From Nkrumah’s Black Star to the African Diaspora: Ghanaian Intellectual Activists and the Development of Black Studies in the Americas

Abstract

After Kwame Nkrumah’s overthrow in 1966, a group of Ghanaian intellectuals brought their specific version of Pan-Africanism into the United States at precisely the moment when Black studies programs were being formed. Consequently, they shaped the trajectory of the field and linked it to a specifically African intellectual project. These Ghanaian intellectuals sought to inject an Africa-centered sense of what political education and political mobilization meant into the framework of Black studies. At the University of Massachusetts Amherst and Brown University, they worked to make Europe’s ongoing economic exploitation of Africa, the persistence of white supremacist regimes in southern Africa, and the US government’s support of these oppressive forces key parts of the otherwise US-centric curricula of Black studies programs. The role that Ghanaian intellectuals played in the United States helps us illuminate the unexplored intellectual impact of African scholars in the 1970s and 1980s outside of Africa on Black internationalism.