Consciencism
from 1964
A newly independent country has three inheritances — indigenous, Islamic and European — and has to make one philosophy out of them.
- Active
- from 1964
- Where
- Ghana
- Status
- extinct
- Tradition
- African
The claim
African society is a confluence of three traditions in tension. Consciencism is the philosophy that digests all three into a form consistent with the egalitarian principles of the original African conscience.
What it held
Nkrumah was the first president of independent Ghana and wrote this as a working leader rather than an academic, which shows in both its ambition and its haste.
The diagnosis is accurate and remains so. A postcolonial African society contains indigenous traditions, an Islamic presence of centuries' standing, and a European inheritance arriving with the colonial state — and these are not compatible. A society can pretend to choose one, or it can work out how they combine.
His answer is philosophical materialism plus egalitarianism, argued as the position most consistent with what he calls the original African conscience: that every person is an end in themselves. From that he derives African socialism, and the claim that it is a recovery rather than an import.
The philosophical weaknesses are real. The materialism is asserted more than argued, the three-strand model flattens enormous variation, and the appeal to an original conscience does what the critics of ethnophilosophy warned against.
What gives it standing is the position it was written from: a head of state setting out the philosophy his state was to be organised on, and then being overthrown while abroad two years later.
How it argued
Political philosophy written as a governing programme, combining materialist metaphysics with an argument from traditional social organisation.
What it was arguing against
Colonial rule and its intellectual apparatus, and the assumption that an independent Africa must choose between Western and Soviet models.
Where it disagreed with itself
Whether the materialism follows from anything. Whether the original African conscience is a historical claim or a founding myth.
Common misconceptions
That it is straightforward Marxism. Nkrumah argues that African communal organisation grounds socialism independently, and that a class analysis developed for industrial Europe does not transfer unmodified.
How it began
Written while governing, in a country four years independent, with the Cold War pressing from both directions.
What became of it
Ended with the 1966 coup. Nkrumah spent his last years in Guinea and the philosophy did not outlast the government.
Lasting influence
Pan-Africanism and the ideology of several independence movements. Its reputation now rests more on the politics than on the philosophy.
Why it still matters
The problem it names — a society holding several incompatible inheritances and needing one public philosophy — is the standing problem of every postcolonial state.
Put another way
Three inheritances woven into one cloth, by someone with a country to run.
Where to start
Consciencism itself. It is about a hundred pages.
The surprising bit
He was deposed by a coup while on a state visit to China, having written the book two years earlier as the philosophical charter of the government that fell.
In their own words
Practice without thought is blind; thought without practice is empty.
The philosophy that must stand behind this social revolution is that which I have once referred to as philosophical consciencism.
Connections
- Parallel to
- Ujamaa
The verdict
A philosophy written by a head of state, and it reads like it in both senses.