Kwame Nkrumah

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Kwame Nkrumah was Ghana’s founding president and a leader who ascended to the heights of power and experienced the depths of failure. Today, despite his flaws, he is remembered as a hero in his home country and across the continent.

Born in 1909 in the British colony Gold Coast, Nkrumah went to one of his country’s best schools before traveling to the United States in 1935. He graduated from Lincoln University, America’s oldest black college, in Pennsylvania in 1939. He embraced America’s black culture, making friends with its intellectuals. He was elected president of the African Students Organization of America and Canada.

Nkrumah moved on to London, where, inspired by India’s independence, he became active in the movement to decolonize Africa. He helped organize the Fifth Pan-African Congress in 1945. Two years later, he returned to his homeland, where he found his country on the path to independence. But he thought it was moving too slowly. He formed the Convention People’s Party and traveled throughout the country speaking and calling for strikes and boycotts. Violence followed, and the British arrested him, convicted him of incitement and sedition, and sentenced him to three years in prison.

His arrest made him a hero. British law allowed him to run for the legislature from behind bars. In 1951, he and his party scored overwhelming victories, winning 34 of 38 seats on the ballot. Days later, British authorities released him after he had served 14 months of his sentence. In less than a day, he became the country’s new prime minister.

Martin Meredith wrote in his book, The Fate of Africa, that things were moving so fast, Nkrumah wondered at one point whether it was all a dream, and whether he might wake up and find himself “squatting on the prison floor eating a bowl of maize porridge.”

While he was the prime minister, ultimate authority was still in the hands of the British governor. In July 1953, Nkrumah introduced a motion in Parliament demanding full self-government. The next year, the British agreed to a new constitution with an all-African cabinet.

At midnight March 6, 1957, Ghana was born, named for an 11th century African empire.

The new country had many advantages. It was one of the wealthiest countries on the continent, with good schools, an established middle class, and an honest and fair courts system. Its new leader was experienced and only 47 years old.

In 1961, Nkrumah visited the Soviet Union and studied its industrialization. He returned with a socialist seven-year plan and began building state-owned utilities and companies. But he moved too quickly, and his country soon was awash in mismanagement and corruption. He overspent his country’s revenues and used Ghana’s cocoa revenues to cover his country’s losses, which did not go over well with cocoa farmers.

As a champion of independence, he had once called for boycotts and strikes. As president, he outlawed such tactics. He also wrote a Preventive Detention Act that allowed his administration to arrest and hold anyone considered to be a security risk, denying due process. He held prisoners without trial — something even his former British rulers had not done.

As he made grand plans for African unity, he appeared to have lost interest in running his own country. He turned Ghana into a one-party state in 1964 and began calling himself Osagyefo, “the Redeemer.”

On February 24, 1966, he traveled to China with a grandiose plan to end the war in Vietnam. In his absence, his army officers rebelled and took over the government. He was forced to live in Guinea, another country experimenting with socialism. He believed that he would eventually return to power, but he died in exile in 1972.

Time has mended his reputation. His birthday is a national holiday in Ghana. The BBC has described him as “the leader of the first black African country to shake off the chains of colonial rule.” He is remembered as a visionary and as a leader in African independence and African unity.