INTRODUCTION
Kwame Nkrumah, the man who led Ghana to independence in 1957, harboured grand ambitions. Not only, like other postcolonial leaders, did he want to ‘jet propel’ his country into modernity, he also aspired to unite the African continent while simultaneously turning Ghana into a socialist state.Footnote 1 To realize those ambitions, an institution that would become an ideological powerhouse was established in Winneba, a small coastal town forty miles west of Accra. On 18 February 1961, in the presence of Leonid Brezhnev, Nkrumah laid the foundation stone of what became known as the Kwame Nkrumah Ideological Institute (KNII).Footnote 2 The very nature and ultimate goals of the institute were subject to contrasting understandings: while Hungarian historian and former KNII lecturer Tibor Szamuely described it as a ‘kind of cross between Socratic Athens, the London School of Economics and the Moscow Institute for Marxism-Leninism’, other observers and foreign powers perceived it as a dangerous site that offered military training to African revolutionaries.Footnote 3
The KNII played an important role in the Ghanaian regime's self-representation abroad: the list of visitors to Winneba included Julius Nyerere of Tanzania, Malcolm X, Che Guevara, and representatives of foreign communist parties, such as James Klugmann of the Communist Party of Great Britain.Footnote 4 The importance that the Convention People's Party (CPP) government attributed to the KNII was confirmed by its rapid expansion. By the time of the coup that put an end to CPP rule on 24 February 1966, the campus reportedly included eighteen bungalows for senior staff; facilities capable of hosting around 550 students; a car park of 10 automobiles, 2 tractors, 3 jeeps, and 4 buses; and a poultry farm.Footnote 5 In 1965, the entrance was decorated with a sculpture of Nkrumah on a plinth by Polish artist Alina Slesinska.Footnote 6
The KNII has been frequently mentioned in discussions of Nkrumah's rule, but its structure and functioning remain understudied.Footnote 7 The military government that ousted Nkrumah inscribed the institute within its attempt to expose Nkrumah's involvement in the subversion of other African countries, painting a monolithic picture of a party school where the curriculum focused on ‘socialist ideology’ (itself a fluid and contested term), with the aim of training cadres loyal to Nkrumah.Footnote 8 Later discussions have repeatedly emphasised the gap between the intellectual pretensions of the institute and the poor quality of its teaching and students.Footnote 9 As a result, the actual evolution of the institute has either been ignored or treated as a grotesque incarnation of all that was wrong in Nkrumah's Ghana. It is only recently that a more nuanced appraisal of the institute and its significance has begun.Footnote 10 Mjiba Frehiwot, for example, has provided a more positive assessment of the KNII as a proponent of Pan-African education.Footnote 11 The institute has also been the subject of historical investigation by Matteo Grilli — who has situated the trajectory of the institute alongside that of the Bureau of African Affairs and the African Affairs Centre — and by Robert Todd.Footnote 12
While Grilli convincingly used the KNII to illuminate the multi-layered nature of Ghana's foreign policy, and Todd provided an exhaustive chronological account of the KNII's evolution, in this article we use the institute as an entry point to the study of what we call the ‘politics of socialist education’. This concept is developed along two key dimensions. The first, inspired by Jean Allman's discussion of the Institute of African Studies (IAS) at the University of Ghana, refers to the changing place of the KNII within the intellectual and political landscape of the country.Footnote 13 Although both the IAS and the KNII embodied Nkrumah's commitment to infuse institutions of learning with his political vision, the two sites capture complementary aspects of the politics of knowledge production in 1960s Ghana. The IAS was expected to project Nkrumah's idea of the ‘African personality’ and his Pan-African aspirations, bringing to the fore tensions between ‘colonial’ institutions and ways of knowing and the struggle for an Afro-centric knowledge.Footnote 14 Although the KNII was even more radical in its commitment to overcome the intellectual and political heritage of colonialism, the construction of a new body of knowledge acquired very different forms.
Focusing on the KNII allows us to observe the crucial role that the social sciences were expected to play in shaping and institutionalising an ‘official ideology’ for the party-state, rather than in the articulation of a global academic project. A close analysis of the KNII also opens a window onto the fluid interaction between the universalistic narratives of Marxism-Leninism and the quest for more localised political iconographies centred on the figure of Nkrumah. The second aspect of the ‘politics of socialist education’, informed by Jeffrey Ahlman's account of life under CPP rule, refers to the discursive formations and concrete strategies adopted by different actors negotiating their participation and involvement with the Ghanaian party-state.Footnote 15 However, in contrast to Ahlman's focus on ordinary Ghanaians, the emphasis on the experience of foreign lecturers leads to a more nuanced appraisal of the transnational dimensions of the Nkrumahist project.Footnote 16
This article attempts to fill a gap in the most studied period of Ghana's history, while also offering a contribution to the literature on African socialisms. Between the 1960s and the 1980s, scholars (typically political scientists rather than historians) tried to understand how authentically ‘Marxist’ African socialist regimes were and to explain the reasons for their disappointing political and economic performances.Footnote 17 It is only in recent years, with the Cold War receding in the background, that less teleological accounts have been produced. This shift is most evident in a string of excellent historical and ethnographic works on Ethiopia, Guinea, and Tanzania.Footnote 18
In line with this literature, the starting point of this analysis is the necessity of shedding a preconceived and univocal notion of what ‘real’ socialism looks like while making the ambiguities, tensions, and contradictions that characterised the historical experiences of these regimes an integral part of the story. In light of the dramatic expansion of the range of sites explored in recent histories of African socialisms, including rural theatres and urban drive-ins (as well as the experiences of African students in ‘allied’ socialist countries), it is surprising that little is known about party schools and ideological institutes on African soil.Footnote 19 By dissecting the short-lived trajectory of the KNII, this article suggests that ideological institutes offer insights into the processes by which the official ideologies of African regimes were created and disseminated, a foil through which to interrogate the usages and appropriation of social science education, and a window onto the multiple ways in which local and foreign agents negotiated their identities and political participation in African socialist experiments.
