Dr. Kofi Dompere On Nkrumah’s Scientific Thinking 6

It is only appropriate at this juncture of our intellectual dialogue to take a momentary break from the previous five-part series, of “Dr. Kofi Dompere On Nkrumah’s Scientific Thinking” specifically, to look at the intellectual profile of Prof. Kofi Kissi Dompere, a dominant force in the American Academy and one of America’s influential thinkers recognized for his signal contributions to bridging the frontiers between science and the humanities/liberal arts. Prof. Dompere is a profound thinker and scholar, not merely a writer. This distinction is important because a running misconception among some ascribes a titular overlap to “writer” and “thinker” or “scholar.”

This fact is not only grossly misplaced but unfortunate as well. Ama Mazama, Wole Soyinka, Ngugi wa Thiong’o, and Noam Chomsky are writers and thinkers (or scholars), James Hadley Chase is not. On the other hand, the criteria for who qualifies as a thinker or a scholar do not always coincide with formal education or acquisition of advanced degrees. Both Wole Soyinka and Charles J. Pedersen, to mention but two Noble Laureates, have impacted the world in ways that could not possibly have derived from their formal education alone. As a matter of serious implication, the concrete skull of the human mind remains as accommodatingly monstrous as the endless possibilities of intellection, so too are life challenges and individuals’ strategic responses to life’s manifold challenges deemed more authoritatively powerful than or superior to the external agency of human pedagogy.

This is acknowledgement is instructive. Simply, man’s environmental externality has more to offer in terms of human psychological evolution than the instructional strictures of the four walls of a classroom. Thus formal education and degrees are merely a means, not necessarily an end, to aspects of the inner sanctum of life’s secrets. This is not to argue against the instrumentalist infrastructure of formal education per se. The point, however, argues in favor of bringing together the positive aspects of formal instruction and informal intellectual development in the progressive crystallization of the constitution of human psychology, principally in the direction of humanism.

The motivation? We raise this protest against those individuals who might be in desperate infatuation, neck-deep as it were, with the lingering cobweb of definitional and philosophical imbrication with the rubrics “writer” and “thinker,” against those individuals who always try seeking psychosocial validation in the culture of formal education and degrees via their referential rhetorical consistency toward the narcissistic scarecrow of topical self-reference. A writer is not necessarily a thinker. Many of our educated folks suffer from this outwardly-imposed neocolonial confusion. Some individuals are even quick to make a direct correlation between the depth of one’s vocabulary inventory and intelligence. Ghanaians generally make too much out of individuals who ostentatiously display profundity with English orthography and Anglicized vocabularization.

Besides, intelligence is not defined by one’s knowledge of English orthography and depth of vocabulary inventory. Intelligence is more that the expression of those two indices. The continuing poor performances of Ghana’s leadership, educated elite, and institutions indicate one thing, that intelligence or wisdom is not necessarily tied to the apron of English orthography or Anglicized vocabularization. That is not to say intimate knowledge of English orthography and Anglicized vocabularization is unnecessary in the scheme of development economics, industrial advancement, economic growth, and material progress, at least in the case of Ghana, since acquisition of both helps open the floodgates of science, technology, mathematics, information technology, engineering, and so on. This proposition does not, nevertheless, negate the social importance of acquiring the orthographies of linguistic nativism.

Our point is that Ghanaian society should begin to accord more instructional emphasis to the study of science and mathematics and engineering and technology as of language, taking note of the additional fact that science, engineering, mathematics, information technology, and technology, are, in and of themselves, languages too, languages philosophically different from Ewe, Ga, Twi, or French, say. A surprising fact may lead to the idea that, the average Ghanaian is more likely to accord excessive respect to individuals with verbal proficiency in English than to one with technocratic expertise or know-how with passable verbal proficiency in English, where the latter’s technocratic aptitude rather than the former’s verbal proficiency is what Ghana requires for her advancement.

