Non Aligned Movement

Nkrumah, like Nasser, was a leading figure in Third World neutralism or non-alignment with either West or East. Early in 1961 the Soviet leader Brezhnev had visited Ghana.

President Nkrumah in a chat with President Johnson at the White house. He visited the United States in 1958

President Nkrumah visited the Communist countries of Eastern Europe and China from July to September 1961.

In November 1961 Queen Elizabeth II of Britain came to Ghana.

Under Nkrumah Ghana took aid from East and West. Towards the end of his rule Nkrumah appeared to veer towards the East, especially after the assassination of President Kennedy of the United States and the accession to power of Lyndon Johnson, who drastically cut aid to Africa. Then in 1965 Nkrumah broke off diplomatic relations with Britain when that country refused to use force to crush the white-settler rebellion in Rhodesia.

Nkrumah's attitude to aid from developed countries was ambivalent. Sometimes he shared the belief that the very act of receiving aid - be it from the East or the West - was fundamentally an acceptance of a neo-colonialist relationship. How then could Africans accept aid without being overcome by neo-colonialism? For an answer, Nkrumah sometimes enunciated the doctrine which we might call the doctrine of balanced benefaction - the idea that the great defence against neo-colonialism lay in the diversification of one's benefactors. In this case both the East and the West were deemed to be neo-colonialist in intention, but one could prevent them from being neo-colonialist in practice by balancing the aid from one side with aid from the other.

Nkrumah could himself obtain from the World Bank and the Western powers assistance to build the Volta River Project, and obtain from the Soviet Union money for the generation of power in some sectors of the project. This was viewed by Nkrumah as non-alignment in action. And yet Nkrumah underestimated the liberating potential of the European Economic Community for francophone Africa. Reliance on a community of six countries (now nine) could mean greater economic sovereignty for French-speaking Africans than reliance on France alone,