Kwame Nkrumah
1966 coup d'état

In February 1966, while Nkrumah was on a state visit to North Vietnam and China, his government was overthrown in a violent coup d'état led by the national military and police forces, with backing from the civil service. The conspirators, led by Joseph Arthur Ankrah, named themselves the National Liberation Council and ruled as a military government for three years. Nkrumah did not learn of the coup until he arrived in China. After the coup, Nkrumah stayed in Beijing for four days, and Premier Zhou Enlai treated him with courtesy.

Nkrumah alluded to American involvement in the coup in his 1969 memoir, Dark Days in Ghana; he may have based this conclusion on documents shown to him by the KGB. In 1978 John Stockwell, former Chief of the Angola Task Force of the CIA turned critic, wrote that agents at the CIA's Accra station "maintained intimate contact with the plotters as a coup was hatched". Afterward, "inside CIA headquarters the Accra station was given full, if unofficial credit for the eventual coup....None of this was adequately reflected in the agency's written records." Later that same year, Seymour Hersh, then at The New York Times, defended Stockwell's account, citing "first hand intelligence sources". He claimed that "many CIA operatives in Africa considered the agency's role in the overthrow of Dr. Nkrumah to have been pivotal." These claims have never been verified.

Following the coup, Ghana realigned itself internationally, cutting its close ties to Guinea and the Eastern Bloc, accepting a new friendship with the Western Bloc, and inviting the International Monetary Fund and World Bank to take a leading role in managing the economy. With this reversal, accentuated by the expulsion of immigrants and a new willingness to negotiate with apartheid South Africa, Ghana lost a good deal of its stature in the eyes of African nationalists.

In assessing Nkrumah's legacy, Edward Luttwak argued that he was undone by the growth of political consciousness and his inability to repress potential opponents:

Nkrumah, in spite of his eccentricities, was largely defeated by his own success: the by-product of the considerable economic development achieved by Ghana was to stimulate and educate the masses and the new elite; their attitude to Nkrumah's regime became more and more critical in the light of the education the regime itself provided. When this happens, more and more repression and propaganda are needed to maintain political stability. In spite of considerable efforts, Nkrumah was unable to build a sufficiently ruthless police system. The cause of his downfall was not, therefore, the mismanagement of the economy—which was considerable—but rather the success of much of the development effort.
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