Accra’s Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park, built on the site of the former colonial polo grounds, is home to two radically different monuments to Ghana’s first prime minister. In the park’s center is an eye-­catching bronze statue of a larger-than-life Nkrumah, clad in royal kente cloth, with an outstretched hand pointing ahead and one foot in front of the other as if he were advancing forward. Erected on top of a pedestal at the spot where Nkrumah stood to declare Ghana’s independence from Britain, it channels the slogan of Nkrumah’s political party: “Forward ever, backward never.” Though the monument was erected in 1992, the statue itself likely dates to the 1970s, when, after Nkrumah’s death in exile, discussions began for returning his body to Ghana and a mausoleum.

The second statue rests in two pieces a short distance from this gleaming icon. Cast and designed by the Italian sculptor Nicola Cataudella, it is considerably older. Originally erected in 1958 at the Old Parliament House, it depicts Nkrumah in a fugu, a smock from the northern region of the country associated with the working class. Here, too, Nkrumah’s right hand is extended, but instead of directing forward movement, it waves in greeting. To some, this might seem like a friendly gesture, but from the moment the statue was proposed, critics lambasted it as an indication of the growing personality cult around Nkrumah. In 1961, the statue was badly damaged in a bomb attack, and Cataudella was commissioned to replace it. Then, during the 1966 coup that unseated Nkrumah’s government, it was toppled and beheaded. The severed and damaged pieces—Nkrumah’s body, minus a right hand and a left arm, and his head—stand on two pedestals next to each other.

These two Nkrumahs are illustrative of the long-standing conflict over the African leader’s legacy. In much of the world, Nkrumah is today a forgotten figure from a lost age of decolonization. Across the continent, however, he is widely celebrated as a champion of African independence and unity. In a 1999 poll conducted by the BBC World Service, African listeners voted for Nkrumah as Africa’s “Man of the Millennium.” And yet closer to home, his memory remains as contested as ever. On the radio and TV, in print, and in everyday conversations, Ghanaians fiercely debate whether Nkrumah was a liberator or a dictator. His own children, Samia Yaba and Sekou, took opposite sides on this question in an impromptu televised interview in 2023.

In his latest book, The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide, the veteran New York Times correspondent, Columbia journalism professor, and author Howard French deftly navigates the global amnesia and national memory wars that surround Nkrumah’s legacy, while also offering a dazzling portrait of the man himself. Following Nkrumah’s unlikely ascent from his birthplace in the western region of Ghana to his success as a national leader and global statesman, French offers us much more than a biography. In Nkrumah’s story, he charts the history of African decolonization and the American civil-rights movement “as linked and intertwined like a double helix.” His effort to narrate the global struggle for Black emancipation extends the ambitions of his previous book, Born in Blackness, to place African and African-descended people at the center of world history. In doing so, he presents Ghana’s anti-­colonial struggle and independence as world-historical events with global reverberations.

In Born in Blackness, French suggested that the roots of Pan-Africanism, a constellation of movements that advocated global Black solidarity, could be found in the earliest slave revolts. Moving his readers from the 1574 revolt on the earliest modern plantations in São Tomé to the Haitian Revolution that abolished slavery and created an independent Black state, French examined how rebel slaves recast Blackness as a shared political identity and universalized the principles of liberty and equality. These early efforts generated inspiration and precedent for the later articulation of Pan-Africanism beginning in the late 19th century.

Now, with The Second Emancipation, French allows this Pan-Africanism to take center stage. Here he reprises some of the pioneering figures of Pan-African history, including the Sierra Leonean historian James Africanus Beale Horton, who wrote on the political conditions of the Gold Coast, and Edward Blyden, the advocate of African American and West Indian emigration to Liberia. Writing between the 1850s and 1890s, these figures insisted on the unity and solidarity of African and African-descended people and challenged depictions of Africa as a place without a history. French details how this broad commitment to solidarity and shared struggled expanded its reach and gained momentum in the 20th century. As he shows, the transformations of Pan-Africanism from an elite to a more popular politics took place against a backdrop of increased globalization, growing labor migration and urbanization, and two world wars, which facilitated encounters and exchanges among people of African descent, making the idea of solidarity more concrete and realizable by the mid-20th century. Nkrumah and his brand of Pan-Africanism, French argues, were products of this wider context.

