Consciencism

The only book in this section written by a serving head of state as the official philosophy of his country. Nkrumah argued that a decolonised Africa needed a metaphysics as much as a constitution, and was deposed two years after publishing it.

Date: 1964
Author: Kwame Nkrumah
Region: Ghana
Language: English

Where it stands in the argument

Position: Reply — Answers a named earlier work
Form: Treatise
Method: Demonstration — Proof from premises the opponent already grants
Transmission: Continuous — Copied and read without a break in its own language
Standing: Historical — Read for what it shows about its moment
Years back to what it answers: 14 years

Written by a sitting president as the official philosophy of a state, and revised into a revolutionary text after that state removed him.

What the book says

An attempt to supply a decolonising society with a philosophy, written by a head of state. Nkrumah's starting point is that the African conscience is not a blank on which anything can be written: contemporary Africa contains three currents - the traditional African, the Islamic, and the Euro-Christian imported by colonisation - which coexist without being reconciled, and a society in that condition cannot act coherently. Philosophical consciencism is his name for the synthesis that would reconcile them, and it is to be built on the traditional segment because that is the one indigenous to the society. The metaphysics is materialist: matter is primary, and Nkrumah argues that it possesses within it the capacity for what he calls categorial conversion, so that mind emerges from matter without being reducible to it. The ethics follows from an anthropological claim - that traditional African society treated every person as an end and never merely as a means, and was therefore egalitarian in principle - so that socialism in Africa is a restoration rather than an import.

What it argues

That decolonisation is incomplete without an ideology, and that the ideology must be philosophically grounded rather than merely political. Nkrumah's materialism is the foundation: if matter is primary and self-moving, then no appeal to an external order can justify a social hierarchy, and egalitarianism follows from the metaphysics rather than from sentiment. The historical claim does the rest of the work. Traditional African society, he argues, was communal and treated persons as ends, so the socialism he proposes is a recovery of something colonialism interrupted rather than a European import - which answers, at a stroke, the charge that African socialism was a foreign ideology imposed on a continent that had not asked for it. The three-segment analysis is the practical part: a society must decide which of its inherited currents is to organise the others.

What it answered

Césaire on what follows the diagnosis, and the practical problem of a state with a colonial administrative apparatus, a colonial economy and no agreed account of itself. He is also answering the classical Marxists on their own ground: without an industrial proletariat, the standard analysis does not apply, and Nkrumah's argument that African society's communal past supplies what Europe's class struggle supplied elsewhere is the move the 1970 revision partly retracts.

How it argues

By philosophical exposition of a fairly conventional kind - a survey of materialism and idealism, a discussion of consciousness and matter, then the application - written for readers with some philosophical training. Whether Nkrumah wrote it alone has been questioned since publication, and the disparity between its technical passages and his other writings is the reason. The historical claims about traditional society are asserted rather than evidenced, which is the book's most exposed feature.

The moment

Nkrumah had led Ghana to independence in 1957, the first sub-Saharan colony to achieve it, and was the most visible figure in African politics. By 1964 Ghana was a one-party state, the Preventive Detention Act was in force, and his government was under increasing pressure. He was overthrown by a coup in February 1966 while visiting China, spent the rest of his life in Guinea as co-president in an honorary capacity, and died in 1972. The revised edition belongs to that exile.

How it travelled

As a state ideology and then as an artefact. Consciencism was taught in Ghana under Nkrumah and circulated widely in the pan-African movement; after 1966 it became a text associated with a fallen regime, and its philosophical reception has never fully separated from that. African philosophers have generally classified it under Oruka's nationalist-ideological trend - work produced by political leaders in which philosophy serves a programme - which is a description rather than a dismissal and is how it is now read.

The strongest objection

That the historical premise is not true and everything rests on it. Nkrumah's egalitarian ethics is derived from the claim that traditional African societies treated every person as an end - and pre-colonial African societies included kingdoms, aristocracies, castes and extensive slavery, which historians of the continent have documented at length. If the communal past is idealised, then socialism is not a restoration and needs a different justification, and the book's central strategy fails. A separate objection concerns the position from which it was written: a philosophy of freedom published by a government that was detaining its opponents without trial invites the question of what the ideology was for, and Nkrumah's admirers and critics have been answering it differently for sixty years.

Why read it

As a document of a moment when a new state genuinely tried to work out what it was, which is rarer than it should be. The three-segment analysis of contemporary African society is the part with lasting value. It is short. Read the 1964 and 1970 editions knowing they differ.

Where to read it

First printed: 1964
First in English: 1964
Digitised: No

The 1970 revision, written in exile in Guinea, adds a class analysis of African society that the 1964 text explicitly denied was applicable, and scholars specify which edition they are citing.

Written in English. In copyright.

Where it stands

Historical. The metaphysics has few defenders, the anthropological claims about pre-colonial egalitarianism are not accepted by historians, and the book is read as a document of the independence moment and of a serious attempt to think about what decolonisation requires beyond a flag.

On quoting this book

In copyright. Nothing is quoted.

Contested

Whether Nkrumah wrote it unaided has been questioned since publication. Which edition represents his position is a real problem given how much the 1970 revision changes. Whether the book is philosophy or ideology is the standard classification question and Oruka's answer - that it is both, and that the category is legitimate - is the usual one. And the relation between the philosophy and the government that published it is not a separate matter from the philosophy.