An Accidental Assassination?

In its first issue to be released after the coup (January 19, 1963), West Africa magazine’s front page report pinpointed the causes with a surprising degree of certainty: “It is now plain…that the military junta who murdered [Olympio] were inflamed by their own real and imagined grievances, and those of Togo’s ex-servicemen. Their claim to have had ‘no religious or philosophical ideology’ seems only too true” (West Africa 1963a). The magazine’s correspondent in Lomé went on to raise the possibility that the soldiers who shot Olympio did not actually set out to kill him, but had somehow done so in the heat of the moment: “Soldiers’ grievances about pay and unemployment among ex-servicemen were the immediate cause of the coup d’état in Lomé on Sunday—of which an unplanned result was the death of President Olympio” (West Africa 1963b). The proof of the pudding, suggested the correspondent, was in the eating, for the soldiers got what they wanted. At a press conference just three days after the coup, Grunitzky announced that his new coalition government would treble the size of the Togolese army in order to accommodate the demands of “1,000 demobilized French colonial troops,” whose “anger at being abandoned amongst the unemployed” was, in the view of the correspondent, “chiefly responsible for the crisis” (West Africa 1963b).

The notion that Olympio’s death was unintended had already been called into question by the time the West Africa report was published. On January 15, 1963, in an exclusive interview with two journalists (Prendergast for Time-Life, and Chauvel for Figaro), one Sargent Etienne Eyadéma stated that he personally had shot the president.^{Footnote 3} Later the same day, the insurrectionary committee held a press conference, at which it was announced that Olympio had indeed been shot, but only because he had tried to escape—a reason which Eyadéma had not given earlier that day.^{Footnote 4} The small but significant discrepancy between the two accounts quickly gave rise to speculation.

Later, U.S. embassy records revealed that, on the morning of January 13, 1963, U.S. Vice Consul Richard Storch had looked down upon the scene from a window in a building across the street.^{Footnote 5} Storch’s account suggested that at 7:10 a.m., Olympio had been standing near the U.S. embassy gate wearing only shorts and a vest, in a street guarded by soldiers from whom he was not attempting to escape.^{Footnote 6} The doctor who dealt with the body indicated that Olympio had been bayonetted as well as shot—a combination of wounds that can only have been inflicted deliberately.^{Footnote 7} News reports that described Olympio’s death as accidental, then, were immediately called into question, and they became further discredited over time. Olympio’s death meets Ali Mazrui’s (1968:42–45) criteria for the term “assassination”—the victim was a political figure whose death was linked to the use of force to influence the structure, composition, or policy of the government.

The theory that the coup was instigated by soldiers—in pursuit of their own interests, and without regard to “ideology”—was later taken up by Samuel Decalo (Reference Decalo1976) in his influential study of Coups and Army Rule in Africa. By this point, the shock that had accompanied the events of January 1963 in Togo had ebbed away. Political scientists recognized that approximately half of Africa’s states were controlled by “military or civil-military cliques” (Decalo Reference Decalo1976:2). Decalo was frustrated by analysts’ continued emphasis on the systemic weaknesses of African states, and by a naïve belief in the justifications of anti-corruption and national unity that military leaders usually offered for their coups. He insisted that the real explanation lay in “the internal dynamics of African military hierarchies, their officer cliques, and corporate and personal ambitions” (1976:xii). The coup in Togo was not only the first in West Africa; for Decalo it held the key to understanding a pattern across the continent.

Decalo noted certain common features of Africa’s post-colonial armies which, he argued, undermined their capacity to act as national institutions governed by values of discipline and unity, and produced instead “coterie[s] of distinct armed camps owing primary clientelist allegiance to a handful of mutually competitive officers” (1976:5). Ethnic imbalance was one of these common features, which certainly pertained to Togo, with its notorious north-south, Eʋe-Kabre divide. But Decalo also clarified one respect in which Togo was distinct. Whereas in most of their African colonies, the French had recruited and conscripted soldiers into troupes coloniales, in Togoland (which had been administered under a United Nations trusteeship agreement), the French could only raise “volunteer contingents” (United Nations 1946: article 4B). Like other presidents in francophone West Africa, then, Olympio had had to create a new national army upon the achievement of independence. But the status of the Togolese soldiers available to him became a matter of contention.

