Early in 1960, when James Baldwin visited Tallahassee, Florida, to report on a sit-in for civil rights by young African Americans, he wondered why they had not been cowed and frightened away by the threatening “baseball bats and knives” wielded by white mobs. To be sure, he told himself, there had been courageous resistance to racial subjugation among previous generations of Black people. What made this generation different, Baldwin concluded, was that they “were born at the very moment at which Europe’s domination of Africa was ending.”
This article is adapted from The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide by Howard W. French (Liveright, 512 pp., $39.99, August 2025).
Just three years earlier, Ghana had become the first Black colony in Africa to achieve independence from Europe, and the ascension of Kwame Nkrumah, who led Ghana to freedom, had taken on unparalleled importance for Black Americans. As they built momentum for their own civil rights movement, they pointed to the Ghanaian’s successes both in his own country and on the world stage with heartfelt pride. The example of bold and yet peaceful liberation from white domination given by Nkrumah, and the cascade of African colonies gaining independence that followed, had helped mold the U.S. protestors into “the only people in this country now who really believe in freedom,” Baldwin wrote.
Some five decades after his death, Nkrumah is for many only a historical wraith in the United States, and yet he remains the most compelling figure in an era that was the high-water mark of pan-Black politics in the world. While his reputation in Africa has ebbed and flowed, opinion polls on the continent nowadays often rank him as the greatest Black person of the last 100 years, surpassing someone far more celebrated in the West: the anti-apartheid hero, former South African president, and Nobel Peace laureate Nelson Mandela.
Nkrumah’s standing in these polls accords with some of the most astute assessments made of him in the years following his death. In 1974, the U.S. historian John Henrik Clarke said of Nkrumah: “He was the first universal African hero of this century. He, more than any other person, figuratively, took Africa and its people for their ‘walk in the sun.’” During Nkrumah’s life, C. L. R. James, his decadeslong mentor from Trinidad, had occasionally been sharply critical of the Ghanaian leader. But in the year of Nkrumah’s death, 1972, James called him “one of the greatest political leaders of our century” and the sort of figure who only appears on the world stage “at long intervals.”
Nkrumah addresses a crowd in Harlem in New York City in October 1960.Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
For decades, conventional Western views of the 20th century have emphasized the centrality of events in the North Atlantic, focusing intently on the United States, Europe, and the Soviet Union. Firmly front and center in the United States is the cherished narrative of the Greatest Generation and the country’s role in winning World War II. This was followed by the construction of a new, U.S.-led world order and the tense and exorbitant (but ultimately triumphant) political, economic, and arms competition with the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Convention holds the foundational events of this era to have been the announcement of the Truman Doctrine, the Marshall Plan, the secret blueprint for militarized competition with Moscow known as NSC 68, and the formation of NATO.
Yet Nkrumah’s story compellingly demonstrates why Africa and Africans merit their place on a centripetal path much nearer to the center of our history. This is not a matter of polemical willfulness. The end of colonial rule on the African continent deserves consideration as one of the most consequential events of our times, yet it remains widely undervalued.
Women walk past pictures of Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II and Nkrumah erected in Accra on Sept. 11, 1961.Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
Decolonization was, of course, a global phenomenon, affecting a large majority of humanity, which might seem like argument enough for taking it more seriously, including by the colonizers themselves. In his 1915 essay in the Atlantic, “The African Roots of War,” W. E. B. Du Bois blamed the murderous scourge of world war on the runaway ambitions of rival colonial powers unleashed by the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, during which Europeans partitioned the African continent. There are far worse ways of understanding the great power competition and ideological struggles of the Cold War than this—or what one historian channeling Du Bois called “a reaction to the undoing of colonialism, which put a quarter of the globe into motion and drew the United States and the Soviet Union, by trying to manage the outcome, into repeated confrontations.” The so-called third world became the stage for most of the killing post-1945, producing a toll of roughly 20 million people in scores of ragged and—from the safe and comfortable perspective of the distant West—remote and obscure conflicts.
For Africa, though, this decolonization had an extra dimension all its own. Everywhere it occurred, Western subjugation of nonwhite peoples involved what an essayist from Barbados called “the full desecration of the human personality.” But only for Africans and for their diaspora in the plantation colonies of the Western hemisphere did this modern form of desecration follow centuries of sale into slavery and brutal and dehumanizing exploitation for their labor. As Lamine Senghor, a decorated French veteran of World War I and a Black internationalist, said of colonial rule in 1927, “Slavery is not abolished. On the contrary it has been modernized.” To the contemporary ear, this might seem like overkill, or a mere rhetorical flourish. But every European colonial power in Africa imposed forced labor programs on its subjects in the 20th century, and Britain and France used their diplomatic influence to ensure that the 1926 international Slavery Convention left this practice untouched.
It is conventionally held that the last major country to abolish slavery was Brazil in 1888, but decolonization in Africa and the Caribbean should be understood as the true end of slavery—or better, a second emancipation. As Nkrumah and many of his peers knew, though, formal independence was not the end of the struggle; far from it. Even the birth of African states, which proliferated in the late 1950s and ’60s, along with bright new flags and anthems, was a mere waystation on the long road out of unfreedom. A more thorough liberation, pan-Africanists like him believed, awaited the banding together of nominally free new nations in novel federations or associations. This alone could lend them the heft they would need to fend for themselves in a world dominated by imposing powers.
