Ghana: Anatomy of a Change

...True, the National Assembly was no longer a real parliament...

...to turn it from an avowedly neutralist, state-oriented country in the familiar African mold into a fervently anti­Western, state-dominated nation committed to what it calls "the Marxist-Socialist camp...

...Once it was proudly signing its name to the comity of nations, but now it has turned away from so many international principles...

...On the economic side, too many show-off projects, too great a concentration of industry in the south (especially in the display city of Tema), too much emphasis on the uncertain Volta Dam aluminum project...

...There were additional petty signs: Every week or so the newspapers carried pictures of the top Army generals and reaffirmations of their loyalty, just to assure everyone that the guns were behind Nkrumah...

...This last a very expensive bit of pettiness, since to change the party colors would require only repainting a few huts and remaking a few flags, while to change the national colors involved revising the insignia on airplanes, ships, buildings, flags, uniforms, stationery and all the other accoutrements of a state...

...There was something strange about that moment, some odd adrenalin of patriotism perhaps, and each of us within the Embassy felt it...

...The judges obviously saw things differently, though, for the three top men were acquitted...

...The government had pushed for a 100 per cent vote, and with such means it is hardly surprising that it was able to claim over 98 per cent of the votes cast...

...I saw the huge Volta Dam and aluminum plant which had risen from the naked bush I had visited two and a half years before, and the crude bench on which I had sat was now replaced by an expensive, modern hotel...

...There was very little passion in the crowd itself-it is not the kind of thing Ghanaians seem to do very well, even under orders-and those who ringed the Embassy compound attracted very little attention from nearby government workers...

...But the university permitted criticism and dissent, it was not fully under party domination...

...There were certain obvious deficiencies, to be sure...

...I happened to be downtown when I saw the line of perhaps 200 marchers heading from CPP head-quarters to the Embassy, led by jeering sound trucks and armed with mass-produced signs such as "American Imperialists Killed Kennedy, But You Can't Kill Kwame," "Yanks Keep Hands Off Ghana" and "To Hell With You, America...

...Not "my country, right or wrong," but "my country, what wrong did it do that these people should attack it in this way...

...The students, too, always had a reputation of being anti-government, an attitude which seems universally true but which Nkrumah apparently found surprising and dangerous...

...When a nation is being dictated to by Wall Street, it is argued, it does not matter what kind of free elections or free parliament it has...

...Ghana still has its apologists: many there and not a few here...

...Under powers granted him by the Constitution, the President immediately removed the Chief Justice from office too...

...The students, bewildered, wanted to take some action in protest, but rumor had it that Nkrumah was prepared to use troops to put down any demonstration and O'Brien urgently warned against public agitation...

...Then the secretaries started squirming and chattering as the flag came closer to the ground...

...It has continued its propaganda attack against the West and has even backed up its militant Congo policy by providing money and arms for the ex-Stanleyville regime...

...And while the justification of economic progress can go a long way, at some point it ceases to justify, just as much with the Volta Dam as with the auto-balms, the trains running on time, the steel production quadrupling...

...Where the law and judiciary are powerless, there are no more defenses against out-and-out dictatorship...

...The faculty, also bewildered and uncertain as to who would be the next to go, had several emergency meetings, but the dominant attitude was do-nothingism, most people saying with O'Brien that "the ship may be hit, even sinking, but I am going to stay with it to the last...

...The apologists also argue that the Western tradition is inapplicable to another continent or another era, and claim that such institutions as contending parties, open parliaments and independent judiciaries are peculiar Anglo-Saxon inventions that have no validity in Ghana...

...This Socialism is now of a much different order than the traditional "African" Socialism of, say, Senegal's Leopold Senghor or of Tunisia's Habib Bourguiba-which essentially involves economic development by the state since there is on one else to do the job, and implies no all-out commitments either against the middle class at home or for the Communist bloc abroad...

...But it was apparent to all that he no longer represented what the government wanted in its Vice Chancellor, and no longer enjoyed the confidence or trust of the President...

...If Ghana could show that without these "imperialist gimmicks" it is able to give the best life to its citizens, I would be quite willing to accept its own system-as I was when I first went...

...Learning about Ghana required some effort...

