75 years ago, Ghana was a colony of the United Kingdom known as the Gold Coast. When their leading independence party, the Convention People’s Party (CPP), won the 1951 council elections with 90% of the vote. It signaled that the end was near for the era of British colonization, first in Ghana, and soon across the rest of Africa.
But a colonial regime isn’t really accountable to an election. Their rule was based on force, so why didn’t the British just ignore the result? They even had the CPP’s leadership, including its charismatic head, Kwame Nkrumah, in jail when the election took place.
Our answer comes from one of Nkrumah’s most well known sayings: organize, organize, organize. The people of Ghana and their revolutionary leadership had embarked on a campaign to organize themselves in order to defeat the British colonial regime over the preceding years. They built up a network of local and national organizations, building off the existing social organizational structures already in place, and they used this framework to engage in just about every kind of non-violent resistance around. They coordinated boycotts, they held marches, protests, and demonstrations, and in 1950, they launched a general strike, which was what had landed Nkrumah and the other leaders of the CPP in jail prior to the 1951 election landslide.
Ghanaians didn’t just wait for an election and hope for the best. They built a mass movement with its power rooted in the people, and they prepared to remove the colonial regime by whatever means necessary. So sure, the British could have waved away the result of the election, banned the CPP, and kept Nkrumah and his cadre in jail. But then what? People prepared for a general strike are almost equally prepared for a revolution, and the masses would have been ready for revolutionary armed struggle if that’s the path the British had forced them down.
And reading about this is what made me want to make this video; waiting for another election and seeing what happens is like waiting to put on our seat belts until we crash. We need to follow Nkrumah’s message and organize. Being ready for a general strike should be our organizational goal, because as the Ghanaians showed us, people who are organized enough for a general strike are organized enough to do anything they need to do in order to liberate themselves.
So in this video, we go over some of the history of Ghana and show how they succeeded in liberating themselves from colonialism, and we tie that to our current political predicaments, looking for the foundations we can lay to get us ready for a general strike.
To read the book that inspired this video, visit here.
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