An African Coup D'etat
In 1963, Togo's national army shot their president Sylvanus Olympio because he refused to enlarge the army of 250 men or increase their salaries.
That same year, Africa’s top leaders formed the Organisation of African Unity (OAU), an organization to promote peace and stability within the newly independent continent. Many of the African leaders who formed the OAU were later toppled by coups.
Though the OAU increased African unity, it has had little power to stop the trend of coups and countercoups that have swept the continent with almost as much regularity as elections in democratic countries.
Consider Ghana. The Ghanaian military seized power in 1966 when President Kwame Nkrumah headed to China with the intention to find a solution that would end the Vietnam War. After Nkrumah left, the military simply announced that he was no longer the leader of the country.
Nkrumah had been one of Africa’s “golden” leaders, the first black president in sub-Saharan Africa and one of the founders of the OAU. He was elected in 1957, promising to lead his country toward the glorious liberty and democracy that he had experienced in the U.S. while he was in college.
After the coup in 1966, Nkrumah fled to Guinea, where he died of cancer. Colonel Akwasi Amankwa, a leader in the 1966 coup, wrote an obituary for Nkrumah, stating that “Nkrumah could have been a great man. He started well, led the independence movement and became, on behalf of Ghana, the symbol of emergent Africa. Somewhere down the line, however, he became ambitious, built a cult of personality and ruthlessly used the powers invested in him by his own constitution. He developed a strange love for absolute power” (Lamb 287).
It is important to remember that this statement reflects the opinion of a victor describing his predecessor. It should be taken with a very large grain of salt. Nevertheless, the same obituary could be written for many of Africa’s leaders. The hero worship Nkrumah experienced in his early days as a leader degenerated until Nkrumah came to represent the “anti-hero” rather than the hero (Birmingham 83). The downfall reflected the disparity between Nkrumah's election promises of democracy and liberty and the reality of life under his leadership.
In 1958, for example, Nkrumah instituted a "preventive detention" act when a member of the political opposition was accused of trying to buy weapons to infiltrate the army. The law deepened police power and led to repression, which citizens resented. Laws like this one started the trend of anti-Nkrumah sentiment.
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