And since we live with nature, are part of nature, and must understand nature to ensure peaceful coexistence, proficiency in language is the way forward, as nature does not speak to man other than through the medium of language, be it science, birth, naming ceremony, religion, culture, music, death, marriage, war, disease, sex, peace, romance, literature, funeral, or ethnicity. What language does a beautiful flower describe itself with? What language does rainbow describe itself with? What language does death describe itself with? What language does hopelessness describe itself with? What language does beautiful language describe itself with? What language does Bob Marley describe “One Love” with? And what language does Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie describe her rich, ornate prose? The central issue for us at this juncture regards our ability to identify which “language” has the most potential to unravel important aspects of nature, to advance a people’s society, to improve their living conditions, and to promote internal and external harmonies in the cause of humanism.

Prof. Dompere has found that powerful “language,” that unique “language” to speak for and on behalf of Kwame Nkrumah, for and on behalf of humanity.

Thus, any disagreeable psychosocial stench emanating from those who disappointingly confuse emotional derangement, intellectual shoddiness, academic laziness, and impulsiveness with the orthography of any “language” for that matter and social overemphasis on vocabularization as a hallmark of intelligence and wisdom, thinking such misguided conceptualizations characterize their intellectual and philosophical slant towards life in general, must be treated as such, as unsung intellectual pariahs on the fringes of creative, productive academization befitting their self-denigrating statuses. We should thus learn not to tolerate weak “languages.” In that regard, Prof. Dompere’s “language” is arguably one of the most powerful methodological arrows in the American Academy, possibly in the world. This genius is a paragon of the metaphysical and the scientific, of the formal and the informal in respect of intellectual consummation, of the methodological and the rigorous, of the profound and the pedestrian, as well as of the insightful and the polymathic.

It explains also, no doubt, why Kwame Nkrumah and Cheikh Anta Diop represent two of the greatest influences on Prof. Dompere’s evolving intellectual landscape.

For one, Diop’s and Nkrumah’s influences on others, importantly coming across variously as African, Asian, and Western, are proverbial, an observation that does not require further elaboration on our part. The intellectual world knows this without the elemental intrusion of moral equivocation!

What is the constitution of Prof. Dompere’s educational profile? Prof. Dompere has a B.A. (Mathematics and Economics), M.A. (Applied Mathematics), M.B.A. (Financial Mathematics), and Ph.D. (Economics), all acquired from Temple University, Philadelphia, USA, the intellectual niche of Ama Mazama and Molefi Kete Asante, also the home of Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Charles Fuller.

His impressive degrees aside, Prof. Dompere is a professor in the Economics Department of Howard University. He also serves as the Director of the Graduate Studies.

Among his pedagogical responsibilities, Prof. Dompere teaches Mathematical Economics, Cost-Benefit Analysis, International Commercial Policy, Research Topics in Economics, Operations Research, and Macroeconomic Theory at the graduate level and Micro- and Macroeconomics, Statistics, and Mathematical Economics at the undergraduate level. Nevertheless, the swathe of his pedagogical interests encapsulates the aforementioned. And more. This enviable height of multidisciplinary grasp of human knowledge is amply reflected in the labyrinthine complication and topical diversity of his large choice corpus of academic works, both inside and outside the immediate province of academic officialdom.

The radical sweep of his intellectual sight and analytic depth of extremely difficult subjects, highly technical as they arguably are, is peerless in many a comparative situation with his colleagues. The sharp curvature of his mind also knows no bound, unlike some of his perpetually-sleeping peers whose intellectual tunnel-visions are trapped in the tangled myopia of uncelebrated scholarly infantility. Prof. Dompere, a man of science, mathematics, philosophy, economics, and the like, is a respected public academic known for being allergic to the scheming traps of intellectual frivolity and consequently shies away from them. It is worth stressing that this is not a feeble attempt at lionizing Prof. Dompere as he does not in any way lionize Nkrumah, his critical appraisal of Nkrumah and his body of works being, essentially, exclusively executed through the rigor of science, logic, mathematics, and philosophy, among others.

