GHANA AND THE LIBERAL MIND

Or, Was the Readiness All?

By KEITH KYLE

C't itsfcE self-government, Ghana has had sym- k3bolic importance as the first Black African colony to become a state. Arguments which had hitherto been abstract—such as whether Africans were 'ready to govern themselves'--could now proceed by way of concrete example. In the late Fifties Ghana was a great comfort to those whom for the purposes of this article I term lib- erals or people of a liberal mind, those who on democratic ground favoured African independ- ence. For many years Dr. Ralph Bunche played the same kind of role in the United States. You would catch a Southerner in mid-rant about the natural inferiority of the Negroid mentality and say: 'What about Ralph Bunche?' Nine cases out of ten he would concede the 'exception,' an effort which at least caused a temporary obstruc- tion to the flow of rhetoric. (Later, Southerners got wise to this and, after a half-hearted attempt to prove Bunche a Communist, incorporated the 'one exception' into the standard rant.) During the years of self-government and for the first year or two of independence, Ghana seemed admirably fitted to fill this bill in arguments between liberals and conservatives over 'African readiness.' There 'vas now an example one could point to on the continent of a cheerfully and, it would appear, efficiently functioning black democracy.

The 'success' of Ghana. by which was meant the apparently successful transplantation of West- minster-type liberal democracy to Africa, became therefore a very considerable emotional and in- tellectual investment for those who were of a liberal mind. It was a guaranteed creator of em- barrassment to conservatives who engaged in automatic speaking about unreadiness. It was Possible to say: 'If the Ghanaians are capable of governing themselves, as you are obliged to admit they clearly arc, why are Kenyan Africans deemed so unready, simply because they have white men living in their midst?'

An African country does not exist for the sake of giving controversial satisfaction to British liberals. It has to work out its own destiny according to its own needs. But since Ghanaian Papers get apoplectically indignant at what they term a giant Anglo-American newspaper con- spiracy against their country, it is worth pointing Out why it is that Ghana does get a worse press than most of the others among the thirty- seven African states which diverge from the democratic norm. Liberals feel that Ghana has let them down rather sensationally; conserva- tives whose defeat, after all, is irrevocable, except Perhaps in Southern Africa, kick themselves when they remember how easily liberals got away With arguments from the Ghana example.

The liberal mind places a high valuation on intellectual integrity; it is particularly sensitive to charges of operating a double standard. Since liberals argued for African independence on grounds of universal application, they find them- selves logically bound not to exempt Africans themselveF from the application of these stan- dards. They worry about such caricatures of their attitude as 'with you black is always right, White always wrong.' Some, then, of those who share the general liberal viewpoint, having got over their first embarrassment at finding the

authoritarian characteristics of Dr. Nkrumah's regime becoming more marked, have accom- modated themselves rather speedily to what they consider to be Ghana's delinquency. A classifi- cation of Nkrumah's Ghana with Salazar's Portugal, Ian Smith's Rhodesia and Verwoerd's South Africa as equally to be condemned gives an impression of impartiality. It is an assertion that liberal principles are not colour-conscious, that rebels against black tyranny deserve the same support as rebels against white tyranny and so forth. Nor is this entirely an academic matter of squaring a liberal's conscience. There are tactical considerations to bear in mind. The Rho- desian battle has still to be won.

One cannot expect supporters of the Ghana government to find this state of affairs attractive. Indeed, if they accepted this diagnosis they would probably resent it as impertinent and not a little patronising. British liberals do not own Africa just because they supported African indepen- dence. But at least some such explanation makes more psychological sense of the bad press Ghana has been receiving than the bogeyman of an im- perialist conspiracy. Still less does it make sense to suggest, as the Ghanaian press so frequently does, that a desire to keep African states divided and to prevent the continental political and economic union which President Nkrumah is advocating in season and out is a leading motive of British Or, for that matter, American attitudes towards Ghana. Almost the precise opposite would be nearer the case. Fewer conceivable de- velopments on the African continent would evoke more enthusiasm than a rapid and convincing movement towards a United States of Africa. The scepticism which has been inseparable from initial public reaction in Britain to any idealistic venture in the international field since the dis- illusionment with the League of Nations would probably be reflected in the press in the early stages. But that success would be applauded, and progress, once the African leaders showed them-

'Have /hey- er --dropped ii?' selves possessed of a real will to succeed, cheered on by majority opinion, is virtually certain in any circumstances short of total Communist domina- tion of such an African union.

