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Africans! “Our destiny is largely in our hands. If we find, we shall have to seek. If we succeed in the race
of life it must be by our own energies and our own exertions. Others may clear the road but we must go
forward, or be left behind in the race of life. If we remain poor and dependent, the riches of other men will
not avail us. If we are ignorant, the intelligence of other men will do but little for us. If we are foolish, the
wisdom of other men will not guide us. If we are wasteful of time and money, the economy of other men
will only make our destitution the more disgraceful and hurtful”.
Frederick Douglas
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INTRODUCTION:
The Problem, And The Theoretical Framework
“The Third World is not a reality but an ideology.”
Hannah Arendt
AFRICA, – “the Jungle,” “the Dark Continent,” “the underdeveloped,” “the developing,” “the
poor,” “the undeveloped,” “the Wretched of the Earth,” “the white man’s burden” (Schreader,
2000: 94). These are some of the most popular appellations of the Continent that remains the
question mark on the globe. Quel dommage!
To the European, and maybe until only yesteryear the history of Africa began with David
Livingstone, just as that of America began with Christopher Columbus.
Historians have long observed the changes in human existence and have labelled it ”Revolution.”
They, like Victor Hugo, believe that revolution is the larva of civilization.
The theme of this essay, in retrospective, is “the Revolution that was not”, and the obvious
implication is a bit unsavoury. History is passing Africa by. Africa is the last continent of the
“Third World” to come to independence. She is the deepest sunk in political and socio-economic
backwardness. She has the most appalling problems and yet revels in the most effusive optimism.
If anything, to my best knowledge, for the most part she is wallowing in an endless web of
misery and despair. It is a continent of mass poverty but the obsession of the ruling groups is with
luxuries and/or petit power plays. The leaders who came to power mouthing the rhetoric of
change faced the critical poverty of their countries with frivolity and fickleness (First, 1972: 9).
Those who are convinced that the Africans are unfit to rule themselves, that the empire opted out
of Africa too quickly and that the continent was bound to go back into decline after the premature
granting of independence, only succeeded in muddling the issue. The colonial era was a period of
swindle and cupidity and these, any theory of conspiracy will reveal to the enquiring discerning
eye.
In Marxian analysis, the Great Depression of 1929 should have triggered a war of liberation for
the colonised people everywhere. When the opportunity was aborted, however, the imperialists
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decided not to be caught napping, especially not in the shadow of their Nemesis, Communism.
They decided to disengage coolly, and cunningly transferred power to stooges and collaborators
who were to perpetuate the horrors and depredations of their masters.
It is not only fitting but also therapeutic to give African politics a FRANK and PITILESS
analysis. Such an analysis will help us understand the position and behaviour of African countries
in International Relations. Are they pretending in the international arena, or are they wholly
integrated into it? For the purpose of analysis, the institutions and instruments of government the
Imperialists handed their colonies at independence, defies description, from the point of view of
constitutional history. The net effect was the creation of little ”de Gaules,” little ”King Leopolds”
and the replicas of Westminster on a continent as ravaged as its mosaic appearance would allow.
The supposition that the colonial period was a period of tutelage of barbarous Africans by the
’civilised’ West is highly flawed and objectionable. It is an uncomfortable naiveté. The haste
with which the imperialists engaged and disengaged belies this assertion. In the words of Sir
Andrew Cohen, a former colonial governor and former head of the British Colonial Office, the
debauchery was planned and expedited out of premonitions of a debacle. ”Britain needed a new
colonial policy for Africa. She should recognize that successful cooperation with nationalism was
the greatest bulwark against Communism. The transfer of colonial power need not be a defeat but
a strengthening of the Commonwealth and the Free World” (First, 1972:42).
1.1. COMMENTS ON METHODOLOGY
This thesis will proceed within the framework of a redefinition and challenging of theories
and assumptions in view of the dyadic nature of the analysis. The key questions that guides this
study can be grouped under five main headings:
1) Socio-political modernization and socio-political decay. Is Modernization a Westernization
process? (This formulation of the empirical problem is coeval with the belief of the notion or law
of inevitable progress).
2) The traditional web of social existence and societal order.
a) What kind traditional institutions existed in pre-colonial Africa?
b) What was the authority and legitimacy of the institutions?
c) Was there democracy and accountability in Traditional African societies?
3) How did the traditional institutions changed under the impact of Colonialism?
4) The transfer of power in colonial Africa – how was power transferred from the British colonial
governors to African elites?
5) Is there any ideology -- intellectual renaissance – in African politics?
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This analysis is crucial if the dilemma of African “independence” and the problems that came
with it can be discussed honestly. The situation is parallel to a case of Hamlet without the Prince - a farcical drama.
The chosen case study is Ghana (the old name ‘Gold Coast’ is used interchangeably) and the
reasons for the choice are manifold. The choice of the case study is influenced largely by the
following reasons:
1) The socio-political history of Ghana, especially its relationship with Europe, which spans a period
of over five centuries. Its unique historical experience affords a clear insight into the dynamics of
modernization.
2) The plethora of secondary sources – based on the fact that Ghana is the first country that achieved
independence – at least in a formal sense -- in sub-Saharan Africa.
3) Finally, the fact that I am an African (though not a Ghanaian) and thus partially familiar with the
African political and social phenomena which I aspire to understand and explain.
This paper is not by any means exhaustive, and for obvious reasons its many drawbacks are
unavoidable, and therefore it may be found wanting in some respects. In many respects, it is a
relative exercise in contemporary history of Africa, yet there is no distinct systematic
chronological basis for such an exercise. A further shortcoming is the use of secondary materials
for the case study. Here again this cannot be held to be a weakness in view of the lack of
proximity to the primary sources. However, in the main, it offers multiple critiques of the many
conceptualizations from economic determinism to historical realism. Thus it is a modest effort to
reconstruct a conceptual framework for the analysis of politics in the mal-developed area—subSaharan Africa. The chosen method in this thesis is comparative, descriptive, analytical and
argumentative.
Finally, I write this thesis not to nag nor to whine, but to prod. Thus, I am keenly aware of
many repetitions throughout the work, unavoidable because of comparative methods used, and
others for emphasis – which may have turned out to seem over-emphasis. I am hopeful that this
humble effort would contribute to some illumination of the problems of socio-economic and
political modernization in this part of the “Third World”.
Now, fasten your seatbelts as we cruise into “Africa’s Political Decay.”
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1.2. TOWARDS A CRITIQUE OF THE ALTERNATIVE APPROACHES
“Third World” politics presents the discipline of international relations, and even the
international relation scholars for that matter, with a great challenge -- a challenge that, according
to Professor Riggs (1967:317), ”we are indeed only numbly beginning to appreciate.” These
challenges and problems, it is hoped, may some day lead to a restructuring of the whole
discipline.
In so far as political theories and ideologies – that is, an orientation that characterizes the
thinking of a group or nation -- are concerned, there are none. Only a barrage of speculations and
hypothesis has been advanced. Apter (1967:viii) puts it aptly: but ”the events are confusing. Our
research ideas are similarly untidy. Quite often we are as much imprisoned in our concepts as the
political leader is in his rhetoric.”
The trend then, for all international relations scholars (particularly those interested in African
politics) is to tread cautiously and to avoid overzealous generalizations. As the most quoted
scholar in African Studies, Thomas Hodgkins (Apter, 1967:viii) poignantly puts it,
our profound ignorance of African History, our lack of comprehension of African attitudes to the
contemporary situation, our remoteness from the ideas of revolutionary democracy, the distortions in
thinking produced by the colonial mythology--- these, I would suggest, are good reasons for doubting
whether we are likely to have any sensible contributions to make to a discussion of the direction of social
and political change in post-colonial Africa. Such questions are best left to the Africans.
Touche!
Dr. Harris, in the preface of his book ’Studies in African Politics, 1970, seemed to have
concurred with this view, as he remarked, ”seen through a number of diverse topics, Africa’s
problems can best be understood, if not solved, in African terms without reference to norms and
conceptions derived from other sources.”
For an African analyst however, these prospects are not reassuring: Schooled in Western norms
and concepts, he can but grope in the dark in the dearth of Western political theories and
ideologies to guide him.
An interesting problem one encounters in utilizing some models of political analysis is the
unsavoury discovery that in Africa politics is not policy-making. Political power is equated with
acquisitive power. When for instance the ”Elite model” is used, the answer to the question, ”who
has power?” or ”Who rules?” appears anomalous. Power lies without rather than within the
country. It is sad.
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The grotesque nature of the situation is not only unnerving but also irksome. Jean-Paul Sartre
(Fanon, 1971:7), gives some relief though when he said:
…the European elite undertook to manufacture a native elite. They picked out promising adolescents; they
branded them, as with red-hot iron with the principles of Western culture; they stuffed their mouths full
with high-sounding phrases, grand glutinous words that stuck to teeth. After a short stay in the mother
country they were sent home whitewashed. These walking lies had nothing left to say to their brothers;
they only echoed. From Paris, from London, from Amsterdam we would utter the words, Parthenon!
Brotherhood! And somewhere in Africa or Asia, lips would open…thenon!!…therhood! It was the Golden
Era.
Of late, however, efforts have been made towards a normative approach to the political problems
in developing areas and it is to these approaches I owe a debt of gratitude. The first approach is
reflected in Kenneth Organski’s book, ”Stages of Political Development.” He fails to provide a
theory of stages in political development. He is rather concerned with a set of problems (crises)
faced by developing countries (Riggs, 1967:33). These problems are mostly socio-economic and
they are preferred to any other, for, like Marx (1913:11-12) said: ”It is not the consciousness of
men that determines their existence but on the contrary, it is their social existences which
determines their consciousness.”
Organski reached the conclusion that there are essentially four stages of development:
1) political unification,
2) industrialization,
3) national welfare, and
4) abundance.
During the first stages, national governments gain effective political and administrative control
over their populations and territories. Without such control, all policies designed to encourage
economic growth through industrialization are bound to fail (Riggs, 1967:332). However, the
Organski model is not without its shortcomings. The first stage of political unification (described
by Lucien Pye as the crises of identity, legitimacy and penetration) is said to have been achieved
by pre-modern European societies but that non-Western societies are still struggling with this
stage of development. What is not pronounced is the historical evidence (like the one given for
the second stage--industrialization), of the means utilized in achieving these ends. A glaring
obfuscation of such genre is an indictment of the entire model, and for that matter all approaches
in the Development Theory are equally blighted.
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What they succeeded in blurring is the relevance of the means, and when, especially in
this instance, it is the hub of the problem. The task of political unification demands a totality of
efforts if “stability” and “orderly” change is intended. Hence the need for a totalitarian ideology.
In retrospect, the Western bourgeois system, and for that matter any other system that ever
succeeded in scaling this hurdle, did so only under the aegis of an ideology as totalitarian as it
was mobilizing in kind. Where else can one put the import of the eerie Catholic Inquisition in the
achievement of unanimity in pre-modern Europe? Or can it be argued that Augustinian theology,
Lutheranism, Calvinism and later Puritanism, appearing in various phases of cultural changes in
the West, were all totalitarian in content and scope, their other-worldly-outlook notwithstanding?
The emphasis on ”westernization” in the non-Western world, therefore, becomes a byword for
a superimposition of culture. For, what inheres in this blatant and inveterate phenomenon is
nothing short of the foisting of alien cultural practices on a people with a totally different cultural
and historical background. In the main, this cultural superimposition is considered innocuous, yet
its impact is so grotesquely repugnant to even the naive observer. It is the onus of the ”political
decay” immanent in the “Third World.” Is not the index of politics in these areas the quintessence
of cupidity of political actors?
If we are to understand Western democracy as a response to the challenges of the allocation
problem (in tandem with the peculiarities of Western European circumstances), tallying with the
third and fourth stages of national welfare and abundance in Organski’s model, then its
superimposition on non-European cultures is deviously anachronistic. Thus, is not the nauseating
pre-emption of the scarce resources in the “Third World” by political actors, in itself a
distribution process of a sort? It is indeed the acme of the westernization process.
However, in hindsight, when the dynamics of modernization are viewed as ”technological”
change rather than ”cultural”, the cross-cultural transmission of the Industrial Revolution is given
wings. It is in this sense that Lenin’s contribution to Scientific Socialism becomes monolithic.
The paradox thus expressed elsewhere that “modernization can thus be seen as something apart
from industrialization—caused by it in the West but causing it in other areas,” is as abstruse as it
is hollow. Almost invariably, the tragedy of cultural superimposition, in the exogenous change
process, is illustrated vividly by the case study, Ghana. In the absence of a highly disciplined
revolutionary party, committed to the initial tasks of political unity, unification and ceaseless
participation, political action assumed the shape of a sordid debauchery. Flung down the gauntlet
the nationalist party all but withered overnight.
During the second stage of economic development, i.e., the industrial revolution, governments
have to make possible the accumulation of capital, which can only be done at great social cost.
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Organski believes that historically speaking, three different patterns of government have
proven successful in solving the problems of industrialization: the bourgeois (that is, Western
Democracy), the Stalinist (Communism), and the Syncratic (Fascists) (Riggs, 1967:33).
This view is upheld by Professor Pares, who said: ”If they (the liberated peoples) insist on
building their own capital the hard way, like the Russians, they will certainly have to resort to
dictatorship—perhaps Communist dictatorship—since no other form of government can easily
oblige the peasant and the worker to tighten his belt for the sake of the future” (Harris, 1970).
Pye’s approach tallies with Organski’s, especially the first stage of unification, namely, the crises
of identity, legitimacy and penetration (Riggs, 1967:333).
In any case, however, it is David Apter’s complex but intriguing theory of stages and alternative
paths of political development in the larger framework of modernization that provided the beacon
light for this analysis.
The net effect is the eclecticism permeating the paper. The pre-occupation with a critique of
theories is due to the cue from Samuel Huntington’s essay on ”Political Development and
Political Decay”. In it he argued that what is going on today in the third word should frequently
be characterized as a process of decay rather than of development (Riggs, 1967:334).
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2
ON MODERNITY AND SOCIAL PROGRESS
“You are born modern, you do not become so.”
Jean Baudrillard
”Modernism may be seen as an attempt to reconstruct the world in the absence of God.”
Bryan Appleyard
This chapter is based on the rejection of the view that all human societies everywhere had to
develop (if they have to develop at all) through the same or similar series of developmental
stages. In order to put the problem of inevitable progress (social evolution) in the right
perspective, and in order to assail its ubiquitous biologism, we shall make a passing remark on
the “vogue of Evolution.” We shall turn to that turbulent period in Western Europe, which is
referred to as the “Withdrawal of Philosophy.” My reason is very simple: the withdrawal of
philosophy led to a form of rationalization or an attempt to explain and justify imperialist
expansion. Imperialism marked the beginning of the process of rationalization of non-hierarchical
African structures since there was growth on human knowledge in African societies. However the
shared system which imperialism brought presupposes a symbiosis in which growth without
development is the only thing possible and conceivable. The obvious implication then is that
imperialism is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for human progress.
2.1 THE LEGACY
Philosophy in the 19th century was not able to resolve the conflict of competing relativities or to
provide absolute standards. Its withdrawal from the traditional business of providing
comprehensive metaphysical ontologies left the particular branches of science philosophically on
their own (Brecht, 1970: 189-190). Hegel, – in weird premonition – dubbed himself as the last
philosopher. In this, Hegel was right that he could know if what we mean by philosopher is a
producer of metaphysical systems. When Hegel gave up the ghost, the fervour for such creations
seemed to have been spent for good. The decisive reason for this sudden decline was not the
towering greatness of Hegel’s philosophy, or that of his predecessors, but the growing awareness
of the scientific weakness of all metaphysics. The exacting demands put on scientific inquiries
operated as a deterrent to metaphysical speculations. That science was on able to prove the
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existence of God solely by scientific means was becoming a scientific commonplace. This led
into a formidable move of historical dialectic, to two extreme alternative doctrines, the one
personified by Sören Kierkegaard, who called for “jump into faith” out of the scientifically
unsolvable dilemma; the other by Friedrich Nietzsche, who declared that “God is Dead.” Caught
between these extremes, scientists turned to empirical research with growing success (Brecht,
1970:189-190).
The ‘unsolvable dilemma’ began as pangs of guilt. The issue was not the existence of God, but
the stern disapprobation of an ethical system believed to be imposed upon society by God. Thus
the need to reject the foundations of the ethical systems was imperative. The “jump into faith”
and “God is Dead” doctrines proved inadequate for this task – for, lo, both doctrines implied a
tacit acceptance of the ethical system. The demolition of the ethical foundations must of necessity
be thorough. To jump into faith is to relent, and to postulate that God is dead is to affirm that He
was there before, (which none can prove anyway). Thus to conclude that He is not there, in fact,
he has never been there at all affords a greater relief from the dilemma.
Darwin and the concept of ethical neutrality provided the facility to solve the dilemma. His “On
the Origins of Species By Means of Natural Selection” played a role in this development. It led to
a distinction between religious or metaphysical doctrines and strictly scientific enquiries. The
primary subject of the ensuing controversies were geological history, the origin of man and
divine intervention; not ethical questions (ibid, 191). Darwin’s opponent spoke of “doctrinal
moralism” – meaning that science should take moral consequences of their theories into account
(ibid).
For the emotional attitude of evolutionalists, we turn to C .H. Waddington (Popper, 1974:106107), who cautioned: we must accept the direction of evolution as good simply because it is
good.” Professor Bernal (ibid) also stated: “it was not … that science had to fight an external
enemy, the Church; it was that the Church … was within the scientists themselves.”
This intense emotional attitude crystallizes itself in the theory of inevitable progress. The logic is
very simple: With the violent rejection of the imposed norms (the ethical system in which God is
held to be the almighty arbiter) what was left was the original system of values, and this provided
the basis for the frenetic and ingenious conjecturing on the nature and origins of human society.
Stemming from this biologism is the view that the masses should be ruled by the intelligent
(Brown, 1964:15). Thus the need to change the value of human existence.
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In the study of the Greek Tragedy, Fredrich Nietzsche, in his book “The Birth of Tragedy,”
discusses two diametrical opposed ways of arriving at the values of existence – the Dionysian and
the Apollonian.
The Dionysian pursue them through the ‘annihilation of the ordinary bonds and limits of
existence;” he seeks to obtain in his most valued moments escape from boundaries imposed upon
him by his five senses, to break through into another order of experience. The desire of the
Dionysian, in personal experience and in ritual, is to pass through it towards a certain
psychological state, to achieve excess. The closest analogy to the emotions he sees is
drunkenness, and he values the illumination of frenzy. He believes that “the path of excess leads
to the place of wisdom.” The closest analogy to this kind of social existence can be found in
modern societies.
