Nkrumah - The Struggle Continues

This is the third of Kwame Nkrumah's publications I have shared notes on. The first was the Handbook of Revolutionary Warfare (1968) and the second was Class Struggle in Africa (1970). This post shares some notes from The Struggle Continues (1973), a collection of short publications that were written between 1949 to 1968. A reprinted chapter "The Big Lie" should be required reading. Some notes:

"In our present vigorous struggle for Self-Government, nothing strikes so much terror into the hearts of the imperialists and their agents than the term Positive Action... The term Positive Action has been erroneously and maliciously publicised no doubt, by the imperialists and their concealed agent-provocateurs and stooges. The political renegades, enemies of the Convention People's Party for that matter of Ghana's freedom, have diabolically publicised that the C.P.P.'s programme of positive action means riot, looting and disturbances, in a word violence." (p. 5)

"In Africa, we thought we could achieve freedom and independence, and our ultimate goals of unity and socialism by peaceful means. This has landed us in the grip of neocolonialism. We could not succeed using non-violent methods. The same power structure which is blocking the efforts of African-Americans in the United States is also now throwing road-blocks in Africa's way. Imperialism, neo-colonialism, settler domination and racialism seek to bring us down and re-subjugate us." (41-42)

"The fact that our enemies decided finally on subversion and violence as the only effective way in which to achieve their objective of halting the Ghanaian revolution and bringing Ghana into the neo-colonialist fold, is a measure of the success of our economic policies. We had proved that we were strong enough to develop independently, not only without foreign tutelage, but also in the context of active imperialist and neo-colonialist resistance." (p. 73)

"Fanon did not mean non-commitment or non-alignment in the commonly accepted sense, though both have come to be associated with the term. The very mention of the "Third World" suggests to some a kind of passivity, a non-participation, an opting out of the conflict between the two worlds of capitalism and socialism. It is this concept which seems to have led to most of the misuse of the term "Third World", and renders its use so misleading. There is no middle road between capitalism and socialism...The expression first came to be widely used when two Conferences of Non-Aligned States had been held" [1961 and 1964] (p. 74-75)