"CLR James’ Reflections On 'The Myth' and Pan-African Governance in Ghana, 1960-1966"

• In Event: "New Directions in Analyzing Pan-Africanism"

Abstract

Nicholas McLeod, University of Cincinnati, mcleodnc@ucmail.uc.edu

After gaining independence in 1957, Kwame Nkrumah actively recruited West Indian intellectual-activists to aid in Ghana’s nation-building process to create a Pan-Africanist state. Among these West Indians were Sir W. Arthur Lewis, George Padmore, Ras Makonnen, and C.L.R. James who all mentored and collaborated with Nkrumah in London, as members of the Fabian Society and the Pan-African Federation. Whereas Lewis, Padmore, and Makonnen relocated to Ghana to advise his government on African affairs and economic planning, James chose to return to the West Indies to forge a Pan-African anti-colonial movement as the Secretary of the West Indian Federal Labour Party for the short-lived West Indian Federation. Still as arguably the world’s most sophisticated Pan-African socialist thinker at the time, James was regularly featured in Ghana’s state media, and in 1960 he was invited to speak in Ghana on what he had observed in Ghana’s first three years and the future that Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party was charting. Making use of a series of James’ letters to Nkrumah and essays reflecting on party politics in Ghana, this paper traces the evolution of James’ relationship with Nkrumah through an examination of his transition from being one of Nkrumah’s largest supporters in the international media to publicly withdrawing his support as democracy faded and authoritarianism consumed the nation. Through James’ reflections, this paper connects the ultimate why of the issues of nationalism, internationalism, and despotism converging in Ghana to the proximate what of the political and social successes and failures that manifested in the praxis of Pan-Africanism in Nkrumah’s Ghana.

Author

• Nicholas McLeod, Dept. of Africana Studies/University of Cincinnati