Kwame Nkrumah
The story of Ghanaian revolutionary leader Kwame Nkrumah is perhaps less one of a mad dictator than a man of high character whose best intentions went horribly wrong.
Ghana, the old colony of Gold Coast, was the first British territory in Africa to gain independence, and the British were particularly anxious that it set the tone for a peaceful and orderly handover of power elsewhere in British Africa. The main question, however, was who to hand over power to. A major failing of all colonial states, across the imperial spectrum, was their tendency to retain political power in the hands of a narrow metropolitan clique. Blacks were recruited to lower-level administrative positions, the ranks of the army and police and blue-collar roles in industry. Therefore, when it came time to hand power in Africa back to Africans, there turned out to be very few qualified, indigenous Africans in a position to assume power.
Kwame Nkrumah was a modestly educated, but politically active native of Gold Coast, who rose to the position of first among equals in independent Ghana through astute organization, and a messianic personality. The British would rather have dealt with any other than him, but in the end, in March 1957, he was installed as the head of an independent Ghana.
It was not just the British who hoped that independence in Ghana would be a success. Africa hoped for the same thing. This was the age of the Cold War, however, and for many like Nkrumah, the surest avenue to social and economic redemption was some sort of African interpretation of Marxism.
Nkrumah plunged immediately into a raft of populist economic policies, and a wide, pan-African political agenda. Initially, the results of this were positive. Foreign aid flooded in, supporting lavish infrastructure projects and socialized education and medicine introduced. At the same time, Nkrumah himself reached out to African nationalists across the region, and Africans throughout the diaspora, to join in a single, pan-African liberation movement.
Things began to go wrong, however, around the peculiarly African malady of corruption. Nkrumah began progressively to retain power through economic and political patronage, and at the same time, to display grandiose visions of himself as a universal, revolutionary leader. As he steadily lost his grip on the fundamentals of economy and politics, his personal vision became more abstract and abstruse. To shore up his control of the country, he sought to concentrate power in his own hands, and In 1964, he declared himself President for Life, summarily banning all opposition political parties.
This inevitably began a cult of personality, and as the economic situation in the country steadily deteriorated, so Nkrumah fell back on a command economy, and the ruthless suppression of political opposition and civil liberties.
On February 21, 1966, Nkrumah flew to North Vietnam to advise Ho Chi Minh on how to end the Vietnam War. It was this sort of delusional sense of his own international status, and the disastrous management of his country that eventually brought him down. In Operation Cold Chop, a well-organized military coup d’etat, power was seized by the army, and Nkrumah was stranded in Vietnam. He never returned to Ghana, and this once prosperous African nation as reduced to penury. Successive, corrupt military governments would follow.