The Apollonian distrusts all this, and has often little idea of the nature of such experiences. He
finds means to outlaw them from his conscious life. He knows but one law, measure in the
Hellenic sense. He keeps the middle of the road, stays within the known map, and does not
meddle with disruptive psychological states. Apollonian way of life implies the distrust of
individualism. The known map, the middle of the road, to the Apollonian, is embodied in the
common traditions of his people. To stay within it is to commit himself to precedent, to tradition.
Therefore, those influences that are powerful against tradition are uncongenial and minimized in
their institutions, and the greatest of these is individualism and discord. It is disruptive, even
when it refines upon and enlarges the tradition itself (Benedict, 1968:56-57). The near parallel to
this kind of social structure is in traditional societies.
Nietzsche says, “Wherever the Dionysian prevailed, the Apollonian was checked and destroyed
... wherever the first Dionysian onslaught was successfully withstood, the authority and majesty
of the Delphic god [Apollo] exhibited itself as more rigid and menacing than ever.” Yet neither
side ever prevails due to each containing the other in an eternal, natural check, or balance.
The essential difference between these two types of social structures is not their value
systems (quite distinct from each other, anyway), but rather, it is the absence of the essential
element in one, and its stagnation in the other. This essential element is knowledge, and the
mystical entity determining its growth is to be found in the aggressive tendencies in the other.
This interplay of forces, then, is the dynamics of social evolution but not of social development
and progress. A necessary inference here is that, imperialism -- which is the crystallization of
social evolution -- produces growth and not progress and development.
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As this thesis commence, we shall henceforth equate the modern-industrialized way of life to the
Dionysian way of life, and the traditional way of life to the Apollonian way of life, respectively.
2.2. MODERNIZATION-WESTERNIZATION DEBATE REVISITED
“All truly historical peoples have an idea they must realize, and when they have sufficiently exploited it at
home, they export it, in a certain way, by war; they make it tour the world.”
Cousin Victor
Modernization is a global process that all social systems are experiencing. Modernization theory
began in the 1950s mainly amongst American development sociologists. It is referred to as “the
applied enlightenment” (Pieterse, 2001:42-43). Unlike the evolutionary theory, which conceives
human and societal development as being “natural and endogenous,” the modernization theory
considers both endogenous and exogenous forces in their development paradigm (ibid, 43). The
endogenous changes are: “social stratification, rationalization, the spread of universalism,
achievement and specificity,” while the exogenous change are: “the spread of market relations or
capitalism, industrialization through technological diffusion, Westernization, nation-building … ,
state formation (as in postcolonial inheritor states)” (ibid, 43).
Modernization increases levels of asymmetrical interdependence and integration across state
frontiers and between different peoples. On the individual, institutional and the group levels,
“these changes appear to have the most impact upon elites and leadership groups, [and the
masses]” (Evans and Newnham, 1998:336).
MOVEMENT OF SOCIETY
A
Level 1
Modernizing
Institutions
(Schools,
factories, Mass
Media)
Level 2
Modernized
Individuals
(Educated,
modernized Elites)
B
Level 3
Modern
Institutions
(Banks, shops,
hospitals, clinics,
nightclubs, etc)
LEADERSHIP (ELITE) AND MASSES CHASING THE GOALS
Figure 1. Interplay of the necessary and sufficient Conditions for Modernization.
Level 4
Sociopolitical and
Economic
Development
GOALS
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As figure 1 illustrates, modernizing institutions are necessary but not sufficient conditions for
modernization – economic development. To realize economic development as a goal, there must
be interplay between all the three levels (1, 2 and 3). The leader must identify his or herself with
the masses in order to achieve socio-political and economic development.
Modernizing institutions such as the schools, factories and the mass media create modern
individuals -- the educated elites -- who staff the modern institutions (banks, hospitals, clinics,
etc) that are necessary for economic growth. Modernizing institutions are prior causers to
modernized individuals and modern institutions. As such, traditional individuals must be
modernized before they can create and staff modern institutions. The strength of the modernizing
institutions should be the most policy-relevant. If a modernizing elite attempts to foster economic
development directly by creating modern institutions without first cultivating the necessary
human capital (modernized individuals), the modern institutions are likely to be abortive.
Modernizing institutions such as the school and the media are typically State sponsored,
controlled, and influenced. Political elites may seek to diffuse modern values and attitudes
through these institutions in order to prepare the work force for the staffing of modern institutions
in the production realm and elsewhere. They may also use these institutions more directly to
promote the mobilization of the population in support of national programs of economic
development. The reach and influence of modernizing institutions is the starting point in
modernizing a society.
The process of modernization therefore, is a universal phenomenon. It is the burden of our age.
“It is an objective that is not confined to a single place and region, to a particular country or class,
or to a privileged group or people. Modernization, and the desire for it, reaches around the world”
(Apter 1967:1). Individuals, institutions and nations are bound to modernize. The right to
modernize is therefore God-given and natural, and no man or nation is chosen by God or by
nature to determine the direction of modernity of other men and/or nations.
Africa has suffered from the effects of invasions, conquests and migration – such that the very
conditions that promote the growth of human knowledge, and the necessary and sufficient
conditions that favour this growth of human knowledge, and therefore, of social progress and
development, have been bedevilled by the formidable crisis of identity which engulfs the culture,
the society and the individual. Any theory of social development or modernization, therefore,
must first perforce consider the solution of this crisis as the sin qua non. However theories of
modernization do betray a glaring obfuscation of this essential variable, pontificating, instead, on
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the virtues of westernization. Empirically, theories of social evolution can be logically indicted
for the lack of fit between western imposed structures and traditional African structures, which
results in social disintegration.
Aplenty eminent scholars blatantly equate modernization in the non-European world with
westernization or Europeanization. This drives us to the pertinent question: Is modernization a
westernization (Europeanization) process?
The use of the term ”Westernization” or “Europeanization” to denote the economic, political,
social and intellectual transformation of African countries can be logically dismissed. The logic
for the dismissal is manifold. Here are two of them: 1) the rising communalistic and solidarity
sentiments of the African peoples opposes western individualism and social discord; and 2)
westernization’s inadequacy in improving the standards of living of the “westernized” is proven - “glance at the low estate of the underdeveloped three-quarters of mankind as the imperialist era
draws to a close” (Emerson 1960: 7), and the failing African nation-states, illustrates the point.
There is no gainsaying the fact that ‘modernization first occurred in the West through the twin
process of commercialization and industrialization” (ibid 43), yet simply regarding it as
westernization is to commit a faux pas, disdainful enough in these modern days. “Europeans were
by no means the pioneers of human civilization. Half of man’s recorded history had passed
before anyone in Europe could read or write” (Emerson, 1960: 3). Therefore, to posit that the
industrial revolution fostered by the humanistic upsurge of the Renaissance period is wholly
European is to commit an intellectual hara-kiri.
What is modernization? What is westernization? The Marxian definition will be preferred in this
paper: “modernization, in this view, can be understood as a series of altering material
relationships out of which a more abundant and kindlier world will eventually emerge”(Apter
1967:6). Modernization can be seen as something apart from industrialization – caused by it in
the West and causing it in other areas (Emerson, 1960: 44). It is a complex process. As a
revolution, it predates the Industrial Revolution. Its origins lie beyond the Renaissance since as
an innovation process it is as old as man. “Thus, modernization as the process leading to the state
of modernity begins when man tries to solve the allocation problem” (ibid 9). It employs “roles
that have been drawn from various industrial societies (and ordinarily associated with Western
industrial society, although modernization can no longer be claimed as peculiarly Western)”
(Emerson 1960: 60). How does one explain away the paradoxes above? Firstly, there is the case
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of the cart-before-the-horse-situation that cannot be overlooked. Secondly, modernization is
considered to be a relative term. The overtones of racial supremacy and arrogance which the term
“westernization,” embodies are based on the notoriously false assumption that, but for the West,
the world would not have experienced an industrial revolution.
Westernization, on the other hand, is defined as the “conversion to the ways of Western
Civilization.” Europeanization is defined by dictionary.com as “assimilation into European
culture,” or “to make European.” Westernization and Europeanization will be used here
interchangeably.
Before we proceed, we shall here make a passing remark on the term Western Civilization.
Correct me if I am incorrect -- “Europe reads with letters and counts in numbers that come from
the crossroad of Africa and Asia. “Civilization”, if anything, “is composite, an accretion of
experiences and ideas beyond race or region.”
Professor Palmer (1967:2), describes modernity (the Dionysian way of life) this way:
It is a world characterised by modern science, by modern industry and machines, modern sources of
energy, modern transport and communications, modern medicines, sanitation and methods of raising
food…. It is a world common men begin to sense the attractions of a higher standard of living, of better
food and housing in return for less laborious and spirit-killing work.
The converse of what is revealed here is the grim reality of Traditional-Apollonian way of life
and existence prevalent in the non-European world, particularly Africa. We here come closer to
answering the pertinent question, “Is the African village best left alone within its unbroken cake
of custom, or should there be a frontal attack upon the superstition, ignorance, infant mortality,
hunger, slavery and tribal warfare which are the price it pays for its traditional [Apollonian]
existence?” (Emerson1960: 14).
Is Westernization the answer? Obviously not. This is where I anchor my argument, with a cue
from Emerson, about the “revolution that was not.” Emerson (1960:18) says:
The inadequacy of the way the task has been done, is vividly illustrated within each of the underdeveloped
countries by the disparity which exists between certain segments of their people in terms of acquaintances
with the modern world…. Everywhere, only a relative handful of people has achieved any intimate
16
familiarity with the west and its ways through education abroad in the imperial centres or in Western
established schools and universities.
The process of transformation or conversion that connotes the term westernization consists of the
adoption of forms of life and production which were first developed among western European
intellectual classes and bourgeoisie in the eighteenth century. These new forms of life, thought
and production can be summed up as follows: rationalism, individualism and industrialism. The
dynamic forces of westernization undermined, underdeveloped and revolutionalized the
intellectual attitude, the social life, and the economic structure of African countries. These new
ways of life and production is referred to as modern civilization. It spread from the intellectual
classes of the west to African countries and classes. As it penetrated, it destroyed the traditional
(Apollonian way of life) structures of African society. This expansion was immanent in its very
nature.
The forms of adaptation to western civilization vary from country to country, and from class to
class. In African nations, as it were in European nations, all kinds and degrees of transition and
fusion, of the traditional and modern, can be observed. The tempo of the transition process
depends upon the government: where national governments promote it, it is faster; it is slowest
where colonial government unconsciously impede its development. It springs from the blatant
misinterpretation of the tendencies of history, from a bias belief that modern civilization is
reserved for, or beneficial to, certain races and classes only. Westernization in Africa has failed to
encourage change, and individuals, states and regions are regressing into a cul-de-sac of
traditionalism. Modernization through westernization, instead of liberating Africans has become
a veritable instrument of socio-political and economic blackmail. This treachery sadly belies
social change in Africa. The problem of identity begets dialectic in the Hegelian sense:
there was an almost universal tendency within a newly rising leadership to accept the conquering Western
civilization as superior and in itself desirable. If the first reaction of the peoples on whom the West
imposed itself was generally a xenophobic order, the next phase was likely to be a swing in the direction
of an uncritical self- humiliation, and the acceptance of alien superiority. The third phase…was a
nationalist synthesis in which there was an assertion of a community with pride in itself and its past but
still looking, at least as far as its leaders were concerned, in the direction of Westernization and
modernization. (Emerson 1960:10-11).
17
(This will be surveyed under the chapter on ideology). Those leaders were, almost without
exception, men who had achieved substantial acquaintance with the West (Emerson, 1962:1011). The point, however, is made clear: instead of goals and ideas based on futurism, African
efforts have been oriented to the past, to a lost Golden Age. The mild and unaccentuated flirtation
with modernization that prevails is directed at the duplication of the immense material advance,
which characterises the West. Such self-hypnosis is what forms the substance of African politics
and society today. It is sad.
The diffusion of western culture has given an unmistakable stamp on Africa traditional structures.
Friedrich Engels and Karl Marx clearly foresaw and interpreted this tendency in their 1848
Communist Manifesto:
In place of the old local and national seclusion and self-sufficiency, we have intercourse in every
direction, universal inter-dependence of nations. And as in material, so also in intellectual production. The
intellectual creations of individual nations become common property. National one-sidedness and narrowmindedness become more and more impossible, and from the numerous national and local literatures,
there arises a world literature. The bourgeoisie, by the rapid improvement of all instruments of production,
by the immensely facilitated means of communication, draws all, even the most barbarian, nations into
civilization. The cheap prices of commodities are the heavy artillery with which it forces the barbarians'
intensely obstinate hatred of foreigners to capitulate. It compels all nations, on pain of extinction, to adopt
the bourgeois mode of production; it compels them to introduce what it calls civilization into their midst,
i.e., to become bourgeois themselves. In one word, it creates a world after its own image.
Marx and Engel’s prophecy has been fulfilled. It is true: “All truly historical peoples have an idea
they must realize, and when they have sufficiently exploited it at home, they export it, in a certain
way, by war; they make it tour the world.” The West has proven it by the superimposition of
western-imposed cultures on non-western cultures. We find today in all African countries stages
of transition similar to those witnessed by Europe in the 19th century – the “growth” of
industrialism, the emergence of the individual from the traditional restraints of family, the
“urbanization” of the country-side, the spread of modern education, transformation of religion
under the impact of rationalism.
18
Now, the question is: was such expansionism a unique peculiarity of the West? No, there have
been other expansions before. African has known great conquering empires before. Western
expansion begun as response to the rise and expansion of the Arab and Turkish civilization. The
west was faced with a challenge to its system, so it had to respond. The west was not unique in its
expansionist appetite. They merely excelled in their capacity to carry it into practice.
According to the historian Arnold Toynbee's (Marwick 1970:85), all civilizations are faced with a
crisis (a challenge), which is either one of ideas, or one of technology. How they respond to the
crisis determines whether they will survive or not. An example is the Fall of Rome. Toynbee
points out, as we shall discuss below, that the Byzantine Empire (the Eastern Roman Empire)
used Christianity to revitalize and reform the Roman Empire for another thousand years.
Toynbee (Marwick 1970:85) remarks:
When civilizations rise and fall and in falling give rise to others some purposeful enterprise, higher than
theirs, may all the time be making headway and in a divine plan the learning that comes through the
suffering caused by the failures of civilization may be the sovereign means of progress.
His concepts -- Challenge and Response -- is of special interest here. Their application to the
study of history is not only entertaining but also highly rewarding. They afford a rare insight into
human affairs.
For an interesting study of a topic in history through the application of these concepts, we
shall begin with the Islamic expansion into Europe. I shall endeavour to stick to the bare outlines
in a bid to refute the odious premise. We shall regard the Islamic expansion into Europe as the
”challenge” to the European world system of the 17th century A.D. Professor Pirenne reached the
conclusion that a Roman civilization, based on the Mediterranean survived the barbarian
invasions, and did not collapse till the Muslim expansion of the 17th century. Medieval
civilization began only with the Carolingians: “without Mohammed, Charlemagne would have
been inconcieved!”(Marwick, 1970:63). Charlemagne and the Holy Roman Empire becomes the
”response” and in time, becomes the ”challenge” to the world system. In this vein, the Crusades
mark the beginnings of Western imperialism.
Now, lets stop here to recapitulate the situation! What happened when the East met the West?
The obvious reason for the chosen debate in history can now be appreciated: The Arabs (East), by
virtue of their location and subsequent conquests had become the custodians of human
civilization. Palmer (1967:16-17) pulls it:
19
In mundane matters, the Arabs speedily took over the civilization of the lands they conquered. In the
caliphate, as in the Byzantine Empire, the civilization of the ancient world went its way without serious
interruption. Huge buildings and magnificent palaces were constructed, ships plied the Mediterranean, …
in the sciences the Arabs not only learned from but went beyond the Greeks. The Greek scientific
literature was translated: some of it is known today through these medieval Arabic versions. Arab
geographers had a wider knowledge of the world than anyone had possessed up to their time. Arab
mathematicians developed Algebra so far beyond the Greeks as almost to be its creator (”algebra” is an
Arabic word), and in introducing the Arabic numerals (through their contacts with India) they made
arithmetic, which in Roman numerals had been a formidably difficult science, into something that every
schoolchild can be taught.
The intercourse that took place when East met West (first, by the Islamic expansion and later the
Crusades) made the Arabs, as well as the Europeans, some centuries later, mere ”transmission
belts” in the process of modernization. Wherein lies the overstatement and “fly your own kite”
that Modernization is a Westernization process?
The product of this intercourse, the Renaissance or Humanism, nurtured in Italy and later
unleashed on the decadent and backward tribes beyond the Alps created the conditions necessary
to open the floodgates of modernization to the entire human race.
Thus, employing the principle of the diffusion of culture, we can grasp the proper historical
position of Africa as a full participant in the development of human civilization, as a continent
that has contributed much of its own to other cultures, as well as one whose cultures received
ideas and artifacts from outside. It thus becomes pointless to speak of Africa as underdevelop and
moving into a wider world. As a matter of fact she was never out of it (Herkowitz, 1962:6).
2.3. A CRITIQUE OF THEORIES OF IMPERIALISM
Imperialism is a policy of extending the control or authority over foreign entities as a means of
acquisition and/or maintenance of empires, either through direct territorial or through indirect
methods of exerting control on the politics and/or economy of other countries (Evans and
Newnham, (1998:244). It is the policy of a country in maintaining colonies, for example, the
subjugation by Europe of most of Africa between 1870-1914, in what is known as the Scramble
for Africa. The ends of this policy are often an attempt to gain more land, resources, or people.
“Theories of imperialism” may differ, but the underlying premise is the same. According to P. W.
Preston (1997:139), imperial expansion “to encompass large areas of the globe can be understood
20
in terms of the expansion of one form-of-life at the expense of other long established local formsof-life.” The consequence of this invasion is the radical restructuring of “the indigenous patterns
of economic, social, political and cultural life” (Preston, 1997:139). In what follows is the
application of the Hobson-Leninist’s theories in explaining the European scramble for Africa.
In December 1958, Ghana served as host to the All-African Peoples’ Conference, which made
the unification of Africa one of its central themes. Chairman Tom Mboya of Kenya vehemently
screemed: “Europeans, scram out of Africa” in explicit refutation of the European scramble for
Africa (Emerson, 1960:5). This is not anymore strange since historic African nationalism can be
dubbed the crybaby of the century. The ardour and gusto with which the colonialists were
excoriated betray the consternation and despair of the nationalist leaders, who had themselves,
achieved substantial acquaintances with the West (the base of their popularity).
Its sonority reached an all-time high in the writing of the late Kwame Nkrumah, the eminent
African statesman. For those who fail to fathom this quixotic exercise in exorcism, I do not
hesitate to point out that “Mumbo Jumbo” is an African word, and the exercise is of tremendous
import to the mind of the African. It is scapegoating. Or is it? (Lloyd, 1971:253-258).
