When Dancers Play Historians And Thinkers – Postscript 1

This critical examination of Basil Davidson’s Black Star: A View of the Life and Times of Kwame Nkrumah (New York: Praeger, 1973), was originally scheduled to run as a chapter or two of my series titled “When Dancers Play Historians And Thinkers,” a part of the seemingly interminable Danquah-Nkrumah Debates, the first of which appeared on Ghanaweb.com on June 9, 2006. Along the line, other issues that I found to be more pressing and/or significant crossed my path, and so I decided to temporarily take a break in order to tackle those issues. Nearly ten years later, I have still not finished dealing with those issues, as sociocultural and political issues are not transient phenomena; one deals with them for as long as one has the energy and interest, but not necessarily as much time as one would like to have at one’s disposal

I find Davidson’s Black Star to be quite fascinating but not necessarily one of his best works on the subject at hand, if also because the author adopts the sort of liberalist stance that has gained quite a bit of justifiable notoriety in many a racially charged Western society in recent years, that polite but decidedly pejorative label of “The Blameless Africans,” as one widely used by the ancient Greek historians to denote excusable benightedness or forgivable lack of enlightenment, whose curious implication was, of course, that, somehow, much that was remarkable and intellectually puissant could not be reasonably expected of the African Personality, philosophically speaking. Still, as a beginner’s introduction to postcolonial Ghana’s first leader, Black Star is definitely a decent read. Among the most memorable paragraphs with which Davidson opens his book is the following: “This difference consisted in a couple of obscure passengers bound for the Gold Coast, the colonial name of Ghana, one of England’s oldest African colonies. To these men, at least, this voyage of the Accra had a singular meaning. They were going home; beyond that, though, one of them was going with a mission to lead his country to independence, and his companion meant to participate in that difficult and risky enterprise. As Kwame Nkrumah and Kojo Botsio watched the shores of England fade along the skylines of November, they knew that, one way or the other, nothing would be the same again” (Black Star 9).

Davidson could have even more poignantly added the widely known fact that Nkrumah’s “missionary” embarkation from Liverpool (in the boon company of Kojo Botsio) was expressly at the invitation of the Danquah-led United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC), and that whatever leadership skills the African Show Boy intended to contribute towards his country’s emancipation from British colonial rule had already begun in full-swing, both by the UGCC and other equally formidable Ghanaian leaders and intellectuals well before the advent of even Dr. Danquah, the man who would seminally introduce a virtually unknown Mr. Kwame Nkrumah to the mainstream of Ghanaian political culture.

And for good measure, the erudite and prolific British historian could also have added that Mr. Kojo Botsio, who would become the future Prime Minister Nkrumah’s closest associate and lieutenant, was returning to the erstwhile Gold Coast after vacation from and back to the Abuakwa State College (ABUSSCO), Kyebi (Kibi), where Mr. Botsio taught under the principalship of Mr. William “Paa Willie” Ofori-Atta. Equally important to observe here is the fact that Mr. Botsio was closely connected to the Danquah family-established secondary educational institution of quite remarkable repute and renown at the time.

But, of course, we know from intimate and practical experience how modern history is purposively constructed such that those cast as heroes, deservedly or not, are invariably made to tower head-and-shoulders above all else among the crowd and also liberally granted the at once rare and practically unlikely privilege of being the singular inventors and shapers of their own fame, fortune and destiny. In essence, in the well-calibrated opinion of Davidson, Mr. Nkrumah ought to, perforce, become no exception to the norm.

The author of Black Star draws a striking portrait of Nkrumah that may be extremely hard to digest by many of the late Ghanaian premier’s most ardent disciples. Indeed, about the only major scholar who frankly arrived at some of the same conclusions as Davidson was Mr. C. L. R. James, at one time Nkrumah’s political and ideological mentor and the avuncular figure who introduced the latter to Mr. George Padmore (aka Malcolm Nurse), Nkrumah’s longtime Marxist ideological chaperon and adviser on African Affairs, once the Show Boy assumed reins of governance as Ghana’s first transitional and postcolonial prime minister.

Regarding his epically lackluster leadership timbre, Davidson observes: “His weaknesses were never much in doubt. He was a man of soaring vision more than calculating thought. This vision could obscure his understanding of what was possible and what was not. He was an insistent optimist; this optimism could mislead him badly. Though he believed firmly in organization, he had little patience with humdrum detail, was quickly bored by routine, and preferred to contemplate distant summits of his vision rather than inspect the immediate soil beneath his feet. He made great things happen. But he was not, in any ordinary sense, a clever politician. In quite a large sense, he was not a politician at all” (Black Star 14-15).

Interestingly, while he has been deservedly crowned the Doyen of Gold Coast and Ghanaian Politics, as well as being described as, perhaps, Ghana’s most erudite thinker in the twentieth century, Dr. Joseph (Kwame Kyeretwie) Boakye-Danquah has equally been described as a statesman of remarkable genius who, nevertheless, woefully lacked the requisite Machiavellian acumen and skills that are the hallmarks of a pragmatic and winsome politician (See Joe Appiah’s The Autobiography of an African Patriot [Praeger, 1990]).