Africa’s political kingdom and the albatross of economic bondage

Abstract

Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana espoused the doctrine that Africa’s struggle for liberation from subjugation by the Western colonial conqueror in its unjust wars of conquest must seek “the political kingdom first”. The complement to this is that “the rest would be added thereunto”. This implicit reaffirmation of Matthew 6:33 reveals the intricate connection between religion and politics, in our particular point of focus, theological politics in the context of Western christianity. This is important because most of the early political leaders of Africa were either christian by upbringing or conviction. Accordingly, Nkrumah’s doctrine—despite his discernment that political independence is incomplete without economic freedom—fell on fertile black soil as the rest of politically independent Africa adopted and implemented it. In consequence, the burden of economic bondage lives on in Africa like the dead Albatross around the neck of Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner. For us the Albatross is both the symbol and the reality that the Ocean was the pathway of the death of many indigenous Africans uprooted by force to become slaves in the “new world”. This depopulation of Africa is yet another death demanding, as argued by Cheikh Anta Diop, the rapid and systematic repopulation of Africa. The thesis defended here is that the repudiation of Nkrumah’s doctrine is an ethical exigency rooted in the demand for reparations to Africa, restoration of sovereign title to territory and its repopulation for emancipation from economic bondage. Conqueror South Africa is our specific focus from the perspective of ubu-ntu.