Reviewer: Kofi Akosah-Sarpong in Ottawa, Canada

TITLE: NKRUMAH & THE CHIEFS

AUTHOR: RICHARD RATHBONE

PUBLISHER: F. Reimer Book Services, 20 Abebresem St. P.O. Box CT 3499, Cantonment, Accra, Ghana. 2000

PAGES: 169

PRICES: US$44.95 (Hardcover); US$19.95 (Paperback)

The dawn of colonialism has seen a never-ending battle between African tradition/culture and the colonial ones. In the course of the battle, the colonial, armed with massive propaganda machine, has demeaned African values and its accompanying institutions—"primitive", "mechanical", "pagan", "developing", "uncivilized" are some of the recurring words used to smear Africa’s traditional institutions.

With the departure of the colonial people, African elite, educated in colonial rather, or more,  than African values, and, therefore, knowing foreign colonial values more than their own native African values, internalized all these colonial propaganda, continued with the colonial mentality, seeing their own native values as inferior, and thinking that they are better than their folks who have not received colonial education. The result, as we all see today, is massive confusion throughout Africa—policies not informed by African values, elite who are so confused that there is massive instability, hatred, corruption, egocentrism, deceit, chronic lies and massive unAfrican attitudes raining on the continent. Still, this has resulted in the African region having foreign models and theories most practiced more than anywhere in the world.

This book, Nkrumah & the Chiefs, tells us about how an African government systematically attempted to destroy a very important African traditional institution either for lack of understanding or hatred of the traditional institution as the Ghanaian elites had been brainwashed by the colonialists or lack of any creative means to modify the traditional institutions to fit the modern times, or all these rolled into one. It is not surprising to see Ghanaian (or African) chiefs, 40 years after independence, still not very much harnessed for national development. There is still tension between traditional chiefs and various African regimes. Instead of co-operation and consensus there is suspicion and mistrust. Where are African traditional chiefs in the face of all these crises befalling Africa? To read this book is to understand why? Why haven’t West African traditional chiefs being used to bring peace in Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea Bissau, Guinea Conakry, Mali, Senegal and Cote d’Ivoire? Why not, say, regional African traditional chiefs associations or parliaments as facilitators of some of the development process—for peace talk, for child soldiers, for campaigns against bad governments. The reason is that the African nation-state was created with disregard to Africa’s own political values by the colonialists and African elites who took over perpetuated this. Hence, today’s crises.

In the interim, the Nkrumah government was set in collision course with the traditional rulers, a lot of energies was spent by the Nkrumah regime to ‘crush’ and ‘control’ the traditional chiefs, the same colonial languages were used by the Nkrumah regime to insult the chiefs, to damage them psychologically, to attach them, to demean them, to disgrace them—in a way they were seen as foreigners in their own domains. The regime incited people against the chiefs. The Nkrumah regime saw the traditional chiefs as enemies. Very terrible indeed!!! Where did all these come from? Where did the ‘enemies’ come from?

In contemporary thinking the Nkrumah regime made very monumental mistake in regard to the traditional chiefs—as Dr. Daniel T. Osabu-Kle, author of Compatible Cultural Democracy: The Key to Development in Africa (Broadview Press, Peterborough, Canada, 2000), has observed African elite not coming from traditional royal homes made them not only misunderstand African political values but made attempts to destroy it—a fatal mistake that has resulted in damages to the traditional political system more than what that the colonialists did. Osabu-Kle, therefore, calls for modification of African traditional institutions to suit contemporary times. The African Renaissance process, too, calls for the revival of African values in the continent’s rebirth in the face of confusion.

Hear this stupidity from the book’s jacket: "Kwame Nkrumah’s Convention People’s Party was committed not only to the rapid termination of British colonial rule but also to the elimination of chiefly power. This book is an account of Kwame Nkrumah and his government’s long struggle to wrest administrative control of the Ghanaian countryside from the chiefs…Between 1951 and the creation of the First Republic in 1960, Ghanaian governments sought to discard the chiefly principle in local government, then to weaken chieftaincy by attrition and eventually, by altering the legal basis of chieftaincy, to incorporate and control a considerably altered chieftaincy."