NKRUMAHISM AND THE SOCIAL SCIENCES
Some historians have claimed that Nkrumahism evolved out of a quest for a new, indigenous form of African socialism, one which emphasised the classless nature of African society and the importance of the ‘African personality’, ultimately emerging as a variant of scientific socialism resembling Soviet orthodoxy.Footnote 20 However, Nkrumahism defies any simple definition. As Jeffrey Ahlman rightly pointed out, Nkrumahism was not merely a ‘philosophy of decolonization’; rather, it provided a ‘language’ that, by virtue of its plasticity, could be appropriated and used by different actors to redefine their identities, build relationships with state structures, and even articulate dissent.Footnote 21 Even when considered as the discursive infrastructure of what Louis Althusser called the ‘State Ideological Apparatus’, Nkrumahism was not a monolithic set of tenets that originated in the leader's writings and circulated homogeneously through society.Footnote 22 While maintaining a stable core of anticolonialism and Pan-Africanism, its relationship with Marxism-Leninism evolved under the influence of factors such as the evolution of Nkrumah's own writings, the changing role of the pro-communist wing within the CPP, and the different contexts in which the notion of ‘African socialism’ was deployed.Footnote 23
The KNII contributed to the construction and dissemination of the regime's syncretic political iconography alongside institutions such as the Young Pioneers and the Workers Brigades, as well as newspapers such as the Evening News, which combined messianic representations of Nkrumah with columns on Marxian political economy, and The Spark, ‘more purist in its Marxism than Nkrumah himself’.Footnote 24 Amidst such diversity, the KNII represented the institutional site where the task of constructing an official ideology was most closely connected with teaching in the social sciences. Unfortunately the scant scholarly discussions of the KNII are characterised by an almost total neglect of what was actually being taught. Trevor Jones’ otherwise detailed history of Ghana's First Republic (1960–66), for example, simply states that it ‘was never made clear what was the most important component of the ideological training given at Winneba — whether it was Nkrumah's eponymous brand of socialism […] or “scientific socialism”’.Footnote 25 Archival material suggests the necessity of going beyond this dichotomy and retrieving a more complex story on the quest for Nkrumahism as state ideology, and on the role of education within the regime's attempt to create a ‘new type of man […] who submerges [him]self in service to his nation and mankind’.Footnote 26
Before the opening of the KNII, Winneba had hosted a CPP party college established under the auspices of the National Association of Socialist Students Organization on 5 January 1958. Although the French intelligence services suspected the involvement of the Nigerian socialist Baktole Akpata (later a lecturer at the KNII) and of Ivan Potekhin — the doyen of Soviet Africanists — in its creation, the party school seemed to aim primarily at shaking the ‘inferiority complex’ of Africans towards the West, rather than explicitly disseminating socialist ideas.Footnote 27 After a visit in 1959, Nkrumah decided that the party college needed to be re-organised as a school that could teach the party's socialist ideology to loyal party members and eventually host representatives of African nationalist movements.Footnote 28
But what kind of institution was best equipped to achieve this dual task? The academic status of the KNII was highly contested. In 1962, the direction of the institute was not entrusted to an academic, but rather to Kodwo Addison. A former trade unionist, prominent member of the CPP Marxist wing and, from 1963, Honorary President of the Ghana-USSR Friendship Society, Addison became one of the key figures of the Nkrumah regime, as shown by his appointment as one of the three members of the Presidential Commission that acted on Nkrumah's behalf when he was abroad.Footnote 29 Addison worked to obtain university status for the KNII, stressing that it was ‘the first of its kind’ and the lecturers had a ‘more scientific approach to the teaching of Socialism under the streamlining of Osagyefo's [literally “the Redeemer”, as Nkrumah was frequently called] philosophical outlook’.Footnote 30 In other words, the ‘scientific’ nature of the content being taught was grounded in Nkrumah's ideas.Footnote 31 In contrast, the National Council for Higher Education pointed out that the KNII did not fall within the either UNESCO definition of higher education or the Ghana Education Act and that it therefore should be ranked as a technical school.Footnote 32
