Kwame Nkrumah Quotes on Politics
Kwame Nkrumah’s Towards Colonial Freedom (1947), Consciencism (1964), and the late Class Struggle in Africa (1970) gave twentieth-century anticolonial African political philosophy one of its most influential systematic statements. The central commitments — that political independence requires economic independence and the corresponding integration of the entire continent into a pan-African political-economic union, that the philosophical foundation of the African revolution must integrate the indigenous African humanist heritage with the resources of Marxism and the Christian ethical tradition (the consciencism Nkrumah names), and that neocolonialism is the persistent post-independence form of the colonial relationship — drove Nkrumah’s political work as the founding leader of independent Ghana and his subsequent intellectual production after the 1966 coup. The framework shaped the African independence movements, the Organization of African Unity, and the broader contemporary engagement with the philosophical foundations of pan-African and decolonial political thought.
Quotes
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“Seek ye first the political kingdom, and all things shall be added unto you.”
The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah -
“Africa must unite.”
Africa Must Unite -
Attributed to Kwame Nkrumah:
“Independence is meaningless without economic and political emancipation.”
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“Neo-colonialism is the worst form of imperialism.”
Introduction," xi -
“We face neither East nor West; we face forward.”
Capitalism is too complicated a system for a newly independent nation. Hence the need for a socialistic society. -
Attributed to Kwame Nkrumah:
“The forces that unite us are intrinsic and greater than the superimposed forces that divide us.”
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“We cannot tell our peoples that material benefits in growth and modern progress are not for them. If we do, they will throw us out and seek other leaders who promise more … We have to modernize. Either we shall do so with the interest and support of the West or we shall be compelled to turn elsewhere. This is not a warning or a threat, but a straight statement of political reality.”
Quoted in Canadian Institute of International Affairs International Journal , Volumes 13-14 (1957), p. 160. -
“The only effective way to challenge this economic empire and to recover possession of our heritage, is for us to act on a Pan-African basis, through a Union Government.”
Neo-Colonialism, The Last Stage of Imperialism(1965) | "Conclusion," 259 -
“Never in the history of the world has an alien ruler granted self-rule to a people on a silver platter.”
The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah -
“The essence of neo-colonialism is that the State which is subject to it is, in theory, independent and has all the outward trappings of international sovereignty . In reality its economic system and thus its political policy is directed from outside.”
Neo-Colonialism, The Last Stage of Imperialism(1965) | "Introduction," ix