The idea that Britain or any other responsible power in this atomic age enjoys dealing with weak and numerous governments in any area of the world is quite mistaken. To believe that western governments have got nothing better to do than to work night and day at the diabolical task of keeping the thirty-seven African states divided is to assume that they have gone out of their minds. Quite apart from considerations of political and international order, which would weigh heavily in favour of a trend towards a smaller number of larger units and preferably a single union that would spare the rest of the world from having to bother about African quarrels at all, there is the economic argument. As President Nkrumah quite correctly said in his Cairo speech last year, the balanced eco- nomic development of a continental economic union would produce a far more satisfactory trading partner for major capitalist powers than thirty-seven feeble fragments. No, the obstacles to African union lie within Africa itself and are not concerned with imperialist conspiracies.

Yet on our part the puritanical liberal view does require some modification in the interests of African realities. The trouble with our liberal/ conservative argument over the future of Africa was that it was argued excessively on the conser- vatives' ground. It was assumed by liberals that it was necessary to refute each and every count in the conservative thesis about Africans 'not being ready.' Instead, all that it was necessary to do was to question the notion of readiness itself. At what moment in England's history were the English 'ready' for self-government? Were we so fit during the Wars of the Roses? Under Henry VIII? Under the Stuarts, perhaps? If mass literacy or democracy or absence of cor- ruption are the ,tandards. was Britain unready until the second half of the nineteenth century, some considerable time after we had first acquired the Gold Coast forts?

'Readiness,' in short, is not a metaphysical concept. The question of transfer of power is a more workaday one: is it possible to hand over to a regime which will secure that its writ runs over the whole length of the state or, as in the case of the British in Palestine and the Belgians in the Congo, is it not? By this standard Ghana was ready, the Congo was not.

Once this is realised, it is clear that a great deal of what conservatives say– that is, those in the conservative camp who are know- ledgeable of African conditions—is and always has been, when dissociated from arguments about 'readiness,' well founded. It is true that in an African country tribalism is rampant, it is true that there is very little sense of civic virtue, it is true that Africans are very often (for all manner of understandable historical reasons, such as the background of slavery) temperament- ally averse, if not to work of any kind, at least to disciplined work of the kind needed to build a modern state, it is true that half-educated young men prefer in disturbing numbers to drift in towns rather than to dig in the fields, it is true that the edicated elite is rather a thin upper layer (whose responsibility was that, by the way?), and it is true that a rather disturbing proportion of members of this elite are in it for what they can get in the way of conspicuous living. All this can be found documented, without any attempt at concealment, in practically every African state. Ghana, for one, does not hesitate to point to these shortcomings; President Nkrumah has been particularly outspoken about practically all of them. He has also acted rather more drastically and more fundamentally than some of his less controversial fellow-rulers.

But this has no necessary connection at all with, timing for self-government. What kind of government is more likely to endow people with a sense of pride and responsibility or overcome an instinctively apathetic response to authority —a foreign government or the country's own? Which is more likely to have the necessary sense of drive and urgency?

By valiantly denying all the experience of conservative-minded administrators because it was necessary to deny the misplaced conclusions usually drawn from this about 'readiness,' the liberal mind shut itself to sympathy with the handicaps under which any government has to operate in Africa. British colonial government was for the most part authoritarian and the tech- niques which it taught by example were authori- tarian techniques. If Africans know about Special Branch, detention camps, rustication, prohibited immigrants, it is because they learnt about them from the British. They apply them more ruth- lessly because they are trying to get things done more quickly; they are sometimes faced with more violent opposition and sabotage than the British because they tackle things that the British felt it more prudent, as outsiders, to leave alone.