The KNII's unconventional academic status became intertwined with the CPP's quest for control over Ghana's intellectual life. By the end of Nkrumah's rule, ministers had already been forced to attend short courses at the institute and there were discussions about the possibility of also sending all the members of the House of Representatives.Footnote 33 Furthermore, the institute's rise to prominence paralleled the increasing suspicion with which the government viewed the University of Ghana.Footnote 34 Nkrumah's appointment as chancellor of the University in 1961, along with the proclamation of the ‘death of the ivory tower’ (and of a university that did not actively contribute to the socialist and Pan-African revolution), solidified the government's commitment to exercise a tighter control over academic appointments and ideological orientation.Footnote 35 Although, as Jean Allman has shown with reference to the IAS, the University of Ghana was expected to maintain a key role in projecting Nkrumah's ideas, it was at the KNII that the leader's vision came to be constructed as the pillar of a ‘total’ epistemology that overcame the distinction between theory and political practice.Footnote 36
This epistemology made an understanding of the world in line with party teachings the basis for self-appraisal and for participation in the life of the community. As pointed out by Nkrumah at a seminar at the Institute, Nkrumahism should ‘be all-pervading’ and ‘influence all thinking and action’.Footnote 37 The willingness to make ideological training a precondition for the acquisition of academic knowledge led to suggestions that only those who had taken a short course at the KNII should be allowed to enrol in a university degree program.Footnote 38 In 1964, upon Ghana's formal declaration as a one-party state, the difficult relationship between the government and the university reached its peak when party activists broke into the University halls and vandalised its property.Footnote 39
During the same time period, the KNII started projecting a long shadow over the life of the university. The task of explaining to university students and staff the ultimate meaning of Consciencism, the most convoluted text of the Nkrumahist corpus, fell to key KNII figures.Footnote 40 These included the philosopher William Abraham (who was a lecturer at the KNII and head of the Philosophy department at the University of Legon) and the Nigerian economist Samuel Ikoku. One of the primary editors of the party magazine The Spark, Ikoku was described in British intelligence reports as ‘one of the most poisonous and dangerous members of the entourage’ and ‘one of the central personalities of Nkrumah's Byzantine court’.Footnote 41
Even alternative socialist organizations came to be seen as potentially subversive: Addison ordered that the university's Marxist Study Forum be renamed the Nkrumahist Forum.Footnote 42 This seemingly inconsequential anecdote captures the essence of the evolution of Nkrumahism, as it is not merely found in its intellectual evolution from ‘African socialism’ to ‘scientific socialism’, but also in its transformation as a political platform, one that subordinated or incorporated other political and epistemic paradigms in the pursuit of hegemony.
The earliest debates about curriculum design at the KNII referred to a three-month course (November 1961–January 1962) for militants and nationalist agitators from other African countries. At this stage, the curriculum of the institute was closely linked with political practice and served the cause of nationalist agitation so that other African countries could be guided to independence. A list of teaching topics drafted in September 1961, for example, mentioned trade unionism, party organization, electoral mobilization, local government administration, and political education for the youth and women movements.Footnote 43 Visits to Ghanaian organizations such as the Trade Union Congress, the CPP's headquarters, the Young Pioneers, the Builders Brigades, and the National Council of Ghana Women had to impress upon domestic and foreign students that Ghana was successful and well-suited for leadership in Africa.Footnote 44
In 1960, around the time when Ghana became a Republic, the expression ‘Nkrumahism’ started being used in the public sphere.Footnote 45 The following year, the country formally embraced socialism as the country's ideology, and the expression became more common.Footnote 46 The 1961 general strike and the assassination attempt against Nkrumah in Kulungugu in 1962 led the government to purge some key figures of the regime and to invest more effort in the creation of loyal citizens.Footnote 47 By the 1962–3 academic year, the curriculum of the institute included short courses along with a two-year program of study in political science. The introduction of the latter marked a turning point in the intellectual identity and mission of the institute, as the social sciences became the main pillars of the institute's pedagogical project. The 1962 timetable reveals an emphasis on seven subjects: English, French, economics, political theory and practice, African studies, civics, and a more practical module which taught bookkeeping and accounting.Footnote 48 In contrast, the 1963 timetable for the first year of the Diploma in Political Science (Table 1) separated theory from the practical courses, reduced the number of hours devoted to African Studies from two to one per week, and introduced an elementary course in statistics.
Weekly timetable for the first year of the KNII Diploma in political science, 1963. GPRLAA, BAA 437.
