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Kwame Nkrumah and Pan-Africanism’s High Tide: A Conversation with Howard W. French
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A
Welcome to the Open Society Ideas Podcast, a project of the Ideas Workshop at the Open Society Foundations. We speak with thinkers and practitioners exploring unconventional and heterodox ideas from around the world. Each episode features authors who challenge assumptions, provoke new ways of thinking, and help us engage beyond borders. A member of the Ideas Workshop sits down with someone whose book invites listeners to expand our understanding of a myriad of important topics. To learn more and keep the conversation going, make sure to subscribe to the podcast feed or visit the ideasletter.org now pull up a chair and join the workshop.
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B
Hello, welcome to Open Society Ideas Podcast, a project of the Ideas Workshop at the Open Society Foundations. I am Aisha Osori, a director in the Ideas Workshop and an author of two books. Today we'll be talking with Howard French about his latest book, the Second Emancipation Nkrumah, Pan Africanism and Global Blackness at High Tide. Howard is a professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism and a former foreign correspondent for the New York Times, where he was a bureau's chief in regions including west and Central Africa, China, and Japan. He's the author of several books on international affairs, including Born in Africa, Africans and the Making of the Modern World, and China's Second How a Million Migrants Are Building a New Empire in Africa. Thanks for joining me on the Open Society Ideas podcast, Howard.
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A
Thank you, Aisha. It's good to see you again.
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B
It's good to see you too. Thanks again. So I've shared a brief bio about you, but it would be great to start our discussion with you sharing a bit more about yourself, like where you were born, where you went to school, how you became interested in journalism, and the type of well researched storytelling that you do so well.
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A
Most of this is accident. I was born in an African American family in Washington, D.C. a long time ago. You know, my parents were professionals. My mother was an early childhood education specialist, my father was a medical doctor. So as to make this a somewhat compact answer, my father, his specialty was surgery. Mid or late Mid career. He decided he wanted to serve more people and got into public health. And so this led eventually on a twisted path to moving the family to West Africa. My father moved with my younger siblings to Ivory coast when I was just entering college in the United States. And so I first began to experience Africa, visiting home, visiting my parents, living in Ivory coast as a college student and it kind of grabbed me in a very totalizing way. I was very unfamiliar with as almost any American of that era would have been with Africa, with the African landscape, with African realities. I had read. I was a political science student and an English major both. And I had read a lot about Africa in college. But that's very different from experiencing Africa. And it just took over my life. I had planned initially to go to law school. Not really firmly, but a vague plan to go to law school. I had always loved writing. I really never considered journalism as an option for me. That's not the kind of writing I was interested in as a very young man. Both as a college student and soon after graduating, I imagined myself somehow writing books. But at that age, I didn't really know what that might mean, you know, so that's where the orientation toward writing came from. And then another series of accidents intervened. And, you know, I met a very distinguished West Africa correspondent, also an African American from the Washington Post named Leon Dash, who lived for some of the time I was in Ivory coast in the same country. And we became friends. He's, you know, half a generation older than me, but he took an interest in me and kind of served as a model in some ways and gave me advice and eventually told me that I should pitch, meaning offer the occasional freelance piece to the Washington Post. And so I started to do this, and this was almost the very beginning. There were a couple things before that, but this was really the most meaningful hook or lure into journalism that I experienced. And eventually the Post started paying me to go places. You know, like, there's a coup in Chad. Get there right away. There's something going on in Cameroon. Get there right away. And this was just totally thrilling to me, you know, as a man in his early 20s, being totally different person, like, heedless of danger, didn't really care how much money I was being paid. Someone was paying me to go somewhere to write about it, and that was just, you know, that's all I needed to do.
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B
Sounds like a dream. I know. I wonder if those kind of opportunities still happen today.
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A
Well, I think some freelancers still begin their lives as journalists that way. The essence of this answer really is that my career as a writer and as a journalist and as a professor do not follow from some conscious plan or pathway. It just kind of unfolded.
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B
Absolutely. Well, thank you for sharing that. And that takes us perfectly into the next question, which is how you came to write this book, the Second Emancipation. And if in that answer as well, tell us, what does the title mean? I mean, there's some very curious phrases there like Second Emancipation and High Tide, that are quite curious. So why this book? Why now? And what does the title mean?
