African Revolutionary Writers, Part 10
Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah
Dr. Kwame Nkrumah is one of the very
greatest of the African Revolutionary writers, as well as being the
independence leader and the first democratic president of his country, Ghana.
Of the two Nkrumah downloads (see below), the first covers major parts of his 1965 work “Neo-Colonialism,
the Last Stage of Imperialism”.
At the end of this book Nkrumah wrote:
“I have set out the argument for African unity
and have explained how this unity would
destroy neo-colonialism in Africa. In later chapters I have explained how
strong is the world position of those who profit from neo-colonialism.
Nevertheless, African unity is something which is within the grasp of the
African people. The foreign firms who exploit our resources long ago saw the
strength to be gained from acting on a Pan-African scale. By means of
interlocking directorships, cross-shareholdings and other devices, groups of
apparently different companies have formed, in fact, one enormous capitalist
monopoly. The only effective way to challenge this economic empire and to
recover possession of our heritage, is for us also to act on a Pan-African
basis, through a Union Government.”
In the year following the publication of this revolutionary
book, and while he was on a visit to China and Vietnam, Kwame Nkrumah was
overthrown as President in a military coup d’état organised by the US Central
Intelligence Agency. This was in 1966.
In 1967 Nkrumah spoke at a seminar in Cairo, Egypt, in
strong opposition to the “Negritude” philosophy of Leopold Senghor, and against
the generally phony false-flag product called “African Socialism”. The second attached
document is a transcript of this input.
From the time of Eduard Bernstein with his 1899 book “Evolutionary Socialism”, and
of Rosa Luxemburg’s classic 1900 response to Bernstein, “Reform or Revolution?”, the same question
has often been repeated.
In the history of the struggle for liberation from
colonialism in Africa, the question “Reform or Revolution?” was once again
inevitably put.
The neo-colonialists wanted to sound better and to deceive
the people more easily. So a false kind of reformist “Socialism”, not very
different from Bernstein’s kind, but now calling itself “African Socialism” was
widely deployed as a smokescreen for neo-colonialism, from soon after the dawn
of African Independence in the 1950s and 1960s.
Some of the appeals for “African Socialism” were more honest
than others. The late Mwalimu Julius Nyerere is still respected, and we will
look at some of Nyerere’s writing next. After Nyerere, we will look at the
self-referential and self-isolating case of Thomas Sankara. Finally we will
look at Walter Rodney, who commented upon
Nyerere’s “Ujamaa” concept of socialism, as well as on underdevelopment as a
deliberate act of colonialism and neo-colonialism. Hence we will end our series
with the following two questions still open:
1. What is Socialism and why do we need it?
2. How do we achieve African unity and thereby defeat
Imperialism?
Kwame Nkrumah was the greatest of the advocates of
revolutionary Pan-African unity against Imperialism. His clear intention was to
destroy neo-colonialism. For this reason it is fitting that Osagyefo’s writing
takes the position of main text in this, the final part of our African
Revolutionary Writers’ Series, of which the point is to change the world in the
particular way that Nkrumah advocated, i.e. to do away with neo-colonialism.
- The above is to
introduce the original reading-texts: Kwame Nkrumah,
Neo-colonialism, 1965, Compilation and Kwame Nkrumah,
African Socialism Revisited, 1967.
- To download any of the CU courses in PDF files please click here.
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