Adhering firmly to the principles of fiscal discipline, Olympio insisted that, in an independent Republic of Togo, the armed forces must be affordable. And as the country’s population was then well under two million, and its economy was heavily reliant on a handful of primary exports, he also decided that the armed forces should be very small. In 1963, the Togolese army consisted of a single infantry battalion of about 250 men, while the gendarmerie and the Garde togolaise were responsible for diverse aspects of public order and national security.^{Footnote 8} While the serving soldiers’ interests were difficult to square with Olympio’s approach to military expenditure, those who resented it most were the “volunteers” who were returning from active service in French colonial campaigns—particularly that in Algeria, which came to an end following the Evian Accords of March 1962.^{Footnote 9}

The Togolese ex-servicemen waited impatiently for their pensions to be paid by the French government. In addition to financial hardship and the stigma that attached to their role in suppressing anti-colonial movements elsewhere, these soldiers—who had accumulated considerable combat experience—now faced the prospect that Olympio would refuse to integrate them into a second Togolese infantry battalion, and thereby render them unemployed. The ex-servicemen thus had both the means and the motive to act against Olympio and his government, and the serving soldiers had reasons to support them.

However, although the West Africa correspondent clearly favored this “military/non-ideological” explanation, not everyone was convinced the soldiers were acting on their own account. President Sékou Touré of Guinea, appealing for a United Nations investigation, described the assassination and coup as a “hideous plot knowingly hatched from outside” (Kitchen Reference Kitchen1963:8), while the Nigerian foreign minister Jaja Wachuku informed a press conference in Lagos that Olympio’s demise was “achieved, directed, organised and financed by ‘somebody’ ” (West Africa 1963c).

A Neo-Colonial Conspiracy?

Several decades later, in La Françafrique, François-Xavier Verschave (Reference Verschave1998) assembled a diverse range of evidence that linked soldierly interests and ambitions in Togo to a sinister record of French neo-colonial intervention across Africa and to the shadowy figure of Jacques Foccart. As head of the secretariat of African affairs under Presidents de Gaulle and Pompidou, Foccart built up a network of informants in the military bases, counter-espionage posts, and policing services that France “provided” to its former African colonies and trust territories under a series of independence-era “co-operation agreements” (Bat Reference Bat2010; Ayache Reference Ayache1983:42; Luckham Reference Luckham1982). After spending the mid-1970s to mid-1990s in the political wilderness, Foccart was rehabilitated as an advisor on Africa to President Chirac. Foccart told his story (Gaillard 1995–1997) and thereby generated evidence for renewed journalistic and academic critiques.

Tracing Foccart’s connections between Paris and Lomé, Verschave (1998:109, 119) concluded that both the French ambassador, Henri Mazoyer, and the security adviser, Georges Maîtrier, had been selected as part of a broader strategy to monitor and contain Olympio in his efforts to steer Togo on “too independent” a course. Highlighting Maîtrier’s direct communication with insurrectionists Robert Adewi, Emmanuel Bodjollé, and Etienne Eyadéma in the days before the coup, Verschave built the case that the security failures of January 12–13, 1963 were neither unanticipated nor accidental. Verschave (1998:119) noted Adewi’s (uncorroborated and post facto) claim that Maîtrier had asked Eyadéma to get rid of Olympio in exchange for a cash payment. He also quoted members of Olympio’s household, who said that the soldiers who forced entry to the residence on the night of January 12–13 had used the telephone to inform Mazoyer that the president was not there (1998:112, 116). Verschave left open the possibility that Foccart was interested only in the demise of Olympio’s government and had not wanted or ordered an assassination (1998:121). But he was clear that while the soldiers may well have thought they were serving their own interests, they had acted with the complicity of Mazoyer and Maîtrier, and thus, albeit indirectly, of Foccart.

