JB Danquah and Kwame Nkrumah’s Conceptual Congruences and Divergences

Abstract

In Ghana it is axiomatic that the lives and thought of J. B. Danquah and Kwame Nkrumah have influenced the historical political narrative of the country and the contemporary cleavage of its political-ideological space into two broad fields—the Nkrumaist/socialist and the Danquah—Busia tradition that espouses liberal economic and political viewpoints, respectively. Debate in the public sphere between these two sides habitually suggest deep, almost diametrically opposed, conceptual divisions which are held as deriving ultimately from the ideas of Danquah and Nkrumah. This paper contests this conveyed strict divergence between their thinking, by emphasizing the substantial philosophical positions that they shared and suggesting that what separates them is essentially divergent political interpretations of these basic philosophical positions occasioned by the demands of political strategy rather than by fundamental conceptual differences.