Nkrumah, Kwame (1909–1972)

Leader of the movement for independence of the Gold Coast from Great Britain, Kwame Nkrumah served first as prime minister and then as president of Ghana from 1957 to 1966. He is considered the father of the postwar phase of the Pan-African movement.

Nkrumah was born in the village of Nkroful in Ghana, just 8 years after the British annexation of the Gold Coast. Trained as a teacher at the Achimota College in Accra, Nkrumah taught at the Roman Catholic Junior School in Elmina before pursuing advanced studies in the United States, where he received a B.A. and a doctorate of divinity from Lincoln University and two master's degrees, in education and philosophy, from the University of Pennsylvania.

While completing his graduate studies in the United States, Nkrumah's engagement in anti-colonial agitation intensified. In 1943, he assumed leadership of the Institute of African Languages and Culture at the University of Pennsylvania, founded the North American chapter of the West African Students Association, and was a regular visitor to Africa House, a hostel in Harlem where politicized African and West Indian students met and discussed strategies for waging the struggle against colonialism in their respective nations. Nkrumah also began to formulate what was to become a key primary document of the Pan-African movement, Toward Colonial Freedom—a detailed exposé of the exploitation of Africans by white rulers.

Nkrumah arrived in London in 1945. With George Padmore, he helped organize the Pan-African Congress held in Manchester in 1945. The fifth in a series of Pan-African meetings, the Manchester Congress is considered the beginning of a new phase of the Pan-African movement where militant journalists, students, and labor leaders from Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States met and demanded that all Africans have the right to determine the government under which they live.

Returning to Ghana in 1947, Nkrumah was appointed secretary-general of the new nationalist party, the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC), composed largely of black businessmen, government employees, and traditional chiefs. These people were concerned primarily with the economic dimension of the movement for self-rule. During 1948–1949, as spontaneous protests spread along the Gold Coast, Nkrumah came to believe that the militancy of masses exceeded that of the UGCC and he fomented a break, forming the more radical Convention People's Party (CPP). The CPP drew popular support from less educated youth and from agricultural workers in rural areas of Ghana.

Central to the CPP's strategy for gaining independence was a program of positive action, which included a general workers' strike, a boycott of foreign goods, and a position of noncooperation with the government. After a bout of rioting in Accra, Nkrumah was arrested by the British in 1950. Repression of the movement served only to increase Nkrumah's stature and popularity. During the 1951 elections, Nkrumah, while still in prison, was elected to the Legislative Assembly, and the CPP overall won a majority of legislative seats. Facing international pressure and further civil unrest, the British decided to leave the Gold Coast in 1951, asking Nkrumah for his cooperation in setting the stage for independence under CPP rule. In 1957, Nkrumah was made prime minister, and Ghana was declared a republic in 1960, the first black country to win freedom from colonial control. The emancipation of Ghana paved the way for an acceleration of the struggle for African unity, thus transforming Pan-Africanism from a movement of ideas centered in Europe to a movement of practical politics based on African soil.

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