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A
Well, how I came to write. It also involves some complication or complexity. I, on the one hand, it's really a story about my life, my experience, even though I figure almost not at all in the book. As I said, I come from an African American family on both sides of my family and my mother's side. The story I grew up with and experienced actually firsthand was of descending from enslaved people who belonged to some of the grand barons of the revolutionary era of Virginia, friends of Thomas Jefferson. Somehow we, meaning my ancestors, ended up controlling a small piece of the grand estate that this person, their owner, possessed. And so I grew up in Washington D.C. but we spent summers throughout my early life going there. And this was, you know, the topic of conversation around the dinner table. And it permeated everything my mother telling us about this history. And so that's the first thing. The second thing is that as a correspondent for the New York Times, I, as is true with my previous book, Born in Blackness, my career in a very unplanned way, took me on an itinerary that just went throughout the world of the book. I was a correspondent in the Caribbean, the northern tier of South America, where, you know, the African derived population is quite large. We are from, even if it's the borderland, as a family are from the American south. I spent 10 years of my life living and working on the African continent. And of course I live, speak European languages and I'm quite familiar with Europe as well. So. So all of these pieces really are kind of laying about as a jigsaw in my background and it was a matter of putting the jigsaw together. Born in Blackness really was a big change of direction for me in my writing. It sort of began with the previous book about China, Everything under the Heavens, which was much more historically oriented than journalistically oriented. But Born in Blackness is a straight out history book. It made me want to continue the story. So Born in Blackness is the of the last 500 years with regard to the African continent. The second emancipation is the story of the last, let's say mostly the story of the last 75, 80 years, but there's some prehistory, if you will, of Pan Africanism that goes into the account as well. What does the title mean? The Second Emancipation means, or my intended meaning is that we're all familiar or should be with the first emancipation. So depending on where you live, we've all learned a story about when white Westerners decided to give up the game, if you will, of enslaving Africans who had been brought across The Atlantic in the transatlantic commerce in human beings in different times, in different places. In Britain, it's 1807. In the United States, it's after the Civil War, 1865. In Brazil, it's a little bit later, et cetera, et cetera. Right. What most people don't know, they should know this too, and if they read my book, they will know this in a deep and intimate way, is that this really did not amount truly to an emancipation of black people, whether they be Africans or whether they be Africans of the diaspora. What do I mean by that? What I mean by that is full citizens rights were not granted or won in my country, the United States, until well into my childhood. Yeah, we Americans tend to romanticize and idealize our own history. I think most peoples do this, but I'm most familiar with our own experience of this, of idealization. And we elevate the Founding Fathers, quote, unquote. And we associate our history with the dream of liberty and a commitment to freedom, etc. Etc. Etc. Right. But black people didn't really become full citizens until quite recently. So just hold that thought in your mind just for a moment while I explore the other piece of this equation, which is that enslavement, commerce in human beings from Africa ends at the time, which I indicated just a moment ago. But then Africa becomes the subject of imperial conquest and domination. And this period of imperial conquest and domination actually lasts itself quite a long time, practically a century. Right. And during this period of time, Africans were anything but free peoples. And so the second emancipation really is about how a greater semblance of freedom was achieved by Africans and by the African diaspora over this second sort of lapse of time after the end of formal enslavement. And I just want to buckle this by saying that to some people this will seem like an exaggeration, perhaps, like, okay, you know, freedom from slavery is a very clear thing. But what do you mean, you know, an emancipation after imperial rule? The best way to answer that really, is to say that Europeans were exploiting Africans, even in the early post war period, for things like forced labor, meaning the rounding up of Africans and the compulsion at gunpoint, sometimes using corporal punishment in places like the Belgian Congo, for example, to extract labor from them. And this was not labor that was compensated in any ordinary way that we would recognize. And so emancipation doesn't just mean that in 1957 with Ghana, or in 1958 with guinea, or in 1960 with a whole host of other African countries, et cetera, et cetera, that Africans got their flags and got their anthems and had their own presidents and could have elections and could be formally independent. It also means that the beginnings of a sovereign, and it's only the beginnings really, but the beginnings of a sovereign economic life began for Africans. Right. And so finally, I know I've been long here, but finally this book is really a story at bottom of how intertwined these two struggles were. The struggle for citizens rights among black people or for black people in the United States and the struggle for independence among Africans. And most people in my experience on either side of the Atlantic are almost utterly unfamiliar with this. Like most Africans don't think today in my experience that their independence had much of anything to do with with the civil rights struggle in the United States and vice versa, when in fact they were tightly bound up together.