By this stage, the creation of the socialist citizen and the Nkrumahist subject thus increasingly depended on political and economic theory, rather than on practical training. In 1963, applied economics and political economy accounted for 25 per cent of the weekly instruction. The latter course drew in large part on Marx's Capital and consisted of lectures on topics such as ‘The Objective Character of Economic Laws and the Social Forms Preceding Capitalism’, ‘The Essence of Capitalist Exploitation’, ‘The Deepening of the General Crisis of Capitalism and the Advance to Socialism’, and a Leninist lecture on ‘Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism’.Footnote 49 That same year, a new course on the political economy of socialism was introduced which dealt more explicitly with the planned Eastern European economies.Footnote 50 The course in philosophy, which in 1962 also addressed ethics and psychology, affirmed in 1963 the primacy of Marxism as ‘the science of victory of Socialism’.Footnote 51 On the other hand, the course in ‘Applied Economics’ was very close to a conventional course in development economics, while the few surviving lecture notes from the course in constitutional law show a total absence of Marxist interpretations of the emergence of the state.Footnote 52 While this suggests that it would be inaccurate to reduce the KNII to a centre for the dissemination of Soviet-style Marxism-Leninism, it is undeniable that over time Marxism acquired a more prominent place in the institute's pedagogical identity.Footnote 53
Yet, at least in the early days of the institute, the relative importance attributed to socialism depended on the audience targeted. This can be seen in the ten-week course organized for foreign students in 1962, when Ghana had already formalised its adherence to socialism as its main ideology. Significantly, the Bureau of African Affairs — the office in charge of Pan-African propaganda that organised the course for foreign students — removed all references to ‘Nkrumahism’ and ‘socialism’ from the curriculum.Footnote 54 While in principle Nkrumahism rested on the notion that socialism in Africa and Pan-Africanism were inextricably linked, in practice the ‘creation’ of Ghanaian socialist citizens and foreign Pan-African militants could follow parallel routes.Footnote 55
From the point of view of the program of study in political science, in which most of the students were Ghanaians, ‘Nkrumahism’ looked very different. Initially part of the ‘Political theory and practice’ module, in 1963 Nkrumahism became a separate subject to which three hours per week were devoted. Although, unsurprisingly, Nkrumah's writings were central readings, the course was primarily concerned with linking Nkrumah's life and works with political practice while also increasing party loyalty, defined as ‘adherence to the Party and its Government together with enthusiastic devotion to the person and office of Osagyefo’.Footnote 56 Students were taught how to behave towards the national flag and anthem, as well as the importance of refusing bribes, resisting nepotism, working hard, and leading by example.Footnote 57 These guidelines were very detailed, for example: ‘If you meet someone who tries to confuse you with any type of argument,’ a lecturer told his students, ‘tell that person plainly: “I have a duty to Ghana. I must serve Ghana always”’. But if the person persisted, the student was to ‘not talk to him anymore’.Footnote 58
Teaching ‘Nkrumahism’ at the institute implied a reconceptualization of the connection between political practice, social sciences, and the cult of the leader. The integration of these three aspects can be observed in the exam paper for December 1963, in which students were given three hours to answer the following questions:
1. ‘Osagyefo Dr. Kwame Nkrumah has lived a full life’. Discuss.
2. To what extent do the social effects of colonialism influence the building of a newly independent state?
3. ‘Africa Must Unite’. Prove it.
4. Show as fully as possible how a Party Vanguard Activist can be fully loyal to the Party and Government.
5. Write a short essay on Collective Responsibility.Footnote 59
As Gregory Mann has found in the case of sociology in socialist Mali, at the KNII, the social sciences were invested simultaneously with an analytical and a talismanic function: they were expected to provide the heuristic tools to describe society while at the same time evoking a sense of possibility that resonated with political rulers’ dreams of transformation.Footnote 60 As Nkrumah himself said, Nkrumahism was expected not only to sketch out the goals and aims of socialist construction, but also to provide ‘intellectual tools by which these aims are achieved’ and to ‘offer the ordinary man and woman some concrete, tangible and realizable hope of better life within his or her lifetime’.Footnote 61 Yet, in contrast to Mali, in Ghana the talismanic function of the social sciences was part of a more radical epistemic project. Indeed, the attempt to redraw the boundaries between analysis and political imagination was aimed at the construction of a new synthesis that ultimately found its highest expression in the leader's vision and persona. This was always the case, whether Nkrumahism was presented as an alternative to Marxism grounded in African traditions and culture or as the highest application of scientific socialism to African conditions.
This process carries implications for the political uses of the social sciences in 1960s Africa. The historical literature, including writings on other ‘African socialist’ countries such as Kenya and Senegal, has located the most significant political use of the social sciences in the conceptualisation of development and in the mobilisation of technocratic forms of expertise.Footnote 62 The employment of these cognitive tools, reified in the practice of development planning and mediated by the creation of a new class of African technocrats, could bypass the ideological dichotomies institutionalised by the Cold War, circulate as a language shared with international organizations, and facilitate political leaders' attempts to present the state as the engine of economic progress and social advancement.Footnote 63 The pedagogical mission of the KNII differed in two important respects. The first refers to its scope of application. Rather than forming a class of technocrats, the KNII embodied the dream of using the jargon and conceptual apparatus of the social sciences to provide party cadres, and eventually society as a whole, with a language and a vision that was simultaneously grounded in historical narratives of colonialism and exploitation and forward-looking in its utopianism. The second aspect pertained to the relationship between social sciences and the process of imagining the state. By directly inscribing the life and works of Nkrumah within an established Western canon of philosophy, economics, and political science, the KNII reified Nkrumah as the ‘philosopher-king’, simultaneously consecrating him as the father and messiah of the nation and as the apogee and terminal point of an intellectual trajectory that began with Marx (or, as in Consciencism, with Thales).Footnote 64 In either case, at the KNII economics and political science did not affirm a vision of the modern state as a technocratic agent. Rather, they institutionalised new forms of ‘political theology’ that found their main justification in the epistemology of the social sciences.