Beyond the hullabaloo, however, the reactions of the imperialists were palpable. It was a mixture
of collective remorse and indignation. In a rare outburst of temper, the late Professor Richard
Pares asked: “what answer are we to make to the revolt of three-quarters of the human race
against colonialism? Obviously we shall not say to the liberated peoples: Come and stamp on us
for a hundred and fifty years; then we shall be all square and you will feel better”(Harris,
1970:16).
It is obvious that of the plethora of theoretical arguments put forward in a bid to explain the
European scramble for Africa in the late 19th century, the only one the African nationalists found
clinching is the Hobson-Leninist thesis. Lenin’s argument is basically simple and it rests on the
notion that the poverty of Africa is a direct result of external exploitation. If the advanced
economic countries of the world were relatively rich this is because those countries had exploited
colonies (Harris, 1970:12). This argument, wholly true, will be dismissed here on two grounds.
First, the denunciation of imperialism in terms of its primary purpose is considered insufficient.
Sure enough, imperialism promotes the interests of the few advanced powers, but the real
weakness of the argument is that it obscures its principal role as a necessary condition for
revolutionary change. The Marxian dialectics considers imperialism crucial, and as one Soviet
ideology phrases it, “Imperialism itself is the stimulator of revolutions”(Emerson, 1960:7).
21
I am not by any means absolving the Imperialists from their remorse and infamy. In trying to
accentuate the role of colonialism as a modernizing factor, par excellence, I run the risk of being
branded an apologist. But far from me be it. If it is flattering to the ego of the Western world to
be ascribed the role of modernizers, then the sarcasm here is that they did it the Western-wayhaphazard, as it were. The balance sheet shows more debit than credit. The records are sullied by
the inhuman traffic in slaves, the decimation of Indian populations in the Americas, the
disintegration of the peoples in the South Pacific and the atrocities of King Leopold in the Congo.
Who holds brief for such notorious crimes against humanity?
Without losing track for the second reason for rejecting this thesis, I shall here digress to
expatiate at length about the Spirit of Imperialism. Professor Emerson (1960:7) summed up the
epic thus, “the entire process appears to be far less the product of conscious human intent than of
the working of forces of which men were only dimly aware.” In sum, it is human development
and progress coming to roost. The Western world was just a cog in a big wheel of development
and progress.
Imperialism, by definition, “involves the domination of one people over another, of a stronger
over a weaker community; yet it would be grossly improper to assume a universal identification
of greater strength with loftier culture”(Emerson, 1960:6).
Professor Carlo Cipolla’s (1972:26) theory of the “Two Revolutions” offers some relief here. He
says that:
The Agricultural Revolution which occurred in the Near East some time around 9.000 B.C. spread all over
the world. By A.D. 1780 the hunting stage had long since been abandoned by nearly all mankind and the
last strongholds of the hunters were being invaded by the triumphant farmers. Then, late in the eighteenth
century, the second Revolution was born: the Industrial Revolution. England was its cradle. Its diffusion
was… Wherever the Industrial Revolution penetrated, it brought into the entire structure of agriculture the
dominant productive sector of the society.
This is the closest that one can come, to an analysis of the situation. It is the allocation problem,
once again being modified. Cipolla (1972:109-110) likens the two revolutions to ‘muscle power’
and ‘machine power’ in his evaluation of the energy sources of man. He shade more light on the
point in these words:
22
The Industrial Revolution is spreading all over the world. We witness that the changes are ‘not merely
industrial but also social and intellectual’… A new style of life has to be emerging, as another disappears
forever. Every aspect of life has to be geared to the new modes of production. Family ties are on the wane
and give way to broader perspectives for larger social groups. Individual saving gives way to collective
social services, undistributed profits and taxes. The rounded philosophical education of the few is set aside
in favour of the technical training of the many. Artistic institutions must give way to technical precision.
New juridical institutions, new types of ownership and management, different distributions of income,
new tastes, new values, new ideas have to emerge as an essential part of the industrialization process
I have here quoted quite extensively from Cipolla for two main reasons: First, it saves the trauma
of describing the Traditional-Apollonian African existence all over again. I do not mean to “deny
the developmental aspects of pre-colonial systems. Traditional societies were not all subsistence
economies … various forms of money were in use long before European intervention. Ports and
markets were very elaborate”(Apter, 1967:50-51). But these did not preclude modernization.
Does it matter if it came at the point of a gun?
The second reason for quoting him extensively is that we find in his resume a blueprint for social
and political change.
And precisely to the point, my views about the Hobson-Leninist thesis being the cause of
nationalists’ penchant to inveigh and berate the imperialists is given eloquent proof. The
disequilibrium created by the inroads of modernization a la Western Imperialism, coupled with
the paucity of resources to resolve the pressing issues made the ‘quixotic exercise in exorcism’
ineluctable. It must be remembered that at this stage, most of the nationalists had inherited the
garb of governance of their own people.
A little gift of hindsight will convince the observer that most of the invectives had to do with
what Colonialism failed to do and not what it did. The suspicion does not unnaturally grow that
in the garrulous nationalist, the exploitation that mattered was not the pre-emption of the natural
resources but the failure of the imperial powers “to devote themselves to the social welfare and
advancement of the alien communities overseas which they had come to dominate in a generally
haphazard process of expansion”(Emerson, 1960:9). To posit such an argument is to lose the real
substance of imperialism. “The passion to plunder is what kept the imperialist going. The
imperialist, out for the profit, strategic advantage, or glory of his own people”(ibid) was not
likely to fulfil the divine role of modernizers. We here run into a headlong collision with
23
historical reality. What was the fate of the common masses in Europe during the imperial epic?
Were they not being exploited too?
With the Hobson-Leninist thesis out of the way we shall now consider another thesis, which is of
thunderous importance to African politics and society. This is the role of the missionary in the
modernization process. “The missionaries were in effect auxiliaries of the colonial
administration”(Crowder, 1968:1,13). They sanctified the activities of colonial governors. Their
complaisance is variously in toned in the imperialist triad, Gold, God, and Glory (GGG) or better
still, the three C’s: Colonization, Commercialization, and Christianization (CCC). “Hobson had
admitted the importance played by missionary idealists, but dismissed them as the tools of
economic interests”(Marwick, 1970:233).
Without indulging in value judgment, we can see the role of the missionary as vital in the
modernization process. In a bid to save benighted souls, he provided education for the colonized
people. It is a fact of African life that almost all the westernized elites including the nationalists
were products of mission schools. The answer to the question why African nationalism never
became revolutionary can now be formulated. Robert Merton (1967:42) explains:
The social role of religion has of course been repeatedly observed and interpreted over the long span of
many centuries. The hard core of continuity in these observations consists in an emphasis on religion as an
institutional means of social control whether this be in Plato’s concept of ‘noble lies’ or in Aristotle’s
opinion that it operates “with a view to the persuasion of the multitude” or in the comparable judgement
by Polybius that “the masses… can be controlled only by mysterious terrors and tragic fears.” If
Montequieu remarks of the Roman lawmakers that they sought to “inspire a people that feared nothing
with fear of the gods and to use the fear to lead it whithersoever they pleased, then Jawaharlal Nehru
observes, on the basis of his own experiences, that the only books that British officials heartily
recommended (to political prisoners in India) were religious books or novels. It is wonderful how dear to
heart of the British Government is the subject of religion and how impartially it encourages all brands of it
True to form, the onus of the westernization process rested on the missionary. He benumbed the
African mind with noble lies, in a gist he offered him a better life after death and the present was
denied him. The importance of this assertion will be seen in the chapter on ideology in this essay.
24
However, before any inconsistency charge is levelled at me, I must explain that the contradiction
in the missionaries’ role in modernization is not my fault. The cue lies in the ‘unholy alliance
between priest and pirate.’ The Historian Palmer (1967:622) couches the entire drama in such
beautiful language: Imperialism “would bring civilization and enlightened living to those who
still sat in darkness. Faith in ‘modern civilization’ has become a kind of substitute religion.
Imperialism was its crusade.”
“To assess the effects of imperialism one must take the wider context and the universal
meaning. Karl Marx, who was of course on the side of the ‘march of history’ noted the
modernizing effects, as well as the evident exploitation, inherent in imperial rule”(Marwick,
1970:235). Thus, the “history of colonization is the history of humanity itself”(ibid).
2.4. PATTERNS OF COLONIALISM
Colonialism and imperialism may indeed be a lopsided partnership, but one thing is certain: we
do not invade and occupy, enclose and dispossess the socio-economic, cultural and political
history of races, and then sit back and compose hymns of praise in their honour.
Colonialism is a “variety of imperialism” – “it involves the settlement of foreign territories, the
maintenance of rule over a subordinate population and the separation of the ruling group from the
subject population” (Evans and Newnham, 1998:79). And “the relationship between the ‘mother
country’ and the colony is usually exploitative” (Ibid)
Viewed from the perspective of a transformation process, Westernization, (Modernization,
Western-Style) was and is a failure. Three-quarters of humanity variously referred to as: ‘the
Third World’, or ’the Wretched of the Earth’, still scratches a precarious survival from the
obstinate earth. The modernizers have returned to their bastions priding themselves with the
sloppy way in which they accomplished their ’task’. “The imperial mystique, so passionately
propagated to excuse colonial control, has been relegated to the reference shelves of history. The
French, who spoke once as if a separation from any part of their empire was an ultimate drain of
their blood, see now a closer community of interest with Holland [and the rest of European
nations] than with Senegal. The British, so much of whose past was invested in colonial
expansionism, search for their future in Germany [and the rest of Europe] rather than in India or
Nigeria”(Segal, 1963:22-23). It is nothing short of a palpable sense of collective paranoia forcing
them to club together (Ibid).
25
Now, let us survey how the task of modernization was carried out by the various colonial powers.
Of special interest here are the British, French and the Belgians.
The colonial attack on African traditional systems was dislocative, and had different patterns.
”For the French, and in different fashion, the British, the key point of attack is the elite who can
serve as the link between the colonial power and the native masses, for the Belgians, it is the
mass itself, or at least a substantial middle class, which must be raised as a whole without
thrusting a Europeanized few above it”(Emerson, 1960:8). How far the colonial stereotype of the
African shaped these patterns is a matter of conjecture. The French for example, believing
fervently in the idea that the Africans lacked any future or history worth calling such, ”were
convinced that the only salvation for the African was his assimilation into French
civilization”(Crowder, 1968:22). The qualification for assimilation was a mastery of the
language, history and art of Metropolitan France. In reality, ”not more than 10% of the
population of the so-called French-speaking African countries have a working knowledge of the
French language. Even more elitist perhaps is the search for the black soul, which is made in
terms of French philosophy, French education, literature and modes of thought. French models
are the accepted models (even perhaps the ubiquitous ’negritude’), although in practical terms
this may seem no more than the pursuit of the ’baccalaureate’ as the key to a job. Indeed the
baccalaureate has been described as ’the superior fetish, the most powerful of fetishes in modern
Africa’”(Harris, 1970, 22).
Recalcitrant and dissenters were ostracised. There was the case of Guinea; she was
’dewesternized’ overnight for refusing to toe the line.
Guinea has clearly been an exception to the usual francophone rule. When de Gaulle returned to power in
1958, the Guineans rejected the referendum. The new French President decided that if the Guineans
wanted disengagement they should have it. Within days French civil servants withdrew. Out of four
thousand of these civil servants, all but fifteen had gone in three weeks. Cash registers were ripped out, the
weapons of the police were withdrawn and even the library of the Ministry of Justice was removed. The
Governor was ordered to remove the furniture from Government House and strip all fittings, movable and
immovable and ship them back to France. Fruit trees were cut, walls were torn down, gardens decimated,
telephone wires were cut, and a ship bringing five thousand tons of rice was re-routed.
(Harris, 1970:22-23).
26
These were the modernizers at their best. One cannot withstand the glamour of comparing this
phenomenon with President Nixon’s decision to ’bomb North Vietnam back to the Stone Age.’
The glamour lies not in the comparison but in the inference -- to ’dewesternize’. A sad
realization.
Strictly speaking then, in terms of decolonization, it was only Guinea that experienced this. The
rest of the Francophone African countries went into a new stage of colonialism.
”The object of the Belgian colonial policy was to create a prosperous black working class
(sociologically undefined) which would be content with wages rather than votes. It was felt
unnecessary to provide freedom of the press, and the Belgian Charte Coloniale omitted these
rights”(Harris, 1970:24). The administrative policy here was to remove the Congo from ‘politics’.
Another effort was to prevent the growth of a landed European class. “In the social sphere,
Belgium’s policy involved a step-by-step preparation of Congolese nationals as they evolved into
Western civilization. The number of evolues were small, for the implementation of this policy
called for mass primary education rather than the production of a highly educated elite”(Apter,
1963:34). The importance of the elite can be seen when we turn to the British pattern.
British colonial pattern evades definition. With slight modifications, the objective can be
described as follows: Britain pursued a settler form of colonization. South Africa, Rhodesia
(present day Zimbabwe) and the frustrated efforts in East Africa are eloquent proofs. Western
Africa seems to have been the exception and here, the efforts were frustrated by the obduracy of
the climate. Administrative policy took various turns, from the very inception of British rule. A
“combination of commercial and political administration formed the classic British pattern
(Apter, 1963:34). They claimed only a limited jurisdiction, and that in a circumscribed area. The
climatic conditions were described as the “miasmic marshes and poisonous mists”. Reason
enough to fall on local material for administrative purposes.
The first political development was the indirect rule—the administration of the country by the
British in cooperation with the chiefs. At this stage the “climatic conditions had assuaged” and
the “senior posts in the administrative system and legal services became the preserve of the
Europeans, thus while in 1883, nine out of forty-three senior posts were held by Africans by
1908, only 5 out of 278 and by 1919 only 2 were held by Africans (Crowder, 1968:22).
In a way the westernized elite appeared only in West Africa during the colonial era because of
the above-mentioned reasons. British colonial pattern generally, is a reflection of the social
stratification that characterizes English life. In the colonies however, race is the determinant.
27
3
THE GHANAIAN TRADITIONAL SCENE AND THE IMPACT OF THE WEST
“If a race has no history, if it has no worthwhile tradition, it becomes a negligible factor in the thought of
the world, and it stands in danger of being exterminated”
Carter G. Woodson
To think that Africans have a tradition and beliefs systems was something that if ever uttered,
would have received little attention during the colonial era.
This chapter offers a brief excursion into the historical background of our case study – the Gold
Coast. First, it is intended to provide a brief definition of the people of the Gold Coast as they
moved from independent tribal status into colonial status. Secondly, it is intended to point out
some of the traditional patterns of political institutions and leaders, and show how the British
authorities met (and altered) such institutions. And lastly, it sets out to analyse the impact of
colonialism on the Ghanaian traditional institutions. The description of tradition is very important
for therein lies the key to understanding the importance of traditional leaders and institutions.
Samuel Fleischacker (1994:45) defines tradition as “a set of customs passed down over the
generations, and a set of beliefs and values endorsing those customs.”
The Ghanaian Philosopher, Kwame Gyekye (1997:221), recognizes the value of tradition, but
argues that in practice tradition is often questioned and modified by its adherents over time, so
that it remains dynamic. Tradition to him is “ any cultural product that was created or pursued, in
whole or in part, by past generations and that, having been accepted and preserved, in whole or in
part, by successive generations, has been maintained to the present.” As such traditional
institutions are not incompatible with modernity. Gyekye (1997:217) concurred:
it may be said that from the point of view of a deep and fundamental conception of tradition, that every
society in our modern world is “traditional” inasmuch as it maintains and cherishes values, practices,
outlooks, and institutions bequeathed to it by previous generations and all or much of which on normative
grounds it takes pride in, boasts of, and builds on.
There were well-defined norms, beliefs and techniques of social control in African system. The
structures of “belief were not only mandatory in a social sense but also explanatory in a material
28
one, and, as such, were the basis of rational thought” (Davidson 1969: 114). Traditional leaders
are the guardians of traditional norms that are respected in particular communities from
generation to generation. These norms could be outlooks on life, ways of relating or of resolving
disputes, institutions etc, and as such traditional leaders and institutions are an important channel
through which social and cultural change can be realized.
Apter (1963:83), says that the most important element that these traditional systems have in
common is a basic knowledge and commitment to the primordial past -- ”the best way to act in
traditional systems, is the way our fathers have ordained. That which is legitimate is that which is
enshrined in the past”. To understand traditional politics one must first understand religion. The
ancestors were the “jealous guardians of the highest moral values … the axiomatic values from
which all ideal conduct has been deemed to flow” (Davidson 2000: 109). Religious integrity is
social integrity, and the religious supports to social structure are fundamental to the maintenance
of the system. Originally religion ”pervades everything: everything social is religious,” this is
how Durkheim saw the situation. According to Burns and Ralph (1974:16) ”religion is
everywhere an expression in one form or another of a sense of dependence on a power outside
ourselves, a power which we may speak of as a spiritual or moral power.”
Thus in these societies, individuals develop what David Riesman, in his ‘modal personality
typology’, calls a ‘traditional-oriented personality’ – “a personality that has a strong emphasis on
doing things the same way that they have always been done. Individuals with this sort of
personality are less likely to try new things and to seek new experiences”.
What is the future of a society, wholly submerged in a total commitment to the past? The
immediate answer is such society cannot brook any substantive change.
3.1. THE ASHANTI (AKAN) TRADITIONAL SYSTEM
The Ashanti, occupying the central area of Ghana, once held sway over most of the territory that
make up modern Ghana. They were industrious in pursuing attacks and forays against the Fanti
who occupied the western coastal area. The Fanti were quick to ally themselves with European
outposts and settlements along the coast, such alliance after European intervention being manifest
in collaboration with the British in wars against the Ashanti Confederacy.
The Ashanti Confederacy, a federal grouping of Ashanti states under the control of a paramount
chief (Asantehene), was an elaborate military hierarchy with powerful armies, a bureaucracy, and
a taste for imperialism which brought them into immediate conflict with the British, often to the
29
latter’s temporary demise. The particular
circumstances surrounding the formation of the
Ashanti Confederacy reveal a good bit of the myth and history found in the Gold Coast
traditional wisdom. It is worthwhile to spell out the formation of the Confederacy in some detail
since it does indicate the formation and institutionalization of certain traditional norms and
beliefs, which survive in contemporary Ashanti custom.
The Confederacy began with a temporary Ashanti alliance against an invading state, Denkyera.
The war, which broke out in 1699, gave a landslide victory to the Ashanti at the battle of Feyiase.
It was a significant victory since a curious series of events had preceded success. An alliance
between Osei Tutu, the Kumasihene (the chief), and Anokye, a priest, played an important
preliminary part. Since the five most powerful chiefs of the Ashanti divisions were of the same
“family” as Osei Tutu, they already had certain types of social obligations towards one another.