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B
Absolutely. And you're talking to somebody who didn't know that. I mean, obviously I'm happy to say I'd found out a bit more about this history before I read your book, but your book provided a lot more detail that I didn't have. And I think for me this ties into because I think in describing your title you've talked about the major themes of the book. So coming to that last point you made about lots of Africans on both sides whether don't know this story, I'm curious, when you were a child going to school in the US did you learn about. I definitely didn't learn about the things that are in the second emancipation as a child growing up in Nigeria post independence. But did you learn about Toussaint Louverture and Haiti in school in the US and the reason why I ask is because I'm curious about when you tell me your answer, what you think about the importance of education, about the history of racism, colonialism, imperialism in understanding the world order today. And as I said, I asked this question because of my own lack of understanding, having been educated in Nigeria of structural racism, which meant that when I was in the US in the late 90s as a graduate of law from the University of Lagos, the truth is my position on African Americans was largely the position of the imperialists and the racists that, you know, African Americans should pull themselves up by so called bootstraps. Sure.
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A
So the answer here again involves multiple parts. My attention to this in these last two books of mine, to him and to Haiti's history is also a product of coincidence. I was a correspondent for the New York Times in the Caribbean. I eventually learned how to speak Haitian Creole. Haitians are swimming in their own history as it stands to reason. And you can't spend a week in Haiti without hearing about Toussaint Louverture. So this was the beginning really of my deep exposure to that historical background. My family background was important and unusual in another regard. My father, both of my parents, in fact, were deeply involved in the civil rights struggle in the United States. They were part of the great historic marches in the south, along with Martin Luther King and all of these other people crossing the bridge at Selma, et cetera, et cetera. The Edmund Pettus Bridge where John Lewis and King and others were attacked by the police and by dogs. My parents were there. They were providing medical care. They used their own van or minibus as a mobile hospital, which they organized to provide first aid care in the moment to people who were being beaten by the police. So they escorted these marches in support of these things. And I grew up with all of this in my life. And so all of this is kind of in a formative background of mine that I deserve no credit for. I just, I was born into this story, right? My father moved the family to Africa. I get no credit for that. That just happened to. Right. I was not a child, but I started visiting right away. And as I told you, this had a tremendous effect on me. To your education question. Yes, of course. One of the things that is remarkable to me about the story of Kwame Nkrumah and it is also a story of accidents, I guess a big lesson for me in the work that I did on this book is how much people, perhaps most of us, maybe even all of us, are the product of accidents, right? So Kwame and Krumah, instead of getting the British formed post colonial education, or in his case because he was born 1909, the colonial era education, which gives idealized, flattering versions of history. Flattering toward the British versions of history, right? Nkrumah encountered formative influences in the persons of Kwegir Agray, who was a like a deputy headmaster at the academy he went to in Ghana, Namdi Azikiwe, who was at the time of Nkrumah's young adulthood, a crusading anti colonial newspaper editor in the Gold Coast. He's from Nigeria. Eventually he will become president of Nigeria. I mean, that by itself is just an extraordinary coincidence, right? These two people coming being not from the same country or colony, but being in the same place at the same time and one influencing the other, right? One of the ways these two men, elders of Nkrumah influenced Nkrumah was to say, don't go to the UK to get Education. The British had expended almost no money or effort in educating people of the Gold coast, which was, in fact, an extraordinarily lucrative colony for Britain. The small, tiny, in fact, elite that the British did allow to be educated had previously almost all gone to the UK for their education. They're forming black Britons or something like that. Right. And Agwe and Azikiwe had both been rare examples of elder Africans who had been to the United States to study. And the point here is not to idealize the United States if there's plenty to be unhappy about in terms of American history. Right. But they understood the importance of not being molded by Britain at a time when they could both foresee the coming battle for independence in Africa. That understanding of yourself and ourselves as Africans outside of the mental psychological bubble of the British world is going to be crucial for those who are going to lead us forward. And so, under their influence, Nkrumah goes to the United States, to a historically black university in Pennsylvania called Lincoln University, and all sorts of things begin to happen, among which Nkrumah begins to understand for the first time, I think, that there's this larger black world. Of course, he would have known. There's people of African descent in the United States. You couldn't be even slightly educated and not know that. But no African really in his era really had much bigger thought about what that meant or who these people were or how they might relate to Africans or for that matter, what they have in common. Right. And so Nkrumah goes to this historically black university, and this puts him on the path toward understanding global blackness. Right. This begins there. And this is the result of these influences.
