Kwame Nkrumah and Ali Mazrui: an analysis of the 1967 Transition debate.

West, Michael O.

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. It assuredly was an investment on which a return was expected--intellectual, political, and commercial. Accordingly, the editors dispatched a copy of the issue with Mazrui's essay to Nkrumah, now in exile in Guinea, with an invitation to respond! If accepted, the resulting Mazrui-Nkrumah exchange would have been a great boon to author and magazine alike. Nkrumah, however, diplomatically refused. No matter. Turning a negative into a positive, Transition trumpeted the statement of refusal as a triumph, an acknowledgment that Kwame Nkrumah had read Mazrui's essay, even if he declined to comment on it. For decades to come, Mazrui would regale audiences with the story of Nkrumah's nonresponsive response. (4)

The Leninist Czar essay was vintage Mazrui, illustrative as it was of the author's intellectual metier: comparative political studies. Its main argument was that Nkrumah patterned his public life on Lenin, the indispensable leader of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution. "There is little doubt that, quite consciously, Nkrumah saw himself as an African Lenin," Mazrui wrote. (5) In support of this view, Mazrui pointed to Nkrumah's books, the most recent of which sported the title, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, (6) a riff on Lenin's 1917 vade mecum, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (7) Mazrui also attributed Nkrumah's emphasis on organization to Leninist influences, although he took care to note differences in this regard. Lenin's chief concern was to organize an elite revolutionary vanguard, whereas Nkrumah stressed mass organization, which his Convention People's Party was the first in colonial Africa to put explicitly to anticolonial purposes. Mazrui even traced Nkrumah's greatest legacy, his unrelenting advocacy of continental African unity, to Leninist origins. (8) Mazrui failed only to add what he would not have known at time, as it was only later revealed: Namely, that Nkrumah reputedly slept under a portrait of Lenin above his bed, as the African American writer Richard Wright, visiting the Gold Coast in the 1950s to gather material for his book Black Power, squealed to United States diplomats. (9)

At one level, Mazrui's essay had said nothing particularly new. From the literary standpoint, at least, Nkrumah's Leninism was no secret. It was certainly evident in his writings and organizational work. Mazrui's novelty was in combining the two, Leninist and Czar. In dubbing Nkrumah "the Leninist Czar," Mazrui, as he was wont to do, upped the rhetorical ante. All good Leninists and students of Lenin knew, or thought they knew, that Leninism had disposed of Czarism, definitively putting paid to Russia's royalist tradition. Now along came the upstart Mazrui, announcing that "while Nkrumah strove to be Africa's Lenin, he also sought to become Ghana's Czar." (10) Lurking in back of Nkrumah's "secular radicalism," Mazrui argued, were deep Czarist impulses inherited from various sources, African and non-African. For Mazrui, the key evidence of Nkrumah's Czarism was his assumption of the title Osagyefo, translated as Redeemer, a title reputedly bestowed on him by Ghanaian royalty. It was not that Mazrui, ever the pragmatist with a high tolerance for inconsistency, objected to the idea of a single individual combining the apparently contradictory ideologies of Leninism and Czarism. He was ready to concede that, "arguably ... a Leninist Czar was what a country like Ghana needed for a while." Nkrumah's transgression, rather, was what the pragmatic political scientist Mazrui prized above all in human affairs, including in the affairs of state: moderation. "Nkrumah's tragedy," Mazrui offered, "was a tragedy of excess, rather than of contradiction. He tried to be too much of a revolutionary monarch." (11)

In the end Mazrui, with usual even-handedness, split the difference. He concluded that Nkrumah ultimately was good for Africa but bad for Ghana. "By leading the country to independence, Nkrumah was a great Gold Coaster," Mazrui offered. "By working hard to keep Pan-Africanism warm as a political ideal, Nkrumah was a great African. But by the tragedy of his domestic excesses after independence, Nkrumah fell short of becoming a great Ghanaian." (12) Mazrui's use of the past tense seemed to connote death, physical as well as political. In fact, Nkrumah would live an additional six years after being removed from power. From his place of exile in Guinea, he had something of a second political coming. He became a theorist of what he called the "armed phase of the African Revolution" and a partisan of the global Black Power movement, which he considered part of the African Revolution. (13)

Mazrui's essay was widely read by the global African literati. The issue of Transition in which the piece appeared sold out and went into a second printing. (14) Meanwhile, Nkrumah had turned down the offer to engage Mazrui, conveying his decision to the editor of Transition through a secretary. "Osagyefo the President is fairly impressed with the scope of your magazine and would be pleased to see copies of future issues," the secretary wrote of Nkrumah, who continued to insist he was Ghana's rightful leader. "The President has admired the literary effort in Professor Ali Mazrui's article 'Nkrumah: the Leninist Czar'." However, the punch line concluded, "I am afraid it has not quite provoked the President into writing comments on it." (15)

Having failed to provoke Nkrumah into engaging Mazrui, the staff of Transition turned to what they apparently considered the best alternative. They turned to K. A. Busia, perhaps the most intellectually able of Ghana's most zealously anti-Nkrumah politicians and a future prime minister of his country. (Busia was trained as an anthropologist, at Oxford, like Mazrui, who of course was a political scientist.) In an interview, the first question the magazine put to Busia was his reaction to Mazrui's essay. (16) Mazrui, Busia retorted, had turned Nkrumah into a better Leninist than he actually was, making "Nkrumahism more orthodox and marxist than was really practiced." Socialism, the anti-socialist Busia continued, was "not compatible with the megalomaniac search for eminence of one individual." (17) But Busia was no substitute for Nkrumah, who for Transition remained the elusive interlocutor.

