Abstract
In 1935 Nkrumah relocated from the mainly agrarian Gold Coast colony, moving at a slower pace, to the driving industrial pace of the United States. When he left his transport ship at New York harbor, he stepped into new realms of modernity and cultural practices that innumerable immigrants have described as disorienting. Like other immigrants he would have immediately felt the bewilderment of being decentered from a way of life that was familiar and comforting.
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Notes
Gloria House, Tower and Dungeon: A Study of Place and Power in American Culture (Detroit: Casa De Unidad Press, 1991), p. 2.
Edwin W. Smith, Aggrey of Africa: A Study in Black and White (London: Student Christian Movement Press, 1929), p. 122.
Adam Clayton Powell, Adam by Adam: The Autobiography of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr. (New York: Kinsington, 1971), pp. 54, 244.
Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah (New York: Nelson, 1957), p. 28.
W. E. B. Du Bois, The Autobiography of W. E. B. Du Bois (New York: International, 1958), p. 343.
However, Frazier’s observations, showing the alienation from African and even black American culture of a portion of the black middle class in New York in the 1920s, coincide with the class division between Du Bois and Garvey partisans, respectively. See E. Franklin Frazier, On Race Relations, Selected Papers, ed. G. Franklin Edwards (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969), pp. 262, 265. After some years of living in the United States, Nkrumah added his voice to this debate about African retentions in black America. For him the two poles of sociological thought were between Professor E. Franklin Frazier at Howard University and Melville Herskovits, Professor of Anthropology at Northwestern University. Nkrumah wrote, “The Howard school of thought maintained that the Negro in America had completely lost his cultural contact with Africa and the other school, represented by Herzkovits [sic], maintained that there were still African survivals in the United States and the Negro of America had in no way lost his cultural contact with the African continent. I supported, and still support, the latter view and I went on one occasion to Howard University to defend it” (Nkrumah, Ghana, p. 44).
Marcus Garvey, Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey (London: Frank Cass, 1923), p. 50.
See David Levering Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois, A Reader, “The Conservation of the Race” (New York: Henry Hold and Company, 1995), pp. 20–27.
See Leon Litwack and August Meier, eds., Black Leaders in the Nineteenth Century (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988).
Alain Locke, ed., The New Negro (New York: Atheneum, 1980), p. 6.
See Clyde W. Ford, The Hero with an African Face: Mythic Wisdom of Traditional Africa (New York: Bantam Books, 2000), p. 19.
Amy Jacques Garvey, comp., The Philosophy and Opinions of Marcus Garvey, Or, Africa for the Africans (London: Frank Cass, 1967), p. 53.
This scenario bears a striking resemblance to the contemporaneous elevation of Elijah Muhammad in the Nation of Islam. Muhammad too grew up in Georgia and heard the teachings of itinerant Christian preachers. His god in Detroit was W. D. Fard, who proclaimed Elijah Muhammad his messenger. See Claude Clegg, An Original Man: The Life and Times of Elijah Muhammad (New York: St Martin’s Griffin, 1998).
John William Johnson, Thomas A. Hale, and Stephen Belcher, eds., Oral Epics from Africa: Vibrant Voices From a Vast Continent (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), p. 58.
Robert Weisbrot, Father Divine and the Struggle for Racial Equality (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1983), p. 53.
Ossie Davis and Ruby Dee, With Ossie and Ruby: In This Life Together (New York: HarperCollins, 1998), p. 104.
Akwasi A. Afrifa, The Ghana Coup: February 24th 1966 (London: Frank Cass 1967), p. 123.
See Richard Wright, Black Power (New York: Harper, 1954), p. 228.
Ghana’s military controlled the elections in 1969 and banned Nkrumah partisans from running for office. The economy collapsed under Busia and the social system deteriorated. On January 13, 1972, the military under Colonel Ignatius Kutu Acheampong executed another coup and overthrew Busia. See Godfrey Mwakikagile, Military Coups in West Africa Since the Sixties (Huntington, NY: Nova Science Publishers, 2001).
See David Rooney, Kwame Nkrumah: The Political Kingdom in the Third World (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), p. 266.
Ibid., p. 68. In 1920 the Chicago office of the Bureau of Investigation falsely reported to the Washington D.C. headquarters that Marcus Garvey had been arrested during a raid of a meeting of the International Workers of the World (IWW). Known as the Wobblies, the IWW was one of the most radical anticapitalist organizations in the United States. See Emory J. Tolbert, “Federal Surveillance of Marcus Garvey and the U.N.I.A.,” Journal of Ethnic Studies 14, no. 4 (1987): 17.
For details on Nkrumah’s financial hardships at Lincoln and during his years in the United States, see Marika Sherwood, Kwame Nkrumah: The Years Abroad 1935–1947 (Legon, Ghana: Freedom, 1996).
See C. L. R. James, Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution (Westport, CT: Lawrence Hill, 1977).
C. L. R. James, “The Rise and Fall of Kwame Nkrumah,” in The C.L.R. James Reader, ed. Anna Grimshaw (Oxford, UK: Blackwell, 1992), p. 355.
Nkrumah, AAConsciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for Decolonization and Development with Particular Reference to the African Revolution (London: Heinemann, 1964), p. 68.
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© 2007 Ahmad A. Rahman
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Rahman, A.A. (2007). The Early Stages of the Hero’s Quest. In: The Regime Change of Kwame Nkrumah. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230603486_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230603486_3
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