Verschave’s analysis was taken up by the Togolese historian Têtêvi Godwin Tété-Adjalogo (Reference Tété-Adjalogo2002) in the third of his three-volume account of Togo’s struggle for Ablɔɖe (freedom). Tété-Adjalogo argued that, in pursuing fiscal discipline, reducing reliance on French budgetary subventions, avoiding the accumulation of loans, and pushing for an “open door” policy on imports, Olympio was setting his tiny republic on the path to economic independence, and, had Olympio lived long enough to succeed, his example would have threatened the very basis of French engagement with its former African colonies. According to Tété-Adjalogo, Franco-Togolese relations reached their nadir in late 1962 when Olympio made public his plans to take Togo out of the franc zone, and this was the “first, second and third” factor behind the assassination (2002:111).

The subsequent turn of events in Togo seemed to reinforce different elements of the “military/non-ideological” and “neo-colonial” explanations. In 1967, Etienne (later Gnassingbé) Eyadéma undertook another coup and thereby inaugurated his own thirty-eight-year hold on power. For Decalo (1990), the connections were as follows: having claimed the “credit” for pulling the trigger on Olympio, Eyadéma recognized that if the pro-Olympio politicians should ever form a government again, he [Eyadéma] would be tried for murder. Self-preservation thus compelled Eyadéma firstly to seize power himself when the Grunitzky administration began to falter, and subsequently to retain power by staving off pro-democracy protests. Verschave (Reference Verschave1998), on the other hand explained Eyadéma’s long hold on power as part of a deliberate and sustained neo-colonial strategy to keep “the friends of France” in power in Africa.

Aided From Accra?

In the immediate aftermath of the assassination and the coup, however, a third explanation circulated through Lomé, Accra, and other West African capitals. According to these rumors, the “somebody” whom Nigerian foreign minister Jaja Wachuku had envisaged behind the coup was neither Mazoyer, Maîtrier, nor Foccart. Rather, it was Kwame Nkrumah, president of the neighboring republic of Ghana. These rumors were deemed plausible for three reasons.

Firstly, while Olympio was negotiating the end of the United Nations trusteeship agreement and French administration in the period from April 1958 to April 1960, Nkrumah had expressed publicly and repeatedly his belief that the future of Togo lay not in independent nationhood, but in a political and economic union with Ghana (Welch Reference Welch1966:115, 139–47). This did not bode well for Ghana’s future relations with an independent Togo. Speaking at Ho in December 1960, Nkrumah emphasized the artificiality of the colonial border, which he claimed had separated “our own kith and kin.” He was unapologetic about the “recent trade restrictions [which] have been imposed [by Ghana on the now independent Togo] to bring home clearly and unmistakeably that union of Ghana and Togoland is natural and inevitable” (Nkrumah, December 19, 1960, as cited in Obeng Reference Obeng1979:235). For Nkrumah, a Ghana-Togo union would be an opportunity to demonstrate and concretize his own “devotion to the cause of African Unity.”

Secondly, and partly by way of response, Olympio’s party declared itself committed not only to the preservation of Togolese national sovereignty, but also to the reopening of the Ghana-Togo border question. That dispute hinged on the status of the former United Nations trust territory of British Togoland, which had lain between French Togoland and the British colony of the Gold Coast. British Togoland had been integrated into the Gold Coast/Ghana at the latter’s Independence from Britain in 1957—a solution which was advantageous to Ghana, to the extent that it gave the Ghana government control over both the east and west banks of the river Volta. Olympio’s party criticized the process by which the future of British Togoland had been determined and insisted that the disputed territory should be “reunified” with the Republic of Togo. The Togolese foreign minister, Paulin Freitas, brought the problem of the border to the attention of the United Nations.^{Footnote 10} As Nkrumah’s economic strategy hinged on the generation of power from a hydro-electric dam on the river Volta (Miescher Reference Miescher2014), the Ghana government could not afford to lose control of this territory to a neighboring country.

Finally, the Ghana government had formally accused the Togo government of harboring dangerous political exiles and either assisting, or at least failing to clamp down upon, their plots against the Ghana government. The Togo government was accused of abetting the notorious attempt on Nkrumah’s life at Kulungugu in August 1962 (by sheltering the prime suspect), and of complicity in the bomb attacks that afflicted Accra through the autumn and winter of 1962. In a series of notes exchanged between the two governments in December 1962, the Ghana government had also indicated its position on regime change—force was justified when other means had failed and when the “desire to end an unpopular regime is backed by the will of the people” (as cited in Thompson Reference Thompson1969:308–9; see Gerits Reference Gerits2015 for an alternative perspective).