Even if Nkrumah emerged from this high point of Pan-African politics, French is also careful to capture his singular personality and determination. A very private workaholic with a force of will that surprised his supporters and critics alike, Nkrumah took up the cause of Ghanaian and African independence with an intensity that was unmatched. No other figure of African anti-colonialism made achieving a federation of African states the crux of their political vision. Yet if these traits made him uniquely skilled as a visionary and a campaigner, they also fed his impatience and paranoia, which in turn fueled his authoritarian turn.

French carefully brings these two sides together to provide a rich and complex account of Nkrumah’s rise and fall. Along the way, he also inserts himself and his family into the story. In recounting the excitement with which he first traveled to Africa as a college student in the late 1970s, or recollecting the Friends of Ghana Association in which his parents participated, French makes concrete the great hope and enthusiasm that the project of African independence carried for African Americans and for many others, too.

Francis Nwia Kofi Nkrumah was born in the British colony then known as the Gold Coast, in the tiny village of Nkroful, sometime in either 1909 (the year normally given in accounts of his life) or 1912 (the year his mother remembered giving birth to her son). This discrepancy is a testament to the obscurity in which Nkru­mah’s earliest years remain shrouded. No one could have predicted then that in less than 50 years, Nkrumah—who hailed from the small, marginal ethnic community of the Nzima—would lead the struggle to liberate the Gold Coast from colonial rule. His emergence as an anti-colonial activist and a national leader were far from foreordained. In fact, each step in his meteoric rise was marked by sheer contingency and chance. “Temporal accidents, being in the right place at the right time when the hinge of history swing loudly, are probably commonplace in the lives of major figures on the global stage,” French writes. “But their recurrence in Nkrumah’s story is nonetheless remarkable.”

In Nkrumah’s autobiography, published in 1957 to coincide with the independence of the country he now led, such moments were occasions for mythmaking. Each chance opening or encounter was rendered a matter of fate, reinforcing the idea that he was destined to emerge as the standard-bearer for his nation’s and Africa’s liberation. For instance, Nkrumah tells his readers that during his brief pit stop in the United Kingdom en route to study at Lincoln University, the historically Black school in rural Pennsylvania, he learned from a newspaper boy that Mussolini had invaded Ethiopia. The invasion unleashed in Nkrumah an emotional awakening in which he prayed “the day might come when I could play my part in bring[ing] about the downfall of [colonialism].” The image of an isolated Nkrumah staring at the “impassive” faces of British citizens and vowing his commitment to Africa’s liberation has all the narrative trappings of a heroic epic. Yet in truth, as French notes, by the time Nkrumah arrived in the colonial metropole, he had already been exposed to emergent forms of nationalism and Pan-Africanism in which Ethiopia loomed large.

Throughout his account, French deconstructs this self-­mythologizing by filling in the gaps in Nkrumah’s autobiography with a sustained attention to the important influences that shaped Nkrumah before he went abroad. It was due to the insistence and determination of his mother, Nyaniba, we are told, that Nkrumah enrolled in a one-room Roman Catholic mission school. In 1926, during a routine inspection of that school, he was recruited to study in the capital of the colony and soon found himself at the newly opened Achimota College, an elite high school. While there, Nkrumah was mentored by James Aggrey, the first African teacher at Achimota whose African nationalism and eloquent oratory would become sources of inspiration.

In Accra, Nkrumah was also exposed to Ghana’s nascent anti-colonial movement. He saw how, in 1930, cocoa farmers responded to the collapse of prices by refusing to sell their beans to British trading firms and boycotting British imports. He also observed the rising ­career of the Nigerian journalist (and later president of Nigeria) Nnamdi Azikiwe, whose speeches and articles enthralled young intellectuals like Nkrumah. Azikiwe also served as the founding editor of the African Morning Post, where he promoted nationalist politics and found himself facing charges under new sedition laws. Another important figure of the interwar Gold Coast political scene who inspired Nkrumah was Samuel R. Wood. Wood was a member of the Gold Coast Aborigines’ Rights Protection Society, a nascent nationalist organization founded in 1897, and participated in the activities of the African Friends of Abyssinia, which opposed Italy’s imperial ambitions in Ethiopia.

