Many literate Nigerians would not only recognize the above quote but would tell you its source with very little prompting. Nkrumah, the first prime minister of Ghana, the first African country to gain independence from Britain is the acknowledged author of the statement which is a parody of a famous biblical quote. “Seek ye first the kingdom of God and everything will be added on to you’. Nkrumah who was given the name Francis to signify his Christian roots was well up with his bible knowledge and he knew that his words were going to strike a chord with many of his followers as well as his opponents. The great thinker that he was, the great man was moved to make many quotable statements in his political life but no other statement attained the rich resonance associated with his admonition that it was eminently profitable to seek the kingdom of politics. He obviously was not thinking of heaven as the original statement about kingdoms suggest and falls squarely in the realm of Caesar rather than that of God, to refer to another famous biblical injunction to render unto Caesar what belonged to Caesar as one rendered unto God whatever fell into the purview of that Deity thus giving recognition to the strict separation of religious matters from those of the state.
As with other famous quotes, Nkrumah’s admonition is open to interpretation and I must confess that for a long time, what I took away from this quote was that politics was of such fundamental importance that anyone who wanted to make a success of life was advised to fashion out a political career. This may well be true to a certain extent but in reality Nkrumah was not talking to the young man or woman making a start in life but to all black people all over the world. He was speaking at a time when virtually all black and brown peoples of the world were under the rule of white people and the possibility of freedom could not be taken for granted. He was asking all the oppressed people of the earth to come together to fight for their collective future in a world in which they were marginalized and were increasingly becoming more so.
Europe first came in contact with Africa south of the Sahara desert in the closing years of the fifteenth century when Portuguese navigators learnt how to sail down the Western coast of Africa and using prevailing winds, got their ships back to Europe. At that point in time, Africa was not noticeably inferior in terms of technology to their strange visitors and the Portuguese were in fact very much impressed by what they saw on their journey through parts of West Africa. By that time, the most impressive African ruler they had dealings with was Affonso, the king of the Bakongo who ruled over a vast territory spreading through parts of present day Congo and Angola. He received the Portuguese with open arms and almost immediately, the two parties established mutually profitable relations which unfortunately, broke down within a generation after which the main trade commodity between them was the Bakongo themselves who were enslaved and taken away from Africa in large numbers. From this time onwards, the relationship deteriorated to that of slaves and masters for the next four hundred years, by which time no less than twelve million Africans from all over the west coast of the continent had been carted away as human cargo to the detriment of African development or even comfort. The final insult was inflicted on Africa when in the immediate aftermath of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade, the representatives of leading European countries met in Berlin and carved up the continent of Africa into areas of influence which they quickly converted into colonies within which they ruled as the fancy took them for their profit. It was at this conference that what later became the Belgian Congo was given over to King Leopold who at the time was the King of Belgium, an insignificant little country which was not otherwise allowed to sit around the same table with genuinely powerful European countries. King Leopold ruled his vast personal estate with uncommon ferocity; extracting the natural wealth of the Congo in such a way that the population of that territory actually fell perceptively before the Belgian government took over responsibility of what was their king’s personal estate. Although conditions within the country improved thereafter, the improvement was miniscule so that by the time Congo became independent in 1960 there were only sixteen university graduates in the country which was torn apart by serious crisis as the Belgians tried to maintain their influence on the resource rich Katanga province. The situation was better in other newly independent African countries of the early nineteen sixties including Ghana and later on, Nigeria which had been part of the far flung British Empire.
By the end of the First World War in 1918, virtually all parts of the world inhabited by black and brown people were ruled over by Europeans, the British in India and virtually all parts of the world. After all, the saying at the time was that the sun did not set on the British Empire because as the sun was setting on one part of the empire, it was rising in another. The French also sat on peoples all over the world whilst Portuguese colonies suffered under the rule of Portugal which by the outbreak of the war, touted as the war to end all wars, had become a backwoods appendage of Europe. In the USA, black people referred to as negroes were hardly recognized as human beings and in the Southern states of that union, black people suffered under the lash of a virulent segregation policy and were liable to get lynched to satisfy the whims and caprices of their white overlords at any time even for imagined infractions of any of the numerous laws which governed their existence. It was not until the turbulent years of the sixties that civil right struggles led to the concession of some breathing space to black Americans. Recent events in that country have shown however that the road to equality for blacks with their white compatriots in still very long, winding and tortuously hilly and this in spite of many years of constant struggle.
By the time the First World War broke out in 1914 there were only some feeble attempts by the oppressed peoples of the world to fight for some form of self-determination. They were pressed into fighting in a struggle that was not of their concern and they died in droves to get precious little for their sacrifice. The only thing that they gained from the war was a realization that they could no longer be satisfied with their subjugation to their European overlords who bled like them when they were shot and cried for their mothers as they bled to death. In other words, they were just as human as they were. The feeble attempts at self-determination became much stronger after the war and there was some confident but unjustifiable expectation that the Europeans would be prevailed upon to lift their hobnailed boots from their collective throat. It did not happen and the realization dawned that a fierce struggle lay ahead if they were ever to breathe the sweet air of freedom. Thus it was that all over the world, the black and brown people raised their voice a little louder in their agitation for freedom but to no avail as there was no change to their status until the world was once again plunged into a global conflict to settle European disagreements even though the Japanese had entered the equation and we all know how that went for them. Two of their cities were made to disappear when atomic bombs were unleashed on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in a callous display of naked power. A warning to the rest of the world especially the Soviet Union that the Americans were now a dangerous atomic power.
By the end of the Second World War in 1945, it was clear that the prevailing world order could not be maintained. India, the jewel in the British crown was pushing forcefully for independence which was to come in 1947 and the black people in Africa and the Caribbean were not to be left out of the fight for independence. In October 1945, independence activists from Africa and the Caribbean came together in Manchester to hold what was called a Pan African Congress, actually the fifth in the series of congresses which had been dominated by Americans and West Indians since the first congress was held in 1900. This time the congress was attended by Africans, notably Obafemi Awolowo from Nigeria, Hastings Banda from what was Nyasaland, now Malawi, Jomo Kenyatta from Kenya and of course Kwame Nkrumah from what was the Gold Coast, now Ghana.
More than anyone else at the congress, Kwame Nkrumah grasped the significance of that congress and this is what caused him to declare that it was imperative that we collectively seek the political kingdom as that was the only way for the colonized people of the world to wrestle their independence from their colonizers and in doing so attain the kingdom of heaven here on earth. For him, Pan-Africanism was the corner stone of politics and his prescription was for the newly independent countries to present a united front to their erstwhile colonial overlords who had no intention of letting the people go to set up truly independent entities, free of control from the people with all the financial and political power which they could bring to bear on the fledgling states which were on the verge of being created. Nkrumah was well aware of the fact that there were all kinds of differences with which the new countries had to contend and this was the more reason why they had to stand together if they were to have a chance of surviving the future challenges which they were bound to confront. He was also quite sure that the politics of liberation had to be built on socialist principles for the simple fact that the colonizers were too deeply entrenched in their capitalist redoubts to be competed against in any meaningful way. Nkrumah had the courage of his conviction and was a champion of cooperation between African countries and which is why he tried to form a union between Ghana and Egypt and was a champion of the formation of an African high command. Unfortunately, he was operating at a level far beyond where his contemporaries were willing to go and his political kingdom remained a pipe dream. With all those little countries which attained some form of independence in those heady days of the sixties floundering in the swamp of their so called independence, Nkrumah must now begin to sound like some Old Testament prophet who did not find any appreciation in his own country. It is now clear that Nkrumah deserved to be appreciated.