Feature Article of Friday, 30 May 2014

Columnist: Kwarteng, Francis

In 2002, under the auspices of the Zimbabwe International Book Fair Association, the Pan-African Booksellers Association, the African Publishers Network, Book Development Councils, African Writers Association, Library Associations, and the Pan-African Book Booksellers Association included Kwame Nkrumahs Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah in its comprehensive final list of Africas 100 Best Books of the 20th Century. It should be stressed here that the entire selection process was highly competitive. Moreover, members of the international jury tasked to vet this collection of highly influential writings apiece and to approve their inclusion in the final list, arguably, represented some of the worlds finest, most accomplished, and authoritative thinkers in their chosen fields of expertise.

As a matter of fact, the Information Services of Columbia Univeristy Library has this to say in connection with the rigorous selection process: Nominations were made based on the basis that the book has had a powerful, important or affecting influence on the nominator, as an individual, or on society. Nevertheless, there are many around the world who had equally wished Nkrumahs Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for Decolonization, one of his well-known scholarly works as well as of his most widely-read masterpieces, had made the final list as well, given that Consciencism represents one of the most sophisticated philosophical works ever penned by a renowned and respected 20th-Century thinker and scholar.

Quite apart from Nkrumahs Consciencism, Attoh Ahums The Gold Coast Nation and National Consciousness and Joseph E. Casely-Hayfords Ethiopia Unbound are consciously transformative?philosophically, culturally, and ideologically?as far as their cumulative intellectual seminality goes. Likewise, Dr. Theophile Obenga, one of the worlds leading Egyptologists, historians, philosophers, and linguists, has described Consciencism as a powerful, sophisticated philosophical treatise on African psycho-physical decolonization! But, generally, what is usually slurred over in the comprehensive valuation?by way of exegesis?of Nkrumahs corpus of written works by his enemies and supporters alike, in the areas of theory and practice, more importantly, is their intellectual or analytic failure to recognize the scientific infrastructure upon which Nkrumahs ideas are raised.

There is, therefore, a critical exegetical diastema in an otherwise interpretative continuum supposedly enjoyed by the extensive library of Nkrumahs revolutionary ideas, a fundamental question eloquently and vigorously raised and pursued by the polymathic Dr Kofi Kissi Dompere, a well-respected mathematician, economist, philosopher, statistician, historian, business analyst, radio programmer/host (WPFW Radio, 89.3 FM), operations researcher, and prolific author in the American Academy. Moreover, this view of scientific singularity presumptively secreted in the interpretive continuum of the far-reaching library of Nkrumahs provocative ideas enjoys ample support from the material locationality of his massive industrialization projects as well as from his progressive attempts at extenuating human suffering.

That made him, Kwame Nkrumah, an intellectual sophisticate and a redoubtable critical thinker to reckon with. That is, Nkrumah was, as it were, admittedly, a rationalist, empiricist, and pragmatist. What is more, much like the wide-ranging revolutionary ideas of Cheikh Anta Diops, Henri Poincares, Theophile Obengas, Martin Bernals, Albert Einsteins, Molefi Kete Asantes, Louis Leakeys, WEB Du Boiss, the experimental ideas of Kwame Nkrumahs have begun to gain intellectual currency, to acquire global exegetical character, as well as to incur the scientific approbation of investigators. Thus, Kwame Nkrumah pushed his thinking beyond the gibbous heliopause of theorizing to accommodate the galactic socio-political exigencies of praxis, the latter of which his practical legacy articulately represents today, ideally, both in the corporeality of infrastructure, namely, public capital, as well as in the ethereality of innovative ideas and institutions.

This is not surprising, however, for, Nkrumah, a highly-gifted, brilliant, and innovative African philosopher-president, came from an influential stemma of profound thinkers, of which the polymathic Imhotep easily comes to mind (See Robert Bauvals and Thomas Brophys Imhotep the African: Architect of the Cosmos; Molefi Kete Asantes The Egyptian Philosophers: Ancient African Voices from Imhotep to Akhenaten; Theophile Obengas African Philosophy: The Pharaonic Period: 2780-330 BC). Asante writes in this connection: Nkrumah is the single most important African politician of the past century. Almost all ideas that are vetted by contemporary leaders have appeared in Nkrumahs writing. He is the seminal African political philosopher. In fact, the epistemological strength of Nkrumahs intellectual sociality and philosophical culturalilty are incontestable hallmarks of a true genius.

Granted, these ideas Asante implicitly refers to are not merely package-insert questions of epistemology, culture, scientific socialism, political spirituality (decolonization of the African mind), but also of science, technology, development economics, modernization, humanism, political economy, and industrialization of Africa. Yet, Asantes precise synthesis invites another matricial preference from the epistemological coordinate-geometry of Nkrumahs innovative ideas, which is that of the spatial-locational cognate of Nkrumahs scientific philosophizing, the science or politics of pragmatism, that is.

Clearly, the logical carrefour of theory and praxis is inhumed in the formulaic instruments of rigorous scientific philosophization and experimentation, two ideas Dr. Dompere explores in his dynamic critique of Consciencism, though, much unlike Asantes vigorous critique of Du Boisian double consciousness via the epistemological institutionalization of the Theory of Afrocentricity or via the dethronement of Newtonian mechanics or Aristotelian physics (classical physics) by way of the proven experimental majesty of quantum and relativistic physics. The book Consciencism is so influential as to cause Lang T.K.A. Nubour, an author, to re-issue an abridged version of it, titled The Mind of Kwame Nkrumah: Manual for the Study of Consciencism, as the Center for Consciencist Studies and Analysis (CENCSA) notes:

Read more:
Dr. Kofi Dompere On Nkrumahs Scientific Thinking