A History That Needs to Be Retold

Vivien Chang reviews Howard W. French’s “The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide.”

By Vivien ChangAugust 29, 2025

• History

• Biography & Autobiography

KWAME NKRUMAH WAS BORN the day his grandmother was buried. It was a fitting coincidence for the man who would preside over the Gold Coast’s transition from colony to nation, whose own life’s arc would be marked from birth by the inseparability of endings and beginnings. Born Francis Nwia Kofi Nkrumah in 1909, the future first prime minister of Ghana grew up in a small village in southwestern Gold Coast—then under British occupation—at a moment of profound transformations. The early 20th century was characterized, above all, by an imperial land rush, economic instability, and brewing discontent in colonized territories across the Global South. In the Gold Coast’s case, the British had just prevailed in a series of wars with the Asante that spanned three quarters of a century, effectively consolidating Britain’s sphere of influence in a region of great commercial importance.

Moments of crisis are also moments of extraordinary opportunity. And, for an ambitious young man from the margins of British West Africa, these meant sliding-doors moments that had eluded previous generations. In time, through sheer will and ingenuity, Nkrumah would maneuver his way to Ghana’s highest office in a bid to shape the country’s—and Africa’s—postcolonial destinies.

Nkrumah’s odyssey is the subject of Howard W. French’s riveting new book. The Second Emancipation: Nkrumah, Pan-Africanism, and Global Blackness at High Tide is the latest biographical treatment of the Ghanaian president, joining a shelf of dustier works by C. L. R. James, Basil Davidson, and Marika Sherwood, as well as an autobiography by Nkrumah himself, published at the moment of Ghanaian independence. In contrast to these earlier works, many of which were penned by Nkrumah’s contemporaries and close associates, The Second Emancipation benefits from French’s temporal distance from the subject matter and his transposition of Nkrumah onto a broader canvas of Pan-Africanism and Black internationalism. His story is deeply researched and thoughtfully told, incorporating insights from both primary sources and more recent secondary literature. Like many good books, it is also personal. French interweaves the narrative with personal history and anecdotes. Peppering the pages, as well, are reports from French’s own visits to sites of particular importance to Nkrumah.

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One way to read The Second Emancipation is to view Nkrumah’s intellectual and political development as a window into the Pan-African scene in the 20th century—first as a passenger, then as a driver. The book follows Nkrumah from his days as a child and young man in Nkroful and Accra to the decade he spent in the United States as a graduate student, from his two years as a Pan-African activist in the United Kingdom to his return to the Gold Coast and entry into politics in 1947. As a graduate student at Lincoln University and the University of Pennsylvania in the late 1930s and early 1940s, he was an avid reader of Marcus Garvey and Karl Marx, served as a leader of the African Students Association, and spent his summer breaks in the New York neighborhood of Harlem. A relative unknown at the time, he was also an observer of or participant in some of the most momentous events of the period, from the Harlem Renaissance to the Manchester Congress to the transnational activism in opposition to the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. These experiences strengthened his long-standing belief in African emancipation and brought him into the company of some of the leading Black intellectuals at the time, especially those in the United States and the Caribbean, including Eric Williams, Ralph Bunche, and C. L. R. James. His engagement with the Howard school of Black thinkers in the 1940s was especially instrumental in developing a global Black consciousness that transcended West African “provincialism.”

It is this very conception of Blackness that instilled in Nkrumah a lifelong dedication to African unity and independence. Nkrumah’s ideology, or Nkrumaism, would come to be associated with a specific brand of Pan-Africanism whose ultimate outcome would feature a federated Africa. But it was a position that he arrived at over time. Over the course of the book, French traces the genesis and evolution of Nkrumah’s political thought and the different strands of thinking from which he drew inspiration. One major, oft-overlooked influence on Nkrumah came from the Gold Coast activist J. E. Casely Hayford, whose views on the colonial Balkanization of West Africa shaped Nkrumah’s own thinking on political unity. His ill-fated dissertation at Penn, which critiqued the divide and conquer strategy of the imperial powers (and which was rejected by his committee), indicated an early identification of federal solutions as a panacea for economic subjugation.