...Ghana has changed, and with that change it diminished, and I diminished...

...One Ghanaian teacher and one student were put in preventive detention...

...History is too full of examples showing that economic progress does not lead to political freedom for us to believe that it will in Ghana...

...Nevertheless, it was a poignant moment for me...

...And perhaps grew...

...The government-run press began its campaign: Remove these people, establish people's courts, people's universities, people's shops, let no one stand in the way of the great Socialist paradise Kwame is building...

...Why should I, who came to Ghana to give it what I could, be subjected to this...

...there is no free press, free radio or free travel, and there is less and less free speech, free learning, free movement...

...Two years later, however, it was obvious that the word "Socialist" had vastly different meanings for O'Brien and Nkrumah...

...the line, I felt, was being crossed...

...But that was before Ghana changed...

...I have run most of this gamut personally...

...The change continued in September of the following year, when after several carelessly planned bomb attempts on his life Nkrumah took sharp steps to eliminate all opposition and dissent...

...A week after the deportation orders, on a Saturday morning, 3,000 CPP-led demonstrators flooded the campus, coming out in every vehicle the party could get its hands on (including all the city buses, which must have wreaked mighty havoc with municipal transportation that morning...

...they might have inspired the image of a police state, except that they seemed as good-humoredly inefficient as everyone else...

...Poverty is still dominant, unemployment is staggering, the nation is getting steadily poorer...

...A man who is absolutely sure that he alone has the right answer for the welfare of his country is not likely to settle for anything less than absolute control...

...privately Nkrumah was said to believe that they were all CIA agents plotting his downfall...

...It was an eerie sight to see khaki-clad soldiers standing in front of the banks at night, bayonets fixed...

...forcing it further underground would only insure more bombs and bullets in place of speeches and ballots...

...Finally, as my own judicious balance turned to an angry chauvinism, two Embassy officials ran out and grabbed the flag just before it touched the ground, pushed the men aside and raised it again...

...Three top officials of the CPP were also purged, including Tawia Adarnafio, a slightly unstable party leader whom everyone had assumed was Nkrumah's right-hand man...

...In the fall of 1962 O'Brien was installed at the University for a three-year term...

...unfavorably with South Africa...

...Nothing could have made clearer the party's feeling that if it could not have the University on its own terms, it would wreck it...

...I was finally convinced that Ghana would prosper when I heard an opposition member of the National Assembly openly and ably demolish the government's foreign affairs report-amid cheers from the government side of the house...

...O'Brien told me later that he thought of this handful as being the reactionary Right, and I had the odd sensation of being in the "conservative" camp for the first time in my life...

...from the riots, crushed swiftly, came a determination to give the government's Convention People's Party (CPP) almost absolute control over all unions in the future...

...He asked me if I were a Sociallist," O'Brien recalled, "and of course I said 'Yes.'" The answer satisfied the President...

...as mere "bourgeois carryovers" and "imperialistic obstacles...

...But the acquittal did not satisfy the government...

...Once and for all, osa refers to war and gyefo means leader, and the title implies a great general who has won a war of deliverance for his people...

...In fact, the Ghanaian ideologues are quick to condemn the other forms of "African" Socialism as "deviations...

...All that was necessary were the final touches...

...Why, above all, should a group of little party men, who individually love Hollywood movies, New York fashions, Ozark rock-in-roll and American visitors, be pressed into such a demonstration of anti-Americanism...

...Getting to know Ghanaians of any class is not easy...

...Nkrmah used the tactic he had used three year earlier in a (partially successful) move to gain more control...

...At the time, of course, it wasn't clear how much we had misunderstood each other...

...I viewed it still with considerable hope and felt very much a part of its youthful, aggressive spirit...

...Yet, it seemed that the UP had been more divisive than constructive as the Loyal Opposition, and a rubber-stamp parliament might actually better serve national progress...

...At some point the guiding state becomes a superstate and the individual finds his compass slowly diminished, his freedoms slowly atrophied...

...it had been reduced to simply a platform and rubber stamp for government policies...

...By this time I was back in the United States, and while reading the dispatches from Accra I felt it was unwise to strangulate opposition...

