In PlatinumBlack Afican
Crusaders, we celebrate PlatinumBlack leaders who have caused positive changes
in the lives of the people of Africa by their amiable character and excellent
good will. Leaders whose legacy are still strongly alive and their lives being
models to pattern younger lives after. Our PlatinumBlack leader this week is...
Kwame Nkrumah
Kwame
Nkrumah PC (September
18 or 21, 1909 – 27 April 1972) led Ghana to independence
from Britain in 1957 and served as its first prime
minister and president. Nkrumah first gained power as leader of the
colonial Gold Coast, and held it until he was deposed in 1966.
An
influential 20th-century advocate of Pan-Africanism, he was a founding
member of the Organization of African Unity and was the winner of
the Lenin Peace Prize in 1962.
According
to intelligence documents released by the American Office of the
Historian, "Nkrumah was doing more to undermine [US government] interests
than any other black African."
Early life and education
Gold Coast
Kwame Nkrumah was born
in about 1909 in Nkroful, Gold Coast. Although his mother, whose name
was Nyanibah, later stated his year of birth was 1912, Nkrumah wrote that he
was born on 18 September 1909, a Saturday, and by the naming
customs of the Akan people was given the name Kwame, that being
the name given to males born on a Saturday. During his years as a student in
the United States, though, he was known as Francis Nwia Kofi Nkrumah, with Kofi
being the name given to males born on Friday. The name of his father is not
known; most accounts say he was a goldsmith. According to Ebenezer Obiri Addo
in his study of the future president, the name "Nkrumah", a name
traditionally given to a ninth child, indicates that Kwame likely held that
place in the house of his father, who had several wives. Kwame, though, was the
only child of his mother.
Nkroful was a small
village, in the far southwest of the Gold Coast, close to the frontier
with the French colony of the Ivory Coast. His father did not live with
the family, but worked in Half Assini before his death while Kwame
was a boy. Kwame Nkrumah was raised by his mother and his extended family, who
lived together in traditional fashion, with more distant relatives often
visiting. He lived a carefree childhood, spent in the village, in the bush, and
on the nearby sea.
Nkrumah's mother sent
him to the elementary school run by a Catholic mission at
Half Assini, where he proved an adept student. He progressed through the
ten-year elementary programme in only eight. By about 1925 he was a
student-teacher in the school, and had been baptised into the faith. While at
the school, he was noticed by the Reverend Alec Garden Fraser, principal
of the Government Training College (soon to become Achimota School) in the
Gold Coast's capital, Accra. Fraser arranged for
Nkumrah to train as a teacher at his school. Here, Columbia-educated
deputy headmaster Kwegyir Aggrey exposed him to the ideas of Marcus
Garvey and W. E. B. Du Bois. Aggrey, Fraser, and others at Achimota
taught that there should be close co-operation between the races in governing
the Gold Coast, but Nkrumah, echoing Garvey, soon came to believe that only
when the black race governed itself could there be harmony between the races.
After graduating from
Achimota in 1930, Nkrumah was given a teaching post at the Catholic primary
school in Elmina, and after a year there, was made headmaster of the
school at Axim. In Axim, he started to get involved in politics and
founded the Nzima Literary Society. In 1933, he was appointed a teacher at the
Catholic seminary at Amissa. Although the life
there was strict, he liked it, and Jesuit. Instead, he decided to further
his education. Nkrumah had heard journalist and future Nigerian
president Nnamdi Azikiwe speak while a student at Achimota; the two
men met and Azikiwe's influence increased Nkrumah's interest in black
nationalism. The young teacher decided to further his education. Azikiwe had
attended Lincoln College, a historically black
college in Chester County, Pennsylvania, west of Philadelphia, and he
advised Nkrumah to enroll there. Nkrumah, who had failed the entrance
examination for London University gained funds for the trip and his
education from relatives. He travelled by way of Britain, where he learned, to
his outrage, of Italy's invasion of Ethiopia, one of the few independent
African nations. He arrived in the United States, in October 1935.