The institute's contribution to the consolidation of Nkrumahism increasingly included the formal definition and ‘certification’ of the regime's ideology. In 1962, Kofi Baako, who held several ministerial positions in Nkrumah's government, defined Nkrumahism as ‘an applied religion’ and a ‘non-atheistic social philosophy’, while in 1964 he defined it as ‘socialism adopted to suit the conditions and circumstances of Africa’.Footnote 65 However, as perceptively noted by a British intelligence report, his definition ‘was never an official one’.Footnote 66 Two months after Ghana was formally proclaimed a one-party state, Nkrumahism was defined as ‘the ideology for the new Africa, independent and absolutely free from imperialism[…] drawing its strength from modern science and technology and from the traditional African belief that the free development of each is the precondition of the free development of all’.Footnote 67 This definition was ‘finalised by the Kwame Nkrumah Ideological Institute in consultation with the President’, formally proclaimed by Addison, and disseminated via directors and editors of the key newspapers and news agencies, trade unions, and party organizations.Footnote 68 In this way, the institute was the main channel through which it was made official.
But this new definition did not contain any reference to Marxism or socialism; rather it emphasised the Pan-Africanist outlook of Nkrumah's thought. While this might appear surprising in light of the fact that in 1964 the KNII popularised the expression ‘Marxism-Nkrumahism’, British intelligence assumed that this ambiguity was perhaps intentional.Footnote 69 Presumably, this distinction was aimed at keeping the use of scientific socialism as a tool of nation building separate from a more vague definition that could ‘travel’ more easily across the ideological divide of the Cold War.
Regardless of its veracity, this hypothesis suggests that there is no simple answer to Trevor Jones's question about the dominance of ‘orthodox’ Marxism-Leninism versus a homemade version of African socialism as the main component of training at the KNII.Footnote 70 Even in the years of ‘scientific socialism’, alternative ways of conceptualising Nkrumahism were produced and disseminated. Yet, within the competing representations of the state and the leader circulating in Ghanaian society, in the last two years of Nkrumah's rule the institute increasingly assumed the role of a gatekeeper for what constituted ‘real’ Nkrumahism. By exercising this function, the KNII embodied the regime's highest expectations of the role that the social sciences should play in the creation of the regime's political iconography and eventually in the engineering of a new revolutionary subject.
BEYOND ‘OPPORTUNISM’: NEGOTIATING INVOLVEMENT WITH THE NKRUMAHIST STATE
As Jeffrey Ahlman has convincingly shown in the case of institutions such as the Young Pioneers and the Workers Brigades, under Nkrumahist rule, ordinary Ghanaians were experimenting with forms of political discourse and participation, testing the boundaries of repression and patronage, and finding new ways of expressing their anxiety over political change.Footnote 71 Following this approach, the KNII can also illuminate how different agents negotiated their relationship with an increasingly authoritarian state. Indeed, while the KNII occupied a central role in the construction of Nkrumahism as the official ideology of Ghana, it also acted as a catalyst for the hopes, motivations, and experiences of the people who chose to become involved with it. Yet, both in contemporary discussions and in later appraisals of the KNII, all these aspects have been minimised under the rubric of ‘opportunism’.
‘Opportunism’ was a central trope in Nkrumahist discourse. The regime contributed to the institutionalisation of a dichotomy between the seemingly mutually exclusive attitudes of self-aggrandisement and genuine commitment to the socialist transformation of society.Footnote 72 Entrusted with the difficult task of eradicating ‘opportunistic’ (the moral equivalent of ‘capitalist’ and ‘colonial’) attitudes and building a ‘new type of man’, the KNII itself was a product of this context.Footnote 73 However, in 1965 the Institute came under attack in parliamentary debates, which lamented that ‘a dangerous tendency is developing in this country among some opportunists who regard their training at the KNII as a step toward getting higher appointments and fat salaries.’Footnote 74 This shows how the categories that informed official discourse also offered a lexicon for the articulation of an ‘acceptable’ critique of the institutions that were at the centre of the transformation envisaged by the regime.Footnote 75
The records regarding Ghanaian students, albeit fragmentary, are consistent with the fact that many students considered their time at the KNII as a means to upwards social mobility or even as a valid alternative to a university career.Footnote 76 While the previous section has shown that the KNII's prestige increased as the position of the university deteriorated in the eyes of the government, several sources report that students’ low educational qualifications did not measure up to the intellectual status the regime envisaged for the KNII.Footnote 77 Although the exact number of students remains difficult to assess, archival registers of a large sample of 435 graduates suggest more than 25 per cent of the students possessed only a primary or middle school qualification and thus could not have attended university, while the most common qualification was a teacher training certificate.Footnote 78
Moreover, students were not exclusively selected for their academic achievements. By 1965, for example, admission criteria included ‘party membership, educational background, the ability to pass the entrance examination, experience in life and character’.Footnote 79 Ikoku recalled how the first cohort of the institute's graduates found their way into ‘the civil service, the ministries, the State corporations, the party press and radio’. Footnote 80 It is for these reasons that, during the inauguration of the 1965–6 academic year, Addison felt compelled to declare that ‘no one, I repeat, no one must think that coming into this Institute is a licence for automatic appointment into a high position.’Footnote 81 When these words were uttered, the coup that overthrew Nkrumah was only months away. In the popular imagination, the KNII remained an iconic representation of the ‘opportunism’ that characterised CPP rule.
