Kwame Nkrumah learned politics on Harlem street corners before leading Ghana to independence
A village boy from the Gold Coast washed dishes and sold fish in America while earning four degrees. Ten years there, including evenings arguing with Harlem soapbox orators, shaped Kwame Nkrumah. In 1957 he led Ghana to become the first sub-Saharan colony to win independence, before his rule curdled into a one-party state.
Nkrumah was born in Nkroful, a small village near the border with the French Ivory Coast, and gave his birth date as 21 September 1909, though his mother later put it at 1912. His father was a goldsmith; his mother, a fishmonger and trader. He raced through a ten-year elementary programme in eight years, teaching classmates while standing on a box. At the Government Training College in Accra, the Columbia-trained deputy head, Kwegyir Aggrey, gave him his first taste of Marcus Garvey's and W. E. B. Du Bois's thinking. Nnamdi Azikiwe, the future Nigerian president, urged him to study at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania.
He reached the United States in October 1935, outraged after learning in Britain of Italy's invasion of Ethiopia. Chronically short of money, he took menial jobs yet graduated in economics and sociology in 1939, came top of his theology course in 1942 and added two master's degrees from the University of Pennsylvania. He supplied the spoken material for the first descriptive grammar of Fante. Summers in Harlem, listening to street speakers, became what historian John Henrik Clarke described as a lasting influence. He also built the African Students Association of America and Canada, pushing a Pan-African strategy over colony-by-colony independence.
Back home, his Convention People's Party won mass support among ordinary voters. He became prime minister of the Gold Coast in 1952 and took the country to independence as Ghana in 1957, then became president under a new constitution in 1960. His government poured money into industry, energy and schools, and Ghana backed liberation movements across the continent; he helped found the Organisation of African Unity.
The darker turn came in the 1960s. After an alleged assassination plot and economic strain, he jailed opponents, held elections that were neither free nor fair and in 1964 made himself president for life of a one-party state, cultivating a personality cult under the title Osagyefo. A coup deposed him in 1966; claims of CIA involvement have never been fully verified. He spent his last years in Guinea as honorary co-president and died on 27 April 1972.
Source: Kwame Nkrumah