In 1935, following the examples of Aggrey and Azi-
kiwe, who had departed from the traditional path of studying in the colonial metropole to pursue an education in the United States, Nkrumah headed off to Lincoln University. He arrived in the United States with little interest in or knowledge of African American history and politics. French notes that in his autobiography, “Nkrumah conveys nothing but the most passing sense of the difficulties of life during the Great Depression, no hint of the politics roiling Harlem [where he had a stopover], or indeed any discussion of Black life in America overall.” But this gradually changed as he studied at Lincoln’s rural campus and took up odd jobs, including at a shipyard in Philadelphia and aboard a shipping line. During these years, Nkrumah honed his oratorical skills, following the examples of Black preachers and practicing at the regular bull sessions on campus. More than his formal education and the degrees he secured at Lincoln and the University of Pennsylvania, his years in America provided Nkrumah with a lesson about the global color line. His time in the cosmopolitan, polyglot maritime scene contributed to an increasingly broad view of race in the world order. In these years, he developed an expansive conception of Blackness and came to view the diaspora as central to the project of decolonization. This growing realization was facilitated by his connections to key African American intellectuals like the political scientist Ralph Bunche, who had studied the League of Nations mandates in Africa, and William Leo Hansberry, a historian
of Africa and an uncle of the playwright Lorraine Hansberry.

But in these years, Nkrumah’s most important mentor was C.L.R. James, who tutored him in political organizing and radical politics. A polymath who had written The Black Jacobins, the classic history of the Haitian revolution, James emphasized to Nkrumah the importance of building mass organizations and tutored him on the various Marxist tendencies. James also made the consequential decision to introduce Nkrumah to George Padmore, a fellow Trinidadian who had broken with the Communist Party and was at the center of Pan-­African politics in London. It was likely that Nkrumah had already encountered the prolific Padmore on the page: His anti-colonial reportage had appeared in African American and African newspapers like the Chicago Defender and the African Morning Post. But his introduction to Padmore proved to be an important connection for Nkrumah when he moved to London to participate in the burgeoning anti-­colonial politics there. Padmore and Joe Appiah, a fellow Gold Coaster, immediately brought Nkrumah into the various organizations in which African and West Indian students, activists, and intellectuals were organizing to end imperial rule. It was in this context that Nkrumah dropped the anglicized first name Francis and adopted Kwame, more befitting the role of nationalist leader that he increasingly envisioned for himself.

While in Britain, Nkrumah helped to organize the historic Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester, which brought leading figures of Pan-Africanism like W.E.B. Du Bois and Amy Ashwood Garvey together with emerging African nationalist leaders like Jomo Kenyatta (from Kenya) and Hastings Banda (from Malawi). In a preview of the political campaigns to come, the congress’s “Manifesto to the Colonial Workers, Farmers, and Intellectuals of Africa” declared that “Colonial workers must be in the front of the battle against Imperialism” and argued that “your weapons—the Strike and the Boycott—are invincible.”

During these years, Nkrumah also served as vice president of the West African Students’ Union and helped to found a group called the West African National Secretariat, which sought to forge a “front for a United West African National Independence.” In an early prelude to the secrecy and individualized rule that would become a tragic hallmark of his leadership, Nkrumah also founded a clandestine cell called “the Circle,” which aimed to bring together the most radical nationalists of the region under his authority for the purpose of founding a “Union of African Socialist Republics.”

French warns that the wording did not reflect “anything like a firm allegiance with the similarly named Soviet Union.” Rejecting the racist view that imputed all African resistance to the instigation of communist agitators, and well aware of the Cold War dichotomies that would eventually lead the United States to encourage and support the coup that ousted Nkrumah, he instead reiterates that the connections between Nkrumah and the Soviet Union or communism more generally were overblown: His Union of African Socialist Republics was an idea born out of his own Pan-­Africanism and commitment to socialism. It emerged, French notes, from an autonomous intellectual and political tradition that aspired to a universalist project of remaking the world, much like Marxism but also distinct from it.

