Contents Chapter 1 Leadership in Postcolonial Africa: An Introduction 1

B A B A   G .   J A L L O W

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The PDA contained provisions that literally crippled the judi-

cial and legislative branches of the Nkrumah government and 

vested the power of life and death over detainees, and by exten-

sion any Ghanaian, on Nkrumah. Among the many repressive 

laws that the CPP government passed between 1952 and 1966, 

the PDA stands defiant of comprehension in its brutality and 

its colonial character. By the time of Nkrumah’s overthrow in 

February 1966, an estimated 2,000 to 3,000 Ghanaians lan-

guished under preventive detention, some as young as 14, some 

as old as 92, some for periods of up to seven years without 

charges or trial and still unsure what crime they had commit-

ted.  

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   While in power, Nkrumah was portrayed as a saint on the 

editorial pages of newspapers—all state-owned, especially on 

the editorial cartoon pages of his party’s mouthpiece, the  Accra 

Evening News . Out of power, he appeared on these same pages 

as the worst devil ever to pollute this earth with his presence 

and stayed on like that for a very long time after the coup. One 

of the most famous victims of the PDA was Dr J. B. Danquah, 

the man who invited Nkrumah back to Ghana in 1947 and 

offered him the position of secretary general of the United Gold 

Coast Convention. Danquah was held under the PDA in 1961, 

released in 1962, and detained again in 1964. He died under 

preventive detention in early 1965. 

 In essence, the colonial state lives on in postcolonial Africa. 

As Crawford Young puts it, “in metamorphosis the (colonial) 

caterpillar becomes (a post-colonial) butterfly without losing 

its inner essences” (1994, 2). In a petition for his release sent 

to Nkrumah while held under preventive detention at Nsawam 

Prison, Danquah made a striking comparison of conditions 

in  colonial  Ghana  to  conditions  in  postcolonial  Ghana.  He 

reminded Nkrumah how, when they were both arrested by the 

colonial authorities in the wake of the Accra riots of 1948, they 

were not treated as badly as he was being treated under preven-

tive detention in independent Ghana. A section of Danquah’s 

petition is worth quoting here at some length.   

 You will recall that when in 1948 we were arrested by the British 

Government and sent to the North for detention they treated us 

as gentleman, and not as galley slaves, and provided each of us 

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with a furnished bungalow (two or three rooms) with a garden, 

together with opportunity for reading and writing. In fact I 

took with me my typewriter and papers for the purpose, and 

Ako Adjei also did the same, and there was ample opportunity 

for correspondence. 

 Here, at Nsawam, for the four months of my detention up to 

date (8th January to 9th May 1964), I have not been allowed 

access to any books and papers, except the Bible, and although 

I was told in January that my application to write a letter to 

my wife, Mrs. Elizabeth Danquah, could be considered if I 

addressed a letter to the Minister of the Interior, through the 

Director of Prisons, I have not, for over three months, since I 

wrote to the Minister as directed on the 31st January, 1964, 

received any reply, not even a common acknowledgment from 

the Minister as to whether I should be allowed to write to my 

wife  or  not . . .  

 Secondly, you will recall that barely a month after our deten-

tion in the North in 1948 we were brought down to Accra 

and released to appear before a Commission of Enquiry set 

up to investigate the justice or otherwise of our arrest and 

detention . . .  

 In the present case, since I was arrested four months ago, I 

have not been asked to appear before any Judge, or Committee, 

or Commission, and, up to now, all I have been told is con-

tained in a sheet of paper entitled “Grounds for Detention” 

in which I am accused that “in recent months” I have been 

actively engaged in a plan “to overthrow the Government of 

Ghana by unlawful means”, and that I have planned thereby 

“to endanger the security of the State” (the Police and Armed 

Forces).  

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 Danquah reveals in his petition that this particular charge 

was later replaced by one alleging that he had received 10,000 

pounds sterling from a foreign businessman and distributed the 

money among striking railway workers in a bid to have them 

overthrow the government by unlawful means and to assas-

sinate the president.  

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 Danquah attributes what he saw as Nkrumah’s leadership fail-

ures to any number of factors. However, he seems to have put 

it all down to Nkrumah’s abandonment of what he called “the 

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Philosophy of Ghanaianism” in favor of Marxism-Socialism. 

He writes thus:

  The philosophy of Ghanaism is in the blood of every true born 

Ghanaian, being in fact the essence of our nation’s very soul 

which is immanent in the five-fold concept of Ghana’s humanist 

and patrician personality, a personality uniquely realized in the 

unity of Onyankopon (God), Oman (State), Abusua (Family), 

Odehye (Patrician) and Amansan (humanity), a five-fold concept 

activated in the five-fold ideology of (1) Theism, (2) Patriotism 

(3) Patriarchy, (4) Freedom (of choice), and (5) Humanism. The 

dominance of this five-fold concept in the Ghanaian personality 

constitutes the driving or motive forces of Ghanaian action and 

the Ghanaian nature. All the five motives or forces need not 

be fully highlighted in any one action, but they operate all the 

same in due proportion.  

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 Warren Bennis suggests that a key test of leadership “is know-

ing what you want, knowing your abilities and capacities, and 

recognizing the difference between the two” (2009, 117). It 

appears that while African leaders like Nkrumah knew they 

wanted independence, they were ignorant of the limitations of 

their abilities and capacities; they did not recognize a differ-

ence between what they wanted and their abilities and capaci-

ties to get it without drawing from creative energies external to 

themselves and residing in the new body politic. Their failure 

to recognize this “knowledge difference” severely limited the 

pool of creative energies they could draw from to assist in the 

momentous transition from colonial subject to independent 

citizen. Organizational flexibility was sacrificed on the altar 

of ill-thought-out “visions” that left no room for alternative 

conceptualizations of nation-statehood. The result was a tragic 

failure of leadership whose consequences have haunted and will 

haunt Africa for a very long time. 

 A brand of Nkrumah’s “patriotic” style of history writing 

“flourished” in many African countries in the decades follow-

ing independence, not necessarily as copies from Nkrumah. In 

the former Belgian Congo, Joseph Mobutu, now widely known 

to have been used by the Belgians and the CIA to engineer 

the overthrow and eventual murder of Prime Minister Patrice 

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