This made possible the frequent, albeit temporary, alliances of the past. In order to formalize their
unity, Anokye “made some medicine” mixed it with palm wine, and all the Ashanti chiefs drank
it; under his instructions, Osei Tutu made new swords for his army officers, and each swore to
fight to the end.
Shortly afterward, in Kumasi, Anokye “brought down from the sky, with darkness and thunder,
and in a thick cloud of white dust, a wooden stool adorned with gold, hence the Golden Stool.
The stool floated to earth and alighted gently on Osei Tutu’s knees. This stool, Anokye
announced, contained the spirit of the whole Ashanti nation, and all its strength and bravery
depended on the safety of the stool. Shortly thereafter, the war with Denkyera ended in victory
for the Ashanti. The Golden Stool became enshrined as the most sacred object of the Ashanti
peoples. All Ashanti chiefs owed allegiance to it, and therefore to the Ashantehene.
This myth, essentially, is a main “derivation of legitimacy” for the Ashanti Confederation.
Having its non-empirical as well as its historical aspects, to deny it is to deny the traditional
religion as well. As a result of this series of events the foundation of a national solidarity emerged
(Apter, 1963:102-103). Thus the Akan Matriarchy, which we shall analyse presently, is mainly
the Ashanti Traditional System, in view of it being the only developed Akan system of thought
and social organization.
According to Gyekye (1997:121), every Akan town or village is made up of several clans. Each
town or village constitutes a political unit. A great number of such towns and villages form a
paramountcy, a state (oman) such as the Asante state. Each town or village has a chief and a
council of elders, these elders being the heads of clans. The chief presides at the meetings of the
council. In the conduct of its affairs, each lineage in a town, or each town in a paramountcy, acts
30
autonomously, without any interference from
either the chief (in the case of purely lineage
affairs) or the paramount chief (in case of purely town affairs). A decentralized political system is
thus an outstanding feature of the traditional Akan political culture. Just as each town or village
has a council, so does the state have a state council. The state council, presided over by the
Omanhene, draws its membership from the chiefs of the towns and villages constituting the state.
This view of the Akan traditional institutions re-enforces an important point: even the most
sophisticated African traditional political systems have kinship units --such as the family, the
clan, and the lineage – at the core of their organization and authority. And since Africans’ sense
of identity and their early socialization are a function of these kinship units, traditional
institutions are potentially among the most useful instruments through which policy makers can
effect social change in Africa.
The chief, who is the political head of an Akan town or village, is chosen from the royal lineage
by the head of the lineage in consultation with the members of that lineage. It is necessary that
the person chosen be acceptable not only to the councillors, who represent their clans, but also to
the Asafo Company of young men or “commoners” who are in effect, the body of citizens. The
paramount chief is chosen in the same way, except that his election has to be acceptable to the
chiefs of the constituent towns and villages. Thus, never is a chief imposed upon an Akan
community (Gyekye, 1997:121). What is important to note here is that despite the restrictions
inherent in hereditary office, the concept of political choice and the consent of the governed were
firmly rooted in many African political systems.
Unlike most monarchies in the world, the Akan system has no obvious next candidate for Chief,
as there are several eligible men in the royal lineage, each with just about equal claim to the
throne. Thus, insofar as the people have a say in the suitability of the person chosen to rule them,
it may be said that the traditional Akan political system makes it possible for the people to choose
their own rulers, even if the initiative is taken by some few people, namely, some members of the
royal lineage (Gyekye, 1997:125).
Having been accepted by his subjects, the chief must take a public oath on the occasion of his
formal inauguration of power before his councillors and the body of citizens, promising that he
will rule in accordance with the laws, customs, and institutions of the state and that should he
renege on the oath, he stands condemned and will be liable to deposition. At the formal
inauguration of power, a series of injunctions are publicly recited before the new chief. These
31
injunctions define his political authority and
the political
relationship
that is
to be
maintained between him and his subjects (Gyekye, 1997:122).
Rattray (Davidson 1962:32) says that amidst the pomp and grandeur that marks the enstoolment
of a chief, the social charter between the ruler and ruled is read publicly. ”Tell him,” the
assembled people will admonish a newly enstooled chief:
Tell him that
We do not wish for greediness
We do not wish that he should curse us
We do not wish that his ears should be hard of hearing
We do not wish that he should call people fools
We do not wish that he should act on his own initiative …
”but he should consult with representatives of the people, and pay attention to other useful
maxims of the like import.”
The legitimacy of this charter was drawn from the Golden Stool. ”The Golden Stool, like the
English Crown or comparable symbols, embodied a transcendental power beyond its material
existence”(Davidson, 1962:54-55). It was the ’artefact of practical statesmanship’, consisting of
’a unifying constitution expressed in 77 laws.’
The injunctions above clearly indicate that the notion of democracy and accountability was not
foreign to African traditional institutions. “It is noteworthy that these constitutionally binding
declarations are all preceded by the words ‘We do not wish that’. The political significance of the
words is enormous: the people are in effect, telling the chief how he should govern them: the
chief is thus not expected to govern his subjects the way he wishes.” And according to Gyekye
(1997:122), the Asafo companies could, and sometimes did, force the chief to be ‘de-stooled’
either directly, or through the electors, if he did not live up to his oath.
This dependency on ancestral charters made the African societies natural species of equilibrium
systems. The symbiosis here is analogous to ‘contraction’ or traditionalism. The ancestral charter
is what provided the conditions for human survival.
The chief’s council is the real governing body of the town. The members of this governing
council are usually the heads of the various clans. The council is presided over by the chief. The
councilors are the representatives of the people, and, as such, have to confer with them on any
issue that is to be discussed in the council. The councilor is obliged to act on the advice and with
32
consent of his councilors, whom he has to
summon regularly. The councilors freely
discuss all matters affecting the town. And, in any such atmosphere of free and frank expression
of opinions, disagreements are inevitable. But in the event of such disagreements the council
would continue to listen to arguments until a consensus was achieved with the reconciliation of
opposed views.
And so it is that every command, every move that is adopted by the chief has been discussed and
agreed upon by his councilors (Gyekye, 1997:122).
We see that in the Akan tradition, no important decision was passed by the councilors without
first consulting the people. The councilors and the people had a symbiotic relationship. The
councilors did not operate like ‘elite’ parliamentarians who knew best what the ‘peasants’ want,
as is the case now in most, if not all, modern African parliaments. The government’s decisionmaking process was not far removed from the people. And since the people were involved
throughout much of the process, the decisions taken by the councilors were most likely to be
endorsed by the community as legitimately representing their interests.
The active participation of the community in its own political affairs in traditional African society
was not unique to the Akan of Ghana. In many non-decentralized societies, elders would sit and
discuss clan or state affairs in open view of everyone. Such participation and ownership of the
political system is arguably the essence of democracy and accountability.
3.2. THE IMPACT OF THE WEST: THE BIRTH OF THE NATION-STATE
The history of Gold Coast peoples, before European contact, was a mosaic of recent migrations,
strife, settlements, and traditionalism. The scene was motley, with many tribal groupings, many
religions, isolated groupings all sharing one element in common -- traditionalism, a basic
commitment to the past, to time immemorial(Apter, 1963:83).
This contraction of tradition into traditionalism is a corollary of the great rhythms of history –
invasions, conquests and migrations. However, the height of traditionalism was attained with the
emergence of centralized states as a response to the imperial designs of European merchantmen
on the West African coast. The centralization of traditional societies involved a “conflict of
principles” which generated further dissonance, that is, further contractions and migrations. In the
light of this state of affairs, the second phase of European contact was a tremendous relief, as far
as traditional Africans were concerned. Africans, of their own accord transferred their judicial
allegiance from the native courts to the British courts. Indeed, the Africans response, at the point
of European contacts, reflected a desire to absorb the standards, values, and the institutions of the
33
West. Thus, except for the skirmishes and the long obduracy of the Ashanti, the imposition of
Pax Britannica was achieved with relative ease.
In spite of French and German ambitions, by the time of the Scramble for Africa, the British were
firmly planted in the coastal area of the Gold Coast and with the subsequent annexation of the
Northern Territories and Ashanti, Britain produced from the small colony of the Gold Coast a
sizeable unit, which in the event turned out to be rich (UN Year Book, 1972:537).
According to Rupert Emerson (1962:10), the entire process appears to be far less the product of
conscious human intent than of the working of forces of which men were only dimly aware
corresponds to the phenomenon of goal-involvement. The goal of imperialist expansionism is the
expansion of the economic system. Africa was considered a vitally important market and a source
of raw materials for the expanding system. To wit, explorers were sent scuttling the length and
breadth of Africa to assess the commercial potential of the area, long before the Scramble.
Much has been written about the causes of the rapacity with which European colonialists
swallowed up and divided the continent of Africa into colonies. The oft-harped explanation is
that the Scramble for Africa took place when it did because the mutual suspicions of the
interested European colonialists of each other’s intentions had reached such a pitch that none of
them was willing to hold off the undesirable for fear their own interests might be pre-empted by
another. Hence the Scramble constitutes one of the important causes of the First World War.
In spite of protests and reservations by the African elite, however, the colonization of the Gold
Coast by the British was very swift. The period between the wars marked in Ghana the inception
of British Indirect Rule; its main thesis was that except for extreme practices contrary to British
standards of morality, traditional social life should continue unimpaired (Apter, 1963:120).
Indirect rule is an omnibus term, which covers a considerable number of colonial policies by
various British authorities in their different areas. It is not a precise term; it is considered one of
the most confusing expressions in the colonial lexicon. It is associated particularly with Sir
Francis Lugard, who devised the system for ruling the newly conquered Moslem Emirs in
Northern Nigeria while having only a small force of officers. The emirates were preserved as
administrative units and the Emirs kept on in their traditional leadership capacities (Apter,
1963:120).
Lord Lugard lays out three alternative conceptions of indirect rule. The first is the ideal of selfgovernment by evolution, as in the case of Europe and America. This Lugard rules out for Africa
because of the diversity of the groups, and the unevenness and “primitiveness” in stages of
34
evolution represented by Africans. Further,
Lugard felt that educated Africans, particularly
those clamouring for self-government, tended to seek monopolization of power in their own
hands, as against the natural rulers or chiefs. This would tend to destroy the old system, which
Lugard holds to be an undesirable eventuality. In fact, he quotes a famous Gold Coast chief, Nana
Sir Ofori Atta, to the effect that the “claim of a handful of educated lawyers and doctors to
represent the people instead of their chiefs, was a base attempt to denationalize the institutions of
the country.” Evolution to self-government is therefore ruled out.
The second alternative noted by Lugard is the notion that “every advanced community should be
given the widest possible powers of self-government under its own rules, and that these powers
should be rapidly increased with the object of complete independence at the earliest possible date
in the not distant future.” Lugard indicates that his position is a deception since underlying it is
the assumption that attempts to train “primitive tribes in any form of self-government are futile,
and administration must be wholly conducted by British officials.” In other words, while this
proposal intends self-government, in actual fact it seeks to isolate traditional authority from
colonial rule and thus provide a completely unreal form of self-government in which direct and
autocratic British government would actually make important decisions.
The alternative, which Lugard considers the best, is based upon the presumed and enforced
inferiority of the black race to the white, at least, as regards the arts of government. “The third
conception is that of rule by native chiefs, unfettered in their control of their people as regards all
those matters which are to them the most important attributes of rule, with scope for initiative and
responsibility, but admittedly – so far as the visible horizon is concerned – subordinate to the
control of the protecting power in certain well-defined directions” (Apter, 1963:120).
Indirectly rule, thus directly understood, shifted the source of traditional power to British law.
Attacks against duly constituted traditional authorities were a punishable offence. This was an
attempt to retain the organizational structure of traditional social life without impairing its
efficiency (Apter, 1963:121).
The conception of indirect rule in terms of the political prescriptions, which it involved, was,
therefore: a belief in colonial government through the principal chiefs as agents, with residual and
plenary powers reserved for the colonial authorities. The objective was a promotion of a system
of law and equity in which slavery and the worst effects of tribal insobriety and licence were
abolished and a Pax Britannica let loose upon the land (Apter, 1963:121-122).
More than anything else, the residual authority of the Crown was the ultimate destructive factor
in indirect rule. Chiefs whose power were traditionally kept in balance by a continuous process of
35
consultation and whose source of authority
affected the maintenance of lineage, kinship,
and clan integrity, suddenly became figures whose ultimate legitimacy derived from British law.
No chief could be considered a chief unless gazetted as such by the governor. The most
destructive element of all was introduced by transmuting traditional legitimacy derived from
Great Britain (Apter, 1963:123).
However, it is worth stressing that indirect rule, as conceived and developed in Northern Nigeria
was not fully applied in the Gold Coast. The Gold Coast system was designed to show the
greatest respect to the position of the chief as representative of the Golden Stool. But this in itself
made it impossible to exert that control which was demanded of native institutions to be effective
agencies of local government. In practice the Gold Coast system has been described as a “mixture
of direct and indirect rule with a steady bias towards the latter.” Administrative difficulties in the
Gold Coast have centred on the position and powers of the chiefs – do the chiefs and native
administration derive their powers from the government? Is the government the sole source of
authority without whose recognition and approval they cannot legally function? (Apter,
1963:124).
Indirect rule, as the basis of a particular form of administration, provided substantial modification
of the traditional system of authority occurring within a framework of British law and order. Its
intent was not major social change, but modified adjustment. The net result was major social
change, within an administrative scheme, which sufficed until new organs of authority were
required, on a basis deemed somewhat less than satisfactory in the light of the problems involved.
“The British ideal was the ideal of a good African, pagan or mahomedan, weaned from savage
and cruel practices, humane to his fellow creatures and to animals, but otherwise staunch to his
attachment to African traditions and institutions” (Apter, 1963:124).
The attempt was thus made to blend traditional authority by maintaining as much as possible of
traditional social organization compatible with consular secular structures. Indirect rule provided
new and wider functions for chiefs. It initiated in this fashion the process of institutional transfer
by demanding Western-type standards of behaviour and secular norms in the performance of
predominantly Western-type role structures. It sought to endow chieftaincy with a supporting
cloak of secular authority, and to endow secular authority with the traditional participation of
traditional authorities. Out of such a pattern, most British leaders felt that a new structural
synthesis would emerge, close to the public, and in that sense, indigenous. Rattray’s (Apter,
1963:140-141) warning is an effective pointer to what followed:
36
In introducing indirect rule into this country, we
would therefore appear to be encouraging on the
one hand an institution which draws its inspirations and validity from the indigenous beliefs, while on the
other we are systematically destroying the very foundation upon which the structure that we are striving to
perpetuate stands. Ts shell and outward form might remain, but it would seem too much to expect that its
vital energy could survive such a process.
The Negation of Nomos and Societal Breakdown
We thus enter into the process of societal breakdown and our working hypothesis here is the
input that creates an “impact” and thus releases the contraction, that is, from nomocracy – a state
of affair where norms are socially constructed and imposed on the society, to anomie -- the
disintegration of the artificially imposed norms. In anomie, group solidarity and normative
consensus become disorganized at different rates of speed.
The basic assumption here is that human behaviour is shaped and determined to a large extent
by previous learned experiences. These learned experiences, which we have called ”tradition”,
include values, beliefs, attitudes, and expectations that are transmitted from generation to
generation through language and symbols to all new members of the group. This tradition moulds
and tones the individual into a particular form. Erik Erikson (1964:161) said the following about
tribal societies:
Systems of child training….represent unconscious attempts to creating out of human raw material that
configuration of attitudes which is (or once was) the optimum under the tribes particularly natural
conditions and economic historic necessities. Thus each society develops its dominant social and cultural
patterns, and upon this are imposed the variation of the individualized character permitted in that society.
The absence of this shaping and moulding led to the hierarchical structure, which emphasises
unity of command on account of imposed norms. On the other hand, the presence of this shaping
process leads to non-hierarchical structures, as individuals appear to function as if self-propelled
on account of internalized norms. Thus, it is easier to conclude that culture and not unhappy fate
afflicts certain groups.
The Greeks had a word for the previous learned experiences, and it is “nomos” -- the hallowed
ways of the ancestors, like the Chinese “li”. (Friedrich, 1972:20). It is the behaviour of this
nomos, which gives culture that inclination to progress and to regress to the degree where the
inclination becomes determination.
37
We shall henceforth equate nomos with the
cluster of norms, which becomes internalized
in the individual. It is custom and it reconciles man internal stability with his external
adaptability. In a nomos society, individuals develop what David Riesman in his modal
personality (“the most common personality type within a society”) typology called an ‘innerdirected personality’ – this is “a personality that is guilt oriented. The behaviour of individuals
with this sort of personality is strongly controlled by their conscience. As a result, there is little
need for police to make sure that they obey the law”. In such a society there is ducto dubitantum
-- rule of conscience. However, when a disturbance situation arises in the system of nomos, it
changes to “disanomie” – “the state of affairs wherein some substantial number of persons who
are members of the community are attached to a given value “a”, while a substantial number of
others insist upon the devalue of “a”, and cherish the opposite.”(Friedrich, 1963:145).
Disanomie as a stimulus arouses “nomocracy” as a response. Nomocracy is the “state of affairs
where everything is judged in terms of traditional values and beliefs, where the nomos become
the tyrant of the community and forestalls all forward movements.”(Ibid).
In order to continue this exercise on nomos, we shall take recourse to how Emile Durkeheim and
Thomas Maine conceived of societies. For Durkheim, the differences between primitive and
modern societies are to be found in the differences between repressive and restitutive law. In
primitive society, which he called “mechanical”, there is a high degree of repressive law, in
which similarity of conduct is ensured by the authorities classifications of any significant
departures from custom as crimes. The crimes, symbolic acts against community solidarity, exact
the most extreme penalty (mainly death). Organic solidarity, that is “modern” or Dionysian
society, on the other hand, is characterised by complex forms of interactions between individuals
and groups. Functional interdependence is the key to this solidarity. Repressive law is only a
small part of the juridical system. Restitutive law is the main part. Norms are imposed, and
sanctions against them are delayed, uncertain, or no sanctions at all.
Like Maine, Durkheim gives us a concept of social systems from lower to higher forms. The deux
ex machina that provides the transition from one form to the other is the division of labour
(Apter, 1967:58-59).
Maine’s repressive law, which characterizes primitive societies (Apollonianism), is the quality of
demarcation – rigid conformity otherwise known as “keeping the middle of the road or staying
within known maps.” The fiction or reality of blood-relations is the limitations put on
identifications in order to ensure the survival of the group. Evidently, this is a reaction-state since
38
it takes a negative, disruptive input to alter the pristine of nomos. The only input that can release
the contraction of nomos is a positive one.