By inheriting categories internal to the Nkrumahist state, the historical literature has perpetuated a simplistic characterization of the KNII's students and lecturers. The point, however, is to go beyond opportunism versus selfless dedication as the sole driver of the choices made by a wide range of different historical actors. Instead, it is necessary to place the KNII within a more complex and contingent set of perceptions and actors that shaped the relationship between different individuals, social groups, and the regime. For example, data on the previous occupations of those who attended the institute — an aspect that so far has been ignored — reveal that only very specific segments of Ghanaian society embarked on a program in political science. This stood in partial contrast with Nkrumah's dream of an institute capable of educating everyone ‘from members of the Central Committee to the lowest propagandist in the field’ and non-violent positive actionists, such as ‘Party Vanguard activists, farmers, co-operators, trade unionists, and women organisers’.Footnote 82 Instead, a sample of 126 students for which occupational information is available indicates that only 8 per cent of the students reported their primary employment as being in party organizations such as the Young Pioneers or the Workers Brigades. The overwhelming majority of the students were employed in white collar jobs in the public sector. Fewer than 1 per cent were self-employed, while only one petty trader graduated from the KNII. Teachers and educational campaigners were the biggest group, accounting for 18 per cent of the students in our sample.Footnote 83 Farmers, who struck a powerful chord in the Nkrumahist imagination, were notably absent.
These data indicate the self-exclusion of those employed in the private sector from ideological education, revealing the unevenness of the penetration of Nkrumahism as ‘certified ideological education’ in Ghanaian society. In 1964 Nana Wetey Agyeman Larbi II, Omanhene of Owutu, was the first chief to join the Institute. He authored a statement in which he declared that he joined the KNII because he felt that he had to ‘go out as a crusader and assist vigorously the building of socialism’ and eradicate imperialism and capitalism, which he defined as ‘the paths of suffering of the masses’.Footnote 84 Regardless of the Omanhene's real motivations, the regime used his enrolment as a significant symbolic victory, reinforcing the narrative of the victory of the socialist state against ‘traditional’ authorities, who were often depicted by the party press as obstacles to the country's modernization.Footnote 85
The motivations and attitudes of the institute's lecturers have also been subjected to a simplistic understanding. Several Ghanaian scholars have claimed that the KNII faculty only paid lip service to socialism, thus stressing once again the primacy of opportunism.Footnote 86 The literature has also provided an inaccurate account of the lecturers’ national identities. David Rooney, for one, has argued that the Congo crisis strengthened the radical wing of the CPP, making the KNII a welcoming place for Soviet lecturers.Footnote 87 The few historians of the Cold War who mention the institute have accepted this interpretation at face value, suggesting that Soviet lecturers indeed had a decisive influence on the life of the KNII.Footnote 88
Instead, although the Institute employed a significant number of Eastern Europeans, very few of them were Russian. In the academic year 1963–4, for example, the four Eastern European lecturers (out of a total faculty of sixteen members) working at the KNII included the Hungarian historian Tibor Szamuely, the Polish statistician J. M. Perczynski, the Russian Boris Petruk (lecturing in philosophy), and the Czech Pavel Kovaly (also in philosophy). Other expatriates included the American Grace Arnold (who, however, had lived in the Soviet Union and taught at the Karl Marx Party School in East Berlin),Footnote 89 the Guadeloupe-born and French-educated Maryse Condé, and the British communist Pat Sloan. The memoirs and correspondence of some of these figures allow us simultaneously to place the trajectory of the KNII within a fluid transnational space that was not monopolised by the Soviet Union and to gain glimpses of power relations and modes of political participation in the life of the institute.
Some of these aspects were grounded in debates about the intellectual identity of the KNII. This can be observed in the case of Pat Sloan, a Cambridge economics graduate and member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. In February 1964, Sloan introduced himself as someone who had been a communist for thirty years, who was an expert on the Soviet Union, but who was eager to see how an African country was ‘exploring its own Socialist path’.Footnote 90 In April 1965, Sloan was appointed lecturer in socialism at the KNII, and he became a prominent contributor to the party press. Discussions taking place in the early days of the KNII stressed the importance of favouring Ghanaian nationals in hiring procedures, but it was also acknowledged that there were few ‘unencumbered Ghanaian graduates who have identified themselves with this form of ideological activities’, and that, at least at the beginning, there was no problem in recruiting expatriates with the right political pedigree.Footnote 91 Sloan's experience reveals the existence of a significant tension between expatriate Marxists and ‘indigenous’ Nkrumahists.
