ABSTRACT
Kwame Nkrumah, an African decolonial theorist and the first leader of independent Ghana, ontologically grounded his plans for socialist development within a non-atheistic materialism that expanded Marxist interpretations of colonialism, class consciousness, and revolutionary mutualism. For Karl Marx, the contradictions of capital accumulation and class exploitation, as well as their remedy, were understood through the experience of Europe. Colonialism as a positive revolutionary force was transforming non-European traditional societies. Unlike Marxism, however, Nkrumah centered on the colonial experience in Africa, reorienting definitions of class antagonism and solidarity away from Eurocentric ideas about alienated white working-class Europeans organizing in the workplace, and instead focused on racialized experiences of colonization and neocolonialism as the basis for revolutionary mutualism as expressed in Pan-Africanist development. He further valued Indigenous forms of knowledge and being as essential to the transformation of social relations and the autonomous movement towards a decolonial future without external coercion. Examining these contrasts through Nkrumah’s use and revision of Marxism within a historical perspective, this chapter argues that while Nkrumah selectively used the explanatory power of Marxism, as a decolonial theorist he was not bound to its doctrines and instead actively reoriented Marxism to reflect a non-Eurocentric world view, the impact of (neo)colonialism, and anti-colonial solidarity.