Meanwhile, Nkrumah did comment on Mazrui's essay, although not for Transition. Nor for public consumption. Several months after the Leninist Czar piece appeared, Nkrumah's London-based confidant, publisher and book procurer, June Milne, sent him a copy of Mazrui's new book, Towards a Pax Africana. (18) After saying he was glad to receive the book, the critique-averse Nkrumah continued apropos of Mazrui: "I have never met him. (19) I have no idea who he is, black or white. After the coup, he wrote an article in the college paper Transition, and called me a 'Leninist Czar', and all sorts of nonsense." But having just denied knowledge of Mazrui's race, Nkrumah then went on to identify him, both racially and politically. "I think he is one of those black neocolonialist intellectuals," wrote the author of Neo-Colonialism. "I will read what he has written." (20) It is unclear if Nkrumah actually read Towards a Pax Africana. If he did, he apparently did not comment on it, as he sometimes commented on the many works Milne and others sent him, generally disapprovingly. In the event, Nkrumah had not forgotten Mazrui. Nor, it seems, forgiven him. Some eight months later another book by another disfavored African intellectual, The Gab Boys by Cameron Duodu, (21) provoked Nkrumah into returning to what he considered the sorry state of the African intelligentsia, with Mazrui as part of the exhibition.

For African intellectuals, Nkrumah offered in gender-specific language that effaced African women intellectuals, (22) "still have the colonial mentality ... these chaps are dependent on European publishers, and they write things they think the white man wants to hear." Only a Chinese-style cultural revolution, combined with a socialist revolution, Nkrumah averred, could reeducate and redeem such individuals. "Ali Mazrui is one of them," he added for good measure. "See the trash he writes in Transition." (23)

If Nkrumah regarded Mazrui's essay as trash, one wondered what he would have made of another article on the subject of his downfall in the next issue of Transition. Appearing under the apparently interrogatory title, "Did Nkrumah favour Pan-Africanism?" the article was written by Russell Warren Howe. A white British journalist with ties to the Central Intelligence Agency, Howe had served as Africa correspondent for various United States publications, including in Nkrumah's Ghana, from which he was deported. (24) Howe began by fastening his sail to Mazrui's wind, lauding the Leninist Czar essay as a "penetrating article" that anticipated the main lines of his own argument. (25) Mazrui, on Howe's telling, had "stressed the similarity between fascism (or Czarism) and communism." From this premise, Howe concluded, "Ghana under Nkrumah was a fairly typical fascist state." (26) Moving seamlessly and promiscuously between fascism and communism, in a manner more reminiscent of Hannah Arendt than of Mazrui's essay, (27) Howe announced that Nkrumah "had leanings towards a Communistic society, but seemed to be more at ease with fascism in the end--albeit a fascism allied to Moscow and Peking when it suited him, and seeking to be compared with the successful image of Lenin rather than the disgraced images of Hitler or Peron." (28) No sooner had Howe settled on a historical model for Nkrumah, however, than he rejected each one as not quite suitable, and began to cast about for others. After toying with Joseph Stalin, the past master of necropolitics who eventually succeeded Lenin, Howe turned to Benito Mussolini, the negrophobic Italian fascist dictator. As an archetype for Nkrumah, he posited, "the example of Mussolini seems closer to that of the Czars or Lenin." (29)

Having exposed Nkrumah as a fascist in communist garb, Howe then set out to demolish the most enduring myth about him. Contrary to popular misconception, Howe disclosed, Nkrumah was no pan-Africanist at all. Far from being a promoter of pan-Africanism, the former Ghanaian leader was actually a wrecker of African unity. Emphatically no, Howe pronounced, answering the question posed in his article, "Did Nkrumah favour Pan-Africanism?"

By his own lights, Howe had unmasked Nkrumah for the fascist that he was and deconstructed the fallacy of his alleged pan-Africanism. It only remained for him to explain the makeup and motivation of so bizarre a personality. For this task, Howe turned to psychobiography. Nkrumah, he determined, was literally crazy, mentally unbalanced. He suffered from schizophrenia. Never short of historical precedents, Howe found yet another one to elucidate Nkrumah's condition. This time, though, he did not have to venture out of Africa, having discovered his model in Tewodros II, an Ethiopian emperor from the nineteenth century. Nkrumah, Howe wrote, "showed disquieting similarities with the Emperor Teodros III [sic] of Ethiopia, who had frankly psychotic periods." (30)

At this point, Howe took leave of Mazrui, whose analytical lead he claimed to have followed and whose trope had it that Nkrumah, although in the end a bad Ghanaian, was a great African. "I accept the main lines of Mazrui's analysis," Howe noted, "but I think history will see Nkrumah more (like Teodros) as a colourful scoundrel, a great 'card' (Transition's cover was symbolic) and a consummate headline-hunter rather than an activist in history. I do not see him as being a 'great' African." (31) After charting the tragedy of Nkrumah, Howe ended his article on a note of farce. "Perhaps Nkrumah's great tragedy--and this is not meant facetiously--was the absence, in the present generation, of a lively and prosperous theatre in Africa," Howe allowed. "The stage, rather than politics, would have been the natural vehicle for a man of such eccentric and erratic talents and brilliant pretences, with a great gift for being, at least temporarily, all or most things to all or most people." (32)

Thus was the leading actor--and this truly is not meant facetiously--on the African political stage for a generation breezily dismissed as a conman and a madman whose only potentially redeeming feature, as a showman, had been aborted by the reputed absence of an arena for the expression of his iniquitous gifts. (Contrary to Howe's assertion, Africa had a theater.) In the flood and fury of ink spilling that followed Nkrumah's fall from power, Howe's article ranked high on the list of the absurd. It truly qualified as trash, the language Nkrumah used to describe Mazrui's essay. Not just by comparison, but also on its own terms, Mazrui's essay was a model of credible (if debatable) analysis and balance, rendering unwarranted Nkrumah's characterization of it. Even Nkrumah's most rabid critics, like the Ghanaian military men who staged the coup against him, refrained from treading where Howe did. (33)

On the face of it, Howe's article was beyond the pale, unworthy of inclusion in a serious journal of African thought, whatever the attitude of the editors toward Nkrumah and the rather inglorious end of his rule--good, bad or indifferent. The article was so intemperate, tendentious and unbalanced that even the editorial pages of Howe's newspaper, the Washington Post, may have looked askance at it. (By the time of his ouster the US and Western press, whose governments strongly backed the Ghana coup, had turned vigorously anti-Nkrumah.)

