Kwame Nkurumah's theory and practice of labour and their manifestation in the Kenyan trade unionism to 1966

Abstract

The main intent of this study is to trace the influence of Kwame Nkrumah's ideas of labour in Ghanaian, Pan-African and Kenya trade union movements in the 1950s and 1960s. Nationalism and post-independence social-economic reconstruction benefited enormously from the veritable role played by Africa workers. It is now clear that a sizeable of leading nationalist were either trade unionists or relied heavily on their respective labour movements to attain their objective. African labour movements continued to serve as crucial instruments of social economic reconstruction and to a large extent, as vehicles of the respective ideological predilections of various countries. This study on Nkumah, a foremost African nationalist, Pan-Africanist and advocte of non-alignment brings out these aspects vividly.

Chapter I addresses the methodological and theoretical issues underlying the study, exposes existing epistemological gaps that it attempts to fill and outlines its main contentions and objectives. Chapter 2 and 3 examines Nkrumah's influence upon Ghana's labour movement during the era of nationalist struggle and after independence. Chapter 4 analyzes his contribution to the field of pan-African trade unionism in the light of his views on non-alignment, imperialism and African unity in the Cold War epoch. Chapters 5 and 6 analyse his involvement and impact on the Kenyan labour movement from the late 1950s to about mid 1960s. The study is an effort to probe with considerable circumspection the ideological under pinnings of Nkrumah's involvement in trade unionism especially his conflict with western labour organisations over the question of affiliation of African trade unions to labour internationals. In Africa, as elsewhere in the Third World, the labour movement was a crucial instrument of imperialist penetration, a system that Nkrumah calls "non-colonialism".