African Intellectuals and Decolonization

Nkrumah/Lumumba

Nkrumah/Lumumba Representations of Masculinity Janet B. Hess In 1958, Ghanaian prime minister Kwame Nkrumah maintained before the African People’s Conference that “the independence of Ghana will be meaningless unless it is linked up with the total liberation of Africa. . . . There have been great Empires on this African continent, and when we are all free again, our African personality will once again add its full quota to the sum of man’s knowledge culture.”1 Patrice Lumumba similarly argued in 1958 that “the present dream of Africa, of all of Africa, including the Congo, is to become a free and independent continent, like all the other continents of the world, for it is the will of the Creator that all men and all peoples be free and equal.”2 Despite their intellectual and political vision, Lumumba and other leaders of the decolonization era are often cast as tragic figures. As one historian stated, Julius Nyerere’s Tanzania constitutes “a case study of misplaced idealism, lost developmental opportunities, and unfulfilled political promises. . . . There is little disagreement about the moral content of Nyerere’s thought and his vision of a just and prosperous society. The same cannot be said for the means selected and results obtained in pursuit of this dream.”3 In this chapter I would like to discuss representations of intellectual leaders of the independence era—specifically, visual representations of Kwame Nkrumah and Patrice Lumumba—and the reception and translation of those representations into an ideology of tragedy constructed around Western notions of masculinity. Michael Leja has argued that ideology can constitute “an explicit, consciously held set of beliefs and commitments organized around a political affiliation,” but it can also be seen as “an implicit structure of belief, assumption, 28 / Nkrumah/Lumumba and disposition—an array of basic propositions and attitudes about reality, self, and society embedded in popular representation and discourse and seemingly obviously true and natural.”4 Constructions of masculinity are historical,5 and the ways we see and apprehend information are also historical. Apprehending and interpreting the intellectual legacies of Nkrumah, Lumumba, Nyerere, and other figures of the decolonization era involve acknowledging the layers of Western interpretation and representation surrounding these figures, including constructs of media, masculinity, and modernization. Attention to the individual human body has been discussed by many theorists as critical in addressing the maintenance and dissemination of power. Victor Turner has described the human body as “the symbolic stage upon which the drama of socialization is enacted.”6 Bill Nichols elaborates, “Economies of colonization or . . . corporeal management, operate to take over effective control of the body, to safeguard it, to regulate its activity, to oversee its movements. . . . The body is the battle site of contending values and their representation.”7 If the practices and discourses related to the body are considered in the social and historical context of decolonization, it is clear that the representation and comportment of the body were significant in the establishment of a particular vision of the colonized and “nationalized ” subject. The body surface is a uniquely important focus for the configuration of identity and gender: fantasy and bodily ideals are reshaped, and local visions and histories of desire are advanced, in the site of the colonized and decolonized body. Such visions and histories have a profound impact upon both historical narrative and personal identity. As Irit Rogoff suggests, “We actively interact with images from all arenas to remake the world in the shape of our fantasies and desires [and] narrate the stories which we carry within us.”8 Colonial and Neocolonial Constructions of the Body: Nkrumah The dissemination of specific ideals and values related to masculinity, and the socialization through discourse related to the body of “nationalized ” subjectivity and identity, is exemplified in the visual culture of the African independence era. Prior to independence, and for much of the colonial period, Western authorities enforced the belief that mere physical proximity to the bodies of inhabitants of the west coast Janet B. Hess / 29 of Africa was enough to induce illness in expatriate populations. In Accra, Kumasi, and Dar es Salaam, for example, separate living sectors were established for the British and local populations. Only after the 1923 publication of the Devonshire White Paper was this policy abandoned, as the White Paper maintained: It is now the view of the competent medical authorities that, as a sanitation measure, segregation of Europeans and Asiatics is not absolutely essential...