When thus a positive input creates an impact on the contracted nomos (nomocracy), nomos
disintegrates and a state of “anomie” results, that is, “there being no longer any sacred custom” to
bind individuals together. Anomie is that state of social disorganisation in which established
social and cultural forms break down (Friedrich, 1972:20). There are two aspects of this
breakdown: 1) loss of solidarity -- old groups in which individuals find security and response
tend to break down; 2) loss of consensus -- felt agreement (often only semi-conscious) upon
values and norms, which provided direction and meaning for life, tend to break down. These two
aspects could be disorganized at different rates of speed, and individuals experience relative
isolation and “normlessness” – a condition in which there is an absence of any organized system
of social norms or values that would allow an individual to choose the most appropriate action in
a given social situation.
In anomie societies, individuals develop what Riesman calls ‘other-directed personality’ — “a
personality that is shame oriented. People with this type of personality have ambiguous feelings
about right and wrong. When they deviate from a societal norm, they usually don't feel guilty.
However, if they are caught in the act or exposed publicly, they are likely to feel shame.”
Furthermore, it is normlessness; Durkheim felt that led to deviant behaviour. It is a very painful
experience in that there is no longer any solidarity and any consensus; men live their lives in a
state of alarm and absolute normlessness, that is, in a sort of Hobbesian existence of bellum
omnium contra omnes -- war of all against all.
Moreover, what the experience of anomie means, literary, is to be without a name, feelings,
identity or nationality. It is also like being placed in a situation of not knowing what one’s social
character is supposed to be or more subjectively, it is similar to the feeling that comes when one
is supposed to go some place but has no man to tell him how to get there.
This is a frustrating experience, and men may seek ways out of their predicament – out of the
confusion and anxiety, which result. This frustration situation may force men to go over to
aggression against real or imagined sources of their difficulties. Moreover, they may – in other to
find temporal happiness -- try the various means of escape (mainly through vices), which the
situation dictates to them: pleasure-seeking, alcohol, drugs, perverse habits and behaviour or
similar things. Finally, men may engage in a quest for community, and a search for new meaning.
From such quests, (social) movements develop which offer new values and new solidarities. Such
39
movements may be religious, or they may be quasi-religious. Evidently, these new solidarity
units could only offer less-than-ultimate values and relationships, as they were responses to social
disintegration.
In Ghana, new solidarity units on the whole adopted, in tentative and preliminary fashion, the
standards and symbols of Western clubs. Boy scouts organization fostered by the missionaries
played their part. As time goes, anything African was looked upon by these educated youth
groups with a measure of embarrassment or even contempt and negligence (Apter, 1963:127128).
Thus at this stage of European contact, “there was an almost universal tendency within a newly
rising leadership to accept the conquering Western civilization as superior and in itself desirable.”
(Emerson, 1962:10) This will be surveyed on the topic of Ideology.
Two sets of authority patterns were therefore visible in the period of indirect rule. These
patterns were manifested in two sets of role clusters, integrated into a formal organizational
network, which can be called Gold Coast colonial government. One, the British administrative
service, was supported by norms of rationality and acceptance based upon criteria indigenous to
the British themselves. Two, the native authorities found themselves deriving “effective
legitimacy” at least in part from the British source. To the degree that such effective legitimacy
derived from British sources, traditional authority weakened and waned (Apter, 1963:130).
The changes wrought under indirect rule were therefore profound. They indicate both the
astonishing resiliency and fragility of traditional societies. Indirect rule demonstrated that at
crucial points of contact between European and traditional patterns of authority, the latter as an
expression of social cohesiveness declined and stagnated. With its decline and stagnation, a
visible source of conflict remained – the question of the terms of social behaviour and group
membership. Such a source of conflict is one of the prerequisites of nationalism (Apter,
1963:151).
Thus it was that the Developing Nation-State was born, and its urgency stems from the fact
that the British had, through the imposition of indirect rule, divorced the chiefs from the
intellectuals. The opportunity of creating an African elite, who could take over the government,
as it later did in the French Colonies, was forever lost. Hence “the Revolution that was not.” The
British administration could, with more foresight, have constructed in the Gold Coast the model
neo-colonialist state (Bing, 1968:86-87). Charles Tilly (2003:2) defines a nation-state as “a state
40
whose people share a strong linguistic, religious, and symbolic identity.” Born out of the
premonitions of Communism, African nation-states have no sense of direction except for the dual
purpose of becoming milking cows for their colonial powers, and subjecting their own citizens to
a razor-edge of survival.
3.3. TOWARDS COLONIAL REFORMS
By early 1948, it had become clear that the imperial mystique had run its gamut. Intense
nationalism, fomented by the net effect of the Second World War echoed around the world. From
Morocco to China, the anti-colonialist wind gathered momentum and nationalists everywhere
began agitating for self-rule. The Ghana scene was rowdy and not without its fervour.
The balance of power between the British and the traditional chiefs was reeling. The earlier
palliative measures aimed at containing the situation had primed the political pump. Intense
reactive nationalism culminated into an open revolt against colonial rule. In the din of the revolt,
many overtones could be heard, but all were to be muted in the quest for a united front against the
British Imperialist.
As for the British, the situation was more than demanding. It required all the guile and perfidy
they could muster, alas! Ghana was too precious a bite to be spewed out. It was true; they were
operating under the aegis of the Wilsonian doctrine of national Self-Determination for the
colonized people. But they were not ready to disengage yet. Disengagement presupposed the
readiness of the Westernized elites to take over from the British and this was not lacking in the
Ghana situation.
The Watson Commission (Emerson, 1960:41) appointed to look into the causes of the 1948
Revolt had this to say:
The moral justification for Britain remaining in the Gold Coast lies in this: out of a population of
approximately four and a half million Africans, on a fair assessment, barely ten percent is literate. We
have no reason to suppose that power in the hands of a small literate minority would tend to be used to
exploit the illiterate majority in accordance with the universal pattern of what has happened elsewhere in
the past throughout the world. His Majesty’s Government therefore has a moral duty to remain until:
a) the literate population has by experience reached a stage when selfish exploitation is no longer the
dominant motive of political power, or
b) the bulk of the population has advanced to such a stage of literacy and political experiences as will
enable it to protect itself from gross exploitation, and
41
c) some corresponding degree of cultural,
political and economic achievement has
been attained by all three areas now part of the Gold Coast.
This was the voice of the colonialist at its best. He had a divine-appointed duty to ‘civilize’ the
African and until that was done there was no shirking of duty.
From this perspective then, the desire to hand over a large share of political power to native
Africans, which took place a few months later could not be considered a move towards selfgovernment and independence. It was just a ploy. The need was to modify the power balance in
order to stay on. This is reflected in what Winston Churchill meant when he announced that “he
had not become His Majesty’s first minister in order to preside over the dissolution of the British
Empire”(Emerson, 1960:11).
Here stands the posit that Kwame Nkrumah of revered memory was a British creation. Before
going into the intricacies of proving this, I shall return to the 1948 situation in Ghana. It must be
remembered that the British had all along been juggling a power balance of the traditional chiefscum-administrators. They had avoided a head-on collision with the traditional system and the
result was manifested in the breakdown of social life. What to do? The only way to arrest the
situation without betraying their nonchalance was to absorb the ‘detribalized’ hoi polloi into a
program of mass hysteria to ward off further disturbances that would rock the imperial mystique.
3.4. A STUDY OF THE POLITICAL ELITES
The term ‘political elites’ has been framed to accommodate the traditional chiefs who do not
measure up to the requirements for attaining elite status (later, there were those among them who
were more than qualified), but played a greater role in politics. There were two other groups of
elite to be distinguished here.
The first group was the product of “indirect rule” and the second group was the net effect
of the nationalist fervour that was born with the war. The important element worth stressing is the
diversified means of attaining elite status.
In order to make this study purposeful, I shall make recourse to the ‘imperial reaction’ in the
fashion of the Hegel dialectic. “… if the first reaction of the peoples on whom the West imposed
itself was generally a xenophobic order, the next phase was likely to be a swing in the direction
of an uncritical self- humiliation, and the acceptance of alien superiority. The third phase…was a
nationalist synthesis in which there was an assertion of a community with pride in itself and its
past” (Emerson 1960:10-11).
42
Around this time, the chiefs had begun losing their positions in their tribes gradually. The most
ardent nationalists considered them to be traitors, and traitors they were. The tribe had become a
base from which chieftainship qualified a few individuals for positions of national honour in
British-inspired Councils. If this was not the beginning of “tribal politics” then what was it? A
stretch of the imagination adds the lustre to the inference here. (When partisan politics was
introduced and the local party branch was identified with tribal affinity, the successful politician
usurped the role of the chief in the tribe. This fostered the further erosion of the status of the
traditional chiefs).
It was not unnatural for the chief to be identified with British Imperialism. For, lo, they donned
traditional robes and business suits with equal dispatch, without realizing the inconsistencies in
these positions. Unlike their predecessors, their behaviour, far from being inchoate, was a tacit
acceptance of the second phase of ‘imperial reaction’ that points to the swing in the direction of
an uncritical self-humiliation and acceptance of alien superiority. Their aspirations were either to
inherit political power or to continue in their partnership with the British for a long time to come.
Following their heels closely in the constructed hierarchy of political elites in Ghana was the
first group of educated “commoners.” They also extolled the second phase of the Hegelian
dialectic with undiminished vigour. To wit, they were the responsible elite. Mostly trained in
Britain or else professional men of one sort or another, they found their affiliations in the
municipalities, to the detribalized, urbanized, restive, and antagonistic westernized society of the
Coast. They moved with comparative ease in British social circles. The lawyer members among
them were growing rich from the decomposed society (the introduction of cash-economy created
a channel in the ownership of land—hitherto communal-ancestrally-owned. Land litigation was
thus the order of the day). By African standards therefore, they had acquired wealth and other
crucial items of conspicuous consumption.
Regardless of how nationalistic they sounded, in retrospect, they were identified with British
custom. Their mode of life, their standard of living, and that of the average African widened. And
as Nkrumah (1968:53) saw them,
most of the intellectual elite received at least part of their education in Britain. They returned to their
native country as if in blinkers, seeing and judging everything in Oxbridge terms. They saw the liberation
struggle as a movement to be conducted slowly and respectably by themselves, having nothing to do with
the toiling masses, whom they regarded with a mixture of fear and scorn.
43
Rattray (Apter, 1963:146) comes in:
the educated Africans feel, and they have been trained to believe that they are brands from the burning. It
is almost impossible that such persons can be sympathetic with their own past, a past which after all few
of them have really known, seen or clearly understand.
However, they considered themselves logical trainees under indirect rule for positions of
authority. Their designs were plain and presumptuous and this gave colour to the British to stay
on. One of their leaders, “Dr J. B. Danquah writing in July 1950 said that the choice in Africa
was between white imperialism and black dictatorship”(Harris, 1970:16)
The second group of elites was a mixture of those siphoned off the main stream of the
intelligentsia, replete with the ‘second phase’ and those who embrace of the ‘third phase’ of the
‘imperial reaction’ in the fashion of the Hegelian dialectic was epitomized in the person of
Kwame Nkrumah. “It was a ‘nationalist synthesis in which there was an assertion or reassertion
of a community with pride in itself and in its past but still looking, at least as far as the leaders
were concerned in the direction of Westernization and Modernization”(Emerson, 1960:10-11).
This group was as broad and diverse in aspirations and designs as to justify the terms omniumgatherum. An interesting point here was the moving force in Nkrumah, reminiscent of his student
days in America, he was imbued with a sense of mission to ‘elevate his black brothers from the
position of second class citizens of the world’. But could he?
This new group stood in contradistinction to the elite group we discussed earlier. Where the
wealth and arrogance of the intelligentsia was a liability to them, vis-à-vis their relation to the
masses, Nkrumah’s affable manner and youthful exuberance was not only an asset but it caught
the fancies of the ‘sans-culotte’— the products of the enlarged primary schools, the taxi drivers,
clerks, teachers and market women. They drifted to him in their numbers and he in turn fanned
their frustrations and hardships into a high sense of political awareness, with simple precepts like,
“we have the right to live as men”; and, “seek ye first the Political Kingdom and all things will be
added unto it”(Austin, 1970:17). Thus the British found their man for the ‘second partnership’.
There were many pluses for the choice of Nkrumah and we shall here consider a few.
His charismatic hold on the ‘detribalized hoi polloi’ if not entire was to be complemented by
British guile. Apter (1963:165), puts it aptly in discussing the colonial crisis,
44
the worst hit were the products of the newly
enlarged primary school system, the ‘Standard VII’
boys, who had migrated to the towns and were on the whole loathe to the jobs involving menial or
degrading labour. These formed a literate and aggressive group linked to both the rural areas and the
towns. Marxist literature occasionally found a ready if only partially understood response. Their partial
education helped contribute to the general decay of traditional orientations, while new outlets for prestige
positions and orientations were not available in the form of jobs. These were recruited by the nationalist
movement.
When the British thus earmarked Nkrumah for the partnership, they set out to ‘create’ him. They
accused him of being a communist (Apter, 1963:169-170), and this charge did the trick. For as
long as he wished to remain in the ‘partnership’ he had to renounce any Communist ideology or
thoughts he might have imbibed during his stay overseas. And this he did with considerable éclat,
until it was too late.
He played into British hands with his adherence to the Gandhian doctrine of ‘Positive Action.’
The British watched the nationalistic uprising with a distinct sense of déjà vu – for, it should be
remembered that the British weathered the Gandhian storm in India. Their experience was more
than adequate. The real ploy was yet to be implemented. In the main, the plan was to create a
kind of psychological attachment to the person of Nkrumah in the masses, and this was based on
a false sense of revolutionary martyrdom.
As we shall see later, this plan more than succeeded, for it blurred the main issue, the
creation of a new social order.
Of Nkrumah, it has been said, “he was less a jailer than a prisoner of the forces around him. He
had a very restricted range of political choices”(Apter, 1963:170).
45
4
AN OVERVIEW OF POLITICS IN GHANA (1951-1966)
“Seek ye first the political kingdom and all other things shall be added unto it.”
Nkrumah
Ghana led the post-World War II struggle to rid Black Africa of the colonial yoke. Two factors
made this possible. She attained self-government with British oversight in 1951, followed by
formal independence in March 1957. She thus became the first colony to open the floodgates to
the independence wave in Africa in the 1960s, and becoming an example to other anti-colonial
fighters. Ghana was blessed with an enthusiastic and radical leader, Dr. Kwame Nkrumah. His
internal developmental project rapidly laid a robust foundation for economic take-off and social
well-being for the dispossessed. In what follows is an overview of the political landscape of
Ghana between 1951-1966.
4.1. THE RUCKUS
As a result of the distinguished role played by the Gold Coast Regiment in the Second World
War, the Colonial Office decided that the fruits of victory should take the form of political
reform. Thus, “the five years dating from the institution of the Burns Constitution were the great
watershed of Ghana politics”(Austin, 1970:49). For the first time in West Africa, the 1946
Constitution gave the Gold Coast an African dominated Legislative Council, and more important,
a representative legislature (Apter, 1963:142).
Meanwhile, the country was growing into a national unit but with no growth of any political
consciousness being apparent around 1946. The only discontent was among the lawyers, teachers
and merchants in the municipalities. Elsewhere, for the most, the dominant nature of the Gold
Coast was a seemingly universal attachment to local chiefdoms, lineages and village groups and
an absorption in local interests, which was encouraged by the decentralized nature of the colonial
administration under which Commissioners controlled their districts with a minimum of
independence from the capital. There seemed little danger of any sudden expression of nationalist
unrest (Austin, 1970:7).
The formation of the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC) in 1947, by the lawyers of the
coastal municipalities was met with mild rebuke from the colonial authorities (Austin, 1970:7).
46
The principal policy of this party was to kindle the struggle for independence or “selfgovernment in our time.” The leaders were liberals who wanted self-government by stages. But
they failed to read the political temperature of the day, and this was their doom. The social
situation was highly inflammable. There were antagonisms aplenty. There was the high cost of
living urged on by a spiral inflation coupled with the grievances of the War veterans. They had
returned from other parts of the world with an appreciation of differing material standards of life
and they not unduly felt that the post-war hardships were a malicious plan to inhibit colonial
development.
Therefore, the rate of change astonished even those who were actively engaged in bringing it
about, “at first one group and then another sought to control the direction of events and yet the
process was a familiar one, whereby a period of stagnation was disturbed by a period of reform,
and reform slipped into revolutions”(Austin, 1970.49). The need for a political ideology to
restructure the minds and attitudes of these people so as to be recipient to revolutionary change
was self-evident. They indeed had ‘chains to break.’ They were many and already organised—
identities of problems and interests had fostered common psychological and social frontiers and
this had superseded tribal boundaries. Their immediate need was a leader. The British were not
able to stop the political boulder that was rolling down the hill. That the situation was crying for a
total revolution can be understood clearly in a Marxian (1964:179) context:
A sphere of society which has a universal character because its sufferings are universal, and which does
not claim a particular redress because the wrong which is done to it is not a particular wrong but wrong in
general. There must be formed a sphere of society which claims no traditional status but only human
status, a sphere which is not opposed to particular consequences but it is totally opposed to the
assumptions of the … political system.
Perhaps, the views of the ‘revolutionary sociologist,’ Tocqueville run more parallel to the dictates
of the situation here. The French Revolution, to him was the result of the problems posed by the
movement of civil society from one of ascribed status to a new social structure founded upon
individual achievement and legal equality. Hence, revolution is the result of a conflict between
the changing mores of members of a society and the existing social order. A revolution comes as
a result of unsatisfied social needs. Unsatisfied social needs leads to social forces. And social
forces leads to the formation of social movements. And social movements bring change in a
society.
47
Continuing on the Marxian vein, a revolution “is a social, an economic, a technological, a
political, a legal and an ideological phenomenon … furthermore, revolution means the
transformation of man himself”(ibid). Finally quoting Carl Friedrick, “a political revolution, then,
may be defined as a sudden and violent overthrow of the established political order”(ibid).
This new group stood in contrast to the educated elite whose aim was just an ‘Africanization’
of the colonial machinery. The educated elite stood for evolutionary change which in the words
of Johnson (1966:56), is a kind of change, the only kind that is compatible with homeostatic
equilibrium.” We find a clinching argument, however, in Guessous (1967:24) view, when he
defined social equilibrium as follows: “a theory of social equilibrium is a theory that seeks to
uncover the general conditions for the maintenance of a society in stable equilibrium and to
specify the mechanisms by which that stability is reversed or re-established after the occurrence
of outside disturbance.” The question we must ask is: Can evolutionary change take place in a
dis-equilibrated system? Evolutionary change thus precludes change from the traditional to the
modern, since the force of the exogenous pressure is the determinant. In such a situation,
innovation as change is wholly inadequate. It begs the question.