Given its literary insipidness and political toxicity, the question of why Transition, an apparently serious journal of African thought, chose to publish Howe's article becomes pertinent. It is unknown if Mazrui, who at that point was one of the journal's five associate editors (working alongside a single editor), had a hand in the decision. It seems clear, though, that Howe's article was part of a larger push to generate discussion of Mazrui's essay. That push included headlining the "Letters to the Editor" section of the issue in which Howe's piece appeared with the news of Nkrumah's refusal to engage Mazrui. The letter of refusal was published under the caption, "Literary Effort Admired," which is what Nkrumah's secretary reported him as saying about Mazrui's essay. (34) Further evidence of Transition's attempt to keep the debate alive is not wanting.

The issue that followed Howe's piece, itself sparked by Mazrui's essay, carried the interview with K. A. Busia, in which the interviewer's first question was about the Mazrui essay. Unusually, the following issue of the magazine (the one after Howe's article) carried just two letters to the editor. The shorter one castigated Mazrui for asserting that, in the period called Reconstruction after the US Civil War, the freed slaves displayed "flamboyant ostentation." (35)

An accompanying and much longer letter also seemed to be aimed at stoking the fire lit by Mazrui, but with a twist. Its author, Y. Tandon, taught in the Department of Political Science at Makerere, as Mazrui did. Tandon attacked Howe and defended Mazrui, although the defense was mingled with mild criticism. "Ali Mazrui's article, to which Howe apparently responded, was reasoned, well-presented and, after reading Howe's article, also a fair assessment of Nkrumah," Tandon declaimed. "What is most irritating about Howe is that he thinks he can use Mazrui's article to prove his point; that, in fact, he too, like Mazrui, is denouncing Nkrumah--only a little more so," Tandon went on. "The treatment of Nkrumah by Mazrui is brilliant, if incomplete. The treatment by Howe is simply vile. The one is academic, the other a specimen of the worst kind of journalism." Tandon concluded with a warning. "If Transition is to retain the respect of its African readership, it has to be careful that it does not become another instrument of the international press," he intoned. "We have already too many international journals which can do the job for Howe and his likes." (36)

Readers of Transition perhaps could be forgiven for concluding that Howe, making his maiden appearance in the magazine, wittingly or unwittingly had become a foil, his article being so unreasonable as to demonstrate, by contrast, the reasonableness of Mazrui's. Such a conclusion seemed to be supported by the fact that Tandon had been given ample space in the journal to set up the counterpoint between Mazrui, his colleague and coworker, and Howe, the neocolonialist whom he denounced.

The Ghanaian writer Ama Ata Aidoo was one of many readers of Transition who seemed to think the magazine was using Howe's article to put Mazrui's essay in a better light and, just as importantly, to keep the discussion going. Writing from the United States, Aidoo, who was one of the few women to join the debate in the pages of Transition, began with Howe before moving on to Mazrui by way of postscript. "'Thank you' to our big white father Howe for an extremely illuminating and rather fresh analysis of Kwame Nkrumah," Aidoo noted, tongue in cheek. "Our ignorance was extreme." In appreciation of Howe's enlightenment, especially in the field of psychiatry, she persisted in the same mocking tone, "we are going to send Kwame Nkrumah to Bellevue (a hospital for the criminally insane in New York) as soon as possible." In an aside, she then took aim at Mazrui as an enabler of Howe. "Incidentally, we are also grateful to our own Professor Ali Mazrui and all other objective and non-partisan African intellectuals and journalists who make the writing and publication of papers like Mr. Howe's possible." (37)

Munhamu Utete, in another letter that appeared in the same issue as Aidoo's, dispensed with indirection, and sarcasm, and attack Mazrui forthrightly. Utete rounded on the Leninist Czar essay, denouncing it, Nkrumah-style, as so much neocolonial sophistry and apologia, "utterly without value." Despite his "spurious objectivity and fake scientism," Utete offered, Mazrui reproduced "all the innuendo, baseless insinuations, and propaganda slanders of world imperialist and reactionary circles that Nkrumah oppressed the people of Ghana." Objectively, Utete determined, Mazrui was allied with the coup makers and their neocolonialist backers who claimed to have "liberated" Ghana. (38)

