Jeffrey S. Ahlman - Kwame Nkrumah: Visions of Liberation

OHIO SHORT HISTORIES OF AFRICA

This series of Ohio Short Histories of Africa is meant for those who are looking for a brief but lively introduction to a wide range of topics in African history, politics, and biography, written by some of the leading experts in their fields.

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by Jeffrey Ahlman

Kwame Nkrumah

Jeffrey S. Ahlman

OHIO UNIVERSITY PRESS

ATHENS

Ohio University Press, Athens, Ohio 45701

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Title: Kwame Nkrumah : visions of liberation / Jeffrey S. Ahlman.

Other titles: Ohio short histories of Africa.

Description: Athens : Ohio University Press, 2021. | Series: Ohio short histories of Africa | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020048193 (print) | LCCN 2020048194 (ebook) | ISBN 9780821424520 (paperback) | ISBN 9780821447390 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Nkrumah, Kwame, 19091972. | PresidentsGhanaBiography. | Pan-AfricanismHistory20th century. | GhanaPolitics and government19571979.

Classification: LCC DT512.3.N57 A66 2021 (print) | LCC DT512.3.N57 (ebook) | DDC 966.7051092dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020048193

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020048194

In 2017, following the launch of my first book on Nkrumah-era Ghana, Living with Nkrumahism: Nation, State, and Pan-Africanism in Ghana, Gillian Berchowitz asked me if I would be interested in writing a biography of Kwame Nkrumah for the Ohio Short Histories of Africa series. I initially wavered. Approximately six months later, she contacted me again about writing the biography. It was through her persistence and foresight that this project came about. Following Gills retirement, Ricky Huard, Stephanie Williams, and Sally Welch, among many others at Ohio University Press, helped shepherd the project to completion in the midst of a global pandemic. I cannot thank them enough for their patience and assistance.

The project is based upon approximately seventeen years of research on Nkrumah-era Ghana. My debts in Ghana, the United States, and beyond are too many to list in these short acknowledgments. However, they include those who talked to me about their experiences in 1950s and 1960s Ghana; archivists, teachers, and friends who introduced me to new archival collections and lines of thought; colleagues who have read numerous drafts of articles, chapters, and other materials on Nkrumah and life in midcentury Ghana; institutions that funded my research, most recently including the National Endowment for the Humanities and Smith College; my family who endured writing times; and students who have helped me think more deeply about decolonization, pan-Africanism, and the politics of both hope and disappointment that surround any discussion of Nkrumah and Africas path to independence. This book could not have been written without you all.

Few individuals exemplify the richness and depth of the world that shaped twentieth-century Africa more than Kwame Nkrumah. At its foundation, Nkrumahs biography necessarily subverts both the intentional and unintentional constraints of what have emerged in both popular and scholarly works as two-dimensional representations of the African past. Like many of his generation, Nkrumah lived a life that spanned multiple historical and historiographical worlds. As a child and young man, Nkrumah came of age in the emerging imperial world of the early Gold Coast (colonial Ghana). Attending a Catholic primary school in the far southwestern Gold Coast town of Half Assini before gaining admission into one of the first matriculating classes at the new Achimota Secondary School just outside the Gold Coast capital of Accra, Nkrumahs early years were fundamentally marked by both the visible and the invisible changes ushered into Gold Coast life by the onset of formal colonial rule. After Achimota, Nkrumahthrough the help of the Nigerian nationalist and Accra-based newspaper editor Nnamdi Azikiwetraveled to the United States to attend Lincoln University, a historically Black college in rural Pennsylvania. Spending approximately a decade in the United States, Nkrumah witnessed American life at the height of the Great Depression and the Second World War. Even more importantly, he confronted life and politics as a Black man in Jim Crowera America.