In the light of this rather public hostility, then, several West African politicians seem to have believed it was possible that Nkrumah himself, or members of his government, had conspired with Togolese political exiles living in Accra and had encouraged or supplied the insurrectionists in a bid to remove Olympio. This possibility, along with several others, was discussed between January 24 and 26, 1963, at an emergency meeting in Lagos of the Inter-African and Malagasy states. The government of Nigeria took extremely seriously the possibility that the uncertainties generated by the coup would provide a pretext for a Ghanaian annexation of Togo—a concern reflected in foreign minister Jaja Wachuku’s official statement that the Ghana-Togo border was Nigeria’s own border “for the purpose of security” (Kitchen Reference Kitchen1963:9).

Accusations against Nkrumah and his government circulated widely in 1963. They were reported by journalists and correspondents working for a range of newspapers within and beyond Africa; they were noted by diplomatic representatives of “western” and other African countries; and they were addressed in early studies in African political science and international relations (Welch Reference Welch1966; Mazrui Reference Mazrui1968; Thompson Reference Thompson1969; Akinyemi Reference Akinyemi1975). Yet these versions of events have received scant attention in the more recent scholarship on Nkrumah’s foreign policy and his pan-African project.

Why the Historiographical Gap?

One explanation for the gap between contemporary accusations and more recent scholarship is that future generations could not take very seriously the accusation that Nkrumah was complicit in the assassination of Olympio and the Togo coup. There is indeed no logical connection between Nkrumah’s agenda for Africa and the outcomes in Togo. Even if Nkrumah had been motivated to act against Olympio, why would he have wished to see Grunitzky restored to power? Grunitzky’s party, along with that of Antoine Meatchi, had benefitted from French manipulation of electoral contests in Togo between 1952 and 1956, before both were ousted by a more radical anti-colonial alliance in the United Nations-supervised elections of April 1958 (Amenumey Reference Amenumey1989:156–64, 285–336). If “somebody” had wished to see Grunitzky restored to power in 1963, the subsequent turn of events surely pointed not to Nkrumah, but to the French.

A focus on French neo-colonial motivations and opportunities for action in Togo is more attractive for a researcher seeking logical connections between events over time. It also facilitates the location of Togolese events within a substantial body of historical and political-scientific research on the demise of the French empire and its damaging aftermath. (Golan Reference Golan1981; Chafer Reference Chafer2002; Chafer & Keese Reference Chafer and Keese2013; Cooper Reference Cooper2014 are but a sample of key works published in English. Bat Reference Bat2012 consolidates, critiques, and extends many earlier studies published in French.) Given that Olympio was not the anointed successor of the outgoing French administration, but the popular leader of a victimized nationalist movement, he resists categorization as a puppet or stooge president. It was in fact Olympio’s Togolese opponents who had enjoyed French favor through much of the 1950s. So when some of these same opponents showed up as political exiles in Nkrumah’s Ghana in the early 1960s, they brought no socialist or pan-African credentials along with them, and it is not at all obvious why they should have been supported.

When the Olympio assassination and 1963 coup are considered in the context of Togo’s relations with its former European administering power (that is, within something akin to a [post]colony-metropole framework), a hypothesis quickly suggests itself: the French had never liked Olympio and always preferred Grunitzky; thus, when soldierly discontent offered them an opportunity to rearrange matters more to their liking, they took it, and benefitted from it thereafter. Armed with this hypothesis, the researcher can sally forth with confidence to the well-endowed French national archives in search of evidence to confirm or deny. Conversely, the researcher who considers the Olympio assassination and the coup in the context of inter-African relations, and acknowledges the contingency and porosity of national borders, may quickly find him/herself mired in contradictions and struggling with the dispersion and discontinuities of Africa’s postcolonial archives.

