| Chapter 2: | Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and the Future of Africa |
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In Nkrumah’s formulation of the idea of pan-Africa, there is a convergence between racial pride and dignity, which is reflected in his notion of the African personality, and grounded in racial consciousness, on the one hand, and the economic and political independence of Africa from colonial and related, mainly neocolonial/imperialist forms of domination, on the other hand. Central to this convergence is Nkrumah’s idea, built on his training in philosophy, politics, and theology (as previously indicated), about the social responsibility of the black and African intellectual, with strong affinity to similar ideas held by Du Bois, Fanon, and Cabral. His belief, like theirs also, in the symbiosis of theoria and praxis. The nature and implications of this convergence is notably articulated in his book, Consciencism: Philosophy and the Ideology for Decolonization (1970).
For him, the convergence illustrates and underscores what he characterized in Consciencism as the combative nature of a self-liberating doctrine, like pan-Africanism. Its combative nature as a form of struggle or praxis, informed by theory, is necessitated by the contradictions thrown up by the asymmetric structure of the colonial political economy as a microcosm of a wider global political economy, both of which are sustained by economic structures, which sustain unequal exchange relations and which are reinforced and complemented by political and sociocultural institutions, which deny African authenticity, mutuality, and recognition.
The Historical Significance of Nkrumah’s Pan-Africanism
Historically, therefore, this need—requiring the Afrocentric decolonization of the mind and of economic and political processes in Africa—has been and continues to be the vitality, the contribution, and the relevance of Nkrumah’s idea of pan-Africa for Africa and the rest of the world. He epitomizes the promise, challenges, and contradictions in the pan-African idea. Indeed, as Ali Mazrui (1967) rightly observed,