Kwame Nkrumah 1909 – 1972

Kwame Nkrumah was a Ghanaian political philosopher and the first Prime Minister and President of independent Ghana. After studies in the United States and the United Kingdom, he returned to the Gold Coast in 1947 to lead the campaign for independence, achieved in 1957. His writings, including Consciencism and Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism, articulate a philosophical and political program of African unity, African personality, and resistance to economic domination by former colonial powers. He was deposed in a military coup in 1966 and died in exile in Romania.

Kwame Nkrumah was born in 1909 at Nkroful in the western Gold Coast, the son of a goldsmith and a market trader. After Achimota College he went in 1935 to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, where he took degrees in economics, sociology, and theology, and then to the London School of Economics. While in London he was a leading organizer, with George Padmore, of the Fifth Pan-African Congress at Manchester in 1945.

Returning home in 1947 he founded the Convention People's Party in 1949, was imprisoned by the colonial government, and led the Gold Coast to become in 1957 Ghana, the first sub-Saharan African colony to gain independence. He served as Prime Minister and from 1960 as President. His writings include Towards Colonial Freedom (1947), Ghana: The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah (1957), I Speak of Freedom (1961), Africa Must Unite (1963), Consciencism (1964), and Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (1965).

Nkrumah's Pan-Africanism, his philosophical synthesis of African communalism, Islam, and Christianity in Consciencism, and his analysis of neocolonial dependence set the terms for two generations of African political thought. Overthrown in a military coup while abroad in 1966, he spent the remainder of his life in exile in Conakry as co-president by invitation of Sekou Toure, and died of cancer in Bucharest in 1972.