Jeffrey S. Ahlman. Living with Nkrumahism

There is no shortage of books on Kwame Nkrumah’s Ghana. In writing Living with Nkrumahism: Nation, State, and Pan-Africanism in Ghana, Jeffrey S. Ahlman challenged himself to say something new about the nature of Nkrumah’s anticolonial nationalism, his leadership of the Gold Coast to independence from Britain, and his ambitious projects of nation building and Pan-African liberation. This task was complicated by the fact that Nkrumah’s mass movement, the Convention People’s Party (CPP), did not maintain a coherent set of party records or deposit them in a public archive for future generations. Many state records were also destroyed in the coup that toppled Nkrumah in 1966. Ahlman therefore trawled a wide range of published sources: pro- and anti-CPP newspapers, Nkrumah’s own writings and speeches, memoirs and biographies of his close associates, parliamentary debates, censuses, and the “gray literature” generated by governmental and quasi-governmental bodies. Where records of ministries, departments, and agencies were available in the National Archives of Ghana, Ahlman made use of them. Insights into how directions from the political center were understood, implemented, adapted, or abandoned in various parts of the country were gleaned both from regional archives (Cape Coast, Kumasi, Sekondi, and Sunyani) and from Ahlman’s forty-four interviews with surviving members of the CPP and its affiliates. Following the lead of Jean Allman, Ahlman also worked with “shadow archives”—that is, sets of records that are directly concerned with early independent Ghana and yield rich information about it, but that are stored in other parts of the world (for example, in the national security files of U.S. presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson).

Convention · Economic history · Independence (probability theory) · Kwame · Media studies · Memoir · Nationalism · Newspaper · Political science · Politics · Sociology · State (computer science) · African history and culture studies · Anthropology · Communism, Protests, Social Movements · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law