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B
Thank you for that. And again, perfect segue into this next question, which is about you. Track. There's a very rich history of Pan Africanism in the book, you know, starting with Martin Delany, Alexander Crummell, Edward Blyden, W.E.B. du Bois, Kisley Hayford, and then the later Pan Africanists like Padmore Azikiwe, who you mentioned, Malcolm X and so on. What would you say is the current state of black internationalism today in 2025?
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A
Thank you. This is a fascinating question. And I get asked this a lot. Sometimes I get asked, I don't feel this from you, but sometimes I get asked this with strong degree of skepticism, sometimes even hostility, like, okay, so how important could Nkrumah have been if Pan Africanism is now like a big vacuum, like, it doesn't mean anything, it's lost all resonance? I don't believe that. Right. What. What I believe is the following. I believe that Nkrumah lost in his day the crucial battle of Pan Africanism, which was the 1963 founding conference of the Organization of African Unity. And I describe this in, I hope, a dramatic way. In the book. Nkrumah goes there and he lays all his cards on the table, which is with an argument which basically says that the only way that this continent, which represents a very substantial and today even far more substantial portion of humanity, that the only way that this continent can fend for itself in the world is by coming together and erasing the divisions that were left behind by imperial domination. And this is the simplest definition of Pan Africanism. There are wider definitions which bring in the diaspora, but this is the essence. This is the beginning of a definition of Pan Africanism. And this happens in 1963. And Nkrumah is, I believe, in many ways in that moment, a victim of his own success. He has illuminated, beginning with the experience of the Gold coast turning into Ghana in 1957, this triumph peacefully against the world's greatest imperial power. He has illuminated a pathway which others rushed to follow him on toward independence in Africa. So I said Guinea. 58, 1960, 17 African countries become independent. This is an enormous success. And it's not all attributable to Nkrumah, but his influence, his example was. It's hard to overstate, right? So in 1963, Africans come together for this founding conference of the OAU. And between 1960, when there was this headlong rush toward independence in 1963, the leaders of these newly founded states had enough time to understand what exactly are the prerogatives and privileges of ruling your own little thing, right?
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B
AKA power is sweet.
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A
Power sweets, as they say, as they might say in Lagos today, right? And Nkrumah didn't have, in that moment, no, you know, operative answer for that. Like he had principled answers for that. He gives a very long speech at this founding conference to the OAU about the logic behind this. And I find the logic still compelling, but I'm not going to recite it in its entirety here. But, you know, one of the pieces of this, impressively for me, was a recounting of the founding of the United States, that if you think this is just an African problem, dear fellow leaders, think about where else in the world we have seen this. Look at Latin America, which did not come together, and look at the way they remain dominated by the outside world. He said this in 1963. Look at the United States, which in the late quarter, last quarter of the 18th century had consisted of British colonies whose leaders or whose elites understood and eventually agreed on the notion that if each of them surrendered a little bit of their own power and position, they could form a whole that was greater than its parts. And the general well being and good would benefit from this. This to me is an extraordinarily is a brilliant answer, not just at the level of rhetoric, but in real terms. Right. But Nkrumah's success, as you know, lighting the way, meant that this would not win in the day. So where's Pan Africanism today? I think that on the African continent we have a situation where almost all of the leaders of African countries either pay lip service to watered down notions of Pan Africanism or simply have no interest in the idea and don't even talk about it. Right. Where you have a small number of states which are openly wrestling with this legacy and openly trying to pull on strands of Nkrumah ism to try to reinvent themselves and to find more viable paths forward. The most obvious examples of these are the Sahelian states that have radically broken with France and are talking about trying to join forces in various ways. Burkina Faso, Mali, Niger, and to a lesser extent Chad. Right. They're trying to work along these lines. It's not clear to me where this is going to go. It's not clear to me how much of this is populism and demagoguery versus actual serious commitment or whatnot. But it's very different from what we see on the rest of the continent. Right. You could also throw maybe Senegal in a more peripheral way into this because the Senegalese also have provided some intellectual and emotional or sympathetic support to these states. You could also look at actually Ghana right now, which has just elected a government which flows from the Nkrumah tradition. We don't know much yet about what this new presidency in Ghana is going to produce. So this is just to say that at the elite level, at the state level, Pan Africanism is not altogether dead. What's most interesting to me is that I believe on the African continent, rank and file, ordinary, everyday Africans, Listen, I've been to almost every African country. I've spent a great deal of time in an enormous, unusually large number of African countries. I've spent my Entire Life since 1975 Traveling and dwelling in the African environment. You and I have traveled in Africa today. So you know that this isn't just a bio point, right?