However, this new group’s quest for a leader was paramount and it found dynamic expression
in the person of Nkwame Nkrumah. The budding leader had been “initially invited to Ghana by
the Intelligentsia group—the UGCC to take up the General Secretaryship of the party. It was an
unholy alliance from the word ‘go’. The lawyers in their fleecing spree had no time for active
politics and they naturally resented the youthful exuberance of their new secretary who was
stealing the limelight. There were other differences that counted too. Nkrumah’s style was
flamboyant, charismatic, energetic and fiery and he was eloquent, in contradiction to the
phlegmatic, courtroom-mannered style of the lawyer-members of the Working Committee of the
UGCC.
The question then was whether he was ready to give the hoi polloi the revolution—the total
revolution—they cried for, or was he going to give them the “objective correlative of Marx’s
partial revolution?” The answer is embodied in his ‘Political Kingdom.’
Meanwhile, the consciousness of political and economic hardship and social ruckus in the
Gold Coast led to a series of crisis. The crisis seemed to have been triggered off by an Accra subchief, who had succeeded with his countrywide boycott of European and Syrian merchants in
order to force them to reduce the exorbitant prices of their goods. This was an anti-inflationary
measure by the common people. The boycott spread to every part of the Colony and Ashanti.
48
The urban population suffered the most as the prices of imported goods rose and wages lagged
behind. There was mass hysteria (ruckus), and as the Watson Commission, appointed to inquire
into the disturbances was told, the only solution lay among other things “in the need to reduce the
prices of imported goods, for industrialization …”(Austin, 1970:56). This was a clear stating of
the problem.
The European trading firms who dominated the entire economy of the country did
importation. These trading firms included the much-maligned colossus – the United African
Company, a subsidiary of one of the greatest companies in the world, the Unilever Co. Their
monopoly was due to the rather questionable issuance of import licences and the allocation of
supplies. They controlled prices arbitrarily and when the government took no action, “the
suspicion not unnaturally grew up that, at all material times, there was some private arrangement
between the powerful importers and the government (Austin, 1970:69).
The colonial government, having so much at stake decided to resolve the problem subtly. One
can have a clever view of the need to tread softly and cunningly if one considers Britain’s
dependence on the Gold Coast around this time. Pressures and demands on the British pound
resulted in a series of post-war financial and balance-of-payment difficulties which threatened
Britain with International bankruptcy and reduction to the status of a second or a third class
power led to an unprecedented fleecing of the wealth of her colonies. Marketing boards were
established for this task in all the colonies. Ghana’s role in providing Britain with capital and
especially with dollars (urgently needed to import United States capital goods to rebuild her
shattered industrial plant) was larger than any other colony with the exception of Malaya. As
Arthur Creech Jones (Austin, 1970:69), former Colonial secretary, remarked: ‘I think we should
be conscious of the very considerable contribution which the Gold Coast had made to the Sterling
area.’ Only a percentage of Ghana’s dollar earnings were allocated to her, making importation of
consumer goods rather difficult. The impact of the boycott was unusually great in spite of the
short-duration. It hit at the very foundation of colonialism – the cartels and trade monopolies.
At the end of the boycott, however, precisely on the same day it was called off, “It so happened
that there was a peaceful demonstration by ex-service men. Among their grievances were claims
that promises made to them while they were away in service had not been fulfilled. That pension
rates were insufficient due to the inflation, that grants had not been made to men too old to start
business on their own, that Africanization of the Gold Coast Regiment was not effectively
maintained and promoted” (Fitch & Oppenheimer, 1966:45).
49
The demonstration, which began as a peaceful procession, turned into a march on the governor’s
castle at Christiansborg. Failing to halt when asked to, they were fired upon. Some of them were
killed.
When the news of the shooting reached the business centre of Accra where hundreds of
Africans were out shopping for the first time since the lifting of the boycott, the whole town was
in a ruckus. In the melee, Europeans were stoned, shops were raided and violence spread like
wildfire throughout the country, with rioting and looting of European and Syrian shops (Apter,
1963:169).
Some leaders of the UGCC were arrested and deported to the Northern Rerritories for a short
time. The treachery of the British was particularly revealed in the motive for the arrest of the
leaders. The charge was that they had incited the hoi polloi. But, the waters in which the UGCC
leaders sought to fish were already troubled, thereby events outside their control, and although by
their fishing they added to the turmoil, this was not to say that they ever were in charge of a
master plan, or responsible for the actual sequence of events from which indeed, many of them
drew back, dismayed.
Factually, the British were out fishing for their man. First, the detention of the UGCC-leaders
succeeded in raising their popularity to national heights. But then, for all practical purposes, this
brought a schism in the party. As Nkrumah (1959:67) wrote later, “there appeared to be a general
belief amongst them that the whole tragedy of our arrest and suffering was my fault, and they
began to make it plain that they regretted the day they had ever invited me to take up the
Secretaryship of the UGCC”
After their release however, Nkrumah was given the boot from the party. “The Watson
Comission Report led to the setting up of a new commission on constitutional reform. The
Commission, composed entirely of Africans, (on the whole represented by the intellectuals of the
UGCC), had as its chairman an eminent African Jurist, Justice Coussey. Its members represented
older and more educated professional men of the Gold Coast. In all there were 40 members of
this All African Committee—31 commoners and 9 chiefs, the right kind of proportion for the
UGCC leaders, and from this point forward, the chiefs and the intellectuals began to work
amicably together. Nkrumah was not invited to serve on the committee (Austin, 1970:81).
Whilst the committee was busy on the constitutional reform, he set about consolidating his
hold on the youth. “Particularly in Ashanti, aggressiveness against the chiefs and British
administration ran high. A committee of youth organizations was formed, composed of a variety
of youth movements usually dominated by adherents of Nkrumah. They formed a powerful bloc
50
anxious to take political action. The youth organization forced Nkrumah to form the CPP in June
1949. From this movement onwards, the struggle for the inheritance between the men of property
and standing, and the young men of the CPP had been sharpened and given precise shape by the
impending elections”(Austin, 1970:81).
The British were now the master of the situation, a new governor, Charles Arden-Clarke had
arrived in August 1949—a strong governor ready to negotiate but prepared to act with resolution.
Both qualities were necessary as events began to move towards a new climax (Austin, 1970:85).
The impact of the Committee’s report on Nkrumah was tremendous. He moved uncertainly
between the need to retain support by a bold appeal to nationalist principles and the immediate
practical advantage of compromise. Thus a wavering line followed. His first reaction to the report
was that expressed in the ‘Evening News’, which warned the readers that the new constitution
would prove a ‘Trojan Gift Horse.’ He labelled the Report bogus and fraudulent, and to talk of
the need for ‘Positive Action’ – a civil disobedience campaign of agitation, propaganda, and as a
last resort, the constitutional application strikes, boycotts and non-cooperation based on the
principles of absolute Non-violence Direct Action (NDA). (Austin, 1970:85).
Nkrumah’s next action was the summoning of the ‘Ghana People’s Representative Assembly’
which drew up amendments to the Coussey Report. “The report proposed a form of semiresponsible government: an executive councillor, three ex-officio and eight representative
ministers, and a nationally elected assembly.”(Austin, 1970:87).
In mid-December, Nkrumah swung back to Positive Action, and then again to Tactical
Action—Nkrumah talking matters over with the Colonial Secretary and governor. That failing to
yield any lessening of tensions, the Trades Union forced the issue by declaring a general strike: a
state of emergency was declared throughout the country and the arrest of TUC leaders followed,
culminating in the arrest of Nkrumah on 21 January.
It was a great mistake on the side of the British. The incarceration of Nkrumah spelled the doom
of the UGCC as an effective organization, by giving the Convention People’s Party (CPP) a cap
of martyrdom. Nkrumah became a household name, in time for the elections, with a widened
electorate (Apter, 1963:172).
The chiefs and their cronies, the intelligentsia, their position usurped, became for the most part a
frustrated lot, albeit, forever scheming.
Nkrumah and his party won the elections comfortably and was co-opted into the ‘partnership.’
What characterised politics in Ghana, after this was a ‘feud’ between the usurped and the usurper.
51
This is where I anchor my argument about the ‘revolution that was not.’ If the glare of the
prospects of power inheritance had not blinded Nkrumah, he would have been more realistic and
instead of agreeing to go into partnership with the British, he would have gone underground. This
was the ideal thing for him to do if he really fought shy of an open confrontation with the British.
He could have found enough time to study the state of things in the country, the social decay, and
devised the appropriate ideology to tackle the problem. (He had been away from home too long
to understand the extent of the disequilibrium created by the colonial impact). Meanwhile,
political power would have fallen in the hands of the intelligentsia and at a latter time when the
British had left, he could have carried out a Castro/Guevara-type revolution (if he could have
done that, the theme of this essay would have been “the revolution that was it”). He was lured
and this became his undoing. By accepting the ‘Trojan Gift Horse,’ he sewed the very seeds of
his own, and his party’s destruction.
The peoples’ tacit demand for a revolution was postponed sine die. When therefore the mass
hysteria wore out, and the people were faced with the grim reality once again, they lapsed into a
state of lethargy. Frank Fanon (1971:59) puts it frankly, “the enlightened observer takes note of a
kind of masked discontent, like the smoking ashes of a burnt-down house after the fire has been
put out, which still threaten to burst into flames again.”
Meanwhile, the “Trojan Gift Horse” proved equal to its name. Whist Nkrumah and his party
were either engaged in feud with the Chiefs-Intelligentsia-businessmen group, or intoxicated by
the miasma of material acquisition, the British unleashed a flurry of instruments of exploitation
on the economy of the country.
4.2. THE FEUD
The years between 1951 and 1957, for the purpose of analysis will be called the period of the
“Feud”. It was the period between the Coussey Commission and the attainment of independence,
when self-government became the talk of the day and nationalists everywhere lusted after it
ardently. The plot hatched in India and tested in Ghana had become exportable. As Nkrumah puts
it plaintively, “it is a standard joke in Africa that when the British start arresting, independence is
just around the corner,”(Nkrumah, 1964:102).
In other respects too, it was the period, “a critic has written, that the character and orientation
of the CPP, as the movement of a petty bourgeoisie seeking to entrench itself, were indelibly
fixed, notwithstanding Nkrumah’s later efforts to change both party and policy.”
52
For the term Feud, it was the period when the clouds gathered and the CPP met its Nemesis in the
Ashanti revolt. Above all, it was the period when Nkrumah’s economic policy served to keep
Colonial economic interests intact (First, 1972:170). No structural changes were made to the
economy.
Nkrumah was released from prison by a special act-of-grace of the governor, Arden-Clarke. He
was invited to become the leader of Government Business. His first statement at a press
conference later in the day, was this, “I would like to make it absolutely clear that I am a friend of
Britain …”, and further that he had no intention of nationalizing any Gold Coast industry” (Fitch
& Oppenheimer, 1966:36-37).
Nkrumah’s moral obligation to collaborate with the British forced him to expel those in his
party who were radical enough as to criticize him. “The remaining agitators from the city squares
and market places were remoulded into practitioners of the Westminster Parliamentary System.
Inside the scale modelled replica of Westminster, however, there was little actual power to
exercise. The ‘mother country’ still [has the ‘monopoly of the ‘legitimate’ use of force’ in the
country]-- controlled the police and the army; the colonial Governor retained his reserve powers;
British bureaucrats held most of the senior positions in the Civil Service; British stockholders
owned the gold mines; over 90% of import-export trade was controlled by the Colonial Office;
and the British banks continued unabated, their eternal policy of vacuum-cleaning the country,
sucking up local capital without any feedback in the form of loans to Ghanaians (Fitch &
Oppenheimer, 1966:38).
The irony was that, while the CPP members imagined themselves getting the better of the
British through tactical action, the British prided themselves on their own subtleties. The
Governor, Arden-Clarke (Fitch & Oppenheimer, 1966:38), described the situation later:
We learnt for example, how effective the device of changing names could be. It is, I suppose, true that a
rose by any name would smell as sweet, but we learnt that if we changed the name of leader of
Government Business to Prime Minister and Executive Council to Cabinet, without in any way altering
their functions and powers, or the name of Chief Commissioner to Regional Officer, or District
Commissioner to Government Agent, they all seemed to smell much sweeter in the public nose. That
device certainly helped us to get over some difficulties
53
The CPP started agitating for constitutional reform. This led naturally to adoption of Nkrumah’s
Constitution and subsequently the 1954 elections. This election was to mark the truly transitional
aspect of the shift from traditional to secular-social-political life (Apter, 1963:297). It was
intended to open the way for the final granting of independence but it resulted rather in further
conflict for the CPP. There were too many groupings, who have in common more than a simple
dislike of the Nkrumah regime. They also took their bearing in the sea of Gold Coast Politics.
The moves towards alliance between Northern and Ashanti groups might perhaps herald the new
kind of association where traditionally oriented groups themselves under the guise of a reformed
chieftaincy might activate large numbers of individuals who now only dimly realize that selfgovernment and freedom are at hand and that the changes taking place in the Gold Coast mean
changes in their lives”(Apter, 1963:314).
Who spoke for the opposition? No single voice or party, not even a single class. In the chorus
of voices raised against the CPP, many accents could be detected (Fitch & Oppenheimer,
1966:54). The very centralization of authority allowed the Nkrumah government to exert
discipline and control had integrated a far-flung range of communications and authority, has
made both the Northern Territory and Ashanti more remote, almost as back provinces of Gold
Coast politics. The chiefs saw their former supporters, the British leaving them at the mercy of
the young men, the secularists—CPP, hence the anguish with which many Northern Territory and
Ashanti groups have greeted the time-table for independence. They are perhaps less sanguine
about the Nkrumah regime than the British are (Apter, 1963:316).
The election was fought by an assorted collection of splinter groups including some from the
CPP. However, the CPP weathered the storm and won 60% of the registered votes, losing heavily
in the Northern Territories.
The ominous defeat of the CPP in the North triggered the real crisis for the party. The feat
could be repeated elsewhere, given the combination of educated leaders, the use of traditional
authority and the appeal of regional interests. Ashanti was quick to copy.
It should be remembered that at this stage, the Cocoa Marketing Board (CMB) – a central body
for the marketing of cocoa had been set up. This was the “most obvious instrument of foreign
economic control – the one which had the most long-lasting and disruptive effects on the
Ghanaian economy – was a government agency on which the CPP duly served (Fitch &
Oppenheimer, 1966:38).
Earnings from the sale of cocoa by the CMB were as it was, loaned to the British and a small
percentage allocated to the Gold Coast. This small percentage did not go to the producers in the
54
country. It was used, through the auspices of the Cocoa Purchasing Company (CPC), founded by
the CPP in 1952, to undermine political and economic opposition among the developing or
aspirant bourgeoisie of rich cocoa farmers and merchants, and to promote support through the
dispensation of benefits and patronage. “The Cocoa Purchasing Company provided the party with
large supplies of credit and business openings with which to consolidate its supports (First,
1972:171).
As a result, the cocoa price was pegged, that is, the government paid a predetermined price,
which did not vary with the world price. Nkrumah put it differently, though; about this time, it
became clear that further steps were necessary to control the price paid to the local cocoa farmers.
Otherwise, we would shortly be faced with inflation. Demand in the world market had far
exceeded supply of cocoa, and the price had risen to a record height: If a proportionately high
prices were paid to farmers there would be an immediate rise in consumer goods followed by a
demand for wage and salary increase” (Nkrumah, 1959:179).
A movement was thus formed in Ashanti to agitate for higher cocoa prices, (and it should be
borne in mind that Ashanti was the centre of cocoa production in the country). This movement
soon acquired some strange bedfellows – the intelligentsia. They found in the movement a last
opportunity to ditch the Nkrumah regime.
This alliance is of some great interest. The aims varied from a desire to break away from the
Central Government in Accra and a wish to postpone independence for the Gold Coast. The
chiefs in particular had more than a bone to pick with the Nkrumah party. The party had become
the one universal tribe and Nkrumah was the great paramount chief. This, to them was an affront.
The ‘cocoa’ movement was to become the National Liberation Movement and the appeal was to
Ashanti nationalism, in the name of the sacred Golden Stool. Some Ashanti leaders in the CPP
defected and the scene was set for battle. Ashanti became out of bounds for the government party
for a long time. Arson, murder, kidnapping and assassination plots were the order of the day.
Other regions joined in with their own brand of nationalism and the Nkrumah regime was rocked
to the bottom.
The British Colonial Office finally stepped in to insist on a fresh round of elections before
independence was granted. In the ensuing 1956 elections, the CPP won again, smashingly. “It
was, however, an abysmally low poll; in fact only one in six eligible to vote actually supported
the CPP, on the very eve of independence. This low level of popular mobilization was to dog the
CPP in this and subsequent elections.
55
The crisis could have been used as an opportunity to dismantle the traditional system altogether
but the opportunity was wasted.
Meanwhile, the opposition group had been gathered into one party – the United Party (UP).
On March 6, 1957 Britain granted Ghana independence.
4.3. THE PURGE
The period I have just analysed marked the zenith of political opposition in Ghana. During the
period, 1957 – 1961, however, politics reached its nadir. This was the period when the country
became a neo-colony in the British sphere of interest. The country looked to the British pound as
its anchor of safety, and the British looked to the Ghanaian gold for its anchor of wealth. The
external reserves were reserved in London instead of in Accra.
Development strategy was orthodox and passive, with a total dependence on foreign capital for
any projected industrialization. Meanwhile, the external reserves started dwindling and the
balance of payment difficulties set in.
Events moved very quickly after independence. The opposition attack on the government was
sweeping and fundamental … by the summer of 1957 bitterly anti-Nkrumah groups could be
found everywhere … Backbenchers of the CPP threatened to bolt to the opposition” (Apter,
1963:329). The nationalist party was clearly in deep trouble. It lurched from crisis to crisis,
governed by caprice and having to use the cruel weapon of Preventive Detention Act to silence
its opponents” (Austin, 1970:415).
In 1957, the government passed a law requiring that all political parties should be nation-wide,
with membership open to all, irrespective of tribe or region. Now firmly in the saddle, with
independence at last, the CPP proceeded to concentrate power at the centre and to weaken the
potential opposition of the regions. The regional assemblies, protected by the independence
constitution were curbed, and then abolished; the powers of the chiefs were circumscribed and
entrenched provisions on the judiciary and the civil service were revoked (First, 1972:173).
These actions were in the right direction if looked upon as part of the process of unification.
Basil Davidson delved into the situation thus, “only those who prefer that Ghana should have
remained a congeries of traditional little statelets with no effective central power can fairly
criticize Nkrumah’s policy of unification” (Davidson, 1967.167).
The question to be asked here is whether in the process an attempt was made at creating a
new social order and if so by what means. A monopoly of the legitimate use of violence does not
help in opening a new vista for any society. One factor that cannot be overlooked is the extent to
56
which the old traditional system has been
dismantled and subsumed under an imposed
Western system.
