Abstract
Certain fundamental factors are common in African epics and myths. The coming of the hero is marked by mystery, a portentous event, a childhood that sets him apart from other common children, and/or a fantastical occurrence during his youth that inspires awe, veneration, and even a tale of terror. The birth itself is an event of wonderment.1
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Notes
Isidore Okpewho, The Epic in Africa (New York: Columbia University Press, 1979), p. 86.
Clyde W. Ford, The Hero with an African Face: Mythic Wisdom of Traditional Africa (New York: Bantam Books, 2000), p. 72.
Otto Rank, The Myth of the Birth of the Hero: A Psychological Interpretation of Mythology, trans. Dr. F. Robbins and Dr. Smith Ely Jelliffe (New York: Robert Brunner, 1957), p. 4.
Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah (New York: Nelson, 1957), p 4.
Kwame Nkrumah, Axioms of Kwame Nkrumah, from an undated speech (London: Thomas Nelson and Sons, 1967), p. 47.
See Steven J. Salm and Toyin Falola, Culture and Customs of Ghana (London: Greenword Press, 2002)
H. Debrunner, Witchcraft in Ghana (Accra: Presbyterian Book Depot, 1961), p. 182. The anthropologist Karen E. Fields explained the routine character of an ever-present knowledge and expectation of witchcraft in the African mind. Despite the Westerner’s view of witchcraft as something extraordinary, for African villagers not to routinely believe in witchcraft would have required them to “escape a texture of life which sustained the idiom of witchcraft.” See
Karen E. Fields, “Political Contingencies of Witchcraft in Colonial Central Africa: Culture and the State in Marxist Theory,” Canadian Journal of African Studies 16, no. 3 (1982): 567–593.
George P. Hagan, “Nkrumah’s Leadership Style—An Assessment from a Cultural Perspective,” in The Life and Work of Kwame Nkrumah, Papers of a symposium organized by the Institute of African Studies, University of Ghana, Legon, edited by Kwame Arhin (Accra: Sedco Publishing Limited, 1991).
T. O. Beidelman, The Kagaru (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), pp. 131–132.
Max Weber, Theory of Social and Economic Organization (New York: Oxford University Press, 1947), p. 359.
See Karl Loewenstein, Max Weber’s Political Ideas in the Perspective of Our Time (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1966), p. 74.
Emmanuel Kotoka was one of the leading generals who overthrew Nkrumah. He expressed this African attitude that contradicts Weber one month after the February 1966 coup. Addressing the Ghanaian army on March 20, he said, “But for God, who had already finished the job, it would have been impossible for the army and the police to overthrow Nkrumah.” Quoted in Peter Barker, Operation Cold Chop: The Coup that Toppled Nkrumah (Accra: Ghana Publishing Corporation, 1969) p. 106.
See Frantz Fanon’s books, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 1968); The Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1967); A Dying Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1965); and Toward the African Revolution (New York: Grove Press 1969) for in-depth expositions of the psychology of the colonizer and colonized. “Ghanaians believe that a white Jesus and Mary are more powerful than if they were black, because the white man and white woman are more powerful than the black,” Sam Nyako explained.
Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972), p. 11. Originally published as Discours sur le colonialisme (Paris : Presence Africaine, 1955).
Gustav Jagoda, White Man (London: Oxford University Press, 1961), p. 77.
M. J. Field, Social Organization of the Ga People (London: The Crown Agents for the Colonies, 1940), p. 100.
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.
William M. Macartney, Dr. Aggrey: Ambassador For Africa (London: SCM Press, 1948), p. 106.
Edwin W. Smith, Aggrey of Africa: A Study in Black and White (London: Student Christian Movement Press, 1929), p. 13.
Magnus Sampson, Makers of Modern Ghana, vol. 1 (Accra: Anowuo Educational Publications, 1969), p. 144.
See Swami Prabhavananda and Christopher Isherwood, How To Know God: The Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali (New York: New American Library, 1953), pp. 89, 90.
Albert Luthuli, Let My People Go (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962), p. 41.
See Kenneth King, Pan Africanism and Education: A Study of Race Philanthropy in the Southern States and East Africa (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).
Nnamdi Azikiwe, My Odyssey (London: C. Hurst & Company, 1970), p. 280.
See Robert H. Brisbane, The Black Vanguard, Origins of the Negro Social Revolution 1900–1960 (Valley Forge: Judson Press, 1970), pp. 50–52.
Herbert Aptheker, ed., The Correspondence of W. E. B. Du Bois, vol. 1, Selections, 1877–1934 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1977), p. 182.
E. Casely Hayford, Gold Coast Native Institutions, With Thoughts upon a Healthy Imperial Policy for the Gold Coast and Ashanti (London: Sweet and Maxwell, 1903), pp. 235, 236, 237, 238.
See George M. Frederickson, Black Liberation: A Comparative History of Black Ideologies in the United States and South Africa (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), p. 147.
Daniel Walden, ed., W. E. B. Du Bois: The Crisis Writings (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1972), p. 60.
All this being so, Aggrey’s presence at Achimota must still be attributed to the uncommon administration of the Gold Coast governor, Sir Frederick Gordon Guggisberg (1919–1927). Guggisberg allocated hundreds of thousands of pounds to build and staff the college at Achimota. This he did when colonizers in other parts of Africa neglected and discouraged with suspicion higher education for black people. Guggisberg also insisted that indigenous Africans receive medical education. Then he had these black doctors appointed to posts where white British colonials had to utilize their medical skills or go untreated. Despite the white men’s strong objections to their wives being treated by black male doctors, Guggisberg refused to change his policy. See Adell Patton, Jr., Physicians, Colonial Racism, and Diaspora in West Africa (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1996). Nonetheless, for all of his progressivism, Guggisberg was, in the end, an administrator of a system of institutionalized black inferiority maintained by armed force. No “progressivism” on the part of Ghana’s British colonial masters could cover the reality that colonialism was ultimately maintained by Europeans’ possession of more technologically lethal systems of violence than indigenous Africans could muster. Without this advantage, neither Guggisberg nor his predecessors or successors could have overstayed their welcome in the Gold Coast or any African colony.
See George Padmore, The Gold Coast Revolution (London: Dennis Dobson, 1953).
Nnamdi Azikiwe, Renascent Africa (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), p. 157. Azikiwe cites as his source
Carter G. Woodson’s The Negro in Our History, 6th ed. (Washington, D.C.: Associated Publishers, 1966), pp. 230–231 and 461–467.
For definitions of Pan-Africanism, taking into account a wide swathe of literature, see D. Sizwe Poe, Kwame Nkrumah’s Contribution to Pan-Africanism: An Afrocentric Analysis (New York: Routledge, 2003).
Basil Davidson, Black Star (London: Allen Lane, 1971), p. 29.
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© 2007 Ahmad A. Rahman
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Rahman, A.A. (2007). The Call and Preparation of the Hero. In: The Regime Change of Kwame Nkrumah. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230603486_2
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