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B
You were born into this.
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A
Ordinary Africans find resonance in this to a degree today that I think is much deeper and more resonant than their elites and their leaders do. Okay, so final point in this long argument. Where is the second dimension of this Pan Africanism, which, beyond Africans coming together meant restoring and strengthening links with the diaspora? I don't have a prediction or an assessment, a clear assessment of sort of state of where things are at this moment. But I also think that there are substantial numbers of people in the black diaspora at the ordinary level who are who remained very, very intrigued by and attracted to Africa and want to find ways to relate to Africa and to reclaim Africa as their place of origin and as their relations. Right? Sometimes it's romantic, sometimes it's naive, often it's superficial. But I don't want to dismiss that because I think this has lasting, ongoing value and it awaits and African leadership that will know how to galvanize this and how to channel this and how to restore some of the vibrancy and some of the idealism and some of the pragmatism also of the Pan Africanist push by Nkrumah and others of his generation?
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B
EFFY Absolutely. Thank you for that, Anson. And you're right, I mean, we see that interest, that lingering interest between African Americans and the continent, at least with Ghana still and this program of return and people coming back. So you're right, but it just still somehow feels like more could be happening, should be happening. But as you say, it's for on our end, on the Africa end, for the leaders or the people to push that, and on the African American side, for more collaboration, more spaces for speaking, for dialogue and for talking in the way that we saw in the 60s when, you know, Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and all the other people who were in Ghana working with Kwame Nkrumah at that time, not just them, but also people like George Padmore. So that opportunity or that time seems to be gone. But as you say, there's still hope and there's still interest. It's just to see how this can happen on a practical level. I'm gonna move to Nkrumah now because he's come up a few times and of course, his name is in the title. And what are some of the most interesting things you learned about Nkrumah from writing this book? I confess that asides from a few uncomplimentary passages on his development and investment decisions when he led Ghana, this is the first book I'm reading about him that really delves into who he was, how he developed, how he came to be, and I'm fascinated. What did you find that was new.
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A
So he is indeed the background, the backbone of this book. Historia is the backbone, narratively speaking, of this book. It's not really a straight up biography of Nkrumah, as you know, many readers have and reviewers have observed and as I readily admit. But he is the spine of the book. His story is the spine of this book. I'd single out a couple of things. One of them is again, how accident of biography put Nkrumah on his path. And I've given you already an example of that. I'm not returning to this, but to what I said before. But another of these accidents was the fact of his origins. Nkrumah is born in the far southwest of the Gold coast, now, of course, Ghana, practically speaking, on the border with Ivory Coast. He's born of a tiny, essentially irrelevant, politically speaking ethnic group, right out of a much bigger family called the Akan, which includes the Ashanti, which is the largest single ethnic group in Ghana. In Kruma's group, the Inzima are not Ashanti, right? They're irrelevant. It's part of the same linguistic faith family, but it's a strange one. Like the other ones can't really understand him. Every Nzima basically speaks the majority Akan languages just to get along in the society. So Nkrumah grows up, even as a boy, with an awareness of how the imperial domination of the penalties that imperial domination had inflicted on Africans. Half of the Inzima are located in Ivory Coast. This produces all kinds of absurdities to visit your relatives. You know, Africans today, and especially Africans of that era, had very rich ceremonial lives. And so a funeral is not just you go to a funeral on Sunday. There's a whole thing, right? And it could go on for a week or two weeks or whatever and have periods when you have to 40 days later or 80 days later or depending on the circumstance, right? You have to mark this thing. Right? And so if you're in. In Zima and you located right on the border with Ivory coast, that meant actually crossing an international boundary and maybe not being allowed to and having to deal with another national language, French, in the case of Ivory coast, and all of the laws that pertain to that, right? And so he grows up not because he had studied this, but because he had lived it. He grows up with an understanding of the injury that Africa's Balkanization had inflicted on Africans. So that's really important. And it remains with him as a founding idea or motivation all the way through to 1963. We Africans, we have to come together for our Own good, right? The other thing that happens, and I think as a Nigerian, you'll understand immediately what this means because Nkrumah was from such a small, insignificant group as he becomes a politician, he doesn't represent a threat to anybody. No other