Abstract
Nkrumah’s stronghold on power, his bitter rivalry with the Asantes and other groups, and the controversial laws that he had passed jailing some of his political rivals made him a target for violence, symbolically and physically. During his presidency as mentioned in chapter 6, an Asante man had threatened violence against the construction of a new statue of Nkrumah in Kumasi in 1957, while his Accra statue was actually bombed in 1961. There were also several unsuccessful assassination attempts against Nkrumah himself. In Dark Days in Ghana, Nkrumah recalled that “members of the police and Special Branch have been involved in each of the six attacks made on my life, and have frequently ignored, and sometimes aided, the activities of people they knew were plotting to overthrow the government.”1 One such assassination attempt occurred nine months after the bombing of his statue in Accra. On August 1, 1962, according to Nkrumah and Milne, a grenade attack orchestrated by “leading police officers” in collusion with Emmanuel Obetsebi-Lamptey, “one of the ringleaders in the plot to kill me,” was made on Nkrumah’s life in Kulungugu in northern Ghana. During this unsuccessful attack, several people lost their lives, including a child, and 55 people were injured.2 Other attempts on and conspiratorial plots against Nkrumah’s life and coup schemes were carried out beginning with the bombing of his residence on November 10, 1955 (attributed to NLM supporters); in 1958 (pinned to various Opposition party officials, including J. B. Danquah, Reginald Reynolds Amponsah, Modesto Apaloo, Joe Appiah, Kofi Busia, and Victor Owusu); and on January 1, 1964, when a policeman stationed at Flagstaff House fired four shots at the president, but missed.3
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Nkrumah, Dark Days in Ghana, 41; June Milne, Kwame Nkrumah: A Biography (London: Panaf, 2006), 173.
See also Roger S. Gocking, The History of Ghana (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2005), 135–136.
National Liberation Council and the Ministry of Information, The Rebirth of Ghana: The End of Tyranny (Accra-Tema: State Publishing Corporation, Printing Division, 1966), i.
See John Stockwell, In Search of Enemies: A CIA Story (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978), 160, 201.
Cocking, The History of Ghana, 132, 133, 139; David Rooney, Kwame Nkrumah: The Political Kingdom in the Third World (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1988), 176.
See, for example, John D. Esseks, “Political Independence and Economic Decolonization: The Case of Ghana Under Nkrumah,” The Western Political Quarterly 24, no. 1 (March 1971): 59–64
Sarah Stockwell, The Business of Decolonization: British Business Strategies in the Gold Coast (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000).
Dennis Austin, Politics in Ghana 1946–1960 (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), 396
Similar occurrences of contesting history by pulling apart the statues of leftist leaders can be found elsewhere; in Budapest, demonstrators dismantled and knocked off the sculpted head of Stalin’s statue during the 1956 revolution. Amidst the ruins of the Chancellery in Berlin lies a bust of Adolf Hitler. On March 8, 1966, former members of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) blew up the Nelson’s Pillar monument that was constructed in Dublin, Ireland, in 1808 to honor the British naval hero Lord Horatio Nelson. See “Nations and their Pasts,” 16th annual ASEN conference, March 28–30, 2006. The symbolic attacks on the policies of political leaders through the demolition of monuments that they erected, reflects both historical and contemporary trends by antimonarchy, antigovernment, or anti-incumbent movements to remove or desecrate monuments that were seen as the symbolic representation of unpopular monarchs, imperial occupiers or domestic regimes. Of course, the earliest African examples of this were from Ancient Egypt, where cartouches of killed or deposed pharaohs were erased. This is even evident in more recent times, including postcolonial Khartoum, pre- and postapartheid South Africa and states within the former Soviet Union. In 1992, Ethiopian workers in Addis Ababa dismantled the statues of communist leaders such as Lenin erected by the exiled Colonel Mengistu. See, for example, Annie E. Coombes, History after Apartheid: Visual Culture and Public Memory in a Democratic South Africa (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003)
Coombes, “Translating the Past: Apartheid Monuments in Post-Apartheid South Africa,” in Hybridity and its Discontents: Politics, Science, Culture, ed. A. Brah and A. E. Coombes, 173–197 (New York: Routledge, 2000)
Andrew Crampton, “The Voortrekker Monument, the Birth of Apartheid, and Beyond,” Political Geography 20 (2001): 221–246
Stephen Heathorn, “The Long Retreat of Stone Generals’: Imperial Memory, Decolonisation and the Repatriation of Imperial Monuments from Sudan, 1956–60,” in “Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism,” special issue, Nation and Empire (2005): 43–61
Hess, Art and Architecture in Postcolonial Africa; Hess, “Exhibiting Ghana;” Hess, “Imagining Architecture;” Hess, “Spectacular Nation;” Henrika Kuklick, “Contested Monuments: The Politics of Archaeology in Southern Africa,” in Colonial Situations: Essays on the Contextualization of Ethnographic Knowledge, ed. George W. Stocking, 135–170 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991)
Mark Lewis and Laura Mulvey, dirs., Disgraced Monuments (New York, NY: Cinema Guild, 1991, VHS)
Sabine Marschall, “Forging National Identity: Institutionalizing Foundation Myths Through Monuments,” South African Journal of Cultural History 19, no. 1 (2005): 18–35
Lawrence J. Vale “Mediated Monuments and National Identity,” Journal of Architecture 4 (1999): 391–408
Whelan, “The Construction and Destruction of a Colonial Landscape;” and Martin Meredith, The State of Africa: A History of Fifty Years of Independence (Johannesburg: Jonathan Ball Publishers, 2005), Chapter 22, plate 15.
Gaines elaborates on the causes, consequences of and chaos that ensued during the military coup, and the impact that it had on Ghanaians as well as “American Africans” in Ghana. See Kevin Gaines, American Africans in Ghana: Black Expatriates and the Civil Rights Era (The University of North Carolina Press, 2007), Chapter 7.
Edward S. Ayensu, Bank of Ghana: Commemoration of the Golden Jubilee (Accra: Bank of Ghana, 2007), 70.
Copyright information
© 2014 Harcourt Fuller
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Fuller, H. (2014). The Downfall of Kwame Nkrumah. In: Building the Ghanaian Nation-State. African Histories and Modernities. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137448583_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137448583_9
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, New York
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-49652-5
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-44858-3
eBook Packages: Palgrave History CollectionHistory (R0)