Those observations clearly prompt a question that needs asking with a view to quelching the licking fire of public curiosity: What do we make of all them?

This important question has been more than adequately answered by the model scholarships of other equally great scholars, such as Patience Mthunzi, Ave Kludze, Victor Lawrence, Yaw Nyarko, Isaiah M. Blankson, Francis Allotey, Tebello Nyokong, Ashitey Trebi-Ollenu, and Cheikh Anta Diop (See Molefi Kete Asante’s “Cheikh Anta Diop: An Intellectual Portrait”; see also Ivan Van Sertima’s “Great African Thinkers: Cheikh Anta Diop” and E. Curtis Alexander’s edited volume “Cheikh Anta Diop: An African Scientist.” Note: The late Dr. Ivan Van Sertima had a special relationship with the Nobel Committee through a four- or five-year advisory capacity on matters related to the Nobel Prize in Literature), to mention but a few. A scrutiny of their collective intellectual and activist profiles reveals an astonishing capacity of the human mind and human spirit to beat the odds in advancing the cause of humanism, of human knowledge.

This anthology of noble names clearly points to exemplification of tenacious matrimony between writership and the epistemology of thinking, of creative scholarship. Unfortunately Diop’s designation as “African scientist” is misleading. But then again, Diop’s non-official affiliation with and official membership in respected international scientific organizations, as well as his intellectual influence on the world, renders that designation characteristically provincial. Moreover, the international readership for his rich corpus of scholarly works attests to the entrenched globalism of his intellectual premiership, the world taking cognizance of the axiology of his thinking prowess. Thus, the example of Diop defines the theoretical delineation between writership and thinking. Yet he represented the attributes of both processes given his facility for French and Wolof orthographies, exquisite authorial calligraphy, multidisciplinary approach to scholarship, and height of reasoning propensity.

Prof. Dompere shares these qualities with Diop.

Inclusive of our sweeping generalizations is another contention which essentially addresses itself to many of our scholars, their annoying infatuation with armchair theorizing and unsung grandstanding via the expressed ornateness of rhetorical extravagance. These fixtures do not epitomize the definitional signatures of their aggregate intellectual practices, of the anthology of noble names we alluded to previously. Rather, they bring intelligence, common sense, seriousness and profundity, analytic rigor, exquisite authorial calligraphy, and intellectual cosmopolitanism to the cultivation of the human mind.

Prof. Dompere represents a prime example of this priceless suite of creative attributes.

For instance, Diop used the concepts of advanced mathematics, physics, biology, and chemistry to make sense out of the methodological boredom of the humanities/liberal arts, including such disciplines as Egyptology, historiography/history, human geography, anthropometry, comparative linguistics, ethnic and racial studies, philosophy, sociology, and so on. We should not forget that Diop, a world-renowned scientific mind, a polymath, and a pillar behind African humanities, sat on prestigious international scientific organizations, a ready example being the International Union of Prehistoric and Protohistoric Sciences (UISPP), an organization part of whose official function was of the nature of methodological corrective, rewriting historiographies and histories and bridging cultural, scientific, and intellectual gaps among nations, races, and ethnicities, among others.

Not only that, Diop transformed his large inventory of scientific and non-scientific ideas into a powerful political philosophy, part of whose scientific formulation directly deals with practical remediation regimina for improving the human condition and race relations across the spectrum of political economy, historiography, development economics, history, and foreign relations. Also, granted, it is not too farfetched to hypothesize that Nkrumah’s influential work, “Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for Decolonization,” perhaps his magnum opus, represents a grand philosophical projection of Diop’s scientific work, not glossing the enormous scientific and mathematical implications of Nkrumah’s brilliant work. Like Diop’s work, Prof. Dompere’s is part corrective, part polemic, and part restorative.