group like Ghana has some big groups, right? And here I'm obviously alluding to Nigeria, right? So Ghana has some big groups which all think it's right for them to, if not just be in charge, to at least have a lot of say, like automatically, right? And Kruma doesn't threaten the groups initially that constitute the kind of pluralities that make up Ghanaian demographics. And so this greases his path. It makes it easier for him to rise because nobody thinks this is going to mean domination by the Ashanti or domination by the Fanti or domination by the Eve or domination by anyone else, right? And so there's that. What else about Nkrumah would I single out? Nkrumah was the other remarkable thing to me about his story is in a lot of interviews I've done about this book, interviewers are eager to dwell on Nkrumah's failures, Nkrumah's failings. So after all, didn't he become an autocrat? After all, as I've said already, didn't Pan Africanism fail? You know, there's lots of these kinds of questions. What's most remarkable to me actually, is without needing to deny that Nkrumah does indeed turn toward authoritarianism in the latter part of his rule, the scope of ambition and the range of solutions that Nkrumah tried and experimented with as a way of helping develop Ghana and make it economically powerful, not for Ghana's own purposes, but indeed on behalf of this idealistic vision of Pan Africanism, which he never abandoned, right? So he wants to build a hydroelectric plant which the west strings him along with or strings him along over for years, right? Crucial years of his rule. There's one way to think about this as, what an unrealistic thing. What a maniacal idea. I don't believe either of those things. And Kruma's vision was we have to industrialize quickly or else we will never escape from domination. So that is part one. Part two is we have natural advantages in our landscape for hydroelectric power. And if we can build an enormous dam, which they eventually do, we can sell cheap power, subsidized power for our neighbors. And by this act of sacrifice on our part, not trying to profit from our electricity, but being brotherly toward our neighboring states, we can show them by example what Pan Africanism means. That if we surrender something on behalf of a greater good, just like I said with the American colonies, we can then emerge on the other side of an equation where we are all in a much better place. Right? He does make this kind of sacrifice with regard to guinea in 1958. So Sekou Toures, this colony led by Secuture, rejects a French proposition to enter into a kind of compact with France in which the French colonies would have flags and would have their own leaders in a formal sense, but in fact France would remain in charge of all of the most important dossiers that any government contains. The Ghanaians said no. And Charles de Gaulle, who was the leader of France at the time, his administrators in guinea rip out the telephone lines, destroy the archives, close down every school and hospital clinic that they had acted out of vengeance and spite in their withdrawal from the country. What did Ghana do under Nkrumah? One year after independence, Ghana said to Sekou Toure, don't worry about it. Let's join together. I will float your government with our money until you can get on your own feet. This is an extraordinary thing. Where do you find examples like this in the world today? Never mind Africa, where do you find these examples? It is true that Pan Africanism comes to the impasse that I described. It is true that Nkrumah becomes more authoritarian in the 1960s than he had been at the outset. I'd like to speak to that again in a moment, though in a totally different way. It would be wrong to lose sight of the many things that he tried, that he endeavored to do, to put his country not just on a viable path, but to promote a greater good for Africa that was principled and was not megalomaniacal or self interested.
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B
Absolutely. And it's funny, I think what he did for guinea on the Secretary was amazing and what he tried to do with Mali. And I have to say that there's certain parts of your book, and no spoilers, because we want people to get the book, were very hard to read. And hearing what the French did in guinea was for me, particularly hard to read. Again because I grew up as a child, socialized through education, through movies and popsoft culture, to sort of idealize the West. They were the civilized people. And so for these so called civilized people to be that petty, that small, that petulant, I think you did a fantastic job in portraying the complexities of who Nkrumah was. And to be honest, even that charge of being authoritarian, I mean, very aware of the way the world is today, where authoritarianism Dictatorship is definitely on the ascendancy. I couldn't help thinking as I finished the book, how else could he have been? There were three attempts at his life. He had seen what had happened to Lumumba. He had every right to be paranoid. He had every right. I thought to myself, people who would criticize him for these things, if they were in his shoes, if they had gone through what he had gone through, would they make different decisions? He thought he was fighting for Ghana's survival. He thought he was fighting for Africa's survival. And if we look at some of the models that are being hailed today, whether it's in Rwanda, on our continent, or whether it's China, then you would see that, yeah, there is a sort of appreciation, let's put it, let me put it that way, for strong men.