Utete's critique, including his "excellent shooting down of Howe's sewer-propaganda article on Nkrumah," was lauded by Ken Geering, writing from Britain. (39) Mostly, though, Geering was concerned to directly connect the contents in Transition with one of its key sources of funding. "As long as the banner of the Central Intelligence Agency's front organisation, 'the Congress of Cultural Freedom' appears on Transition's first page, however inconspicuously, however shyly, just so long will what is in so many ways a fine magazine publish anti-African, American interpretations of African events." (40) Geering had raised a very sore point. The Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF), the Paris-based, anticommunist outfit and cultural Cold Warrior that funded scores of organizations and publications worldwide, had recently been exposed as a CIA front. While the CCF leaders were well aware of its underwriters, most recipients of its largess were quite ignorant of the ultimate source of their good fortune. It was no secret that Transition was one of those recipients, and had been for a number of years. When the news of the CIA connections broke, the editors of Transition put out a statement "paying tribute to an important benefactor of this magazine," the CCF, "through its 'no strings' grant." Without directly mentioning the intelligence revelations, the uncharacteristically convoluted statement thanked the CCF for its "truly impartial and disinterested" support "at a time when the 'hidden (or not so hidden) persuasion' fact or in all aid can so easily devalue the integrity of grants [sic]." The statement further noted that, in the wake of the CIA expose, the Ford Foundation had assumed full financial responsibility for the CCF, from which Transition continued to receive support. (41)

That the Ford Foundation had picked up where the CIA left off was not good enough for critics like Geering, especially since many former recipients, unimpressed by the changing of fiduciary guards, had severed ties with the CCF. "One would have thought that news of the flight from the Congress of Cultural Freedom would have reached Kampala," where Transition was based, Geering acidly reproved. "All over the world organisations are hastening to dissociate themselves from this offshoot of the U.S. spy and murder organisation, the C.I.A. The game is up, the C.C.F. has come to the end of its yard of cloth, and there's no rope left ... Transition should disassociate too, from this foreign espionage group." (42)

The Kenyan novelist James Ngugi (later Ngugi wa Thiong'o) agreed with Geering. "I remember hearing, quite recently, that this great cultural organization," the CCF, "received funds from CIA pockets," Ngugi offered satirically, in the manner of his fellow imaginary writer, Ama Ata Aidoo. Ngugi noted that Transition had recently called attention to a "Project Camelot," which directed CIA funding of cultural organizations, and concluded: "I wonder how many other Project Camelots there are in East Africa to-day!" (43) Transition, he implied, was one of them.

Geering and Ngugi had made explicit what was implied in other responses to Mazrui (and Howe). Repeatedly, it was insinuated, or outright asserted, that the attacks on Nkrumah were disingenuous and unprincipled. According to this view, Mazrui was in the service of external forces, indeed anti-African forces, objectively if not subjectively. (There was consensus among the interlocutors, including defenders of Mazrui, that Howe consciously served the neocolonialists.) The revelation that Transition had been getting CIA money--even if the editors of the magazine, like many if not most recipients of CCF funding, were unaware of that fact--only strengthened the critics in their conviction that the payer of the piper indeed was calling the tune.

The stream of unflattering commentaries on Nkrumah in Transition, hard on the heels of Mazrui's essay, seemed to further bolster the view that the magazine had an animus against the ousted Ghanaian president. Some of those commentaries even seemed gratuitous. Consider, for example, a Freudian-inflected article on Shaka, the nineteenth-century founder of the Zulu kingdom in contemporary South Africa. Having been silent on Nkrumah all along, the article suddenly and inexplicably ended by attributing to him a "Shaka complex." (Like Nkrumah and Tewodros, Shaka was labeled as mentally unbalanced by various European writers, some of whom nicknamed him Shaka the Terrible, causing some Africans to respond with an opposing moniker: Shaka the Great.) James Fernandez, the author of the article, thought Nkrumah mirrored Shaka in "his [Nkrumah's] relationship to his mother, his relationship to women, his driving and, in the end, self-defeating ambitions." The title of Nkrumah's self-written life story, Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah, (44) Fernandez informed readers, "is reminiscent of the consuming ambition of Shaka--the nation become [sic] the leader's wish objectified. Politics, for those driven by a Shaka complex, is no longer the process of arbitration and maintenance of balance. It is the creation of a charisma and its imposition upon reality--a charisma let it be said which was first possessed by the child in his mother's eyes." (45) There seemed to be no end to the historical personalities, in and out of Africa, Nkrumah's public life is said to have resembled. Evidence of an anti-Nkrumah design in Transition, for those seeking such evidence, apparently was everywhere in the magazine.

Nkrumah's admirers responded by doubling down on their counterattacks. In Mazrui, whose essay they saw as the opening salvo in the campaign against their hero, the Nkrumaists found their chief target. (Nkrumah and his acolytes spelled it "Nkrumaist," without the "h," not "Nkrumahist," as Mazrui joined others in doing.) Mazrui, his pro-Nkrumah critics declared, was a man of talent, but his talent was politically misguided.

He had little sympathy for and even less solidarity with struggling humanity in Africa. Instead, he had put his intellect in the service of the oppressors and traducers of Africa and Africans. By this reasoning he was, in Nkrumah's formulation, a Black neocolonial intellectual.

That was certainly the view of O. F. Onoge and K. A. Gaching'a, respectively from Nigeria and Kenya. Both men were students in North America. In a long coauthored letter to the editor of Transition, the pair refused to be drawn into a discussion of the article by Howe, whom they summarily dismissed in language similar to Howe's own invectives against Nkrumah. Howe, they said, was "irretrievably deranged." (46) The coming African revolution, Onoge and Gaching'a declared, would render people like Howe mute and irrelevant. "Unfortunately the Mazruis will still be with us," they lamented. "It is to him that we must address ourselves." Mazrui's essay, the duo asserted, was "an excellent illustration of the misdirected brilliance of much of current African scholarship." He was a "political science with more politics than science" and, as such, guilty of many wrongs, among them "magical verbal tricks," "intellectual masturbation," and "scurrilous diatribes" against Nkrumah. To Onoge and Gaching'a, Mazrui's essay was "a case of neo-colonial scholarship." (47) Their conclusion, and manner of speech, was too much for the Ghanaian Maxwell Owusu. Confessing that he, like Mazrui, may be a "Eurocentric, neo-colonialist scholar," Owusu scolded Onoge and Gaching'a for using "vehemently abusive" language that was "unbecoming of the budding African social scientists." (48)

