Ghana became an independent state on March 6, 1957, the first British African colony to achieve independence; a major celebration was held in the capital of Accra. US President Dwight Eisenhower sent his congratulations and sent Vice President Richard Nixon to represent the United States at the event. The Soviet delegation urged Ghanaian president Kwame Nkruma to visit Moscow as soon as possible. Ghana received numerous offers of material aid from around the world and even without that, the new nation looked to have a promising future with cocoa prices high and potential new resource development. Nkruma proclaimed "Ghana will be free forever!" and "We have a duty to prove to the world that Africans can conduct their own affairs with efficiency and tolerance and through the exercise of democracy. We must set an example to all Africa." The new government enacted some socialistic and welfare policies and started public schools.
It was only a matter of weeks before unrest began. Unrest in Togoland was suppressed by army troops after a disputed plebiscite there. In August there was a bus drivers' strike and riots in Accra when members of the Ga tribe felt that they had gotten an insufficient portion of the government patronage pie. Nkruma responded by passing the Avoidance of Discrimination Act in December, which forbade political parties based on regional or tribal affiliations. The opposition parties chafed at this action and responded by coalescing to form the United Party under Kofi Busia.A year later, an opposition MP was arrested for trying to purchase weapons abroad to infiltrate the army, so Nkrumah thought there had been an attempt to assassinate him and ordered Parliament to pass the Preventive Detention Act, allowing persons to be detained for up to five years with no charges or trial, with only Nkrumah himself empowered to order their release. It was claimed that this measure more than anything else ruined the Ghananian leader's reputation. Nkrumah did not care for the British-trained judiciary which he saw as just getting in the way of his plans. He also disliked the regional assemblies, and so in 1959 he got the constitution amended to abolish them and allow Parliament to amend the constitution with a simple majority.
Ghana remained a British dominion until 1960, when this was abolished and Nkrumah became officially head of state instead of merely prime minister. He also sought to suppress tribal organizations as most Ghanaians were more loyal to their tribes than the nation at large. Nkrumah moved to ban organizations that spread tribal or religious propaganda and also ban tribal flags (the ban was widely ignored). Opposition leader Kofi Busia objected to this authoritarian measure and soon left the country. Nkrumah also created a large personality cult around himself and reveled in his status as the first post-World War II leader of an independent African state. His anti-tribal measures created numerous enemies who sought his downfall.Three younger members of the Convention People's Party were arrested in 1962 for plotting to plant a bomb underneath Nkrumah's car and explode it while he rode in a motorcade. The plotters were acquitted and an irate Nkrumah fired the chief judge of the state security court and got Parliament to pass a law allowing a new trial, which promptly re-tried the three men, found them guilty, and sentenced them to death although their sentences were later commuted to life in prison. A new constitutional amendment gave the president the power to sack judges at all levels. In 1964, Nkrumah proposed and got a constitutional amendment making the CPP the sole legal party in the nation and made him president for life, which passed with a suspicious 99% of the vote and made Ghana into a de-facto dictatorship. Technical advisors from the communist bloc were brought to Ghana in increasing numbers.
Nkruma for his part sought to maintain a neutral position so he could extract maximum assistance from both the West and the communist bloc.Nkrumah promoted Africanization of the culture, often wearing traditional clothing instead of Western outfits and he promoted education, culture, and a filmmaking industry. He also encouraged gender equality and liberation of Ghanaian women. Some women were promoted to the Central Committee and more attended university, took up educated fields, and went on overseas visits to Israel and the Soviet bloc. Women also served in the armed forces. Nkrumah appointed as his Secretary of Propaganda Hannah Cudjoe, one of the country's relatively few women with an education at the time, and dispatched her to the north to discourage nudity and promote the wearing of proper clothing, as locals traditionally wore little beyond a loincloth. Cudjoe formed the Ghana Women's League, which promoted the government's agenda on nutrition, child-rearing, and wearing clothes. The League also protested French nuclear weapon testing in the Sahara, but Cudjoe eventually became marginalized when national women's groups were consolidated.
He launched a Ghana News Agency and consolidated state control of newspapers. Nkruma declared that the press, left in private hands, could not be trusted to report the news factually and accurately. Starting in 1960, he invoked the right to censor any news prior to publication. In a speech to Parliament on October 15, 1963, Nkruma declared that TV in Ghana would focus on educational and informative content and not be trivialized by cheap entertainment or commercialism. He also invoked the right to fire employees of the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation as he pleased and forbade all media to carry advertisements.Ghana had always been one of Africa's more advanced and economically developed regions, and by independence in 1957 the country had a quite sophisticated economy and infrastructure. Nkruma declared a series of plans to promote manufacturing in the country. After visiting the communist bloc in 1961, Nkruma felt that still more state control was needed--after the trip, he began wearing Mao jackets. The Volta River Project was the centerpiece of his economic program and Kaiser Aluminum was contracted to build the dam, but it put the government in considerable debt and Nkruma created resentment by levying high taxes on cocoa farmers. The dam was finished to much publicity on January 22, 1966. Although cocoa prices had been high in 1957, they began to drop as the years passed and by mid-1965 had fallen by a fifth of what they were a decade ago.
Nkruma also created a fully-decked out Ghanaian military, including an air force and a navy. Ghana sent troops to intervene in the 1960 Congo crisis but faced mutinies and the loss of 43 men in an ambush by Congolese forces in 1961.While he was out of the country in February 1966, the army and police revolted and staged a coup-de-etat led by Joseph Ankrah, who called themselves the National Liberation Council. Nkruma was unaware of the coup until arriving in China. He spent four days there and was warmly received by its premier Zhou Enlai. Nkrumah believed the CIA had plotted his downfall. The agency's involvement in the coup is unclear and official records provide no substantial clarification. The new Ghanaian government abandoned its pro-communist bloc ties and immediately aligned with the Western world. It also pursued friendly ties with the apartheid government in South Africa and lost a lot of its credibility to African nationalists. Nkruma went into exile in Guinea and maintained a low profile. In 1972, suffering from a serious but undisclosed illness, he traveled to Romania for medical treatment where he died that April 27 at the age of 57.American geopolitical author Edward Luttwak believed Nkruma was the victim of his own success. By promoting education, he made Ghana's elites a little too well-educated and eager to challenge his authority and promote their own alternative vision for the country while his attempts at consolidating a one-party autocracy were not successful enough.
>>18467605>>18467610>>18467606like a lot of pie-in-the-sky idealists (cf. Woodrow Wilson) he tried to push his country into enlightenment a little faster and further than they were willing to go
>>18467615>suffering from a serious but undisclosed illnessAIDS?
>>18467632it was the early 70s, AIDS didn't exist yet. probably cancer.
>Nkrumah also accepted as a guest the aged American civil rights leader W.E.B. DuBois, who moved to Ghana in self-imposed exile and died there in 1963 at the age of 95.[3]
And he was a good friend.
What was his stance on the Mountains of Kong? Surely, there were resources to exploit.
>>18467630Ghana was and is comparatively functional by African standards the Gold Coast was as the OP said pretty developed and wealthy even pre-colonial era whereas some places like the Congo were totally backwards and still in the Stone Age.
>>18467610got tired of National Geographic photographers taking photos of topless girls on the guise of being educational, huh?
>>18467615>Nkrumah believed the CIA had plotted his downfall. The agency's involvement in the coup is unclear and official records provide no substantial clarification.It's more likely that CIA agents were given verbal instructions to help oust him, but not written ones unless it was a note scrawled on a cocktail napkin.
>Get independence from da ebil whyte mane for 5 minutes >Immediately go back to killing and eating one anotherLmao dumb niggers