- [36:50]
A
Excuse me, I'd. I'd like just to throw in a thought here. I should. Picking up on what you've said, you know, some of the reviewers of my book, I'm not upset about. I've. The book's been widely reviewed, the book has almost uniformly been well reviewed, but in a couple of notes have nonetheless irritated me and, and I beg my listeners indulgence. Right. So no author is. Few authors are always going to be satisfied with every response to everything, right? So if you take that into consideration as I give the following thought, one recent review in a prominent American magazine on this very subject of authoritarianism. So in the book, I say, without attempting to make light of Nkrumah's authoritarianism or even to excuse it away, I say it should be understood nonetheless that the precedent and example set by the west in the case of the Gold coast by the UK was nothing other than authoritarianism. What was imperial rule except for authoritarianism? It was a higher form of authoritarianism than any African regime ever has implemented on the African landscape, Right? It involved personality cult. You had to worship practically the queen. You had to observe rituals honoring British royalty, et cetera, et cetera, with holidays for them and whatnot. Habeas corpus was not observed. The British in the colonial period destroyed opposition press. They jailed people without trial, including Nkrumah. On and on and on. You had no right of obviously political representation until they were ready to allow it. You had no right of free speech, no right of free assembly. We could continue. Right? And so the reviewer said in his article, how is this germane? In other words, does that have to do with assessing what Nkrumah did or how he comported himself, as if this were a mere excuse? And my response to that is as a reader of American history, there is no classic account of American history, the founding of this country, which does not say that part of the American Enlightenment that our founding supposedly resulted from drew on the previous Enlightenment in the uk, right? The ideas of John Locke and John Stuart Mill and people like this, these grand philosophers of democracy and freedom in the UK that created a tradition out of which flowed this American democratic ideal. So which way do we want to have it? Is the immediate path germane only when it's convenient to say, look, this is a nice thing about us, or is it not germane because we are too tight to allow for the fact that Africans, like people everywhere, are imperfect, but that the precedent created in their own history of under domination by others was an important feature in some of their imperfections?
- [39:54]
B
I mean, you're incredibly polite. I have another word for it. It's just hypocrisy because it's literally what we who lived on the military rule in Nigeria know as do as I say, not as I do. I was going to ask you that question because it didn't seem, as I read the book, that you were giving him any excuses whatsoever. And so I'm going to put that question to you and I'm glad that you raised it. I have two questions, just two. One was just I was fascinated. I didn't know that Lumumba, in a way was radicalized by his attendance of the All African People's Conference. And again speaks to my own. I don't want to say miseducation or under education, but I'm curious, considering Fanon's warning at the December 1958 All African People's Conference in Accra that it was time for African countries to prepare for violent conflicts? How hard was it for you writing about the disintegration of Congo's independence within weeks, especially the role played by soldiers and any reflections on Fanon's position, particularly today in the shadows of Gaza, Sudan and Ukraine?
- [40:58]
A
Well, I would say first of all, this was something that involved lots of discovery for me too. I have actually spent a lot of time in Congo, Born in blackness. My previous book talks at great length about the deeper history of Congo, meaning going back to the 15th century. But I did not know certainly to with anything approaching the depth that I delve into in this book, in the new book, I did not know how closely intertwined were the post 1960 histories of Ghana and Congo. And one of the proximate causes, I believe, of the West's turn against Nkrumah, its decision to stop supporting Nkrumah and eventually to support the overthrow of Nkrumah had to do, I argue and believe, with Nkrumah's support for Lumumba for having the temerity, in fact, to act like Africans should have a say in things with regard to Africa. So the west had decided that Lumumba must go. Ghana, under Nkrumah sends some of the first peacekeepers ever to wear blue uniforms under the UN system to the Congo to try to bolster the brand new government of Lumumba and to bolster its legitimacy. And the west, in effect, as I described, this doesn't happen overnight, but it plays out over over a year or so. The west basically decided, we've got to punish this Nkrumah guy because we don't want Lumumba to be in charge of this storehouse of mineral wealth called the Congo, where most importantly, most of the world's easily exploitable uranium reserves come from. So this was a revelation for me.
