Kwame Nkrumah

Kwame Nkrumah led the British colony of the Gold Coast to independence as Ghana in 1957, the first colony in sub-Saharan Africa to break free of European rule, and governed it until he was overthrown in 1966. The leading champion of Pan-Africanism, he argued that only a politically united Africa could be truly free, and he inspired independence movements across the continent. At home his ambitious development plans were overshadowed by economic crisis, a one-party state and the jailing of opponents.

Nkrumah was born at Nkroful, a village in the far south-west of the Gold Coast, in September 1909; the date usually given is the 21st, though no birth record was kept and he sometimes used other years. His father was a goldsmith and his mother a petty trader, and he belonged to the Nzima people. He was baptised a Roman Catholic, attended a mission school, and trained as a teacher at the government college in Accra that became Achimota, finishing in 1930. He then taught at Catholic schools in Elmina and Axim and at a seminary.

In 1935 he went to the United States, where he spent ten years. He studied at Lincoln University, a historically Black college in Pennsylvania, and the University of Pennsylvania, earning degrees in economics, sociology, theology and education and a master's in philosophy, while working at menial jobs to pay his way. He read Marx and Lenin and was deeply influenced by the Jamaican-born nationalist Marcus Garvey, whose call for Africa's redemption he never forgot. He also became president of the African Students' Organization of the United States and Canada.

In May 1945 Nkrumah moved to London. With the Trinidadian activist George Padmore he helped organise the Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester that October, which brought together future leaders such as Jomo Kenyatta and, unlike earlier congresses, demanded immediate independence for Africa. In 1947 he was invited home to become general secretary of the United Gold Coast Convention, a party of lawyers and businessmen seeking self-government.

Nkrumah proved a far more radical organiser than the men who had hired him. After riots in Accra in 1948, in which police fired on ex-servicemen, he and other UGCC leaders were briefly detained. He broke away in June 1949 to found the Convention People's Party, which demanded "self-government now" and drew mass support from young people, workers, market women and farmers. In January 1950 he launched a campaign of "Positive Action", strikes and boycotts modelled partly on Mahatma Gandhi, and was jailed for sedition.

Britain had already conceded a new constitution with an elected assembly. In the election of February 1951 the CPP won a landslide while Nkrumah was still in prison. The governor, Sir Charles Arden-Clarke, released him and made him Leader of Government Business, and in 1952 he became prime minister. Over the next five years he shared power with the colonial authorities while pressing for full independence, which came on 6 March 1957, when the Gold Coast and the British-administered part of Togoland became Ghana, named after the medieval Ghana Empire. That night in Accra he declared that Ghana's independence would be meaningless unless it was linked to the total liberation of Africa.

Ghana became a republic on 1 July 1960, with Nkrumah as president. He wanted to transform a cocoa-exporting economy into an industrial one within a generation. His governments built schools, clinics, roads and the new port of Tema, and the great Akosombo Dam on the Volta River, opened in 1966, supplied power for an aluminium smelter and for much of the country. Free primary education and expanded universities greatly increased the number of educated Ghanaians.

The cost was heavy. Falling world cocoa prices, costly state enterprises and prestige projects drained the reserves that Ghana had inherited at independence, leading to debt, shortages and inflation by the mid-1960s. Politically, Nkrumah grew steadily more authoritarian. The Preventive Detention Act of 1958 allowed detention without trial, and many opponents were imprisoned, among them the veteran nationalist J. B. Danquah, who died in detention in 1965. After assassination attempts, including a bombing at Kulungugu in 1962, he withdrew into a circle of loyalists. A referendum in 1964, widely regarded as rigged, made Ghana a one-party state with Nkrumah as life president of the party, and a personality cult grew around him under the title Osagyefo, "redeemer".

Nkrumah used Ghana as a base for the liberation of the rest of Africa. He hosted the All-African People's Conference in 1958, gave money and training to nationalist movements, and formed a union with Guinea, later joined by Mali, which existed mostly on paper. He argued for a continental government with a common army and economy, but at the founding of the Organisation of African Unity in Addis Ababa in 1963, most leaders, including the host, Haile Selassie, preferred a looser association of sovereign states.

He was also a prolific writer. His books include an autobiography, Ghana (1957); Africa Must Unite (1963); Consciencism (1964), which tried to combine African tradition, Islam, Christianity and socialism; and Neo-Colonialism: The Last Stage of Imperialism (1965), which argued that former colonial powers and foreign capital still controlled nominally independent states through economic means. During the Cold War Ghana was a founding member of the Non-Aligned Movement, though Nkrumah moved increasingly towards the Soviet bloc.

On 24 February 1966, while Nkrumah was in Beijing on his way to Hanoi with a proposal to end the Vietnam War, the army and police seized power in Ghana. Crowds celebrated in Accra and his statues were pulled down. He never returned. He lived in exile in Conakry, where Guinea's president, Ahmed Sékou Touré, made him honorary co-president, and continued writing. He died of cancer in Bucharest, Romania, on 27 April 1972. His body was buried at Nkroful and in 1992 moved to a mausoleum in Accra.

Ghana's reputation for coups and economic decline in the decades after 1966 led many Ghanaians to look back on Nkrumah more kindly. Today he is widely honoured as the founder of the nation and as a pioneer of the decolonisation of Africa; his birthday, 21 September, is marked as a national day of remembrance, and in 2000 listeners to the BBC World Service voted him Africa's man of the millennium. His record as a ruler who suppressed dissent remains part of the debate about him. For the wider story, see the History of Ghana.