A Ghana-centric analysis of West Africa’s first coup has proved unattractive as a focus of historical research. This is not surprising, given that it seems illogical in the light of subsequent events, unheroic when compared to the study of solidarities between freedom fighters, and difficult to test against a bank of reliable empirical data in well-resourced or extensively digitized public archives. But this begs the questions why a Ghana-centric explanation was ever taken seriously at all, and how it features in the early political-scientific and international relations research on Africa. Is this merely symptomatic of the Cold War context in which such research was conducted? Does it reflect the biases that were embedded in later twentieth-century U.S. apparatus of knowledge production about international relations in general, and the African continent in particular (Skinner Reference Skinner1976; Sutton & Smock Reference Sutton and Smock1976; Vitalis Reference Vitalis2015)? Was it just a thinly disguised attempt to discredit Nkrumah?

W. Scott Thompson attributed more significance to Ghana-Togo relations than any scholar before or since. Indeed, Thompson argued that “no state was to be more important to Ghana than Togo” (1969:10). He identified in Togolese affairs early tests of Nkrumah’s statesmanship and Ghanaian statecraft. Describing Nkrumah as “charismatic but unintelligent” (87), Thompson elaborated on how Ghana’s interactions with Togo had “weakened its prestige throughout Africa” (81) and he concluded that “Ghana was to fail no test more thoroughly than this one” (81). Having interviewed former Ghanaian ministers, ambassadors, and foreign policy advisors, Thompson appears to have taken it as axiomatic that

Highlighting the (uncorroborated and post facto) testimony of an individual who claimed he had been sent by Nkrumah with orders to organize the assassination of Olympio, Thompson suggested that there was indeed a Ghanaian plot in January 1963. But he concluded that these conspirators had been overtaken by events in Lomé—that is, by the initiatives of Togolese soldiers and ex-servicemen, “whatever the extent of French complicity” (1969:313). In Thompson’s account, Nkrumah appeared receptive to conspiracies against neighboring governments, but not competent enough to see them through; thus, Nkrumah thoroughly undermined his own position in the crucial build-up to the first meeting of the Organization of African Unity in May 1963.

Any Answers From the Archives?

Thompson conducted his research in the later 1960s, in the aftermath of the coup that toppled the Nkrumah regime in February 1966. At this point, there seemed little prospect of accessing complete series of records from relevant government ministries, departments, or agencies in Ghana, not least because some of them were deliberately destroyed (Grilli Reference Grilli2017). Thompson relied heavily on interviews, as well as on press coverage, and on documentation provided to him by individuals (1969:441–43). Since then, the records of the many countries that had diplomatic representation in Ghana have become available in public archives, and these provide some avenues through which Thompson’s picture of Nkrumah’s foreign policy, and Ghana-Togo relations in particular, might be revisited.

Like other researchers who have engaged with French and U.S. embassy records, I quickly became aware that multiple ministries, departments, and agencies (foreign affairs, defense, aid/co-operation, intelligence) had a stake in their respective governments’ relations with, and activities in, any given African country. The embassies were by all means important nodes which absorbed, produced, and disseminated a substantial volume of information. But they also belonged within a much larger state apparatus. Within and between ministries, departments, and agencies, individuals operated with differing levels of knowledge and influence, and generated competing assessments of opportunities and threats. The problem, then, is not a paucity of information about French and U.S. relations with Ghana and Togo, or an absence of insight into the kinds of calculations made by elected or unelected officials. Rather, the problem is that it is difficult to be sure which individual(s) exercised the most power at a given moment, how exactly they translated their ideas into action, and who/what else might have intervened.

The records of the French embassies in Accra and Lomé help to crystallize the French dilemma in Togo. It is clear that ambassador Mazoyer disliked Olympio intensely and had no enthusiasm for propping up his government. At the same time, however, Mazoyer recognized the possibility that, should Olympio fall, the ensuing uncertainty might provide a pretext for a Ghanaian annexation of Togo—a risk which he regarded as significant threat to French interests across West Africa.^{Footnote 11} In order to grasp how the French government responded to the increasingly tense situation in Togo, and the particular role played by the head of the secretariat of African Affairs, historians have turned to the “archives Foccart.” Jean-Pierre Bat (Reference Bat2006), drawing from Pascale Geneste (Reference Geneste2003), explained how the “archives Foccart” were constituted, and how they could be compared with other sets of records, including those of the French foreign ministry, so as to generate well-evidenced assessments of the French role in Africa.