United States
According to
historian John Henrik Clarke in his article on Nkrumah's American
sojourn, "the influence of the ten years that he spent in the United States
would have a lingering effect on the rest of his life." Nkrumah had
sought entry to Lincoln some time before he began his studies there; on 1 March
1935, he had sent the school a letter noting that his application had been
pending for more than a year.
When he arrived in New
York in October 1935, he travelled to Pennsylvania, where he enrolled despite
lacking the funds for the full semester. However, he soon won a
scholarship that provided for his tuition at Lincoln. Nevertheless, he remained
short on money through his time in the United States. To make ends meet,
he worked in menial jobs, including as a dishwasher. On Sundays, he visited
black Presbyterian churches in Philadelphia and in New York.
As a student in the
United States, Nkrumah proved successful, gaining a Bachelor of
Arts degree in economics and sociology in 1939. Lincoln then appointed him
an assistant lecturer in philosophy, and he began to receive invitations to be
a guest preacher in Presbyterian churches in both Philadelphia and New York. In
1939, Nkrumah enrolled both at Lincoln's seminary and at the Ivy
League University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He gained
a Bachelor of Theology degree from Lincoln in 1942, the top student
in the course, and earned from Penn the following year both a Master
of Arts degree in philosophy and a Master of Science in
education.
Nkrumah spent his
summers in Harlem, a center of black life and thought. He found housing
and employment in New York City with difficulty and involved himself in the
community. He spent many evenings listening to and arguing with street orators,
and according to Clarke,
These evenings were a vital part of Kwame
Nkrumah's American education. He was going to a university—the university of
the Harlem Streets. This was no ordinary time and these street speakers were no
ordinary men ...The streets of Harlem were open forums, presided over [by]
master speakers like Arthur Reed and his protege Ira Kemp. The young Carlos
Cook, founder of the Garvey oriented African Pioneer Movement was on the scene,
also bringing a nightly message to his street followers. Occasionally Suji
Abdul Hamid, a champion of Harlem labor, held a night rally and demanded more
jobs for blacks in their own community ... This is part of the drama on
the Harlem streets as the student, Kwame Nkrumah walked and watched.
Nkrumah was an
activist student, organizing a group of expatriate African students in
Pennsylvania and building it into the African Students Association of America
and Canada, becoming its president. Some members felt that the group should
aspire for each colony to gain independence on its own; Nkrumah urged a Pan-African strategy. Nkrumah played
a major role in the Pan-African conference held in New York in 1944, which
urged the United States, at the end of the Second World War, to help
ensure Africa became developed and free.
His old teacher,
Aggrey, had died in 1929 in the United States, and in 1942, Nkrumah led
traditional prayers for Aggrey at the gravesite. This led to a break between
him and Lincoln, though after he rose to prominence in the Gold Coast, he
returned in 1951 to accept an honorary degree. Nevertheless, Nkrumah's
doctoral thesis remained uncompleted. He had adopted the forename Francis while
at the Amissa seminary; in 1945 he took the name Kwame Nkrumah.
Just as in the days of
the Egyptians, so today God had ordained that certain among the African race
should journey westwards to equip themselves with knowledge and experience for
the day when they would be called upon to return to their motherland and to use
the learning they had acquired to help improve the lot of their brethren . . .
I had not realized at the time that I would contribute so much towards the
fulfillment of this prophecy.
Kwame
Nkrumah, The Autobiography of Kwame Nkrumah(1957)
Nkrumah read books
about politics and divinity, and tutored students in philosophy. In 1943
Nkrumah met Trinidadian Marxist C. L.R.