In a 1965 memo on teaching reform, Sloan pointed out that the teaching of party organization should have carved a more significant role for the ‘expatriate experience of Marxist parties abroad’.Footnote 92 In a letter to Addison, he went as far as to call the expatriate communists ‘the only fully-developed Marxist-Leninists here’.Footnote 93 When Sloan reviewed a pamphlet on ‘categorial conversion’ (a key idea in Nkrumah's Consciencism), he stressed the pamphlet's anonymous author was wrong in claiming that Nkrumah had invented the concept, since it had already found expression ‘as an essential aspect of Dialectical Materialism’ in the nineteenth century.Footnote 94 Indirectly, Sloan wanted to show that ‘mature Marxists’ such as himself were needed in Ghana. It was only on the basis of a solid study of the orthodox canon that a new ideology for Africa could be built, he argued: ‘Authors who are not aware of this [scientific socialism] should not write on Nkrumaism. First, let them study Scientific Socialism and its development. Then let them turn to its application to the African social milieu.’Footnote 95
This was not simply a matter of disagreement on the intellectual genealogies of socialism. Rather it was the avenue for an internal power struggle over the identity and the future of the institute. Sloan's arguments were simultaneously a reflection of his vision for the KNII and possibly a strategy to advance his position in Ghana's ideological machinery. The British communist accused Addison of having adopted a highly personalistic and dictatorial rule, repressing initiative from below as well as open criticism, and thus failing to make the KNII ‘the model it should be in Ghana and in Africa’.Footnote 96 This correspondence also illustrates the prominence of the teachings and the life of Nkrumah as a trope that even expatriate ‘scientific socialists’ chose to adopt as a rhetorical weapon. For example, this is how a letter from Sloan, eager to prove his righteousness, began:
Dear Comrade Addison,
When I read in the AUTOBIOGRAPHY [of Kwame Nkrumah] the following words I felt they applied to me: ‘They must have thought that I was either a pretty weird character or that in a shrewd way I was trying on something too clever for them to see’. In Osagyefo's case it was the lack of interest in money; in mine, my lack of interest in idleness.Footnote 97
But the tensions shaping the interaction between Addison and the expatriate lecturers did not only manifest themselves in the exegetic battle over Marxism and Nkrumah's writings. This is evident in the experience of the Guadeloupian writer Maryse Condé, who came to Ghana ‘lonely, young, vulnerable’, jobless, and with four small children to look after.Footnote 98 She was appointed lecturer in French at the KNII through the intercession of a Nigerian lecturer, Akpata.Footnote 99 Condé’s memoir, presenting a vivid description of the KNII as a place marred by architectural ugliness, intellectual mediocrity, and excessive drinking, also illuminates some of the darkest aspects of the Institute's life, claiming that Addison forced her to resign after she stopped having sex with him.Footnote 100 Although she initially found a great source of hope for political renewal in African socialism, her choice to move to Ghana followed the bitter disappointment that she felt when she observed first-hand the brutality of Sékou Touré’s rule in Guinea. There is a tragic irony in the fact that, after the 1966 coup, Condé was accused of being a spy on the Guinean government's payroll. Condé’s encounter with the KNII (and with African socialism more generally) was marked by self-exile and disillusionment, two conditions that were central to the lives of other fellow KNII lecturers.Footnote 101
Although in a very different way, the interplay of these two tropes can also be observed in the trajectory of the Hungarian Tibor Szamuely, who became a lecturer in history in 1964. Born in Moscow in 1925 into an exiled Hungarian family, Szamuely spent part of his childhood in England. He then returned to Russia and obtained his PhD in history from the University of Moscow. Accused of espionage, he was arrested and spent eighteen months in a labour camp, until he was allegedly released upon the intercession of Hungary's leader Mátyás Rákosi.Footnote 102 In 1953 he returned to Hungary, and in 1957 he was appointed vice-chancellor of the University of Budapest. A party investigation found Szamuely guilty of violating ‘principles of Party democracy’ and relocated him to the Institute of History.Footnote 103 It was at this time that he determined to relocate permanently to the United Kingdom. In 1963, secretly disillusioned with communism, Szamuely joined the KNII at the invitation of Addison, where he taught a history course from ‘The process of primary accumulation and the rise of the bourgeoisie’ to ‘National liberation movements of the early 20th century’.Footnote 104 Unlike his sojourns in Britain in the 1960s, when the Hungarian authorities had prevented him from taking his children with him, he was allowed to take his family to Ghana. In 1964, while still formally a lecturer at the KNII, Szamuely travelled to London with his family on the pretext of having to conduct research at the British Museum and never returned. In the aftermath of the coup that toppled Nkrumah, he wrote a series of articles in which he exposed the ‘totalitarian’ tendencies of Nkrumah's regime.Footnote 105 The University of Reading offered him a lectureship in political science, and he became a naturalized British citizen in 1970 as well as a darling of conservative circles.Footnote 106
These biographical snapshots reveal the inadequacies of existing discussions of the institute. Far from being merely ‘opportunists’ or Soviet ‘Cold Warriors’, the KNII was an important node in a series of transnational encounters that, under the veil of adherence to the Nkrumahist revolution, hid very different individual motivations, attitudes, and strategies. If the involvement of the Nazi pilot Hanna Reitsch in Ghana's first gliding school shows the power of a formal commitment to ‘modernization’ to erase past political trajectories, the experience of the KNII indicates that the embrace of an explicitly socialist or Nkrumahist identity also mattered.Footnote 107 The life stories of the KNII lecturers offer a rich catalogue of ways in which the language (and the credentials) of socialism were mobilised. On the other hand, the engagement of foreign intellectuals with the KNII, even when resulting in material benefits, was also marked by disillusionment and frustration. The inclusion of these emotional dimensions is crucial in order to humanise the transnational history of African socialism.
