Ghana?
Here's something:
The background of the whole process of African
decolonization was built up in the wartime and early postwar
periods, but the trigger on the chain reaction of the
decolonization process was the defeat of the Anglo-French effort at
Suez because of America and Soviet pressure in October 1956. As
might, perhaps, be expected, the process began in a British colony,
the Gold Coast, now called Ghana.
The independence of Ghana was
a personal achievement of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah, who returned to Accra
from an educational process in Pennsylvania and the London School
of Economics. The year before, in 1946, the Gold Coast obtained the
first British African Legislative Assembly that was allowed a
majority of Africans. Nkrumah's agitations, including the founding
of a new political party, the Convention People's Party, under his
own control, earned him a two-year jail sentence. While he was
still in jail, his party won 34 of the 38 seats in the Assembly in
the election of 1951; therefore he was released from confinement to
take control of the administration. With good will on both sides, a
transition period of six years gave Ghana its independence, under
Nkrumah's rule, in March 1957.
Within a year of independence,
Nkrumah faced the typical problems of post-colonialism that we have
mentioned: a rapid fall in cocoa prices upon which Ghana's
international trade position depended; disease in the cocoa trees,
which required destruction of thousands of trees over the violent
protests of their peasant owners; dissension between the pagan,
commercial, coastal area, in which the Convention People's Party
was based, and the more pastoral, Islamic, remote
interior.
Nkrumah soon showed his readiness to handle all problems
with ruthless decision.
The "sick" cocoa trees were cut down; political opponents
were silenced in one way or another; Nkrumah was ballyhooed as the
father of all Africans, the unique genius of the African
revolution, the mystic symbol of all black men's hopes.
A Five-Year Plan for economic development (1959-1964)
promised to spend over 92 million dollars. In 1960 the previous
British-granted constitution was replaced by a new republican
constitution that was amended almost at once by a clause allowing
Nkrumah to rule without parliament whenever necessary.
The leader's Pan-African hopes were reflected in a clause
that permitted "the surrender of the whole or part of the
sovereignty of Ghana" to a union of African states.
By the end of the same year, political party designations
were abolished in Parliament, and the Preventive Detention Act
(which allowed Nkrumah to imprison his enemies without charge) was
used to arrest the chief members of the political opposition. Ghana
embarked on an economic war witl1 the Union of South Africa in
protest against the latter's extreme segregation of the races and
on a somewhat weaker system of economic reprisals against France in
retaliation for its nuclear-explosion tests in the Sahara.
Vigorous activities at the United Nations, in African
affairs (chiefly in opposition to any Pan-African movement that
would not be dominated by Nkrumah), in balancing the two sides of
the Cold War while seeking economic aid from both, in establishing
a Ghana shipping line defiantly called the "Black Star line," and
in constructing a gigantic hydroelectric and aluminum manufacturing
complex on the Volta River, kept Nkrumah's name in the world's
press...
... The ordinary African is very remote
from either future preference or infinitely expandable material
demands.
He generally has preference for the present, and his demands
are often nonmaterial and even non-economic, such as his desire for
leisure or for social approval.
The African has a fair recognition of the immediate past, a
dominant concern for the present, and little concern for the
future.
Accordingly, his conception of time is totally
different from that of the average Western man.
The latter sees the present only as a moving point of no
dimension that separates the past from the future.
The African sees time as a wide gamut of the present with a
moderate dimensioned past and almost no future.
This outlook is reflected in the structure of the Bantu
languages, which do not emphasize the tense distinctions of past,
present, and future, as we do, but instead emphasize categories of
condition, including a basic distinction in the verb between
completed and incompleted actions that places the present and the
future (both concerned with unfinished actions) in the same
category.
We do this occasionally in English when we use the present
tense in a future sense by saying, "He is coming tomorrow," but
this rare use of the present to indicate the future does not blur
our conception of the future the way constant use of such a
construction does in Bantu.
...In addition to his present preference, the Bantu
has a list of priorities, in his conception of a higher standard of
living, which contains many non-economic goals.
A fairly typical list of such priorities might run thus:
food, sex dalliance, joking with one's friends, a bicycle, music
and dancing, a radio, leisure to go fishing.
Any list such as this, with its high priority for
non-economic and basically leisure activities, does not provide the
constantly expanding material demands that are the motivating force
in the West's economic expansion.
Nor is the African's strongly socialized personality, which
shares all its successes and wants with others and constantly
yearns for the social approval obtained by sharing income with
kinfolk and friends, capable of supporting any economy of private
selfishness and individual capital accumulation that became the
basis for the industrial expansion of the West...
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