In this milieu, Kwame Nkrumah continued to wield human rights as a tool of African liberation, insisting that European states must live up to their own expressed ideals and clear the way for African liberation. Standing before the United Nations in 1962, Kwame Nkrumah compared South African apartheid to the towering, bright-line example of international human rights abuse: Nazi Germany. “The essential inhumanity [of apartheid] surpasses even the brutality of the Nazis against the Jews,” he explained. A state-funded political magazine, the Ghanaian, took up the cause, echoing Nkrumah’s stance about the moral hypocrisy of the “so-called free West” who “look on unaffected with only occasional protests while the lives and liberties of millions of Africans wither in the iron hands of apartheid South Africa.”29 Eventually, Kwame Nkrumah would provocatively suggest that possession of any colonial holding should disqualify countries from UN membership.30
In the first years of national independence in Ghana, Kwame Nkrumah deployed human rights to undermine the moral authority of Western nations. Meanwhile, a collection of critics including Kofi Busia insisted that Nkrumah’s government must be cried down as a human rights violator. These debates about whether rights talk would justify Pan-African liberation or apartheid and which leaders and nations might don the mantle of human rights advocate reflect the moral and political complexity of African countries’ entry into the global political order.
Following the 1966 National Liberation Council (NLC) coup d’état, with Kwame Nkrumah in exile and the CPP banished from Ghanaian political life, human rights continued to be part of the debates about Ghana’s political future. Immediately following the February 24 action, the NLC released a pamphlet entitled The Rebirth of Ghana: The End of Tyranny, which established that “Ghanaians in all walks of life have been denied their fundamental human rights.”31 Independent Ghana’s first coerced regime change was supposedly an attempt to restore human rights—or so said a number of editorials published in the Legon Observer, a University of Ghana–based publication that sprang up in the aftermath of the NLC coup.
In the Observer, Franklin Oduro described the Nkrumah years as a time of propaganda and distortion. These were days when the politician responsible for administering the Preventive Detention Act might turn around and give an eloquent public speech about “fundamental freedom, the right of men to be treated as men … the right of men and women to the serenity and sanctity of their homes and hearths, the right of children to play in safety under peaceful havens … the right of old men and women to the tranquility of their sunset.”32 “It is incredible,” Oduro quipped, “that a man who had such love for freedom would detain so many people without trial.”33 The Observer’s editorial pages were marked by such critiques about the gap between human rights rhetoric and reality in Nkrumah’s Ghana.
There were also musings about the role that the human rights concept might play in building a better Ghanaian future. Five months after the NLC coup, an Observer editorial pondered whether constitutional language about human rights might “nip an incipient dictatorship in the bud” and thus safeguard the future.34 This particular author concluded that human rights language would not guarantee Ghana’s political fortunes, noting that “no sequence of words, no matter how morally stirring or upright, could guarantee that human rights would be respected.35 Ghanaians utilized the language of human rights to describe both what had befallen Ghana and how the country might be set to rights. During the first decade of Ghana’s independence, politicians, journalists, and citizens marshaled rights talk, domesticating it for use in local political conflicts and simultaneously confronting the inequity and imbalance of the global political order. This trend would continue. By the time Ghana embraced a truth and reconciliation commission (TRC) in the early twenty-first century, a malleable human rights rhetoric had long been part of Ghanaian political life.
1957–1966
No single Ghanaian has been subject to as much praise or vilification as Kwame Nkrumah, Ghana’s first prime minister and president. Differing versions of Nkrumah’s legacy—visionary anticolonial icon, father of Pan-Africanism, paranoid African president, authoritarian leader—form a tangled and volatile bulk in the public sphere. From his own ideological pragmatism to the authoritarian inheritance of the British colonial state and the Cold War pressure chamber, Kwame Nkrumah’s transformation from the man deemed osagyefo, or “redeemer” in the Akan Twi language, to his pyrotechnic political demise in Ghana’s first coup d’état in 1966, is a foundational tragedy story in modern African politics.36
Pose the following question to any group of Ghanaians—did Kwame Nkrumah’s CPP government abuse peoples’ human rights?—and a volatile and protracted debate will ensue. The question is provocative because it calls for a moral assessment of the leadership of one of Africa’s most imposing thinkers, theorists, and diplomats.37 A simple label (abuser or respecter of human rights) is ill-fitting for a leader who both articulated the value of African self-determination and established himself as the head of a one-party state in which “of dissensus there was little evidence.”38 In 2012, a Ghanaian writer called for a “presidential commission involving intellectuals” who would “write the history of Dr. Nkrumah for an objective and non-partisan view.”39 Little did the writer know that such a history has already been produced. This nonpartisan accounting of Nkrumah’s legacy was not articulated by a group of esteemed professional historians; it was curated by Ghanaian citizens themselves within the national reconciliation process.
The NRC archive’s stories and petitions challenge the narrative of Kwame Nkrumah as either demagogue or savior. Ghanaians told stories establishing Nkrumah as the architect of the 1958 Preventive Detention Act (PDA), a law that empowered Ghana’s government to detain citizens preemptively and without trial. Nkrumah’s government defended preventive detention as a policy to protect the sovereignty of a lone independent nation surrounded by European colonies and in the midst of global Cold War. Over the course of eight years, hundreds of Ghanaians were swept into jail without recourse. In the NRC, Ghanaians remembered the PDA as an act of political violence; this was a policy that effectively incarcerated large numbers of citizens who, for diverse reasons, had made themselves enemies of local, regional, or national branches of the CPP government.
Indeed, there were persons like Kwablah Darquah, who participated in national reconciliation expressly to describe how people swept into prison as young men emerged years later, scarred, disillusioned, and bitter. “My being here today is to inform … about what the PDA did to a lot of able-bodied young Ghanaians and also to educate the public about the hardship we underwent.”40 Emmanuel France, arrested in 1958, explained that the “PDA had no moral roots,” that “it was just passed as a tool to turn Ghana into a one-party state.”41 Detaining people extrajudicially and indefinitely, France claimed, licensed further atrocity. There were “prison officers [who] maltreated and tormented the detainees far beyond what they could bear,” and proud Ghanaians emerged from cells damaged, plagued by “physical disability [and] emotional and psychological sores.”42 Preventing detention, many NRC participants explained, was a policy easily hijacked by those who would prosecute petty and local conflicts using state power. Petitioner Nicholas Dompreh blamed his detention on a physical altercation between himself and Kwamina Otoo, a local Akim Oda man. When Dompreh was later arrested by police, supposedly for “hurling insults at Kwame Nkrumah,” he insisted that Otoo, his rival, used the cover of the PDA to engineer his arrest.43
The violence of preventive detention is not the only image of the CPP years lodged in the NRC records. Ghanaians injured by acts of terrorism also came forward to