The book demonstrates that chieftaincy was consciously and systematically reconstructed in the decade of the 1950s with implications, which can still be felt in modern Ghana. Why all these attempts to weaken the chiefs, to destroy them, for what purpose? For political expediency or what? And since then what has been the consequences till today? The author himself states that the book will anger those who have seen Nkrumah as saint. It appears the Nkrumah regime lacked the creative means to either tailor the traditional chieftaincy institutions to modern times or were so brainwashed by colonial propaganda that it saw its own traditional native institution and its practitioners as enemies. And in all measure, much of these battles between the Nkrumah regime and the chiefs were in the southern region.

With memorable pictures of Ghanaian chiefs and Kwame Nkrumah, the book is as a result of immersion in the archives of both Ghana and U.K, reading of Ghanaian newspapers, and talks with veteran Ghanaian politicians and chiefs. The author, Richard Rathbone, a British, who teaches modern history of Africa in the University of London, was for some time an undergraduate exchange student at the University of Ghana. Rathbone informs us that for first 50 years people thought chieftaincy will die in the face of the so-called modernization, radical and popular nationalism in Africa. The Chiefs had been seen as supporters of the colonialists and were, therefore, doomed to go with them. And in today’s democratic currents, "chieftaincy and democracy appeared to be definitionally antithetical even if some chiefs, like autocrats everywhere, claimed that they exercised power democratically."

Wrongly or rightly, the Nkrumah regime, like other African nationalists, saw chiefs as obstacles to material modernization and economic transformation. Writes Rathbone, "Chiefs were regarded as barriers to the achievement of either of these goals; they stood for the past, for other-worldly values, and were opposed to both individualism and modernizing corporatism. The process by which chiefs ruled, the rituals and ideas that maintained their authority, were, it was widely claimed, the enemies of rapid transformation.

Africa’s and Africans’ besetting problems were broadly those of ‘underdevelopment’; chieftaincy was seen as a significant aspect of the problem rather than as part of the solution." In this context Nkrumah and other nationalists as well as history concluded that chieftaincy would "wither", informed by world-historical processes which had destroyed powerful aristocracies from Paris to Peking. It appears Nkrumah and his regime didn’t think very deep about how not to destroy Ghanaian chieftaincy institutions, of which they did not succeed, but how they could be healthy partner in national development and economic transformation unlike what had happened in other parts of the world. The thinking of the Nkrumah regime was no more or less than the colonialists, and followed some Eurocentric paradigms, whether Marxist or Liberal. According to Rathbone, the reason for such disdain of traditional chieftaincy was that, "Chieftaincy, rooted in custom and sustained by its mediation with and sometimes control of the supernatural, could not cohabit happily for long with capitalism, the internal combustion engine, literacy, the telephone and international travel."

From here the book aims at the tenacity of chieftaincy in southern Ghana, its ability to survive despite sustain campaign to undermine it, then its reconfiguration by hostile government bent on destroying it in its zeal to control rural affairs. For 10 years the Nkrumah regime spent the same energies it spent on fighting the colonialist as it did on trying to ‘crush’ and ‘control’ the southern chiefs. Chieftaincy in Ghana in essence has changed, not because of the sustained attack on it by various governments, though it played a part, but due to historical processes. In this regard Rathbone informs us that the importance of chieftaincy in Ghana has been obscured by Ghana’s historiography such as nationalism.

As the Museveni government of Uganda has aptly done, in a more creative way, chieftaincy is seen as part of civil society and is competing with other institutions in the development process, waking from their slumber and shaking off their esoteric garb, chieftaincy in Ghana is increasing looking at the development goal as more and more educated and wiser men and women become chiefs. Before last weeks general elections, in a more revised role, amid traditionally, Ghanaian chiefs showed Ghanaian politicians where the roots of the country is, by warning them of increasing political violence and death, in the face of regional instability, and how when in the case of civil war the politicians will run away and leave them and their subjects behind.

This book is a must-read for African reconstructionists, African Renaissance preachers and Afric-centric journalists who seek to understand how colonialism with its African elite followers got it all wrong in dealing with African chieftaincy institutions such as how for 10 good years the Nkrumah government attempted to destroy southern Ghanaian chiefs and how today these chiefs could be used solidly for national development in a more creative way as Uganda have been doing, using them as part of civil society.