When the apparatus of the state finished its duty with the outside opposition (the colonial
government), it was turned on the opposition pockets in the nationalist part itself. As it were,
many landed in jail or ‘snowballed’ out of the country.
By 1961, therefore, the country had been unified but the lack of effort on the part of the
government to overhaul society completely made it difficult to implement the avowed plans for
industrialization-cum-modernization.
Professor Cipolla (1972:110) viewed the problem this way: when “industrialization is
artificially speeded up, the socio-cultural environment can indeed represent a formidable
bottleneck and invalidate all efforts to achieve industrialization. This is the reason why some of
those societies who want, or are forced to quicken the pace of industrialization may feel – more
or less emotionally – the urge to resort to political and social revolutionary movements.
The CPP proved wholly inadequate for the task of forging a social and political revolution,
for the following reasons: the party had been organised as a vote-maximizing and mixing
machine and it never really changed. It had no body of cadres at grass roots levels to stimulate
popular support; instead the technique was patronage and coercion. It was not uncommon for the
branch leaders of the party to be the toughest man in the area, displaying all brawns and no
brains. Emotion was blended with self-interest. The appeal was to the heart – to the loyalty of
those who preferred self-government to servitude. An appeal to local pride and Africanism. It
became, in reality, the breeding place for opportunists and adventurers. They were in effect
likened to a bunch of bureaucratic gangsters, and Fanon (Caute, 1970:88) went on to describe
them like this:
where decolonization has been evolutionary and relatively non-violent, the emergent nation is controlled
by ‘know-all, wily intellectuals’, who resort to legal robbery, import-export combines [sic], stock
exchange jobbery and so forth, to cheat their own people. Touché!
Most of the members of the CPP leadership had been the life and soul of the ‘positive action’
campaign; but once the CPP was in power they had reached journey’s end. They calculated on
settling in office to enjoy the spoils. It
was not always a matter of ideology. Ideology and
ideologists were thin on the ground in the CPP. Views of socialism ranged from Krobo Edusei’s
description: ‘Socialism doesn’t mean that if you have made a lot of money, you can’t keep it’, to
57
the finer definitions by a minute group of
Marxists that was divided against itself in
doctrinal polemic.’
The real differences within the CPP, certainly in the early days of power, were manifestations of
the tug-of-war between different groups for authority and advantage. Conspiracy and
manipulation asserted personal family, business, clan, community or other vested interests. The
CPP became an unmanageable lobby of different pressure groups, with the struggle for power
carried on at the University, in the press, in Parliament and in government ministries, as well as
in the party itself (First, 1972:182).
Nkrumah (1968:73-74) was to speak ruefully of this sad state of affairs after his fall:
I had for a long time the gravest doubts about many of those in leading positions in my party. Despite the
establishment of the ideological institute at Winneba, which I hope, might be used to teach some general
understanding of what we were attempting, it was clear that many high positions still failed to understand
the political and social purpose of the state … the old organization was defective and that the old
leadership in many cases which was inherited from the struggles against British imperialism was
inadequate for its task and when put to the test of crisis failed
Sad as these words may sound, they fail to absolve Nkrumah from blame, since
intrinsic to the failings of the CPP was Nkrumah’s own character, with his limitations as a theoretician and
a leader. He saw Socialism and economic development as a process to be promoted by edict, from the
pinnacle of government, by himself, a strong man and charismatic leader. Changing Ghana’s social system
was a matter of his power and authority. He undertook no close analysis of Ghanaian society and
instructed no one else to do so. He published descriptions of imperialism, and of neo-colonialism and
thought that, having identified their purposes, he could prevail against them … He lived in a world of
paper plans, ministerial and presidential instructions, diagrammatic schemes for Pan-African unity,
African high commands, the clandestine sponsorship of radical groups in neighbouring countries addicted
to more conservative policies than his own. Many of his schemes were exactly what Ghana and Africa did
need; but between the scheme and its execution was a period of woolly thinking.
(First, 1972:187).
Frank Fanon, no doubt, had Nkrumah in mind when he described the typical African party leader
as the “general president of that company of profiteers, impatient for their returns, which
constitutes the national bourgeoisie … His honesty, which is his soul’s true bent, crumbles away
little by little”(Caute, 1970:92)
58
5
SOCIETY AND IDEOLOGY
“To get to the best society nowadays, one has to feed people, amuse people, or shock people.”
Oscar Wilde
“Society is a madhouse whose wardens are the officials and the police.”
August Strindberg
“If you take away ideology, you are left with a case by case ethics which in practice ends up as me first,
me only, and in rampant greed.”
Richard A. Nelson
Indeed, it can be said that in every society there is to be found an ideology. Also, there exist in
every society at least one militant segment which is the dominant segment of that society. This
dominant segment has its fundamental principles, its beliefs about the nature of man, and the type
of society, which must be created for man. It will to a least extent, help in developing and
controlling the type of organization which the dominant segment can use (Nkrumah, 1970:5758).
In societies where there are competing ideologies, it is still usual for one ideology to be
dominant. This dominancy is that of the ruling class or group – the elite. The elite in African
societies have not come to realize that “an ideology” should not seek merely to unite a section of
the people, but should intend to seek unity for the whole of the society, which it finds itself.
These African elites are the dominant ideology within the society. For besides seeking political
power, they should seek rather to establish common attitudes and purposes for the society.
Ideology will give a sense of direction for African leadership. Leadership also have the sole
responsibility in the light of circumstances to decide what form or structure shall their respective
institution have and into which direction would they be directed.
When I say that in every society there exist at least one kind of ideology, I thereby want to give
an understanding that in every society there is also a morality, which goes side by side with this
concept. A morality is termed as a network of principles and rules for the guidance and appraisal
of conduct (Nkrumah, 1970:60). It is usually upon these rules and principles that ruling elites in
African societies have a constant fall back in their behaviour. There shall be in the society a body
of moral principles and rules geared both from the African experience and that of their ancestors.
59
Just as morality guides and seeks to connect the actions of millions of persons, so an ideology
aims at uniting the actions of millions towards specific and definite goals. Again, I should be apt
to say that ‘ideology’ in this context is used to mean a group of individuals directed only at
fundamental change within a society rather than an ‘ideology’ which otherwise referred to be a
body of writing of one individual.
5.1 ON IDEOLOGY
I have mentioned that ‘ideology’ should seek to bring a specific order into the total life of its
society. In order for a society to achieve this, it needs to employ a number of instruments. These
instruments are centred on the society political theory, social theory and moral theory. Thus
ideology displays itself in moral theory and practice. The ideology of a society is total (Carter,
1962:4). It embraces the entire class-structure, history, literature, art, religion and society as a
whole.
One of the most momentous experiences that can befall any civilization is for it to break loose
from its religious base. It is not to reject once ancestral religion per se. On the contrary, to
reaffirm it, to modernize it, to adapt it, to make room for new and non-religious interests, to bring
it about that religion, instead to being the womb or matrix from which all else comes shall be one
interest among many (Palmer, 1967:329).
The African traditional system described elsewhere is said to be originally religious – religion
pervades everything: everything social is religious – and it is the crux of the matter: The practise
of necromancy; and the basic commitment to the past – gerontocracy -- and the ignorance
shrouded in superstition and the morbid fear of nature is the greatest obstacles to change. The
kind of worldview thus proffered by such a situation is cannibalistic in kind and genre, impeding
rather than galvanizing progress.
The view expressed elsewhere, that the problem in Africa is the lack of ideology is an
understatement. For ideologies there are, in vast diversities and assortments when the lexical
(Webster Dictionary) definition of ideology “as the body of ideas reflecting the social needs and
aspirations of an individual group or culture” is used. It is anomalous to contend that there is a
dearth of ideology in Africa. The predatory nature of the indigenous religions and ideologies are
further compounded by the otherworldly view of the Christian and Islamic faith. In some areas,
the orthodox of the Christian faith has been defied and an amalgam has been affected between the
two. It is therefore imperative that accounts should be taken of the spiritual revolution that is
taking place on the continent. This is considered by many to be the inevitable outlet for tensions
60
emanating from the societal decomposition. Religion remains an important element of African
culture and a potent force in contemporary life and thought, relevant to the search for
modernization (Parsons, 1963:70).
There are various kinds of world outlook calling for a rational choice on the basis of progress
of reaction. World outlooks based on reactionary tendencies are those based on “ancient beliefs
and superstitions, and seek to persuade religious-minded people that they must remain blindly
dependent upon some supernatural being and his vicars and anointed regents on earth. Other
philosophies, while not openly asserting the existence of a deity and even avowing faith in
science resort to subtle but false arguments in an effort to destroy man’s conviction of the real
world” (Kuusinen, 1963).
The progressive worldviews are those, which are all based, in one way or another, on a belief
that life here on earth is capable of being perfected by human knowledge and effort. Since man
by nature is an inventive animal, there have been significant improvements in human technology
ever since that day when some caveman first began to chip flints into handy shapes. Until
comparatively recent times, however, those improvements came too slowly to effect any sudden
changes in the conditions of human existence. The usual expectation was that people would go on
living much of their lives as their fathers and grand fathers had done, experiencing the various
joys and privations to which, as it often seemed flesh is heir. All this has changed in the past 200
years with the industrial revolution (Watkins, 1964:2). It is abundantly clear that science has
opened a new mindscape for mankind. It is in this sense that science can be said to have become
an ideology. It is the ultimate talisman against cynicism. It defines its own purposes through the
logic of inquiry and reason (Apter, 1967:316).
A typical feature of modern ideologies is their militantly revolutionary character. This is
considered to be natural though by no means necessary, consequence of their close relationship to
the process of technological innovation. Whenever anticipated evolutionary improvements fail to
take place on schedule it is quite natural to try to speed up the economic process by political
means. The characteristic purpose of modern ideologies is to try to persuade men that it is both
possible for them to further the progress of the industrial revolution by launching a revolutionary
attack against the established political order.
Our absolute inference from the “crisis” confronting African Developing Nation-States can
be summed up in one, mobilization. We hereby resolve that this lack of mobilization is what
smothers all efforts towards that “take-off into economic growth.” Further, the goal of economic
61
growth and the norms pertaining to it being
less-than-ultimate becomes an imposition,
which is a source of conflict in the individual. This conflict tends to alienate leadership from the
led. Figures 2a illustrates this cleft.
LEADERSHIP
+
GOALS
MASSES
Figure 2a. Leadership with Goals alienates and oppresses the Masses.
However, Marxism-Leninism has proved efficacious in bridging this gap, especially in situations
where wars of liberation are waged against colonial domination as in China, Vietnam, and to
some extent, Cuba. A relatively high degree of mobilization was achieved during the course of
liberation struggles; traditional structures disintegrate more rapidly and the resulting frustration is
absorbed into a programmed fanned by the ideology. In fanning these aggressive trends into
achievement-motivation or motivational-orientations, leadership identifies itself more and more
with the masses. See figure 2b!
GOALS
LEADERSHIP
+
MASSES
Figure 2b. Leadership identifies itself with the Masses in chasing Goals.
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Hence the master key that unlocks the mystery of social mobilization is ideology. It is the
fulcrum of modernization.
But revolution is a taxing process, which imposes its own laws. Man is by nature a creature of
habit, and tradition tails doggedly after habit. “The way of the revolutionary then has been a hard
one. To compensate his followers for the immediate risks and discomforts of change, he must
inspire them with a compelling belief in the value of future rewards. In the process, he must also,
in most cases, persuade them to break their habitual bonds of allegiance to established political
authorities. To overcome men’s fear of change, and to justify new forms of allegiance, are the
central problems to be solved by any theory of revolution” (Watkins, 1964:4).
Watkins (ibid) continues,
whatever its ultimate advantages may be, the rapid industrialization of a country is clearly a painful
process. Old and cherished ways of life must be abandoned at a time when the prospect of new and
presumably better things to come is still little more than a promise. To make so daring a leap, into the
future, with all its attendant dangers and discomforts, is an act that calls for no small measure of faith and
determination.
“We are therefore right in supposing that ideology is closely connected with the problems of
industrialization.” He continues, “of all ideologies available, Communism is the one which would
seem to have the likeliest prospects of mobilizing the have-not nations” (Watkins, 1964:106).
That this is a Hobson’s choice for Africa is doubtless. But the annoyance is the charge that
even Communism is an unusual Western thought. This elicits no small a measure of hesitance in
African minds.
The hitch can be scaled when once the “Industrial Revolution”, in spite of its origins, is
considered a human heritage other than exclusively Western. Scientific alias Marxism is the
ideology of the industrial revolution – equally a human heritage. The Dialectical Materialism or
Marxian dialectic offers an explanation of everything that had ever happened or could happen on
earth. It possesses the universal aspect of a religion. Marxian socialism is a dogma and a faith
transcending the borders of race and region. It is a strong compound of the scientific, the
historical, the metaphysical and the apocalyptic (Palmer, 1967:499).
Hence what began in liberated areas as natural development devolves into imposed
development – with leaders relying more and more on force, both internal and external, to
implement policies.
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In a larger sense therefore, the crisis of identity, which begets the authority, and legitimacy crisis,
which begets the penetration crisis, which begets the leadership crisis, is, indeed, a problem of
meaning.
Taking the cue from the leadership crisis, we will discover that policies and decisions concerning
economic development prove increasingly difficult at the implementation stage. Effective
leadership demands individual allegiances and confidences of those being led, and the sum total
of these individual allegiances and confidences creates legitimacy of the leadership. In other
words, leadership becomes charismatic by being able to make people to do what they would not
normally do without any use of force. In this connection, we define charisma (“gift of grace” or
personal magnetism) as the embodiment of the group’s values, goals and aspirations in one
person who is acclaimed as a leader by the others. His authority over the group derives from the
fact that he possesses the right answer – that he ‘knows the solution to the problem’.
Real/ethical charisma or moral-dependent charisma (as opposed to issue-dependent, unethical
charisma as manifested in liberation wars) is the product of nomos (norms) – defined as that state
of affairs wherein the individual’s inner stability is reconciled or harmonized with his or her
external adaptability so that both vectors, value-orientations and motivational-orientations, are at
the required operational level. To attain this, the emphasis should be on the restructuring of the
family. For, the family is the psychic agency of society. The family is the first institution or
society that an individual passes through. The family therefore occupies a strategic position in the
process of ultimate rationalization. It is the producer of character and charisma – direction, order
and stability which are the necessary conditions under which human drive energy finds
expression, discharge and pleasure – and like a factory, it produces characters according to
definite specifications supplied by the society within which it is functioning. When this
requirement is met, physical coercion is replaced by inner compulsion, internalized behaviour,
and the particular kind of human drive energy, which is channeled into character traits (Brown
1964:161). As people acquire the characters which will make them want to act appropriately as
members of the society, physical coercion is replaced by psychic coercion -- individuals will be
oriented towards attaining anticipated goals by means of a normatively regulated expenditure of
energy.
Finally, when social change is considered to be imperative, the presumption is to orderly
change. It is only possible under Marxism, interpreted to suit African needs and conditions.
64
The arguments over the interpretation of Marxism as obtained in Nkrumaism and the other
versions of African socialism will now be surveyed.
5.2. AFRICAN SOCIALISM
African socialism (Communalism and Collectivism) is the belief in the doctrine of sharing
economic resources in a “traditional” African way, as compared to classical socialism. African
Socialism should NOT be interpreted to mean Russian Communism.
The one feature common to colonial Africa was the predominance of the rural population. There
were regions of African territories where the colonial administration was absent and where
control was maintained through indirect rule. There were other districts in which the heavy hand
of Commissioners was always apparent. But few regions were insulated from the needs and
demands of the cash market, and there was widespread discontent in almost every colony. It is
not always clear whether the aspiring leaders set out to capture the rural constituencies, or
whether the process was reversed.
To capture the rural constituency national leaders adopted tribal dress, used ceremonial libations,
shook flywhisk, sang tribal songs, adopted tribal titles. They preached the virtues of the African
rural communalism or African collectivism: Tanzania’s Julius Nyerere extolled the mutual
security of the rich and the poor, in which the community ensured the welfare of its members.
This was supposed to have pre-existed colonialism and he called it the communitary society.
Guinea’s Sekou Touré spoke of the communaucratic society with a “unique humanism...in
collective living and social solidarity”. “In regions ‘contaminated’ by colonialism, personal
egoism abounded, but otherwise an individual in Africa cannot conceive of the organization of
his life outside that of the family, village or clan. The voice of the African is faceless and
nameless” (Carter, 1962:193). Nkrumah harked on the same theme. Communalism, he assert,
involved the African:
as primarily a spiritual being, a being endowed originally with a certain inward dignity, integrity and
value...[Socialism] includes the restitution of the egalitarian and humanist principles of traditional African
life within the context of a modem technological society serving the welfare needs of its people
(Miliband and Saville, 1974:232).
The worker in African societies was viewed differently. Fanon, Senghor, Mboya, Touré and
others inveighed against a “privileged minority”, a “selfish privileged group”, who played little
65
part in overthrowing colonialism. Nyerere said of them that after independence they “displayed a
capitalist attitude of mind” demanding a greater share in the general income because of the
contribution they made. (Miliband and Saville, 1974: 245). Attitudes differed, but African leaders
were agreed that socialism did not involve working class control of production: some because
they said the working class was minute or because they claimed that the workers were selfish.
Behind much of this rhetoric came the claim that there were no class divisions in Africa, and no
class struggle. Touré claimed that his party had “adapted from Marxism everything that is true for
Africa' and had 'excised' the class struggle 'to permit all Africans regardless of class to engage in
the anti-colonial struggle” (Carter, 1962:189). Elsewhere he said that the party had “formally
rejected the principle of the class struggle ...” as a European inspired doctrine that was not
relevant to Africa (ibid).
Leaders in east and in central Africa repeated these arguments. I am not concerned with the truth
or falsity of the claims for traditional society, but with the fact that African leaders rested their
cases on such statements.
Such fantasy led Nkrumah to the conclusion that capitalism was “too complicated a system for a
newly independent nation. Hence the need for a socialist society.” Others were more cavalier in
their discussion of economic problems: “You cannot be a capitalist when you have no capital.” It
was in this tradition that Nkrumah was to write in Consciencism “the presuppositions and
purposes of capitalism are contrary to those of African society. Capitalism would be a betrayal of
the personality and conscience of Africa” (Miliband and Savile, 1974:221-2).
One of the viewpoints constantly expressed is that ideology is a veil for untidy motives and
appearances (Apter, 1967:314). The efforts in the previous chapter were directed at an
identification of the ideology of Science with Marxian Socialism. In this chapter, however, the
emphasis will be on the basic differences between African Socialism and Scientific Socialism. By
African socialism, I mean African communalism or collectivism. The first observation is
however disturbing. African Socialism is another name for African nationalism and this is its
principal weakness. “Nationalism may be a revolutionary ideology vis-à-vis colonialism but it is
not normally so with respect to other aspects of social life. It is largely silent on the forms of
economic organization (Apter, 1967:314).