In other words, Prof. Dompere’s own highly technical academic works simultaneously dissolve and expand the concrete frontiers of these two highly gifted thinkers, Nkrumah and Diop, with the former’s unification of African project, the latter’s scientific, philosophical, and historiographic work on the cultural unity of “Black Africa,” and Prof. Dompere’s extensive scholarship on the scientific, mathematical, and philosophical explication of Nkrumah’s works, share a convenient overlap of thematic familiarity. On this point, we specifically have in mind Prof. Dompere’s monumental works, including, but not limited to, “African Union: Pan-African Analytical Foundations,” Polyrhythmicity: Foundations of African Philosophy,” “Africentricity and African Nationalism: Philosophy and Ideology for Africa’s Complete Emancipation,” and the yet-to-be-released “The Theory of Categorical Conversion: Analytic Foundations of Nkrumahism” and “Theory of Philosophical Consciencism.”

None of these titles is easy to peruse, not to talk of those used to casual reading. Critical reading techniques may not even be helpful if a reader lacks the instruments of multidisciplinary knowledge as is so typical of his scholarly works. It is even safer and convenient to keep away from his economics texts, as far as the topical indulgences of this series goes, because they belong to a different meta-universe of conceptual multilayering. This is not an attempt at hagiographic embellishment on our part. Like his non-economic texts, the economics texts are exclusively addressed to specialists, academics, and experts. We bring up these facts to show the striking parallels between Prof. Dompere and Diop.

Of course, the multidisciplinary thinking that went into Diop’s body of works is not as straightforward as some of his texts seem to indicate. It requires close, critical, and persistent reading to appreciate the scientific and philosophical depth of his thinking. Asante did his best to simplify some of these complicated Diopian ideas for undergraduate and graduate students in his published intellectual biography on Diop, an award-winning title already alluded to, in which he explores many of the questions students usually encounter. Further, Diop also founded a cutting-edge carbon-14 dating laboratory within the Fundamental Institute of Black Africa (IFAN), Senegal, then became its director working in close partnership with scientists affiliated with the Paris-based French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and the French Atomic Energy Commission (CEA). Diop established a close working relationship with Theodore A. Monod, a French scholar and a respected member of the French Academy of Sciences (See “Cheikh Anta Diop Biography” published on the website of IFAN/Université Cheikh Anta Diop de Dakar (UCAN)).

Through his able directorship of the radiocarbon laboratory, the only one of its kind at the time in the whole of Africa south of the so-called Sahara, Diop fastidiously undertook vigorous scientific asseveration of his catalogue of provocative theories, bold yet corrective scientific convictions that would ultimately overthrow many of the profound standing theories and hypotheses supporting the skewed historiography of ethnic, cultural, political, and race socialization, a transforming circumstance captured in the impactful matrix of the expanding historical evolution of human knowledge, of Africa upon the world, in the service of white supremacy and reinforcement of African intellectual and human inferiorization. Diop’s melanin dosage test is well known, a forensic technique adopted in the West to identify the racial identity of badly burnt victims.

As well, very much in the vein of Prof. Dompere’s setting mathematical and scientific tongues of fire to the philosophical soul of Nkrumah’s profound ideas, Diop’s intellectual diligence summoned before the courtly authority of logic, mathematics, and science, the horrifically bias scholarships of his European intellectual predecessors, with their emotional gravitation directed toward the hegemonic deceptions of white supremacy. These epochal events recall a renowned 19th-century Haitian anthropologist Anténor Firmin’s whose influential classic piece of anthropological, scientific, and historical work, “The Equality of Human Races: Positivist Anthropology,” represent a forceful resistance of factual invalidation of Arthur de Gobineau’s landmark work of scientific racism, “Essay on the Inequality of Human Races.” Relatedly, the scientific work of Prof. Dompere subtly aims, among other things, at dismantling any lingering coliseum of white supremacy, African peoples’ continuing internalization of inferiority complex, while overtly carving a rational path for Africa’s long-overdue yet deserving autonomy, autonomy in terms of the growth variables of development economics, science, technology, education, cultural and political institutions, improved standard of life and quality of life, technocratic politics, principles of conflict resolution, and so forth.

