Rethinking Institutions: Nkrumah In the Metropole

A Belated and Opinionated Review of Nkrumah’s “Consciencism”

Many young Africans who went to the British metropole to study during the colonial era came back much less African than when they had left. They came back well charmed and often with a very assuaged interest in dismantling the colonial apparatus of which they were now a privileged part. The first time I visited London, even though it was well more than a half century after my country of birth, Ghana, had become independent, I understood why. The capital is an eloquent philosophical argument in stone for the empire for which it stood: with its triumphal arches, its squares with towering monuments, its stately ways, its old palaces and castles, The Mall, The Tower of London, London Bridge, Whitehall, Trafalgar Square, Westminster Abbey, the Admiralty Arch — it is so much pageantry set in stone! I could see how these young Africans might have been persuaded to return home and reproduce Whitehall in Accra. It is a testament to the philosophical strength of will of those few who did not fall for the glamour that they came back no less adamant for nothing short of total independence. On the way up to Buckingham along The Mall with these thoughts, I conceived of a certain new admiration for Kwame Nkrumah, one of those resolute few.

The famous Oxford philosopher A.J. Ayer once said of Nkrumah:

I liked him and enjoyed talking to him but he did not seem to me to have an analytical mind. He wanted answers too quickly. I think part of the trouble may have been that he wasn’t concentrating very hard on his thesis. It was a way of marking time until the opportunity came for him to return to Ghana.

Ayer’s remark unwittingly indicates the difference between two modes of philosophizing: philosophizing with a Damocletian sword hanging over one’s head, in the existential mode, and philosophizing leisurely, in the logical mode. It is not that Nkrumah was not capable of philosophy at all — his philosophical oeuvre attests to the fact that he could philosophize. The problem was that the urgency of his mode of philosophizing must have been alien to Ayer. It is true that Ayer lived through the Second World War as a philosopher with interests in ethics, but as has sometimes been pointed out, he belonged to a school of philosophers which not even a war of that scale could lead to philosophize with existential urgency. Nkrumah was on the other hand compelled to philosophize by his condition as a colonial subject in that mode from which Ayer, motivated by a dry positivism and relative freedom, was alienated. Nkrumah came from a country that was still a colonial territory. This was his urgency: the many existential demands of being denied self-determination, the yen to find answers to the problems of identity under imperialism. These are the problems, immediate in their very essence, which color every part of his philosophical thought when it finally found expression.

Nkrumah would shortly after his British sojourn head back to Ghana to lead the pressure for independence and, when the pressure eventually succeeded, become the country’s first head of state. Ghana, under the leadership of Nkrumah, became the first colonial territory in Africa to become independent. This achievement made Nkrumah a star of sorts across the continent (and there is much to be said for the case that the stardom went to his head) and a rallying point for self-determination, anti-colonialism, and pan-Africanism. This gave his pronouncements philosophical currency across the continent. But the course of his political career overshadowed his philosophical legacy; today Nkrumah, at least in Ghana, is seen only in a political light and the long shadow his figure cast against the backdrop of that light. Many who take him as an ideal do not know (beyond generic anti-colonialist and pan-Africanist sloganeering) what his vision really was. It is true that for Nkrumah philosophy could not be pulled apart from the politics it makes possible and so perhaps his political legacy can be thought to be sufficiently testamentary of his philosophy; but it would be impossible for us who reflect on the man, because of the (sometimes questionable) unyielding convictions of his political acts, to see in the sole light of the political an important unfinished philosophical project he set for himself. This was a project whose results were always inchoate, in progress, unfinished, and perhaps unfinishable. This was the important project which showed up in some of his significant political acts, like the formation of the Non-Aligned Movement: it was the project of rethinking all the institutions he had inherited by dint of his and his country’s colonial heritage, and his and his country’s place as a battle-ground for empires’ ideas. This task can be found at the heart of such products of his philosophical thought as his 1965 book Consciencism.

