Arrival of President Kwama Nkrumah, to the Non-Alignment Movement conference, Belgrade 1961.
“One of the most important dates for the Ghanaian left is February 24, 1966, the day the country’s first president Kwame Nkrumah was overthrown. At this year’s commemoration, the Socialist Movement of Ghana organized an event around the reissuing of a book, The Great Deception. Published by the Socialist Forum of Ghana, it documents the role of the CIA in the overthrow of Ghana’s first president. This release is just one in a long line of recent books, articles, and documents that seek to turn our attention to that historic moment of triumph and then tragedy. The euphoria of independence, and the hopes for new beginnings were immediately supplanted by despair after the interests of external powers destabilized the nascent state. Susan Williams’s White Malice, reviewed in these pages, touches on this. So too does a new article from Declassified UK highlighting Britain’s role in Nkrumah’s overthrow. But why this moment? And what lessons should we take to make sense of the world we live in today? In an essay he published on the centenary of Nkrumah’s birth, Yao Graham, the coordinator of the pan-African policy and advocacy organization Third World Network Africa, and the chairperson of this year’s Nkrumah commemoration wrote: One of the key lessons from Ghana’s development experience under Nkrumah is linked directly to his commitment to a pan-African solution to the challenges of under-development. Nkrumah’s works are replete with warnings about the limits of what small, ‘balkanized’ African countries can do on their own. Faced with the absence of a larger political-economic unit he sought to transform the small economy and market of Ghana into an industrialized economy at a fast pace. The post-Cold War global economic framework has made the regional and continental even more key in any serious African project of economic transformation. I spoke to Yao Graham to make sense of the fight to use Nkrumah in Ghanaian domestic politics, and better understand how real the New Cold War in Africa is, and how it might impact Africa’s development trajectory. The interview has been lightly edited for clarity. …”
Africa Is a Country
Africa Is a Country: Archiving pan-Africanism
W – Kwama Nkrumah
1960s: Days of Rage
1960s: Days of Rage 