...on the political side, too much unchecked power in the Office of the President, too much deification of Nkrumah himself in the schools and news media, too little concern with achieving open dialogue and responsible dissension...

...Furthermore, there is as yet no evidence to show that even if a nation establishes economic independence and cares well for its citizens it will necessarily get around to giving them the vote...

...At some point "authoritarian" turns into "dictatorial," "one-party democracy" into "one-party oligarchy...

...And it was clear because in the two years since 1962 Nkrumah had managed to change his nation quite radically in the direction of what he meant by Socialism...

...When I first went to Ghana in early 1961, I was impressed deeply with the material progress and political stability of the country-especially compared with such other states as Liberia, which had the stability of an authoritarian regime without the progress, or Sierra Leone and Nigeria, which had neither...

...all who are "bourgeois" are subversive, and anyway they have too much money, too many cars...

...The judiciary had been reduced to the same kind of rubber stamp as the legislature...

...To his mind it was a hotbed of dangerous imperialism, some 60 per cent of the teachers being expatriates to begin with and the other 40 per cent Ghanaians who had studied abroad either in Britain or America...

...EIGHT YEARS AFTER INDEPENDENCE Ghana: Anatomy of a Change By J. Kirk Sale It was at a noisy party on the lawn outside his house about a year ago that Conor Cruise O'Brien, then a much-beleaguered Vice Chancellor of the University of Ghana, told me about one of his early meetings with Kwame Nkrumah...

...Still, it was impossible to see any signs of the "dictatorship" or "police state" that some were talking about at home, nor did Ghana's economic policies seem any more Socialistic than those of a better-than-average progressive American city...

...But so far, without them, it has shown only increasing limitations on individual political latitude as well as increasing constriction of personal economic expression...

...For two hours the mob swirled through the campus, yelling and singing, while the students, honoring O'Brien's requests, only looked on in pained silence: They had been warned not to demonstrate, and yet here was this challenging demonstration right in their faces...

...The referendum campaign played heavily on the danger of non-party, subversive elements, and the newspapers (when not distorting facts and falsifying voter information) made it clear that to cast a negative vote would be tantamount to committing treason...

...During this period immediately after the referendum an incident occurred that helped to solidify my disenchantment, and though I knew that my reaction was emotional rather than intellectual, it was no less powerful for that...

...He fired six foreign teachers without warning, giving them at first 24 hours (later a week) to leave the country...

...It seemed to be accurate...

...O'Brien chose to stay on-until the ship was sunk or his contract ended-as did most of the faculty...

...I applied for and was appointed to a job as Lecturer in History at the University of Ghana, a position I took up late 1963...

...But it was an important psychological step for the party men battling for internal power...

...As demonstrations go, it was a mild one: no eggs, no stones, no windows broken (the Embassy windows are rock-proof anyway), no fights...

...A rot was setting in...

...As the newspapers made plain, talk of "academic freedom" was only bourgeois nonsense, an excuse for subversives to instill reactionary doctrines...

...They were members of the plot to kill the President...

...On the heels of the policeman's assassination attempt, the top-level police officers were replaced by low-ranking but loyal party men, and some police duties were shifted to the Army...

...I find nothing so different about Africans that they cannot work with those institutions which advance their freedom and security...

...At the end of it all several more leaders of the UP­again blamed-were jailed...

...I am unhappy for Ghana...

...The Marine guards reacted first, shouting at the two men, and only the fact that they were under orders not to interfere kept them from charging out to the flagpole...

...But this is like saying that a slave fed on steak is a free man, or telling the Strasbourg geese that their life is happy because they are fed so well...

...Then came the staged march on the American Embassy...

...The trial itself had been going on for some months and always received prominent space in the local press, both because the accusers were charged with having tried to kill Nkrumah and because they included Adamafio and two other high government officials...

...It took place just after O'Brien resigned in anger from the United Nations operation in the Congo and Nkrumah was searching for a sympathetic man to head his university...

...But," he added, somewhat ruefully, "it's clear now...

...Generally, the newspapers attacked: American involvement in South Africa, improper treatment of Negroes in the U.S., vestiges of subservient mentality in Ghana...

...A taxi driver was sentenced to three years in jail for saying that Kwame had shot one of his own security men...