It is the case in many spheres that arguments have a life of their own, irrespective of who originally used them, and they pass over time from one terinporary repository to another. This seems particularly true of Africa. The argument that the Westminster style of democracy was unsuitable for African countries was, tf course, the classical.case of the imperialist—it was used in relation to East Africa by Winston Churchill in a major speech as Colonial Secretary in January 1922. It has now become the glory of the African nationalist. There need be no sur- prise that the reality of African government seems to fit in more with a conservative than with a liberal frame of reference. Insensitivity to the practical obstacles to progress with which a government in Africa has to wrestle seems par- ticularly remiss in a country which claims ex- perience in these matters.

Two considerations especially favour the de- velopment of the charismatic personality and the one-party state. The first is that while the colonial period afforded a partially democratic experi- ence in favoured parts of most of the colonies, this was seldom so throughout their length and breadth. The second is more general. Any new society that is to have a sense of itself must be created to norms that arouse some responsive- ness throughout the land. This is more than ordinarily true of a country which is hoping to Plan rapid economic progress. All outside tech- nical advisers wish to know before they can give technical advice what is the end towards Which society is supposed to be working. This is the case for an ideological framework which initially, certainly in African conditions, must come from above.

This leads up to the most difficult problem of all for the outside observer. The performance of an African government must clearly, in the first instance, be assessed in relation to African conditions. But is this all? A democratic press normally applies certain standards to develop- ments in the internal affairs of foreign countries. It is thus that apartheid is condemned or the misuse of states' rights in the American South. Do African governments, . including Ghana's, wish us to say that, since they have difficulties which we ought to understand, they should be exempted from all criticism? Would this not be an insufferably patronising thing for us to do? Would we not be saying that what happens in an African country does not matter 'because they are only Africans and what can you expect?'

Ghana's regime is not a very easy one to under- stand, even for its educated citizens. There is, for example, a proclaimed foreign policy of non- alignment, which has been interpreted as the judgment of international issues on their own merits. On the whole, Ghana's government does not have at all a bad record in this respect; indeed, it has often played a subtle and construc- tive role. But this is seldom reflected in the sloppy one-sidedness of most of the party press, which gives the impression of deriving all of its foreign news from Communist sources. Lebrecht Hesse, the chairman of the Marxist Study Forum at the University. of Ghana, called the party's attention 'to this in an article last year in the student magazine which he edits. He gives ex- amples of this one-sidedness and concludes: 'With this background in mind, could we honestly blame the .western powers if they become sus- picious of our policy of neutralism?'

Some greater evidence of objectivity would certainly lend more weight to criticism of the West when it is well grounded. Readers of Spark, the stimulating but obtuse ideological journal, must sometimes be astonished to come across certain passages in the President's speeches when these are printed in extenso. Nkrumah's moving tribute to Kennedy must have seemed odd when spoken of the man who had been leader of a nation which, on previously printed evidence, had been doing little else but compass the destruc- tion of Ghana. Similarly, when the President makes extremely valuable suggestions about a Commonwealth Secretariat, does no regular reader ask what his leader is doing consorting in this fashion with dedicated and malignant foes? Yet when one realises how much African states in fact depend on the West for any hope of -approaching their desperately desired economic targets, there is something rather moving about the way in which they sturdily decline to allow this situation to dictate their policies. It cannot really be because they know that in case of necessity the Soviet Union will bail them out. The part which criticism of Khrushchev for push- ing this policy so far with Egypt played in that leader's downfall cannot have passed unnoticed. No, it is a matter of dignity and self-respect. But is it necessary to protest quite so much? Is it necessary to lean quite so far against the wind to avoid the charge of subservience?

That a country like Ghana is not indifferent to its international reputation is shown by the Government's invitation to outside bodies to in- spect the detention camps and by its daringly unconventional challenge to Dr. Nkrumah's exiled enemies to allow his case against them to be tested by a UN-appointed tribunal of jurists meeting either in Ghana or in 'a sister African state.' We and the Ghanaians still have much to say to each other—and a mutual sacrifice of hobgoblins would assist the dialogue. Since Ghana has been so much a symbol, much of what has been said applies to other parts of Africa as well. A clearer retrospect about our own internal debate about Africa could be our contribution.