French is not wrong to make such an argument, though it can inadvertently minimize or obscure some of the deep entanglements between Pan-­Africanism and Marxism and even between Pan-­Africanism and communism. From the Russian Revolution to the rapid industrialization of the Soviet Union, the East did serve as an inspiration and model for the project of political and social transformation that many anti-­colonialists hoped to stage in their own contexts. When figures like Padmore broke with the Soviet Union, disappointed with its failure to more forthrightly support the anti-imperial cause, it is worth noting that they did not fully reject Marxism. The title of Padmore’s 1956 book, Pan-Africanism or Communism, suggests a dichotomous choice, but what he laid out there and advocated in the last years of his life was a synthesis of both.

It was one thing to dream of and plan for African independence and regional unity from inside Britain or the United States, but Nkrumah soon found out that it was quite another thing to pursue such a vision on the ground in Africa. His chance to try his hand at building a nationalist movement came in 1947, when he was invited to return home and help lead the fledgling United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC), a party started by long-­standing figures of Gold Coast politics like the lawyer J.B. Danquah, which sought a gradualist path to national independence.

By his own account, Nkrumah used this moment as another opportunity for self-­aggrandizement: He presented himself as the assured, confident hero eager to accept the UGCC’s call to action. As French notes, this might not exactly have been the case. For instance, Appiah recalled that Nkrumah was “wracked with anxiety and fear” as he considered the magnitude of the task ahead.

Despite his fears, Nkrumah hit the ground running to transform the UGCC into a mass party. With that aim, he went on a speaking tour of the country, opening party offices wherever he could, signing up members, and collecting dues. His timing was fortuitous: Despite its appearance as a placid model colony, the Gold Coast had undergone dramatic political and economic change in Nkrumah’s 12 years away. Rebellion was brewing just under the surface. Over the last decade and a half, the growing cities had increased the ranks of urbanized young people with some formal education, who formed literary clubs and debating societies in which they developed an interest in local and international politics. Meanwhile, economic woes and bad harvests only added to the pressure on the colonial government. When, in 1937, colonial officials responded to an outbreak of swollen-shoot disease by ordering that all contaminated cocoa plants be destroyed, the already politicized farmers staged another boycott, refusing to sell their crops to British companies.

The end of World War II complicated the situation for the British government in the Gold Coast further still. When servicemen returned there after supporting the British war effort around the world, they found that their bonuses would not support the upward mobility that they had been promised. On February 28, 1948, hundreds of veterans and their supporters marched on Accra’s Christianborg Castle, the seat of the colonial government, to deliver a petition requesting relief. After a confrontation between the veterans and the police, who blocked the protesters and fired into the crowd, the peaceful march quickly escalated into a riot. Nkrumah and the rest of the UGCC leadership had not been involved in organizing the protest that day, but colonial officials surmised that communist influence via the party had instigated the riot. The main leaders of the UGCC, known as the “Big Six,” were quickly arrested.

The Accra riots dramatically sped up the political timeline of decolonization, exposing the fissures within the UGCC and pushing the colonial state to initiate constitutional reforms. The following year, Nkrumah broke with the UGCC and founded the Convention People’s Party. Its demand of “Self-Government Now” was circulated at mass meetings and on the pages of its newspaper, the Accra Evening News. Inspired by Gandhian nonviolence and drawing on the discussions at the Pan-African Congress in Manchester, Nkrumah outlined a program of positive action that entailed “carefully calibrated…civil disobedience.” Soon the CPP was challenging the colonial state’s gradual path to what it called “responsible government” and calling for a constituent assembly.

Once again, however, popular forces took the initiative. The Union of Meteorological Workers began a strike in late December 1949, and when its members were dismissed from their jobs, the larger Trade Union Council called for a general strike to begin on January 8, 1950. Just two days later, the CPP followed its lead, and Nkrumah urged all nonessential workers to stay home. For this, Nkrumah and most of the party leadership ended up back in jail. In the 1951 general election, organized by the colonial state as part of its gradual process of decolonization, Nkrumah ran for and won a seat on the newly created Legislative Assembly from his jail cell. With the CPP clinching a majority, Nkrumah was released. He would now serve as the leader of the transitional government.