...Nkrumah was damned and ridiculed, and Time had great fun in mistranslating his official title, Osagyefo, a dozen different ways to make him look ridiculous...

...In the year since its swift period of change, Ghana has consolidated its position in a variety of ways...

...I stood at the spot where the Volta Dam was to be made out of sheer wilderness, saw the extensive plans for the future there and marvelled at the Ghanaians' energy and determination...

...It was then that he introduced a rather silly compulsory savings scheme (planned somewhat earlier), which led to anti-government dock riots in Takoradi...

...He meant, really, a dedicated Marxist," O'Brien said, "more of a British Communist than a British Laborite...

...the party was generally discredited and became virtually defunct...

...The whole affair was unpleasant and I was a good deal disenchanted...

...It may be that in judging Ghana I have been too much a prisoner of this Western tradition, but I do believe the West has shown these peculiar institutions to have an inherent value, and I do not believe that value is evaporated in the heat of the tropics...

...The new amendment would give the President full power over the courts, would make the CPP the only legal party, and would even change the national colors to match those of the CPP...

...For the first few months I saw no reason to change my opinion of Ghana...

...It is not the best life...

...By now I was generally disillusioned...

...A state of emergency was declared, police guarded all entrances to the capital, homes were searched...

...Our eyes are upon you," said the party's Evening News...

...especially over the more conservative civil servants...

...therefore it had to be attacked...

...there was, and could be, no opposition from either legislature or judiciary...

...Only a handful of us wanted the University to stand up for its integrity, to insist that academic freedom meant some minimum security for those who taught, and we were quickly shunted aside as boat-rockers...

...It was out to make the University into its propaganda institute, and to rid it of those-teaching or learning-who resisted...

...The change began, I think, as early as September 1961, when Nkrumah returned from red-carpet trips to Russia and China-during which he started negotiations for expanded aid and even more extensive trade agreements, and seems to have been searingly convinced by the successes of ruthless centrally-planned economies...

...Those who think they can hide under the so-called 'secrecy' of the polling booth to fool us," added the Ghanaian Times, "must know that the days when we could be fooled are over...

...The voting on the amendment itself was farcical...

...the University, a few miles outside Accra, is a community unto itself and contact with the government­party people in the capital cannot always be established or maintained...

...This campaign blended into a constitutional referendum campaign launched at the turn of the year...

...Once it seemed to offer so much, but it changed, almost under my eyes...

...They must be impeached, maybe even imprisoned...

...For it is not hard to see that once convinced of the absolute rightness of his ideological position, he chose to have no hindrances in his way and was able to dismiss the former checks and balances (Parliament, judiciary, elections, etc...

...But it also claimed that the Ashanti Region, the most populous area in the country and known to have a large number of anti-government voters, had voted 100 per cent for the government...

...reasonable and just, maintaining that the prosecution had simply not made its case...

...From now on it was the President's Office which would really be running the University of Ghana...

...A new Presidential Commission (which assumes the duties of the President in the event of absence or disability) was appointed, replacing the Chief Justice and other such evil men with men of the caliber of Kodwo Addison, a dockworker and union organizer who for some reason was head of a new propaganda factory called the Kwame Nkrumah Institute of Ideology...

...It was at this point-late 1962­that most of the conservative Western press wrote Ghana off as a "Redlining" state, a near-Communist country with an evil dictator out to overrun all of Africa, the chute for Russia's entry into the Continent, etc...

...the "bourgeois" elements and anti-government forces were cowed and emasculated...

...Equally depressing, this appeared to be some kind of signal for the government to act against what it called the "bourgeois" elements in its society-professional men and civil servants (because Western-trained and oriented), businessmen (because profit-seeking capitalists), expatriates (because disloyal, subversive foreigners) . The judges were "bourgeois" and subversive...

...Led by angry party workers on foot and in sound trucks, the crowd waved its printed banners ("We Farmers Built This University, Give it Back," and the priceless "Intellecturers Go Home...

...My friends in the Faculty of Law were impressed by the decision...

...According to this thesis, a single party can allow for democratic discussion within its ranks, authoritarian African states are simply trying to construct viable nations out of tribally-centered masses and in any event, it is silly for us to demand that our own Anglo-Saxon political system flourish elsewhere...