CONCLUSION
In the immediate aftermath of the military coup that toppled Nkrumah's regime on 24 February 1966, the ideological apparatus embodied by the KNII collapsed. Addison was arrested, Ikoku was tortured and extradited to Nigeria, and the Eastern European lecturers were repatriated within forty-eight hours.Footnote 108 Sloan, who had purchased a plane ticket back to Kent even before he was officially asked to leave the country, described to Nkrumah the swift and uneventful way in which the students abandoned the institute, ‘baggage on head like a lot of refugees’ and without protest: ‘The students showed no signs of morale, collective spirit or any form of resistance, and if this was their reaction, what of the rest?’Footnote 109 The cheering crowds celebrating the end of CPP rule provided an immediate answer to the question. The weekly journal West Africa reported that the people who were ‘most deeply relieved’ by Nkrumah's fall were the university staff, for whom ‘it was constantly humiliating to find their newspapers full of rubbish’ and ‘to have to listen to party men of little education and less background laying down the law about economics and philosophy’.Footnote 110 The new military government's concerns about the institute had to do with financial matters rather than with doctrine and ideology.Footnote 111 The former employees of the institute (474 people, including gardeners and cooks) asked the new military government to prevent the Winneba population from harassing them and requested ‘alternative jobs’ and the payment of the February wages.Footnote 112 The institute's bank account was frozen, while the NLC received numerous letters from creditors who were waiting to be paid for the provision of yams, kenkey, bread, corn, fish, meat, petroleum, leather goods — and even airplane tickets.Footnote 113 The NLC settled the debts and dealt with the recovery of advances paid to teachers who had signed up for ideological training before the coup. The government converted the institute into a teacher training college.Footnote 114 In 1992 the premises of the KNII became part of what is today the University of Education, while its Pan-Africanist aspirations live on in another institution with the same name.Footnote 115
This study has challenged several claims often made in the literature about the KNII. The curriculum was not univocally designed by Soviet advisers who, on the contrary, did not play any significant role in the life of the institute. Likewise, KNII students were not only party officials, as claimed by the NLC after the coup; nor were they a representative cross-section of Ghanaian society, as Nkrumah had hoped. Besides correcting the historical record of a specific institution, the reconstruction of the short-lived trajectory of the KNII carries some implications for the analysis of intellectual change, agency, and transnational connections under African socialist regimes.
Recent histories have captured the richness of political imagination and practices under African socialisms. Yet, the trajectories of institutions such as the KNII that had the ambitious task of integrating the social sciences within the construction and institutionalisation of the state's official ideology have largely been neglected. While the use of education in the social sciences to create ‘modern’ citizens was not peculiar to socialist regimes (and even less so in the golden age of modernization theory), the concrete ways in which this was done changed substantially.Footnote 116 Rather than using the social sciences to summon and mobilise forms of technocratic expertise that could bridge the Cold War divide, party schools and ideological institutes had the greater ambition of ‘democratising’ the language and conceptual apparatus of political economy and political science to forge new subjectivities. Within a conception of African socialist regimes as ‘living laboratories’ for the production of political discourse, the ‘experimental’ nature of institutions such as the KNII was not limited to the contamination of the universalistic outlook of Marxism-Leninism with the search for more local political iconographies.Footnote 117 Instead, it can be found in their role as mediators between the state's reflexive attempt to construct and project an image of itself and its historical mission and a wide array of concrete strategies and discursive formations adopted by local and international actors.Footnote 118
For this reason, the construction of official discourse, with its multiple intellectual genealogies, its formulaic repetitions and its obvious inconsistencies, should be read against the grain of individual and collective actions, choices, and identities.Footnote 119 By replacing the faceless and nameless ‘Soviets’ (or other proxies for foreign communist regimes) with a diverse cast of ‘global’ individual characters, the history of socialist party schools can also enrich histories of communist presence and intervention in Africa.Footnote 120 Investigating the individual motivations of foreign actors can provide the starting point for a more realistic appreciation of the multicentric and dispersed nature of socialist transnationalism as it happened on the ground, beyond the realm of high Cold War diplomacy.
Rather than being merely a footnote in the history of a turbulent period, or an allegory of the worst aspects of Nkrumah's rule, the KNII was a complex microcosm that can serve to enrich our understanding of the ‘politics of socialist education’ in postcolonial Africa. From Bamako to Mogadishu, the study of ideological institutes and party schools can provide precious insights into the processes by which political visions were formulated and disseminated as well as how individuals and social groups negotiated their involvement in the political and intellectual landscapes of African socialisms.