Nkrumah and the CPP won two more elections (in 1954 and 1956) before the country achieved independence in 1957. French details how these years set in motion a central contradiction of Nkrumah’s political leadership: Even as his star shined brighter on the international stage, he became increasingly embattled at home. Nor did his international reputation initially emerge through the official platforms of international politics. With the superpowers focused on the Asian and Central American theaters of the Cold War, the small country of the Gold Coast and the momentous arrival of African independence barely registered in the geopolitical battles of the period. This was both a blessing and a curse. It meant that Nkrumah’s fledgling government was not subject to the surveillance and covert intervention that hampered other anti-colonial movements. But it also meant that his bold calls for large-scale contributions to African development went unheeded.

In the context of this studious neglect by the major states, it was African Americans who catapulted Nkrumah onto the world stage. Thanks to the extensive efforts of Horace Mann Bond, then president of Lincoln University, Nkrumah received a statesman’s welcome to the United States in 1951. Black publications from the Pittsburgh Courier to Ebony offered extensive coverage of his political rise. In book-length treatments, the journalist Era Bell Thompson and the author Richard Wright chronicled the transformations afoot in the West African country. Drawn by the promise of an independent Black nation, figures like Maya Angelou and W.E.B. Du Bois later moved to Ghana.

“African American interest,” French argues, “drove American momentum toward engaging with Nkrumah’s government.” In February 1953, he appeared on the cover of Time magazine, and in September 1960, he gave a historic address to the United Nations General Assembly. During John F. Kennedy’s presidency, Nkrumah received an official invitation to Washington.

African American interest also strengthened Nkrumah’s view that African Americans and Africans were engaged in a shared struggle of emancipation. When Ghana declared its independence in 1957, Nkrumah extended the same warm welcome that he had received during his 1951 visit to leading figures of the civil-rights movement, including Martin Luther and Coretta Scott King. Nkrumah hoped that African American engagement would help the new nation forge ahead with economic modernization. He urged African Americans and West Indians to bring their professional and technical expertise to Ghana, and several of them did. The St. Lucian economist W. Arthur Lewis served briefly as Nkrumah’s economic adviser; the legal scholar Pauli Murray taught at Ghana’s law school and coauthored a book about the new country’s constitution. The historian David Levering Lewis taught at the University of Ghana, while the Barbadian poet and historian Edward Kamau Brathwaite worked in the Education Ministry.

Nkrumah advocated a federation of African states for the same reason that many of these Black intellectuals from the United States and the Caribbean sought to contribute to the development of Ghana. Through political integration, African states could overcome their economic dependence by building larger domestic markets and enhancing their bargaining power on the global stage. In making this argument, Nkrumah drew explicitly on the example of the United States. Nkrumah argued that in ratifying their Constitution in 1789, “the American states saw that they could not survive by living separately and managing their own affairs independently.” Glossing the title of his 1963 book Africa Must Unite, he insisted that the founders of the United States knew that “America must unite.”

Nkrumah hoped that his rising international star would summon the African unity he dreamed of and help decolonization transcend the nation-state; instead, he was mostly dragged down into the grubby and intractable politics of attempting to save his own nation-state from even more fragmentation. Almost immediately after the 1951 general election, regional and ethnic opposition parties began forming. First came the Northern People’s Party, which advocated “the North for the Northerners,” and then came the Ashanti-­based National Liberation Movement, which proclaimed “No self-government without federation”; both contested the unitary and developmental state at the center of Nkrumah’s agenda. Even as he faced these domestic headwinds, Nkru­mah stubbornly pursued his Pan-­Africanist project, arguing that Ghana’s independence was meaningless unless it was linked to a wider African emancipation and eventual federation. He laid the groundwork for this goal by hosting the Conference of Independent African States in 1958 and forming the hastily assembled Ghana-­Guinea union.

The entanglements and dissonances between Nkrumah’s internationalism and his nationalist project are central to the story of his fall. First, though his vision of a unitary Ghanaian state won out domestically, the sovereignty associated with such a state made it more difficult to achieve the Pan-­African federalism that he had championed. Second, Nkrumah’s efforts to advance a Pan-African agenda on the international stage, and especially his support of Patrice Lumumba, the martyred young leader of Congo, placed Ghana on the radar of the Cold War’s warriors. If, in 1951, American officials barely noticed Nkrumah’s emergence on the West African scene, a decade later they openly wondered whether stemming the tide of communism required marginalizing or even ousting him.