...Actually, a large portion of the faculty was sympathetic to the Nkrumah government and many were giving, in various degrees, the kind of Left-wing orientation that Ghana seemed to want-though, of course, there were some crusty old men who had never been satisfied with the place since they discovered it was not Britain in blackface...

...Downtown Accra was modern by West African standards, and some of the houses in the posher suburbs would have stood out in Scarsdale...

...The campus was in a turmoil...

...And the fact is that my country did nothing wrong, unless its crime is being a power many times stronger than poor Ghana, and a capitalistic one at that...

...and added to the normal inefficiency in government offices is a dislike and distrust of Westerners among higher officials, making fact-gathering almost impossible...

...The all-out drive was not hindered when, conveniently, a police officer reportedly tried to shoot Nkrumah and killed his loyal bodyguard instead...

...And it was with this feeling that I determined to return to Ghana, to examine it more closely, to give it the fair shake it seemed not to be getting in most of the world...

...But after a few minutes two men broke from the crowd, ran to the flagpole and started pulling down the American flag...

...By now it is obvious that Nkrumah is a convinced ideologue who deeply believes in his interpretation of Marxism and is sincerely dedicated to applying it to Ghana...

...And I meant simply that I had never thought of voting Tory in my life and held pretty generally to the Labor party line...

...But the government arguments that the situation was crucial and emergency measures were necessary seemed convincing...

...Most foreign magazines were no longer available, Playboy succumbing to a puritanical "vice" campaign and Time and Newsweek vanishing during periods of tensions or whenever they carried anything unfavorable to Ghana...

...The judges were branded as "Enemies of the People," imperialist agents bought by the CIA and the revolutionary clique forced into exile over the last few years...

...The police came in to avert trouble, moving the crowd back on the street again...

...Where African Socialism, for example, usually holds that there are no classes in Africa, these men stick to the standard class-warfare line and point their ideological fingers at the "bourgeois" civil servants, intellectuals, merchants, etc...

...The decision seemed a foregone conclusion, since it was not expected that the Supreme Court judges would defy the government, and it had become clear that Nkrumah himself was quite convinced of the defendants' guilt...

...One businessman friend of mine told me that he intended to vote "No," but that the obstacles put in his way and the policemen looking over his shoulder convinced him that it was better not to vote at all...

...Soon, several leaders of the opposition United Party (UP), which was blamed for all the troubles, were jailed...

...In the end, no one acted, everyone waited...

...Eventually, the strip was dropped...

...Nkrumah's Parliament subsequently rammed through a new law enabling the President to dismiss any justices and overrule unwanted decisions, and in short order he overruled this one...

...I myself wrote that, "for all its unpleasant aspects, perhaps necessary at this stage of its young life, Ghana offers more hope for economic and political development than any other nation in West Africa...

...In response, most liberals were forced to follow what might be called the Wallerstein thesis (first outlined in these pages and developed in his book, Africa: The Politics of Independence...

...It has extended the party tentacles well into the University, and there are reports that cells within the Army will soon be formed...

...There had been a fairly steady and uniformly vulgar series of attacks on the West, and especially the U.S., in the local press and radio: Articles (penned by local Eastern-trained journalists or the vociferous community of Maoist American Negroes) berated American "neo-imperialism" and compared the U.S...

...The expatriates I met felt as I did, and could fuss about the bad driving and inefficient service while still admiring the government's advances...

...It is no accident that Nkrurnah's overt efforts to enforce his ideology have paralleled his strong moves to establish an all-pervasive dictatorship-in other words, that they have been most apparent since the beginning of 1964...

...Then, in late December, the decision in the treason trial was handed down...

...What was needed was a center for "Nkrumaist" ideology and Marxist doctrine to train Socialists for the nation...

...Why should the United States be subjected to this...

...As to the last, I found it difficult to understand why the government press still ran the daily comic strip "Phantom," about a white king of a black tribe...

...Another friend who did vote "No" saw an idle bystander take down his registration number, a number which can be checked on the polling books to determine his name...

...As individuals they neither knew nor hated Americans-in fact, one demonstrator dropped his banner to welcome an American tourist to Ghana in the warmest terms-yet they were made to castigate them...

