Nkrumah's Consciencism and the Material Question

Kwame Nkrumah published 'Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for Decolonization' in 1964, four years after Ghana's independence and three years before the coup that removed him from power. The book proposed a philosophical framework that would integrate three strands he identified as constitutive of the modern African situation: indigenous humanist traditions, Islamic religious and intellectual heritage, and the Euro-Christian tradition that colonization had imposed. Materialism, in a broadly Marxist sense, was the analytical method for the integration.

The book is short and ambitious. Nkrumah argued that any philosophy adequate to the African situation had to address the actual social composition of contemporary African societies, which everywhere contained the three strands he identified in varying proportions. A philosophy that simply selected one strand and rejected the others, in his view, could not provide a basis for cohesive social action. The task was to identify what each strand contributed to the humanist core that he treated as common to all three, and to construct a political program on that basis. Materialism supplied the method because the underlying social conditions the relations of production, the patterns of labor and exchange were the material that any honest philosophy had to engage.

The book's reception was mixed and has remained so. Critics in the African philosophical tradition have variously argued that Nkrumah's synthesis was forced, that the Marxist analytical framework imposed categories alien to the African humanist tradition Nkrumah claimed to be honoring, and that the political project Consciencism sought to support pan-African continental unity under socialist principles required philosophical underpinnings that the book could not actually provide. Defenders have responded that critics treated the book as an academic philosophical treatise when it was in fact a political-philosophical intervention by a head of state, written under operating constraints that no academic work faces.

The deeper question the book raises is whether African philosophy is possible as a single project. Nkrumah's answer was that the practical political demand for cohesive social action made such a project necessary regardless of philosophical purity, and that the synthesis he proposed was provisional and revisable in light of further philosophical and political work. Subsequent African philosophical traditions Kwasi Wiredu's conceptual decolonization project, Paulin Hountondji's critique of ethnophilosophy, V.Y. Mudimbe's invention of Africa thesis have either built on or pushed back against the foundation Nkrumah's work supplied. Whether or not one accepts the specific synthesis, the question Consciencism poses what philosophy can do for the political community trying to form itself out of the wreckage of colonization remains a live one.

The book is also a document of a specific historical moment. Nkrumah wrote as a head of state confident that the newly independent African nations were moving toward continental unity and socialist economic organization. Neither of those expectations was fulfilled in his lifetime or in the half-century since. The book's analytical argument can be read independent of its political program, but the political program was not incidental; it was the reason the book was written. The disjunction between the philosophical ambition and the political outcome is itself a topic that subsequent African political and philosophical thought has had to address.