Ghanaian independence after oil
Last week, Ghana’s parliament approved a Ghanaian company to explore oil fields off its coast. This is noteworthy because most companies working to extract Ghana’s oil are American or European. In fact, in 2007 it was a U.S.-based company that discovered the vast oil reserve. To transnational piracy and the increased U.S. military presence that have accompanied oil, Ghana has responded with lively, public debate about neocolonialism—a term coined by Ghana’s founding father Kwame Nkrumah.
When the Gold Coast became Ghana in 1957, Nkrumah foresaw that independence would be meaningless unless the country maintained political and economic freedom. Freedom did not mean isolation, however. Nkrumah’s anticolonial vision was also insistently internationalist—a position he came by honestly.
In the late 1930s, Nkrumah earned degrees—including a masters in sacred literature—from HBCU Lincoln University and from Penn. By 1945, he was in Manchester to organize the momentous fifth Pan-African Congress, which called for the decolonization of Africa. After returning to the Gold Coast, Nkrumah drew from Gandhi’s methods to develop Positive Action, a “practical revolutionary politics” that upheld the “moral correctness of nonviolence.”