Finally, Pan-African federation had been proposed by Nkrumah as an answer to the economic and political weakness of the postcolonial state. Within the domestic context, this weakness—and the potential for foreign interference and subversion—spurred him to view the entrenched opposition as possible foreign agents. This was no doubt intensified by Nkrumah’s suspiciousness, which sometimes bordered on paranoia. It is for this reason that one of the first signs of authoritarianism under his rule was the passage of the Deportation Act just five months after independence. Its earliest victim was Bankole Timothy, a Sierra Leonean writer and former Nkrumah supporter, whose crime was critiquing the growing personality cult around the prime minister.

French rightly notes that Nkrumah never enjoyed what might be called a loyal opposition—that is, parties that objected to the CPP’s policies while accepting the government’s legitimacy. Instead, his critics often adopted the colonial state’s language to describe Nkrumah as a communist infiltrator and, in one case, an “African Hitler.”

Soon, this bitter and often personalized opposition gave way to assassination attempts and bomb attacks. The government’s increasingly harsh responses, including the reintroduction of the colonial-­era practice of preventive detention, exacerbated and escalated the conflicts. As Nkrumah and his administration doubled down on their view that the opposition aimed to subvert the government, the political terror intensified.

In 1964, the government officially declared what was already true in practice: Ghana would be a one-party state. But even this centralization of power could not stem the centrifugal forces. Very quickly, members of the CPP leadership were suspected of plotting an overthrow. The party was cannibalizing itself, and Nkrumah’s trusted circle grew even smaller. By the time he was overthrown in a coup in 1966, it was hardly a surprise to observers of Ghanaian politics.

In explaining Nkrumah’s authoritarian turn, French masterfully braids together accounts of his propensity for feelings of insecurity and paranoia, the difficulty of founding a new regime, and the colonial inheritance that primed new nations for despotism. “Contrary to the conventional wisdom that European imperial rule had been a healthy finishing school for democracy and good governance,” French notes, “it had in fact been an academy of authoritarianism.” Not only did Nkru­mah and other postcolonial statesmen have a ready-made playbook at hand for repressing dissent through colonial laws like preventive detention, but they also inherited a Frankenstein state in which the repressive apparatus of the police and the army was overdeveloped, while the mechanisms for building consensus and legitimacy were weak and untested. Especially in moments of crisis, it was easier to exercise the muscles that were already strong than to strengthen other, more democratic capacities.

For this reason, French situates the excesses of Nkrumah’s government in a comparative historical context in which a number of postcolonial states across the Anglophone world, from India and Pakistan to Tanzania, instituted similar mechanisms of repression. At times, his account becomes too defensive: For instance, French favorably compares the magnanimity of Nkrumah’s government, which suspended the sentences of people who were condemned to death for a spate of bombings in Accra, to the brutality with which Britain used the Special Powers Act in Northern Ireland.

This defensiveness, a charge familiar to many authors who seek to write sympathetically about the project of African decolonization, stems from an aspiration to explain the rise of authoritarianism without pathologizing Nkrumah or Africans more broadly. Through comparison, French is implicitly responding to those who might attribute Nkrumah’s authoritarianism solely to his personality or who might find in the rise of one-party rule across the continent a specifically African propensity for dictatorship. His aim is not to sanctify Nkrumah or to cleanse him of flaws and failures. It is instead to register that the tragedy of Nkrumah’s fall was not 
his alone.

Unchecked ambition and political miscalculation took their toll, but this happened in the context of the conflicting aims of nationalism and internationalism, developmentalism and democratization, that were brought together under the umbrella of decolonization. In different ways, these political dilemmas continue to resonate, and not just in the postcolonial world. At the same time, the sense of political possibility and world-historical agency that animated Nkrumah’s vision of Pan-Africanism has been lost, leaving in its wake narrower solidarities and more limited political horizons. The world that Nkrumah sought remained beyond his reach, and the one he feared has come to pass.

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