But despite the occasional defender like Owusu (and Y. Tandon), the responses in Transition ran strongly against Mazrui's essay. The critics included E. R. Ibira and K. Y. Waibike. It may be safely assumed that Ibira and Waibike, writing jointly from Kampala, knew Mazrui personally, although the general tenor of their intervention suggested a less than cordial political and intellectual relationship. Ibira and Waibike found Mazrui's essay "obnoxiously fluent but intellectually hypocritical." On reading the essay, they were "struck by a pervading sense of injustice and cruelty meted out to one of Africa's greatest sons--Nkrumah--by one of Africa's talented professors, but nevertheless whose talent is misdirected--Mazrui. Why does he rejoice at Nkrumah's overthrow by an army clique motivated by greed and financed by eternal forces?" Accordingly, Ibira and Waibike demanded to know: "On whose side is Mazrui? On Africa's or on the imperialist predators? Mazrui is one of the new Africa's [sic] intellectuals who is a failure. He is a failure because he does not regard himself as being involved in the African struggle, he shapes past history to dovetail into his newly propounded theory divorced from reality and laughs, as a Lucifer would laugh, at efforts made by millions of Africans 'towards colonial freedom'." (49)

Mazrui had the last laugh, though he denied he was any kind of Lucifer. (50) He concluded the debate he began in the pages of Transition with a reply to his many critics that was more than half again as long as his original Leninist Czar essay. (51) While "irritated" with his detractors, whom he waved off so as many "Nkrumah worshippers," Mazrui insisted that he had tried to be "balanced and fair" in his assessment of Nkrumah. (52)

Claiming to be a dispassionate, objective scholar, Mazrui likened himself to the emerging nation-states of Africa and Asia whose refusal to take sides in the Cold War earned them the scorn of East and West alike. A "spirit of detachment in assessing Nkrumah and a spirit of nonalignment in the cold war have something in common--they share the risk of being despised or blamed by partisans on both sides." (53) His critics, Mazrui suggested, had been unfair to him, in part because they had not taken the time to read him carefully. Perhaps, he added, they could not spare the time. "I realise that it is the business of revolutionaries to be in a hurry," he wisecracked. "And many of my critics in your column sound like revolutionaries. In that capacity perhaps one does not have time to examine too closely what one is about to 'demolish'!" (54)

Whether or not the critics had succeeded in demolishing it, the Leninist Czar essay had provoked animated, even angry, discussion and debate on multiple continents, as evidenced by the responses. For better or worse, the profile of the thirty-three-year-old author, a rising star in the East African academy, had been greatly boosted. While belied by Nkrumah's seemingly unruffled, nonresponsive response in Transition, mediated by his secretary, Mazrui had even managed to raise the hackles of the former Ghanaian president himself, although that was not public knowledge at the time. (Nkrumah's private correspondence, in which he lashed out at Mazrui, would not be published for another quarter century.) Yet for all the ruckus it caused, in many ways the most provocative thing about Mazrui's nine-page essay was its title. Even so, it launched the first notable debate of a public intellectual who so relished debates, and whose subsequent life in and out of the academy would be studded with such discursive fisticuffs.

For Nkrumah, Mazrui was just one of legions of detractors, albeit one irritating enough to warrant being castigated on at least two occasions in his private correspondence. In this respect, however, Mazrui was not unique. Nkrumah answered many other critics in his personal letters, often in more sustained ways than he dissected Mazrui. In a few instances, Nkrumah seemed to try to convince (or at least engage) his critics by sending them copies of his books and other writings, as he did to Harry Bretton, a white professor in the United States who had written an unfavorable "rise and fall" book on Nkrumah that came out the year after Mazrui's essay. (55) From all accounts, Nkrumah made no similar gesture to Mazrui. If he had, Mazrui surely would have publicized it, just as he publicized Nkrumah's nonresponsive response to his essay. It is known that Nkrumah had a copy of Mazrui's Towards a Pax Africana, which came out around the same time as Bretton's book. But, as previously noted, there is no indication that Nkrumah read or commented on Mazrui's book. After his choice words, sotto voce, about the Leninist Czar essay, Nkrumah apparently took leave of Mazrui. Mazrui, however, was not finished with Nkrumah.

Some four years after his Leninist Czar essay, Mazrui wrote Nkrumah, apparently his first attempt at direct contact with the exiled ex-president. The occasion was the death of Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Egyptian leader. Nasser and Nkrumah had a complex relationship: they were at once overt allies and covert adversaries. Popular lore had it that each man desired to be the preeminent figure on the African political stage and the preeminent African on the global political stage. (56)

Even so, Nasser condemned Nkrumah's overthrow as part a larger "imperialist plan" to undermine African independence; supplied Nkrumah with mangoes during his exile; and materially supported his Egyptian wife and their children, who fled to Egypt after the Ghana coup. (57) Nkrumah and Nasser are reputed to have shared a vision of pan-Africanism that was, in Mazrui's language, "trans-Saharan." (58) But Nkrumah, at least the exiled Nkrumah, seemed to doubt Nasser's pan-Africanism (and his revolutionary zeal), believing his real passion was pan-Arabism. Nasser, Nkrumah observed in private to a correspondent on the death of the Egyptian leader, was "a nationalist but [he] lacked revolutionary socialist foundation. He would have done so much better for Egypt if he had looked towards Africa instead of towards the Middle East." (59)

