Ghana: The diaspora presence that made such a huge difference

New African, Mar 2007 by Alex-Assensoh, Yvette Marie

If Ghana under Nkrumah was a huge success, part of it was due to the presence of Diasporic Africans who heeded Nkrumah's call to return and help rebuild the ancestral homeland. Dr Yvette Marie Alex-Assensoh reports.

Six years before Ghana's independence, Dr Kwame Nkrumah (who would become Ghana's first prime minister and president) visited the USA in his capacity as "Leader or Government Business" of the then Gold Coast. Nkrumah's trip started on 30 May 1951; he was accompanied by his political confidant and the Gold Coast's then education minister, Kojo Botsio.

Nkrumah was returning to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, his alma mater, at the invitation of the university's then president. Horace Mann Bond (the hither of Julian Bond, chairman of the USA-based National Association tor the Advancement of Coloured People, NAACP). Nkrumah was to receive an honorary Doctor of Laws (LL.D) degree that was approved overwhelming!)' by the university's board of trustees.

The Ghanaian leader was an undergraduate student of Lincoln University, one of the oldest colleges of higher learning established in the 1800s tor freed slaves. Nkrumah earned two academic degrees from Lincoln: a Bachelor of Arts degree in Economics and Sociology (19391; and a Bachelor of Theology degree (1942) from the Lincoln Theological Seminary (after which he went on to earn two Master's Degrees in Education and Philosophy from the nearby University of Pennsylvania, a prestigious Ivy League institution).

In June 1951, Nkrumah was honoured as part of Lincoln University's speech and prize-givingday (called "commencement exercises" in the USA). The Ghanaian leader was asked to give the commencement speech, in which he invited African-Americans (then called Negroes) to return to Ghana and help develop the country.

"We are aiming to work under democratic principles such as exist in Britain and m the United States," Nkrumah told the crowd at Lincoln University and spoke about how the Gold Coast needed technicians, machinery and capital to develop its natural resources.

There was much tor African-Americans to do to help their ancestral country, Nkrumah said, adding that it was the intention of his Convention Peoples Party (CPP) to re-name the country Ghana. It was Nkrumah's clarion call that inspired many African-American leaders to pack their bags and baggage to return to their ancestral country.

The exodus to Ghana began in March 1957 when the late civil rights icon, Dr Martin Luther King Jr and his wife Mrs Coretia Scott King paid their first and only joint visits to Ghana and, later, Nigeria as a result of Nkrumah's inviration.

After the visit, Dr King preached a sermon about the new Ghana titled "Birth of a New Nation" at his famous Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama. Mrs King, too, wrote in admirable and historic terms about the 1957 trip in her 1969 book, My Life With Martin Luther King Jr.

Some of the historic events and selected correspondence between the Kings and Nkrumah have recently been documented in Volume VI of the Stanford University-based Martin Luther King Jr Papers Project (on which I served in the 1980s as A graduate student intern from the Ohio State University).

As documented, among diaspora-based black leaders who made the 1957 trip to witness the birth of the new Ghana, were such men and women like A. Phillip Randolph, the trade unionist; Congressman Adam Clayton Powell; the Nobel Peace Prize winner and UN under-secretary-general Ralph Bundle; Lucille Armstrong (representing her husband, Louis Armstrong, the jazz legend); and the University presidents Horace Mann Bond (Lincoln) and Mordecai Johnson (Howard).

Also on the trip were Prof Lawrence Dunbar Reddick who wrote Crusader Without Violence, an authorised biography of Martin Luther King, and a close friend of Dr Nkrumah and Dr Nmimdi Azikiwe; Julian and Ana Cordera Mayfield; W. Alphacus Hunton; Roy Wilkins; Ras Makonnen of Guyana who helped in organising the 1945 Pan-African Congress in Manchester, UK. and later directed N'krumah's African Affairs Bureau in Ghana; Michael Manley, the future radical prime minister of Jamaica; C.L.R. James, the Trinidadian radical scholar; and George Padmore (formerly called Malcolm Nurse), the great Caribbean-burn Pan-Africanist.

Dr. W.E.B. DuBois, who would later move to, and die in Ghana, was invited but he could not make the trip because his American passport had, reportedly, been "withdrawn" by the State Department at the time, allegedly, on suspicion of being a Communist sympathiser.

It was at Ghana's independence event that Dr and Mrs King first met America's then vice-president, Richard Nixon, who was leading the official USA delegation to Accra. Not knowing who Dr King was at the time, Nixon reportedly congratulated him on his country attaining its freedom, "No, I am not free yet. I am from Alabama. My name is Martin Luther King Jr," Dr King reportedly told Nixon.

In heeding Nkrumah's call to return home, many diaspora-based blacks, including those from Caribbean nations, flocked to live and work in Ghana. Some other black leaders paid casual visits only. One of them was Malcolm X who arrived in Ghana on 10 May 1964 on a pilgrimage-type of trip.