Question

In what ways did Kwame Nkrumah attempt to achieve African nationalism in Ghana? What kinds of powerful forces did African leaders have to deal with to achieve their goals?

Answer 1

Ans. The British took over control of all the trading ports by the year 1821 and by the year 1844 Ghana was taken over. This led to colonialism in Ghana. Ghana was earlier called Gold Coast.
Kwame Nkrumah was a leading activist of Pan-Africanism movement. In the year 1952, he became the Prime Minister in and in 1960 became the President when Ghana took up the republic-constitution in 1960.
The Africans were segregated from the world as black people. They were used as slaves and they were imbibed with the thought that they were meant to serve other people, mainly the White people.
Kwame Nkrumah emerged at this time as a Nationalist and won over his people to develop a voting system. This was done with the aim of draining out the thought of slavery from the mind of the people.
He wanted them to stop following the path of the British. He wanted them to develop their own system socially, politically, economically, culturally and scientifically. He made the Africans absorb within them the idea of liberation which soon turned out to be reality under his guidance.
He initiated the seeding of modernizing the Africans and to make them believe in themselves by starting construction of a huge dam Akosombo, on Volta. It was supposed to be used to provide electricity for the entire area. The funding was provided by the Volta aluminium power company. This attempt suffered adverse effects as people misunderstood this step to be a part of colonization.

He was arrested twice prior to holding political positions, but he emerged out as successfully winning hearts of people. Though authoritarian, he, in his tenure built educational institutions mainly schools, health care facilities, roads etc. This opened the pathways to employment.

There were different powerful forces mainly liberalization which when blended with other factors successfully gave a thrust to colonization. These are as follows:

1. It was initially started with peaceful protests. Non violence was used as the means to opt for negotiation. It failed and gave rise to revolution movements.
2. Inception of revolution is a significant force. Different revolutions spread out in different parts of Africa involving the natives and the Africans that were sent to America to act as slaves. The prime one was the Pan African movement. It later was intensified to guerrilla wars throughout the country.
3. With the advent of different nationalist activities becoming dominant, economy started strengthening in some of the colonies like South Africa, Zimbabwe etc.. Though particularly in these two areas the investment of the British were high due to availability of allocation of resources. Moreover in parts of Uganda, Ghana, Tanganyika agriculture had sown its seeds by the localities ahead of colonial powers.

In a nutshell mainly strong political efforts by some great leaders, liberalization was possible. Above all building nationalism was the biggest hurdle and when it was overcome it joined the common people which further strengthened the movements.