Heeding Bat’s advice, Alexander Keese undertook a thorough search of the French repositories. From this Keese concluded that “Foccart was a boaster” and that his network in the early 1960s was in fact still “rudimentary” (2007:594). Looking more specifically at French agendas in Togo and Guinea, Keese concluded that there are “no real proofs that the French were behind the crisis that Togo went through in early 1963” (2008:525). Implicitly acknowledging that the absence of documentation does not, in itself, rule out the possibility of anti-Olympio actions or intent, Keese nonetheless insisted that,

The U.S. government records are similarly challenging, and there are significant scholarly disagreements about the extent to which U.S. interest in Africa changed through the presidencies of Roosevelt, Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy (Nwaubani Reference Nwaubani2003). Philip Muelhenbeck argues that Kennedy advocated a more robust and autonomous U.S. approach to Africa than that pursued by Eisenhower. The former had been “publicly hostile towards ‘premature independence’ [in Africa]” and content to assign to France the responsibility for keeping its former colonies out of the Soviet orbit (Muelhenbeck Reference Muehlenbeck2012:6). The Kennedy administration, by contrast, opened embassies in all but one of the newly independent African nations, and initiated aid programs to all twelve of the African states that achieved independence from France in 1960 (160–61).

From the perspective of Kennedy, Olympio must surely have been an ideal African leader. Olympio’s track record of protest and mobilization against the French administration identified him unambiguously as an anti-colonial nationalist, and not as a French lackey. At the same time, Olympio was very clearly not a socialist, and as such he could be comfortably accommodated within Kennedy’s efforts to expand U.S. influence in Africa through the cultivation of “personal diplomacy” (Muelhenbeck Reference Muehlenbeck2012:49). Olympio’s visit to the White House in March 1962 cemented his reputation as a “friendly” African leader whose vision might be compatible with that of the U.S. government. A more extensive search of the State Department records, however, raises the question of just how much weight the warm relations between the two presidents would carry when the chips were down.

Muelhenbeck points out that in the immediate aftermath of the Olympio assassination, the White House rebuked William De Pree (of the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research) for suggesting that the U.S. government should wait and see how the situation developed (2012:161). De Pree was told that “a policy of doing nothing” was inappropriate under a Kennedy administration. The U.S. embassy records from Lomé, however, allow another insight into the U.S. dilemma.

The U.S. ambassador Leon Poullada reminded the State Department that, shortly before he was assassinated, Olympio had secured from Nigerian foreign minister Jaja Wachuku a commitment to defend Togo against any Ghanaian attempt at annexation. Poullada further noted that the (now deposed) Togolese interior minister Théophile Mally had produced, on the day before the Togo coup, an unverified report that Nkrumah had already “bought off” the commanding officer of the Togolese army.^{Footnote 12} Conjuring up the worst case scenario of a “free-for-all Donnybrook,” Poullada pointed out that should the Nigerians attempt to restore the former Togolese government, the French might cite their defense agreements with Togo, and their duty to defend its national sovereignty and territorial integrity, so as to justify a military intervention.^{Footnote 13}

But the desire to avoid this kind of “free-for-all Donnybrook” had to be weighed against a desire to preserve U.S. relations with other “friendly” African leaders. This is probably why Secretary of State Dean Rusk approved a secret memorandum recommending that the U.S. government recognize the provisional Togo government but delay its announcement of recognition “until a substantial number of African states have actually taken such action.”^{Footnote 14} These considerations did not quite lead the U.S. government into “a policy of doing nothing.” But they limited the U.S. government’s room for manoeuvre and inhibited an open or enthusiastic backing of Grunitzky.^{Footnote 15}

The meeting of Inter-African and Malagasy heads of state in Lagos from January 24 to 26, 1963, raised another difficulty for the United States. Here, Théophile Mally claimed that both the Ghanaians and the French had played a part in the coup: the former had actively conspired, by distributing money and providing arms to those willing to partake in an insurrection; the latter had “taken advantage of the situation” by failing to prevent the distribution of arms or to warn Olympio, and by promising soldiers that they would receive better conditions from a new Togo government.^{Footnote 16} On January 25, Removille (a Quai d’Orsay official with responsibility for Togolese affairs) approached the U.S. embassy in Paris. He sought to convince the embassy officer that “a widely publicized assassination investigation would serve no purpose.” He suggested that the U.S., UK, and French governments should instead “all counsel moderation to other African states in the hope that the latter will leave Togo alone long enough for Grunitzky Government [to] control its own extremists and solidify its position.”^{Footnote 17}

