist of genius in the struggle against colonialism.”

—Basil Davidson, Black Star

Writing the Self-Nation

Those … who are deluded by the false promises of “preparing” colonial peoples for “self-government,” who feel that their imperialist oppressors are “rational” and “moral” and will relinquish their “possessions” if only confronted with the truth of the injustice of colonialism are tragically mistaken.

—Kwame Nkrumah, Towards Colonial Freedom

Nearly five decades elapse between the appearance of Hayford's Ethiopia Unbound and Nkrumah's Ghana. In Ghana the story is retold of another seminal nationalist figure. Emerging from the ranks of the middle class, Nkrumah is able to pose challenging questions of its modernist situation— as in the epigraph at the head of the section—and therewith to articulate its historical tasks and possibilities in a style that radically departs from that of his predecessors.