Prof. Dompere’s many technical and dense monographs on economic theory and practice, principles of democracy, cultural theory, critical theory, law, critical race theory, etc., directly and indirectly, capture several aspects of these questions.

We do, however, invoke the concept of conflict resolution as an expression of decision-choice theory both in respect of the decisional matrix of human economic behaviors and as a response to the question of conflictual diversity born of the negating disparateness of Africa’s ethnic and cultural superficiality. Prof. Dompere scrupulously examines the latter question as part of his overall methodological investigation of his polyrhythmicity theory. He maintains in that regard: “The methods and techniques of the argument are drawn from the logic of polyrhythmics where conflicts in cultural differences as revealed in Africa’s diversity are viewed as strength and beauty in unity within the Africentric mindset.” He adds also: “These cultural conflicts and differences must be concretized in unity for Africa’s emancipation, development and social welfare improvements.” Diop investigated these questions as well in two important works: “The Cultural Unity of Black Africa” and “Black Africa: The Economic and Cultural Basis for a Federated State.”


Peradventure, the only difference in the methodological approach to investigating the twin questions of emancipation and development economics vis-à-vis the two scholars’ parallel working hypotheses, we could add, technically stems from the rigor of scientific and mathematical formality with which Prof. Dompere philosophically welcomes those two questions. The subtle difference in their methodological approaches to the radical science of Africa’s emancipation and development economics, nonetheless, does not take anything away from Diop’s technocratic, scientific, and philosophical vision, bearing in mind that these questions preoccupied Nkrumah’s captivating intellect as well.

We may recall that Diop won the admiration and plaudits of some of the most influential thinkers and scholars in the world, during the international scientific colloquium organized under the auspices of UNESCO, in 1974.

It is not for any reason that the late Jean Vercoutter, one of France’s leading archeologists, Egyptologists, and historians, an intellectual who held the directorship of the French Institute for Oriental Archeology (IFAO), from 1977 to 1981, membership in the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS), from 1945 to 1955, should go to any extent to secretly recruit Diop, a scholar he had enormous respect for, for one of France’s top universities even after he had demonstrated stiff public opposition to Diop at the 1974 international colloquium. It is for the same reason that one of France’s elite institutions of higher learning, the Sorbonne University, Diop’s alma mater, should erect Diop’s statue on its premises in honor of his signal contributions to human knowledge. The same university has since collected and archived Diop’s scientific papers and books for students, scholars, and researchers alike.


Then, finally, Les Nubians, an award-wining soulful duo and one of the world’s most successful jazz, hip hop, and neo-soul acts from France, should dedicate “Immortel Cheikh Anta Diop,” a memorable track on their 2003-released “One Step Forward” album, to Diop’s humanism, intellectual prowess, Pan-African vision, and lasting scholarly influence on the world. Similarly, Nana Adomako Nyamekye’s monumental “Manyi Wo Ayea,” a puissant highlife track celebrating the greatness, influence, humanism, and long-tunneled vision of Kwame Nkrumah and other Pan-African leaders, is a fitting tribute. We may then understand why Prof. Dompere privately and publicly identifies with Diop and Nkrumah.

Meanwhile, the colloquium brought together the best minds from Africa, Asia, the so-called Middle East, and the West to debate questions bordering on human evolution, comparative linguistics, historiography, classical antiquity, political economy, archeology, human geography, Egyptology, ancient history, anthropology, and so forth. The breadth of Diop’s scientific knowledge, multidisciplinary expertise, and sheer force of arguments won the day (See the book “The Peopling of Ancient Egypt & The Deciphering of the Meroitic Script” based on the proceedings of the 1974 UNESCO-organized colloquium).

