Nkrumaism: Ideological Syncretism in the Anti-Colonial Political Imaginary

In this article, I explore the role of varied educational, environmental, and political forces in Kwame Nkrumah’s ideological orientation. I argue against a popular impulse to portray African colonial elites as ideologically passive, merely supplanting Western thought systems into the postcolony—often unsuccessfully. Though various historical cases provide evidence for such a position, here I argue against analyses that characterize Nkrumah as non-agential in his intellectual and political development. Rather, I demonstrate that he drew inspiration from diverse educational environments, from the colonial Gold Coast, to the Ivy League and historically Black colleges of the American Northeast, to student-activist spheres in London. Armed with expertise in philosophy and theology, Nkrumah engaged with his contemporaries in the Pan-African liberation struggle to birth visions of novel political forms and ideals. In particular, I focus on the development and deployment of consciencism—a hybrid political philosophy that aimed to illustrate the multiplicity of the African condition. This article employs some comparative methods in assessing the ideological divergences between American-educated colonial elites (such as Nkrumah) and their British-educated counterparts. However, the overall methodology is a global one, emphasizing the manner in which ideas traveled anti-colonial circuits and adapted to suit particular conditions