Ambassador Poullada was not convinced that the French embassy had been transparent in its dealings.^{Footnote 18} In his view, the French had committed several sins of omission: first, by failing to speed up the payment of pensions to Togolese ex-servicemen and thereby alleviate pressure on Olympio to integrate them into the Togolese army; second, by failing to notify the U.S. embassy immediately the coup was underway; and third, by failing to share with the U.S. and other “friendly” embassies all the moves it was intending to make in regard to the provisional government. However, although Poullada found this French behavior “regrettable,” he claimed that his embassy had “assiduously tried to kill anti-French rumors and dispel suspicions,” and vowed that he would “continue [to] seek close and friendly relations.”^{Footnote 19} When push came to shove, the U.S. ambassador and the Secretary of State did not wish to cross the French in Togo.

A close reading of the embassy records, then, would lead one to believe that the U.S. pursued a “friendly” but ultimately cautious or even non-committal approach in Togo, despite Kennedy’s aspirations for a more robust and autonomous U.S. approach to Africa, and despite his warm personal relationship with Olympio. But this picture might not withstand a thorough inspection of the activities of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency. While Thompson (1969:308) gave ready consideration to any evidence of Ghanaian subversion in Togo, he was skeptical of Nkrumah’s repeated accusations that plots against the Ghana government were being hatched on Togolese soil. Thompson acknowledged that after Kulungugu, a series of bomb attacks were carried out in Ghana—indeed, the last of these occurred just one week before Olympio was assassinated—but Thompson was more interested in critiquing Nkrumah’s reactions to the attacks than in investigating their origins. The implication, then, was that Nkrumah was paranoid and unstatesmanlike in his accusations.

Mary Montgomery’s more recent research into Ghana-US-UK relations brings to mind Joseph Heller’s dictum, in Catch 22, that “just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.” After studying the records of the U.S. State Department; files pertaining to Ghana in the presidential libraries of Eisenhower, Kennedy and Johnson; and UK foreign office and embassy records, Montgomery believed it possible that “the accepted argument that Nkrumah falsely accused Togo of harboring and supporting the military training of Ghanaian refugees is wrong, and Olympio did actively support US intelligence activities in Togo directed at Ghana” (2004:210). She also warned, however, that some of the U.S. government “documents that make reference to a possible coup [to topple the Nkrumah government] have been heavily censored or removed from the files” (2004:208)—a phenomenon we also noted in our reading of the correspondence between the State Department and the U.S. embassy in Lomé.

Ironically, then, while the records of the French and U.S. governments are voluminous and neatly catalogued in well-resourced national archives, they are also dissatisfying. They do not reveal the decisive execution of a conspiracy in Togo, or even a coherent and consistent French or U.S. agenda. Rather, these archives bring home the complexity of policymaking, the possibilities for competing and contradictory agendas, and the considerable potential for unedifying or inconvenient information to be swept under the carpet.

Doing More with Less in Africa’s Postcolonial Archives

The conclusion that French and U.S. archives are dissatisfying may be comforting to historians of postcolonial Africa who have been forced to let go of expectations of archival completeness and coherence—both in the quest for “whole series” of papers for ministries, departments, and agencies; and in the reading of individual files as windows onto a linear process of agenda, implementation, and outcome. The reader of incomplete archives is thus incentivized to “do more with less”—to go deeper in the analysis of each fragment, and wider in search of the connections between one fragment and actual, potential, or absent others (Bernault Reference Bernault2015). This seems particularly pertinent to the study of subversive political activities across national borders. What kinds of fragments, then, are available to a historian seeking to revisit the Olympio assassination and the Togo coup? How might they help us to evaluate deposed Togolese interior minister Théophile Mally’s accusation (reiterated in a modified form by Thompson), that there was indeed a Ghana-based conspiracy at work, albeit one that came unstuck?