Prof. Theophile Obenga, a former head of San Francisco State University’s Black Studies Program and a major contributor to the authorship of UNESCO’s General History of Africa and the Scientific and Cultural History of Humanity, accompanied Diop to the said colloquium. Obenga, himself a world-class historian, Egyptologist, linguist, and philosopher, Chief Editor and Director of the journal “ANKH, Journal of Egyptology and African Civilizations,” as well as ex-Director General of the Centre International des Civilizations Bantu (CICIBA), has described Nkrumah’s “Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for Decolonization” as a masterpiece.

That is not to miss the point that any of Nkrumah’s other works is just as epochal, polemic, insightful, informative, and provocative. Chinua Achebe made a similar point to an audience at the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., during an auspicious occasion to mark his birthday and the 50th anniversary of the publication of “Things Fall Apart,” telling the audience: “But I should tell you I have written other books.” That remarkable statement was meant to redirect the audience’s attention to the larger corpus of his literary works and also to tell the world that the other literary writings in his corpus are just as equally indispensable and worth paying attention to. It is against this background that we argue for Nkrumah’s literary corpus to be made required reading in schools, read at all levels of society, and thoroughly discussed in the corridors of power.

Having said all that, Prof. Dompere has admitted having Gerald Massey, Yosef Ben-Jochannan, and Theophile Obenga as the other major influences on his intellectual evolution. In a sense, we cannot look at the larger contexts and implications of Prof. Dompere’s scholarly works outside Diop’s and Nkrumah’s intellectual and political achievements, including the aforementioned. Prof. Dompere dialectically brings the productive syntheses of these great minds together as a unitary inquiring backdrop for his scientific and mathematical and philosophical delving into the secret dungeons of other great thinkers and scholars as Nkrumah. Certainly, there are important overlaps and mutual continuities flowing into or out of each other’s ocean of scholarly works, a point too conspicuous to ignore.

Given these facts, we could not, therefore, underestimate Prof. Dompere’s admission that his own intellectual development has benefited enormously from Diop’s multifaceted work and multidisciplinary approach to the study of human knowledge. Similarly, Wole Soyinka has consistently credited Diop, a position he assumes through critical moments of qualified laudation, with dislodging Western illogical discoloration of Africa via the stilted philosophical consciousness of white supremacy. “With these three publications,” continues the website of IFAN/UCAN, adding: “Cheikh Anta Diop founded the scientific history of the African continent and inaugurated, at the same time, a school of African history.” Prof. Dompere expands upon Diop’s legacy.

The three publications in question are L’Afrique Noire Précoloniale (“Pre-colonial Black Africa”), L’Unité Cultural de L’Afrique Noire (“Cultural Unity of Black Africa”), and Nations Nègres et Cultures: De L’Antiquité Nègre Égyptienne (“Black Nations and Cultures: The Antiquity of Black Egypt”).

As a matter of further emphasis, Diop and Nkrumah were uniquely united in their intellectual, philosophical, humanistic, and political enterprise across time and space in bringing Africans together in the interest of cultural, scientific, ethno-racial, geopolitical, and technological homogenization on a par with the West and Asia, this in terms of development economics. Nkrumah would then not only engage the monstrous intellect of Diop but formally extend an invitation to him to join a philosophical movement the former had conceived, to transform Africa from within and without, to make the world a better through the soundness of their scholarships. Profs. Botwe-Asamoah and Dompere revealed this little-known information to us during one of our conversational moments.

And not unlike Diop, Prof. Dompere’s massive academic work, seventeen texts in all as of this writing, charts new radical trajectories of transformational consciousness in human thinking.