James,Russian expatriate Raya Dunayevskaya, and
Chinese-American Grace Lee Boggs, all of whom were members of an
American-based Trotskyist intellectual cohort. Nkrumah later
credited James with teaching him "how an underground movement
worked". Federal Bureau of Investigation files on Nkrumah, kept
from January to May 1945, identify him as a possible Communist. Nkrumah
was determined to go to London, wanting to continue his education there now
that the Second World War had ended. James, in a 1945 letter
introducing Nkrumah to Trinidad-bornGeorge Padmore in London, wrote:
"this young man is coming to you. He is not very bright, but nevertheless do
what you can for him because he's determined to throw Europeans out of Africa.”
London
Nkrumah returned to
London in May 1945 and enrolled at the London School of Economics as
a PhD candidate in anthropology. He withdrew after one term and the next year
enrolled at University College, with the intent to write a philosophy
dissertation on "Knowledge and Logical Positivism". His
supervisor, A. J. Ayer, declined to rate Nkrumah as a “first-class
philosopher”, saying, “I liked him and enjoyed talking to him but he did not
seem to me to have an analytical mind. He wanted answers too quickly. I think
part of the trouble may have been that he wasn't concentrating very hard on his
thesis. It was a way of marking time until the opportunity came for him to
return to Ghana.” Finally, Nkrumah enrolled in, but did not complete, a
study in law at Gray's Inn.
Nkrumah spent his time
on political organising. He and Padmore were among the principal organizers of
the Fifth Pan-African Congress in Manchester. The congress elaborated
a strategy for supplanting colonialism with African socialism. They agreed
to pursue a federal United States of Africa, with interlocking regional
organizations, governing through separate states of limited sovereignty. They
planned to pursue a new African culture without tribalism, democratic
within a socialist or communist system, synthesizing traditional aspects with
modern thinking, and for this to be achieved by nonviolent means if
possible. Among those who attended the congress were the venerable W.E.B.
Dubois and some who later took leading roles in leading their nations to
independence, including Hastings Banda of Nyasaland (which
became Malawi) and Jomo Kenyatta of Kenya.
The congress sought to
establish ongoing African activism in Britain in conjunction with the West
African National Secretariat (WANS) to work towards
the decolonization of Africa. Nkrumah became the secretary of WANS. In
addition to seeking to organise Africans to gain their nations' freedom,
Nkrumah sought to succor the many West African seamen who had been stranded,
destitute, in London at the end of the war, and established a Coloured Workers
Association to empower and succor them. Both the U.S. State
Department and MI5 watched Nkrumah and the WANS, focusing on their
links with Communism. Nkrumah and Padmore established a group called The
Circle to lead the way to West African independence and unity; the group aimed
to create a Union of African Socialist Republic. A document from The Circle,
setting forth that goal, was found on Nkrumah upon his arrest in Accra in 1948,
and was used against him by the British authorities.
Kofi Atta Annan (born 8 April 1938) is a Ghanaian diplomat who served as the seventh Secretary-General of the United Nations from January 1997 to December 2006. Annan and the United Nations were the co-recipients of the 2001 Nobel Peace Prize "for their work for a better organized and more peaceful world." He is the founder and the Chairman of the Kofi Annan Foundation, as well as being the chairman of The Elders, a group founded by Nelson Mandela.
From 23 February until 31 August 2012, Annan was the UN–Arab League Joint Special Representative for Syria, to help find a resolution to ongoing conflict there. Annan quit after becoming frustrated with the UN's lack of progress with regard to conflict resolution, stating that "when the Syrian people desperately need action, there continues to be finger-pointing and name-calling in the Security Council". He has been involved in several humanitarian projects and won several awards including the Kora All Africa Music Lifetime Achievement Award in 2001.
On 13 December 1996, the United Nations Security Council recommended Annan to replace the previous Secretary-General, Boutros Boutros-Ghali of Egypt, whose second term faced the veto of the United States. Confirmed four days later by the vote of the General Assembly, he started his first term as Secretary-General on 1 January 1997. He was reelected for a second term in 2001, which was unusual since this meant a third term for Africa. The Asian states didn't protest although it should have been their turn because Annan was so popular among the UN member states and UN staff.
