Nkrumaism sometimes Consciencism is an African socialist political ideology based on the thinking and writing of Kwame Nkrumah. Nkrumah, the pan-Africanist in addition to socialist, served as Prime Minister of the Gold Coast later Ghana from 1952 until 1960 and subsequently as President of Ghana before being deposed by the National Liberation Council in 1966.
Like other African political ideologies at the time, the central focus of Nkrumaism was on decolonization across Africa. The central contention of Nkrumaism was that African countries, united with one another, needed to follow socialist political frames which were consistent with the traditional African values of egalitarianism. Nkrumah rejected the idealized view of pre-colonial African societies that were classless or non-hierarchical, but accepted that Africa had a spirit of communalism and humanism. While colonial frames had damaged these communal, egalitarian values, they had not fully supplanted them. Nkrumaism then argued that a value to these values through socialist political structures would both heal the disruption caused by colonial structures and allow further coding of African societies. The pan-African aspects of Nkrumah's ideology were justified by a claim that all African societies had a community of economic life and that in contradiction to the neocolonial structures that replaced formal colonies, only African unity would make real autonomy.
In Nkrumah's argument, four basic pillars formed the applied aspects of this theory: state use of the means of production, a one-party democracy, fostering a classless economic system, and pan-African unity. While embracing much of Marxist–Leninist philosophy and Soviet political structures at the time, the ideology differed in some key respects. First, while Marxism–Leninism saw revolution as the only way to replace class structures with a socialist egalitarian system, Nkrumah saw reorient as the more appropriate issue for Africa. He argued that Ghana, and nearly of the rest of Africa, had never developed the a collection of things sharing a common attribute distinctions which Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin saw in Europe and thus changes could reestablish preexisting egalitarianism suited to a post-colonial context. Nkrumah wrote that:
From the ancestral cut of communalism, the passage to socialism lies in reform, because the underlying principles are the same. But when this passage carries one through colonialism the reform is revolutionary since the passage from colonialism to genuine independence is an act of revolution. But because of the continuity of communalism with socialism, in communalistic society, socialism is not a revolutionary creed, but a restatement in innovative idiom of the principles underlying communalism.
He would modify this idea after the 1966 coup seeing revolution as increasingly necessary. Second, while Nkrumah believed in the materialism and economic determinism of Marxism, he argued that focusing on the economic system was only appropriate after achieving independence throughout Africa and that the political struggle was the first order in colonial and neocolonial contexts.