Yet, the kind of transformational consciousness we are referring to appears somewhat conceptually similar to Nkrumah’s philosophical consciencism, which Prof. Dompere again explained to us as a conceptual formula that provides a solid philosophical foundation for a regimen of development strategies aimed at Ghana’s (and Africa’s) internal development, growth, and relative stability, and by extension strengthening and enhancing her strategic stature in the structural development of Africa, by, among other things, negotiating society’s internal contradictions and the huge historical costs Africa has incurred over five centuries through her fortuitous relations with external hegemonizing forces that did not and still do not have Africa’s interest at heart.

Patriotism, an uncompromising sense of nationalism, represents an infrastructural signature of philosophical consciencism, so too are human development, human capital development, industrialization, humanism, public health, universal quality education, self-autonomy, African unity, etc. Alas, the contemporariness of neocolonialism adds to the major challenges philosophical consciencism faces today. Is it not ironic that neocolonialism is a necessary collaboration between the rapacity of Western capitalism and the greed of her willing African androids.

“No nation can hope to develop with an albatross of juvenile delinquency around its neck, of school-going children hawking wares on roadsides during school hours as we see happening in Ghana today,” Prof. Dompere tried explaining to us during one of our fruitful discussions on the theory of philosophical consciencism and its implications for national development. “You need efficiently-running universal public services. You need universal quality education for your citizens. You need a healthy population for development. You need food security. You need infrastructure. You need patriotic citizens and good leadership and unity for development…And yet what do we see happening across Ghana? Kleptocracy and kakistocracy and incompetence everywhere…Politicians coming in and going out through the revolving-door of the state coffers, pillaging in turns. Why must a country as rich as Ghana go begging?”

Prof. Dompere then concludes: “This new crop of post-Nkrumah leadership does not understand Nkrumah, what he stood for, and his great ideas.”

It is clear from the foregoing that Prof. Dompere’s frustrations with Ghanaian leadership in particular and African leadership in general do not substantially, to put it bluntly, deviate from Chinua Achebe’s overall reservations about postcolonial African leadership as candidly laid out in the book “There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra,” reservations of which Wole Soyinka has been highly and sharply critical, with “The Guardian” Alison Flood writing thus: “Soyinka said he regretted that he had never had the chance to challenge Achebe’s final book…‘It is…a book I wish he had never written?that is, not in the way it was. There are statements in that book that I wish he had never made (See “Calls for Chinua Achebe Nobel Prize ‘obscene,’ Says Wole Soyinka”).”

What is so objectionable about Achebe’s admissions as to summon Soyinka’s critical ire? Is the literary criticism of such works as Achebe’s final nonfiction no longer subject to the investigational claims of historicity? Aside what we have said about Achebe and Soyinka, Prof. Dompere’s scholarship goes beyond either man’s diagnoses and prognoses of African problems, including Nigeria’s, thus expanding upon and revising previous theories, inventing new ones, and validating them primarily via science, mathematics, and logic. We should, as matter of fact, try to understand Prof. Dompere’s acute demur to Ghana’s and Africa’s political and economic dilemma in the presence of abundant natural wealth and human capital, of the lost of vast opportunities that could have been translated into better conditions for the masses with the right ideas. The discontinuity introduced into Ghanaian politics by Nkrumah’s disappearance from the political scene has a lot to do with it (See Robert Woode’s book “Third World to First World?By One Touch: Economic Repercussions of the Overthrow of Dr. Kwame Nkrumah”).

One of the major reasons for Ghana’s (and Africa’s) continued underdevelopment has everything to do with a lack of creative or innovative ideas for transforming the continent and improving the living conditions of the masses. Nkrumah as a practical answer to Ghana’s (and African’s) myriad problems has been uncritically overlooked by many a post-Nkrumah leadership. Yet it is also not too farfetched when we make a claim of philosophical connectivity between Prof. Dompere’s righteous indignation and the ideological structure of contemporary Ghanaian politics concerning her negative development economics.

