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Periodical article Periodical article Leiden University catalogue Leiden University catalogue WorldCat catalogue WorldCat
Title:Nkrumah and Rawlings: political lives in parallel?
Author:Nugent, PaulISNI
Year:2009
Periodical:Transactions of the Historical Society of Ghana (ISSN 0855-191X)
Issue:12
Pages:35-56
Language:English
Geographic term:Ghana
Subjects:heads of State
political philosophy
political conditions
political history
About persons:Francis Nwia Kofie Nkrumah (1909-1972)ISNI
Jerry John Rawlings (1947-2020)ISNI
External link:https://www.jstor.org/stable/41406753
Abstract:The author engages in a sustained comparison of the lifelong political preoccupations and legacies of the two figures who dominate the postcolonial history of Ghana, namely Kwame Nkrumah and Jerry Rawlings. He pays particular attention to the context in which their political socialization took place and how their subsequent behaviour was shaped by the environment in which they were forced to operate. Looking at the broad contours of the comparison, the author concludes that Rawlings and Nkrumah actually travelled in opposite directions during the course of their lives. On the basis of his experience of having lived for a long time outside Ghana, Nkrumah was guided by a marriage between Garveyite ideas, anticolonial nationalism and an emerging international discourse of development. Rawlings, on the other hand, was very much 'made in Ghana', a country that had become more inward-looking after 1966 and even more so as the economic travails of the country deepened in the 1970s. Rawlings rose to prominence in a politically-charged environment in which 'kalabule' (economic chicanery) was blamed for all the woes afflicting Ghanaians. Notes, ref. [ASC Leiden abstract]
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