“African Socialism integrates the contribution of European socialism with African nationalism
and with ‘Negritude’ defined as the common denominator of all Negro Africans whatever race,
religion or country” (Lloyd, 1971:283).
66
It is the last phase of the ‘imperial reaction in the fashion of the Hegelian dialectic’ all over again.
A clear understanding of the ramifications of the African Socialism is only possible when the
ubiquitous slogan “African Personality” is fully surveyed. It is the umbilical cord between
ideology and reality.
Basil Davidson says it has a dual content: “The African Personality emphasizes African
particularity over against the rest of the world (or therefore of African equality with other major
human groupings), but it also affirms a basic unity within the countless diversities of African
life” (Davidson, 1967:79). In this sense, African Socialism looks backward and forward at the
same time. As far as its proponents are concerned, there are no class antagonisms in African
society. “Nkrumah described traditional society as communistic and rejected the notion of a class
struggle in African society” (Lloyd, 1971:285). This is sheer duplicity; since aside from the elites
manufactured by the colonial powers, it is anybody’s guess that African Society is a slave
society. This characterization includes the classical and spiritual forms of slavery.
The very imperial presence was enough to point out this to any well-meaning analyst. It was
the secular (material) approach to the environment that made for the success of imperialism. In
the process the African was dominated politically, exploited economically, and socially, his
human status has been demoralized and debased (by courtesy of the slave trade). In his book,
Consciencism, Nkrumah affirmed this fact when he alluded to racial discrimination as the product
of the slave trade, and it was not to be expected that he should turn round to deny the Africans
status (proffered by the Capitalist system) in the world. If most of these African leaders would
look around them, they will find that they are merely promoted slaves overseeing slaves.
Hence, the greatest omission in African Socialism is the lack of emphasis on the role of
property. It is the prerogative of the overseers. They still revel in the need for religion for the
masses. It is a foregone conclusion that the quintessence of African tradition and culture are no
more. What obtain in the name of culture and tradition are the gangrenous remains of the Western
impact. What with social values having become money values, human right values having
become property values (the preference to property rights over human rights), and the extended
family brimming with pests and parasites. Lest I be charged for being pessimistic, it is foolhardy
to build anything upon this.
African Socialism is not only a travesty of the Scientific Socialism but also a caricature of it, if
it is supposed that Socialism as an ideology “defines modernity and social discipline as
manifested in solidarity groupings whose raison d’etre is the functional quality of their roles for
67
development. This functionalism, in turn, sets down the terms of individual identity and
establishes a new system of motivation that emphasizes achievement” (Apter, 1967:330).
When it is thus exposed as a sham, African Socialism becomes the political religion of the
janus-faced ‘Westernized’ elites. Indeed, they need an ideology, which will provide them with an
identity – a defence-mechanism against assimilation to white society – and to legitimize their
rule. No traditional sanctions exist by which they may justify their rule. The elite must espouse a
doctrine that purports to explain and justify its leadership, converting political power into
political authority, and the ideology must find acceptance not only among the elite but also
among the masses. For the alternative to a general acceptance of the legitimacy of government is
rule by coercion (Lloyd, 1971:270).
A thick blanket is African Socialism, and under it the dictators (presidential monarchs) hide
and perpetrate their evil machinations, horrors and depredations.
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6
CONCLUSION
“You do not, simply because you are unable to uproot mistaken opinions and correct long established ills,
abandon the State altogether. In a storm you do not desert the ship because you are unable to control the
winds… you must try to use subtle and indirect means … and what you cannot turn you must make as little
evil as possible.”
Moore Thomas, Utopia
6.1. COMMENTS
As I said elsewhere, I write this brief and interesting study in “African Political Decay”, not to
nag nor whine, but to prod. Therefore, in other to conclude it, we shall again return to Toynbee’s
‘Challenge and Response’ model. We left off where as a result of the Carolingian response to the
challenge of Muslim expansion, Western Imperialism was born and it in turn became the
challenge to the world system. This challenge is, in a way, an epic, in that the entire world had
become its scope, through the sheer force of colonization.
In the evolution of a response to this challenge, however, there must be a precondition, a
dyadic conflict between systems. Hence we have the clash between “traditionalism” and
“modernity”. It is this clash that can open the floodgates of modernization to the entire human
race. In the absence of this head-on collision, what prevails is westernization. Thus
modernization becomes the preserve of a few – the ‘westernized elite.’ What happens after can
only be viewed from the point of view of the “imperial reaction, in the fashion of the Hegelian
dialectic,” which has been an undertone of tremendous importance in this study.
The last two stages in this dialectic are the watermark in African politics (if politics is to be
construed as the ascription of roles and values in a changing polity). The first stage of xenophobic
defence vanished a long time ago in the light of the military superiority of the invading colonial
forces. The second stage, the assimilation stage, or in the words of the dialectic, “the swing in the
direction of an uncritical self-humiliation and acceptance of alien superiority” has a portent of
change, but in the wrong direction and at the wrong tempo. This stage is the ‘elite stage’ and the
particular emphasis is on the preservation of colonial legacies. Only lip-service is paid to
modernization, in so far as socio-economic change is concerned. The third stage marks the
resurrection of the first – the xenophobic defence of the existing order – and this was married to
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the second phase with the blessings of nationalism. It is the “nationalist synthesis” according to
the dialectic, “in which there was an assertion or reassertion of a community with pride in itself
and in its past but still looking, at least as far as the leaders were concerned, in the direction of
Westernization and modernization. Thus, instead of the dyadic conflict we get a two-way pull –
to the past and to the future. If there is any political development (institutionalization) therefore,
it will be synonymous with political decay. That is mirroring the decadence of African society.
Modernization is a multifaceted process involving change in all areas of human thought and
activity. It is a frontal attack on poverty, ignorance, disease and squalor. Modernization is seen
“as supplementing rather than supplanting traditional society and there is considerable evidence,
particularly from the Third World, of modernity and tradition coexisting in the same social
system” (Evans and Newnham, 1998:336). In African societies, modernization through
westernization has failed to encourage homogenous change, and individuals, regions, and states
are regressing into a cul-de-sac of traditionalism.
On the psychological plane, modernization involves a fundamental shift in values, attitudes
and expectations. Traditional man expects continuity in nature and society and does not believe in
the capacity of man to change or control either. Modern man in contrast accepts the possibility of
change and believes in its desirability.
Sociologically, modernization tends to supplement the family and other primary groups
having diffuse roles with consciously organized secondary associations having much more
specific functions. “In many traditional societies the most important social unit was the extended
family which itself often constituted a small civil society performing political, economic, welfare,
security, religious and other social foundations functions. Under one impact of modernization,
however, the extended family begins to disintegrate and is replaced by the nuclear family”
(Huntington, 1968:37). Thus, the decaying familism prevalent in African societies is typical not
of a traditional society but of a backward society in which the traditional institutions of the
extended family has disintegrated under the impact of the first phase of modernization.
“Modernization thus tends to produce alienation and anomie, normlessness generated by the
conflict of old values and new values. The new values/structures undermine the old bases of
association and authority before new skills; motivations and resources can be brought into
existence to create new groupings. The break up of traditional institutions may lead to
psychological disintegration and anomie, but these very conditions also create the need for new
identifications and loyalties” (Huntington, 1968:37). Simple sets of internalized and integrated
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norms may break down and be replaced (partially) by imposed norms, but there is no law in the
world that says that this break down will evolve inevitably into a modern industrial state, except
that the norms are reconstructed, providing men with the necessary and sufficient conditions for
progress.
To wit, African tribal consciousness was almost unknown in traditional rural life. Tribalism
was a product of modernization and the western impact on a traditional African society. African
Socialism, with its total commitment to the past, fails as an ideology to lead the way to a better
tomorrow. Its inadequacy is unfortunate. It blurs the vision splendid, and social change becomes
a mad circus. On the other hand, Scientific Socialism is the consummate of the “New Concept of
man” mentioned earlier in the study. The “new concept of man,” institutionalized in the
Renaissance, boosted the Industrial Revolution and the Imperial Mystique. Taken as a simple
communication model, from an ideological point of view, imperialism is justified so far as its
exploitations and oppressions can be viewed as the message to the traditional system. The
message is the old maxim: change or perish. A feedback is called for. Otherwise the message
continues unabated. The feedback must be based on social and distributive justice.
Intoned in the imperial message is the measure of the feedback: Man has conquered nature
through science. Theoretically, the yoke of slavery is broken, both classical and spiritual forms of
slavery no longer hold sway over man.
Man today can live better and happier than the generation of yesteryears. The feedback should
therefore have been a colonial war. This would have been a revolution, changing man and his
institutions. What was an ideology based on a future state of things, and it came in company of
imperialism. It is only in this sense that one can consider Communism (Scientific Socialism) as
the response to Capitalism (Western Imperialism), the challenge to the world system. From this
perspective, the concept “third world” is an ideology, which is derogatory. It connotes failure. It
is a phenomenon that jolts even the annals of human history.
Human existence, and, for that matter, human history are dualistic, to wit, the bipolar system. The
transfer of colonial power is nothing short of a swindle. The African leaders, saddled with the
weight of the decomposed states, sadly lacking a world-view to guide their efforts, regressed into
the traditional exercise of exorcism (call it ‘mumbo jumbo’ if you like). The anti-colonial tirades
that mark(ed) the careers of most African leaders are the classical examples of this exorcism.
It is a shame that African leaders lack original ideas and cannot use their imagination to craft
authentically African solutions to African problems. If all they can do is to imitate the colonialist,
then they might as well bring back the colonial governors to rule Africa. At the very least, they
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could copy or improve Africa’s own indigenous systems if they were bereft of original ideas.
This issue is important. Before long, most of these foreign imitation projects began collapsing
because they had no roots in the indigenous culture. Political oppression, civil war, ruinous strife,
coups, and chaos have ravaged Africa, leaving the continent littered with human carcasses.
Armed with a few imported bazookas, “useless idiots” are “bashing and gashing” their own
country and people on behalf of foreign ideologies and values.
6.2. INDICATIONS
In the Third World, modernization can only be achieved under Socialism. “It has a special
meaning for the nations, born out of that swindle. It becomes the ethic for a system of political
discipline emphasizing science — science for its own sake as a symbol of progress and as a form
of political wisdom. In keeping with this aim, socialism offers a set of unified development goals
that stress roles functional to modernization and the achievement of a workmanlike/workwomanlike rational society in which people lend one another a helping hand because they feel
themselves a part of the community effort toward industrialization.”
In the dearth of such an ideology, the polities are infested with the cupidity of irresponsible preemptors (of scarce resources) of the second and third phases. What is nauseating about these is
their opulence. Their conspicuous consumption, standing as it were, in weird contrast to the most
debasing poverty, disease and squalor, immanent in the term “third world”, “the Wretched of the
Earth”, or “underdeveloped world”, is obviously frustrating to the political analyst. Such a
subject matter belongs to the realm of another analyst: the psychoanalyst, other than the political
analyst. It is the crisis of identity, legitimacy and penetration that make such an analysis
imperative.
However, for this humble exercise to be anything purposive, it must end on a sanguine note.
There are prospects for development. The “Wretched of the Earth” situation, fraught with
SOCIAL INJUSTICES, is a nursery for a SOCIAL(IST) REVOLUTION. And this cannot be
overlooked. This will put the modernization process in gear, reversing the present situation where
it is like drops of water in the Sahara desert. If it so happens, African societies will be jetpropelled into the modernization age. Modernization shall then be like a spring of water, flowing
in a desert, whose waters fail not.
But when? When exactly? ‘When the cumbersome armour of Saul is rejected, then the Goliath
of survival will be ultimately subdued.’
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And the cure for “the Wretched of the
Earth” situation?
It is quite simple, really.
Only get rid of imperialism, and, what comes to the same thing, see to it that people freely
determine their own history.
E-N-D
7. Bibliography
Apter, David, The Politics of Modernization. University of Chicago Press, 1967
--------------- Ghana in Transition, Atheneum, New York, 1963
Austin, Dennis, Politics in Ghana, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1970.
Beattie, John, Other Cultures, Routledge and Kegan Paul, London, 1969.
Bing, Geoffrey, Reap The Whirlwind, Macgibbons and Kee, London, 1968.
Brecht, Arnold, Political Theory, Princeton University Press, Princeton, New Jersey, 1970.
Brown, J. A. C., Freud and The Post-Freudans, Penguin Books, 1974.
Burns, Edward Mcnall and Ralph, Philip Lee, World Civilization, Volume 1, W W Norton & Co
Inc, 1974.
Carter, Gwendolen, African One-Party States, Cornell University Press, 1962.
Caute, David. Frantz Fanon. New York: The Viking Press, 1970.
Cipolla, Carlo, The Economic History of World Populations, Pelican Books, 1972.
Crowder, Michael, West Africa Under Colonial Rule. London: Hutchinson University Library,
1968.
Danquah, J. B., The Akan Doctrine Of God, Frank Cass and Company, London, 1968.
Davidson, Basil, Which Way Africa, penguin Books, 1967.
------------------, Black Man’s Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation-State, James Curry,
1992.
-----------------, The African Genius: An Introduction to African Cultural and social History.
Little, Brown and Company Publishers, Boston- Toronto, 1969.
Dinitz, Simon, Russell Dynes and Alfred Clarke, Deviance, Studies in the Process of
Stigmatization and Societal Reaction, Oxford University Press, New York, 1969.
Dumont, Rene, False Start in Africa, Sphere Books, London, 1967.
Emerson, Rupert, From Empire to Nation: The Rise to Self-Assertion of Asian and African
Peoples. Cambridge: Harvard University, 1960
-------------------, From Empire to Nation, Cambridge, Massachusett, 1950.
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Engels, Freidrich and Marx, Karl, Communist
Manifesto, 1848
Erikson, Erik, in J.A. Brown, Freud and the Post-Freudians, Pelican, London 1964
Evans, Graham and Newnham, Jeffrey, The Penguin Dictionary of International Relations,
Penguin Books, 1998
Fanon, Franz, The Wretched of the Earth, Penguin Books, 1971.
First, Ruth, The Barrel of a Gun, Penguin Books, 1972.
Fitch, Robert Beck, and Mary Oppenheimer. Ghana: End of an Illusion. New York: Monthly
Review Press, 1966.
Fleischacker, Samuel, The Ethics of Culture, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994.
Friedrich, Carl, Man and His Government, McGraw Hill Book Co., Inc., New York, 1963.
-----------------, Tradition and Authority, Macmillan Press Ltd., London, 1972.
Gyekye, Kwame, Traditional and Modernity, Philosophical Reflections on the African
Experience, Oxford University Press, 1997.
Harris, P., Studies in African Politics, Hutchinson, London, 1970
Herkowitz, Meliville, The Human Factor in Changing Africa, Knopf, New York, 1971.
Huntington, Samuel P., "Political Development and Political Decay," World Politics 17
1965.
--------------------------, Political Order in Changing Societies, Yale University Press, New Haven,
1971.
July, Robert, The Origins of Modern African Thought, Faber and Faber, London, 1968.
Kussinen, O., Fundamentals of Marxism-Leninism, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1963.
Lloyd, Peter, Africa in Social Change, Penguin Books, London, 1971.
Marwick, Arthur, The Nature of History, London, 1970
Marx, Karl. Selected Writings in Sociology and Social Philosophy. (translated by
T.B. Bottomore). London: McGraw-Hill, 1964.
Merton Robert, Social Theory and Social Structure. New York: The Free Press,
1967.
Mensah-Sarbah, John, The Fanti National constitution. London, 1906.
Milliband, Ralph and Saville, John (eds), Socialist Register, London Publisher, 1974.
Nkrumah, Kwame, Consciencism: Philosopy and Ideology for Decolonization, Monthly Review
Press, 1970.
-------------------, A Handbook on Revolutionary Warfare. London: Panaf Books, 1968.
Palmer, R., A History of the Modern World, Knopf, New York, 1967.
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Parsons, Roberts T., The Churches and Ghana
Society 1918-1955, Leiden Netherlands, 1963.
Pieterse, Jan Nederveen, Development Theory: Deconstructions/Reconstructions, Sage
Publications, London 2001.
Popper, Karl, The Poverty of Historicism, Routledge & Kegan Paul, London, 1974.
Preston, P. W., Development Theory: An Introduction, Blackwell Publishers Ltd, Oxford, 1997.
Riggs, Fred The Modernization of a Bureaucratic Polity. Honolulu: East–West Center Press,
1967.
Schraeder, Peter, African Politics and Society: A Mosaic in Transformation. Bedford/ St.
Martin’s Boston, New York. 2000
Segal, Ronald, ed. African Profiles. Revised ed., Baltimore: Penguin, 1963.
Tilly, Charles, Coercion, Capital and European States, Ad 990-1992, Blackwell Publishers; 2003
Watkins, Frederick, The Age of Ideology – Political Thought, Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs,
1964.
Other Sources
Definition of Europeanization in www.dictionary.com
Greek Tragedy and Neitzsche: (see, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Birth_of_Tragedy).
David Riesman:
http://anthro.palomar.edu/social/soc_3.htm
http://anthro.palomar.edu/social/glossary.htm
http://anthro.palomar.edu/social/glossary.htm#modal_personality
8. Additional Notes
Two types of leadership charisma can be distinguished:
1) Ethical Charismatic Leader -- Uses power to service others; aligns vision with followers’ needs
and aspirations; considers and learns from criticism; stimulates followers to think independently
and to question the leader's view; open, two-way communication; coaches, develops, and supports
followers; shares recognition with others; relies on internal moral standards to satisfy his
followers’ interests and societal interests, and can turn followers into leaders. The behaviours of
an ethical charismatic leader include: high self-confidence, competence, serve as role models,
communicate high expectations, have strong power needs, engage in effective argumentation and
create transcendent goals. The followers look to the charismatic leader to fulfil hopes, frustrations
and fears. The charismatic leader creates a sense of adventure and excitement. New visions are
seen within the group and widely shared beliefs, values, and goals help to promote the charismatic
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visions. Example of ethical leaders: Mahatma K. Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, Martin Luther King
Jr., etc.
2) Unethical/issue-dependent Charismatic Leader -- Uses power only for personal gain or impact;
promotes own personal vision; can lead the led into moral degenerates; censures critical or
opposing views; demands that own decisions be accepted without question; one-way
communication; insensitive to followers' needs; relies on convenient external/imposed moral
standards to satisfy self-interests. An example is what we see in liberation wars, Rambo-type
action movies and zones of genocide. Example of unethical leaders abound in history.