When Nasser died, Mazrui sought to organize an edited book on his life's work. In view of the connections, and contradictions, between the late president of Egypt and the ex-president of Ghana, Mazrui wrote Nkrumah soliciting a chapter for his proposed collection. Undoubtedly, Nkrumah's contribution would have been the star attraction of such a book. Publishing the subject of his controversial essay would also have been something of a literary and political coup for Mazrui. It would not come to pass. Once again, Nkrumah did not engage. He failed to respond to Mazrui's invitation, his silence substituting for a written refusal this time around. The reason is unclear. Perhaps Nkrumah, who was known to hold a grudge--Mazrui did not--was giving the cold shoulder to someone who, from his standpoint, had kicked him at the very moment he had been knocked to the ground. But Harry Bretton did pretty much the same (even if his book did not generate the kind of discussion Mazrui's essay did), which did not prevent Nkrumah from initiating communication with him. Perhaps also Nkrumah was not then prepared to publicly share his real thoughts on Nasser; among other reasons, he likely would not have wanted to antagonize Nasser's successors, who continued to sustain his family. Again, too, Nkrumah's failure to reply to Mazrui was consistent with a policy he adopted on going into exile, a policy of rejecting virtually all unsolicited requests for essays and interviews. This was the very principle on which he had refused to engage, in the pages of Transition, Mazrui's 1966 essay. Furthermore, by the time of Nasser's death Nkrumah's own health had deteriorated, a consequence of his undiagnosed, or misdiagnosed, cancer. In any case, Mazrui's projected volume on Nasser apparently never appeared, whether because of the inability to interest Nkrumah is unknown.

"Kwame Nkrumah is dead." (60) In April 1972 a Russian friend so informed Mazrui, as he was leaving a hotel in Washington, DC. Nkrumah had succumbed to cancer in Bucharest, Romania, where he had gone for treatment months earlier. Mazrui was "deeply moved" by Nkrumah's passing. When Mazrui visited Romania months later, he found himself "enquiring where Nkrumah had spent his last days." (61) These personal reactions prefaced an article, appropriately enough in Transition, in which Mazrui lauded Nkrumah's foreign policy, including his attempt to mediate the US war against Vietnam, as capturing "African aspiration." Nkrumah, who was overthrown while traveling in Asia on his Vietnam peace mission, "lost domestic power partly because he had internationalist concerns," Mazrui noted. (62)

Now, there was no critique of Nkrumah's domestic policies. Nor any mention of the (in)famous Leninist Czar essay. Whether because of its quasi-obituary quality or not, Mazrui's treatment of Nkrumah on this occasion was pure celebration, with nary a hint of critique. It was the beginning of a love affair, of sorts.

Mazrui's romance with Nkrumah reached its apogee with what would become his most identifiable intellectual legacy, and the trope for which he is best known, that of an African "triple heritage" consisting of indigenous, Afro-Asian Islamic, and European-Christian civilizations. First presented in 1986 as a BBC/PBS television documentary and then as a book, Mazrui's triple-heritage idea reached a mass audience worldwide. On seeing the television series, Gamal Nkrumah (named after Gamal Abdel Nasser), Nkrumah's son with his Egyptian wife, asked Mazrui how his "concept of Africa's triple heritage was different from his father's consciencism." Gamal Nkrumah had in mind Kwame Nkrumah's book, Consciencism, his major philosophical work. (63) Published in 1964, more than two decades before Mazrui's television series aired, this book advanced an argument strikingly similar to Mazrui's, namely that the societies of Africa are a synthesis of African, Islamic and Western cultural traditions.

In response to Gamal Nkrumah's question, Mazrui replied that his triple-heritage trope came from "three great teachers." The first was Edward Wilmot Blyden, perhaps the outstanding black intellectual of the nineteenth-century and author, in 1887, of Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race, which indubitably anticipates Mazrui's triple heritage. (64) His "second great teacher," Mazrui told Gamal, was Kwame Nkrumah, the lessons coming largely from Consciencism. "My third great teacher was my own life," Mazrui finished off. Growing up in the Indian Ocean port city of Mombasa, Kenya, he "crossed those three civilizations several times every twenty-four hours. I was getting Westernized at school, Islamized at home and at the mosque, and Africanized at home and in the streets. I was myself a triple heritage in the making." (65) It remained for Blyden and Nkrumah to lay out, in historical, theological and philosophical terms, the foundations of Mazrui's lived triple heritage.

Mazrui's realization of his triple heritage marked a disjuncture, including as it did a revision of his previous views on Nkrumah. At the center of this evolution in Mazrui's thinking was Nkrumah's book, Consciencism. Several critics of Mazrui's Leninist Czar essay had called attention to its neglect of Consciencism. No serious analysis of Nkrumah, the critics argued, could fail to take account of his major philosophical work. (66) Mazrui, as usual, had a ready response. "I do not think Consciencism is an interesting work," he shot back. Quoting from his own inaugural lecture at Makerere, Mazrui went on: "the most intellectual of all Nkrumah's own works is Consciencism ... Yet Consciencism is also the least Africa-oriented of all Nkrumah's books." Intellectually, Mazrui also had a less than exalted opinion of Nkrumah. "On the whole I do not think Nkrumah is a particularly original thinker," he offered. Mazrui rated Nkrumah "significantly below" the Tanzanian leader, Julius Nyerere, "in sheer intellectual freshness." (67)

From this unpromising beginning, Mazrui arrived at a much more hallowed view of Nkrumah's mind a generation later. From the unoriginal thinker of his relative youth, Nkrumah was promoted to the post of preceptor, the "second great teacher" of the mature Mazrui, after the very intellectually imposing Blyden. Consciencism, previously dismissed by Mazrui as uninteresting and the least African-centered of Nkrumah's works, became one of two sturdy epistemic legs on which he rested his career-defining triple-heritage trope, the third leg of the triad being experiential, that is, Mazrui's own life. It was a remarkable about-face, but one Mazrui never explained. How then to explain it? Had the mature Mazrui adopted as his mentor an unoriginal thinker, and then taken inspiration in his uninteresting and non-Afrocentric book? That seems unlikely. It is more likely that Mazrui changed his mind about Nkrumah's intellectual worth, and about the Africanist value of Consciencism, albeit without advertisement.