That few remember how freedom for Africans was accompanied by and indeed became deeply entangled with the conquest by African Americans of their full political rights elevates its significance yet further. Consider that the main thrust of the civil rights movement in the United States—the period between the Supreme Court’s 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision and the Voting Rights Act of 1965—aligns almost perfectly with the period from Nkrumah’s rise to power (from inside a prison cell) by a landslide election victory to his overthrow by a military coup in 1966. The parallels run deeper than this, though. Martin Luther King Jr. and other civil rights leaders quickly came to view triumphs over de jure segregation as a mere first step in their struggles for justice. The essential tasks that remained to them included greater equality of economic opportunity at home and peace and freedom for peoples dominated by great powers abroad. The same held true for African liberation.
Nkrumah and his wife are flanked by chieftains as they dance at an event in Accra on Jan. 20, 1963.Bettmann Archive/Getty Images
Nkrumah speaks with a child in Mooresville, North Carolina, in 1960. Afro American Newspapers/Gado/Getty Images
As great as his achievement was, Nkrumah was an extremely complicated human being; flawed, to be sure, even deeply so, but above all versatile. In the French usage of the word adopted here, this conveys a sense of multitudes of traits, many of which contain opposites or contradictions. In Nkrumah’s early life, some of this can be glimpsed in his religious trajectory. Raised a Roman Catholic, he seriously considered becoming a Jesuit priest before attending a Protestant university in the United States. There, he earned pocket money preaching to African American Baptist and Methodist congregations throughout the mid-Atlantic region. It was in these settings that he honed his talent for oratory. As a politician, Nkrumah called himself a secular Christian socialist, but also sometimes a Marxist.
He possessed tremendous personal discipline, and he revered organization as one of the highest virtues in politics, and yet he had little passion for details and could be very impatient. With his deep and resonant voice, Nkrumah could easily rouse crowds and light up a room with his brilliant smile and humor, and yet he showed little interest in social life and loathed chitchat. He seemed to have an effortless effect on women, who were seduced by his charm and often proved devoted and willing to do his bidding. The most that can be said of his love life, though, is that it was a black box, whose truths remain impenetrable to others. On the available evidence, he formed few emotional connections and nothing resembling what in his era might have been called a conventional romance.
In some ways, Nkrumah was miscast for the role that he built his life around, but history is constructed from real lives. Nkrumah was a shy and introspective man, whose life played out on the most public of stages. He was a visionary whose genius lay in his dreams, and yet his political calling demanded endless concrete action and decision making. He achieved far more in life than anyone who knew him during his formative years might ever have expected, and yet he could be a clumsy, even obtuse, politician. His stubbornness, however, also contributed to success. Nkrumah not only led the first Black African colony of Europe into independence but also evangelized pan-Africanism as an ideological platform that countless others have spiritually embraced, if not politically implemented. Although he was never able to realize the continental project of his aspirations, his passion for panAfricanism remained constant.
Tourists visit Kwame Nkrumah Memorial Park in Accra on July 4, 2023. Xinhua via Getty Images
Nkrumah’s story helps illuminate his age—a time of extraordinary possibility for Africa and for Black people the world over and also, ultimately, one of unrealized hopes. In the latter stages of his rule and in the early years after his overthrow, Nkrumah was decried for his government’s growing authoritarianism and for the failure of his excessively ambitious domestic policies. Critics denounced what they saw as his improvisational and chaotic adoption of socialism, along with the distraction and expense of his precipitous drive for African unity. Even Clarke, the historian quoted so favorably earlier, called him a “magnificent dreamer.”
With the benefit of decades of hindsight, though, the unravelling of Nkrumah’s dreams deserves better. Seen in the fresh light of the still-early 21st century, those dreams appear to have been less the result of simple naivete or overreach than of something more common to his era—and, in that light, something more insidious. From the 1950s to the 1970s, an astonishing variety of ideologies, political structures, and economic strategies for advancement competed on the continent; Africa’s leaders were willing to try pretty much anything on for size. The fact that their efforts to create prosperous nations all came to naught should tell us something important.
The usual litany of explanations that critics give for Africa’s failure to emerge economically strong and politically stable after independence—corruption, incompetence, and a lack of democracy—is inadequate, and taken alone, I would even venture intellectually dishonest. The West was often characteristically stingy and overbearing toward Africa in this era, as well as almost irrationally insecure. That is because the Soviet Union was inexperienced and lacking in financial resources, and for much of Nkrumah’s political life, surprisingly lacking in serious geopolitical ambition toward Africa. With the exception of its one monumental showcase project, the Tazara Railway, China (which has become a leading partner of many African countries much more recently) was still a mere bit player economically and a political spoiler on the continent. Each of these powers, the West included, marshalled idealistic rhetoric in favor of its own system, but all demanded loyalty and imposed themselves in other ways. In the fractured international system of this era, the superpowers often behaved like “thieves on the same market” toward the weakest countries just then emerging onto the world scene.
Seen in this way, Nkrumah’s story is one replete with his flaws and weaknesses, but also one of pathos and tragedy, in that the world lost an opportunity to seize hope where there had been none. Yet through this necessary retelling of history, we are able to see not only the destiny of Africa more clearly in this decisive age, but also ourselves.
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