Kwame Nkrumah and the Dawn of the Cold War: The West African National Secretariat

by Marika Sherwood

The West African National Secretariat (WANS) has almost been forgotten by history. A pan-Africanist movement founded in 1945 by Kwame Nkrumah and colleagues in London and France, WANS campaigned for independence and unity. Nkrumah returned to the Gold Coast in late 1947. The colonial government accused him of being a communist and fomenting the riots of early 1948. He was jailed. This led to the beginning of the Cold War in West Africa.

Drawing on archival research including the newly released MI5 files, Marika Sherwood reports on the work of WANS, on the plans for a unity conference in October 1948 in Lagos, and on Nkrumah's return home. Sherwood demonstrates that colonial powers colluded with each other and the US in order to control the burgeoning struggles for independence. By labelling African nationalists as 'communists' in their efforts to contain decolonisation, the Western powers introduced the Cold War to the continent.

Providing a rich exploration of a neglected history, this book sheds light for the first time on a crucial historical moment in the history of West Africa and the developmental trajectory of West African independence.

Genres: Africa

208 pages, Hardcover

Published June 15, 2019

About the author

Marika Sherwood was a Hungarian-born historian, researcher, educator and author based in England. She was a co-founder of the Black and Asian Studies Association and a pioneering researcher into the history of Black British people.

Reviews

[Richmond Apore · Rating 3 out of 5]

Overall, it was an anticlimactic read, perhaps because it felt more like a series of intercepted intelligence reports being scrutinized and analyzed, rather than what I expected, that is, a singular theme or main idea that branched out throughout the book. I can't fault the author for the remarkable depth of scholarship that went into writing this book; any possible angle of Cold War intrigue in soon-to-be post-colonial West Africa was thoroughly dissected. The European colonial masters would categorize African nationalist leaders as Communists to discredit their anti-colonial efforts while concurrently maintaining U.S. support in "curbing Communist influence" in their colonies. Yet, this was obviously a smokescreen to avoid appearing as if they were actively resisting the self-determination of African colonies—something the U.S., per the UN Atlantic Charter, saw itself as the so-called police of.

Speaking of the U.S., their dilemma was even more complicated with several moving parts. They couldn’t appear hypocritical both at home and abroad by not holding the European colonial masters in check in Africa (in sniffing out cries for independence). Yet, per realpolitik, they understood that the economically weakened post-WW2 European powers needed the natural resources of their African colonies to pay back American loans. However, if these European powers granted independence to their African colonies, the U.S. could now gain direct access to the minerals of Africa without first going through the British, French, Belgians, etc. But then again, without at least the assuredly Western European colonies, what if the newly independent African colonies fell to Communism?

So, per the Cold War era milieu, it was clearly ideologically and politically expedient for the European colonial masters to intentionally mislabel African nationalist leaders like Nkrumah and Azikiwe as Communists, so they could discredit their calls for independence while brokering anti-communism (rather than anti-nationalism) goodwill with the U.S. Great, that makes sense, right? This equation and its variables seem reliable. But what about Lumumba in Congo? Isn’t that an outlier to the equation?

The Belgians followed the script, yes—they denounced Lumumba as a Communist rather than the nationalist he was. But what about the U.S.? I guess they not only missed the memo but somehow knew the game too, concurrently? Initially, they understood that Lumumba wasn’t a Communist, despite Belgian intelligence reports. Yet, after Lumumba became Prime Minister, they (the U.S.)—more than even the Belgians—began to chastise him as a Communist more than the latter ever did. Yet, no credible CIA reports ever potently linked Lumumba to the USSR or Communism.

So, is it that the dynamics of the Cold War era in the pre-postcolonial African period, as discussed in this book, made much more sense because the erstwhile European colonial masters stuck faithfully to their working equation (nationalism = Communism), while the U.S. was bereft of any "equations" or specific Cold War era (especially post-colonial) policy regarding Africa? Was it more about "feelings and pulse on the ground" than actual dedicated policy? No wonder the likes of mere CIA station chiefs in Accra, Leopoldville, and other African capitals had so much sway in implementing American foreign policy. All the local CIA chief had to do was label you a Communist, and the anti-communist apparatus would go after you.