In Consciencism, Nkrumah set himself the task of rethinking the entire philosophical apparatus that was inherited from the colonial administration and which now formed the basis of the governmental structures of newly independent African countries. He intended to rethink this entire apparatus along the lines of what he termed African humanism, a certain ideological character belonging to and relevant to the ways of life of the peoples of Africa. Nkrumah’s argument in Consciencism can seem long-winded at points as he ambles through the history of philosophy for a chapter and a half in order to make a point against what he deems a sort of false universalism which characterizes the sort of philosophies made available to the “African student” (this is the class of people who traveled to the metropole to learn the philosophical language without which they could not hope to make the case for independence); he aims to show that every philosophy is grounded in and draws its motive force from the social context in which it arises, that “there is a social contention implicit or explicit, in the thought of the philosophers” (Consciencism, 53). And showing this, he aims to make the argument, which is the centerpiece of the work, and the statement of that project earlier indicated, that it would thus not do to simply — in the spirit of that false universalism which he calls into question — transplant the inherited philosophical apparatus developed through long toil in the particular soil of Europe, with its long pageantry of philosophical invention in response to idiosyncratic problems, into the context of Africa. Instead all the philosophical institutions — law, ethics, governance, etc. — must be rethought in light of the particular circumstances of Africa.

But here, where he is at most risk of falling into the trap of Afro-centrism, Nkrumah displays his philosophical prowess (and gives the lie to Ayer), threading his way with analytical care between responsiveness to the demands of the unique conditions of Africa and sensitivity to the cosmopolitan heritage it had accrued. For while he recognizes a distinct “African humanism”, he contends that that humanism is not the only cog that will constitute the new apparatus for the recently independent African countries. He recognizes the influences of both the Islamic and Euro-Christian modes of thought that had thoroughly permeated the continent and deemed their integration necessary to the success of the project. He writes (Consciencism, 70):

With true independence regained, however, a new harmony needs to be forged, a harmony that will allow the combined presence of traditional Africa, Islamic Africa and Euro-Christian Africa, so that this presence is in tune with the original humanist principles underlying African society. Our society is not the old society, but a new society enlarged by Islamic and Euro-Christian influences. A new emergent ideology is therefore required, an ideology which can solidify in a philosophical statement, but at the same time an ideology which will not abandon the original humanist principles of Africa.

The task, which he named philosophical consciencism, of articulating this new philosophical apparatus is one Nkrumah began, but like any worthwhile philosophical project, did not (could not) conclude. There is no substitute for deep thinking about how to shape ourselves in response to what we have been given. There are no simple, fixed, once-and-for-all answers. The task Nkrumah set himself is a philosophical task in the full sense of the word. It is an ever-demanding task: it cannot be completed, but it must be done. It is the task of thinking through all the institutions we have inherited and developing new ones responsive to tradition and cosmopolitan reality. Simultaneously. It is not a task which is solely the responsibility of philosophers — no task that is solely the task of philosophers is philosophical (another theme we might find implicitly at work in the dialectic of Consciencism). But this is a philosophical task — so it requires all of us to think deeply about the institutions in which we are embedded: the lawyer in the law, the research scientist in the research institution, the teacher in pedagogy, etc. 

Our question is to ask how these institutions could be made responsive to the relevant demands of consciencism. In the frequently mocked dress of Ghanaian lawyers, we see dramatized on a superficial level that sense of a surrender to realities and institutions forged elsewhere (“Why do Ghanaian lawyers still dress in a way which makes little sense for a tropical country like Ghana just because it made sense in the British context from which the style of dress was imported?”) and unresponsive to the realities here. The task of rethinking institutions is to ask such critical questions of and to reform the substance (not just their superficies, like their manifestation in dress) of the institutions which constitute the country. The sorts of questions we might ask and how we answer them will vary across the institutions and so there is no cookie-cutter “how-to” guide in pursuing this task. And yet it must be done. There is no substitute for deep thinking.

In the grand outcome of things, Ayer was mistaken about Nkrumah. He was perhaps justified in his judgment about Nkrumah’s philosophical haste, but the source of that haste was misapprehended. It is not a lack of analytic clarity which precipitated Nkrumah’s haste. Nkrumah was in a hurry because tardiness cannot be tolerated in philosophizing in the existential mode. If we dither in answering the questions of our self-constitution, others will constitute (or continue — if they already are in that position) ourselves for us. If the task Nkrumah set himself has any relevance — if we too must carry it on — then we too must take it in haste. We must not rush — there is no shortcut for deep thinking — but we must take it in haste, with all urgency.