Nkrumah’s interest in Pan-Africanism would continue during his time as an organizer in London, where he helped found the West African National Secretariat, which called for a “front for a United West African National Independence.” But it was not until he returned to the Gold Coast as a nationalist leader that his ideas would begin to gain currency on the continent. Memorably, Nkrumah proclaimed at Ghana’s independence celebrations that the “independence [of Ghana] is meaningless unless it is linked up with total liberation of the African continent.”

Nkrumah’s efforts to realize a “United States of Africa” formed a cornerstone of his foreign policy agenda once in office. In his eyes, political independence meant little if it was not accompanied by economic independence, and the only way for Africa to attain meaningful self-determination was for nations to join forces. Neocolonial interventions and the continued control of African resources by foreign firms in the years after decolonization reaffirmed for him the necessity of a united and more powerful Africa. French argues that Nkrumah’s Pan-Africanism was not “a diplomatic vanity project” but a genuine desire to “infuse as much substance and African agency as possible” into self-determination.

Nkrumah, an erstwhile academic, was eager to put his ideas into practice. But he would be in for a rude awakening. In spite of the common desire for closer forms of cooperation, newly independent African nations mostly favored territorial integrity and noninterference over political unity. When African leaders gathered in Addis Ababa in 1963 to discuss the formation of an Organization of African Unity, Nkrumah’s proposal was sidelined. Sovereignty, as it turned out, was not so easily sacrificed. Ironically, Nkrumah’s successes in establishing a unitary postcolonial state—the first in sub-Saharan Africa—triggered a wave of decolonization that washed over the continent, eluding alternative forms of political organization in favor of the modern nation-state.

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As its title suggests, French’s book is not a mere intellectual biography. It is, rather, as much a story about the world Nkrumah inhabited as it is about Nkrumah himself. In fact, there are whole chapters dedicated to the early Cold War and African American intellectuals, in which he scarcely appears. In framing the book this way, French tells a parallel and broader story about the transnational nature of Black resistance against colonialism and white supremacy in the independence era as well as its myriad internal tensions.

Central to this story are the freedom struggles of Africans and Black Americans, which occupied two sides of the same coin. During the Civil Rights Movement, Black Americans often gazed beyond American shores in attempts to shape US foreign policy toward Africa, articulate support and solidarity with African freedom struggles, and challenge the racist and imperialist assumptions undergirding American social sciences. Similarly, African elites capitalized on Cold War politics to draw attention to racial inequalities in the United States and sought expertise from African American intellectuals and activists in their state-building enterprises. That Nkrumah straddled the twin movements in a way few others did owed in part to his decision to pursue graduate studies in the United States rather than in Britain (where most other African students from British colonies went at the time). His experience in the US, first as an impoverished student and later as a preacher, shaped his early political career in profound ways, instilling in him an ability to connect with broad swaths of the population and sharpening his exceptional oratorical skills. Notably, he drew inspiration from the call-and-response tradition prevalent in Black American churches in his own appeals for “Self-Government NOW.”

But it was Nkrumah’s continued engagement with African Americans once Ghana gained independence that cemented him as a symbol, albeit short-lived, of transatlantic Pan-Africanism. His 1958 visit to the United States—on the first anniversary of Ghanaian independence—marked the start of a “Golden Age” of relations between Africa and African Americans. French writes of the euphoria that greeted the Ghanaian leader everywhere he traveled, at both elite and grassroots levels. When the progressive academic turned UN bureaucrat Ralph Bunche introduced Nkrumah to a crowd of 10,000 in Harlem, he addressed him as not only “the leader and liberator of the people of Ghana” but also as a representative of “all of us whose skins are pigmented, all the people the world over who have suffered from prejudice and discrimination because of color or race, all who know the subjection of colonialism, all of the depressed and underprivileged, the scorned and deprived.” These renewed bonds prompted intellectuals and activists in the African diaspora, including the venerated intellectual W. E. B. Du Bois, to flock to Accra. Nkrumah, for his part, would visit the United States two more times: to attend the United Nations General Assembly in 1960—the “Year of Africa”—and as a guest of President John F. Kennedy’s the following year.