The reason for the reversal obviously had nothing to do with Nkrumah, long since dead, and everything to do with Mazrui. In part, the explanation may have to do with location, and the experiences derived therefrom. Responding to critics of his Leninist Czar essay, Mazrui had observed that they were all non-Ghanaians. (68) He may also have noted that many of those critics, although hailing directly from Africa, were writing from outside the continent. In fine, they were in the diaspora, temporarily or permanently. As the postcolonial African universities declined in the 1970s and 1980s, along with the journals they sustained, including Transition, many African scholars, including Mazrui, also joined the growing new African diaspora in North America and Europe. It was from his perch in the diaspora that Mazrui completed his reexamination of Nkrumah, whose own political consciousness was decisively shaped during his twelve-year-long sojourn outside of Africa, as a student, worker and organizer in the United States and Britain. Mazrui never became an Nkrumah worshipper, as he had accused critics of his essay of being. He was too good a scholar to be uncritical of anyone, and too good a Muslim to worship any but the almighty. He did, however, in due course come to a greater appreciation of Nkrumah's mind and of his intellectual (if not always his political) labor.

The evolution in thought coincided with an evolution in practice. The diaspora-based Mazrui could hardly be described as detached from struggles outside the academy, as his detractors previously asserted; or as a neocolonial shill, as Nkrumah declaimed. Remade in the diaspora into an insurgent and transgressive organic intellectual, Mazrui proved ever more willing, even eager, to enter the antinomian political arena, the many causes he championed including reparations for slavery and colonialism for black folk and Palestinian national rights against Israeli apartheid and settler colonialism. A pair of critics of his Leninist Czar essay, E. R. Ibira and K. Y. Waibike, had rhetorically posed the question: "On whose side is Mazrui? On Africa's or on the imperialist predators?" The question had since become academic. Mazrui transparently was now on the side of Africa and struggling humanity everywhere. This Mazrui, the fighter of the good fight based in the diaspora, was in part a product of engagements with Nkrumah and his life and legacy. Indeed, two Nkrumah-centered projects, the Leninist Czar essay and the triple-heritage trope, may be seen as veritable bookends to Mazrui's public life, intellectual and political. It was a significant part of a significant life, Ali Mazrui's interlocution with Kwame Nkrumah.

by

Michael O. West, Ph.D.

michaelowest@gmail.com

Professor, Sociology, Africana Studies, History

Binghamton University

State University of New York, Binghamton, NY

(1) See, for example, C. L. R. James, "The Rise of Fall of Nkrumah," in Anna Grimshaw, ed., The C.L.R. James Reader (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1993; first pub. 1966), pp. 354-361; William Bedford van Lare, The Rise and Fall of Kwame Nkrumah and Its Impact on the Rest of Africa (Accra-Tema: State Publishing Corporation, 1967); Harry L. Bretton, The Rise and Fall of Kwame Nkrumah: A Study of Personal Rule in Africa (New York: Praeger, 1967).

(2) Ali A. Mazrui, The Africans: A Triple Heritage (Boston: Little, Brown, 1986).

(3) Ali Mazrui, "Nkrumah: The Leninist Czar," Transition 26 (1966), pp. 8-17.

(4) See, for example, Ali Mazrui, Nkrumah's Legacy and African's Triple Heritage: Between Globalization and Counter Terrorism (Accra: Ghana Universities Press, 2004), p. 12.

(5) Mazrui, "Nkrumah," p. 9.

(6) Kwame Nkrumah, Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (London: Nelson, 1965).

(7) Vladimir Il'ich Lenin, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (Moscow: Foreign Language Pub. House, 1951; first pub. 1917).

(8) Mazrui, "Nkrumah."

(9) Richard Wright, Black Power: A Record of Reactions in a Land of Pathos (New York: Harper, 1954). Although an exile from American apartheid living in France, Wright became an (apparently unpaid) informer for the United States government, betraying over several years the confidence of Nkrumah and even more so of George Padmore, Nkrumah's London-based close advisor and supposedly also Wright's close friend. See Hazel Rowley, Richard Wright: The Life and Times (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2001), pp. 436-437; Carol Polsgrove, Ending British Rule in Africa: Writers in a Common Cause (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009), pp. 118-144.

(10) Mazrui, "Nkrumah," p. 9.

(11) Ibid. (italics in original).

(12) Ibid., p. 17 (italics in original).

(13) For a sampling of Nkrumah's writings in exile, see Kwame Nkrumah, Revolutionary Path (New York: International Publishers, 1973).

(14) Transition, 30 (1967), p. 27.

(15) Transition, 27 (1966), p. 5.

(16) "Interview with Dr. K.A. Busia," Transition, 28 (1967), pp. 20-23.

(17) Ibid., p. 20.

(18) Ali A. Mazrui, Towards a Pax Africana: A Study of Ideology and Ambition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967). Nkrumah's Ghana is the subject of chapter 4 of this book, pp. 59-73.

(19) Mazrui said as a student he encountered Nkrumah at a reception ("sherry party") in New York around 1960 and subsequently in Ghana. See Ali A. Mazrui, "A Reply to Critics," Transition, 32 (1967), pp. 48-52; Mazrui, Nkrumah's Legacy and African's Triple Heritage, p. 4.