- [42:37]
B
In Fanon's call to sort of be aware about violent conflict. How do you situate that warning with today in terms of Gaza, Sudan and all the other wars that we're experiencing?
- [42:50]
A
So I have mixed feelings about this call by Fanon. I think that Fanon had a valuable insight in that he understood that freedom is almost never granted, that freedom is almost arises. It is almost always one and one in a very active way. And I think I would like to imagine that if I could have a conversation with Fanon, which is of course not possible, that we could agree to a formulation of this thought that doesn't result in a exclusive focus on violence as a solution, that there are other ways to actively win freedom that don't necessarily involve violence. They may be rare, they may be unusual. I actually think Ghana is an example of this. Right. Nkrumah wins power from a jail cell. Right. I think that the word violence can serve to distract readers of Fanon from a deeper wisdom in his comment or in his thought, which is precisely that. Power doesn't concede easily and maybe not at all. If you're going to have meaningful freedom, you're going to have to fight for it. Right. You know, there's proof of this in Ghana's own example. So nkrumah wins his first election, stuns the British in 1951 from jail. Landslide election. The British have fought that this tiny coterie of British trained lawyers would win power and that they would be happy to have a very slow transition to independence. Right. And that they would agree, much like de Gaulle had wanted from the French colonies, they would agree basically to be ruled under terms favorable to the British. Nkrumah wins election to them. But to them, the British, by grand surprise, the British did not hand over the keys to the Gold coast to Nkrumah. They made him win two more elections. They knew that they couldn't because it had been a landslide. They knew that they couldn't outright deny that he had won. They knew that because the election had been carried out under their auspices, they couldn't say that he had rigged the election. And so what they did is move the goalposts and said, okay, very good, we recognize you won, but you're not independent now. You're not really going to be in charge now. In fact, we're going to invent a new title to kind of make you. To patronize you. We'll call you leader of government business instead of prime minister. And then they made him win two more elections over the course of the 1950s, until finally, in 1957, Ghana gets independence from Britain. What's the lesson of this? This is the lesson of Fanon, that until you can force power to concede, it's not going to concede. Right. And some people say that this whole argument that I have from certain types of certain audiences and certain reviewers about, after all, wasn't Nkrumah a failure, look at his period of rule, and how could he have not amounted to more in the time granted him? They're almost never taking into account the fact that Nkrumah should have been prime minister or president of Ghana from 1951. And in fact, the result of this requirement that he keep winning elections without granting of any power to him sapped the momentum of his movement. That was the whole point. And so by 1957, when he finally does gain independence, even though he has this tremendous role as torchlight for the rest of the African continent toward independence, Nkrumah is, you could argue, actually has already had many of his energies depleted by that point. Right.
- [46:31]
B
I mean, that's. That's really a good answer. And not just his energies, but then also the markets had shifted, so Coco wasn't getting the kinds of prices it was getting. And so, so many things had shifted. So I didn't even think about this angle. So thank you so much. Finally, what are you working on? Just to close this conversation, what's your new project or what project are you working on next?
- [46:51]
A
So thank you, Ayesha. First of all, I have to say to you, and I told you this was an okay question, and we didn't, by the way. We didn't rehearse any questions, but you asked me if we could talk about what I'm working on, and I said yes. I'm superstitious. And so I don't really like to talk about in depth about stuff that I'm working on until it's a real thing, meaning available and out there in the world. But I'll, I, I will address your question in the following way. So all of my books so far have been about the world outside of the United States. And my present book is really about the United States and a particular aspect of the United States. It involves the world of musical creativity, extraordinary world of musical creativity, black musical creativity of the midse century, meaning the previous century here in New York, and about the rise and destruction of the world that created the jazz of the mid 20th century. I'm very excited about it. I'm about three quarters of the way into the writing and I don't have a date yet. But hopefully in another, I don't know, a year and a half, maybe there'll be a new book for people to read.
- [47:55]
B
Fantastic. I'm looking forward to your book, especially, as you point out, it will be the first book I'm reading of yours that's turned inwards into America. But thank you so much for your time.