While Nkrumah’s Ghana captured the imaginations of so many, the reality at home was less heroic. And the unraveling of these transnational alliances says as much about the nature—and limits—of Black internationalism as their renewal. As Nkrumah adopted ever more autocratic policies, and as his Pan-African ambitions began to overshadow the imperatives of domestic reform, Black diasporic and expatriate communities grew disenchanted with the promise of Ghana. Further, Nkrumah’s pragmatic maneuvering to secure foreign aid to fund his prized Volta River dam project alienated Ghanaian leftists and African American radicals, whose ideological purity existed at odds with the pragmatics of Nkrumah’s policy of nonalignment. The conundrum Nkrumah faced was a familiar one for the first generation of postcolonial leaders. Bedeviled by the realities of institutional politics, a deeply hierarchical international system, and the outsize expectations of their constituents, could they remain on the side of the angels?

For Nkrumah, these challenges were colossal and, ultimately, insuperable. As French writes, Nkrumah was “a visionary whose genius lay in his dreams, and yet his political calling demanded endless concrete action and decision making.” In spite of his political sagacity and knack for self-reinvention, the burdens of governing in the face of considerable economic difficulties weighed heavily on him. Perhaps this is why the story is suffused with a sense of preordination. French emphasizes both the commingling of fate and providence that catapulted Nkrumah onto the national and international stage, and the intrinsic qualities—intransigence, messianic tendencies, distrust of others—that accelerated his fall.

While The Second Emancipation is not a traditional biography, its ruminations on Nkrumah as a person nonetheless constitute the book’s beating heart. French’s efforts to understand Nkrumah’s psyche are laudatory, given how little we actually know about the man himself. Though Nkrumah left a substantial paper trail, he was often an unreliable narrator, his tendency to self-mythologize necessitating reading against the grain. Privately, he was equally enigmatic. French goes into considerable depth on Nkrumah’s complicated, and at times unusual, relationships with women: his protective and beloved mother, a wife from Egypt whom he likely wed for political purposes, and his longtime English secretary Erica Powell, with whom he shared a rare intimacy. “I am friendless and companionless,” Nkrumah once confided to Powell in an uncharacteristic moment of vulnerability. “I am an isolated man—isolated from life itself.” It is with revealing nuggets like this that French’s Nkrumah finally feels embodied.

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Where there are beginnings, there are endings. And Nkrumah’s odyssey came to an abrupt halt when he was unceremoniously deposed during a trip to Vietnam and China. By then, he was more unpopular at home than abroad. He lived out the remainder of his life in exile as a guest of the Guinean president Sékou Touré. In Conakry, Nkrumah continued to plot his return to power and the realization of his Pan-African project. One of his close associates during this time was the Black Power activist Stokely Carmichael (who would rename himself Kwame Ture in the late 1970s in honor of Nkrumah and Touré), with whom Nkrumah worked in service of the All-African People’s Revolutionary Party until his death in 1972.

For all intents and purposes, Nkrumah paralleled Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr. in his reach and influence. That little is known about him outside of Africa and African diasporic communities is a reflection of the continued marginalization of the continent in the Western imagination. “Who remembers Nkrumah and the ‘African personality’ or recalls the images of African diplomats holding forth at the United Nations when African Americans were still violently barred from voting throughout the South?” the historian Kevin K. Gaines has asked. “It is as if the appearance of new African nations on the world stage never happened.” But it did. And it is a history that needs to be retold. For a moment, marginalized communities across the world looked to Nkrumah’s Ghana for inspiration. The moment was fleeting, leaving in its wake whispers of a dream deferred.

Against the backdrop of the US imposition of travel restrictions on disproportionately African countries, including Ghana, and an enduring proxy conflict in Sudan, French’s book reads as history told in the present tense, at once enthralling and devastating. The Africa of Nkrumah’s dreamworld—stable, prosperous, in charge of its own destiny—is still struggling to be born.