...Stories about election irregularities -"No" boxes which were never opened, CPP poll-watchers who acted as vote-watchers, police intimidations, etc.-circulated from a variety of quarters with enough frequency and enough reliability to leave no doubt as to their accuracy...

...A few voices of political dissent could be heard in the palmwine bars, yet by and large Nkrumah himself was supremely popular and his policies were apparently well received...

...I am absolutely sure that if he had a choice between ridding Ghana of "poverty, ignorance and disease" on practical, unideological, Nyerere-ish lines in a single year or on his own Marxist-Socialist lines in a decade, he would unhesitatingly choose the latter: That is the depth of his commitment...

...The CPP and the press set up a furor...

...The defendants were returned to "preventive detention"-an arrangement whereby Nkrumah can keep anyone in jail for any length of time without reason or recourse...

...cartoons showed an evil Uncle Sam paying Ghanaians to overthrow the government or supplying great hordes of gold to all those who would halt the great African march to Socialism...

...Nevertheless, I gradually came to understand a good deal about Ghana and Ghanaians and I saw no reasons to change my optimism...

...It is crucial for Ghana-because it is crucial for Nkrumah himself...

...Once it was triumphantly showing the undeveloped world the way out of colonial bondage, but now it has replaced a new bondage for an old...

...This pro-found change posed a problem not only for men like O'Brien, who last month announced he would quit his University post in July when his contract runs out, but for the Western liberal in general: Faced with a nation like Ghana, is our attitude to be one of sympathetic support, bitter antagonism, or something in between...

...jeering at the students, it then broke into the dormitories, smashing windows, furniture and plates...

...After a few short speeches from party men in the soundtrucks-essentially incoherent but obviously bitter and ugly-the crowd broke up, heading back to work...

...In the case of the judiciary, however, the issue seemed especially critical: Where there are legal defenses and judicial safeguards, even a powerful executive with the legislature in his pocket cannot so easily do what he wants with the individual...

...Even the rickety bar of the dingy hotel where I had stayed had been turned into a modern, paneled restaurant...

...The final blow came when Nkrumah tried to take over what was the last major institution in the country not completely under his control: the University...

...It has severely restricted domestic trading by refusing to issue many types of import licenses, mostly affecting goods from Western countries-this in order to increase trade with its "fellow Socialist" countries in the Eastern bloc, and to get some return on its barter agreements with the bloc...

...Most of the Ghanaians took it as more of a lark than a protest, and only the leaders came without the usual African good humor...

...Publicly it was said that they were deported "in the best interests of the state...

...I saw new highways and buildings and bridges which proved that Accra (unlike Freetown, the capital of Sierra Leone, for example) had grown considerably since my earlier trip...

...Their line is, in Marxian terms, that economic freedom must be created before there can be any meaningful political freedom, and that Ghana is trying to accomplish just that by lessening Western market influence and increasing domestic economic independence...

...Radio Ghana's editorials found the CIA behind more and more doors, now blaming Western imperialists for Russian crop failures, now for malaria in West Africa...

...This was laughed at by even the most loyal CPP followers...

...Thus Ghana has continued to redefine and pound home its "Socialist" ideology...

...The party of which he was the Life President was officially supreme, dominant in all areas of the country...

...They represented an archaic bourgeois spirit inherited from the old colonial masters, which must be rooted out of Ghana...

...A new group of party-lining directors, including one Communist-trained newspaper hack, also was installed at the Daily Graphic, a paper the government had taken over a few years ago which still was not sufficiently subservient (and was therefore, incidentally, the most popular newspaper in the country...

...This attachment to Marxist Socialism is no idle form of American-baiting or youthful muscle-flexing...

...And the students by and large were proud of and loyal to Nkrumah, though they knew too much about the country and the CPP personnel to swallow all the propaganda put forth by the newspapers...

...By the end of January Nkrumah had what he wanted...

...It has retried the five treason defendants and sentenced all of them to death (later, to no one's surprise, the sentences were commuted by the President to life imprisonment...

...This Socialism is self-consciously Marxist and envisions state control of all aspects of society, with the aim of eliminating the bourgeoisie and placing the peasantry (for there is virtually no proletariat) in permanent power...