Consequently, we should argue in furtherance of the positive attributes of Prof. Dompere’s ideas that, any given political party that claims to represent the aspirations and interests of the masses and have the nation at heart must surely derive its political philosophy from a genuine philosophy of inclusiveness, the kind of philosophy that provides guidance to development and growth strategies, speaks boldly to the negation of Africa’s neocolonial dependency complex, promotes scientific and technological and engineering and mathematical ideation with a practical capacity for resurrecting Africa’s originality, all of these painted against a social pastiche of patriotism, universal quality education focusing on critical thinking and STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics) and information technology, and so on.


Such a practical philosophy requires unity of purpose for fruitful eventuation. More significantly, unity is virtually lacking at all levels of the Ghanaian society, cultural, ethnicity, political, religious, gender, and so on. Philosophical consciencism, a unifying theory of sorts, has no room for such retrogressive tendencies as ethnic nepotism, regrettably a major institutional fixture of post-Nkrumah politics. Yet again, it is clear we have Nkrumah to thank for so many great things, including for the rich legacy he left behind for the world, which Ghana and the rest of Africa, alas, have failed to avail themselves of for all the wrong reasons. This is exactly where Prof. Dompere’s scholarly work comes in. An obvious corollary of Prof. Dompere’s reservations about Ghana’s and Africa’s poor political, scientific, economic, and technological showing points to the palpable absence of Nkrumah’s titanic technocratic and philosophical vision in the atavistic character of either of the leadership of Ghana’s major political parties.

A theoretician of philosophical consciencism may want to find answers to the following questions:

Have we examined our scientists to see why they are not performing on par with international standards? Have we examined our educational institutions and curricula to see whether they meet the standards of STEM education? Have we thought of replacing Ghana’s divisive politics with a more inclusive politics of populist democracy? How hard are we working at “true” independence? What plans have we put in place to add value to our natural wealth? Have we asked ourselves whether we are adequately supporting our scientists through investment in research and development (R & D)? Have we asked ourselves why Ghanaian movie and music industries are behind Nigeria’s and why African movies continue to promote ignorance, rather than scientific and mathematical and technological knowledge, etc?

Have we asked ourselves why bureaucratic bottlenecks and organizational antiquation undermine productivity? How hard are we working towards African unification? What are we doing to address youth unemployment, juvenile delinquency, and child hawkers? What are we doing in terms of reducing disease burdens? What are we doing to resolve ethnic, political, and religious conflicts on the continent? What are we doing to create industrial economies in Africa? What are we doing to make Africa a military power to reckon with?

The moral of philosophical consciencism, essentially then, is getting Africa out of the tangle of neocolonial political ectopy and economic mendicancy against the dehumanizing tendencies of external patronage, largesse, and paternalism, with Ghana’s post-Nkrumah leadership conveniently working so hard to replace philosophical consciencism with neocolonial peonage. Prof. Dompere’s scholarship, then, aims at the radical reversal of these dehumanizing tendencies through close scientific and mathematical and philosophical examination of Nkrumah’s influential “Consciencism: Philosophy and Ideology for Decolonization” and other such critical works.

This work by Nkrumah is so difficult conceptually and technically ambiguous as to take Prof. Dompere’s nearly a decade of intense closing reading of it to reach the many interesting yet bold conclusions he presents in his two unpublished volumes on Nkrumah which he is still editing and others

It is clear that our leaders have not picked up anything worthwhile from Diop’s “Pre-colonial Black Africa: A Comparative Study of the Political and Social Systems of Europe and Black Africa (from Antiquity to the Formation of Modern States)” as well as from Walter Rodney’s “How Europe Underdeveloped Africa.” Our leaders’ incompetence and their collusion with Western multinationals to rob the people in broad daylight, economic mismanagement, nepotism, universal corruption, cronyism, witch camps and trokosi and religious dogmatism, social decay, ethnocentrism, irresponsible journalism, declining educational standards, gross misunderstanding of democracy, and the willing participation of the people’s nonchalance are open variables of the neocolonial equation of Ghana’s underdevelopment.

We shall return…