(20) June Milne, ed., Kwame Nkrumah, the Conakry Years: His Life and Letters (London: PANAF, 1990), p. 116.

(21) Cameron Duodu, The Gab Boys (London: Deutsch, 1967).

(22) On Nkrumah's elision of women in Ghanaian nationalism, see Jean Allman, "The Disappearing of Hannah Kudjoe: Nationalism, Feminism, and the Tyrannies of History," Journal of Women's History, 21, 3 (2009), pp. 13-35.

(23) Milne, ed., Kwame Nkrumah, p. 184.

(24) Howe blamed his deportation on Nkrumah advisor George Padmore, "a rather terrifying figure." See Posgrove, Ending British Rule in Africa, p. 162.

(25) Russell Warren Howe, "Did Nkrumah favour Pan-Africanism?" Transition, 27 (1966), pp. 13-15.

(26) Ibid., p. 13.

(27) Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1951).

(28) Howe, "Did Nkrumah favour Pan-Africanism?", p. 13. Juan Peron was the Argentinian leader who modeled himself on European fascists.

(29) Ibid., p. 15.

(30) Ibid.

(31) Ibid.

(32) Ibid.

(33) See, for example, Colonel A. A. Afrifa, The Ghana Coup: 24th February 1966 (London: Frank Cass & Co. Ltd, 1967).

(34) Transition, 27 (1966), p. 5.

(35) Transition, 28 (1967), p. 5. Others also took Mazrui to task for "patronizing and glaring distortion of Afro-American history." Mazrui, in turn, defended his characterization. See O. F. Onoge and K. A. Gaching'a, "Mazrui's 'Nkrumah': A Case of Neocolonial Scholarship," Transition, 30 (1967), pp. 25-27 (quotation on p. 26); Mazrui, "A Reply to Critics," p. 51.

(36) Transition, 28 (1967), pp. 5-6. Howe responded to Tandon. See Transition, 29 (1967), p. 5.

(37) Transition, 29 (1967), pp. 5-6.

(38) Ibid., pp. 6-8.

(39) Transition, 32 (1967), p. 7.

(40) Ibid., p. 8. The organization was actually named Congress for Cultural Freedom, not Congress of Cultural Freedom, as Geering called it.

(41) Transition, 29 (1967), p. 3.

(42) Transition, 32 (1967), p. 8.

(43) Ibid.

(44) Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah (New York: Nelson, 1957).

(45) James W. Fernandez, "The Shaka Complex," Transition, 29 (1967), pp. 10-14 (quotation on p. 14).

(46) Onoge and Gaching'a, "Mazrui's 'Nkrumah'," p. 25.

(47) Ibid., pp. 25-27.

(48) Transition, 31 (1967), pp. 7-8.

(49) Ibid., pp. 5-7. The phrase, "towards colonial freedom," is derived from Nkrumah's first book, Towards Colonial Freedom, which, together with Neo-Colonialism (then Nkrumah's latest book), is used to bookend Mazrui's essay. For additional contributions to the debate, see Transition, 30 (1967), p. 5; Kenneth W. Grundy and Michael Weinstein, "The Political Uses of Imagination," ibid., pp. 20-24; Transition, 31 (1967), p. 5.

(50) Mazrui may or may not have taken comfort in the fact that Nkrumah was also accused of possessing satanic qualities: a poster in a march organized by the military men who overthrew Nkrumah called him a "devil in a Christian suit." See K. A. Bediako, The Downfall of Kwame Nkrumah (Accra: Published by the Author, 1966?), p. 9.

(51) Mazrui, "A Reply to Critics."

(52) Ibid., p. 48.

(53) Ibid.

(54) Ibid., p. 49.

(55) Bretton, The Rise and Fall of Kwame Nkrumah. Howard University Archives, Moorland-Spingarn, Kwame Nkrumah Papers, Box 154-2, folder 48: Bretton to Nkrumah, 12 June 1969.

(56) Mazrui himself has discoursed on "Nkrumahism versus Nasserism." See Mazrui, Nkrumah's Legacy and Africa's Triple Heritage, pp. 9-11.

(57) Milne, ed., Kwame Nkrumah, pp. 21, 68, 382-283. Nasser himself reportedly selected Nkrumah's Egyptian Coptic (Christian) wife, Fathia Rizk. The dynastic-like arrangement was made sight unseen, the couple first encountering one another when the bride arrived in Ghana for the nuptials. The marriage, in 1957, the year of Ghana's independence, lasted as long as the Nkrumah regime. Although correspondence passed back and forth, wife and husband never saw each other again after she returned to Egypt. Nor, apparently, did Nkrumah see his children after going in exile.

(58) Mazrui, Towards a Pax Africana, p. 212.

(59) Milne, ed., Kwame Nkrumah, p. 382.

(60) Ali A. Mazrui, "Nkrumah, Obote and Vietnam," Transition, 43 (1973), pp. 36-39 (quotation on p. 36).

(61) Ibid., p. 36.

(62) Ibid., p. 37.

(63) Kwame Nkrumah, Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology of De-Colonization (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970; first pub. 1964).

(64) Edward Wilmot Blyden, Christianity, Islam and the Negro Race (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1967; first pub. 1887).

(65) Mazrui, Nkrumah's Legacy and Africa's Triple Heritage, p. 1.

(66) See, for example, Onoge and Gaching'a, "Mazrui's 'Nkrumah'"; Transition, 31, pp. 5-7.

(67) Mazrui, "A Reply to Critics," p. 52.

(68) Mazrui was in error; there was at least one Ghanaian critic, Ama Ata Aidoo, in addition to at least one Ghanaian defender of his, Maxwell Owusu.