Scholars of Ghana’s foreign policy are well aware that responsibilities were spread across several bodies. Following the death in 1959 of George Padmore, Nkrumah’s first key advisor on African affairs, Ghana’s foreign policy apparatus shifted several times (Grilli Reference Grilli2018:165–211). A basic split can be discerned between the Ministry of External Affairs and the Foreign Service, on the one hand, and the African Affairs Committee, on the other. The latter was chaired by Nkrumah and met weekly at Flagstaff House. It assumed oversight for the Bureau of African Affairs (which gradually absorbed the All-African Peoples’ Conference secretariat) and the African Affairs Centre (which provided support to freedom fighters on the continent), and it worked toward the establishment of the Kwame Nkrumah Ideological Institute at Winneba (Grilli Reference Grilli2015:101–16). This multiplicity of institutions points to the generation of a large volume of documentation—much of it produced by a new cohort of female clerical workers (Ahlman Reference Ahlman2012)—and thus to challenges similar to those that we identified above vis-à-vis the French and U.S. archives. In Ghana, however, many records were deliberately destroyed in the coup that toppled Nkrumah in 1966, while others were not well preserved, thoroughly catalogued, or made accessible to researchers in public archives (Grilli Reference Grilli2017:298–99).

Fortunately, archivist Joseph Mensah (Reference Mensah1990) kick-started a process of recovering, cataloging, and rendering accessible the papers of the Bureau of African Affairs at the George Padmore Research Library, Accra (as described in Grilli Reference Grilli2017). Meanwhile, some other papers pertaining to Nkrumah’s pan-African policy have been catalogued under series RG17 and made accessible through the Public Records and Archives Administration search room (PRAAD) in Accra. Intelligence reports for the first half of the 1960s were stored in the PRAAD building in Ho (Volta Region), under series VR2. These fragmentary records can be put together with new research on political movements in early independent Togo (Skinner & Yayoh, forthcoming) to revisit three key points of contention in existing accounts of the Togo coup.

Firstly, they confirm that there was indeed a series of Ghanaian attempts to weaken and pressurize Olympio’s government over several years before the coup (although this does not prove either that Nkrumah conspired to have Olympio assassinated or that a conspiracy was successfully executed).^{Footnote 20} More importantly, they demonstrate that Nkrumah was willing to engage with the conservative elements in the Togolese opposition.^{Footnote 21} This offers a potential answer to the longstanding and vexed question of why Nkrumah might have backed, or at least tolerated, Grunitzky: it was a pragmatic (although ultimately misguided) calculation that Grunitzky could replace Olympio in the immediate term, until the more radical and left-wing elements in Togo’s variegated political opposition could be strengthened.

Second, the evidentiary fragments suggest that, whether or not he was behind the Togo coup, Nkrumah may have sought to exploit the opportunity to propose a treaty to the provisional Togo government. This treaty was accompanied by a secret annexure which, had it been signed, would have ceded a very significant measure of Togo’s national sovereignty and, in effect, ushered in Nkrumah’s long-desired Ghana-Togo union, while deliberately disguising its implications from the Togolese public.^{Footnote 22} The treaty and secret annexure are significant documents, because they provide us with a possible explanation for why Nkrumah moved rapidly to official diplomatic recognition of the provisional Togo government at a time when many other African leaders were resisting immediate recognition and calling for an investigation into the assassination.

Third, the Ghanaian records confirm that Nkrumah’s rapid recognition of the provisional Togo government, outside of any collective agreement with other African heads of state, became a bone of contention in the build-up to the May 1963 meetings of African foreign ministers and heads of state in Addis Ababa (a point also emphasised by Grilli Reference Grilli2018:265–73). In particular, this soured Nkrumah’s relationship with President Sékou Touré of Guinea, who strongly opposed the representation of the Togo government at the meetings that established the Organization of African Unity.^{Footnote 23} And it stimulated a bitter, but unresolved, debate within the Organization of African Unity about whether diplomatic recognition of unelected governments should be a matter for each individual nation-state or a matter for collective, pan-African decision-making (Akinyemi Reference Akinyemi1975).