Nkrumah and Nkrumahism

A coup by a handful of police and army officers on the morning of 24 February 1966 overthrew the regime of President Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana while he was en route to Hanoi on a peace mission. To those who engineered, or supported, the coup it was the only means left, because all avenues of constitutional and peaceful change had long been blocked by which to rid the country of a despotism that had deprived its citizens of all liberties and reduced its economy to near bankruptcy. To Nkrumah himself, and to those supporting him, it was one more dastardly act of neo-colonialism which had seen fit to strike precisely at the moment when, having surmounted obstacles and survived difficulties created by imperialism and its Ghanaian and African agents, the socialist experiment in Ghana was about to succeed. But the basic question remains: not why the coup was staged, but why the old system so readily succumbed to the coup without a trace of resistance? An adequate answer requires an analysis of the origins, growth and failure of the Convention People's Party, in the light of both Nkrumah's leadership and his doctrine