Kwame Nkrumah and Ali Mazrui: An Analysis of the 1967 Transition Debate

Kwame Nkrumah was the single most consequential figure of African descent in the global movement for decolonization, which swept colonialism from the greater part of Asia and Africa after World War II. Nkrumah began his career as an anticolonial agitator in the British colony of the Gold Coast in 1947. Exactly a decade later, in 1957, the colony attained sovereign nationhood under the leadership of his Convention People's Party, the most storied anticolonial movement in Africa. Ghana, the name the former Gold Coast assumed at independence, was the first territory in Africa south of the Sahara to escape the colonial yoke. Ghana, and Nkrumah personally, became de rigueur, celebrated in music, poetry, sermons and other forms of literary and artistic expressions in Africa and the far-flung African diaspora. A Black Star, a sobriquet accorded Nkrumah, had been born. But then as stars--political and otherwise--often do, Nkrumah precipitously fell. In 1966 he suddenly lost power, overthrown in a military takeover. His ouster spawned an expansive body of work on "the rise and fall of Kwame Nkrumah," as several contributors to this literary genre entitled their accounts of his two-decades-long whirlwind of a political career. (1) Ali Mazrui contributed one of the first, and most contentious, installments on the narrative on Nkrumah's fall from power. But this was just prelude. Mazrui's engagement with Nkrumah would have many a sequel, stretching over nearly five decades, which is to say for the rest of Mazrui's life. From a highly critical beginning, Mazrui warmed up to Nkrumah over time, his appraisal of Ghana's first postcolonial leader becoming increasingly more favorable as the years went by. Along the way, Nkrumah's writings came to provide some of the essential building blocks for the trope that is Mazrui's greatest intellectual legacy, for general audiences if not for the cognoscenti--namely, the idea that Africa is a continent with "a triple heritage": African, Islamic and Western. Initially offered as a television documentary on BBC in Britain and PBS in the United States, the triple-heritage idea did double duty, later reappearing in book form. (2) "Nkrumah: The Leninist Czar. " (3) Such was the bold and brash title of the essay Mazrui published in the wake of Nkrumah's fall. In a lifetime as an intellectual gadfly, this was Mazrui's most provocative piece to date. The fiery reaction, mostly negative, was also the first of the many notable debates in which he would become embroiled. The site of the debate also mattered. Mazrui's essay, along with most (although not all) of the responses it engendered, appeared in Transition. Based in Kampala, Uganda, Transition was a magazine of the arts, culture, and politics. Necessarily, the faculty at nearby Makerere University College (later Makerere University), where Mazrui taught, played an outsize role in magazine. Mazrui himself was an associate editor of Transition, which gave his essay unprecedented promotion. The lead article in the issue in which it appeared, the essay was preceded by a lavish and colorful illustration that took up the entire cover of the magazine. (Generally, the cover of Transition was in black and white, not color.) The illustration featured an image of Nkrumah's head at one end and that of the Russian revolutionary leader V. I. Lenin at the other, separated by a single shirt with identical collars. The name of the magazine, Transition, appeared at both ends of the illustration, except it was transposed at the bottom. When turned upside down, Lenin was on top and Nkrumah at the bottom, which neatly illustrated the point of the essay: that Nkrumah, very consciously so, was an African version of Lenin. Mazrui also received top billing in the section of the journal that listed the contributors: he was the sole author in that issue whose biographical summary was accompanied by a mug shot. Clearly, a decision had been made to showcase the essay by Transition's associate editor, and to spare no expense in doing so. …